The story behind the cover of the Louvin Brothers' 1960 Satan Is Real album is the stuff of country music/folk-art myth--it's like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story come to life. Ira Louvin soaked old tires in kerosene, buried them in rocks, set them on fire, propped up a hand-painted twelve-foot devil, and stood in pristine white with his brother Charlie while the photographer snapped pictures--and while the heat from the flames caused the rocks around the brothers to crack and split like real brimstone. The point: the devil is real, sin is real. Satan Is Real.When you hear the Louvin Brothers sing, you're tempted to believe in the reality of the devil, no matter your religious persuasion or lack thereof. But in fact, the Satan depicted here was only plywood, and despite Ira Louvin's bad behavior (he was the rounder, and brother Charlie the teetotaler; Ira knew all too well that sin was real) this fallen angel doesn't have much depth. Not so the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
In Paradise Lost, Milton strived to create something remarkable--something "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Not only was the fusion of classical epic and Christian tradition untried, no one had ever before endeavored to parse out the dimensions of Satan's character in the way Milton had. Marlowe's Mephistopheles, for instance, simply delights in evil, and that is that. He is a walking embodiment of the idea of evil, as all good devils had been up to that point. Milton's project, to "justify the ways of God to men," required that he indicate the devil as the source of the first fall from grace experienced by "our grand parents." That is, Satan, in the exercise of his own free will, had to corrupt Adam and Eve, who acted also on the premise of their own free will. Out of this situation will emerge God's greatest triumph: the redemption of downfallen humankind through His "Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy."
For all of this to work, though, Satan must be a compelling and convincing tempter. He must possess depth of character. Satan must be real, or at least as real as Hamlet--which is pretty real. Like Hamlet, Satan is complex, convincing, and--if you can conceive of such a thing--morally ambiguous. That is why Milton's Satan, who through the poet's liberal imaginative faculties fills in the blanks left by the Bible, engages our imaginations and at times perhaps our sympathies.
As a thinker, Milton was something that is inconceivable to many of us today: he was both a religious extremist and a rationalist. Moses (invoked in Book I of Paradise Lost as the author of the Pentateuch) was obviously not a rationalist. Milton planned to remedy that situation by rationally explicating the problem of evil as part of his larger project. Paradise Lost is a logical argument for God's rightness, and only in an era of burgeoning rationality would a poet feel so compelled to explore Satan in the way Milton did. The Enlightenment, a later era that took the rationality of Milton's day several steps further, replaced religious extremism with judicious humanism. A yet later era, the Romantic era, replaced this judicious humanism with a belief in passion and the imagination; the Romantics by and large said to hell with rationality as well. What happens when you take away both the rationality behind Satan's characterization and the religious impulses that automatically make Satan the would-be ursurper and God the legitimate source of power? You get Percy Shelley, who claimed in A Defense of Poetry that "Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost." If you think that sounds like crazy talk, then you haven't read Book I of Paradise Lost very closely.
Milton was not quite "of the Devil's party," as Blake claimed, but he might as well have been. Of course, Milton could not have anticipated the attitudes of later eras and how they might transform the concept of his wicked Archangel. Skipping over the parts about Satan's devotion to the "study of revenge" and his "immortal hate" (and is it not sensible to hate a tyrant?--for Satan, that's all God was), we are left with a being whose appeal to the Romantic poets is all-too apparent: a powerful figure with an "unconquerable will" and "courage never to submit or yield." Satan embraces adversity and strives to find a way to overcome. Satan's grand statement to Beelzebub, when the chief of the fallen angels hails the abysmal landscape of Hell as his new home, is among the most powerful testaments to the power of mind and imagination in all of literature: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." (And is there not an echo of Hamlet here, who could get stuck in a nutshell and count himself "a king of infinite space"? Satan's character in Paradise Lost is far more sensible and consistent.) Satan continues: "Here at least / We shall be free ... / Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n." Satan is no rebel without a cause, especially given the fact that God in Paradise Lost is a real flat bore. Milton accepts it as a given that his audience would not conceive of the possibility of seeing God as anything but the good guy. He didn't count on the coming of a genuine anti-Christ like Shelley.
All of this raises a fundamental question about the value of literature: does the meaning of a text emerge from the author's intentions, or from the reader's interpretation? Jaded citizens of a postmodern landscape that we are, we are unlikely to believe anymore that it somehow springs magically from the text itself. Perhaps it's not magic, but just like the tree falling in the forest without anyone there to hear it fall, the book on the shelf doesn't own any meaning unless somebody reads it. Regardless, there's no doubt that Shelley's interpretation of Satan is itself a feat of great imagination, and not one without legitimate grounds. For Shelley, at least, Satan was truly real.
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