I tried reading Paradise Lost and I’ve come to the conclusion that Milton was on some type of acid trip when he wrote it. A lot of this book is just completely bonkers to the point that I had to stop. There are some descriptions, like his random details about hell that he explains in an incoherent fashion. I completed reading Book One; it consists of him arguing in some incoherent, racist tangent about how Jewish people, Palestinians, and Egyptians are all devil-worshippers and then goes into details about what type of hell the fallen angels suffer in – and cannot seem to decide if its fiery infernos or twisted, discordant wind blasts – and then goes back to his racist tangent by falsely claiming Jewish people don’t really worship the Abrahamic God and are really following ancient, vague Middle-Eastern polytheistic deities in order to argue that the Christians are the only ones following the “One True God” and then explaining how Christian followers are justified in warring against Egypt and especially Palestinians because Milton believes Palestinians are barbarians. I wasn’t surprised by the anti-Semitism after trying to read the oft-celebrated Magna Carta and finding repeated instances of anti-Semitic laws throughout the document and I wasn’t too surprised by the anti-Egyptian animus due to how dehumanizing and racist the actual Bible is when depicting Egyptians, but I was completely unprepared for Milton’s racism against Palestinians who Milton disgustingly perceives as barbarians judging from his descriptions of them. Nevertheless, it’s no wonder that these poems humanized Satan for European audiences.

He has a few of Satan’s followers, Moloc and Belial, argue that their true purpose is to keep antagonizing and harming humanity so that Jehovah permanently obliterates their existence, because they’re already suffering extreme torture in eternal hellfire within hell itself. They can’t suffer worse, because they’re already suffering eternal torment in hell. The beginning of Book 2 of the poem has them talk about how fruitless it is to challenge Jehovah, how horrible the suffering in hell is for them for their individual liberty (Milton makes a point to disparage hell as everlasting fire and torture at all points as the backdrop and context for this), and how they seek to cause chaos, strife, and misfortune for humanity until Jehovah is forced to obliterate them from existence to end their suffering and how they will die affirming their belief in personal freedom, even as Jehovah denies them for being “arrogant” about this.

In what way is this not admirable? Did Milton himself even think about what he did here? Did he think “da evil” was a good enough argument to not feel sympathetic for them with how he wrote this? Even if there’s a plot twist and Satan is a slave to his desires . . . that would be their God’s fault for making them that way, in the first place as it implies they don’t have freewill when choosing to sacrifice themselves for personal freedom. It would be like a Sisyphean curse.

Also, there’s a serious logical blunder in all of this that Christian readers don’t seem to realize from what I’ve seen of analyses; if the argument is that these demons are sacrificing themselves in eternal torment for their own arrogant belief in personal liberty without worship for Jehovah, then… they are making a tremendously greater sacrifice than Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was only tormented in hell for three days. These demons – including Satan – allow themselves to be tormented for eternity and expect no reward for their eternal damnation in what Milton himself describes as hellfire and their stated purpose is to sacrifice themselves for their belief in Personal Liberty above faith in Jehovah. Their only absolution will be their deaths and they know it. If Milton didn’t realize this very obvious and glaring logical blunder, and if Christians themselves don’t seem to realize this, then what kind of weird cognitive dissonance is this? I’m not trying to be insulting here, I’m just completely confused by how or why anyone thought this would be a good way of convincing people to fear and despise Satan by writing his character in this manner.

I decided to skim it further after finishing Book 1, because it just got even weirder to the point that some parts were genuinely incoherent. The parts that do make sense are just odd. At the end of book five of Paradise Lost, Satan makes a pro-democracy argument and says Jesus Christ shouldn’t be worshipped above others in heaven. Seraph Abdiel harshly repudiates Satan and says it is obvious that Jesus Christ is above all… because it’s Jesus Christ’s Divine Right to be above notions of Satan’s belief in democracy. Milton makes it clear that he wholeheartedly believes in Abdiel’s forceful and unwavering support for monarchy over Satan’s evil ideas of democracy.

I’m guessing this was a book of poems were made to convince people in the 1600s of the goodness of Monarchy and to shut down criticisms of democracy? Because this was quite the acid trip of a read. This man is literally condemning democratic rule and he ended-up making Satan a popular anti-hero figure as a result of not recognizing the logical errors of his arguments. In short, Milton kind of deserved this misreading; he literally presented compelling argument after compelling argument for Satan’s side and then tried to say “haha bad, because MONARCHY BABY!” as if that would be enough to convince readers. It reads more like he had serious cognitive dissonance with his beliefs and relied on unthinking obedience to the monarchs of his time to clear his mind of his doubts. I honestly lost interest after deciding to skip ahead to the portions of Abdiel and reading other sections, even when beginning where the new scenario or context begins, it comes across as completely incoherent in some parts. This is honestly not a good series of poems in my personal opinion.