Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno

The character of Satan is portrayed quite differently in Milton's Paradise Lost than he is in Dante's Inferno. Where Dante serves to illustrate Satan as a "dumb" being, Milton gives him a personality that attracts the audience and forces them to sympathize, to a certain degree, with him. He also makes him out to be an intellectual who has a purpose and seemingly "just" objective.

Dante makes Satan out to be intellectually inferior by presenting him as being unable to speak because he is chewing on the sinners. This serves to dehumanize Satan and emphasizes the issues of the "levels" (intellectual, animalistic and vegetative) of the soul that we have discussed in class. Satan, in the scene in which Dante sees him chewing on Judas, Brutus and Cassius, appears to be incapable of thought. He is doing a seemingly menial task that provides no such sort of intellectual stimulation. There is an emphasis on chewing, which portrays him in a rather primitive and animalistic fashion; thus leading us to believe that his "soul" is on a lower level than that of Dante's and therefore he is a character that we do not deem worthy of our respect.

Where Dante portrays Satan as an animalistic being with a soul/being that is something less than that of intelligent, Milton sees him as a character worthy of both respect and credibility in regards to intellectual competency. Satan is a complicated hero in Paradise Lost. He is complicated because we recognize that he is clearly a villain and yet we are sympathetic to his cause. Milton's Satan portrays God as being an unfair tyrant, one who deserved to be rebelled against. Now, having been banished to Hell, Satan is wondering what his purpose is. He wonders if God had considered him unusable wouldn't he have just killed him. He feels that since God has granted him his life, that God does have a purpose for him and this bothers him to a certain extent because God sees him as a tool that he can use for his own purposes.

Satan, in Paradise Lost, is the leader of a revolutionary group in Hell that is attempting to overthrow/stop the unfair rule of the "tyrant" God. In this regard we begin to see him as more of a character with which we can sympathize. He is a figure attempting to overthrow a tyrannical ruler who appears to have taken advantage of those who he is ruling.