Among the many peculiar things about 2016’s heated election season in the U.S., perhaps the most interesting aspect of the ensuing chaos is the reoccurring invocation of Lucifer by the political Right, which is a distant echo of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Romantic Satanism. Romantic icons Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were demonized as heads of a “Satanic School” by first-generation Romantic radical turned reactionary Robert Southey, whose co-option by the political establishment had been consecrated in his laureateship. In his elegy for King George III, A Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey demonized the wayward second-generation Romantics Byron and Shelley for following Milton’s fallen archangel in having “rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society,” Southey identifying an intense diabolism in their works, “characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety…”¹ Southey’s Satanic School diatribe against Byron and Shelley was in part a call for the English government to censor the irreverent writings of these Satanized poets and their circle, which the Poet Laureate believed threatened the social order. “Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations,” thundered Southey, “labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul!”² Nearly two centuries later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the political landscape is witnessing a return to this reactionary Satanizing—this time at the presidential level.

The Christian tradition has a long history of demonizing undesirables, which began as early as the New Testament with the demonization of the Jews, Jesus himself casting the Pharisees—who not only disbelieve the messianic Jesus but seek to kill him—as sons of Satan: “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God.…Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:42–44). Christian Scripture is unequivocal with regards to the Satanic status of the Jews: those who “say they are Jews, and are not”—i.e., those Jews who fail to accept Jesus as the Son of God and their savior—are said to belong to “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9, 3:9). Indicting the Jews as “Christ-killers,” who had invited their own doom when boasting of the condemned Christ, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), helped foster anti-Semitism throughout the history of Christendom,³ and in fact it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that the charge of the cosmic crime of deicide was officially dropped. The Jews were originally demonized because Christians (erstwhile Jews) believed they’d gone astray from “the good shepherd” (John 10:11, 14) while believing themselves still part of the flock (they “say they are Jews, and are not”). This remained the inspiration for demonization in the Christian Church, fellow Christians with unorthodox views accused of heresy (Greek for “choice”) and persecuted accordingly.

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner, in an April 28, 2016 interview hosted by Stanford University, followed the Christian tradition of marginalizing one of his own by way of demonization, describing then struggling Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh.” Boehner’s demonizing dismissal of Cruz was not based upon theological or ideological differences, but a vehement dislike of the man: “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” Things only got more colorful when the media sought actual Satanists to weigh in on the matter, co-founder of The Satanic Temple Lucien Greaves immediately responding:

Boehner’s comment is illustrative of how well past time it is to adjust our mythologies to reflect our realities. Cruz’s failures of reason, compassion, decency, and humanity are products of his Christian pandering, if not an actual Christian faith. It grows tedious when pedophile priests and loathsome politicians are conveniently dismissed as Satanic, even as they spew biblical verse and prostrate themselves before the cross, recruiting the Christian faithful. Satanists will have nothing to do with any of them.

The Satanic Temple is known for its political—and politically progressive—slant on Satanism, but the Church of Satan, which is normally devoid of official political positions, was also asked to respond to Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh.” On April 30, 2016, incidentally the 50th anniversary of the Church of Satan’s founding, the organization’s High Priest, Peter H. Gilmore, took exception to the comparison of Cruz to Lucifer:

Having a conservative Christian likened to Lucifer — one who opposes equal rights for same sex couples and promotes the ability to deny services to any with different values — we Satanists see as besmirching the positive, heroic aspects of that character as portrayed by Milton in his epic Paradise Lost.

Boehner’s blanket dismissal of Cruz as Lucifer incarnate was, again, more of a personal insult than an ideological condemnation. Conservatives have reserved full-fledged demonization for their political counterparts on the Left. In his speech at the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016, former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson—a retired neurosurgeon who apparently considers Darwin’s theory of evolution a deception of Satan—explicitly aligned Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with Lucifer:

One of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky. This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently.…He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now think about that. This is a nation where our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, talks about certain inalienable rights that come from our Creator. This is a nation where our Pledge of Allegiance says we are “one Nation under God.” This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says “In God We Trust.” So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that.

Carson here misrepresents the Declaration of Independence (the reference he cites is to the non-interventionist designer God of Deism, hence “Creator” and “Nature’s God” as opposed to “Jehovah” or “Jesus”) and is likely ignorant of the phrases “one Nation under God” and “In God We Trust” having been placed in the Pledge of Allegiance and on U.S. currency, respectively, in the 1950s. These are subsidiary issues, however; what screams out from Carson’s speech is the garish reference to Lucifer. Naturally, there can be no more focused demonization of Hillary Clinton than aligning her with none other than Lucifer himself, but Carson was merely bringing to new heights a topic/tactic familiar in right-wing circles.

Saul D. Alinsky, though now an extremely marginal historical figure, has been viewed as the archetypal community organizer. His Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, published a year before his death in 1972, was designed as a guide to challenging and ultimately overcoming the sociopolitical establishment, the crux of which is infiltrating the system in order to change it from within. “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power,” Alinsky explains, whereas “Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”⁴ Contrary to what Carson and his ilk claim, the book is not dedicated to Lucifer but “To Irene,” Alinsky’s wife. Flipping the page, you then find the Lucifer reference, which follows two quotations—one from Rabbi Hillel and the other from Thomas Paine—and Alinsky describes Lucifer as “the very first radical…who rebelled against the establishment,” and he is clearly invoking Lucifer the idealized arch-rebel imagined by the Miltonic-Romantic tradition:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.⁵

Ben Carson is surely ascribing more significance to this cheeky quotation than is appropriate. British-Indian author Salman Rushdie—who, as the target of an Islamic witch hunt ever since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, knows what it feels like to be truly demonized—quite rightly derided Carson for his inability to “recognize irony or humor.” Clearly, as far as Carson is concerned, the mere “over-the-shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer is enough to summarily dismiss Alinsky—and, by extension, Hillary Clinton—but other conservatives have gone further, demonizing Alinsky/Clinton by way of aligning his/her political stratagems with the Devil’s. In a June 5, 2014 interview with The Blaze, neocon and Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza gave the following analysis of Alinsky and his political disciples:

…Alinsky was obviously not a Christian; in fact, he was an atheist. So why would an atheist dedicate a book to Lucifer? I think to discover the answer, you have to pay careful attention to what Lucifer represents in the Western tradition. So I did a close reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and you begin to see how Lucifer operates. First of all, Lucifer is a master of organizing resentment, and so is Alinsky. Lucifer is also a master at making G-d [sic] the bad guy. So even though Lucifer rebels against G-d, even though G-d justly expels Lucifer from Heaven, Lucifer goes, “G-d, you’re a tyrant. I don’t have to follow you. I want my own kingdom.” So Lucifer practices, you may say, demonization against G-d. And finally, Lucifer is a liar. He is a master of dishonesty and deceit. Now, Alinsky adopted these Luciferian techniques.…And I think here, we begin to see the Obama and even the Hillary playbook.…: Seeming very respectable, being very self-disciplined, and ultimately pretending to be a friend of the middle class, whose values you are trying to undermine.

Paradise Lost’s Lucifer, the charismatic character Milton brought to life as a celestial insurrectionist who scorns “Knee-tribute” to the King of Heaven as “prostration vile” (V.782) and, despite damnation, pledges himself to forever defying “the Throne and Monarchy of God” (I.42), was extremely appealing to the radicals of Romanticism living in the wake of the American and French Revolutions.⁶ The Miltonic-Romantic Satan continued to be channeled throughout the nineteenth century by antiestablishment figures, such as the anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin.⁷ Alinsky’s Lucifer reference surely owes much to this tradition, but more than anything else it appears to be a simple satirical aside. D’Souza takes the “over-the-shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer and runs riot with it, and what emerges from his intricate demonization of Alinsky, Obama, and Clinton is something that seems straight out of the reactionary assaults on the Romantic Satanists back in the nineteenth century, “close reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost” and all.

While demonizing or Satanizing political rivals appears to be growing increasingly commonplace on the American Right (the Left is inclined to a more modern-day form of demonization by way of employing accusations amounting to secular Satans: fascist, racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc.), it is doubtful that anyone within the political landscape will follow the Byronic-Shelleyan precedent in response.

Byron and Shelley had initially been demonized in part because of their combination of licentious lifestyles and radical politics, both spiced up by cultivation of provocative and mischievous diabolical personas. These rebellious poets escalated the matter by responding to their public demonization by styling themselves as Satanic—in the tradition of the heroic Satan out of Milton—to sardonically mock and forcefully challenge the forces of reaction. For example, Byron, who was the central target of Southey’s Satanic School tirade, when preparing his drama Cain (1821)—the poet’s retelling of the biblical story of the first murder, in which Lucifer emerges as a noble opponent of a tyrant God and a Promethean patron of Man—vowed to “give…Mr. Southey – & others of the crew something that shall occupy their dreams!”⁸ Any such response today is highly unlikely, especially at the level of the presidency. Indeed, in the case of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—the first black and potentially the first female presidents, respectively—there are already enough obstacles in their political paths without attempts to disarm reactionary demonization by embracing it. If anything, just as Byron responded to Southey’s Satanic School charge with a countercharge (“If there exists anywhere, excepting in his imagination, such a school, is he not sufficiently armed against it by his own intense vanity?”⁹), Clinton and her campaign may perhaps turn Ben Carson’s Luciferian demonization back around and liken the egomaniacal Donald Trump to Lucifer, the one who aspired to the Throne of God.

As far as I’m concerned, though it may be interesting and amusing to hear the Devil’s name bandied about in my country’s current election season, comparison of either presidential candidate to Lucifer is quite simply downright insulting—to Lucifer.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Quoted in C. L. Cline, “Byron and Southey: A Suppressed Rejoinder,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 3 (Winter, 1954), p. 30.↩
2. Ibid.↩
3. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: the Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1984] 1986), pp. 192–93; Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996), pp. 122–27.↩
4. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, [1971] 1972), p. 3.↩
5. Ibid., p. ix.↩
6. See Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), pp. 263–65, 286–87; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: the Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1986] 1990), pp. 168–69.↩
7. See Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 116–20.↩
8. Quoted in Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 101.↩
9. Lord Byron, Preface to The Vision of Judgment (1822), in Lord Byron: the Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., [1986] 2008), p. 939.↩</sup>

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>