Season 3 Podcast 158 Milton's Paradise Lost, Bk IV, Pt IX, The Wiles of Satan
Milton’s Paradise Lost Bk IV, Pt IX, The Wiles of Satan
Satan is about to enter the Garden of Eden. The following description by Milton brilliantly describes the devil in his duplicity.
Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marred his borrowed visage, and betrayed
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld.
For heavenly minds from such distempers foul
Are ever clear. Whereof he soon aware,
Each perturbation smoothed with outward calm,
Artificer of fraud; and was the first
That practiced falsehood under saintly show,
Deep malice to conceal, couched with revenge:
Yet not enough had practiced to deceive
Milton suggests that even Lucifer had to grow in cunning but not in evil. He represents all the vices, some listed above are ire, envy, despair, false, counterfeit, fraud, falsehood, and revenge. Satan is the opposite of Christ in every point. The Jews call him ‘the destroyer.’ A huge wall protects Eden. If you remember he had to get Sin to open the gates of hell because the walls were too high, but to get into Eden, he merely leaps over the wall.
One gate there only was, and that looked east
On the other side: which when the arch-felon saw,
Due entrance he disdained; and, in contempt,
At one flight bound high over-leaped all bound
Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within
Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold:
Satan, ironically, perches like a vulture on the highest limb of the highest tree which is the tree of life.
Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life,
The middle tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life
Thereby regained, but sat devising death
To them who lived; nor on the virtue thought
Of that life-giving plant, but only used
For prospect, what well used had been the pledge
Of immortality.
The tree of life was next to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Milton describes the paradox.
Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow
All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;
And all amid them stood the tree of life,
High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold; and next to life,
Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by,
Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill.
Satan, even amidst the Garden of Eden, is unable to appreciate the good. He only delights in the evil. He is his own hell, wants to destroy the happiness of others, converting good to evil and evil to good, unable to feel joy, only hate.
From this Assyrian garden, where the Fiend
Saw, undelighted, all delight, all kind
Of living creatures, new to sight, and strange
For the first time, Satan is confronted with Adam and Eve. He is astonished at their beauty. There is almost a regret that he must destroy their happiness.
O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold!
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heavenly Spirits bright
Little inferiour; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured.
Ah! gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe;
But Satan justifies his behavior because the ends justify the means. That is Lucifer’s greatest tool to convince man that he may perform any evil if it is for a greater good.
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