From Milton to Marx

Exploring the complex contradictions of Satan as dialectical figure

by Jessie Jones

The Satan that we know—indeed, that contemporary feminism and a legacy of witchcraft knows—is Miltonian through and through. Milton spun his Satan, a symbol of refutation, rebellion, but also fallen perfection and angelic tragedy, from very little yarn. Although the conflation of Satan and Lucifer the fallen angel is now well established, this came from inference and interpretation; this connection is never explicitly made in the Bible. As Elaine Pagels and other critics have consistently pointed out, the conflation of Lucifer the fallen angel with Satan (or Satanos) is an interpretation made centuries after the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Pagels argues that “rereading biblical and extra-biblical accounts of angels,” one realises “that while angels often appear in the Hebrew Bible, Satan along with other fallen angels or demonic beings, are virtually absent.” 

Who is Satan, then? And how does he function as both a figurehead and a symbol? Pagels reads the events on the human level of the Bible, “told in the gospels about Jesus, his advocates, and his enemies”, as congruent to the divine level, the level of “supernatural drama.” In short, “the struggle between God’s spirit and Satan.” If we entertain the idea of Jesus as a Biblical Marxist, a proto-communist figure extolling the virtues of community, the spiritual significance of sharing wealth, and the divine status of those that sacrifice by giving, then this complicates our contemporary understanding of Satan. If Satan is the oppositional force in this dynamic, then how has he become a cultural figure at least adjacent to ideas of liberation, if not the direct source? How can a figure so antithetical, in the original source material, to human liberation, come to stand centuries later for just that? At least, certainly, in a feminist sense? 

It is through an equally fraught tension, between the traditional and theological, and the contemporary and the cultural, that we can uncover a less contradictory figure. By looking at the dialectics that the sexy, modern Satan represents (the struggle between the status quo and the political agitator) we can see what is truly appealing about him. When rubbing this Satan against his Biblical source, holes emerge, gaps gape, and Satan quickly becomes an inherently contradictory figure. This is where he becomes a vehicle through which to discuss pertinent political issues.

By looking at the dialectics that the sexy, modern Satan represents, we can see what is truly appealing about him.

When discussing the struggle between Jesus and the “unseen forces” propelling his enemies, Pagels points to Jesus’ establishing of the disciples. These twelve, “presumably […] one leader for each of the original twelve tribes of Israel,” are sent out with the power to “cast out demons,” thus establishing an oppositional force to Satan’s. Pagels describes this in a typically dialectical fashion, calling it an “escalation of spiritual conflict” which “immediately evokes escalating opposition”; sound familiar? It would be naive—and indeed not very useful—to try to directly overlay the current political tensions between the far right and the contemporary left with that of Satan and Jesus. (I’m not sure that the two even parse without sounding heavy-handed, ham-fisted, and obviously inviting a lot of evangelical outrage at the resolute diagnosis of Jesus-as-communist.) However, for the sake of thought experiment, the situations bear comparison if not outright parsing.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus responds to accusations that he is charged by demons, possessed by Beelzebub, by asking:

How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his good unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder his house.

Mark 3:23

Jesus here points out the irony and contradiction of the charges against him: how can he be possessed by demonic forces if these are the very ones he’s charged his disciples to expel? So much of this is familiar in current discourse, in which the right accuses the left of being the real perpetrators of prejudice, and the left becomes increasingly subject to infighting. These contextual, inter-Biblical dialectical struggles, then, create an interesting backdrop to Satan’s symbolism, as well as his prominent contemporary place. 

So, on to the contemporary Satan—he who permeates witch-infused feminism, recent folk horror movies, and literature of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, is the one you’re probably most familiar with. The cultural Satan, as touched on before, is one frequently associated with the emancipatory. And he developed, predominantly, from Milton. His status in Milton’s epic Paradise Lost is of the anti-hero: a fallen angel, one of God’s legion who dares challenge him, embarking on a bildungsroman writ large as he travels through Pandemonium. Reading around Paradise Lost confirms Satan’s “virtual absen[ce]” and reveals further lacunae.

In her essay “The Problem of Satan,” Balanchandra Rajan highlights the Miltonian Satan as a poetic figure rather than an ethical one. Satan, for Rajan, “considered as a poetic force is different from Satan as a cosmic principle,” and though they run parallel, never quite meeting, they are still inextricably linked and dependent on one another. She argues that this Satan, “an element in a concerted whole,” must be seen as “a single fact in a poetic process. Therefore, to understand its nature and function you need to relate it to the pattern it fulfils and the background of belief against which it is presented.” In short, there is the poetic Satan and there is the theological Satan. We can bring to him, in the poetic sense, “simple emotions of mirth or admiration,” but these responses are not divorced from the “background of belief” from which the figure emerges.

She continues in terms that will help us unravel the uniquity with which Satan has permeated culture: “we think of him either as an abstract conception or else, more immediately, as someone in whom evil is mixed with good but who is doomed to destruction by the flaw of self-love.” The former is the vessel in which consistent vast interpretations have been placed, the latter a combination of Milton’s fallen angel and the complex Old Testament Satanos of Job.

Pagels delves deeper into the Hebrew Bible to illuminate the etymology of Satan, revealing something equally present in current interpretations: “the satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character.” This seems very much in line with our contemporary fascination with the devil as a symbol of rebellion and refutation. More of a metaphor for dialectical opposition, even the biblical Satan was somewhat abstract.

What is lost in translation now is the dependence of this figure upon the divine: this role cannot exist without God. In fact, Pagels continues, “what they meant was any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity.” We’re familiar with this Satan in literary history. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Satan’s arrival is a satire on the rigid atheism of Stalinist Russia at Bulgakov’s time of writing. The arrival is not of God, but his adversary; his appearance and the chaos he reeks throughout Moscow is supposed to represent the prevalent denial of God. One figure is theologically and philosophically dependent on the other.

More of a metaphor for dialectical opposition, even the biblical Satan was somewhat abstract.

In Job, Satanos is charged with a sort of nihilism, determined to prove to God, following a surveillance of the earth, the imbecility of the human. The current cult of celebrity around Satan distances him from this task of proving humanity’s lack, removing his abstraction and falling foul of a neoliberal individualism. This is one way in which Satan has come full circle from the theological Satanos of Job, through the witch trials and Bulgakov’s hell-raiser, right up to present day, in which he permeates feminist poetry and independent horror. Satan stands for hubris, decadence, individualism, self-obsession, selfishness. If we are to follow the aforementioned interpretation from Rajan, that his flaw and fall result from rampant self-love, then we can dissect our current socio-political landscape. In much the same way rapacious capitalism frequently absorbs, and is propelled by, its oppositions, somehow Satan as a figure of personal, individual gratification, somebody charged with highlighting the rottenness of humanity, has come to symbolise its opposite. Pair his self-obsession with his nihilism, antithetical to the significance of hope in the left historically, and an incredibly contradictory figure emerges. 

This is complicated even further during and after the witch trials of the 1600s. This was when a conflation emerged between paganism and witchcraft, and witchcraft and devilry. In his book on the subject, Ronald Hutton traces the aligning of witches’ sabbaths to both the satanic and the pagan. He highlights the “belief, held by a succession of authors between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, that the people tried for witchcraft had been practitioners of a pagan religion that had survived from antiquity and was now annihilated by the witch-hunts.” The puritans and protestants of the 1600s are largely responsible for synonymising the anti-Christian with the Satanic. Satan, as shown earlier, is far from anti-Christian; he permeates the theological and, in the Old Testament especially, is the left hand of God. 

Hutton continues that, following the witch trials, “to conservatives and reactionaries” this portrayal of Paganism and Satanism as being one and the same, served as a defense of the trails. He suggests that “although witchcraft itself could no longer be taken seriously, the people accused of it were still adherent of bloodthirsty and orgiastic old cults that deserved to be punished and repressed.” Simultaneously however, and this is where the familiar manifestation of Satan-as-emancipatory-symbol comes in, “liberals, radicals and feminists could reverse these claims.” He states that “by portraying the pagan witch religion as being a joyous, life-affirming, liberating one which venerated the natural world and elevated the status of women,” witchcraft appeared severed from the church, patriarchy, and other systems of brutal oppression. This idea, though, emerges from the same place as conservative defense of violence; the rendering of paganism as a mirror image of Satanism, and therefore witchcraft as simply a manifestation of pagan ritual, was a fiction used historically to defend violence against women.

In some of the more recent examples, like Robert Eggers’ The VVitch and Rebecca Tamas’ poetry collection The Witch, Satan is very much reinstated. There is a reimagining and recombining of pagan ritual, connection to the natural world, Satan as a liberatory figure, and the satisfaction of female desire. But, as shown above, this has a complicated and mostly fictionalised history, charged with excusing the original crimes of the trials.

So, can a synthesis be reached? Not only is there a hidden dialectic process behind the contemporary lauding of Satan, a familiar dialectics of dominant ideology meeting its opposition, but another struggle between the theological and cultural Satan. Can the historical version wrestle with the present to provide some answers to the questions he’s used to answer? Maintaining nuance and shades of grey reveals that dialectics are not always positive. It would be dangerous to suggest that the rise of the right is a positive catalyst for revolutionary change, although plenty of classical Marxist theory would. Using Marxism to read our contemporary fascination with Satan reveals our enduring fascination, and indeed need, of dialectics. This is by no means the quickest solution to altering anybody’s material conditions, and an overindulgence of these ideas can separate us from the issues on the ground, day to day. But the underlying processes behind so much of the discourse around Satan, being an equal and oppositional force to dominance, suggests there is resistance here, now, burning brightly in the left. 

For the figure of Satan to persist as such a complicated, nuanced figure of resistance, this presupposes a propellent. He would not be such a complex figure if the enmeshed and entangled ideas he represents weren’t still at the forefront of contemporary thought. Parsing these disparate strands, these contesting directives, represents what still presents the biggest challenge to the left. These oppositional forces may be burning brightly, but some synthesis must lie ahead for any hope of revolutionary change. 

---