Nobody Wants All Hell to Break Loose. But Who’s Breaking, and from Where?

President Trump, it would seem, has his contacts in the infernal regions. How else could he be so certain, as he has repeatedly threatened since January 7, two weeks before his inauguration, that “all hell will break loose” if Hamas does not do his bidding and release the remaining Israeli hostages held by it?

It’s unlikely that the president has been reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is where this English expression comes from. If he had been, he would know that should Hell ever break loose, it will not be because the Supreme Commander, whether Jehovah or POTUS, opens wide its gates, but because Satan and his cohorts storm them in an assault aimed at reconquering the heavens from which they were driven.

Paradise Lost, of course, is Milton’s great 17th-century poetic epic about the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden. Starting in the first of its twelve chapters or “books” with an account of a great battle between Satan’s rebel and God’s loyalist angels that ends with the rebels’ crushing defeat and casting into Hell, the poem moves on in Book II to an assembly held by Satan’s forces to assess their situation. The first speaker is Satan himself. Proclaiming that his followers have but lost the first round, and that having fallen from Heaven they will rise again “more glorious and more dread” than before, he calls for a debate on what is the “best way,/ Whether of open Warr or covert guile” to achieve such a reconquest.