Satanâ•Žs virtues: On the moral educational prospects of fictional character

Revista Española de Pedagogía

year 82, n. 287, January-April 2024, 5-16

5 EV

Abstract:

Recent attention to character formation as the key to

moral education has also regarded personal and fictional

role models as appropriate means to this end. Moreover,

while one may have grave reservations about the influ

ence of personal role-models (perhaps upon the young by

those they happen to admire), serious fiction has often

been considered an inspirational source of moral exam

ple. Still, while this paper ultimately mounts a defence

of the moral educational potential of literature, it is also

concerned to press two significant reservations about any

and all attention to fictional character as a means to such

education. First, since the ultimate meaning of any fic

tional character and conduct is largely, if not exclusively,

confined to their narrative contexts, we should not sup

pose them to have any direct role-modelling application

to the affairs of human life beyond such contexts. Second,

and more significantly, since morality is also ultimately

more than and/or not entirely reducible to the contingen

cies of human character, attention to either fictional or

real-life character must anyway fall somewhat short of

full moral education.

Keywords: literature, fiction, character, virtue, moral edu

cation.

Resumen:

El interés reciente por la formación del carácter como aspecto

clave en la educación moral ha llevado a considerar también los

modelos de referencia personales y ficcionales como medios apro

piados para este fin. Además, aunque uno pueda albergar serias

reservas con respecto a la influencia de los modelos de referencia

personales (quizá la que ejercen sobre los jóvenes las personas

que estos admiran), la ficción seria se ha visto a menudo como

una fuente inspiradora de ejemplo moral. Aun así, a pesar de que

este artículo defiende el potencial de la literatura como promotor

de la educación moral, también expresa dos reservas importantes

sobre la atención dedicada a los personajes de ficción como medio

para dicha educación. En primer lugar, puesto que el sentido final

de cualquier personaje y conducta ficcionales está, en su mayoría

(si no en exclusiva), limitado a sus contextos narrativos, no debe

ríamos asumir que tienen alguna aplicación directa como mode-

lo de referencia en los asuntos de la vida humana fuera de esos

contextos. En segundo lugar, y aún más importante, puesto que

la moralidad es, en última instancia, algo más que (o no reducible

totalmente a) las contingencias del carácter humano, la atención

a un personaje de ficción o de la vida real no es suficiente, en

cualquier caso, para una educación moral completa.

Palabras clave: literatura, ficción, personaje, carácter, vir-

tud, educación moral.

Satan’s virtues:

On the moral educational prospects of fictional character

Las virtudes de Satanás: perspectivas de educación moral del personaje de ficción

David Carr, PhD. Emeritus Professor. University of Edinburgh ([email protected]).

David CARR

Date of reception of the original: 2023-10-13.

Date of approval: 2023-11-21.

Please, cite this article as follows: Carr, D. (2024).Satan’s virtues: On the moral educational prospects of fictional character [Las virtudes de Satanás:

perspectivas de educación moral del personaje de ficción]. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 82 (287), 5-16. https://doi.org/10.22550/2174-0909.3923

“Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver

import than history, since its statements are of the na-

ture more of universals, whereas those of history are

singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to

what such or kind of a man will probably or necessarily

say or do, which is the aim of poetry.”

(Aristotle, 1941a, p. 1464)

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“We touch here on a central dilemma of literature. If

literature is didactic, it tends to injure its own integrity;

if it ceases wholly to be didactic, it tends to injure its

own seriousness.”

(Frye, 1974, p. 169)

1. Theorising moral education

Briefly, the dial of modern academic thought about

moral learning and education seems to have swung

between two apparently opposite poles of attention to

rational thought and principle on the one hand and

focus on character and practical conduct on the other.

The former emphasis on thought and principle, un-

der the (probably main) influence of sociologist Emile

Durkheim (1973) and psychologists Jean Piaget (1932)

and Lawrence Kohlberg (1974), was to dominate moral

educational theorising for much of the twentieth cen-

tury. For all these theorists, it was basically an applica-

tion to educational practice of the deontological ethics

of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. On this view, mor-

al development is largely a matter of cultivation of

rational respect for universal principles of other-re-

garding rights and justice. On the other hand, the

emphasis on moral education more as the psycholog-

ical cultivation of character and correct practical con-

duct, while undoubtedly drawing some inspiration

from the learning theory of early twentieth century

(Russian and American) behaviourism, seems to have

been largely a late twentieth-century reaction to what

was perceived as the excessive rationalism and intel-

lectualism and insufficiently practical focus of cogni-

tive developmental theory (see, for example, Ryan &

Bohlin, 2003; Lickona, 2004).

A moment’s thought, however, should suffice to

show that any extreme swing of the pendulum be-

tween moral reason and practical conduct is hardly

helpful and that responsible moral agency (as in the

case of other human action) cannot be other than ap-

propriate conduct in the light of some form of reason.

In this light, it has seemed for many contemporary

theorists of moral education that final reconciliation

of any and all oppositions between moral educational

reason and conduct is to be found in a recently revived

ethics of virtue drawing mainly on Aristotle’s Nicoma-

chean ethics (1941b). On this view, to be sure, the key

components of moral life, commonly referred to in An-

glophone usage as virtues (via the Greek arete and the

Latin virtus) are basically qualities of good character.

Such qualities are considered good (morally and oth-

erwise) as conducive to the human well-being or flour-

ishing of Aristotle’s ethically naturalist conception of

eudaimonia. Virtues such as self-control, courage,

justice and fair dealing shape or condition human

conduct in generally positive or beneficial directions,

whereas human vices, such as indiscipline, cowardice

and deceit, are the source of human ill or harm.

However, such virtues are not merely mechanical or

conditioned routines or habits. Rather, they are dis-

criminating responses to the needs or requirements of

some particular human circumstances under the ra-

tional guidance of that intellectual virtue of practical

wisdom to which Aristotle refers as phronesis. It is via

the rational exercise of phronesis that we can come to

appreciate that courage, for example, is not always a

matter of mere fearlessness: in short, that as much

moral error may lie in store from the insufficient fear

or caution of recklessness as from the excessive fear

of cowardice.

To be sure, this is something that we may know

on the basis of familiar (empirical) human interactive

experience: those who are characteristically self-con-

trolled, courageous and respectful of the interests,

rights and feelings of others are generally regarded

as better and admired more than those who have no

self-control, pluck or fellow-feeling. Still, while such

considerations about good character appear well and

good up to a point, they are far from morally conclu-

sive or unproblematic. To start with, phronesis, or

practical wisdom, may have its uses for the right psy-

chological balance of rational perception and affect in

(say) the proper exercise of courage; thus, for exam-

ple, absence of fear may be as (morally or otherwise)

bad as excessive fear. However, it is less than clear

how it might serve well in advising us how to act in

those not humanly infrequent circumstances of moral

uncertainty wherein it is precisely unclear what we

should do. Thus, for example, in the famous soliloquy

of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince asks (presumably,

about which is of more virtuous character): “Whether

’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows

of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea

of troubles and by opposing end them?”. Here, whatev-

er phronesis may have to contribute to Hamlet’s grasp

of courageous action, it would hardly seem to help

much towards advising what he should do. And, to be

sure, Aristotle himself is fairly explicit that practical

wisdom, as a form of deliberation rather than knowl-

edge (Aristotle, 1941b), must fall short of any such ad-

vice in Hamlet’s or like circumstances. Indeed, all that

phronesis seems to offer to would-be virtuous agents is

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the advice that there are no general rational principles

whereby such moral questions might be decided and

that what it might be right to do depends much upon

the agent’s particular context or circumstances. But

this is not much help to Hamlet either: he could be as

clear as day about his circumstances, but yet quite un

clear about precisely whether he should or should not

rightly slay his uncle and stepfather Claudius.

But it seems a no less serious problem about basing

morality on some notion of good or virtuous charac-

ter that, apart from the fact that agents of bad or vi-

cious character may sometimes perform good actions,

agents of virtuous or morally exemplary character can

act badly or even wickedly. It is neither logically con-

tradictory nor at odds with common experience that

genuinely temperate, courageous (or even mostly oth-

er-regarding) agents may often behave in quite moral-

ly wrong or unjustifiable ways. To be sure, it may be

insisted by some virtue ethicists that there can be no

genuine courage, temperance or other virtues unless

these character traits are directed towards morally

justified ends (see, for example, Geach, 1977); and it

is possible (though by no means certain) that Aristotle

himself may have subscribed to some such unity of vir-

tues thesis. Still, first, if this position is not just actu-

ally question-begging, it would certainly set an impos-

sibly high bar for most if not all common ascription of

temperance, courage or even kindness or forgiveness:

it makes perfectly good sense to regard a bank robber

as truly courageous person or as a genuinely kind fa-

ther even though he is not good or virtuous in other

respects. Secondly, however, it is far from clear how

(on a strict virtue ethical perspective) any such mor-

al justification might be grounded. For while Aristotle

certainly explored the idea of justice as both as charac-

ter trait and more general moral principle (supposing

this to be one likely yardstick of the moral), it there-

fore seems hard to construe virtuous character as oth-

er than largely strict observance of the principle. But

such dependency of character on principle would now

seem to jeopardise the status of virtue ethics as a strict

ethics of character. And it should here be recalled that

Elizabeth Anscombe, the founder of modern virtue

ethics, commended return to an Aristotelian ethics

of character precisely in view of her rejection of any

useful search for a more principled measure of moral

value (Anscombe, 1958).

Moreover, if we are to agree with Aristotle that the

human virtues (bearing in mind that ancient Greek

virtue and virtues could be other than human) of his

Nicomachean ethics are not innate, but acquired, this

last point brings into quite sharp relief the problem

of how such qualities of character might be developed

through experience or education. To be sure, Aristotle

affirms that regular practice of the virtues is a key

mechanism of virtuous character formation, but this

obviously cannot be in and of itself sufficient. Besides,

primary focus on habit formation risks some relapse

into cruder behavioural conceptions of character ed-

ucation and losing sight of the contextualised guid-

ance of Aristotelian phronesis, or practical wisdom.

Nonetheless, the same Aristotelian repudiation in the

name of phronesis of any appeal to general principles

of moral conduct, reinforced by Anscombe’s later dis-

missal of the principled ethics of duty (deontology)

and utility (utilitarianism or consequentialism) of her

day, would also seem to leave the nature of virtue ac-

quisition no less uncertain. In short, if virtuous char-

acter needs to avoid the devil of habituation to fairly

routine patterns of behaviour on the one hand and

the no less undiscriminating deep blue sea of appeal

to general moral principles on the other, how are as-

piring virtuous agents to learn or acquire the more

context-sensitive patterns of practical deliberation

and judgement that serve to define genuine virtuous

agency? Indeed, bearing in mind here that the virtues

of good character are far from synonymous with moral

conduct, by what measure might such judgements

count as moral rather than (say) merely prudential or

instrumentally opportune?

2. The prospects of moral learning from

character

In the event, those drawn to the contemporary

virtue ethical focus on qualities of so-called good char-

acter as the heart and soul of human moral life are

inclined to regard something like close (empirical) en-

counter with or observation of the motives and conduct

of others as the key means to moral learning. In short,

on this view, effective moral learning crucially requires

exposure to the moral example of others via the process

that is usually referred to as role-modelling. Indeed, it

might here be noticed that the function of role-model-

ling in moral learning has been strongly reinforced in

latter day virtue ethics by a theory of so-called “exem-

plarism” (Zabzebski, 2010, 2013; for insightful criti-

cism, see Szutta, 2019) that takes admiration of others

to be the key mechanism of moral learning. To be sure,

this perspective may appear compelling insofar as it

seems undeniable that much moral learning does ev-

idently follow from the influence of others, especially

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those to whom the young are exposed in the persons of

such early custodians as parents and teachers. This,

in turn, speaks strongly in favour of some social and

professional case for ensuring, as far as possible, that

such early carers are persons of decent and responsible

character and conduct (see, for example, Carr, 2007).

Still, this line of argument may seem to be little more

than question-begging and to put the empirical cart

of admirable or imitable character before the horse of

moral or normative appreciation. For how is the po

tential moral learner to recognise that those to whom

they are exposed as appropriate role models come up

to reputable moral scratch? Indeed, the very social

and professional case for trying to ensure that early

carers are morally respectable agents itself rests upon

the commonly accepted fact that the influence of oth-

er people can be as often for moral ill as good: it is

all too clear, from the slightest acquaintance with past

human history and contemporary global politics, that

very large numbers of people have been and continue

to be all too easily influenced by persons of the worst

possible human character and conduct in the course of

close or more remote encounter, and thereby prompted

towards the perpetration of unspeakable human injus-

tices and atrocities. (For recent criticism of role-mod-

elling approaches to moral education, see Carr, 2023a.)

That said, virtue ethicists and other would-be char-

acter educators have been drawn to another rather

less immediately personal but clearly time-honoured

route to good or virtuous character formation via the

exposure of young or old to the rich heritage of lit-

erary narrative. A literary narrative which, from the

earliest days of oral and written storytelling, has in-

variably been directly concerned with often detailed

exploration of the consequences for (moral or other)

good or ill of human psychology and agency. Thus,

while moral and educational advocates of more nor-

matively principled deontological, or consequentialist,

ethics (of precisely the sort condemned by Anscombe)

have been largely indifferent to past literature as a

potential means to moral education, philosophers in-

terested in character as a key engine of moral agency

have been increasingly attentive to this possibility or

prospect. One notable example is the distinguished

twentieth century philosopher and popular novelist

Iris Murdoch. While more influenced by Plato than

Aristotle and perhaps not a virtue ethicist of recent

stamp, she has clearly defended non-literal narrative

or fiction as a key means to human understanding of

the moral implications of character in both her philo-

sophical and fictional writings (Murdoch 1970, 1973,

1997). For another, the highly influential (especially

with regard to various forms of educational and other

applied ethics) contemporary virtue ethicist Alastair

MacIntyre has insisted that fictional literature and

narratives (as distinct from the descriptive literature

or discourse of this or that empirical scientific en-

quiry) reflect or constitute the basic logical form of

human self-understanding in terms of moral agency

(MacIntyre, 1981). On such views, we may stand to

learn much if not everything about good or bad human

motives and conduct and what makes them so from

close attention to the past and present imaginative

works of Euripides, Shakespeare or Tolstoy (which

may also serve to explain why such fictions have so

often found their way into the educational curricula

of many if not most schools).

This general perspective on the moral educational

significance and prospects of what has been celebrated

as great or serious literature merits serious attention.

Various defences of this view, such as so-called ethi-

cism (Gaut, 1996) and moderate moralism (Carroll,

1996, 1998), have lately appeared in the literature of

aesthetic theory. That said, this view is neither un-

contested, entirely well formulated nor problem-free

(especially in any overstated form). In this light, we

may for the moment briefly notice and dismiss the

general drift of one familiar objection to the moral ed-

ucational potential of literature from the direction of

so-called aestheticism. Aestheticism (defended of late

with specific regard to fiction by Peter Lamarque; see,

for example, Lamarque & Olsen, 1990, or Lamarque,

1996) is the source of two main complaints about any

suggested moral educational use of literature. First,

insofar as fictions are artworks, no reading of them

for the purpose of moral edification may amount to

genuine literary appreciation. Second, insofar as such

works are imaginative creations, they cannot be ex-

pected and must fail to shed much if any light on real

human moral issues. Indeed, far from shedding fur-

ther light on human moral concerns, the ascription

of moral significance to any fictional literature would

appear to presuppose some already existing moral per-

spective on the part of readers. For present purposes,

however, the key flaw of aestheticism would seem to

be some serious conflation of the fairly distinct con-

cepts of the artistic and the aesthetic; indeed, of effec-

tive reduction of the former to the latter.

Briefly, for present purposes, while the distinction

between the aesthetic and the artistic has been various-

ly made in recent times (see, for example, Best, 1982;

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Hepburn, 1984; Carroll, 1986; Carr, 1999; Stecker,

2005; McFee, 2005), it is clear that there are objects

or events of aesthetic concern (such as sunsets or

birdsong) that are of no artistic point or significance.

And (at least notionally) there are artistic concerns

or achievements (such as some conceptual works) of

little or no aesthetic import. To be sure, there is some

danger of overstating this distinction insofar as art-

works entirely devoid of aesthetic qualities (such as

perhaps Cage’s 4’33” ) seem to be also the exception

rather than the rule. Still, it seems safe enough to say

that while most literary artists are concerned to give

aesthetic form to their works, they are also mostly

concerned to express something of substantial artistic

point substance. Unlike sunsets or birdsongs, literary

works such as poems, novels or plays invariably have

some dramatic, psychological, moral or other point

or purpose. Thus, while such poets as Wordsworth,

Yeats and Eliot; such dramatists as Euripides and

Shakespeare, and such novelists as Austen, Dickens

and Dostoevsky are evidently creators of works of

aesthetically significant shape and form, they are no

less clearly concerned to express or convey substantial

points or lessons to readers about the world, human

association and psychological, moral or other human

nature. Indeed, any failure to appreciate this would

clearly miss the artistic point of such works almost

entirely. This said, unlike (say) histories or newspa-

pers, it is not the main point or intent of artworks

to report or comment directly on the happenings of

everyday human life and association. To this extent,

there would still seem to be something in the aestheti-

cist objection to which we will need to return follow-

ing some attention to the moral prospects and limita-

tions of any and all attention to the fictional depiction

of human character.

3. Fictional attention to human virtuous and

other character

There cannot, of course, be much doubt that books

(of all kinds and genres) comprise much of the educa-

tional input of modern literate societies and cultures.

To be sure, while some of this literature has sought to

transmit scientific and technical knowledge of human

material or economic progress, much has evidently

been concerned with the wider moral and spiritual

formation of societies and cultures. Thus, the Chris-

tian Bible and Shakespeare have been jointly cited as

the basic texts of western civilization. That said, the

plays of Shakespeare and other great literary figures

of the western canon, beginning perhaps with Homer

and the classic Greek tragedians, are evidently works

of fiction; as, indeed, the Christian Bible is also like-

ly to be considered by many, if not most people, in

the secular climate of contemporary western society.

Thus, on one extreme view, it may be said that such

works could or should have no significant influence

on anything of much modern concern. As already not-

ed, however, the virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre

has compellingly argued (broadly in the spirit of

Aristotle) that the creative and imaginative narratives

of received culture are rich and indispensable sources

of moral and spiritual wisdom to which human agents

cannot avoid turning for guidance. From the very

dawn of humanity, on this view, such narratives have

been the main source or vehicle for exploration of the

complexities of character, motive and conduct (even

where these have been attributed to non-human

agents or animals) as implicated in the human search

for ultimate purpose and meaning in life.

In this light, MacIntyre (1981) regards narrative

as the basic logical form of human moral understand-

ing of self and others: as he puts it, humans essen-

tially understand themselves as characters in stories.

Again, however, this view has also been echoed by

other moral theorists and is perhaps most signifi-

cantly anticipated (though, from a rather different

Platonic perspective) by the distinguished twentieth

century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. More

precisely, Murdoch argued that novelists should re-

gard it as the very purpose of fictional work to ex-

plore the moral complexities of human character and

association, and professed this to be her aim in her

own fictional work. While this view would appear

somewhat overstated (since novels and other fiction-

al literature have often set out with the rather less

ambitious purposes of entertaining or exploring other

aspects of human life), it is nevertheless consistent

with a time-honoured perspective on the role of fic-

tion and drama in the economy of human moral edi-

fication. Hence, exploration of moral character, asso-

ciation and conduct have certainly had a large, if not

pre-eminent, role in the works of such authors of the

western canon as Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare,

Cervantes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William

Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, James, George Eliot, D.

H. Lawrence and countless others.

Still, alongside his defence of imaginative litera-

ture as a prime vehicle of moral and spiritual narra-

tives, MacIntyre also embraced (at least in his early

and more influential major works) a non-naturalist

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ethics according to which virtues are socially con

structed products of essentially rival cultural and

moral traditions that have also often diverged to the

point of direct opposition or conflict. Hence, while still

following Aristotle in construing virtues as integral

to, or constitutive of, human flourishing, divergent

or rival social and cultural traditions have often en-

shrined or celebrated different virtues or moral pri-

orities. While this case is made by MacIntyre mainly

by reference to past cultural, theological and philo-

sophical trends (for example, in terms of the contrast

between the heroic virtues of past pre-modern societies

and the more compassionate virtues of Christendom,

or between the Christianity and pagan Aristotelian-

ism that Aquinas sought to reconcile), such moral

divergence might well be expected to show up quite as

conspicuously in past and present literature (and he

does illustrate this by reference to Icelandic sagas and

other literature). As I have elsewhere argued (Carr,

2017), Macintyre’s overall presentation of this case

seems questionable on the grounds that, while human

literary works could be hardly other than products

of their historical socio-cultural contexts, it is nev-

ertheless apparent that the work of most past great

authors (such as those already cited) is often notable

for its moral critique of the values of such authors’

own societies. All the same, it appears that attention

to imaginative literature does indeed reveal quite dra-

matic conflicts and ambivalences between conceptions

of virtue and moral flourishing, ancient and modern,

that also seem quite beyond MacIntyrean or other

(not least Aristotelian) resolution.

There can also, of course, be little doubt about the

enormous economic, social, cultural and other changes

that have overtaken human life and association (per-

haps most notably in developed western countries)

from antiquity to the modern day (for brief notice of

these, one might need only consult Marx’s Communist

manifesto.) With respect to present literary concerns,

however, we might observe two crucial periods of west-

ern European history. The first of these is the period of

complex transition from medieval feudalism to modern

industrialism that is generally termed the Renaissance.

While, on the one hand, often nostalgic for the ideals

and learning of classical antiquity, it is also a period

of shifting post-medieval social and economic trends

and of a new humanism of scientific discovery and ar-

tistic creation. This general period is witness to the

emergence of writers of such enduring stature, impact

and importance as Thomas More, Edmund Spenser,

Shakespeare, Cervantes, Francis Bacon and Christopher

Marlowe, whose works variously reflect such social and

economic transition from the medieval to the modern

(as evident, for example, in emerging class tension be-

tween an older feudal aristocracy and a rising economi-

cally powerful mercantile bourgeoisie).

Clearly, however, the other highly significant rev-

olutionary episode of European history, occurring

around the height of the Renaissance, was the Refor-

mation. Thus, from its early sixteenth century origin,

rejection of the traditional hegemony of the Roman

church by various movements of religious reform also

resulted (along with much bloodshed) in social, cultur-

al, moral, spiritual, intellectual (and, inevitably, liter-

ary) ferment and revolution from one end of Christen-

dom to the other.

In this light, one author whose work perhaps more

than any other reflects the cultural and intellectual

turmoil, tensions and ambivalences of such times (par-

ticularly in his own politically and religiously divided

country) is the English poet John Milton. The moral

and spiritual tensions and ambivalences in Milton’s

work are plain enough. On the one hand, as an advo-

cate of religious reform, Milton aspires to purify Chris-

tian faith of what he and other reformers construe as

the tyrannical and oppressive abuses of Roman eccle-

siastical hierarchy. However, he does so without any

fundamental rejection of the essentially authoritarian

Christian narrative of sin through disobedience and

redemption via (according to much Protestant theol-

ogy) fairly arbitrary divine grace and forgiveness. On

the other hand, however, as a proto-liberal champion

of freedom of conscience, thought and speech, Milton

is also an advocate of religious and political dissent

from unwarranted or arbitrary (especially secular) au-

thority or coercion.

Once these two inclinations or commitments on

Milton’s part are made explicit, their evident tensions

or conflicts are not hard to see. They are also conspic-

uously apparent in the literary work for which Milton

is best remembered: his remarkable blank verse epic

Paradise lost. To begin with, it is fairly evident that the

rebel angel Satan is the most prominent and memora-

ble character of Milton’s poem (if not, indeed, its actu-

al hero). To be sure, Satan is on the wrong side of the

Christian religious tracks and his downfall (in line with

orthodox Christian theology) is attributed to his disobe-

dience of a benevolent and merciful God. In this regard,

Milton’s narrative has Satan confessing at one point to

his ingratitude for God’s favours: “What could be less

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than to afford him praise. The easiest recompense, and

pay him thanks. How due! Yet all his good proved ill in

me. And wrought but malice” (Milton, 2005).

On the other hand, Satan (in more the patrician

spirit of Aristotle) seems to see no compelling reason

for gratitude if divine or other benefits are bestowed

de haut en bas by imposed, if not arbitrary, authority:

“Lifted up so high, I denied subjection, and thought one

step higher would set me highest; and in a moment quit

the debt immense of endless gratitude, so burdensome

still paying, still to owe” (Milton, 2005).

At all events, leaving aside for the moment his the

ologically ambivalent stance, the most striking feature

of Satan is that he is a courageous rebel who is un-

willing to accept a destiny of submission to the will of

others and a life that is not self-determined, authentic

or self-determined. On the one hand, to be sure, such

self-assertion or refusal of any authority may some-

times appear to be no more than misplaced or perverse

pride, or hubris: indeed, the Devil’s tempting of Christ

to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple in

the gospel narratives is evidently the theological war-

rant for regarding Satan’s pride in Paradise lost as the

last, worst and most unpardonable of sins. But Satan’s

defiance of authority may clearly also be regarded as

morally exemplary; as, precisely, a source of admirable

virtues of courage, initiative and resilience in the face

of unequal and (literally) hopeless odds and adversity.

Moreover, to those with some acquaintance with liter-

ary traditions and trends prior and subsequent to Par-

adise lost, it is impossible to ignore the conspicuous

(moral or other) literary predecessors and successors

to Milton’s Satan.

4. The devil’s ancestors, disciples and heirs

It would seem that Satan’s most conspicuous liter-

ary antecedent is the titan Prometheus of Greek myth,

memorably dramatized by the tragedian Aeschylus in

Prometheus bound. In defiance of Zeus, he stole fire

to liberate humans from impotent submission to a

divinely ordained state of nature. As Satan was pun-

ished by God to an eternity in hell, so Prometheus

was condemned by Zeus to crucifixion and eternal tor-

ment by daily devouring of his liver by an eagle. To

be sure, the obvious objection to any such parallel is

that whereas the mythical rebel Prometheus was an

apparent benefactor of mankind, Milton’s rebel Satan

plots the downfall of mankind by tempting Eve and

subsequently Adam to disobedient consumption of the

apple from the tree of knowledge. However, something

may here depend on theological interpretation of the

Genesis myth. For it seems that, in ancient gnostic pa-

gan and Christian versions of the narrative, the myth-

ical creator of Eden and its human occupants was not

the supreme ruling spirit of the universe, but a local

demiurge intent on keeping his creation in ignorant

thrall to his arbitrary will. Thus, in The Apocryphon of

St John (one of the non-canonical gospels discovered

at Nag Hammadi in 1945), an explicit dialogue on the

Genesis narrative occurs between the apostle John and

Jesus the saviour in which the latter takes full respon-

sibility for encouraging Adam and Eve to eat of the

tree of knowledge by asserting “But I was the one who

induced them to eat” (Meyer, 1998, p. 175.) On this

ancient reading of Genesis, the original temptation

opened up a spiritually progressive route to knowl-

edge or wisdom (enabling freedom from the tyranny

of a false deity). Thus, Jesus of the New Testament

gospels appears as a teacher of the knowledge (logos,

or Word) of the true world-transcendent God which

aspires to replace and transcend the oppressive and

repressive law of the Old Testament Jehovah. (Gnos-

tic construal of the Genesis story us also evident in the

cinematic narrative of the 1998 movie Pleasantville;

see Carr, 2023b.)

Moreover, this gnostic take on the Genesis narra-

tive is also fairly evident in the poetic works of the

early modern English author and artist who was an ar-

dent admirer of Milton: namely, the visionary painter

and poet William Blake. Thus, in Blake’s somewhat

perplexing Prophetic books, some such overall gnostic

drift seems evident in the general construction and

dramatis personae of these complex narratives. On

the one hand, Blake’s Urizen (identifiable with the

oppressive conventional morality of church and state

and/or the cold rationality of Newtonian scientific

reason) resembles the repressive demiurge of gnostic

theology. On the other hand, such characters as Los

(Urthona), Luvah and/or Orc are expressive (more or

less respectively) of imagination, love and passion as

largely opposed to such cold reason. Of course, the re-

bellious powers and sentiments opposed to Urizen are

inspired more by the altruistic virtues of the canonical

gospel Jesus than by Satanic pride. But Blake famous-

ly observed in his Marriage of heaven and hell that

“Milton…was of the Devil’s party without knowing

it”. His own work (along with that of such contempo-

raries as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley) plays a

significant part in fueling a new romantic literary sen-

sibility of individual independence, self-determination

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and emancipation from the repressive political, reli

gious, economic and other influences and institutions

of both traditional (feudal) and modern (industrial and

capitalist) society and culture. To be sure, while the

literary genius of early romantics may well have been

expressive and supportive of the distinctively new

modern politics of freedom and democracy pioneered

by the likes of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau,

it should not be forgotten that Blake and Wordsworth

were no less strongly opposed to the utilitarianism,

philistinism and human degradation that the new po-

litical and economic liberalism of industrial capitalist

exploitation trailed in its wake.

In this light, one cannot doubt that the new mod-

ern moral sensibility of earlier and later literary ro-

manticism (broadly speaking, the main drift of fiction,

drama and poetry from the late eighteenth century to

the end of the nineteenth century, if not beyond) seems

more sympathetic to the rebellious, self-assertive

and iconoclastic virtues of Milton’s Satan than to the

Christian virtues of humility and service to others pro-

moted by official eastern and western churches for the

purpose of encouraging lower feudal orders to know

and accept their subordinate place. Thus, despite all

other significant and interesting differences, such

major English nineteenth century novelists as Jane

Austen, the Bröntes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot,

Thomas Hardy (as well as their foreign counterparts)

are much concerned to promote an essentially roman-

tic project of liberation of their heroes and heroines

from various constraints of social convention, class

prejudice or patriarchy that prevent them from real-

izing their mature moral growth, individual potential

or ambition. To be sure, it cannot be denied that the

fictional worlds invented by these authors (in which

their various self-affirming characters pursue their

imagined destinies) are (even in the case of an evident

non-believer such as Hardy) also informed by moral

ideals and virtues of some Christian provenance. That

said, it is fairly evident, as early as Matthew Arnold’s

mid-nineteenth poem “Dover Beach”, that a major

cultural and literary break with the traditional Chris-

tian moral basis of western culture is looming on the

horizon.

Moreover, it seems plausible to trace the decisive

break with traditional western European subscrip-

tion to the moral authority, or truth of the Christian

gospels (at least, in literary terms) to the work of the

nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich

Nietzsche. While it is customary to regard Nietzsche

as a founding father (perhaps along with Soren

Kierkegaard) of twentieth century existentialism, he is

no less aptly regarded as a philosophical spokesman of

nineteenth century romanticism (itself a main source

of much later existentialism). While it is also of consid-

erable present interest that Nietzsche has lately been

lauded as a type of virtue ethicist (Swanton, 2003), the

virtues that he extolls could hardly be further away

from the moral and theological virtues celebrated by

(for obvious example) such major Christian theologians

as St Thomas Aquinas. In short, Nietzsche’s virtues

are not at all the Christian virtues of love, humility

and selflessness. On the contrary, they are significantly

closer to Miltonian satanic (or perhaps, in the terms

of later romanticism, Byronic) virtues of self-asser-

tion, personal independence, revolutionary action, re-

sistance to imposed authority and individuality of ex-

pression, showing thus much disdain for humility or

servility of character. Indeed, Nietzsche’s contempt for

and dismissal of what he evidently considered to be the

pusillanimous and feeble character of the specifically

western Christian social morality of humility and self-

lessness could hardly be more evident:

Our weak, unmanly social concepts of good and evil

and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul

have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped

the self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pil-

lars of a strong civilization. (Nietzsche, 2012, p. 163)

Indeed, it is not merely that Nietzschean virtues

seem significantly satanic, but that they are invoked

and celebrated to the end of opposition to Satan’s very

own enemy, namely, the Christian God, whose final

demise was also famously pronounced by Nietzsche.

For many, of course, such radical departure from or

opposition to received Christian faith and morality

will be sufficient to dismiss the Nietzschean perspec-

tive as false, immoral and even demonic. In this light,

the influence of Nietzsche’s satanically virtuous Über-

mensch on the toxic twentieth century Nazi ideology

will also no doubt spring to mind. That said, aside

from his formative influence on the mid-twentieth

century philosophy and fictional literature of existen-

tialism, it is hard to think of a major literary figure

of early to middle years of that century who was not

influenced by some reading of Nietzsche, including,

amongst many others, James Joyce, Henrik Ibsen, D.

H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill,

Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, Hermann

Hesse, Andre Gide and Albert Camus. Many new lit-

erary traditions (such as stream of consciousness fic-

tion, the neo-symbolist literature of existentialism and

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new social realist fiction) were also undoubtedly influ

enced by the problematization of traditional Christian

morality of the new twentieth century climate of secu-

larism, to which Darwin and Marx, as well as Nietzsche,

clearly contributed. However, a large proportion of

such post-Nietzschean literature is aptly construed as

neo-romantic by virtue of its significant concern with

themes of the human search for authentic identity,

self determination and liberation from the shackles of

convention pioneered by nineteenth century forbears.

Thus, for example, the (especially female) protagonists

of D. H. Lawrence are much exercised with the issue

of escaping traditional patriarchal gender or sexu-

al constraints in a way that is not at all dissimilar in

spirit from the aspirations of Charlotte Brönte’s Jane

Eyre. Still, it may be that the Nietzschean quest for

the uncompromising honesty and integrity of personal

independence and authenticity is best captured by the

declaration (as well as the actions) of Dr. Stockman in

Ibsen’s Enemy of the people, that “the strongest man is

he who stands most alone”.

At all events, this abundance of past and more re-

cent fictional literature serves only to compound the

immense difficulties in the way of efforts to discern

any clear moral compass for human moral development

via primary or exclusive attention to human character

in the rich heritage of literary tradition. It cannot be

doubted that much (if not all) ancient and modern

imaginative literature has often primarily sought to

plumb the psychological and moral depths and com-

plexities of character in a potentially infinite range of

individual and social contexts and circumstances. How-

ever, the greatest, most memorable and enduring of

such literature has often been just as if not more con-

cerned to explore the frequent ambivalence and conflict

of such character and can rarely be taken (as aesthetic

formalists are wont to complain) to provide certain or

unequivocable advice of much direct relevance or appli-

cation to everyday human life. Indeed, we are all too of-

ten shown how agents of many admirable qualities (such

as Homer’s Achilles) can be capable of morally bad or

squalid conduct and those of weak, corrupt or deplorable

qualities (such as Sydney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of

Two Cities) may yet be redeemed by actions of morally

positive or altruistic conduct. Thus, however sympa-

thetic we may be towards the desire of Shakespeare’s

Hamlet (perhaps the most conflicted and ambivalent

of all literary characters) for revenge on Claudius, it

might well seem ill-advised to endorse his final mur-

derous expression of this sentiment in similar circum-

stances (even if it might make any sense to speak here

of similar circumstances). Likewise, however much

we might admire Milton’s Satan for his impressive

courage and heroism (which the poet also shows to be

mixed with other morally less desirable qualities), we

might, at the very least, want to question the morality

of the ends to which such qualities are directed. In

any case, whether we finally judge such characters to

be morally good or bad, right or wrong, will ultimately

depend on moral values that we bring to such fictions

rather than derive from them.

5. Conclusion: art is not life

While we have lately taken modern aesthetic for-

malism to task on the grounds of its misguided con-

fusion between, or reduction of, artistic to aesthetic

significance, we are nevertheless now better placed

to comprehend the real point behind formalist or

aestheticist resistance to artistic moralism or other

instrumental construal of the ultimate ends or pur-

poses of art. To be sure, insofar as extreme aesthetic

formalism (of, as it were, art for art’s sake) has often

appeared to hold that genuine artistic appreciation

must be exclusively focused on the intrinsic formal

or aesthetic properties of artworks, it would seem to

confine all significant art to (perhaps non-cognitive)

entertainment or distraction. Thus, it precludes the

prospect of much real human instruction or learning

from literary or other art. But this clearly cannot be

right. In the first place, as our second prefatory quote

from Northrop Frye indicates, this risks emphasis

on the integrity of fictions to the exclusion of their

seriousness. In the second place, however, it also fa-

tally ignores the crucial distinction between the lan-

guage of history and other descriptive human literary

contexts or purposes and its more philosophical de-

ployment in poetry that Aristotle draws in our first

prefatory quote from his Poetics (a work that may also

be fairly considered the foundational text of western

aesthetic theory).

To be sure, Aristotle’s distinction is perfectly in line

with a very basic tenet of much post-Kantian formalist

and other modern aesthetic theory which aims to ob-

serve a quite fundamental distinction between the lan-

guage or semantics of ordinary descriptive discourse

(which is also employed in history or the sciences to

report the contingent facts of past or present human

experience) and the literary or other artistic language

or semantics of human imaginative creation of, for ex-

ample, tragedy or other art. Briefly, in the terms of

modern analytical (post-Fregean) philosophy and log-

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ic, the fictional language or narrative of imaginative

artworks is intensional (not to be confused with in

tentional) rather than extensional. That is to say that,

while the propositions that we encounter in a novel,

such as Jane Austen’s Emma or Charles Dickens’

Oliver Twist, have evident sense, or meaning, within

such fictional contexts, they do not (unlike the prop-

ositions of ordinary, historical or scientific discourse)

have any reference to events in the actual world be-

yond such contexts. Thus, the narratives in which

such propositions or (pseudo) statements occur are

entirely the constructs or inventions of human imagi-

nation and should not be confused with the real world

of empirical experience. Moreover, while this point

might seem so trivial as to be hardly worth making, it

is of quite wide-ranging educational import. To begin

with, while most people of mature years will have lit-

tle difficulty distinguishing the non-literal or fictional

narratives of fairy story or Greek mythology from the

purportedly factual reports of history or science, much

modern mischief continues to be caused by failure to

distinguish what are clearly the myths of past religious

traditions (perhaps especially of the Old and New Tes-

taments of the Christian Bible) from actual historical

record. At all events, there can here be little doubt that

this basic distinction of the non-referential language

of art and fiction from forms of referential discourse

lies at the heart of latter-day aesthetic formalist objec-

tion to any and all attempts to derive moral or other

lessons from imaginative narratives.

That said, it seems no less mistaken to hold (as,

at least, more extreme of such aestheticists appear to

have held) that, because fictional narratives have no

direct external reference, there can be little or nothing

of any wider worldly value or relevance to be gained

from them. Indeed, this is quite evidently not the po-

sition of Aristotle in our introductory quote, where he

quite explicitly affirms that “poetry is something more

philosophic and of graver import than history”. Indeed,

it might here be noted that, while some distinguished

modern advocates of the educational significance of

fictional literature (such as Iris Murdoch 1970, 1227 )

seem to have held that narrative fiction has more hu-

man relevance the closer it approximates to real life,

it would to the contrary appear that the highest of lit-

erary regard has more often been accorded to works

of evidently pure fantasy (such as Sophocles’ King

Oedipus, Milton’s Paradise lost and Shakespeare’s The

tempest; not to mention the parables of Jesus) at the

very farthest remove from any actual (empirical) hu-

man experience. This, to be sure, clearly underscores

the general danger of failing to distinguish the real

human significance of imaginative fiction from that

of literal description. For while generations of readers

have greatly profited by way of profound human in-

sight from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Cervantes’ Don

Quixote (without the least illusion as to the non-liter-

al or figurative character of such stories), it is evident

that many more have quite failed to appreciate the real

human import or significance of the no less fictional

narratives of Genesis or Kings by literal readings of

these biblical books.

But then, how can stories or narratives that clear-

ly do not report on or refer directly to actual human

events or affairs be said to have meaning outside or be-

yond their distraction or entertainment value? On the

face of it, Aristotle’s more particular response to this

question (at least, as applied to ancient Greek drama),

in terms of the cathartic power of tragedy to purge or

purify human emotions of pity or fear, may appear less

than helpful. While it may be true up to a point that

audiences are often moved in this fashion by tragedies

or other literary narratives, this does not seem to be

the case of all such works (though it would also appear

that other works are instructive in ways that tragedy is

not). Thus, the more generally compelling Aristotelian

point evidently lies in his understanding of the lan-

guage of poetry or other literary art (as distinct from

that of history) as concerned with the universalization

or typification more than description of human actions

or affairs. Following Aristotle’s lead, the great twenti-

eth century literary critic Northrop Frye usefully dis-

tinguishes the language and idioms of imaginative lit-

erature from the descriptive discourses of science and

other more literal enterprises as “myths of concern”

(Frye, 1974). It should also be clear here that Frye is

here strictly faithful to Aristotle’s own use of the term

myth to denote the stories or narratives of his purely

imaginative and fictional poetry. In these terms, while

such purely fictional constructs can have no direct ref-

erence to human actions or affairs (and it would be a

dire mistake to assume they have such application),

they may yet be potent sources of human instruction

or education by way of the characteristic poetic devices

of metaphor, analogy, parable, allegory, satire, irony

and other imaginative, semantic and conceptual tropes

and idioms that are no less clearly vehicles of insight

into the human condition. So, while it would be mere

folly to construe Swift’s Gulliver’s travels, Cervantes’

Don Quixote or Kafka’s The trial as reporting on actu-

al historical events, we may yet stand to learn much

about human folly as such from the large and small

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characters of Swift’s Gulliver, about true human wis

dom and humanity from Quixote’s apparent madness,

and about the potential dystopian nightmare of human

bureaucracy from the fictional fate of K in Kafka’s

frightening parable.

With regard to particular present concerns about

moral learning from literature, then, we clearly need

to distinguish two different respects or levels in which

fictional literature may be implicated or embroiled in

moral (or, more specifically, character education). On

the one hand, we do need to take on board aestheticist,

or formalist, caution against drawing any clear directly

applicable conclusions for everyday practical conduct

from imaginative poetry or literature. Apart from the

consideration that the characters of fictional narratives

are just precisely characters in stories (so that the con-

duct attributed to them can have real point or purpose

only in the context of such stories), we have seen that

no very reliable moral conclusions can be drawn from

either real or fictional perceptions of human charac-

ter and that any such judgements that we may apply

to them must derive from other sources of reflection.

Indeed, as the introductory quote from Frye implies, in-

sofar as the primary aim of fiction or other art is not to

describe the actual world but to construct imaginative

possibilities, it is actually liable to artistic failure if it

explicitly professes any non-artistic and propagandist

function (as in the case perhaps of much so-called social

realist painting). Still, all this said, any extreme formal-

ist or aestheticist denial of the moral significance or val-

ue of fictional literature is no less clearly belied by the

Aristotelian distinction of the philosophical purposes of

poetry from the descriptive function of history. Thus,

while the heroic Satan of Milton’s Paradise lost (or oth-

er literary figures) may afford us little direct practical

guidance for conduct in the non-fictional world, this

fictional character, as well as others, can nevertheless

provide rich food for philosophical thought on the wider

and more general conceptual or normative contours of

potentially human character and conduct. This might

well be put by saying that although we would not be

well-advised to seek practical instruction on character

and conduct from Milton’s Satan, one may yet regard

Paradise lost as a potent source of education concern-

ing the wider and more principled normative and moral

contours of human life. In this regard, indeed, such

more philosophical, objective or disinterested acquain-

tance with great literary works may also serve to avoid

the potentially lethal hazards of currently vaunted per-

sonal role-modelling approaches to moral and charac-

ter education, which clearly risk exposing the young or

gullible to quite the wrong sorts of undesirable influ-

ence from others (Carr, 2023a). But while Milton’s mas-

terpiece may persuade us that Satan has virtues of some

such loose designation, we may therefore also hope to

gain from the wider context and scope of this powerful

narrative (and by comparison of this character and his

story with those of other great fictions) a broader or

more educated vision of the limits and defects of human

character and conduct as such.

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Author’s biography

David Carr. Emeritus Professor of the University of

Edinburgh and was until recently Professor of Ethics and

Education at the University of Birmingham (UK) Jubi-

lee Centre for the Study of Character and Virtues. He is

author of four books, editor or co-editor of several major

collections of essays on philosophy and/or education and

his papers have appeared in such journals as Mind, Phi-

losophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Proceedings of the Aris-

totelian Society, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Value

Inquiry, British Journal of Aesthetics, Educational Theory

and Oxford Educational Review. Much of his work has ex-

plored aspects of virtue ethics and, more recently, the im-

pact of literature and various other arts on moral character.