Adam Kissel
2/98

Satan's primary operational problem in Paradise Lost is his lack of obedience. The fundamental misunderstanding which leads to Satan's disobedience is his separation of free will from God's hierarchical power. In the angel Raphael's 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 are not mutually exclusive, as Satan suggests, but overlapping concepts. Even though Satan has been created with sufficient freedom to choose to disobey, he tacitly acknowledges God's sovereignty when he exercises his choice. Satan is constrained existentially, from the outset, by having a specific choice to make about whether or not to obey God.

Satan, just as all angels, demons, and humans, may exercise his freedom as assent or dissent, for God had created him "Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall./Such I [God] created all th' ethereal powers/And spirits . . . /Freely they stood who stood, and fell 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 impossible, as the demons determine in counsel in Book II; so long as he exists, Satan must make choices with respect to his possible obedience to God.

If Satan's first mistake was to completely divorce his free will from God's power in giving him that freedom, his second mistake occurs in his conception of what it means to exercise that freedom. God says that "Not free, what proof could they [Satan et al.] have given sincere/Of true allegiance"? (3.103-04). But Satan has exactly the opposite conception of the same truth. Satan knows that God wants him to love God and to be obedient to God. But if Satan does only what God wants, there is no external proof that Satan indeed had exercised his will. Satan cannot be content with mere assent that looks like blind obedience. Dissent, on the other hand, is absolute proof of Satan's individual will being realized over against God's will. Satan's intent seems to be to prove the existence of his will rather than, as God wants, to prove the independently good content of his will. By dissent, Satan shows himself to be more concerned with himself than with God, with the appearance of free will than with its real content. Here is the second major constraint under which Satan lies: as a rule, he only recognizes that part of himself which is disobedient. This constraint, unlike the one natural to Satan's will, is self-imposed.

Satan's pride further constrains him. Because he is able to prove his freedom via dissent, and because he has ignored the fact that his free will comes from God, Satan thinks (or at least tells the angels before his own fall) that all heavenly beings including God are "Equally free" (5.792). Focused on his own freedom, Satan cannot understand that God has even more freedom than he. When confronted with the hegemonic power of the Son, then, Satan believes that "new Laws" have been imposed, that God has changed the rules (5.679-80). But this is not a new constraint; it is merely a new formulation of the Godhead.

According to Raphael, Satan thinks that to acknowledge the Son would be to accept the establishment of a new hierarchy in which Satan would be "impaird" (5.665) or demoted. Satan chooses to dissent from acknowledging the son rather than to obey the Son (5.662). Rather than seek understanding of the truth in order to assent to the new formulation of the Godhead, Satan has made a decision based on the appearance that the Son is distinct from God. Satan asks, "who saw/When this creation [of the Son] was?" as though the Son is a separate creation like the angels (5.856-57). By presuming that the Son represents a new restraint on his freedom, and then choosing "by proof to try/Who is our equal," (5.865-66), Satan ironically lets his pride and presumption of equality with God constrain him to disobedient acts designed to prove an equality he can never have.

What, then, is the root of this inequality? What freedom does God have which Satan lacks? God has a very different kind of will. Whereas Satan can only exercise his freedom in relation to God and the materials at hand (though he has a great deal of control over the created heavenly and earthly cosmos), God has control over freedom itself. God says, "I formed them [the original angels] free" (3.123). God "ordained/Their freedom" while "they themselves ordained their fall" (3.126-27). God's particular creative power includes the creation of other free beings themselves. God therefore shows a supreme ability to transcend self-interest by creating beings who are free enough to deny Him.

This is just what Satan says he has forgotten: "Forgetful what from him I still received;/[I] understood not that a grateful mind/By owing owes not, but still pays" (4.54-56). While still in Heaven, Satan had claimed to be self-created, "self-begot, self-rais'd/By [his] own quick'ning [that is, self-enlivening] power" (5.860-61); Satan had not been able to remember his being created, and so he had attributed it to himself. But at this point of recognition that Satan owes his very existence to God, Satan decides that it is too late to repent, for his pride (his "dread of shame," 4.82) continues to constrain him. Satan now privately admits that his existence is due to God, but he is not willing to publicly acknowledge, to others or to God, the natural existential constraint that this fact places upon him as a creation of God.

God, not Satan, is the first cause, the original Creator. Just as created matter is constrained to follow the material laws of nature that humans have come to understand, created spiritual beings are constrained by the spiritual fact that free will itself is inextricably bound up with God. Although one can choose, as Satan does, to dissent and disobey, such purportedly self-creative acts are in fact merely an acknowledgment of God's hierarchical power. When pride and ambition to be like God prevent humans from hearing the "umpire Conscience" God has placed within us (3.195; Satan likewise 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 dissenting in our ears.