Month: April 2016

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

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<sup>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.↩</sup>

Milton’s Satan was able to assume the position of nineteenth-century Romantic Hero in part because the Devil ceased to be terrifying—a shift which took place in the eighteenth century, as orthodox theology’s Prince of Darkness was brought to his deathbed by the Enlightenment. The decline in belief in the Devil as a literal entity walking to and fro in the Earth in search of souls to devour allowed for the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) to be read with greater sympathy as a literary rather than a theological character. Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of a five-volume study of the Devil in history and literature, explains that the “depersonalization of Satan, his reduction to a symbol, and the unmooring of the symbol from Bible and tradition meant that the idea of the Devil could float free of its traditional meanings.”¹ Paradoxically, as the Devil shrank in theological significance—as Satan was reduced to symbolic form—he grew in mythic stature. No sooner than the “supernatural figure was killed off,” notes Peter A. Schock in his study of Romantic Satanism, was Satan “resurrected in the form of a modern myth,” indeed, “a Gnostic countermyth that idealize[d] revolution and free thought,” wherein “Milton’s Satan [was] constructed as an idealized antagonist of an Omnipotence embodying the dominant political and religious values of the era.”² There is a discernible resurgence of this radical Romantic trend in the so-called “New Atheism” movement, which has flourished at the start of the new millennium.

Today, while belief in the Devil (and God, for that matter) is declining, Milton’s Satan looms large. The apostate angel’s impact extends well beyond the bounds of literary criticism, as the spirit of Miltonic Satanism pervades modern popular culture. For instance, His Dark Materials (1995 – 2000) trilogy author Philip Pullman—invoking William Blake’s infamous observation in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) that Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”³—has asserted that he is proud to “be of the devil’s party and know it,” reasoning, “if there is a God and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against…”⁴ This is to say, effectively, that Lucifer was right to revolt against the Almighty, and Pullman more or less confesses his Luciferian allegiance in his Introduction to an Oxford edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman opens with a retelling of an anecdotal story “about a bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire two hundred years ago or more” who, having Paradise Lost read to him, “Suddenly…bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims ‘By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!’ Which are my sentiments exactly.”⁵

 

 

Pullman’s unequivocal love for the Miltonic Lucifer permeates his award-winning fantasy novels, described by the author as “Paradise Lost for teenagers in three volumes.”⁶ Conservative voices have naturally reacted to Pullman with hostility, Peter Hitchens even deeming Pullman “the most dangerous author in Britain,” a hyperbolic assessment echoing Southey’s “Satanic School” diatribe against Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.⁷ The significant difference, of course, is that while Byron and Shelley had to be evasive when it came to their Satanic sympathies, Pullman can be open—boastful, even—about his own. This is indicative of a nascent movement of neo-Romantic Satanism, provoked by theocratic encroachments upon secular life and liberty.

The Islamic terror attacks against the United States on September 11 of 2001, along with the revitalization of crusaders for Christ which followed in its wake, were met with a backlash of pent-up anti-theism, which became a militant movement deemed “New Atheism,” leading the charge: contrarian Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Sam Harris, and philosopher Daniel Dennett. These four militant atheists embraced their collective moniker “the Four Horsemen,” but, like the Romantic Satanists, they flipped the Satanic symbolism on its head, waging a war of ideas against organized religion, which, rather than godlessness, they found to be a principal propagator of conquest (jihad), war, famine, and death.⁸ Yet because New Atheism is suffused by a diabolically charged resistance to religion and is open to employing Satanic symbols (albeit with tongue in cheek) as derisive challenges to the authoritarian God of the religious—both of which were hallmarks of Romantic Satanism and its Satanic School—the Miltonic Satan has reared his head in the New Atheism movement.

 

 

The late iconic public intellectual atheist Christopher Hitchens explained in a 2004 lecture bearing the Shelleyan title “The Moral Necessity of Atheism” that if there truly were a God who ruled as dictator of the cosmos, as the great religions propose, he, an admirer of Milton’s Satan for his unyielding resistance to such a God, would “be of the Devil’s party,” i.e., “I wouldn’t worship it; I wouldn’t agree to be bound by it; I wouldn’t become one the serfs.” Hitchens, who listed Lucifer as one of his favorite heroes of fiction,⁹ proclaimed a kinship with the Miltonic Satan because he was not only an atheist but a self-styled “anti-theist,”¹⁰ and by asserting himself as such, Hitchens echoed the Romantic Satanists two centuries before him.

 

 

The Romantic atheist Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford University for refusing to deny authorship and distribution of a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism (1811), was explicit that he would feel compelled to defy God if He did exist: “Did I now see him seated in gorgeous & tyrannic majesty as described, upon the throne of infinitude – if I bowed before him, what would virtue say?”¹¹ This same sentiment is expressed by modern-day atheists perhaps less aware of their Romantic forebears and/or less keen on the prospect of using Satanic icons as a means of iconoclasm. For instance, Dan Barker, who transitioned from fundamentalist Christian minister to atheist activist—indeed, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation—took a rather Shelleyan stance in his book Losing Faith in Faith: “Speaking for myself, if the biblical heaven and hell exist, I would choose hell. Having to spend eternity pretending to worship tyranny would be more hellish than baking in eternal flames. There is no way a Bully will earn my worship.”¹² This mirrors in sentiment, if not in eloquence, the fallen rebel angel Mammon in Paradise Lost, who, exploring the idea of returning to Heaven, expounds upon Satan’s “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (I.263) declaration:

                         …Suppose he [God] should relent

And publish Grace to all, on promise made

Of new Subjection; with what eyes could we

Stand in his presence humble, and receive

Strict Laws impos’d, to celebrate his Throne

With warbl’d Hymns, and to his Godhead sing

Forc’t Halleluiahs; while he Lordly sits

Our envied Sovran, and his Altar breathes

Ambrosial Odors and Ambrosial Flowers,

Our servile offerings. This must be our task

In Heav’n, this our delight; how wearisome

Eternity so spent in worship paid

To whom we hate. (II.237–49)

Anti-theism gives New Atheism a noble ring, for anti-theists not only dismiss the Judeo-Christian God as nonexistent, but decry Him as malevolent, proudly expressing that (at least in theory) they would prefer to burn in His Hell than bend their knees to Him in Heaven. Yet this is the quintessential Satanic sentiment, for Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost rejects “Knee-tribute” to the King of Heaven as “prostration vile” (V.782), and when damned to Hell he retains his “unconquerable Will” and “courage never to submit or yield” (I.106, 108) to the God he lambasts as a “Tyrant” (X.466) who “Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav’n” (I.124). What mythic figure could be a more apposite standard-bearer for the anti-theist strain of New Atheism? Reactionary Christians are of course comfortable demonizing the irreligious as friends of Satan, but it is remarkable and certainly culturally significant that a number of prominent nonbelievers increasingly accept this as complementary rather than opprobrious.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1986] 1990), p. 169.↩
2. Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 2, 6, 5.↩
3. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, [1965] 1988), p. 35; pl. 6.↩
4. Quoted in Milton in Popular Culture, eds. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, aft. Stanley Fish (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, [2006] 2007), pp. 8, 9.↩
5. Philip Pullman, Introduction to Paradise Lost, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005), p. 1.↩
6. Quoted in Stephen Burt, “ ‘Fighting Since Time Began’: Milton and Satan in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” in Milton and Popular Culture, p. 48.↩
7. In the Preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821), Robert Southey wrote: “Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic School, for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.” Quoted in C. L. Cline, “Byron and Southey: A Suppressed Rejoinder,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 3 (Winter, 1954), p. 30.↩
8. See Revelation 6:1-8.↩
9. See Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (New York: Twelve, 2010), p. 331.↩
10. In his Introduction to The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), p. xxii, Christopher Hitchens provided his most thorough explanation of his “anti-theist” stance: “I myself have tried to formulate a position I call ‘anti-theist.’ There are, after all, atheists who say that they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those of our predecessors who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom.”↩
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley, quoted in Schock, p. 80.↩
12. Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc., [1992] 2006), p. 331.↩</sup>