Strategy (13 page)

A strategic debate then took place in hell among the leaders of the fallen angels—Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beelzebub, and Satan himself. The setting was a special place called Pandemonium (literally a house of devils), where the rebels gather to consider their next steps. God presumably had the option of preventing them ever causing trouble again, but he still allowed them to decide their own course of action. Satan was determined to raise his comrades out of their miserable sense of weakness and work to oppose everything that God was trying to do. “To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight.” He used a parade, with accompanying brass band, to raise the spirits of his followers and demonstrate that they were still a force of great strength, greater “than the forces on both sides in the Trojan War, greater than any forces King Arthur or Charlemagne could command.” While this may have raised the morale of his followers against God, it could not serve as the basis of a credible strategy.
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A set of options was described that might have been put to any group trying to respond to a major setback. Anthony Jay noted that “in every important respect the situation is that of a corporation trying to formulate a new policy after taking a terrific beating from its chief competitor and being driven out of the market it had previously depended on.”
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Satan, who knew what he wanted, nonetheless followed good practice and opened proceedings by asking for proposals.

Moloch was the first to step forward, recommending “open war.” His appeal was based on emotion and drive, aggression and fatalism, while contemptuous of attempts to use wiles: “Let us rather choose/ arm'd with hell flames and fury, all at once/ O'er Heaven's high towers to force resistless way.” He could not, he admitted, promise victory, but at least a form of revenge.

Compared with Moloch's unsubtle aggression, Belial offered more realism, but the effect was defeatist: “ignoble ease and peaceful sloth.” He doubted they could achieve even revenge. “The tow'rs of heaven are filled/ With armed watch, that renders all access/ Impregnable.” He made a fundamental point about the impossibility of both “force and guile” that his fellow devils seemed ready to ignore. God saw “all things at one view” and so saw and derided the devil's council even while it was in progress. Belial's alternative was therefore to wait until God relented. “This is now/ Our doom, which if we can sustain and bear,/ Our supreme foe in time may much remit/ His anger.”

Mammon ridiculed both of the previous options. He had little taste for war or expectations of God's forgiveness: “With what eyes could we/ Stand
in his presence humble, and receive/ Strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne/ With warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing/ Force hallelujahs, while he lordly sits/ Our envied Sov'reign.” His idea was to develop the possibilities of hell: “This desert soil/ Wants not her hidden lustre, gems and gold: Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise/ Magnificence: and what can heav'n show more?” So he urged the fallen angels “to found this nether empire, which might rise/ By policy and long process of time/ In emulation opposite to heav'n.” As he had helped construct Pandemonium, Mammon's ideas had some credibility. For the first time the audience saw something they liked. Mammon “scarce had finished when such murmur filled/ The assembly, as when hollow rocks retain/ The sound of blustering winds.”

But like any clever chairman, Satan had worked out his preferred outcome before the debate had begun. Everything had been structured to produce the desired conclusion. His second-in-command, Beelzebub, “Pleaded his devilish counsel, first devised/ By Satan and in part prospered.” First, he undermined Mammon by warning that God would not allow hell to become equivalent to heaven. Beelzebub proposed taking an initiative but not the direct strategy of Moloch. Satan spoke of a “place/ (If ancient and prophetic fame in heaven/ err not) another world, the happy seat/ Of some new race called Man.” This new race was supposedly equal to angels, perhaps created to fill the gap left by the exiled rebels. This was a way of getting at God without the futility of a direct assault. Perhaps men might be tricked into joining the rebellion. As a strategist Satan had identified one possible explanation for the defeat in heaven. It was simply a lack of numbers. There were twice as many loyal angels as rebels. Instead of trying to reverse the outcome of battle through a direct assault, which would be futile, why not trick men into joining the rebellion? After Satan praised Beelzebub's plan, it was adopted. Having come up with the strategy, Satan set off to implement it. First he needed good intelligence. “Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn/ What creatures there inhabit. Of what mould/ Or substance, how endued, and what their power,/ And where their weakness, how attempted best,/ By force or subtlety.”
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He journeyed seven times around the earth to avoid the vigilance of the angels guarding Paradise. He tricked his way into Eden, appearing to the guard as a cherub. His aim was to conquer Eden and then colonize it with his fallen angels. But, coming upon Eve in Eden, he was enraptured by her beauty and for a while was “stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,/ Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge,” until he pulled himself together and reminded himself that he was about “hate, not love.” He considered Adam and Eve now more cynically as he recalls his aim of malign coalition: “League with you
I seek,/ and mutual amitie so streight, so close,/ That I with you must dwell, or you with me,/ Henceforth.”

In the form of a serpent, which Milton compared to the Trojan Horse, Satan tempted Eve to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Satan argued that he, a beast, received the gift of speech after eating it and God had not killed him. Eve later explains to Adam that she doubted he would have “discern'd/ Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spake.” Even if she had been aware of the possible deceptiveness of appearances, why should she have been suspicious? “No grounds of enmity between us known,/ Why he should mean me ill or seek to harm.”
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After eating the fruit, Eve persuaded Adam to eat some as well. This set up a potential contest for the allegiance of men. Should they give themselves over to Satan, the balance of power might tilt in his direction. For Adam and Eve, this was the moment of decision. No longer innocent, they must choose. Satan's cause was defeated when Adam and Eve made their choice; they repented and aligned themselves with God. Michael's prophecy was “so shall the World goe on,/ To good malignant, to bad men benigne,/ Under her own waight groaning” until Christ's second coming. The lesson, as Adam came to understand, was that even the few must oppose the unjust and the wicked, for “suffering for truth's sake/ Is fortitude to highest victorie.” God's accomplishments would not always be the obvious route. They came “by things deem'd weak/ Subverting wordly strong.”
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By that time, a less-confident Satan, away from his home ground and supporters, had his own “troubl'd thoughts,” acknowledging the omnipotence of God and the error of his revolt, as well as the evil within him. His pride would not allow him to contemplate submission. The problem was not with the strategy Milton attributed to Satan. With all involved enjoying immortality, brute force was never going to be decisive. Satan's best hope was to turn humans so that they joined the ranks of the fallen. In this effort deception was essential, and initially Satan was successful in removing Adam and Eve as allies of the angels. What he failed to do was win them over to his cause, for here God had the ultimate weapon in his Son.

Although Milton put sentiments about freedom—in words he might have used against his own king—into the Satanic speeches, he was not necessarily of the devil's party. Milton's heaven, while odd in its apparent militarism, was never described in tyrannical terms. The angels obeyed God as a result of his inherent authority rather than fear of punishment, and individual angels were given latitude when acting on God's behalf. They came together naturally and joyously to defend heaven against the rebels. Moreover, there was every difference between using such republican rhetoric to denounce an earthly
king, who had usurped the power of God and claimed to be his agent, and the denunciation of God himself. In 1609, James I spoke to Parliament about how “kings are justly called Gods, for they exercise in a manner or resemblance of Divine power upon earth … Kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.” Milton's political project from the start was to challenge this presumption and the associated claim that disobedience to a king was tantamount to disobedience to God. Such a presumption was idolatrous. Milton's hell was a developing monarchy “with royalist politics, perverted language, perverse rhetoric, political manipulation, and demagoguery.”
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Despite the language Satan employed as a rebel leader, he acted as a supreme king once he got to hell. He appeared as a great sultan and addressed Pandemonium “high on a throne of Royal State.” He took his command for granted. He did not offer the rebels republican self-government but rather servitude to himself, a usurping king. His feigned commitment to political rights was no more to be believed than the vivid description of a serpent's life he gave Eve while tempting her—or his other imaginative deceptions, for that matter.

The real puzzle is why Satan ever believed he could succeed. The problem was not predestination but God's omnipotence and omniscience. Not only did God have superior power, but he could not be tricked either. Whatever was being planned, God saw it coming. As a former archangel, Satan should also have seen it coming. This is why, despite appearing to be modeled on Machiavelli's ideal prince, Milton's Satan fell short in key respects. In confrontation with God he made elementary mistakes and lacked the prudence Machiavelli advised when dealing with a stronger power. Machiavelli's prince was “above all a pragmatist.” Machiavelli did not admire “those who oppose insurmountable odds or persist in lost causes.” In
Paradise Lost
, Satan acknowledged that while in heaven he underestimated God's strength, and once in hell he made no effort to reconsider the logic of his initial rebellion. He stuck with a strategy that had already brought him failure, in part by claiming that it was almost successful. He learned nothing that could truly make God vulnerable. His boasting that he could do so was, to quote Riebling, “a mockery of strategic wisdom.” He was ready to use force or guile, but not to gain true advantage—only to wage “eternal Warr.” Against an omnipotent foe, this hardly betrayed pragmatism. “Satan may seem to be a free agent, boldly innovating his future,” but “he is instead a slave to his own nature.”
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In Milton's fiction, Satan's task was to allow God to make a point. Satan was “cast in a poem with an axiomatically omniscient and omnipotent God.” This meant, according to John Carey, “that every hostile move he makes must be self-defeating. Yet his fictional function is precisely to
make hostile moves: he is the fiend, the enemy.”
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If, having seen the possibility of redemption, Satan had taken it, then the plot would no longer work. But that still left the flaw. Milton provided God with a truly evil opponent who was sufficiently clever to develop a challenge substantial enough to demonstrate God's glory but not so clever that he could conclude that he should surrender to God's mercy. By exploring the relative merits of force, guile, conciliation, and fatalism,
Paradise Lost
illuminated strategic debates, but as with all debates in which God was involved, in the end the deliberations were all futile. The players in these dramas could act to serve their own purposes only to the extent that these conformed to God's overarching plan.

Although the regular references to deception in the Bible are by no means always disapproving, the serpent's cunning, which gets humankind off to such a poor start, did not set an encouraging precedent. Milton further confirmed the link between cunning and wickedness by identifying the serpent as Satan in disguise. When Milton referred to “guile,” he connoted fraud, cunning, and trickery. From a strategic perspective, these still could seem preferable to violence—and certainly to defeat—but such methods were underhanded, certainly lacking in nobility and bravery. Those who won by such guile would forever have a stain on their character. Even now, it is complimentary to describe a person as being “without guile.” What such a person says can be taken at face value; there is no need to search for hidden meanings. Or else we speak of a victim “beguiled” by a seductive personality or idea as one detached from normal composure and rationality. A comparable word is
wiles
, which the philosopher Hobbes employed as an alternative “to master the persons of all men he can.”
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The Oxford Dictionary definition conveys the distasteful flavor of wiles: “a crafty, cunning, or deceitful trick; a sly, insidious, or underhand artifice; a stratagem, ruse. Formerly sometimes in somewhat wider sense: A piece of deception, a deceit, a delusion.”

Stratagems, as described by Frontinus, involved deceit, surprise, contrivance, obfuscation, and general trickery. A stratagem is still defined as an “artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy.” There were examples in Shakespeare in which resorting to stratagem appeared as less than wholesome, a way of gaining an unfair advantage by surprising the enemy. The mad Lear's suggestion of a “delicate stratagem” to “shoe a troop of horse with felt” was not to be taken seriously. The preference for acting without trickery was made most clear in
Henry V
, in which the king boasted
of a victory achieved “without stratagem” but rather “in plain shock and even play of battle.”
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