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Junkie
Location: Sydney, Australia
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I think the first step is to think of Satan as a consumate politician in the Congress of heaven. I hunted a little bit and pulled an essay that I thought was most relevant to this question. It's a little long and dry but it shows how any talented politican would be able to create some strong rhetoric with certain arguments at their disposal. Here's an extract.
From http://www.brysons.net/miltonweb/milton04.html
Quote:
Satan's Protestantism in Paradise Lost
Satan mixes elements of each of these theories of the relation of subject to ruler into his rhetoric. In justifying his, and his faction's, rebellion against heaven's king, Satan portrays himself as a prince entitled and even required to resist an unjust monarch who is grasping for absolute power and thereby attempting to usurp that portion of the "higher power" or "governing authority" that belongs to the lower magistrates: "A third part of the Gods [again, read "Gods" as elohim in Calvin's sense of gods, magistrates, or judges], in Synod met / Thir Deities to assert, who while they feel / Vigor Divine within them, can allow / Omnipotence to none" (VI. 156-159).
The picture of heaven's king as a grasper, a usurper of powers not rightfully his own, is common to those who follow Satan's lead. Nisroch, "of Principalities the prime," addresses Satan as "Deliverer from new Lords, leader to free / Enjoyment of our right as Gods" (VI. 451, 452). Satan himself characterizes the pronouncement of the Son as the great Vice-gerent as a usurpation of power rightfully belonging to others: "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, / If these magnific Titles yet remain / Not merely titular, since by Decree / Another now hath to himself ingross't / All Power, and us eclipst under the name / Of King annointed . . . "(P.L. V. 772-777). Satan goes on to characterize this shift in heavenly politics as a demand for "Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile, / too much to one, but double how endur'd, / To one and to his image now proclaim'd?" (V. 782-784).
The political balance of Stephen Marshall's "Letter" is at work here in two ways: Satan is characterizing the heavenly system as having been one in which (until the usurpation) the threefold power of enacting laws, making wars, and judging "causes and crimes" had been shared by the king and parliament, the heavenly king and his heavenly princes and magistrates; the "Father infinite" of V. 596 is characterizing the heavenly system as one in which the threefold power is contained in one ruler, the heavenly king. By claiming to defend their right to rule, to defend "those Imperial Titles which assert / Our being ordain'd to govern, not to serve" (V. 801, 802), Satan and his followers are claiming their rights under a system of government which holds that it is the duty of lesser magistrates to hold the king in check. This fits quite nicely with Calvin's insistence that the only lawful political resistance to a tyrannous king could come from lower magistrates acting in concert with one another. It is, in fact, the sacred duty of such magistrates to resist tyranny, as is spelled out quite clearly in the following passage:
I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God's ordinance. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV. xx. 31, p. 1519)
That Satan claims to be fighting against tyranny is made clear by his numerous references to the Father as a tyrant: Hell is the "Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns / By our delay"; the Father is "our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n" (I. 122-124). The key here is the phrase "Sole reigning." In a system in which lesser magistrates or princes had real power, the monarch would not be in a position of exclusive and absolute reign. This makes sense of Satan's famous "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n" in a way that does not require that Satan be pictured as being himself an absolute ruler, a tyrant who rails against tyranny. Despite the "Oriental" descriptions of Satan given by the narrator at the beginning of book II, the "Throne of Royal State," the "Barbaric Pearl and Gold" that the "gorgeous East with richest hand / Show'rs on her Kings," Satan justifies, and maintains, his power by appeal to what he and his followers represent as the king-in-parliament model of heavenly government: the system of "Orders and Degrees" that "Jar not with liberty" (V. 792, 793) to which Satan refers when he tells his fellow fallen angels that the "just right and the fixt Laws of Heav'n / Did first create your Leader" (II. 18, 19). As we will see later, however, Satan appeals to this system precisely in order that he may establish a tyrannical rule over his fallen compatriots, imposing a top-down system in Hell after having explicitly rejected and rebelled against such a system in Heaven.
What is distinctly missing from Satan's political rhetoric is any mention of those who are ruled. Over whom, after all, do all of these "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, [and] Powers" reign? If "those Imperial Titles" indicate that the angels were "ordain'd to govern, not to serve" (V. 801, 802), whom are the angels governing? Each other? William Empson somewhat whimsically suggests a solution to this problem by postulating the existence of what he calls "the vast dim class of proletarian angels who are needed so that angels with titles may issue orders" (Milton's God 60). Before the creation of Adam and Eve on a new-made Earth, one might ask the same question about the reign of the Father. Over whom, besides these "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, [and] Powers" does the Father reign? Does the Father reign if there are no subjects but angelic princes and magistrates?
Protestant political theory, at least as it appears in Calvin, Luther, Mh ntzer, and Marshall, assumes as a given that magistracy and the power thereof is designed for the good of those who are ruled, basing this claim on Romans 13:4, where the magistrate is described as "the minister of God to thee for good." Marshall describes a proper Magistracy as one set up "with a sufficiencie of power and authority to rule for the publicke good" (3). However, in Paradise Lost, there appears to be no public, much less a public good, until the rebellion by Satan, and the subsequent creation of Adam and Eve on Earth. Until this radical break, heaven appears to have been little more than a gigantic May Day parade with only Party members in attendance. There is only dictatorship, no proletariat in Milton's prelapsarian heaven.
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Whew. I had a look at the war's aftermath in <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/index.shtml">book one of Paradise Lost</a> and the fallen Angels are really trying to spin it as a close fight, really feeling a lot of stubborn resentment towards God and kind of rallying each other to regroup with all these great speeches. It all comes down to Satan's pride and his great line that it's better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. |