As a text depicting the Fall of humanity, the question of liberty and by extension, free will, is central to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with questions of Adam and Eve’s freedom in the poem being the subject of extensive criticism. The discussion of the characters’ liberty—most commonly defined as self-government or the state of not being imprisoned—is problematised by the representation of God’s omnipotence which is commonly read as undermining any notions of true or meaningful liberty in the poem. However, through his representation of Satan, and Satan’s interior life in particular, Milton allows for the reconfiguration of what it means to have liberty in the poem.1 Thus, while liberty for the characters as traditionally defined is difficult to locate conclusively because of the paradox of free will, by magnifying Satan’s imagination and through the depiction of Satan’s relationships to the poem’s other characters, Milton demonstrates Satan’s possession of different kinds of liberty in a theological framework that seems to contradict this very notion.
The vitality of Satan’s interiority, which Milton demonstrates extensively through the many speeches he gives to Satan in the poem, is symbolic of a new conceptualisation of liberty in early modern English thought. Where prior to the Civil Wars, liberty had been thought of almost exclusively as the ability of a person to act without limitations of any kind, the development of notions of selfhood as a result of unprecedented political and religious upheaval opened up this definition to include freedom of the mind. In Milton’s play Comus, the female protagonist expresses this new way of thinking in her assertion of the fact that while she might be restricted bodily, ‘Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind’ and Richard Lovelace voices the same sentiment at the end of ‘To Althea, from Prison’ with the lines ‘Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage’, encapsulating this development in interiority. Milton constantly alerts us to God’s ultimate sovereignty with Satan reflecting the anxiety between predestination and agency in his fear of the possibility that God seeks ‘to bring forth good’ from his evil.2
Despite the ever-presence of this fear, and the accompanying idea that all of Satan’s actions in the poem are therefore actually in accordance to God’s will, through the repetition of Satan’s determination to frustrate God’s plans, and the sheer force of this determination, Milton represents Satan as possessing an interiority that is not only a kind of liberty in itself, but that is potent enough to give the impression of challenging this lack of wider freedom. In his first speech to Beelzebub Satan says of the mind:
The mind is its own place and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same (I. 254-56)
Milton reflects the power of Satan’s mind to construct his reality in Satan’s assertion of the mind as a place of its own, with the capacity to ‘make’ anything at all. Satan’s ascribing to the mind a creative potential that rivals God’s, which his speech in itself is an articulation of, demonstrates his liberty. His use of antithesis in the phrase ‘Heav’n of Hell’ and ‘Hell of Heav’n’ for example reflects the sentiment that whatever God has ordained as good or evil can be dismissed by the will of one’s mind as this privileges his mind over the truth of God’s word, undermining God’s declarative authority. The forcefulness of Satan’s belief in his own mind’s supremacy is reinforced by his use of monosyllabic words which gives a tone of militance to his speech. Further, in describing his vengefulness as a ‘study’ (I. 107), which implies its artistic character and therefore legitimises it as a craft, Satan displays the grandeur that the autonomy of his mind enables him to imagine for himself.
The contrast between the narrator’s voice and Satan’s own works to emphasise the liberty Satan’s mind affords him. At the beginning of Book 2, the narrator writes that Satan,
insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav’n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid. (II. 8-10)
By describing Satan’s pursuit of war against God as ‘Vain’, denoting Satan’s pride as well as explicitly stating the futility of his plans, and the characterisation of Satan as foolish through the adjective ‘untaught’, the narrator highlights a disconnect between Satan’s conceptualisation of himself and the reality of his state. This is furthered by the fact this description immediately follows Book 1’s conclusion of Satan and his demons seated in Pandemonium like ‘The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim’ (I. 794), emphasising Satan’s experience of reality as illusory. But rather than diminishing Satan’s liberty, Milton’s reduction of Satan’s palpable sense of power to mere ‘proud imaginations’ transforms the liveliness of Satan’s language in Book 1 into the expression of the liberty afforded him by his mind. Through this narrative structure, which depicts the preceding grandiosity as the fabrication of an extremely vivid imagination, Milton demonstrates the capacity of Satan’s mind to ‘make a Heav’n of Hell’ as he boasted.
In presenting the power of Satan’s mind to create liberty for himself, Milton also illustrates the power of the mind to erode the liberty of others. During his speech to Satan, Beelzebub notes that ‘Though Heav’n be shut’, the human mind is a place that ‘may lye expos’d’ (II. 358, 359), making it susceptible to demonic manipulation. While the suggestion to destroy Adam and Eve by seducing them to Satan’s party and causing them to hate God is spoken by Beelzebub, Milton makes it clear that glory for the strategy belongs to Satan by describing Beelzebub’s counsel as ‘first devis’d/ By Satan’ (II. 378-80), the use of ‘devis’d’ emphasising Satan’s mind as the birthplace of the scheme. Thus, by explicitly locating Satan’s mind as the seat of all evil, as his mind alone is responsible for the concoction of the Fall — the ‘mingling’ and ‘involving’ of Earth with Hell (II. 382-3) — Milton depicts the liberty of Satan’s mind as a force to be reckoned with as much as God’s power over time and space.
Throughout the poem, the concepts of liberty and bondage are spatially configured, with Eden representing liberty and all extra-Edenic and extra-Heavenly spaces representing the bondage of sin and death. However, by ascribing imagery traditionally used in poetic depictions of Heaven to Hell, paired with the motif of empire which is demonstrated through Satan’s subjugation of land and the character Sin, Milton also portrays another aspect of Satan’s liberty. Although we know from the beginning of the poem that Satan will ultimately be defeated by Jesus, making Satan’s idea of his own freedom a mere delusion, through his description of the spaces Satan is ruler over, Milton creates a sense of majesty that outwardly reflects the feeling of boundless liberty within Satan’s mind. Hell is described as a place ‘Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,/ Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things’ (II. 622) yet it is characterised by vitality, abundance and creative power. When Satan resolves to declare war on Heaven at the end of his speech to the Infernal Council, Milton describes how as if to confirm his words, out flew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze
Far round illumin’d hell: highly they rag’d
Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arms
Clash’d on thir sounding Shields the din of war
Hurling defiance toward the Vault of Heav’n. (I. 664-49)
Historically, the flaming sword has been taken to represent God’s righteous judgement, instituted by him to safeguard the gates of Paradise from Adam and Eve following their banishment at the end of Genesis. Therefore, by appropriating the image of God’s wrath to signify Satan’s own power, the force of which is emphasised by the multitude of ‘millions’, a number that recurs in relation to Satan throughout the poem, Milton demonstrates Satan’s grandeur, reflecting his sense of liberty. This is reinforced by the internal rhyme of ‘thighs’, ‘mighty’, ‘highly’, ‘Highest’ and ‘defiance’ which through their mimicry of flight signify Satan’s desire for upward mobility as well as the vastness of his dominion in Hell. Given that in his first speech Satan laments exchanging ‘that celestial light’ of Heaven with the ‘mournful gloom’ of Hell (I. 244-45), the capability of the swords to illuminate Hell ‘Far round’ also illustrate Satan’s power by fulfilling Belial’s rhetorical question that ‘As he [God] our darkness [imitates], cannot we his Light/ Imitate when we please?’ (II. 269-70). By using light to depict Satan’s dominance, Milton demonstrates Satan’s liberty to imitate God by creating a subverted Heaven for himself.
The colonial overtones of Satan’s power also demonstrate his liberty. Although distinctly non-human in corporeality, Milton codes Satan as male both through the pronouns he uses for him and through his manifestation of a kind of masculinity that was coming to be the dominant expression of maleness in seventeenth century England. Much has been written on the fact that Satan and his demons’ creation of Pandemonium at the end of Book 1 mirrors the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the establishment of colonial rule in overseas territories by English forces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, in Satan’s sexuality, Milton also depicts a very specific liberty that Satan has in contrast to Adam, who importantly is the only actual man in the poem. In The Readie and Easie way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton wrote that monarchy makes people ‘servilest, easiest to be kept under; and not only in fleece, but in minde also sheepishest’ whereas a free Commonwealth would flourish the people.3 By drawing attention to Adam’s effeminacy in his imagining of Satan, at a time when the demarcations between male and female were beginning to be more rigidly drawn, Milton simultaneously aligns Satan with a ‘free’ England, depicting him as representative of liberty itself.
As observed by Kent R. Lehnhof in ‘Performing Masculinity in “Paradise Lost”’, in contrast to Satan, Adam is marked by deficiency; while Satan is active and inquisitive, demonstrated by his many endeavours throughout the course of the poem, Adam is envisioned as feeble, lacking in imagination and impotent, enacting a masculinity Lehnhof describes as ‘precarious’.4 By suggesting the maturity of Satan’s sexuality through its life-giving capacity as opposed to the sterility of Adam’s sexuality which represents the stasis that characterises his and Eve’s life in Paradise, Milton associates Satan with masculine liberty. This is illustrated most vividly by the dynamism of the scene describing the birth of Sin and Death, compared to the absence of any such birth from Eve as Sin laments how her pregnancy with Death ‘Distorted… my nether shape’(II. 784), leaving in her ‘yelling Monsters that ‘howle and gnawe’ her bowels (II. 795-99). Although Satan’s sexuality is violent, represented by the language of ruin and suffering in Sin’s description of the consequences of Satan’s rape, and perverse, suggested by the fact that he produces offspring that rapes its mother, it is nevertheless generative. That Satan’s ‘performance of masculinity is more “convincing” than Adam’s embodiment of it’ as Elizabeth Hodgson notes, demonstrates Satan’s liberty to possess a masculinity inaccessible to Adam while under God’s authority in Eden.5
In Paradise Lost, Satan’s conquest of land (often imagined as female in early modern literature) through the creation of Pandemonium as well as his impregnation of the poem’s only other feminised character are the physical expressions of a ‘free’ man in early modern thought. Through Satan’s embodiment of this masculine identity, as well as through his depiction of the imaginative capacity of Satan’s mind, Milton reinvents the notion of liberty, presenting us with a Satan who despite his banishment from God’s presence, is liberated rather than confined by his rebellion as the theological definition of liberty would suggest. By using language and images with very specific religious and political connotations, particularly in his coding of republican ideals in Satan, in opposition to the ideals of monarchical rule represented by God, Milton’s reimagining of Satan articulates a new way of imagining experience ushered in by the Civil War period, demonstrating the liberty of the poet at this time as well.
Bibliography
Chernaik, Warren, ‘Monarchy and Servitude’ in Milton and the Burden of Freedom, (King’s College London: Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp. 124-142
Hodgson, Elizabeth, ‘Chatting Up’ in The Masculinities of Milton, (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp 84-118
Lehnhof, Kent R., ‘Performing Masculinity in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 50, (2009), 64-77
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. by Barbara K. Lewalski, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007)
Milton, John, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, (London: 1791) in Eighteenth Century Collections Online II [accessed 12 December 2022].
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v ‘liberty (n.)’ <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/107898?rskey=QGH8zJ&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid> [accessed 12 December 2022]
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘liberty (n.)’ I; 2.a. [accessed 12 December 2022].
↩︎ - John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Barbara K. Lewalski, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), II. 163. All subsequent references to this edition will be made in text.
↩︎ - John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, (London: 1791) in Eighteenth Century Collections Online II [accessed 12 December 2022]. ↩︎
- Kent R. Lehnhof, ‘Performing Masculinity in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 50, (2009), 66.
↩︎ - Elizabeth Hodgson, ‘Chatting Up’ in The Masculinities of Milton, (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 111.
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