Satan's False Hero

On the surface, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic tale about the battle between good and evil in the spiritual realm. Milton, a devout Puritan, used this setting for his work not only to describe the struggle between the supernatural forces of good and evil; his epic also served as an allegorical social commentary on the chaos caused by the English Civil War of the 1640s. Throughout the decade, King Charles I, exercising his “divine right” to rule England as he saw fit, had instigated war across the United Kingdom, taking the lives of many citizens, and later refusing to accept the Parliament’s terms at the end of the war. This act angered many Puritan members of the group who felt that Charles was abusing his power, and committing sacrilege

Yet in Milton’s eyes, neither of these figures was a hero. As the epic progresses, the reader is constantly forced to alter his perception of Satan based upon the context in which his motives are described; “Satan’s false heroism draws from the reader a response that is immediately challenged by the epic voice, who at the same time challenges the concept of heroism in which the response is rooted. ... At some point during th[e] sequence of actions, the reader becomes immune to the Satanic appeal because he has learned what is, or, [more precisely], what is not” (Fish 529). At the outset of Book I, Satan appears a sympathetic figure, and all of the other angels are willing to loyally follow him into battle. By the opening of Book VI, this pretense is done away with as the angel Abdiel abandons Satan’s side in the fight for Heaven, and later relates the depth of Satan’s treachery to God’s archangels. Abdiel is praised for realizing the error of his ways and is permitted to reenter the kingdom of Heaven; Raphael’s welcoming speech, which notes that Abdiel has “fought the better fight” in choosing to bear reproach from Satan instead of suffering at the hands of God, as the other fallen angels will soon do, reflects Milton’s personal religious and political views on the issue of kingship and divine right (Milton 138: VI.29-43). Milton’s chief complaint against Charles I was that he abused his power as a king, and did not follow the Calvinist belief that the will of God reigned above all other powers, including that of a monarch (Rivers 309). This obliviousness to the supremacy of God’s law is evident in the behavior of Milton’s Satan as he tries to convince Abdiel to come back to his side before the battle for