Professor John Carey – The differences between Satan and Scrawdyke are that Satan’s delusions of grandeur are not entirely delusions – we do not need to be admirers of ‘leadership’ to feel the magnetism of Satan’s sheer courage – and he really is persecuted.

The images of dynamism and magnitude heaped upon Satan carry far more conviction than those applied to any other character. When he stumbles across the burning marl, leaning on his spear, ‘to equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast / Of some great Ammerial, were but a wand’ (i, 292-4) the attentive detailing – ‘Pine’,  ‘Norwegian’ – and the four mid-syllables at the end which fling what we had been led to believe a comparison into colossal inadequacy, reveal a resourcefulness in the workmanship which seem never to be called upon when a heavenly inmate is described.

Satan’s crime in the first place was not so much pride as doubt – intellectual, not moral, and so, we feel, less blameworthy. If he had been as sure as Abdiel that God could see and do everything, his conduct would have been suicidal, and far from impelling him pride must then have withheld him from inevitable humiliation. Alternatively, one can diagnose his doubt itself as a symptom of megalomania. At all events God deliberately encouraged it, as Satan complains (i, 642), by fielding only half a side for the first three days’ battle. Afterwards, in his speech to the troops, Satan pretends it was God’s ‘utmost power’ they fought against (i, 103), to cheer them up. Of course, he realises now that it was not, but we should not infer that he knew all along that God could make a better showing.

We are, of course, frequently reminded that Satan is doing his best to imitate God (ii, 511; v, 764, etc.), and he is remarkably successful. The oriental allusions (meant to sound heathenish and degenerate), and warnings like ‘barbaric’ stuck on to Satan’s ‘Pearl and Gold’ (ii,4), distinguish his despotism only incidentally from God’s. Both are totalitarian. Gold, crowns and thrones are as surely symbols for worth in Heaven as in Pandemonium. Heaven even shared the same architect (i, 732-3). Critics who feel superior to Pandemonium’s bad taste would probably go no further into Heaven than the self-operating, diamond and gold doors on musical hinges (iii, 506; vii, 206, 566). Both devils and angels exercise their bodies, but only the devils exercise their minds (ii, 528-61; iv, 551-2). ‘Pomp’ is inexplicably bad in Hell (and on earth), but good in Heaven (ii, 510; v, 354; vii 564).

Dr Lois Potter – Satan is a poignant study of how loss of virtue leads to perversion of reason and thus to loss of freedom.

St. Augustine, writing of the fall, noted that the punishment for disobedience was disobedience: “For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he can’t?” The same is true of Satan. Though he rebels against God in assertion of his freedom, he soon finds that he is not free to do what he knows to be right (IV, 79-83). Satan has become the prisoner of his own image; it is Disdain, not God, that forbids him to repent.

Satan is vividly realised. Like Adam and Eve, he is trapped in his past actions, constantly looking back at these. He is unable, like the good man, to make a free decision at each moment, guided only by reason.

An  objection of many readers is that Milton’s good characters find it too easy to make the right decisions, because their reason and passions are so completely in harmony. Many critics of Milton repeat the famous ‘1066 and All That’ diversion of dramatic personae into Cavaliers (‘Wrong but Wromantic’) and Roundheads (‘Right but Repulsive’). Milton is notoriously good at playing devil’s advocate. The lush enticements of Comus.  The heroic speeches of Satan. His even more moving weariness and despair in ‘Paradise Regained’. These may be designed to enhance our admiration for the characters who successfully resist such temptations. They also force us to make a choice between good and evil: to recognise that this choice is much harder for us that it is for Milton’s heroes.

Helen Gardener, in ‘A Reading of Paradise Lost’, calls Satan ‘the last great tragic figure in our literature’. This may be a result of his kinship with Faustus, Macbeth, and other evil yet noble heroes of the great age of drama. Compare Satan (IV, 75), ‘Which way I fly is hell, myself all hell” with Mephistopheles:
	‘Swift from myself I run, myself I fear,
	  Yet still my hell within myself I bear.’
Through suffering in late life, Milton came to an intimate understanding of human suffering which made it possible for him to create such a character.

Satan embodies all the examples of defiance in a bad cause from Achilles to Tasso’s pagan heroes.

Satan is apparently described as an active character. But he is constantly being transformed from a subject to an object. In Book I, lines 27-81, the transition from ‘he’ to ‘him’ reflects the moment at which he loses the power to act. The ‘Who’ in the last line is the subject of ‘durst’,  it is also grammatically related to ‘him’.  Milton keeps reminding us that Satan, despite his belief that he is acting under his own power, is really only doing what God permits him to do. Only those characters who willingly do God’s will are free. Christ, and Milton himself as narrator, use the accusative ‘me’. Satan is constantly saying ‘I’, yet they are the active figures, not he. Only the original act of rebellion was his choice: thus just before this passage, we’re told his ‘pride’ not God, had cast him out from heaven. Milton constantly underlines the paradox of a god whose service is perfect freedom and whose antagonist freely chooses to be as Abdiel tells Satan, ‘not free, but to thyself enthralled; (VI, 181).

Devilish syntax is generally more complicated that that of God, and of the good angels. Satan (the father of lies) deals in puns and ambiguities. He sometimes conceals the full implications of his words from himself as well as from others. The devils are fond of rhetoric as well: one reason their speeches are more dramatic is that they are also more public, because their loss of freedom forces them to play a part.

Bernard Bergonzi – For Blake, ‘he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. Shelley, asserting that ‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is far superior to this God’…

Satan, having become much too impressive and interesting in the first two books, is systematically degraded in the rest of the poem.

John Wain – A propos the character of Satan, ‘Defeat is the only thing that can make pride beautiful’; and after all these years I cannot think of a better formulation. Satan, when we first see him, is unforgettably beautiful and heroic, because he has lost everything and is still proud. It is only later in the poem, when we get to know him better and realise that this pride is inseparable from his character, that he was proud even in blessedness and would be so even in victory, that we turn against him. It has been suggested that Satan’s character deteriorates as the poem goes on; it would be nearer the mark to say that the character stays the same, but Milton turns it round to show it in an increasingly harsh light. All in all, the portrait of Satan is so flawless and yet so powerful that it strikes one as almost miraculous.

Professor Frank Kermode – Milton would doubtless have considered those readers who
heroise Satan to be either corrupt or imperfectly educated; but I do not think he would have  argued there was not, in some sense, an heroic Satan in the poem. To say that poetry appeals to the mind through the senses, and this is central to Milton’s view of the function of poetry, is to admit that the work can never be exactly regulated by his moral intention.

Milton’s varying of the point of view in this poem… He uses the epic poet’s privilege of intervening in his own voice, and he does this to regulate the reader’s reaction; but some of the effects he gets from this device are far more complicated than is sometimes supposed. The corrective comments inserted after Satan has been making out a good case for himself are not to be lightly attributed to a crude didacticism; naturally they are meant to keep the reader on the right track, but they also allow Milton to preserve the energy of the myth. While we are hearing Satan we are not hearing the comment; for the benefit of a fallen audience the moral correction is then applied, but its force is calculatedly lower; and the long established custom of claiming that one understands Satan better than Milton did is strong testimony to the tact with which it is done. On this method the devil can have good tunes. Not only does his terrible appearance resemble an eclipse which ‘with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs’ (i. 598 – 9), but his oratory can include sound republican arguments – God is ‘upheld by old repute / Consent or custom’ (369 – 40). This sort of thing makes its point before the authorial intervention corrects it. Milton even takes the risk of refraining from constant intervention and Satan-baiting in the first book, where the need for magnificence and energy is greatest.

Professor Harold Bloom – The reader’s centre in Paradise Lost has to be Satan, the whipping boy of nearly all scholarly exegetes and yet clearly the greatest glory of the poem.

 Milton makes our pleasure in Satan a guilty one, ostensibly insisting upon belief and an overt   morality.

 His aesthetic eminence...

Yet Milton avoids representing for us the crucial change by which Satan ensues from Lucifer. If we search the text, that most crucial of metaphoric moments is simply missing. This is a most un-Shakespearian evasion; we want to hear it dramatised, just as we want to see Lucifer before he dwindles forever. In flight from Shakespeare, Milton represses the dramatic moment of his hero-villain’s transformation. After all, Raphael is wrong; it is Lucifer who thinks himself impaired, and we are irked by the party line that tells us Lucifer is now an unperson named Satan. Shakespeare unfolds Iago and Macbeth before us, whereas Milton simply assumes that the reader, being Christian, will accept the story as told entirely from the perspective of the winning side.

Satan, gorgeous as his eloquence is, is nevertheless a repetition of Shakespeare’s discovery of the nothingness at our centre.

Dr Peter Conrad – Incapable of knowing or representing God, it must be a legacy of that virtuoso arguer and actor, that genius of epic bravado and dramatic crisis, Milton’s Satan.

The action of epic man, its ‘energy and magnificence’ so thrilling to Shelley is Satan’s folly. His pride in the possession of character and in the mind’s occupancy of ‘its own place’ where heaven and hell can’t be transposed is his most vicious illusion. No one else in Paradise Lost is a character: that idea, so precious to literature, is another inspiration of the devil’s. God and Christ are above the pettiness of the personal; Adam and Eve (until they fall) predate it, content to be part of one another, Sin and Death, incubi of allegory, are outside it. Satan’s individuality is the penalty of his estrangement from God. Refusing to be ‘me, whom he created what I was’, he ventures to invent himself anew by the rabid insistence of will. Yet though he fuels that renegade, dangerously single self with all his emotive and intellectual power, he cannot prevent its degeneration.

Because hell is a parody of heaven, it is a place of vocal dissidence not accord: hence the parliamentary hubbub, whose raised voices by the end of the poem are indistinguishable from the malevolent, meaningless sibilation of serpents. The utterance of Satan, not serene in unchallengeable invisibility like God’s, has to be wrung from him as a symptom of his anguish. He tries three times to speak, whilst his hushed sycophants wait, but is silenced by his misery. His words – remnants of the divinity in him, because language is man’s means for upraising himself to God – must struggle to escape from the body, which imprisons  them: ‘at last / Words interwove with sighs found out thir way’. The elocutionary orator who embodies the troops or the agile debater who tells Eve that the fruit first taught him speech ends exiled from language, emitting only noise when ‘hiss for hiss returnd with forked tongue / To forked tongue’.

Professor Catherine Belsey – In Paradise Lost the concern with subjectivity sits uneasily with the epic mode. It is perhaps an effect of history that twentieth century readers tend to find the inner conflicts of the central figures more interesting than the war in heaven. We are, after all, a culture preoccupied by the self. To a critical tradition steeped in character-analysis, much of the pleasure of Paradise Lost lies in the glimpses it offers of an interiority which is not on display in earlier epic poems:
		So spake the apostate angel, though in pain,
		Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair.
(I, 125 – 6)

Only a figure capable of error experiences serious doubt, moral uncertainty, inner conflict, despair. (The soliloquy developed in tragedy, not comedy.) Thus God and the Son appear ‘flat’ to a humanist reading: they inhabit no secret inner world of anxiety or anguish.

Satan, on the other hand, dwells in such a world from the beginning of the poem. From the moment of his opening speech we know him to be silently racked with deep despair. It is Satan’s soliloquies which carry much of the moral meaning of the epic, defining the sense of loss, the hopelessness and the future malice which will make hell intelligible – and unbearable – as precisely a state of mind, a condition of the subject. At the same time, of course, it is the soliloquies which elicit the sympathy of the (humanist) reader, just as Macbeth’s solitary utterances, alternating with displays of further butchery, enlist the audience in alternating compassion and horror.

The mind of Satan is a richly populated kingdom. In a strategy borrowed and developed from the drama, the soliloquy at the beginning of Book IV invokes a series of conflicting voices within a single speech. One of these voices seeks to evade the  despair of the present by constructing imaginary alternatives to the real position:
		O had his powerful destiny ordained
		Me some inferior angel, I had stood
		Then happy; no unbounded hope had raised
		Ambition.
							(IV, 58 – 61)

‘Yet why not?’, intervenes a second and more lenient voice (line 61). Another important angel might have raised a revolt and drawn Satan in. Perhaps there was no real choice. But a third voice speaks from the position of authority and brooks no excuse: ‘other powers as great / Fell not, but stand unshaken’ (lines 63-4). Satan too could have stood. And the stern voice of authority addresses him in the second person, and thus from a place specified as outside the self-indulgence already identified: ‘Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand? / Thou hadst’ (lines 66-7). He has therefore no one and nothing to blame but the divine love itself which gave him free will. The succeeding voice is petulant: ‘Be then his love accursed…’ (line 69). Authority replies, still in the second person: ‘Nay cursed be thou… ‘(71) The effect of dialogue is sustained as the soliloquy continues: ‘Which way shall I fly’ (line 73); ‘which way I fly is hell’ (line 75). And there follows the account of the self’s absolute privation which, as a humanist reader, paradoxically grounds the soliloquy in the ‘reality’ (the real absence) which is the condition of the humanist subject:

			my self am hell;
		And in the lowest deep a lower deep
		Still threatening to devour me opens wide.
						(IV, 75 – 7)

Professor Stanley Fish – As I describe them, Milton’s tracts and poems are always engaged in an act of containment. Centrifugal forces – named , variously, Satan, Comus, Chaos, Chance, the Prelates, the Confuter, Belial, Mammon, Moloch, Beelzebub, Sin, Death, Daliah, Adam, Eve and sometimes, Milton – are struggling to get out, to set up their own shop, to nominate their own values, to establish their own empire, to write their own literature, to draft their own laws, to go their own way, to have their own circuitous paths; and always they are reined in, as an omniscient and pervasive power either routs them (as in book VI of Paradise Lost), or expels them to a place he has prepared (and therefore a place that is his and not a world elsewhere), or reveals their plans to be a subset of his, or turns their designs against them.

The surface energies in his work are almost always attached to the perspective and forces he would have us repudiate. This is hardly a new insight; it has been ours ever since Blake and Shelley noted Satan’s magnificence and speculated that Milton may have been of the devil’s party with or without knowing it.

Kenneth Gross is absolutely on target when he locates Satan’s appeal not in his heroism but in his dramatization of the “myth of the self”. Satan offers us a “persuasive illusion of what a self or character might be.” “It is not that I like Satan’s voice, mind or attitude better than those of other characters in the poem, but rather that Satan, at times, seems to be the only character with a voice, mind or attitude.” That is, Satan is the only character (at least before Adam and Eve fall) who is divided from the source of being and therefore in the grip of bottomless self-consciousness. This is his error and, as Gross says, his “lure”. “Satan is an image of the mind in its dividedness from both itself and others, in its illusions of inwardness and power.”

The question of whether Satan is gentle cannot, Milton would tell us, be settled by examining the empirical evidence – by looking for example at the present distress of his cohorts and assessing his efforts to comfort them; rather, we must look at Satan’s underlying relationship to the value that founds and grounds the universe, and reason (if that is the word) from that relationship to the meaning of what he – or someone like him, someone who has “broken union” – does, no matter what the particular circumstances of his doing it.