Satan's Seduction

Is Satan the more appealing character, dramatically speaking? More charismatic perhaps? Or just more engaging?

I’m reading C. S. Lewis’ “A Preface to Paradise Lost,” and I thought I would share the part where he deals with the fact that critics make a big deal from the fact that “Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters,” with William Blake perhaps expressing the point most memorably, that Milton was really of the Devil’s party. Lewis defends Milton’s piety this way:

Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the ‘good’ characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves.

We are, of course, familiar with this issue with respect to contemporary movies. Actors often tell us that the bad guy roles are the more fun to play. And it is often said that the villain is the one who makes the story, at least when we are talking about a good versus bad guy movie; without a strong, provocatively drawn villain, a movie will fall flat. Indeed, was it not Heath Ledger’s Joker that truly made the latest Batman movie the critically acclaimed blockbuster that it proved to be. Anyway, I just thought Mr. Lewis gave us a charming answer to the question back in 1942.

Satan's Seduction

Is Satan the more appealing character, dramatically speaking? More charismatic perhaps? Or just more engaging?

I’m reading C. S. Lewis’ “A Preface to Paradise Lost,” and I thought I would share the part where he deals with the fact that critics make a big deal from the fact that “Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters,” with William Blake perhaps expressing the point most memorably, that Milton was really of the Devil’s party. Lewis defends Milton’s piety this way:

Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the ‘good’ characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves.

We are, of course, familiar with this issue with respect to contemporary movies. Actors often tell us that the bad guy roles are the more fun to play. And it is often said that the villain is the one who makes the story, at least when we are talking about a good versus bad guy movie; without a strong, provocatively drawn villain, a movie will fall flat. Indeed, was it not Heath Ledger’s Joker that truly made the latest Batman movie the critically acclaimed blockbuster that it proved to be. Anyway, I just thought Mr. Lewis gave us a charming answer to the question back in 1942.