Rebellion in the Garden

As Burke and even Milton understood, if we choose to deny the natural moral order, we cannot help but live in tyranny and disorder.

Chase Cross is an undergraduate student at Baruch College in New York City.

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven,” declares Satan in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which dramatizes the fall of our first parents and mankind.

Throughout the poem, Milton adds rich colors to an archetypal narrative that underly many truths in Western history, adding a layer of what can only be described as political prophecy through his exploration of the psychology of Satan. In particular, Satan’s denial of hierarchy and natural order relates to the rebellious spirit of man, and how this spirit overwhelmingly tends towards tyranny and the destruction of true freedom. Milton’s subtle warnings expressed in Paradise Lost prefigure the French Revolution (brilliantly and tragically) and connect him to the romantic poets, the children of the revolution. 

The epigraph to Mary Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein begins with a quote from Adam as he laments his newly acquired sinful nature: “Milton writes of Adam, ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? did I solicit thee / from darkness to promote me?’”(Milton, Book X 743-745).

To understand how Satan’s viewpoint corrupts Adam and Eve’s visions of the moral order and their proper places within the hierarchy of creation, we must explore the mind of Milton’s Satan. It is worth noting that Milton presents God (and subsequently the trinity) and the kingdom of Heaven as a perfect kingdom where every entity exists in a perfect state so long as their (whether that be the angels or men) wills are ordered and directed toward the ultimate will of God.

It is also helpful to define a few basic principles of Christian theology and philosophy that Milton is certainly referencing and would likely affirm as a professing Christian. Namely, God exists definitionally as love and goodness absolutely, so anything not aligned with God would be definitionally evil as by refusing to participate in God’s love.(which is goodness itself). Therefore, it would have to exist as a privation of good, that is, evil.

The difference between the transgression of the angels versus the transgression of men lies with the angels having been bestowed the knowledge of good and evil during their creation, and subsequently choosing to reject God. For this reason, their offense is theologically unforgivable as their rejection was chosen in a manner where repentance could not be desired because the angels beheld the goodness and glory of God directly and still chose to transgress.

This contrasts the sin of man who was tempted to transgress (albeit freely) without the knowledge of good and evil. As a basic matter of theology, Satan was not tempted, and this understanding plays greatly into his psychology and motivations.

Milton challenges this notion to an extent and makes mention of the question of repentance in Satan’s dialogue, though arguably this is less an expression of being upset over the transgression against God’s goodness. Rather, he plays into a lamentation of his now miserable state, as he is apart from his glory and luminosity which was given to him by virtue of God.

Before Satan questions repenting, he begins his first speech by acknowledging his changed state: “If thou beest he- but oh how fallen! How changed / from him who, in happy realms of light / Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine / Myriads, though bright!” (Milton, Book I 84-87).

In this passage, Satan is not even exhorting his beauty for its own sake, but in the capacity that it outshined his angelic peers. It is further made evident in book II of Paradise Lost that Satan views himself as a victim of fate, as though his fall was predestined (in a sort of Calvinistic sense) and in the opening passages is constantly making references to this accusation of pre-destiny: “…thus High uplifted beyond hope, aspires / Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue / Vain war with Heaven” (Book II 7-9). Or consider the following excerpt: “Me though just right, and the fixed laws of Heaven, / Did first create your leader – next, free choice” (Book II 18-19).

The state of mind we find in Milton’s Satan is that of denial of responsibility, and a casting of blame on fate. Milton’s Satan tells us “This state I’m in is not my fault but that of God and the universe! Heaven willed for me to rebel against it.”

To understand what Milton was getting at with his characterization of Satan, we must consider the conditions in which Milton was writing. During his stint in politics during the English Civil War, he came out in opposition to the crown with his publication in defense of free speech (against pre-printing censorship) titled Areopagitica; aligning himself with the parliament opposite the monarchy.

He would further go on to write in support of the regicide of Charles I and would later serve under the English parliamentarian and militaristic tyrant Oliver Cromwell. Milton would continue to publish political tracts, and after writing in support of the expansion of divorce in the Anglican church, the parliamentary government Milton fought in support of suddenly turned on him, burning his books and seeking his arrest.

Many of these political events in Milton’s life serve as undercurrents for Paradise Lost, with Milton interestingly identifying the democratic impulses of the monarchy with Satan, giving the impression that he may have viewed the English resistance of the monarchy as ultimately a denial of hierarchy.

While the monarchy certainly had their own sins and opposition may have been just, there is a proper ordering to rebellion and revolution. This rebellious spirit tends towards tyranny, either of the self or the society upon which it seeks to reform, and Milton addressed this pattern of temptation and the result of the denial of hierarchy in his Satan brilliantly in one of the most famous lines in English literary history: “A mind not to be changed by place or time. / The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (Book I 253-255).

This sentiment would later be identified by English statesman Edmund Burke over one hundred years later in his commentary on the French Revolution, which will soon be discussed. To better understand the spirit of rebellion, it will be helpful to do a close reading of Satan’s temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden from Book IX of Paradise Lost.

The first line of the serpent's exhortation of Eve gives us a clue into Milton’s thoughts of the revolutionary spirit. Satan begins: “O sacred, wise, and wisdom giving Plant, / Mother of science! Now I feel thy power / within me clear; not only to discern / things in their causes, but to trace the ways / of highest agents, deemed however wise” (Book IX 678-682).

The way Milton characterizes Satan with reason is a very intentional choice. One of the first temptations that comes with the denial of a divine order is the reduction of phenomena to their material components. This is precisely why Satan exhorts science. It is a subtle way to begin shifting the moral (and in some sense cosmological) order from originating from above (God) to originating from below (its material components). In shifting the order, man's relationship with creation moves from one of divinely ordained responsibility to one of subservience and control.

This sentiment is also expressed by one of Milton’s contemporaries, Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote: “My only earthly wish is... to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man's dominion over the universe to their promised bounds... [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”

This understanding of the world would come to fruition during the Enlightenment and would be tested (and ultimately fail) during the French Revolution, with the goal of the revolutionaries to instill an empire of reason after slaughtering the monarchy and dragging the starving French citizens to enlightenment kicking and screaming. Satan continues his speech, constantly attempting to shift his reasoning for Eve to take of the fruit.

He first tells her not to believe God’s threat of death: “Queen of this universe! Do not believe / those rigid threats: ye shall not die” (Book IX 684-685). Then he tells Eve that the transgression is so small it wouldn’t even bother God: “or will God incense his ire / for such a petty trespass?” (Book IX 691-692) and remarks that God may in fact praise her desire to become more knowledgeable. Finally, he concedes that she probably will end up dying, but it will ultimately be worth it to know the truth: “So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off / Human, to put on Gods; death to be wished” (Book IX 712-713).

One of the great wisdoms contained in this exchange is that it serves as an almost symbolic microcosm of an unjust revolution and rebellion; we begin with the denial of a transcendent moral order by exhorting science, we move to a justification for transgression (or in the case of revolution, monarchical overthrowing), and then are left with what remains when you usurp monarchy and tradition while attempting to replace is with pure reason and science; that being tyranny and death.

There is no better example of this in history than the French Revolution. A revolution predicated initially on avenging the starvation and bringing equality to the French people (a just cause), later morphed into an attempt to create a perfect society from the bottom up that resulted in the regicide of the monarchy, followed by the streets being baptized with blood, the revolutionaries turning on each other, the systematic murder of anyone remotely associated with the aristocracy, and resulting in warring Europe by way of the Napoleonic Wars.

What the French revolutionaries and the modern revolutionaries of our day fail to understand is that the very notions of justice and order they desire to implement by burning down the traditional structures they live in were given to them by the culture they detest; it is as present in Satan’s usurpation of God as it is in the regicide of King Louis XVI. 

Burke explores this in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. What Burke understands about monarchical structures is that they are not simply arbitrary but are reflections of the divine hierarchy made manifest on Earth, and their very structure in society and our participation in them civilize and edify us. Burke writes:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason … are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion (Burke 32-33).

It is ultimately man’s free submission to these hierarchies that allows the moral order to flourish. These seemingly superfluous traditions and customs we have exist for a reason and allow human beings to participate in society in a moral and proper way. These social and moral structures are built into human beings implicitly and it is that very fact that Milton was attempting to argue in Paradise Lost. That same loss is lamented by Burke. Contemporary writer and political commentator Andrew Klavan writes the following about Burke, which apply to the politics of our day: “Burke understood the great flaw in radical thinking: radicals seek to overturn the very traditions which created their values” (Klavan 102).

Today we live in a culture which prizes reason, individualism, and its materialist, scientific bias above all, creating a social confusion in the fabric of society. We end up worshiping “science” and reject a consistent moral vision because we have obliterated traditional structures and have forgotten how to properly mediate relationships in our social fabric. Human beings are ordered toward hierarchy by nature, and if we choose to deny the natural moral order, we cannot help but live in tyranny and disorder. Milton and Burke understood this far better than we do today, and it would serve us greatly to heed the warnings they left us.

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Works Cited:

Bacon, Francis. The Complete Essays of Francis Bacon: Including the New Atlantis and Novum Organum. 1963. 

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France: And Other Writings. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Klavan, Andrew. The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. Zondervan Books, 2022.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.