Erickson, Lee. “Satan’s Apostles and the Nature of Faith in Paradise Lost Book I.” Studies in Philology, vol. 94, no. 3, University of North Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 382–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174584.
Lee Erickson argues that Milton’s positioning of Satan and his “Apostles” are rooted in radical Protestantism and the belief of individual understanding of divine grace. Taking note of the similarities between Greek epics and Paradise Lost, Erickson requests that the audience focus their interpretation through a religious lens rather than one of heroic epics. Erickson offers the example of how although one could read the listing of Satan’s leaders in a similar fashion to Homer’s heroes in the Iliad, this oversimplification overshadows the complex religious parody of Jesus’s first earthly action anointing his apostles and Milton’s Satanic parody of the moment. Analyzing aspects such as language parallelism between Satan’s apostles and the New Testament’s ordered listing of earthly apostles as well as their individual characteristics, Erickson is able to identify the apostles’ devilish counterparts. This hellish parody also offers a chance for Milton to critique corporate belief, placing faith in something more divine than mere acting mediators. From the very beginning of Paradise Lost, Satan’s actions are a distorted reflection of Christ’s, the difference being Satan’s actions, even the seemingly heroic ones, are perverted by personal disbelief in God.-Hannah Nagy
