Why do rebels and revolutionaries love “Paradise Lost”?

It is hard not to like Satan. He is Western culture’s original rebel, the bad boy who dared to defy the authority of God. He also has the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n,” Satan declares in “Paradise Lost”, an epic poem by John Milton. God, by contrast, says boring things about goodness. “Heav’n’s awful monarch” is, in fact, a bit of a tyrant. Satan and his band of rebels will not submit to “forced hallelujahs”.

“Paradise Lost” (1667) retells the story of the fall of man; Milton sought to “justifie the wayes of God to men” by probing themes of sin and innocence, moral obedience and free will. But as Orlando Reade, an academic, writes in a new book, Milton’s poem has found other earthly meanings. From the French revolution to the Arab spring, readers have turned to “Paradise Lost” in times of political struggle.

The poem has inspired revolutionaries around the world partly because it was written in the wake of a failed revolution. During the English civil war, Milton championed the parliamentary cause against the absolute monarchy of Charles I. After the king’s execution in 1649, he joined the new republican government and wrote treatises in defence of deposing the king. Royalists attacked him as a monster.

When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton’s political career came to an immediate end. He was imprisoned and fined and subsequently devoted himself to his work. By this time, he had gone blind. He composed “Paradise Lost” by dictating it to his secretaries.

A century later the poem was picked up by agitators in America. Thomas Paine quoted the poem in “Common Sense”, a pamphlet calling for the colonies to throw off the British yoke: “Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” Thomas Jefferson, too, copied quotations from the poem into his commonplace book. He especially liked Satan’s rousing speeches, which influenced his lines lambasting the tyranny of George III in the Declaration of Independence. “Did Jefferson intuit that Satan’s enemy, the distant tyrant, bore some resemblance to the King of Britain?” wonders Mr Reade. “Or did he simply admire Satan’s deathless commitment?”

Paine and Jefferson were hardly alone in sympathising with Milton’s devil. In France the Jacobins hailed Milton as a “friend of liberty”; in Britain the Romantic poets saw Satan as the poem’s hero. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” wrote William Blake, suggesting that Milton, though devoutly religious, secretly preferred Satan, too.

Later the poem fired up campaigners for equality. Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist writer, criticised Milton’s sexist depiction of Eve. (Is Eve’s disobedience, like Satan’s, a rejection of tyrannical rule?) Jean Louis Vastey, a Haitian essayist, argued that it was not the rebellious Haitians but their former colonial masters who were “like the infernal spirits”. Abolitionists likened slavery to Milton’s hell. Malcolm X, a black activist, read the poem in prison and felt it chimed with the teachings of the Nation of Islam, to which he then belonged. Satan was symbolic of the evil white man: “Milton and Mr Elijah Muhammad were actually saying the same thing.”

For a 17th-century religious work that goes on for 10,565—admittedly spectacular—lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, its legacy is remarkable. It is fascinating to read the different, often contradictory, interpretations. And the text remains relevant in the 21st century. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist beloved by right-leaning “bros”, has said “Milton’s great poem was a prophecy.” He sees Satan as a resentful figure—similar, he feels, to today’s aggrieved leftists.

The poem’s final book ends with Adam and Eve banished from Eden, and an assertion that “to obey” God “is best”. Tyrants, fancying themselves godlike figures, rather like that message. So when an Arabic translation of “Paradise Lost” was published in Syria in 2011, a state newspaper argued that the poem shows the inevitable failure of revolutions. Do not resist, for you might end up like Satan and Beelzebub, his second-in-command, floating in hell’s burning lake like “two lizards in a jacuzzi” (as Mr Reade puts it). Bashar al-Assad’s subjects seem to have preferred a different interpretation, and overthrew him in December. Their “stubborn patience”, unlike Satan’s, was ultimately rewarded. ■