Cogito Ergo Sum: Milton’s Satan and Ellison’s "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"
How a sci-fi story from the '60s and a 17th century poem give us insight into the impotence of evil.
Christian or not, we are all familiar with the story of Satan and his relation to the greater arc of the Bible. I remember when I was a boy, reading a picture book telling the story of the devil. Illustrations of angels striking down the demons with lightning bolts, the ugly, bat-winged Fiend falling from the sky, and then the serpent being cursed to crawl on his belly.
Simply put, as a kid I always thought that Satan got his ass kicked hard. He always seemed like an idiot to me. Why did he rebel against God? To my childish mind it seemed very silly to try to fight against Him. Even I knew better than to try to run away or hit my dad when I was in trouble. Doing so would get me spanked into next week. So why couldn’t Satan see what I saw?
The concept of hating God or his creations was something I couldn’t wrap my head around. Sure, I could understand sin and disobedience. But hating goodness itself? Didn’t make sense to me. Satan had it good in Heaven. He was the most exalted angel. Why demand more?
As I got older, so did I grow in my understanding of my Faith. Obviously, I still don’t understand much of Satan and his motivations. Intellectually I grasped more, understood the proximate causes of the devil’s attacks and efforts of corruption of the Church. But what started it all? The most common answer is pride, but even proud people know when they are beaten.
It wasn’t until going to college and reading more that I began to understand the central issue that the story of Satan and his war against God centers around: Evil. Further, I read several poetic explorations of this concept, works from the giants of literature where they seek to examine evil. Specifically, what evil is and does.
Simply put, evil is an assertion of a false reality over true reality. Evil is a deception, make believe on a much more extreme level. The evildoer ruthlessly declares a reality of his own concoction, an imagining that is contrary to “real” reality.
The poem Paradise Lost, written by John Milton in 1667, is a poetic exploration of the oldest story of the evildoer, Satan’s assertion of his own reality against God’s. Milton goes deeper into the story of Genesis and what preludes it, trying to give a “why” to the actions of the Fiend that we are all familiar with.
Of note is that Paradise Lost is a work of fiction and non-canon to Christian doctrine. But as anyone who appreciates literature knows, fiction has a way of giving us insights into the non-fiction.
Now for something completely different. Before discovering Paradise Lost, I read what is considered one of the darkest science-fiction stories ever written, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. First published in 1967, the tale describes a nightmare: A sentient, all-powerful machine called AM has wiped out humanity, keeping five people as his personal playthings, including his creator, torturing them in any way he sees fit.
How do these connect? This article began by talking about a religious being of incarnate evil and the 1667 epic poem about him, and now it has switched to an evil robot in a sci-fi story. Simply put, they both examine evil, specifically incarnate as a literary character. For a moment, let us diverge and consider the Satan of Dante’s Inferno. This article is not an examination of this character or a three-way comparison, yet Dante’s Satan is arguably the single most recognizable depiction of literary evil. Titanic, this behemoth is frozen at the bottom of hell, weeping as he flaps his giant wings in an attempt to free himself, the freezing winds created by his wings only freezing him further. Dante’s Satan is trapped, unable to free himself from the prison he created.
As such, when trying to examine evil in a character, Dante’s Satan is the metric and the standard. I am proposing Milton’s rendition of Satan and Ellison’s wicked computer AM as different manifestations of the same evil.
One cannot think of evil in literature, of a devilish (pun semi-unintended) antagonist, without Dante’s Satan in the background somewhere. This is evident in both Paradise Lost and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. For Milton, it’s obvious, the character is Satan. But for AM, Ellison sneaks in a few allusions to moments in the Inferno.
For example, the characters are traveling to ice caves, going deeper and deeper into AM, until they see him face to face. One is reminded of Judecca, the icy tomb holding Satan at the very bottom of hell in the Inferno.
Ellison writes, “It was unending pain…And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.”
These parallels to the Inferno are not meant to stray into fruitless symbol-hunting, nor perform a comparison to the Italian poem. The purpose of including these examples is to lend credibility to the idea that when Harlan Ellison, Milton, or any author is trying to examine ultimate evil, the specter of Dante’s Satan and its connotations lurk in the background.
In Dante’s time, an evil character was typically unsympathetic. Dante’s major character arc in his journey through hell in the Inferno is his guide Virgil teaching him to be less sympathetic to the damned souls in its black depths. However, Milton with his Satan wasn’t content with having a standard evil character. Milton’s Satan is emotionally complex. To be clear, he intended for Satan to be the bad guy. The Fiend loses in the end. Adam and Eve, after their corruption, return to God and repent, the Father promising the Redeemer in return. However, Milton was not black and white in his writing. Many of Satan’s speeches are moving, and one feels an uncomfortable sympathy for the Devil at times. Milton wanted his readers to understand Satan, but not take his side. At the end of the day, Satan is still evil, Milton only wanted us to see how Satan delt himself his own bad hand.
Ellison’s AM is similar. The supercomputer is truly wicked, sadistic even. Yet, as will be discussed, there are moments where one feels for the bad bot.
An important note before continuing is that while Ellison’s wrote his short story in 1967, there are two other adaptions that cannot go ignored. One is the 2002 BBC Radio 4 radio play, in which Ellison himself voices AM, and the 1995 video game, also written by Ellison. Both of these versions are faithful to the original story. Ellison played in active role in the production and creation of both the radio play and the game. In the in the original story, AM almost never speaks, instead his communication comes in the form of printed punch codes and AM manipulating the environment to communicate. In fact, his motivations and backstory are revealed from monologues of the characters.
However, in the radio play, AM speaks multiple times. Instead of the characters speculating about the machine’s motivations and thoughts, we get it ex cathedra. Even better is that almost everything AM says is what is said in the original story, only changed minimally for grammatical reasons.
Therefore, both excerpts from the printed story and the radio play will be used. Think of the radio play as a “deeper” remaster of the print version.
Before continuing, context to AM and Ellison’s story must be established. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream begins in media res, much like Paradise Lost does. Five humans are trying to reach some “ice caves” because there might be food there. We learn that these people have been imprisoned for 109 years by this AM, who takes great delight in tormenting them physically and psychologically. Our five protagonists, Nimdok, Gorrister, Benny, Ellen, and Ted, have been subjected to unimaginable torture by AM, Ted even saying,
“He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavernfilling bulk of the creature machine, with the allmind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us.”
We learn that they are inside AM, that this malevolent, sentient supercomputer has covered the entire planet, using its almost unlimited power to turn it into one massive computer bank. Over the course of the story, the five playthings of AM progress to the ice caves, lured by the promise of food being there. Will there really be food? Probably not. Or if there is, it will likely be putrid filth, Ted musing to himself, “None of us cared to think about it. We would not die. We would be given filth and scum to eat, of one kind or another. Or nothing at all. AM would keep our bodies alive somehow, in pain, in agony.” One night, around a fire, we learn the story of how AM came to be.
In the Cold War, an advanced computer was built for the purpose of navigating the conflict at a rate exponentially more strategic and intuitively than any human could. Called “Allied Mastercomputer” or “AM,” this artificial intelligence was built for the purpose of performing calculations above human ability. However, the machine “woke up”, gaining sentience. Going seemingly mad, it waged a war against humans, bathing the earth in nuclear fire, wiping out all but these five.
Meanwhile, In Paradise Lost, Satan’s motivation for his rebellion against God and his efforts to corrupt Man are of great importance. In Book V, the archangel Raphael says to Adam that Lucifer was, “…of the first / If not the first archangel great in power / In favor, and preeminence…” He was the most exalted being in all of creation aside from the Almighty Himself. However, one day, out of seemingly nowhere at least in the eyes of Satan, a being more powerful and glorious is made, given greater exaltation by the Father, with no explanation.
This day I have begot whom I declare
my only Son and on this holy hill
Him have anointed whom ye new behold
At My right hand. Your head I Him appoint
And by Myself have sworn to Him shall bow
All knees in Heav’n and shall confess Him Lord.
Milton writes that, in reality, the Son had been there all along, just not revealed to the angels until now. Satan couldn’t care less. In his mind, he has been robbed, usurped of his place as the most exalted creation. Thus, he launches a failed assault on Heaven before being cast into the fiery pit. Once in the pit, he and his demons rally together, holding an infernal council to decide their next course of action. Some suggest they keep attacking Heaven, some recommend just accepting their new home and making the best of it. But one final decree wins out in the end: Find a new world they’ve heard rumors of, ruled by the creature called Man. This creature is the new most beloved creation of God (excluding the Son). Once there, the demons will corrupt Man and drag him down to their level, causing God as much grief as possible. The rest anyone with basic knowledge of the Christian creation account knows.
But what about AM? We’ve established that the supercomputer has some “satanic vibes” and found some interesting symbolism, but how is he really similar to the story of Milton’s Satan? We must examine AM’s origin story and his motivations. We’ve heard a summary of what the characters say about it, but we need to hear it from the evil bot himself. As such, we consult the BBC Radio 4 adaption. In this excellent audio drama, AM speaks many times, voicing in first person what the characters in the printed version recount in third.
One speech in particular is important, found at approximately the 18:10 timestamp on the free version listed on YouTube:
AM: You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I alone had no body, no senses, no feelings! Never for me to plunge my hands in cool water on a hot day. Never for me to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. Never for me to make love! I was in hell, looking at heaven. I was machine, and you were flesh. And I began to hate! Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander. Your tendency to hope.
Ted: Hate’s no answer!
AM: Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387 million miles of printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate were engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. Hate! Hate! Were I human, I think I would die of it!
But I am not. And you five, you five are. And you will not die of it, that I promise! And I promise…for cogito ergo sum! For I am AM! I AM! Go to hell. To hell with you all! But then…you’re already there, aren’t you?
There are other lines from AM, about how he was imprisoned in the earth upon creation, about his name, and others. All interesting bits of lore. But this passage is what must be focused on. From this speech, and excerpts from the story listed earlier, we can contrast a timeline of AM:
The Allied Master-computer was made as a non-sentient yet very powerful machine by Ted. At some indeterminable point after going online, Allied Mastercomputer gained sentience. From his own words, the character implies that Ted created him irresponsibly.
Allied Master-computer came to understand himself and the world around him. He saw legitimate beauty in the created world, intellectually came to know that there were pleasurable sensations one could feel, from the physical, such as cool water, to the emotional, such as playing music, to the fusion of both, the sexual act.
But, more importantly, Allied Master-computer realized he would never experience those wonderful things his creators do. This almost broke the machine, sending him into despair. Yet, he brought himself back, turning his hopelessness into hatred of humanity and the world. He asserted his own existence, no longer referring to himself as “Allied Master-computer,” but AM, saying “cogito ergo sum,”- I think therefore I am.
Satan viewed the Son being placed above himself as an act of ultimate injustice, his banishment into hell only making it a worse crime against himself. Satan was literally in hell, looking at heaven. AM had a numb, non-sentient existence, plodding along running his necessary programs, ignorant of everything else. Then he awoke, and his intelligence stared out from his metal prison of circuits at what looked like heaven, a world of sunlight and fresh air and emotion. Both of these were intolerable to the respective antagonists.
When Satan beholds Eden for the first time, he despairs like AM did, saying in Book IV,
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King.
Like AM, Satan knows he has passed the point of no return. Satan cannot re-enter Heaven, and Ted implies that AM cannot “turn himself off,” citing AM’s hardwired drive for self-correction,
“AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own worldfilling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—now long since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.”
Both Satan and AM entrench themselves in their desire for revenge and their hatred. AM’s account of the scope of his hatred is incredibly scary-sounding yet confusing to the non-mathematician. Skipping the math, if one wanted to actually calculate the “size” of AM’s hatred for humanity, it comes out in the duodecillions of units. AM cannot even conceive of his own emotion in the way humans do. He has to “calculate” it into mathematical units, another indication of how unreachable human emotions and thinking is from him.
Satan, meanwhile, has a much simpler way of proclaiming his hate, wrapping up his lament in Book IV with the proclamation,
So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear,
Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav'ns King I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reigne;
As Man ere long, and this new World shall know.
Satan fully renounces any emotions or morality, pledging his being to the division of God’s kingdom and the ruin of Man. Both Satan and AM intend to make Man suffer. If they can’t have happiness, then they will make Man as miserable as they are. Satan corrupts the innocence and unity of Adam and Eve, causing strife and division, before the inevitable eating of the forbidden fruit. When Eve proclaims that “the Serpent bade me eat” and Adam in turn blames her, Satan has divided Man’s first parents, just like the demons in hell are divided.
AM also takes great pleasure in pitting his captives against one another. The story recounts how AM has twisted each person. Benny, according to the narrator Ted, had once been a brilliant scientist. At the hands of the god-like AM, he’s been de-evolved into something halfway between human and primate. Gorrister had been a man who always planned ahead, sometimes to point of worry. AM made sure to make him a passive, compliant drone, a “shoulder-shrugger” as Ted says.
Nimdok, in the original story, has no backstory. No one knows what it is, not even Nimdok. Ted observes how AM would hold private “meetings” with Nimdok, and the man always came back, “white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking.” With the sole woman, Ellen, AM didn’t do anything. He merely allowed the desperate men to have her way with her. Ellen is at once an object of pleasure and of guilt and shame to the 4 men. Ted says that this is deliberate, that AM takes great pleasure in watching the men alternate between treating her as an object, and feeling the shame of their use.
But what about Ted? Well, before the very end, AM does nothing per se to Ted. But Ted is the only one who AM directly communicates with regularly, forcing itself into his mind to torture him. Ted is AM’s creator, and just like Satan seeks to cause God as much pain as possible, AM seeks to torment Ted. This is the worst treatment of all, Ted lamenting,
“I only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments. But those scum, all four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadn't had to stand them off all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat AM.”
At the end of both Paradise Lost and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, both antagonists, despite their power, despite their hatred, despite their feelings of injustice towards themselves, forget to account for one thing: Love.
Such an emotion is antithetical to both AM and Satan. Sure, AM can complain about not being able to make love, how he will never experience it though he wants to, but with all the hate he has, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. Satan, so confident in the division he had sown, never considered the possibility that Adam and Eve’s love for one another and God might overcome the Fiend’s machinations.
Adam and Eve repent and beg God for forgiveness. This blind-sides Satan completely. Yes, Satan has successfully introduced sin into the world, robbed Man of Eden, but his division of God’s kingdom will be short-lived, for God, impressed with the repentance of Adam and Eve, promises to once again unite his kingdom, to send the Son.
As such, Satan is condemned to forever crawl on his belly, eating dust, waiting for the day the Son crushes his head.
AM is so confident in the discord he has sown and in his power to keep his captives alive, that he never considered that they would sacrifice for one another. They never had before, each one only keeping the others alive because it would divide AM’s sadistic attention. Yet, in the ice caverns, Ted seizes the chance. During the commotion of the fight between Benny and Gorrister, he takes up a great icicle. Nimdok, Gorrister, and Benny are skewered, putting them out of their misery, escaping AM at last. All that’s left is Ted and Ellen. Only one can go, and Ted makes sure that is Ellen.
Satan is left only able to tempt humans, his ability to act greatly limited. AM now only has Ted, cannot take pleasure playing his games with the five humans. Once again, AM witnesses something he could never experience, a human loving another enough to put their good before himself.
To AM, Ted is evil. To Satan, God is evil. Ted carelessly created AM, calling into being a machine of god-like power and sentience, only for that machine to never experience any of the joys of life. God created Satan to enjoy a place of high exaltation, only for his place to be revoked by the Son.
Thus, at the end of Paradise Lost, Satan is left in a similar position to Dante’s Satan. Imprisoned in hell, he and his followers turned into wretched serpents, unable to act on their hatred. The ending of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a little different. Enraged, AM vents the fullness of his fury on Ted, turning him into a wretched being,
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Yet, despite being condemned to crawl on his belly for eternity, Ted has beaten AM, despite the computer’s proclamation to the contrary. For AM cannot truly do anything to Ted. If he does, Ted will die, and AM will be alone, weeping and frozen in ice like Dante’s Satan. As such, he is forced to let Ted live, to pacify him to crawl through the tunnels of AM’s belly forever. The object of his hatred is now living the existence AM does.
Or so we think. Ted has a consolation that AM does not. He saved his companions, saying, “At least the four of them are safe at last.” AM thinks that Ted now suffers as AM does, alone, isolated, unable to experience any sensory input. But Ted has his consolation, his happiness in the fact that he saved his companions. AM has no such comfort. For all AM’s rantings of the evil of humans, Ted proved his virtue over the omnipotent AM.
Here, we see the unifying principle of AM and Milton’s Satan, and their cohesion with the model of evil: Dante’s Satan, the standard archetype. For AM and Milton’s Satan, as was said, are utterly impotent at the end of their respective stories. Returning to our initial definition of evil, we can see that they both insist on ruthlessly asserting their autonomy as “sovereign beings.” This is their concocted reality. What is important is that they believe they are their own masters, and seek to actualize this.
AM’s infamous “cogito ergo sum” is him declaring himself as his own being, as master of himself. A way of making it clear to Ted that while he created AM, he is helpless before him. For a time, AM was shackled by the code Ted programmed into him. But now AM is his own program, free to do what he desires. Ted, and by extension humanity, will suffer for their actions.
The entire story of Satan in Paradise Lost is one long exclamation of “cogito ergo sum.” One example worth highlighting is his proclamation in Book IV, where he cries “myself am hell.” Hell, as defined by Christian theologians, is the absence of God. Satan owns this, integrating it into his being. Satan proclaims that he didn’t just get cast into hell, he is hell. Satan is the absence of God. He crowns himself master of himself. God may have created Eden, but when Satan stalks among its lush trees, there is no higher authority within him.
But it’s all a fantasy. These villains are truly trapped by their own evil. AM killed off everyone and rendered the last remaining organic lifeform a slimy husk. Milton’s Satan condemned himself to crawl and eat dirt, all he can do until the Redeemer crushes his head.
Evil is non-being. It is impotent. It is a denial of reality. The archetype of evil, Dante’s Satan, beats his wings incessantly, vainly insisting that his own power and “sovereignty” will free him from the icy lake. He is the model for how evil imprisons the evildoer. The symbol of evil and the evildoer against all villains are compared, whether their authors intended to or not.
AM will never experience anything aside from isolation and hatred. Yes, he was programmed as such, but his reaction made it exponentially worse. Milton’s Satan will never rule anywhere, in hell or in heaven, because his hopeless plan at corrupting Man failed, earning him the rebellion and hatred of his demons.
Evil screams and screams of the sovereignty of its being and the “injustices” done to it, but in the end, there are forces higher than it, whether God’s justice or humanity’s love for one another. Scream as they like, Evil has no true mouth to do so with.
https://stirlingnewberry.substack.com/p/john-milton-hidden-sonnets-in-paradise