Lucifer: The Original Anti-Hero

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a retelling of Genesis; the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The villain in this story is clearly the devil — who assumes serpent form and tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. The great paradox of Paradise Lost is that the devil is presented as a sort of anti-hero — so much so that critics, since the 1600s, have been debating whether or not (as William Blake once said) Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party’.

Why would a devout Protestant present the devil in such a flattering light? In his book, Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish argues that this depiction is didactic (intended to teach). It is a real-time re-enactment of ‘the fall’. By sympathising with the devil, we re-enact our ancestor’s susceptibility:

I would like to suggest something about Paradise Lost that is not new except for the literalness with which the point will be made: (1) the poem’s centre of reference is its reader who is also its subject; (2) Milton’s purpose is to educate the reader to an awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man, and to a sense of the distance which separates him from the innocence once his; (3) Milton’s method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem’s scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not…