The Complex Legacy of Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

A Study of Rebellion and Redemption

The Fallen Angel (French: L’Ange déchu) is a painting by French artist Alexandre Cabanel. It was painted in 1847, when the artist was 24 years old, and depicts the Devil after his fall from Heaven.The painting is at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, John Milton gave Lucifer a voice through his poem Paradise Lost. Upon its release, Paradise Lost was hard to ignore, regarded instantly as either a work of genius or heretical nonsense. Writing an epic poem of this nature was bold, but it was Milton’s masterpiece.

Since its publication, Milton’s poem has spawned critiques, defenders, and copycats. A whole genre of fictional characters were born from Milton’s prototypical “antihero” depiction of Satan.

C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia series, critiqued Paradise Lost in his work A Preface to Paradise Lost in 1942. Lewis’s critique was composed during the height of the mid-twentieth century, which the value and quality of Milton’s representation of Satan as a hero was reentering the cultural conversation.

The division found in Satan’s reception is intriguing because defenders of the work and its critics have to contend with whether it is appropriate to turn the Devil into a tragic hero. Some writers argued whether Milton’s Satan is morally superior to Milton’s God, whose immoral actions toward Satan provoke and may even justify his attempted revolution.