New Atheism is at its heart anti-theism—opposition to the traditional concept of God as a malevolent force that must be challenged and overcome. Yet, as Romanticism revealed, antipathy to God and sympathy for Satan appear to go hand-in-hand; “anti-theism leads to Satanism,” explained Maximilian Rudwin in his seminal study of The Devil in Legend and Literature:
If what has been considered good is found to be evil, what opposes it must necessarily be good. Thus the denunciation of the Deity led to the sanctification of Satan. If the ruler of an evil world is bad, his adversary must necessarily be good. This paradox accounts for the belief held by many Romantics that Satan was wronged and that there was…a great historical case to be judged anew before the court of our conscience.1
Disdain for the divine autocrat of Judeo-Christian theology certainly led to Romanticism’s reassessment of this despotic Deity’s great Adversary. The revolutionary Thomas Paine—a member of the intellectual circle presided over by radical publisher Joseph Johnson, which, with contributions from the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and William Blake,2 laid the foundation for Romantic Satanism—unleashed an unprecedented, acerbic assault on orthodox religion with The Age of Reason (1794–95, 1807). Paine was writing in defense of Deism—the belief in God as the Creator of the cosmos, the non-interventionist Deity far grander than the petty, micromanaging, all-too-human God of the Abrahamic faiths—but Paine’s Age of Reason waxes Satanic when he demonizes the Bible as “the word of a demon,” as opposed to “the Word of God.”3 Finding in the so-called Good Book “a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind,”4 Paine believed the sanguineous Scriptures sullied the Deist God he adored: “It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.”5
Paine of course had little time for “his sooty highness,”6 but while The Age of Reason dismissively derides the Devil as one of the main arms with which institutional religions “terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,”7 in Common Sense (1776) Paine had employed the example of Satan in its traditionally negative sense when idealizing the American system of government: “He that will promote discord, under a government so equally formed as this, would join Lucifer in his revolt.”8 More significantly, however, in the same work Paine let slip Satanic sympathies by quoting Milton’s fallen angel—when explaining why he could never repent and return to God’s service, even if such a path were open to him (IV.98–99)—to stress the impossibility of the American Colonies returning to subjection: “Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream.…For, as Milton wisely expresses, ‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.’ ”9 This subtle identification with the Miltonic Devil very much foreshadowed the Romantic Satanists who would go well beyond diabolically barbed criticism of God into open assertions of admiration for Milton’s sublime Satan.
Romanticism’s militant atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his unpublished Essay on the Devil and Devils (ca. 1819–20), asserted that the Devil “owes everything to Milton,” in part because “Milton gives the Devil all imaginable advantage…[with] arguments with which he exposes the injustice and impotent weakness of his adversary…”10 By referring to God as the “adversary”—the literal definition of the Hebrew Satan—Shelley was deliberately echoing Milton’s Satan and his “Atheist crew” (VI.370) of rebel angels, who refer to God with epithets typically reserved for the Devil, such as “enemy” (I.188, II.137) and “foe” (I.122, 179; II.78, 152, 202, 210, 463, 769). In turn, Shelley, channeling the revolutionary spirit of the Miltonic Satan, exclaimed his wish “to crush the Demon, to hurl him back to his native Hell never to rise again,” the “Demon” in question being none other than God Himself.11 Lord Byron similarly demonized the Deity and heroized the Devil in Cain: A Mystery (1821), wherein Lucifer emerges as a genuine light-bringer (in the Promethean sense):
I tempt none,
Save with the truth: was not the tree, the tree
Of knowledge?.…
…Then who was the demon? He
Who would not let ye live, or he who would
Have made ye live for ever in the joy
And power of knowledge? (I.i.196–210)
Today, French philosopher Michel Onfray follows the tradition of Shelleyan/Byronic Satanism, for Onfray goes well out of his way in his Atheist Manifesto to express hypothetical appreciation for “fallen, rebellious angels, untamed, undefeated,” taking his atheism to the boundaries of Satanism proper:
In the Garden of Eden the devil — “the slanderous one, the libeler” — teaches what he knows best: the option of disobedience, of refusal to submit, of saying no. Satan — “the adversary, the accuser” — breathes the wind of freedom across the dirty waters of the primal world where obedience reigns supreme — the reign of maximum servitude. Beyond good and evil, and not simply as an incarnation of the latter, the devil talks libertarian possibilities into being. He restores to men their power over themselves and the world, frees them from supervision and control. We may rightly conclude that these fallen angels attract the hatred of monotheisms. On the other hand, they attract the incandescent love of atheists.12
In his orthodox reading of Paradise Lost, the Christian C. S. Lewis remarked that “Many of those who say they dislike Milton’s God only mean that they dislike God,”13 and John S. Diekhoff added that Satan sympathizers “will do well to ask whether their liking for Satan does not spring from enmity to God.”14 The atheist William Empson was not about to disagree, professing, “I think the traditional God of Christianity very wicked,” and concluding that Christians “worship as the source of all goodness a God who, as soon as you are told the basic story about him, is evidently the Devil.”15 This is an echo of Shelley, Byron, and the other Romantic Satanists, who cast the Christian God in a demonic light and, consequently, sympathized with the demonized God’s great Adversary, Satan. Yet Romantic Satanism’s overturning of the God and Satan paradigm was not mere literary criticism; the Romantic Satanists exalted the Miltonic Satan as a provocative symbolic means of challenging sociopolitical orthodoxy. Perhaps it is no surprise that we find a reemergence of the spirit of Romantic Satanism in the current zeitgeist. Perhaps it is no surprise that the New Atheists, fighting tirelessly to dethrone God in our culture—to in essence realize on Earth what the mythic Lucifer had vainly attempted in Heaven—are inclined to give the Miltonic-Romantic Devil his due.
Notes
1. Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), p. 306.↩
2. See Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 34–35, 42–43.↩
3. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, intro. Joseph Carrig (New York: Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc., 2006), p. 21.↩
4. Ibid.↩
5. Ibid., p. 195.↩
6. Ibid., p. 71.↩
7. Ibid., p. 4.↩
8. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. intro. and notes. Mark Philip (New York: Oxford University Press, [1995] 1998), p. 32.↩
9. Ibid., p. 27.↩
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essay on the Devil and Devils, in Shelley’s Prose: or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark, pref. Harold Bloom (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988), pp. 268, 267.↩
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley, quoted in Schock, p. 80.↩
12. Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: the Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, [2007] 2008), pp. 97–98.↩
13. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, [1942] 1961), p. 130.↩
14. John S. Diekhoff, Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Commentary on the Argument (New York: The Humanities Press, Inc., [1946] 1963), p. 48.↩
15. William Empson, Milton’s God [1961] (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1978), pp. 10, 255.↩