Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) (7 page)

But Satan’s true God is his own will. Milton always maintained that tyrants were self-enslaved. An unconquerable will sacrifices the willer and everyone under his sway. Most readers, their infatuation with Satan having run its course, savor his final comeuppance in the poem, as his triumphant return to Hell becomes the first of countless annual reenactments of the wicked self-harming travesty he is doomed to think a victory. The attractions of Satan are real, and beguiling, but in the end not so profound as his degradation.

Satan’s heroism, though felt in its highest form by the Romantics, did not die with them and remains a main source of argument in modern
Milton criticism. It is crucial, for example, to the middle period of Harold Bloom’s work, which begins with
The Anxiety of Influence
(1973). Hazlitt noted that Milton showed no signs of alarm over a vast literary indebtedness that would have stymied many a lesser poet: “Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer.… The quantity of art in him shows the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition” (Thorpe 101).

Bloom points to a great subtext in
Paradise Lost
concerning the apparent ease with which Milton masters the anxiety of being belated, preceded, and preempted. Satan is the modern poet (20). God is “cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more” (21). Everything has been done. The world created, the Bible written, the classical epics finished, the romance versions of them already penned by Ariosto and Spenser. What is there to do? To rally what remains, to salvage all creative impulses that are not infected by devotion, while trying to fend off the knowledge that nothing remains, that one will wind up in one God-like imitated state or another. Wallace Stevens’s famous aphorism “The death of Satan was a tragedy/For the imagination” (“Esthétique du Mal”) seems pertinent here. Assuming that his death has occurred, or may soon occur, this reading of
Paradise Lost
shows the dimensions of the tragedy. For Satan
is
imagination. Bloom transformed the Satan controversy into a neo-Romantic fable for modern poets.

The arguments set forth in Stanley Fish’s influential
Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost
(1967) are also to a large extent responses to the traditional Satan controversies. The author, a born Miltonist, loves to argue. Fish maintains that it is all right for the most serious readers, for readers in search of the author’s intentional meaning, to allow heroic images of Satan to form in their minds, provided they are willing to sacrifice those images when the intentional meaning of the poem requires it (as it always will). Satan’s attractiveness is not an unconscious or unintended effect of some sort. Milton wanted his readers to entertain false ideas of Satan’s virtue. He deliberately and repeatedly trapped them into doing so, only to correct them in the next phrase or line or passage. Blake responded to attractive cues but refused to obey the corrective cues, and wound up losing touch with
the poem. Milton himself is the creator of, and ultimate manager of, the Satan controversy. Fish’s most impressive examples are of course drawn from the glamorous treatments of Satan in the first two books of the epic. The spasmodic self-corrections of his model reader uncannily resemble the recoils of Satan.

While impressed with the neatness of this argument, and the energy with which Fish has defended it, other critics have wondered at the infinite gullibility of Fish’s model reader, who goes through the same experience again and again without learning his lesson, as if reading were less a process of illumination than an obsessive-compulsive ritual. They doubt Fish’s implicit view of Milton as a dogmatist unable to admit to mixed feelings about the devil. They question whether great poetry could be as Pavlovian in its didacticism as Fish implies (Kerrigan 1974, 180n, 1983, 98–99; Rumrich 1996, 2–4, 7–11, 60–64; Pritchard; Leonard 2002).

A related and comparably venerable controversy concerns Milton’s portrait of God. Pope observed that “God the Father turns a School-Divine” (“The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated”). The word
school-divine
appears in many subsequent discussions of this issue. It means “a medieval scholastic theologian, of the sort that was taught in European universities,” and was not usually a derogatory word, though it does appear to have pejorative charge for Pope. He seems to be referring primarily to God’s speeches during the Heavenly Council at the opening of Book 3, where the Father explains the relationship between freedom and foreknowledge, and the doctrine of the Atonement, in a language compounded of standard theological terminology and statements from Scripture. Some have answered with Addison that in Book 3 the central mysteries of Christianity and the “whole dispensation of Providence with respect to man” are defined with admirable clarity and concision (Shawcross 1:178). Some have maintained that Milton went wrong in the very decision to assign speech to deity, since this procedure will inevitably bring God down to a human level (Wilkie in Shawcross 2:240–43).

But the deeper issue here is not whether God should speak at all and if he must in what vocabulary. Milton’s God, foreseeing the development of human philosophy and theology, anticipates being held responsible for the sins of Adam and Eve. This forethought irritates him:

The speech implies that man’s theodical attacks continue the faithlessness of the Fall itself. If someone maintains that God did not make him in such a way that he could be responsible for the Fall, he manifests ingratitude. He wants to have been given more from God than mere freedom. He deems his divine endowment not “sufficient.” With regard to the poem’s readers, God is provocative and ill-tempered. “Go on,” he seems to be saying, “blame me. Doing so can only show your fallenness, your faithlessness, your ingratitude, and your utter lack of responsibility.”

The same sort of provocation, daring his audience to disagree or disobey, marks the Father’s words when he is exalting the Son in Heaven. He demands that the angels kneel and “confess him [the Son] Lord”:

It is difficult not to be reminded, as we contemplate such a passage, that Milton hated the bullying ways of earthly monarchs. Why did he make the Father, at times, into a threatening king?

Milton would probably have replied that because God is a king, almighty and eternal, no one else can be. For all others sit in God-like imitated state, aspiring to godhead like Satan himself. God’s legitimacy through merit, not birthright, renders all other monarchies illegitimate, all other monarchs pretenders. This helps to explain why a republican like Milton can have a king for a God, but not why his God should be angry and threatening. God is not always that, to be sure, and at one point amuses the Son by acting the role of some chronicle-history Henry IV worried about usurping northern lords (5.721–32). His aims are merciful, and he praises the Son for seizing upon those aims
and guaranteeing their future realization (3.274–343). When pretending that Adam does not need a mate, God seems playful, and appreciative of a creature whose freedom and rational self-confidence permit him to disagree with his creator (8.357–448). But as we have seen, Milton’s God has a tough side.

This much can be said. Today we are somewhat embarrassed to think about God in terms of human emotions, unless the emotion in question is love. But the idea of God having in any sense a character—with exasperation, anger, jealousy, and wrath to go along with his love, mercy, and playfulness—probably seems childish or simplistic or even (though we have grown suspicious of this word) primitive. As Milton saw things, however, the portrait of God in the Bible was full of anthropomorphism. No form of divine symbolism can represent God as he is. But in the Bible, God delivered the metaphors through which he wished us to know him. There can be no shame in taking him at his word. “Why does our imagination shy away from a notion of God which he himself does not hesitate to promulgate in unambiguous terms?” (
CD
1.2 in
MLM
1148). Milton had little interest in the sort of God we sometimes associate with philosophers and mystics, known to us through some esoteric and reason-humbling symbolism. By the same token, he was relatively unexcited by the thought of contemplating the
visio dei
. His angels seem happiest, like Milton himself, when performing a divinely assigned task.

Both the God and the Satan Controversies animate William Empson’s striking
Milton’s God
(1960). In the process of indicting Christianity, this book invents a new way to praise Milton, albeit one that he himself would surely have deplored. Christianity, for Empson, is intractably evil. In any telling of the story of the Fall of man, God will in some manner be revealed as the responsible party. Milton was a Christian of uncommon moral sensitivity, and he did virtually all that one could do to improve the faith. There is, as we have noted, no torture. The Crucifixion, though recounted briefly (12.411–19), is hardly the centerpiece of Milton’s religion. Temptation, the act of free moral decision, takes its place. Satan is more sympathetic than ever before. But God the Father is still provocative, still threatening. This portrait, far from being the failure it was conventionally assumed to be on one side of the God Controversy, shows Milton’s honesty. His God manifests
the dark impulse to rule, to wield power purely and simply, that the many attractive aspects of
Paradise Lost
conceal from our view. Dennis Danielson’s aptly titled
Milton’s Good God
(1982) defends Milton and Christianity against some of the main arguments in
Milton’s God
.

The third of our controversies, about the character of Eve, first appeared in the feminist criticism of the twentieth century. “For the Romantics,” Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson wrote in 1987, “it was Satan who was oppressed by the author’s consciously held beliefs. In our time it tends to be Eve” (xiv). Satan was the controversy of another day. Feminism has arrived, and it wants to argue about Eve.

Traditionally Milton had received mostly high marks for his characterizations of Adam and Eve. Coleridge thought the love of Adam and Eve was “removed from everything degrading,” the creation of two people who give each other what is most permanent in them and achieve “a completion of each in the other” (Thorpe 96). Their love unfolds without flattery or falsehood. Hazlitt told of some men’s club wit who maintained that Adam and Eve enjoyed only the least interesting of the pursuits of human life, the relations between man and wife. Hazlitt replied with a long catalog of the furniture of fallen life (wars, riches, contracts, et cetera) missing from the supreme pleasures of Eden: “Thank Heaven, all these were yet to come” (Thorpe 111). Extending Hazlitt’s idea that Milton had the power to think “of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him” (Thorpe 98), Emerson praised the poet for giving us a new human ideal: “Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity.… Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait” (
Early Lectures
149).

But there was information of diverse sorts suggesting that Milton might have had a grudge against womankind. During the time that he was deserted by his first wife, Mary Powell, Milton wrote four pamphlets arguing in favor of divorce on the grounds of spiritual incompatibility. Mary’s daughters did not get along with his subsequent wives. Now and then the daughters were asked to read to their blind father in languages they could not understand (Darbishire 177, 277). And there were also a few passages in the poetry cataloging domestic unhappinesses with a somewhat unbalanced fervor. Samuel Johnson
brought all of these factors together in a memorably pithy sentence: “There appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings” (
Lives
1:193).

But through the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries, Milton’s misogynistic streak was usually considered an eccentricity, not a malign preoccupation at the center of his being. At the dawn of the feminist period, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their groundbreaking
The Madwoman in the Attic
, maintained that Milton’s patriarchal version of Genesis had from the beginning intimidated and oppressed female writers. He taught that a divine Father and Son had created everything, that Sin was a cursed mother, that Eve was supposed to be obedient to Adam (“He for God only, she for God in him”) but instead was corrupted by the devil (Gilbert 368–82; later in Gilbert and Gubar 187–212). Philip Gallagher objected immediately (Gallagher and Gilbert 319–22) and later expanded his views in the fervently argued
Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny
(1990).

Joseph Wittreich’s
Feminist Milton
(1987) showed that, Gilbert and Gubar to the contrary, many women down through the years had been empowered by Milton’s portrait of Eve. Early commentators on
Paradise Lost
were well aware that a passage such as Adam’s enumeration of marital woes to come at 10.896–908 was forced and gratuitous, since Adam “could not very naturally be supposed at that time to foresee so very circumstantially the inconvenience attending our
straight conjunction with this sex
, as he expresses it” (Thyer, cited in Todd 3.321). A few passages on a pet peeve were not too high a price to pay for great literature. Most poets had bees in their bonnets. Shakespeare himself never had a good word for dogs and cats. But feminists feared that Milton, whether consciously or not, was the agent of patriarchy or logo-centrism or bourgeois individualism—whatever its name, a large conspiracy of overlapping ideological commitments hostile to women and progressive civilization alike.