The Elaborate Antagonist

So Milton was a Puritan. That rattles my preconceptions a bit. The more I read and considered, the more certain I was that his “justification” of God to man was meant to be ironic. Based on studies from my American literature course, however, the Puritans were not prone to irony (nor any abstractions, for that matter). Theirs was, in general, a very practical if superstitious faith. I would guess that Milton’s intelligence set him apart as unconventional in any crowd, but that same intelligence presumably would have given him the mental freedom to renounce any religion with which he did not agree. So he was Puritan - knowledgeably, brilliantly Puritan - and his justification no clever jesting. Really, that is curious on so many levels.

The Puritans believed in an angry God, certainly: angry and powerful. That much lines up with Milton’s portrayals in the text. They also believed in the absoluteness and inherent goodness of God’s will. Is it possible that Milton was so steeped in this mindset as to think that his God needed no justification, that his very Being spoke for itself even against the humanoid and sympathetic struggles of his Arch-Enemy? I do not discount that entirely, but Milton seems to be, well, smarter than that. If God is Good and Satan is Evil and things are that simple, why go to the trouble to create such an elaborate enemy figure?

It struck me during our class discussion this Thursday that Milton’s was not the first convincing devil I had encountered in my reading. C.S. Lewis creates a similarly seductive Adversary in one of my favorite books of all time, Perelandra. Perelandra follows the story of the temptation on another world. The tempter happens to be a man (possessed eventually, but that is beside the point) from our world. To be fair, he is clearly the antagonist; there is not a moment in which we trust him. He is also human, however, and relatable if only on that account. Still, what puts me most in mind of Milton’s Satan is not his literal humanity, but the forcefulness of his argument during the days-long temptation. It impresses me every time I read it. Many Christian authors fall into the trap of contriving “evil to the core” villains whose power lies in physical superiority and whose mental stance is barely strong enough to argue, but Lewis's Weston (later known as the Un-Man) puts forth an intelligent, meaningful debate, so that were the counter-argument not typed before me I would totter as Eve herself on the brink of its temptation.

Would anything else be fair? We humans are not so dull as all that, and even the most heinous evils ever committed have generally been thought a kind of good by their perpetrators. Besides, if we are to operate from a Christian standpoint (as Milton obviously did), evil is not an entity of itself, but a mutation of good. Good may be inherent, but evil must have something to work with, some truth into which it may plant its foul seed. It could not convince us otherwise.

There has to be a sort of glory in the fall. The sin with which Lucifer was charged was pride, and the connotations of that word vary greatly. If I proud to be an American, is that wrong? What if I am proud to be a follower of Christ? If Lucifer was an angel of light, the good and perfect offspring of a good and perfect God, was he entirely outside his rights to glory in himself? This is not a black and white issue. Perhaps Milton, as a Puritan with Christian ideals, explored the idea of a truly tempting adversary as a caution to his readers, even to himself. If the only evil we fear is a devil with red horns and a leer like a seedy used-car salesman, we set ourselves up to repeat Eve's deception. Light may blind as well as darkness, if we are less wary of it.