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John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost is one of the greatest pieces of fanfiction ever written. Paradise Lost takes the Bible’s sparse account of the Fall of mankind and transforms it into a masterpiece full of new and familiar characters, revenge-fueled by hatred and jealousy, and salvation achieved only through love. In the first few lines of the poem, Milton says that he wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men.” (( Milton, John. Paradise Lost, (London: Penguin, 2003), 4, line 26. ))
In other words, Milton wrote his poem to further explain the Bible to his readers by pondering answers to questions the Bible does not answer: Why did Satan fall? Why did Satan trick Eve? What was Eve thinking when she ate the fruit? Milton answers these questions and more, and in doing so, he showcases the brilliance and adaptability of the genre that is fanfiction.
Milton Wrote What?
There’s no denying that John Milton was a fan of the Bible. Born in 1608 in London, Milton lived during the time of the English Civil Wars and actively participated in the politics of that time.
He spent his life engrossed in constant discussion about Christianity and faith, which meant that Milton really knew the Bible. Milton spent the early parts of his life studying the Bible, and he spent his later years dissecting it in order to try and grasp its true purpose as a text. (( Labriola, Albert C. “John Milton.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., December 5, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Milton. )) He felt a deep connection to the Bible’s stories, and he wanted more.
Paradise Lost fills in Genesis’s gaps, and in doing so, captures the true spirit of fanfiction. The heart of fanfiction lies not in the plot or the setting, but in the characters. By focusing on a character’s motivations or desires, fanfiction writers can push a character’s limits by placing them in new situations or by putting a spin on situations they’ve already experienced.
In Milton’s case, he spends Paradise Lost adding dimension to the Bible’s characters, which creates a story that stands on its own. With its depictions of the characters Satan and Eve in particular, Paradise Lost expands on the Bible’s moral lessons regarding the Fall in order to show readers in a new way that Satan’s evil is not inevitable; it’s a choice.
But why are Satan and Eve so important for Paradise Lost? Well, Satan and Eve are pretty crucial players in the story of the Fall of man with Satan acting as the tempter and Eve as the tempted. They also get the least amount of attention in Genesis (( The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. 5ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. )) compared to God and Adam. In the Bible, Satan and Eve are the plot devices who receive all the blame for doing exactly what they were written to do—make man Fall.
And yet Milton sees them as more complex than mere plot devices designed to keep the story moving. Milton not only thinks that Satan and Eve have more to say, but that there is more to learn from their mistakes. After all, the best characters tend to be the most morally complex, and the best fanfiction writers know how to play with that complexity.
Satan Wasn’t Always Pure Evil
Satan is one of the most hated figures in the Western canon. He represents evil in its purest form, but even Satan was once an angel. Milton’s Satan is at a crossroads at the beginning of Paradise Lost as he is a very broken and lost fallen angel, struggling to find his identity and purpose.
Fueled by a need to take revenge against God, Satan escapes from hell and ventures to Eden to ruin God’s newest creation: mankind. However, upon first seeing Adam and Eve, Satan feels love for mankind, proclaiming, “I at your harmless innocence melt.” (( Milton, John. Paradise Lost, (London: Penguin, 2003), 96, lines 388-9. )) And so Satan’s path of pure darkness and hatred is momentarily shadowed with doubt. Could he, the fallen angel, love God’s creation? Can Satan love and care for man even better than God could? While there is no question that man must Fall, must it be horrible?
But in the end, Satan tricks Eve and becomes mankind’s strongest and most hateful enemy. Losing the compassion he initially had for man, Satan becomes the very essence of evil and darkness, but Milton argues that Satan’s decision to succumb to evil was just that, a decision—not an inevitable reality.
Satan’s Free Will
Milton highlights the Devil’s free will by writing the Devil as a conflicted character who puts himself into a position where he can choose great love or great hate. This inner conflict adds depth to Satan and makes him inherently more human because free will and the conflict that derives from having to make moral decisions for ourselves is a fundamentally human condition.
With the creative licence that fanfiction allows, Milton invites his readers to consider that Satan was not always a pure essence of evil, but a conflicted being. By writing fanfiction, Milton was able to write Satan as more human-like without invalidating the contents of the Bible. And because Milton was a great writer, he also used his poem to illustrate a moral lesson: Satan’s path can be anyone’s path. We all have the capacity for great love and the capacity for great hate.
By further dissecting Satan’s origin story, Milton shows readers how a once great angel, a beacon of light, can become so consumed with jealousy and revenge that he becomes the very essence of evil. In the Bible, Satan is only a perfect essence of evil whose only goal is to take revenge on God, but Milton shows a version of Satan that is just as capable of good as he is of evil. In order for readers to truly learn how to avoid becoming a monster, Milton seems to argue that it helps to know what made the monster in the first place.
Developing Eve’s Voice
There is only one paragraph in Genesis describing Eve’s deception and mankind’s acquisition of knowledge. In this paragraph, Eve is easily convinced and makes her decision without much thought. There is no internal conflict, no deliberation. She just eats the fruit because she wants knowledge. However, Paradise Lost provides readers with a different rendition of the Fall—one that gives Eve a voice.
Milton’s fanfiction gives readers an idea of what it would have been like to be in Eve’s situation. It imagines Eve’s internal deliberation over the pros and cons of eating the fruit where she meditates on the concept of death, on the snake’s promises, and on God’s intentions. After she eats the fruit, Eve does not immediately share it with Adam, but stops and once again ponders the consequences of her actions.
Eve wants freedom and control over her own life, and she hesitates because she wonders if sharing the fruit’s power with Adam will ruin her chances. But ultimately, her love for Adam trumps her desire for power. Eve proclaims, “I love him…without him [I could] live no life.” (( Milton, John. Paradise Lost, (London: Penguin, 2003), 280, lines 832-3. )) Her love for Adam is fueled by the connection she feels with him, which makes her want to give Adam this gift of knowledge.
It is not a choice sprung from malice but from love. At its core, Paradise Lost is a love story, so despite the stress of the Fall, Eve and Adam remain together because Eve (and Adam, too, who eats the fruit because he loves Eve) chooses love. And it is because she chooses love that Eve, unlike Satan, is not alone in the end.
Fanfiction Mattered Then And It Matters Now
Fanfiction continues to entertain and delight readers today just as much as it did readers in Milton’s time. Though modern fanfiction’s source materials have expanded beyond the Bible, Milton’s work can always be used as an example of a piece of model fanfiction. But Milton’s influence does not end with the modern fandom communities as it also holds a special place in the Western canon.
Western academics tend to have an ironic general disdain for modern fanfiction as a creative medium as they see it as unoriginal and unworthy of serious study. However, if these academics were to look a little bit closer at their literary canon, they would see that it is full of fanfiction. From Plato’s Socrates fanfiction to Virgil’s Homer fanfiction to Dante’s self-insert fanfiction to Milton’s Bible fanfiction, the Western tradition is no stranger to this genre. Considering fanfiction’s influence on the Western tradition, it makes one wonder where we would be today without it.
