Paradise Lost
Satan

Satan, formerly called Lucifer, is the first major character introduced in the poem. He is a tragic figure who famously declares: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" (1.263). Following his vain rebellion against God he is cast out from Heaven and condemned to Hell. The rebellion stems from Satan's pride and envy (5.660ff.).

Opinions on the character are often sharply divided. Milton presents Satan as the origin of all evil, but some readers have struggled with accepting this interpretation. Romanticist critics in particular, among them William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt, are known for interpreting Satan as a hero of Paradise Lost. This has led other critics, such as C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, both of whom were devout Christians, to argue against reading Satan as a sympathetic, heroic figure. Despite Blake thinking that Milton intended for Satan to have a heroic role in the poem, Blake himself described Satan as the "state of error", and as beyond salvation.

John Carey argues that this conflict cannot be solved, because the character of Satan exists in more modes and greater depth than the other characters of Paradise Lost: in this way, Milton has created an ambivalent character, and any "pro-Satan" or "anti-Satan" argument is by its nature discarding half the evidence. Satan's ambivalence, Carey says, is "a precondition of the poem's success – a major factor in the attention it has aroused".

However, in Lewis's book A Preface to Paradise Lost, he notes that it is important to remember what society was like when Milton wrote the poem. In particular, during that time period, there were certain "stock responses" to elements that Milton would have expected every reader to have. As examples, Lewis lists "love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful". Milton would have expected readers to not view Satan as a hero at all. Lewis says readers far in the future romanticizing Milton's intentions is not accurate because:

"The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered, the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them."

Lewis goes on to note that regarding Paradise Lost, the first thing we need know is "what Milton meant it to be," a need which he argues is "specially urgent in the present age because the kind of poem Milton meant to write is unfamiliar to many readers."

Later in the book Lewis details the character of Satan in Paradise Lost, and why he was not someone Milton would have considered a hero or someone to take pleasure in.
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