"The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil"
About this Quote
Voltaire doesn’t come at Milton with a club; he comes with a smirk sharpened into theology. “The ancients” and “the Graces” evoke a classical ideal of art as proportion, charm, and social pleasure - the civilizing polish of culture. Then he pivots: Milton “sacrificed to the Devil.” The joke is acid because it’s not really about piety. It’s about what kind of imaginative energy a writer chooses to worship.
The line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s a swipe at Paradise Lost for making Satan the most magnetic presence in the poem. Voltaire’s insinuation is that Milton, supposedly composing an epic to “justify the ways of God,” can’t help lavishing rhetorical splendor on the rebel: the best speeches, the most kinetic ambition, the most modern interiority. Calling it “sacrifice” suggests devotion, not accident - as if Milton’s artistry kneels where his doctrine won’t.
Underneath, Voltaire is prosecuting a broader Enlightenment case against Christian sublimity and Puritan severity. He prefers elegance over grand metaphysical melodrama, the salon’s taste over the pulpit’s thunder. The “ancients” are a proxy for rational, human-scaled aesthetics; “the Devil” becomes shorthand for a gothic appetite for extremity - violence, grandeur, obsession - that Christianity, ironically, feeds while claiming to condemn it.
It works because it compresses a whole cultural argument into a neat blasphemous compliment: Milton’s genius is undeniable, and that’s precisely the problem. The Devil wins by being better written.
The line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s a swipe at Paradise Lost for making Satan the most magnetic presence in the poem. Voltaire’s insinuation is that Milton, supposedly composing an epic to “justify the ways of God,” can’t help lavishing rhetorical splendor on the rebel: the best speeches, the most kinetic ambition, the most modern interiority. Calling it “sacrifice” suggests devotion, not accident - as if Milton’s artistry kneels where his doctrine won’t.
Underneath, Voltaire is prosecuting a broader Enlightenment case against Christian sublimity and Puritan severity. He prefers elegance over grand metaphysical melodrama, the salon’s taste over the pulpit’s thunder. The “ancients” are a proxy for rational, human-scaled aesthetics; “the Devil” becomes shorthand for a gothic appetite for extremity - violence, grandeur, obsession - that Christianity, ironically, feeds while claiming to condemn it.
It works because it compresses a whole cultural argument into a neat blasphemous compliment: Milton’s genius is undeniable, and that’s precisely the problem. The Devil wins by being better written.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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