I have recently begun reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I previously attempted to read a bit of last summer at the beginning of my journey through the major epic poems. But I rightly say that it was merely an attempt because I found its style to be far too difficult to enjoy.

Now after a year of working my way through Beowulf, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy as well as starting to learn Greek and Latin, I picked up Paradise Lost again a couple of weeks ago, and this time I have found it to be riveting and every bit the masterpiece that it is esteemed to be.

The subject of the poem is humanity’s fall into sin, and one of the principal characters is Satan, whom many modern critics now call the tragic hero of the story. Of course, that is not without some merit. Part of the great brilliance of the poem is that Milton deliberately places Satan in the heroic role. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, Satan is a warrior, clad in arms and mail, who makes grand speeches and goes on frightful and perilous journeys (especially through the underworld). Even so, this does not mean that Milton is portraying Satan as good and virtuous but rather that Satan sees himself as the tragic hero, doomed to damnation for his rebellion against God’s holiness.

But even while we know that Satan is… well, Satan, we still find him fascinating, which ought to discomfort us. Thankfully, C. S. Lewis provides a marvelous description of what is happening as we read Milton’s Satan:

It remains, of course, true that Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the ‘good’ characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives.

But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder. It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.

Heaven understands Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven, and all of us, in our measure, share the Satanic, or at least the Napoleonic, blindness. To project ourselves into a wicked character, we have only to stop doing something, and something that we are already tired of doing; to project ourselves into a good one we have to do what we cannot and become what we are not.

Hence all that is said about Milton’s ‘sympathy’ with Satan, his expression in Satan of his own pride, malice, folly, misery, and lust, is true in a sense, but not in a sense peculiar to Milton. The Satan in Milton enables him to draw the character well just as the Satan in us enables us to receive it. Not as Milton, but as man, he has trodden the burning marl, pursued vain war with heaven, and turned aside with leer malign. A fallen man is very like a fallen angel. That, indeed, is one of the things which prevents the Satanic predicament from becoming comic. It is too near us; and doubtless Milton expected all readers to perceive that in the long run either the Satanic predicament or else the delighted obedience of Messiah, of Abdiel, of Adam, and of Eve, must be their own.

It is therefore right to say that Milton has put much of himself into Satan; but it is unwarrantable to conclude that he was pleased with that part of himself or expected us to be pleased. (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 125-126)

An honest reading of Paradise Lost almost places the reader in the shoes of Adam and Eve, revealing that the satanic lie is just as much at work in our hearts as it was in theirs. Thus, like our fallen parents, we too need the redemption that only the Son of God can bring. And that is what makes Milton’s poem a distinctly Christian epic. Christ alone is the true hero of the story, not rebelling against the Father but perfectly obeying, not fighting for His own glory but sacrificing Himself for the redemption of mankind, not conquering with sword and spear but through His death and resurrection.