Strategy (12 page)

Milton's core project was to address the most perplexing of theological issues about free will as first introduced by the story of Adam and Eve. If everything was preordained, Adam and Eve had no choice in the matter. Their original sin was not their fault. If it was their fault, God still needed to have some reason to allow it to happen. If the choice was between good
and evil, then God must have created evil. If human beings could be tempted in this way, then they must have been created imperfect. Yet if this was a consequence of the original design, did they deserve to be punished? If there was no flaw, then how were they able to sin, and from where did they find a concept of sin? How could there be two falls, as Eve was the only one actually tempted by the serpent before she went on to persuade Adam. What was the serpent's motive?

In
Paradise Lost
, John Milton tried to make sense of all of this. At one level, his story was about a rebellion within a kingdom, the defeat of the rebels, and the consequences of the rebels' attempts to reverse their defeat. At another level, it was—as Milton put it in his introduction—about how to “justify the ways of God to man,” particularly how to reconcile God's omnipotence with man's free will. And at yet another level, it was about earthly relationships between kings and men. Milton wrote during the restoration of the monarchy following a civil war in which he had been a devoted republican. It was a time of suppression of dissenters; at one point, Milton himself was close to being executed for treason.

The concept of free will raises questions about God's role in human affairs. If God does not intervene, then what is the purpose of prayer and repentance? If he does intervene, then why do bad things happen to good people? Contemporary theologians may have come up with formulations to answer these questions, but in seventeenth-century Europe when Milton was writing, they were hot topics—politically as well as religiously.

The century began under the influence of a rigorous Calvinism preaching a God of such power that little could be done to thwart his will. Divine grace had been allocated in advance. Everything was set in motion by the original grand design. “God orders and ordains all things,” observed Augustine of Hippo. He worked in the “hearts of men to incline their wills withersoever He wills.” He “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass,” echoed the Calvinists. Nothing could happen that reflected any will other than his. Humankind was just playing out a drama according to a script set down by God at the moment of creation, with no later need for improvisation. It was beyond the comprehension of mere men. This view went even beyond omnipotence, which merely presumed that God could intervene in human society if and when he wished to do so, and assumed that history was set on an unalterable course. If all events were predetermined, and choice was merely an illusion, then the only response was fatalism. Any attempt to change the course of history was pointless.

Against the Calvinists, the followers of Jacobus Arminius argued that humans are able to make their own histories through the exercise of free will
and that God's strength was manifest in acts of love in response to humans' obedience and repentance for their sins. The God of the Calvinists was arbitrary and beyond explanation. The God of the Arminians would allow no arbitrary exclusion from his grace and insisted on the human ability to distinguish good from evil, in order to demonstrate their obedience to God.

By the time of
Paradise Lost
, and after an early Calvinism, Milton was with the Arminians. His view was that “God made no absolute decrees about anything which he left in the power of men, for men have freedom of action.” To hold the opposite position would be absurd and unfair. If God turned “man to moral good or evil just as he likes, and then rewards the good and punishes the wicked, it will cause an outcry against divine justice from all sides.”
¹
The best answer to the conundrum posed by Genesis was that without evil there would be no way to test the faith of humans and allow them to realize their potential for goodness. Milton has God explain that he made man, “just and right/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”
²

One way to think about evil was as a function of human weakness, a constant readiness to be tempted and knowingly disobey God's word. Another way, common by Milton's time, was to consider evil as a living, active force, deliberately trying to subvert God and tempt man. Evil acquired the personality of Satan, and the serpent in Genesis was therefore really Satan in disguise, although there was no basis in Genesis for this notion. In a number of ancient civilizations, serpents have signified evil, but also fertility. Satan did not appear until late in the Bible and then not in opposition to God but as a loyal angel. Satan had an adversarial role and took a harsh line in disputations before God in heaven, but he was always loyal in the end. The best-known example of this is in the book of Job, when he is introduced as returning “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
³
His role was one of challenging men in their sinfulness. It was Satan who urged God to test Job, and when God agreed, Satan was sent to make Job's life miserable. Nonetheless, Satan did this not as a rebel but as a member of the heavenly court.

Eventually Satan, acting not merely as a harsh angel but also as one who had fallen, came to be blamed for all forms of division and misery. The early Church had attempted to challenge the influence of Manichaeism (another eastern religion which explained matters in terms of the contrast between the forces of good and evil), but its insistence that evil was not constituted as a live being failed to convince. The idea of a demonic force constantly seeking to lure humankind away from obeying God took hold. The main difference for Manicheans was that in the end this had to be an unequal struggle. Hell could be no sanctuary where Satan reigned supreme. God was always superior.
Evil could therefore imperil the world but also be sufficiently containable and vulnerable to defeat.
⁴
The Bible closes with the book of Revelation, in which Satan represents the forces of evil. An extraordinary scene is described, a war in heaven between Michael and “the dragon,” each with their own cohort of angels. “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”
⁵
Biblical scholars consider this to refer to a vision of a tremendous upheaval at the end of time. Milton was not alone, however, in taking this to refer to the start of time. It was Satan's rebellion against God that led to his exile to earth where he became a troublemaker, gaining his first victory as the serpent persuading Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.

Milton's narrative gained force not only because of his mastery of language and sense of drama but also because of his intense commitment to the notion of free will. To square the circle of faith, he sought to demonstrate that the true exercise of free will leads to a decision to obey God completely and without reservation. So while God allows free will, he knows how individuals will decide. Milton also distinguished between a challenge to the authority of a secular king—a good thing—and a challenge to the heavenly king—a bad thing. Indeed, the secular king's authority needed to be challenged because it was tantamount to a challenge to God's authority. The arguments that might be used to justify disobedience in one context should not work at all in another. Yet rhetorically this did not quite work, as the arguments against both types of kings sounded very similar. As many commentators have observed, when Satan makes the case against blind obedience to God, Milton gives him the best lines. William Blake observed that Milton was “of the Devil's party without knowing it.”
⁶
Milton's portrayal of Satan as a leader matched a Machiavellian prince. Satan had the appropriate character—a blend of the courageous and cunning—was able to adapt to changing circumstances, had the confidence to take risks, and was aware of the respective merits of force and guile (“Our better part remains/ To work in close design, by fraud or guile/ What force effected not”).
⁷

The narrative structure humanizes the main characters, with the effect of diminishing God and elevating Satan. Milton undermined God's aura and left him appearing defensive and pedantic. As we have seen in Exodus, God could be deceptive and manipulative as part of his mysterious ways, but
his approach in
Paradise Lost
was less subtle. Satan comes across as a much more rounded character, altogether more interesting.
⁸
Though at times he appeared regretful of his fallen status, he still followed his chosen path. His ambivalent character and claims meant that he was not always so easy to resist. For Milton, Satan was Machiavel, using fraudulent rhetoric and force to manipulate the fallen angels while also attempting to attribute exactly these corrosive tendencies to God.
⁹
Satan adopted the republican claims of free choice, merit, and consent in describing his rule, while asserting that God depends on coercion and fraud.

There are many themes and ideas developed in
Paradise Lost
, of which the most important is the link between the events at the start of time and the eventual crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. My focus is solely on the conflict between God and Satan and what this might tell us about their respective strategic calculations. There are two key episodes in this story. In
Paradise Lost
, they do not appear in chronological order, but here they do. The first is the story of the great battle in heaven, which is told by Rafael, one of God's loyal angels, to Adam to warn him about the nature of Satan and his potential for evil. Unfortunately, by the time this story has been told, Eve has already been tempted. The second episode, the opening scene of the book, depicts the deliberations among Satan's followers as they work out how to respond to their defeat in the first battle.

In the beginning, according to Milton, Satan—then known as Lucifer—was one of the great angels among the heavenly host. The crisis came when God proclaimed his Son to be his equal. Satan was greatly affronted. He had been given no warning of this development and now felt that his position in the hierarchy was undermined. Satan urged the other angels to join him in rebellion: “Will ye submit your necks and choose to bend/ The supple knee?” He then provided a powerful case for political rights:

Who can in reason then or right assume/ Monarchie over such as live by right/ His equals, if in power and splendor less/ In freedome equal? or can introduce/ Law and Edict on us, who without law/ Erre not, much less for this to be our Lord,/And look for adoration to th' abuse/ Of those Imperial Titles which assert/ Our being ordain'd to govern, not to serve?
¹⁰

A third of the angels rallied to Satan's side, and heaven was attacked. But heaven was ready. Curiously, rather than a place dedicated to peace, beauty, and tranquility, heaven was already geared up for battle and organized on martial lines. Milton had been an admirer of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, with its organization and discipline. This seems to have given him the
idea for a New Model Heaven.
¹¹
This struggle was more than hand-to-hand combat. The rebels were pushed back on the first day, but they countered on the second day with cannon, only to be countered in turn by having hills and mountains hurled at them. The rebels' resort to gunpowder, a material linked to treason in the Catholic plot of 1605, is not without significance. At the time, it was often described as the devil's invention, calculated to remove honor and glory from war.

God watched this chaos and at last intervened on the third day. Why did he let it continue? The reasoning was consistent with that used to interpret the basic message of the Hebrew Bible. He was creating the conditions in which his glory and wonder would be appreciated. In this case, it was the Son whose decisive role had to be noticed. He explained to the Son that this was in order “that the Glory may be thine/ Of ending this great war, since none but Thou/ Can end it.” He commanded him to lead out all the heavenly forces and drive the rebel angels down to hell. The Son accepted the command willingly, again demonstrating a clear contrast between his obedience and Satan's rebellion. For the Son, “to obey is happiness entire.” Satan's forces also regrouped, “hope conceiving from despair.” They made themselves ready for a battle they knew must be final. The Son told his forces to stand aside for this was his battle: “Against me is all their rage.”
¹²

Leaving aside the odd ideas of a civil war in heaven, the use of artillery (somehow mountains as projectiles are more fitting), or even the earthly tendency to stop fighting for the night, there was an added twist that resulted from the immortality of the angels on both sides. No wound was ever fatal, although they did cause pain. Despite his admiration for martial virtues, Milton was also demonstrating that some matters could never be truly solved by battle. Perhaps he was also reflecting on his experience of victory for the parliamentary side in the civil war followed by the return of the monarchy. Even in this particular contest, it was the special strength of the Son rather than weight of numbers that made all the difference.

When the enemy is able to recover from initial blows, it is difficult to inflict a decisive defeat. Immortal combatants gave an added twist to this classic dilemma. As
Paradise Lost
opened, the fallen angels were meeting to regroup and consider their next steps in their new home. Despite being expelled from heaven, Satan was undaunted. He remained a dedicated opponent of “the
tyranny of Heav'n.” “Here at last,” he proclaimed from hell, “We shall be free. [ … ] Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!”