The List #73: Wicked and Thence Weak

The marks of good and evil.

Early on in Paradise Lost, Satan confronts a couple cherubs for the first time since his rebellion. These are celestial bit players he would have wiped off the sole of his shoe before he fell from grace. But now he’s brought so low that he’s no match even for the privates in heaven’s army. He acts as if hand-to-hand combat is beneath him, but one of the angels sees easily through that bluster: “thy fear,” he says, “Will save us trial what the least can do / Single against thee wicked, and thence weak.”

Satan then performs a version of the classic tweet by one of Twitter’s great anonymous comedians, @dril: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob.” Modern interpreters, misreading Satan’s anti-God crusade as somehow stunning and brave, fail to detect the light touch with which Milton makes a running gag out of the devil’s transparent cope.

Sometimes God intervenes directly to underline the point, as when he turns Satan and all his minions into various species of vermin. Most of the time, though, Satan’s disfigurement and humiliation just proceed naturally from the twisted logic of his own evil.

I have thought about this all week as we discuss the palpable difference, even online, between the luminous warmth of godly love and the feverish illogic of diabolical spite. Glib and skillful as Satan is, the unmistakable mark of God’s goodness is a resolute simplicity, an internal coherence that explodes Satan’s elaborate nonsense on contact. In confrontation with the lucid brilliance of heaven, he is “wicked, and thence weak.”