In class, with Prosecution One, I argued for Satan’s freedom and forgiveness with the ruling of time served. Our judge ruled for Satan’s right to return from Hell, and in doing so corrected a wrong against Satan and thereby established a more peaceful world for all.
In Paradise Lost, there is an expectation of established good, but not of established evil. Satan, our purported antagonist, is meant to struggle with and ultimately become evil, while God acts in direct opposition to this, supposedly expressing his goodness through his opposition and his nature. However, God acts more as a force than as a tangible character; his character is built primarily not on his actions, or strong expressions of deep feeling, but on his words and condemnation
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It’s a bumpy path, and he resists it throughout the epic, trying desperately to rationalize his actions or imagine a way to avoid transgressing further against God. One particularly powerful moment in this transformation occurs in book four, when Satan asks about knowledge and death. At this point, Satan has committed himself to the fall of humanity, and is recovering from a passionate fit of jealousy after witnessing an intimate moment between Adam and Eve. At this point, he’s just learned of the death promised by the Tree of Knowledge, and he ponders the rationality of God’s …show more content…
Throughout Milton’s epic he struggles against God, desperate to escape the preformed pattern and yet he fails, ultimately, to do so. His ultimate tragedy is that he believes in committing himself to revenge he is circumventing God’s plans. Michael Bryson referenced Percy Bysshe Shelley, who hits the nail on the head in his statement that God is: “One who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge on his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.” (qtd. In Milton Quarterly,