Myself am Hell
I first fell in love with Milton’s Paradise Lost at Holy Cross in my sophomore year when I read it for Professor Morse’s literature course. This class met in a classroom beneath the stairwell of the Stein building on campus twice a week. There weren’t many of us, and I don’t remember a single one of the other students now. I was still in a fog that semester from a tragic loss my freshman year, so I didn’t speak much in class, but I devoured the books. And this text spoke a language that my heart had been trying to speak and couldn’t articulate for some time. I was by no means fluent in that language, but it sounded like something deep and familiar. Professor Morse, dealing with his own darkness that year, helped us navigate the text in a way that somehow made the crisis of Adam and Eve and the pain of Satan relevant to college kids whose social lives may not have revolved around 16th century English literature. The text stayed with me. I used it as the basis for my senior thesis, which I worked on under the guidance of Professor Morse; I took another course that explored Milton’s works when I started grad school in Vermont years later; and I find myself returning to it now.
The archaic language of Paradise Lost may be outdated, but the story bears relevance to our lives in a way that matters even today. Milton uses the Biblical stories of creation, the fall of the angels, the Garden of Eden, and the fall of man to inform his text. He captures the critical issues of balancing individualism with community, the trials of despair and loss, and the intense vulnerability required in love - all deeply human experiences that he develops through his depictions of not only Adam and Eve, but through the divine and the devils as well.
In my senior thesis, I used Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus as the opening chapter, which discusses both works’ representations of the individual’s conflict to actualize his autonomous identity while reckoning with the role of community and the need to belong. Marlowe and Milton, though writing about a century apart, inhabited a place and time - Renaissance England - when the emergence of man as a self separate from his society introduced concepts of freedom and will that challenged traditional, more Medieval understandings of the self as part of a larger whole. Whereas people had been valued by their contributions to the community to which they belonged, Renaissance thinking celebrated the individual and thus opened new territory for exploring one’s worth and the extent to which one bore responsibility for his or her own life trajectory.
My thesis argued that these texts present the predicament of living in this modern world that celebrates individuality at the cost of community; while Marlowe’s protagonist highlights the tragedy of bargaining for individual glory and autonomy, Milton uses his main characters - Satan, Adam and Eve - to explore the conflict a bit further and offer a solution for living as fallen beings in a broken world.
As humans in an imperfect world, we have a lot in common with each of Milton’s characters, even Satan. Especially Satan. Each of them was born into a state of perfection out of the goodness of God’s generosity, and each experienced a fall from that state. Their stories dramatize the tragedy of such a loss while coming to terms with their own roles in the trauma they experience as a result of it. I’m just going to look at Satan in this essay, because you may not want to read a hundred pages in this one sitting. If you’re like me and have no qualms about reading excessive pages or getting into deeper discussion about Paradise Lost, send me a message on the contact page and we can talk.
Compared with Adam and Eve, Satan is arguably the most dynamic character, the antihero whose articulation of his pain and his inability to compromise his newfound autonomy strikes a resonant chord with many readers. Satan - the Hebrew word for adversary - is the name given to Lucifer - bearer of light- after his fall and banishment from Heaven. In the Christian mythology, Lucifer was the highest ranking archangel, the messenger of God Himself. So many mythologies share this story of one of the highest of the good falling to become the leader of the evil; it is an incredibly relatable and terrifying trajectory to see. Lucifer’s tragic flaws are pride and ambition; these he credits as the agents having thrown him from his once glorious place in Heaven. In Book IV, after his fall, he addresses the sun with hateful spite, lamenting his status as now lower than it when he once gloried above even its radiance. The sun reminds him of his former height and place in Heaven, which he held until his character defects usurped his better judgment. He says, “Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down” (IV.40). It’s notable that he doesn’t cite himself as the agent of his fall, but rather recalls himself as the victim of Pride and Ambition, the internal enemies who ejected him from his state of glory. They are parts of him, for sure. Just as our own prideful need to remain in control of our lives dictates a lot of our choices. Pride and ambition here are Satan’s addictions; he cannot manage them, and so they throw him down when he lets them live in him unchecked. Satan is attractive to readers because we can empathize with having pride and ambition; they are not innately bad things. But they skew the mind just as alcohol does, and when you’ve begun to drink freely of pride and ambition it’s hard to stop.
Pride and ambition often come hand in hand and can sometimes be construed as one and the same, so it might help to clarify the distinction between the two fiends that did Lucifer dirty. Pride is the feeling of deep pleasure derived from our own achievements and accumulations; ambition is the powerful personal drive we have toward achieving goals perceived as important to us. The two feed each other when allowed to grow unchecked by their counterparts: humility, gratitude and acceptance. Lucifer’s pride in his high ranking among the angels festered into a warped marriage with ambition for more power and skewed his understanding of true freedom and autonomy. He revels in his superiority, but it’s not enough to sate him, and he loses perspective of the higher power that put him in this place of honor. His pride tells him that his height among angels is due him, and his ambition tells him he must go even higher. Their voices tell him that he and only he can can and must take the reins over his destiny if he wants to retain his stature and secure his path.
It’s how we operate in addiction, with the belief that we have to be the ones making every move, controlling each piece of information and deciding just how our lives will go. We can’t let go of this need for control, especially when it feels that things are beginning to spiral out of our reach. When our lives become unmanageable in this way, our pride tells us that we just have to try even harder to keep things in line, even if we sense that we’re only creating a more inescapable problem for ourselves. Sometimes we need to hit a point when circumstances completely strip us of the ability to retain agency in our lives so we can pause and look hard at our lives. For Satan, it’s being tossed out of heaven and waking up in the fiery wasteland of hell. That’s an ultimate low, a hell of his own device.
Even though Satan appears to rally at first, he’s clearly suffering the loss of heaven. In front of the other fallen angels, who followed him in his rebellion against God and consequently suffer the same banishment from heaven, Satan utters one of my favorite Milton verses: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav’n of hell, a hell of Heav’n” (I.254-255). That’s deep. We’ve got an angel fallen from the highest place of power, second only to God and his Son, and he’s making the most of his situation. Trying to at least. He’s right. The mind is a place in itself; perspective is everything. Satan’s perspective, however, is defective. He’s literally in hell and tries to spin it for his followers that it’s all how you look at it. This is delusion and denial at its finest. I’ve tried a lot of that with myself when suffering in my personal hell: I’m not that bad; I’m too educated to need rehab; I don’t have a drinking problem, I’m just depressed; a boyfriend or dog will fix me; etc. I never successfully turned my hell into heaven though. Satan doesn’t either, despite what he says.
He perceives this unfortunate truth when he’s flown out of Hell and encounters that damn sun, still shining with the same brightness and glory Satan once had. He laments, “Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell” (IV.75), realizing that he has nowhere to go and nothing to say to relieve himself of the essence of hell, which is banishment from heaven. Hell is the disconnect of addiction, the opposite of the conscious connection we were all born into. No matter where we are or whom we’re with, we bring the hell of disconnection everywhere with us when we don’t take steps to change the habits and mindset of the addiction in which we’re enslaved. That hell persists even without the alcohol exacerbating it.
In the dire desperation of his circumstances, Satan debates seeking forgiveness from God, but cannot guarantee a merciful response for his offense, so he doesn’t even try. His pride and ambition still hold sway in his mind, and they don’t allow for the risk of surrendering control to the choice of a higher power to forgive or not. Satan tragically dismisses the possibility of repentance and listens to the ambition that urges him to seek power and revenge. Satan’s struggle is the same as any of us who ever considered that life might get better if we stopped drinking but feared the risk of trying it. That’s scary territory because we’re talking about leaving behind a certainty we’ve made a habit. For me, it meant letting myself experience feelings and go about the process of amending my past with no guarantee that I’d be OK. I can only trust that this is the right way to do it, hardships and all. Alcohol was the only successful form of medication for pain I’d had for a long time, but I’d also begun to see that it was causing probably just as much if not more pain than I thought it was treating by the time I stopped drinking. With the exception of a few unique souls, humans don’t like pain, rejection or shame, so choosing to give up a means of numbing that discomfort without the security that everything will be just fine is a big struggle.
At the heart of this struggle is the desire for autonomy. Autonomy is a tricky concept with an almost paradoxical way of being in our lives. When we strive for autonomy, we lose it. When we accept our powerlessness and let go of trying to control our lives, we experience the essence of autonomy as we’ve imagined it to be. I think it has to be this way, because in striving for autonomy we often perceive that to mean keeping our addiction in the picture. Autonomy in this sense means I say when I get to drink, I say who’s in charge, I say who I will love and who I will not so that I can avoid pain and maximize pleasure. “I say” is in the literal etymology of the word: autonomy comes from the Greek words for self and name. But we can’t really choose these things. We can’t remain in control of our addictions because they entrap up in the vicious cycle of needing them. Even if we are doing everything in our power to keep them alive, we’re not keeping ourselves alive. We are slaves to it. If we bend our efforts to name ourselves as the one in charge, we are enslaving ourselves to pride and ambition, just as Satan did. If we deceive ourselves with the idea that we get to choose who to love, we’re closing ourselves off from the only thing that can make us truly free, which is what we wanted all along, and that is conscious connection with ourselves, others and God. We have to have connection with all three sides of that triangle: self, other and God, in order to be truly centered in our autonomy. And to achieve that sense of connection, we need to give up our control over the things we cannot change.
In the case of Satan, he has allowed ambition and pride to take over his control, but because they are operating under the thrall of his will, he justifies his place in Hell as a free existence. When we are in active addiction, we can tell ourselves that at least we’re the ones choosing to feel this way. We may feel terrible, isolated and anxious at times, but we know why. We can have some sick comfort in the fact that we know exactly why we feel certain ways and why people have chosen to leave us. And unfortunately, the certainty and self-designed nature of that misery is a lot less terrifying than surrendering ourselves to the mercy of others and the whims of life.
So a lot of us choose hell, and we stay in that hell, flying about our worlds and telling ourselves and others it’s a heaven so we don’t have to acknowledge that the real heaven is waiting for us if we can only let go of our need to maintain an appearance of having it all together. Satan abandons his identity as Lucifer altogether; it’s telling that his character is only referred to as Satan throughout the text as if to solidify his loss of self. Paradise is truly lost to him, but Milton provides Adam and Eve as archetypes for how we move forward from this loss, even if Satan doesn’t. Satan remains as the tragic epitome of who we would be if we listened to the voice of addiction that tells us we don’t have to surrender our lives to be free. Freedom is choosing love, and true love is an abandonment of self that leads to true connection and the only kind of autonomy that matters. Because if autonomy means a self-ordained life, then a life in which our self is intrinsically connected and in tune with others and a higher power is the greatest form of autonomous fulfillment we could hope for.
