Satán (Lucifer): The first to choose Hell

In Paradise Lost, the epic poem John Milton published in 1667, the villain is the oldest of all: Satan, the angel who rebelled against God and was cast into hell. But Milton does not write a stupid monster — he writes the most brilliant being in creation, who had absolutely everything and yet chose the fall. With no misery to push him, no faulty brain, no childhood of neglect — no biography even — Satan decides, with perfect knowledge, to defy God and prefer a kingdom in darkness to service in the light. It is the purest thought experiment there is on the question that upholds all justice: that of free will. If anyone ever chose evil with no excuse, it was him.

// The theoryThe freedom that punishment presupposes

As we saw with Richard III, the classical school — Beccaria, Kant — built modern criminal law on one premise: the human being is free and responsible. He does not offend out of a defect or his destiny, but because he chooses, and that is why he can be blamed and punished. Kant was emphatic: it only makes sense to blame someone for what he did if he could have acted otherwise. Without freedom there is no guilt; without guilt, punishment is a meaningless cruelty, like reproaching a stone for falling. The whole machinery of justice — responsibility, punishment, the very idea that we are authors of our acts — rests on that presupposed freedom. And Satan is its ultimate test bench, because in him choice appears in chemically pure form, without a single one of the circumstances that cloud it in the rest of us.

Christian theology had refined that idea centuries earlier to answer a thorny problem: if God is good and all-powerful, where does evil come from? Saint Augustine's answer was free will: God created his creatures free — «sufficient to have stood, though free to fall», Milton would say — and evil is not a thing God made, but the result of those creatures misusing their freedom. Satan was not created evil: he was created free, and with that freedom he made himself evil. He is, in mythic form, exactly what the classical school claims of the criminal — that he is not a faulty product, but an agent who chose. That is why Satan can plead no mitigating circumstance: there is no biology, no environment, no ignorance to point to. Only his will, fully informed, saying «no».

// The subject«Better to reign in Hell»

What makes Satan a one-of-a-kind case — and the most dangerous in all the theory — is his grandeur. Milton gave him the best verses of the poem: he is brave, eloquent, unbending, a leader who harangues his fallen angels with a charisma that chills and seduces. «Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven», he declares — and something in us applauds. There lies the trap that the theory of free will must watch for: the seduction of the rebel. The critic Stanley Fish showed, in Surprised by Sin, that Milton lays a deliberate ambush for us: he makes us admire Satan so that then, verse by verse, he can reveal that our admiration is our own sin — that we have fallen into the same pride that ruined him. Because Satan's heroism is self-deception: he calls rebellion freedom, resentment dignity, the inability to forgive grandeur. He is the villain who makes himself and presents his choice of evil as an act of sovereign courage. And that figure — the one who chooses evil with lucidity and dresses it as freedom — is as magnetic as it is false, and runs from Satan down to Richard through all the great villains who «choose themselves».

// The crackIs evil really chosen with no cause at all?

The crack in free will, as we have already seen, is that Satan's absolutely free agent barely exists outside of myth. No real criminal chooses in the perfect vacuum in which he chooses: all drag along a biology, a history, circumstances that tip the scales — the positivism of Lombroso and Ferri put it on the table, and modern science confirms it. Satan is a philosophical fantasy precisely for what he lacks: he has no damaged amygdala, no neighborhood, no trauma, no deprivation. That is why he is useful as a limiting case — the thought experiment that isolates the variable «will» by eliminating all the others — and that is why he is misleading as a portrait of a real offender, who never comes so clean of conditioning factors. The question Satan forces is not «does free will exist?», but «how much effective freedom did this subject have, with this history?» — and the answer, except in myths, is never «all» or «none».

The sensible way out is the same one we offered with Richard: the compatibilism that the law practices. You do not need to believe in Satan's absolute metaphysical freedom to uphold responsibility; it is enough that the subject had, as H. L. A. Hart argued, the capacity and the opportunity to adjust his conduct to the norm. Most people have it, to a sufficient degree, and that is why they answer for their acts; some, by contrast, have it so diminished — by psychosis, coercion, minority of age — that the law recognizes exemptions. Satan marks the theoretical ceiling — total freedom, and therefore total guilt; reality always lives below, in the grays. But that ceiling matters: without the idea that, in the end, there is a margin of choice that is ours, there would be no one to hold to account for anything — and all justice, and all the dignity of considering ourselves authors and not automatons, would come crashing down.

That is why Satan remains, three and a half centuries later, the greatest villain in Western literature and the most dangerous: because he convinces us, for a moment, that his damnation was a victory. Milton wrote the definitive portrait of the will that chooses evil and calls it freedom — and he made it so seductive that half the world read it backwards, as a hero of rebellion. There lies his final lesson for criminology: free will is real and founds our responsibility, but the villain who «makes himself» is not an icon of freedom to admire, but a warning. Satan was free, yes. And he used all that freedom to chain himself, proudly, to a hell he chose himself — and to try to convince us to do the same.