Essay on Freedom and Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Freedom and Satan in heaven disordered Satans primary operational problem in Paradise Lost is his drop of obedience. The fundamental misunderstanding which leads to Satans disobedience is his separation of free leave al unmatchable from Gods class-conscious power. In the angel Raphaels account, Satan tells his dominions, Orders and Degrees/Jarr not with liberty (5.792-93). Tempting as this differentiation seems, Satan is mistaken. Free will and hierarchical power atomic number 18 not mutually exclusive, as Satan suggests, but overlapping concepts. regular(a) though Satan has been created with sufficient freedom to choose to disobey, he tacitly acknowledges Gods sovereignty when he deeds his choice. Satan is constrained existentially, from the outset, by having a proper(postnominal) choice to make about whether or not to obey God. Satan, meet as all angels, demons, and humans, may exercise his freedom as acquiescence or dissent, for God had created him Sufficient to have st ood, though free to fall./such(prenominal) I God created all th ethereal powers/And spirits . . . /Freely they stood who stood, and throw away who fell (3.99-102 cf. 5.549). If Satan would choose neither to assent nor to dissent, thereby refusing to exercise his free will, he would be discarding his free will. But this is im come-at-able, as the demons recover in counsel in Book II so huge as he exists, Satan must make choices with respect to his possible obedience to God. If Satans first mistake was to completely divorce his free will from Gods power in giving him that freedom, his second mistake occurs in his concept of what it means to exercise that freedom. God says that Not free, what proof could they Satan et al. have disposed(p) sincere/Of true allegiance? (3.103-04). But Satan has exactly the... ...lthough one can choose, as Satan does, to dissent and disobey, such purportedly self-creative acts be in fact merely an acknowledgment of Gods hierarchical power. When prid e and emulation to be want God prevent humans from hearing the referee Conscience God has placed within us (3.195 Satan in any case has been given conscience enough to remember the call to obedience, 4.23), we become like Satan, for the same reasons constrained to listen only to the Satanic voice take issue in our ears. Works Cited Scott Elledge, ed., Paradise Lost, second edn. (NY Norton, 1993). Millicent Bell, The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost, PMLA 68 (1953), 863-83 here p. 878. Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden (Buffalo Univ. of Toronto, 1965), 39-40, 43 Barbara Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton Princeton U. , 1985), 174.