John Milton's Paradise Lost Book lll Lecture Notes

This is a transcript of the video lecture for fellow students studying English Literature in the Renaissance and Restoration.

Title: Paradise Lost Book lll by John Milton

Lecturer: Professor John Rogers / Yale University

Video of Lecture at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U6pf5v_Fkg

 

I want to revisit just for a moment the opening of the Invocation to the Holy Light which is of course at the beginning of Book lll of Paradise Lost.  So this is page 257 of the Hughes and this is how Milton begins the invocation as you will remember:

HAIL holy light, offspring of heaven first-born,
Or of the eternal co-eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed?

Milton had a desire to look at himself unblamed or unblamable for the condition of his blindness.  Milton had for years gone out of his way to justify himself before his nation and before his God.  But that was only one way to read this line, this question, May I express thee unblamed?  Unblamed could just as easily modify the Holy Light being addressed by the poet.  It can correspond to the ‘thee’ as well as to the ‘I’ in this question.  And so it is this alternative syntactical possibility that I want to explore in this lecture.  I’ll be focusing on the status of this poem as an attempt to exculpate not only is poet but this poet’s God.  To render God blameless for the range of losses that this epic so eloquently innumerates.

Dr Johnson’s Life of Milton:

His purpose is the most useful and the most arduous to vindicate the ways of God to man, to show the reasonableness of religion and the necessity of obedience to the divine law.

And Johnson here is clearly thinking of Milton’s ambition of producing a theodicy – an attempt to justify the ways of God to men. He is right to identify Milton’s theodicy is one of the central tasks of the poem.  Milton seems genuinely sincere in wanting to provide a rational and reasonable account of the ways of God but Johnson has got his quotation wrong.  And he may have gotten his quotation wrong because he is not thinking directly of  the Milton but he is thinking of Alexander Pope’s earlier thinking of Milton from Pope’s great poem – The Essay on Man.  Pope gets it wrong as well.  Milton of course doesn’t end the opening invocation to Paradise Lost in Book l with the claim that he will assert eternal providence and vindicate the ways of God to men.  Milton says that he will justify the ways of God to men.  I think it is slight but nonetheless there is a difference between these two words and I think something instructive here about Johnson’s slip and Alexander Pope’s slip a few decades before.  Now when Milton says that he will justify God’s ways, I think he means simply that he will account for the justice of God’s ways.  He will demonstrate their justifiability.  But to vindicate God’s ways – vindicate is a slightly different word although they can certainly be seen as synonyms – is to presuppose from the outset that God is under some suspicion of guilt; that he is assumed to have done something wrong and that it is our job to vindicate him or to get him off the hook.  Milton of course can’t himself and doesn’t rightly use the word ‘vindicate’ – it is too prejudicial.  It seems on some levels to criminalise God’s behaviour in advance.  This is of course exactly what he does not want to do.  That said, it’s on some level impossible for us to read Paradise Lost and not assume that this God requires vindication.  God seems in so many ways to be responsible for the fall and it might even be impossible to read the story of the fall in Genesis and not attribute some of the guilt to the Yahweh who placed the forbidden fruit in the garden in the first place.  Dr Johnson, inadvertently here reveals something about Milton’s poem that Milton himself is perhaps isn’t willing or able to admit.  And that is God appears to be guilty and it’s up to Milton to clear him of any suspicion of guilt. 

So look at the headnote that Milton attaches to the beginning of Book lll, page 257 in the Hughes.  And when Paradise Lost initially appeared, its initial appearance in 1667, these arguments, these headnotes weren’t there.  He added them to a later printing presumably at the request of a printer who thought that the readers needed a little help with the poem.  And you may actually want to think about, it’s an interesting phenomenon, and very little written about, that the general relation between the summarised arguments – they are essentially plot summaries – to the actual story, the actual narrative that follow s in each book.  The beginning of this argument strikes me as a particularly interesting one.  So this is Milton’s argument for Book lll:

God sitting on his throne sees Satan flying towards this world, then newly created; shows him to the Son who sat at his right hand; foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind; clears his own justice and wisdom from imputation, having created man free and able enough to have withstood his tempter;

I am just going to focus on a couple of those clauses.  “Foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind;” then we get Milton’s semi-colon “clears his own justice and wisdom from imputation”.  You kind of get the feeling here that the semi-colon is working as hard as it possibly can to yoke these seemingly conflicting principles together and I’m not sure of the case that any semi-colon is up to such an enormous theological task.  In this formulation, Milton seems to own up on some level to Johnson’s characterization of the theodicy of Paradise Lost as a vindication – God needs to clear his own justice – he needs to clear his name’s innocence because that name has been clouded over with some kind of suspicion.  I take this absolutely seriously that it has to be seen as authentic and sincere Milton’s desire to justify God.  He needs to imagine a God who can’t be held responsible for the fall because only a blameless God could be worthy of Milton’s praise or even worthy of Milton’s interest.  Frankly I think that Milton does a pretty decent job of representing a God who cannot be seen as some kind of guilty co-conspirator in the fall of man.  He does a pretty decent job vindicating God but then when we think about it there are few poets more adept at the art of vindication than John Milton. 

Milton had been practicing the art of vindication, the art of defence, something like the art of criminal defence, all of his life.  We looked last time at the lengths to which Milton went in his poetry and his prose to vindicate himself with regards to his blindness.  But long before that, before Milton’s sight had been cut off, long before his tender orbs of vision had been quenched, to use his poetry, Milton had been exercising his talents in the rhetorical art of self-defence.  In sonnet 7, actually throughout the early works, Milton was defending himself against that fear that God would punish him for waiting so long to begin his career.  That God was angry with Milton, Milton was already 23 years old, and he had so little to show for himself.  And later Milton devoted a good deal of energy to other kinds of defence – he laboured to vindicate the radical Puritan left in England when it was held that they had committed in killing the King.  Raising a hand against God’s anointed monarch and Europe was aghast at the barbaric behaviour of the English revolutionaries so Milton wrote it in Latin for the benefit of the entire European intellectual community.  Two defences of the crime of the regicide.  So he wrote a First Defence of the English People and a work titled The Second Defence of the English People and there is no question that he would have been capable had there been time or had there been interest of writing a third defence and a fourth defence.  The labour of defence, the work of vindication was something that Milton was getting very good at and it really goes to the core of his intellectual temperament. 

Now Milton lays the groundwork for his sweeping vindication of God in the discussion in Book lll between the Heavenly Father and his Son.  And this is essentially the same theology that Milton will established in the theological treatise that he is writing at the same time as Paradise Lost on Christian doctrine.  Now it is important for Milton to establish something like – and this is what he gets to do in the venue of the prose treatise as opposed to the poem – he has the opportunity to establish a theoretical basis for a lot of his beliefs; so a theoretical basis for his vindication of God.  He needs to prove, theologically, not just poetically or narratively that God did not place Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the intent, or with the purpose in mind for punishing them for eating the fruit.  He needs to convince himself and he needs to convince his reader that the fact of God’s foreknowledge of the fall doesn’t in any way cause the fall.  This is a huge worry not just for Milton but for all philosophically minded Christians that the faculty of free-will is a genuine faculty and this is something that Milton really needs to believe.  And it is not just some paper-maché concept pasted together by a cynical and manipulative deity or by a cynical and manipulative poet.  And in order to assert this belief in a genuinely meaningful faculty of free-will, Milton has to tackle head on the theology of his fellow Puritans – the prevailing theology of his fellow Puritans.  Milton has to dismantle, and this is no easy task, the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination.  Now the most prevalent belief amongst Milton’s contemporary Puritans was this belief in divine predestination and nearly all men and women that we can identify comfortably as Puritans embrace the faith in God’s omnipotence  outlined in the works of John Calvin – the 16th century French theologian living in Geneva who insisted that every one’s salvation could be traced back ultimately to the predestinary will of god.  So for Calvin God has not only known since the beginning of time what we will do but God actually causes us, in some sense, to do what we do.  There’s very little space for a meaningful range of free will in a strict Calvinistic system.  And it is God then who is for Calvin, elected in advance who will be saved and who will be damned.  Calvin was justified or he felt he was justified and many of his followers felt he was justified in his assertion of God’s control.  When he read the passage St Paul’s epistle to the Romans. 

Roman 8:29

For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.  Moreover whom he did predestinate them he also called and whom he called, them he also justified and whom he justified he also glorified.

It is devastating bible by verse for anyone committed to a strong stance as Milton was to the doctrine of free-will.  So on some level, at least this passage from St Paul scripture seemed to provide incontrovertible evidence for the fact that God had already predestined the elect – those Christians who had arbitrarily at the very foundation of time been elected for salvation and by extension God had also, and this is also another important component of the Calvin theological system that God had arbitrarily marked another group of men and women for punishment and eternal damnation.  Seems incontrovertible but this course is about Milton and nothing is incontrovertible for Milton and you see him tangle with just this passage from the book of Romans for two solid pages on Christian doctrine and you just have a sense that Milton is saying , ‘This can’t possibly mean what it seems to mean!’  There is a genuine and powerful urgency charging Milton’s – it is like a wrestling match almost with a biblical passage like this.  And so one of the important conclusions that Milton comes to in his wrestling match with scripture is the term ‘elect’ as St Paul uses it in the bible – doesn’t refer to God’s absolute  predestination. 

Hughes Page 921 – Christian Doctrine

I conclude that believers are the same as the elect and that the terms are used indiscriminately

Believers are the elect and because of course we get to choose on some level, we get to choose whether or not we believe, we therefore get to choose, we have some sort of agency whether we or not we are going to be one of God’s elect.  This is one of Milton’s most compelling and really wonderful perversions of mainstream Calvinist theology.  Calvin had insisted in predestination to assert God’s absolute control over his creation and God’s absolute control over that final separation at the end of time between the saved and the damned.  Calvin felt that his theology was the least we owed to the grandeur and the omnipotence of God.  But for Milton to say that believers are the same as the elect is essentially on some level to strip God of that control.  It is as if Milton were defending something like a usurpation of God’s authority and it’s the same strategy you will see Milton employing time and time again.  He is able to take the most depressingly constrictive biblical doctrine and he turns it into a proof.  He turns it into a proof for his faith and man’s absolutely free-will.  And Milton’s philosophy, he is not the only person doing this but he does it with more ingenuity perhaps than just about any one of his contemporaries, is often called Arminianism – named after Jacobus Arminius 16^th century Dutch theologian.  Now I have been speaking about the theology of free will as if it were simply a matter of religious doctrine or exclusively a matter of religious doctrine and of course probably more importantly than any other way it is a matter of religious doctrine but religion, and I think this can be said not just for Milton - it surely can be said for all of us – religion serves a whole range of cultural functions; we saw last time some of the deeply personal uses to which Milton was able to put his theology just as he needs to prove that God’s  omniscience and omnipotence is not a sign of his responsibility of the fall, Milton needed to prove that his blindness wasn’t a sign of God’s punishment of Milton.  That was a personal motivation for some of the theological energies of Milton poem.  But I think more central to Milton’s theology than anything like a personal motivation is Milton politics although the political sphere is intimately intertwined with anything that we would want to think of as personal.  Theology and political philosophy – these obviously seem to us as radically distinct spheres of thought but they are incredibly closely intertwined in the 17^th century.  I think there are all sorts of political and social motivations for Milton’s theology.   There are political and social reasons for the fact that some of the period’s radical intellectuals, like Milton, are beginning to radically assert the importance of man’s free-will and beginning at the same time to diminish the authority that had traditionally in the Calvinistic system been accorded to God.  And I think there is a political significance to the period’s renewed attachment to and investment in the philosophy or theology of Arminius who died at the beginning of the 17^th century. 

Arminianism has a new wave, maybe its third wave by the later part of the 17^th century.  Now as we know from the treatise Areopagitica and for Milton’s regicide writings as well – Milton was establishing himself in the middle part of the century as one of England’s foremost, articulate spokesman for a phenomenal liberalism (anachronistic term).  Obviously the word liberalism hasn’t emerged yet but you have something like a theory of liberalism or at least a theory of libertarianism beginning to assert itself in the middle of the 17^th century.  You have a serious formulation of liberalism later in the 17^th century shortly after Milton dies with the philosopher John Locke who was a great reader of Milton.  
 
Traditional Renaissance political thought was before Locke and I think you can say before Milton, was more or less authoritarian.  It placed a monarch at the top of the society, at the top of the polity and traditional Renaissance political thought needed to imagine that monarch’s control, his ultimate governance over the behaviour and actions of all of the individuals in that society.  This political philosophy invariably asserted the importance of a radical image of centralisation of power.  And it is not really until the middle of the 17^th century that Europeans and it’s not just Englishmen are beginning to articulate any serious alternative to the authoritarian, the centralised model of political organisation.  There are people on the radical left, and Milton is one of them, who begin to posit the idea that the disperse individuals throughout a society can be reasonably depended on to govern themselves.  With sufficient self-control of course such a theory assumes a lot of things.  It assumes a sufficient degree of self-control that every individual would have.  With this self-control rational individuals could organize themselves without a king, without a top-down hierarchical structure of a monarchy.  And this position is most often associated in England at least in the middle of the century with the Levellers – the high-minded intellectuals of the army during the English revolution in the middle of the 17^th century and the Leveller theory of sovereignty is something like an elected sovereignty.  If there is a sovereign that sovereign will be elected or chosen by the people.  The sovereign is not going to be imposed upon the people and election in a lot of ways is not simply a theological alternative to this day it has political resonances as well.  So this brand new ‘liberal’ theology is not only political in nature however it is also economic.  It is precisely this same period, the mid 17^th century when something like a ‘liberal’ market theory of economic exchange is being theorised.  So up until – I’ll give you a brief history  of economic thought in the early modern period up until this point it was assumed that the only efficient way to organise the economic life of a nation was to have the monarch, the sovereign, the authoritarian centre of the government fix prices and to determine the value of currency and in general to oversee the dynamics of just about all economic exchange.  But suddenly, and this really is happening in the 1650s and its happening first in England, a liberal economic theory is coming into view and it was being conjectured that individuals, meaning individual merchants could freely set prices and values according to the law of supply and demand rather than according to the law, the authoritarian law of the king.  And there is a wonderful book on this subject by Joyce Appleby “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.  The argument is essentially that a free market philosophy had simply been unthinkable, the free market philosophy that we take as a given almost, was unthinkable before the middle years of the 17^th century.  So you have these two enormous shifts in which the English intellectuals were thinking about political and also about their economic lives.

It seems to me that it only stands to reason that there is going to be a corresponding shift or some sort of related shift on the level of religious thought.  If individuals are going to be liberated from their earthly monarch, if merchants are going to be liberated from the centralising power of the sovereign in charge of the economy, then individual souls are going to have to be liberated at least to some extent from the predestinary stronghold of the heavenly monarch as well.  As if intellectual life could operate in these huge analogous forms and I think that is one of the functions of Milton’s insistence on his liberal theology of free-will.  It is as if he needs to bring his religion in line with his liberal politics. 

 

Now let’s look at the dialogue in heaven – page 260 in the Hughes Book lll line 93.  It is here in the dialogue in heaven between the father and the son where so many of the tensions between Calvinistic predestination and Miltonic free-will get worked out.  But let me digress for a moment – before we actually look at the dialogue I think it is important to ask why it is and I think people have been asking this question because people have been reading Paradise Lost – why it is that God the Father and God the Son need to be holding a dialogue at all?  What is it that they need to say to one another?  I think we can reasonably ask.  For orthodox Christians in Milton’s time and I think for a lot of orthodox Christians in our time, the Father and the Son are members of what is known as the Trinity.  The Father the Son and the Holy Spirit are paradoxically , according to most Trinitarian thinking, three separate entities but they are also most importantly one unified entity.  And because they are all one and all equally one it borders on almost blasphemy to imagine the father and the son needing to discuss anything.  But Milton realised that and this was an extraordinary bold move on his part.  Milton argued that there was no basis in Scripture for belief in Trinity and people have always known that the word Trinity actually appears nowhere in the Scripture.  And you can see Milton in the Christian doctrine supplying mountains, literally mountains of evidence, of Scriptural evidence to disprove the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  So Milton took very seriously the biblical metaphors the Father and the Son.  The Father and the Son are not the aspects of the same deity, they are literally for Milton a father and a son.  And when God refers in Scripture to ‘my only begotten son’ or to ‘my first begotten son’ he really means it.  According to Milton, the father generates the son, he gives birth to him at a specific moment in pre-creation history.  Milton has been called a subordinationist – he subordinates the Son to the Father because the Son will never be, or not until the very end of time, the Father’s equal.  And so the Son can no way be imagined identical or equal to the father.  Father can when he chooses, and this happens in Paradise Lost, to grant a certain measure power to this Son but the Son in no way possesses any kind of power that hasn’t been granted to him at God’s pleasure.  The Son has nothing like the foreknowledge or omnipotence that the Father has.  Now we see the Son doing things, performing actions in Paradise Lost, for example he is responsible for having created or serving as the vehicle of the creation of the universe, not negligible perhaps, but he can only perform these god-like feats and he can only be called god-like not actually God when the Father permits him to perform such feats.  He needs his father’s permission and like Adam and Eve it is beholden upon the Son to obey the Father.  This is crucial to Milton’s theology.  So look at how all these essentially domestic relations get theologised in the dialogue in heaven.  And the Father speaks in the future tense of absolute foreknowledge because he can.  You are right to think that there is something a little chilling about the father’s discursive manner here.  The way he can shift so easily between the past tense and the future tense.  So this is line 93…

For man will hearken to his glozing lies,                  93

And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall,                95
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his his own? Ingrate, he had of me      97
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.         99
Such I created all the ethereal powers
And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;       101
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.

This little outburst seems incredibly indecorous and inappropriate.  The last line indicates one of the central rhetorical strategies of the Father’s speech.  Look at line 99, there is something liberating about the Father credo here – I created man sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.  This is kind of rousing but the father doesn’t leave it there.  He broaches the subject of the fallen angels and he repeats the same formulation but he repeats it with a difference.  Look at line 101.  He has just discussed both them who stood and them who failed “Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.”  The Father recasts that original statement within a repetitive rhetoric – it is essentially a repetitive rhetoric of tautology  (the saying of the same thing twice in different words) and in so doing he exposes something of the highly schematic nature of his sense of justice.  And this last line is often cited in Milton criticism as a positive example of Milton’s commitment to the doctrine of free-will.  But I don’t really buy it…I’m not convinced by the Father’s statement.  This line may begin with that exuberant adverb “Freely” but the rest of it smacks of something like predestination.  And it is a little depressing.  They stood who stood, and fell who fell.  Is it a stretch to extrapolate from that a parrot phrase like this – the type of person who is created to stand did stand and the type of person who was created to fall did fall.  There is something disconcertingly programmatic about the Father’s repetition here – the repetitiveness of his explanation and the tautological force of this formulation seems to rob the opening word of the line “Freely” and robs it of some of its liberatory energy.  That was the Father’s speech. 

 
Wonderfully the Son seems almost to recoil from the rigidity of the Father’s position and in fact, he seems actually to soften the Father a little.  He asks the Father to show him mercy towards man since man, like the Son himself, is a son of God.  And it is at this point that you get the Father’s condescending claim that he of course knew all along that his Son would be asking for mercy.  And Milton is obliged to make the Father’s omniscient as of course the Father is omniscient.  Although the entire drama of this dialogue is structured as any drama or any dialogue has to be structured to suggest that there are two individuals who are reacting genuinely to one another’s speeches because they don’t know in advance what the other is going to say.  That’s what a dialogue is.  But there is clearly a powerful asymmetry here in this dialogue in that the asymmetry threatens to cast this entire scene into something like a potentially ridiculous light.  But the Son does seem at least to have made a kind of impact on the Father and the Father seems to relent.  And the Father agrees to accept the repentance of Adam and Eve.  So let’s look at line 194 Book lll at the top of page 263 of the Hughes.  The Father promises to show mercy and he promises to permit Adam and Eve a safe journey back into his good graces.

And I will place within them as a guide                     194

My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,               196
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.

It is as if the Father has been cajoled by the Son; cajoled and nudged to a more linear and to my taste a more palatable form of human progress.  And I think we sigh with relief at the knowledge that all will be well again after the fall.  If we have all the earmarks of a narrative, I’m moving from a beginning, through a middle and towards an end, then we sigh with relief at the knowledge that everything is going to be ok.  But of course this is only momentary.  As soon as the Father has agreed to this concession, as soon as he has promised a safe journey back to God – he adds a condition – and this condition appears at line 203.  He returns to that rhetoric of repetition and equivalence that had marked his earlier speech:

But yet all is not done; man disobeying,     203

Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high supremacy of heaven       205
Affecting godhead, and so losing all,
To expiate his treason hath naught left,     207
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,         209
Die he or justice must, unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay           211
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.

“well used they shall attain, / And to the end persisting, safe arrive.” – it did seem pretty much that all was done.  But..’yet all is not done’ – you can almost hear Milton in this line catching himself and realising that man of course wasn’t redeemed simply because Adam and Eve were repentant, simply because they said they were sorry.  It has the same force as that incredibly startling moment in the Nativity Ode when Milton tells us “But wisest Fate sayes no, / This must not yet be so, “.  Milton just can’t get away  although he certainly gives it a shot, he can’t get away from the unhappy fact that man was not redeemed simply because Adam and Eve said they were sorry.  Man was redeemed through the much more troubling, for Milton, the troubling mechanism of the Father’s sacrifice of the Son.  Milton has successfully avoided finishing his poem about the crucifixion, the poem called The Passion, when he was a young man.  It just went unfinished.  And as you read the dialogue in heaven in Book lll of Paradise Lost, it seems for a while at least, it seems that Milton is able to evade the entire question of the sacrifice one more time…but he catches himself.  ‘But yet all is not done”.  He forces a consideration of the atonement of the crucifixion and it is crucial to understanding exactly how it is that Milton here is imagining the dynamics of the redemption.

So Milton first of all had to reject the orthodox understanding of the Christian redemption.  In the New Testament and for a lot of Christian theologians, the redemption  seems to work along the lines of something like a revenge sacrifice and as cultural anthropologists have taught us, there is something of an intensely primitive logic at work behind the Christian notion of the crucifixion.  One of the Father’s sons Adam has died and so the Father will avenge that death by murdering someone else.  And of course that means murdering another son.  This model of redemption is based on a repetition of the initial crime.  And this logic of repetition I think is largely responsible for that rhetoric of repetitiveness that we hear so often in the Father’s speech.  According to this sacrifice theory of redemption or the atonement, God chooses to sacrifice his Son since someone is going to have to be punished for Adam’s sin – the logic demands that.  But Milton can imagine no aspect of his religion, no aspect of Christianity more barbaric than the image of the Father’s willing sacrifice of his Son.  This would be a God truly unworthy of Milton’s justification and Milton is struggling here, and there are a few of his contemporaries doing the same thing in the 17^th century, he’s struggling to bring together Christianity in line with certain standards of rationality .  As  Doctor Johnson had said – Milton wants to show the reasonableness of religion.  So Milton replaces the sacrifice model of the redemption with something like a satisfaction model of redemption.  According to this way of thinking in Adam’s sin a debt has been incurred and this debt can be satisfied by someone else’s payment.  So revenge is no longer the motive.  It is like an economic desire, simply to balance the books.  There is something impersonal about this new way of imagining the atonement.  And it is here that Milton gives the notion of the Christian redemption its particular Miltonic twist.  Milton’s Father does not willingly sacrifice the Son – it’s magnificent – he simply asks for a volunteer.  And the Son, out of his goodness, volunteers.  He chooses to make himself mortal and it is a perfect example of how Milton has shifted the emphasis away from Christian orthodoxy and forcing the authoritarian image of God’s sacrifice to yield to Milton’s liberal image of a kind of volunteerism or libertarian image of volunteerism.  The Son chooses to humiliate himself and subsequently God chooses to compensate that humiliation with the Son’s supreme exaltation.  You see the extent of this compensation at line 311 in Book lll.

                                                 …because in thee              311

Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt                              313
With thee thy manhood also to this throne;
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign               315
Both God and man, Son both of God and man,
Anointed universal king; all power                                   317
I give thee, reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits; under thee as head supreme                        319
Thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions I reduce:
All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide               321
In heaven, or earth, or under earth in hell,

To reward the Son for having sacrificed himself, the Father is going to give his Son all power.  And this complete, seems like it is going to be a complete transference of power and it is a transfer that will hold until at the end of time there will no longer even be a difference presumably between the Father and the Son because as the Father says in line 341

God shall be all in all.             341

There will be no power differential between the Father and the Son and presumably there will be no power differential between/among any of us.  We’ll all be joined at the end of time in one massive, liberal, non-hierarchical state of harmony.  The image of the ‘all in all’ is Milton’s most exuberant visionary end point.  And it satisfies a lot of Milton’s most liberal impulses and even the authoritarianism’s structure of heaven, and of course Milton’s heaven is as authoritarian as any heaven ever been conceived.  Even it would be transformed into something like a fantasy of egalitarianism – fantasy of absolute equality.  This ecstatic redistribution of power and glory at the end of time can only come about because the Son has so willingly humiliated himself.  He subjects himself to the Father’s wrath. 

 
I think we recognise this gesture, this image of the noble and voluntary self-sacrifice.  This is the matter, this is the image that Milton had established in his defences of his blindness.  Milton had written in the sonnet XXll: To Cyriack Skinner; and he had also written in The Second Defence of the English People that he had willingly sacrificed his sight for the good of his fellow Englishmen.  He lost his eyes overplied in liberty’s defence, my noble task Milton had written in that sonnet.  And in the Second Defence, Milton had explained that he continued to write his regicide treatises despite the advice of his doctors who insisted that he would go blind if he continued.  That’s how important the project was for Milton.  And the sacrifice.  You begin to see a way the two dominant features of Book lll – Milton’s invocation to Light and the discussion of blindness therein and the dialogue between the Father and the Son – they are speaking to one another – they’re functioning in a kind of parallel fashion.  So just as the Son’s voluntary sacrifice will be rewarded with his inheritance.  On some level the heavenly plot of Paradise Lost is essentially an inheritance narrative.  The Son’s voluntary sacrifice will be rewarded with his inheritance of all of God’s power presumably too, Milton’s sacrifice will also be rewarded by God.  It is as if Milton wanted the same compensation of paternal power that the Son had been granted for undergoing his sacrifice. 

The transfusion of divine power that Milton imagines, the transfer of power from Father to the Son – it extrapolated (extend the application) to the situation of the poet and his God would guarantee the inspired success of the poem.  What would that mean?  It would guarantee essentially the status of Paradise Lost as Scripture itself – as something divinely authorised or perhaps even divinely authored.  That at least is related to Milton’s personal concern with his own composition of Paradise Lost.  But this image of a divine transfusion of power or an ultimate transference of power also I think speaks to the political component of Milton’s theology.  You have in this passage an image of a transfer of power from a centralised authority, the creator of the entire universe to the humble individual.  The image supplies the conceptual foundation for Milton’s liberalism.  That form of social organisation whereby power has been shifted away from the centre, away from the monarch and towards the subject.  You will find images of inheritance and transference and of transfusion abounding in Paradise Lost and they crop up in all sorts of venues; often having nothing whatsoever to do with the domestic interactions of the Godhead.  These images prepare us for that beautiful but truly outrageous end point in Christian history that Milton foresees – the one that God had foretold in his speech to the Son.  There will come a point in time in which God shall be all in all. And that’s an idea that works on the level of theology to satisfy  nearly every desire, to satisfy the personal, the social and the political desires of what I think not entirely wrongly think of as Milton’s idea of the liberal Christian.

 

[end of lecture]

John Milton: Paradise Lost [tapescript of lecture]

I am sharing this for fellow students of English Literature who may find it useful to look at a tapescript when watching the lecture from youtube.  This is a great lecture and is recommended for anyone who is interested in studying John Milton.

John Milton [1608-1674]

Title:                  Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton
Author:              Yale Courses
Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf91LApkCpU

For a vast number of complicated reasons, Milton has invited for 350 years now, a uniquely violent response to the particular question of his value as a poet.  And the violence of this reaction is due in large to a tendency to think of Milton, and of Milton’s work, in terms of the category of power.  So I have given this first lecture a title, the title being “Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton” because any introduction to Milton has to confront the longstanding conviction in English letters of Milton’s power or his strength as a poet and it is practically impossible to begin a reading of Milton without the burden of innumerable prejudices and preconceptions.  Milton’ reputation always precedes him and in fact that has always been the case.  Even in his lifetime.  And even if we have heard of nothing of Milton the poet or nothing of Milton the man, we’re certainly of course likely to have heard of Adam and Eve and the story of the Garden of Eden.  So it is especially difficult to read Paradise Lost without bringing to it some sense of the power of the religious problems the theological and the ethical problems that that story seems so powerfully to set out to address.

 

Now readers of English Literature talk about Milton very differently from the way they talk about other writers.  Historically, it has not been a pleasure, or wit, or beauty that have been associated with the experience of reading Milton.  Those are the categories of value we tend to associate with or affiliate with our other favourite writers, writers as diverse as William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf for example.  But in our collective cultural consciousness, if there is such a thing, whether we like him or not, we tend to think of John Milton as powerful and reasons for this coupling of the name Milton and of this idea or the metaphor of power are worth looking into.

 

Power is a conceptual category that Milton brooded on and cultivated his entire writing life.  From a very early age, Milton nursed the image of himself as a powerful poet.  We have in Milton, a man who was able to state categorically in his early twenties that the epic poem, that he would not begin writing for another 25 years, would become an unforgettable work of English literature.  Milton anticipated and lovingly invested all of his energy in his future literary power and future literary fame.  He anticipated this power much as his father, the reasonably well-to-do banker might have anticipated long term earnings from a particularly risky business venture.  And in Milton’s case, this investment in power paid off.  Milton would eventually come to feel so comfortable with the mantel of power that he was able to do much more than simply rewrite the first two books of the Bible which of course was one of the things that he accomplished in Paradise Lost.  That is itself no mean undertaking.  By the end of his life, Milton would in effect try to rewrite everything.  After he published all of his major poems, he began publishing a spate of works that attempted to recreate British culture from the ground up.  He invented his own system of philosophical logic.  He published a treatise he had written earlier on grammar, inventing his own system for the understanding and the learning of the Latin language.  He wrote a long and detailed history of Britain, attempting to create the meaning of that little island that he always assumed was God’s chosen nation.  And finally, and probably for Milton the most important, Milton wrote a theology inventing in effect, his own religion.  And Milton’s Protestantism looks like no-one else’s before or since.  There’s a real sense in which Milton wanted to recreate all of western culture in his own image.  And regardless of what we think of the success of that example, or the appeal of the attempt to do such a thing, the amazing thing is that Milton felt so empowered even to embark on such an enormous project.  And readers of Milton ever since have had to confront not just Milton’s writing but this unspeakable sense of empowerment that underlies just about everything that Milton writes.  It seems that a useful introduction to the poetry of Milton would be a look at some of the various types of power that Milton imagines in his work and some of the types of power that literary history have tended to confer upon Milton the man, the image of Milton the man and Milton’s writing. Now probably the form of power that we readily associate with John Milton involves his position at the dead centre of the English literary canon.  Milton is – this goes beyond questioning – he’s an object of worship by British and American institutions of higher education. 

 

 

Adam & Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden

 

 

It would be utterly inadequate to account for this institutional, surreal institutional power that Milton holds over us by stating blandly that Milton is the greatly English poet.  That is the easy answer and of course is not untrue.  But we can anatomise some of the forms of power that have been most commonly attributed to this greatest English poet.  There is first the understandable aesthetic power, the power of beauty of Milton’s verse; an aesthetic power that is often thought or felt to inhere somewhere in the poetry itself.  And in fact for readers of Paradise Lost, and this has been an experience for a few hundred years, it does often seem that there were some mysterious life force pulsating through Milton’s dense and driving lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter in Paradise Lost. 

 

There is also the power that Milton himself claimed was behind the poetry of Paradise Lost.  Milton insisted and it’s completely possible that he might actually have believed that God himself was responsible for composing the poetry of Paradise Lost.  John Milton was merely the conduit for God’s first attempt serious at an epic poem.  So we have, in this perspective, we have an image of the awesome power of the deity himself, thundering away behind every dot and tilde of Milton’s great epic. 

 

But for Milton’s contemporaries in the 17^th century, Milton’s power really wasn’t at all as aesthetic or even religious in nature.  Milton’s power was primarily seen as social, political and cultural.  Milton – and this is a wildly anachronistic use of terms but there is nonetheless a lot of sense to it – Milton was essentially a left-wing political radical.  And it was widely feared by his more timid contemporaries that his writings would seduce his readers into rejecting good old fashioned traditional religious and social values.  And there was a lot of validity to that contemporary cultural fear.  Milton was a revolutionary.  He was responsible for writing the first justification for an armed rebellion against a legitimate monarch, the first to publish such a work essentially in Europe.  Milton actually wrote that it was the duty, not just the right, but the duty of a nation to rise up and dethrone, through execution, an unjust, though legitimate, king.  And Milton in fact, was largely responsible in a cultural sense that the fact that the armed rebellion of England’s civil war, what we think of as the Puritan Revolution, actually led to the execution by decapitation of England’s monarch – Charles l in 1649.  On top of all of this political revolution, political radicalism, Milton was one of the first, intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favour not only of divorce, Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility, but also he argued for the right to plural marriage – polygamy.  He was branded as a radical and dangerous debunker of traditional Christian family values. 

 

Many of you know that Milton, in his later years, was blind, and the fact of his blindness was in his own day frequently cited by contemporary preachers, men at the pulpit, as an example of exactly how God punishes who dare to write against the king or those who dare to write against the institution of marriage or the family. Milton’s power for so many of these contemporaries was seen as palpably destructive and truly frightening.  Obviously, it goes without saying that today the assessment of Milton as some kind of imminent social threat or some sort of social force, in terms of his radical nature of political power – that has taken a sharp turn.  Milton is much more likely imagined to wield - and if you have a sense of what the mythology surrounding Milton is, you would have to agree with this – Milton is much more likely to wield a socially conservative power over his readers.  In the debates ranging for the last 30 years or so over the value of tradition pedagogy, and over the value of canonical reading lists, Milton is always cited, invariably cited, as the canon’s most stalwart representative of oppressive, religious and social value.  There is no question - Milton is the Dead White Male Poet par excellence in English literary circles.  His poetry works, at least from this point of view, to solidify those Dead White Male values – whatever those values are.  In the unsuspecting minds of his readers, none of whom obviously are dead and many of whom are neither white nor male.  Milton’s power from this perspective of the radical cultural critique is really not so different from the power of the late Jerry Falwell (1933-2007 American evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and a conservative political commentator) or someone like Rush Limbaugh (1891-1996 American radio talk show host and political commentator).  There is something insidious and culturally malicious and powerful about the social conservatism of what is thought to be his voice.  Now this more or less is the contemporary picture of John Milton and his more or less contemporary picture as a powerful force of conservatism derives in large part to the English writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote for a few decades, but who wrote about Milton during the 1920s.  And it’s Woolf’s image that’s probably the one that’s most firmly rooted in the minds of Milton’s readers today.  For Virginia Woolf, especially in A Room of One’s Own the dead writer Milton exercises an active power at the present moment as he forces his female readers to accept their subordinate place in society.  And the text of Milton, especially of Paradise Lost, therefore has to be seen as an active persistently malignant conveyor of patriarchal oppression.  Now like all judgement of literary value and literary power and force that the 20^th century feminist evaluation of Milton, Virginia Woolf’s has a complicated and long prehistory.  It is worth our while to look briefly at some of the complicated steps by which an evaluation like Virginia Woolf’s actually comes into being.  So let me take you back to the 17^th century, up to the very beginning of the literary reception of John Milton.

 

So Milton who had died in 1674 had established himself as the great English poet within 20 or so years of his death.  So as early as the late 17^th century, Milton had already entered what we can think of as the English literary canon.  He was, for many of his younger contemporaries, a canonical authority whose wisdom, whose mere opinions could be cited as proof, as some sort of indisputable evidence for one position or another.  An extraordinarily ambitious poet like Milton naturally derived a great deal of satisfaction, I’m convinced, in his own life time, in anticipating just this kind of posthumous respect and worship.  The fantasy of his fellow Englishmen quoting him as an authority, much as he had himself had for so many decades quoted scripture.  Now one of the earliest citations of Paradise Lost that actually appears in print in the 17^th century, comes from the proto-feminist writer Lady Mary Chudleigh.  Chudleigh dared to argue, it is an amazing argument given the time in 1699, that a man - that a woman rather - could be considered, should be considered as excellent a creature as a man.  That women might actually be as ontologically valuable as men and in making such a point, Chudleigh naturally had to confront, as writers have for millennia, the scriptural account of the priority of the sexes.  The suggestion that many readers extract from the Book of Genesis from the Bible that the initial creation of the male of the species, Adam, seems to establish the privileged rank of the entire male sex.  So Chudleigh attempts to demonstrate that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve establishes no such thing.  She writes

 

Woman’s being created last will not be a very great argument to debase the dignity of the female sex.  If some of the men own this it is more likely to be true.  The great Milton, a grave author, brings in Adam thus speaking to Eve in Paradise Lost

   

Oh fairest of creations, last and best of all God’s works

 

And the great Milton can be invoked here because he has already been established as an authority, a figure whose very word possesses something like an indisputable cultural power.  And so as a ‘very grave author’ this is what Chudleigh is implying, Milton can tell us potentially true about the priority of the sexes.  Of course, like any literary critic, whoever tried to write an analysis of anything, Chudleigh had no choice but to nudge the lines that she is quoting out of context.  And it has been said that, to quote anybody is necessarily to misrepresent him and this fact is obviously a very good thing for Lady Mary Chudleigh since Milton would certainly not himself would have wanted to suggest that women are superior to men.  Milton in fact soon goes on in Paradise Lost, right after this very passage that she cites, Milton the narrator berates Adam for his over-valuation of his wife through the character of the archangel Rafael.  I think this is one of the great ironies of the English literary history, certainly in the reception of the poet Milton that one of the very first published discussions of Milton’s epic attempts to enlist John Milton as a proponent of feminism.  Now we don’t have to be overly concerned here with Chudleigh’s generous oversight of Milton’s generally sexist bias.  What is important for our immediate purposes is the identification of Milton as a cultural authority.  He’s a literary power.  A figure who can be called upon to supply the voice of tradition itself.  He could be called upon in fact exactly as he is by Lady Mary here to contradict scripture.  It is this power to contradict the word of God that makes Milton a force then which is hard to imagine anything more powerful.

 

Milton is discussed in a very different manner a year later in a work published by Mary Astell in 1700 in a far more remarkably feminist way.  A remarkable cry for the liberation of women from what she describes and characterizes as domestic oppression.  Astell writes the following:

 

Patience and submission are the only comforts that are left to a poor people who groan under tyranny unless they are strong enough to break the yoke.  Not Milton himself would cry up liberty to poor female slaves or plead for the lawfulness of resisting a private tyranny.

 

So Milton for Astell was hardly the embodiment for orthodoxy as he is for Lady Chudleigh.  For Astell, Milton remains the subversive revolutionary whose treatises against the tyranny of the Stuart Monarchy, whose treatises against the tyranny against Charles l established his reputation as a liberator.  A liberator of all the oppressed and enslaved citizens of England and that is Milton’s rhetoric – that rhetoric belongs to Milton himself.  But Astell resents, of course, Milton here and what she resents is the limitation of his subversiveness.  He refused to extend his critique of tyranny in the political realm to a critique of man’s domestic tyranny over women in the private realm – in the domestic sphere. It’s as if Mary Astell is saying that Milton was on the right track but he simply didn’t go far enough.  He didn’t extend the logic of his position.  Now Milton’s – now it has to be said of Mary Astell image of Milton is probably the product of a much closer reading of Paradise Lost than Lady Mary Chudleigh’s was,  Astell certainly seems to have noticed that Milton’s notorious  and of course deplorable line in Paradise Lost of God’s creation of Adam and Eve. 

 

He for God only, she for god in him.

 

And Milton’s narrator tells us of the creation of Adam and Eve.  And Mary Astell is clearly responding to this and her statement points to the persistent worry and it is a worry that even now exists in the 20^th century about the nature of Milton’s power.  Is this guy a revolutionary or is he a reactionary?  Astell distinguishes Milton’s cry against political tyranny from her own critique, her own cry against a patriarchal tyranny.  And in making this distinction she’s exposing the uncomfortable affinity between two competing, equally progressive social movements.  And you will see this phenomenon manifest itself throughout your reading of Milton.  What we see here is the strange proximity and it is often a very uncomfortable proximity of Milton’s rhetoric of political liberation to the proto-feminist rhetoric of domestic liberation that is just beginning to emerge at the end of the 17^th century.  Now in the middle years of the 17^th century during English revolution that saw the execution of the king, and saw the establishment of a non-monarchic republican government, Milton had practically the formal language, the literary language, of insubordination.  He developed an entire vocabulary, a rhetoric of righteous disobedience, of resistance, of protest and revolution.  It is a measure of Milton’s anti-tyrannical language that it can be used against Milton himself.  A writer like Mary Astell can employ Milton’s revolutionary rhetoric to advance a course which John Milton would himself have had difficulty subscribing - that the dead Milton could exercise a social power that had nothing whatsoever to do with the living Milton’s own social views. 

 

Now fast forwarding a couple of centuries and look at Virginia Woolf.  By the time we get to Woolf in the early part of the 20^th century, Milton has come to be associated with essentially all of these ways of thinking about power, however contradictory they are.  He’s the very voice of traditional wisdom for some, as he was for Lady Chudleigh, and he is the voice of political subversiveness for others, as he was for Mary Astell. He was a friend of women everywhere, as he was for at least a few of his female readers of the 18^th century and for many he is the very embodiment of oppressive patriarchy.  It is Virginia Woolf who is largely responsible for our sense of Milton’s identity of oppressive patriarchal literary voice.  But Virginia Woolf too had inherited these contradictory ways of thinking about Milton and about Milton’s power.  In 1924, Woolf is beginning to formulate her dazzling feminist critique of the masculine traditions, what she thinks of as the masculine traditions of literary writing.  And she is not just one of the first literary critics to reveal the most famous writers have been men, everyone had always known that.  But she is one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have been writing as men.  Exerting the influence of their sex, that’s to use her language, in a manner that implicitly glorifies their masculinity – implicitly glorifies all men.  But this is not so with Milton she writes in 1924. This is Woolf’s amazing argument here:

 

There is a small group of writers whose work is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said to be sexless and Milton is their leader.     

 

Like Lady Chudleigh, Woolf holds up Milton as a powerful authority.  He is almost a mythological figure who can sanction, who can authorize this revolution in women’s writing that Virginia Woolf is beginning to prophesize here, early in the 20^th century.  But this of course, as we know, this is only one of the ways in which Milton’s power or what Woolf thinks of as his leadership, can be thought of. 

 

In 1928, Milton has come to represent for Virginia Woolf a very different type of cultural force.  Near the conclusion of the perfectly extraordinary book A Room of One’s Own Woolf elaborates on her prophesy of a feminist future in a world in which women can be viewed - a literary feminist future; a world in which women can be viewed in no less stature and of no less power than men. 

 

For my belief is that if we live another century or so and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we look past Milton’s bogey for no human being should shut out the view. Then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.

 

Now the language is intentionally and sublimely opaque apocalyptic here as Woolf imagines what might have happened to Judith Shakespeare had she been given the cultural opportunities of her more privileged brother, William.  But the anticipated triumph of women writers can never occur, according to Virginia Woolf here, until we look past his bogey.  She is ingeniously vague about what Milton’s bogey is.  Milton’s bogey would seem to be that frightening shadow cast over wives who might find themselves identifying with the subordinate Milton’s Eve.  Milton’s bogey seems to be the spectre that hovering over women poets or women writers who may find in Milton an identification of poetic strength with masculinity itself.  Now Woolf does not explain exactly how it is that Milton is shutting out the view, and she doesn’t try to explain what the view would look like if it weren’t shut out but in citing the power of what she claims to be this Puritan bogey.  Virginia Woolf really subtly reveals how difficult it is even for her to shut out entirely the real or it might just be the bogus power of John Milton.  At the very moment that Woolf advises women readers to look past Milton’s bogey she finds herself in the peculiar position of echoing the poetry of John Milton.  And this is an unbelievable thing to have happened, at one of the formative moments of 20^th century feminism.  She is alluding here to one of the most famous passages in Paradise Lost in which Milton is asserting nothing other than this poetic power.

 

That the blind poet calls on the Holy Spirit to assist him in the composition of the epic.  He asks the heavenly muse at the end of the passage to see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight.  And Milton is going to need this additional help from God because as he said

 

Wisdom at one entrance is quite shut out

 

Milton’s blindness, the fact of his blindness has shut out his view of the visible world, that would ordinarily present itself to him through the entrance of his eyes.  This shut out will enable him, will help him to explore the invisible world of divine truth.  Now when Virginia Woolf writes that Milton has shut out the view of his female reader, she seems to be suggesting that the spectre of Milton blinds women to the things that they should be seeing, the most important truths, out there in the world.  How troubling though this seems undeniable, how strange, that Woolf, really at her most radical is echoing the very words of the power she is opposing.  It’s almost as if she were saying in some way, in a post Miltonic world, which is the world we all live in, it’s impossible fully to look past Milton bogey.  The rhetoric of power, the literary strategies of power and in some cases the very experience of power, and of literary power have become inextricably tied and indebted to Milton.  In this great prophecy of 20^th century feminism Woolf is essentially proposing a revolution and it’s as if the text is here telling us that whether we like it or not, whether we like Milton or not the language of revolution is one that is forever and always indebted to that bogey man, John Milton.  As Virginia Woolf had written ‘Milton is our leader’. 

 

In Paradise Lost, the representation of power for which Milton is most celebrated is the power exhibited in the failed revolution against God - the revolution against God by Satan and his fellow rebels.  Our sense of Milton’s power, however that power is imagined, is intimately related to the way in which Milton himself represents power in the characters of Satan and of God in Paradise Lost.

 

Satan and the rebel angels have been roundly defeated, they’ve been humiliated by the son of God and the other priggish loyalist angels so they are pained, utterly humiliated, they are prostrate on the burning lake of this miserable new realm called Hell.  Nonetheless, Satan pulls himself together and begins to analyse, to theorise his situation.  He describes for us his own power that somehow manages to survive even a terrifying and humiliating defeat like the one he’s just experienced.  So this is Satan:

 

What though the field be lost

All is not lost, the unconquerable will and study of revenge immortal hate

Encourage never to submit or yield and what is else not to overcome

That glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me.  To bow and sooth for grace with suppliant knee and deify his power who from the terror of this arm so late doubted his empire.  That were low indeed.  That were ignominy and shame beneath this downfall

 

Now we might at first think that Satan is vaunting here is a product of nothing more elevated than hate and a desire for revenge.  Milton is doing something truly extraordinary and the imaginative achievement in Satan’s speech is easy to miss.  Satan finds it ignominious and shameful to lower himself to God.  To bow and sooth to grace with suppliant knee and deify his power.  This kind of admission is shameful not because it’s simply always shameful to so debase oneself.  It’s an ignominy and a shame it may very well be, what Satan is implying here, that God is not actually omnipotent.  Would an omnipotent, truly all powerful God actually doubt the extent of his own power?  In Virginia Woolf’s terms Satan is trying to look past God’s bogey.  He tries to get behind the highly theatrical, the culturally constructed illusion of God’s power.  You can hear Satan “So what if we lost?  The important thing is we may have lost this battle, but the important thing is that God revealed a terror of this arm; of our strength.  A fear of the military strength of the rebel angels is what is manifested in this war.  God was so afraid of us that he actually doubted his hold on his own empire and an empire that he was only able to maintain because of good luck or something like superior military fire power.  But certainly nothing is grand or is absolute as omnipotence.  This is an amazing for Satan to say after his fall.  Even the expulsion of Satan from heaven was not sufficient to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the legitimate authority of God.  That Satan is still able to doubt the legitimacy of God’s power is a testimony to the complexity of the analysis of power in Paradise Lost. 

 

No power, not even God’s power can be irresistibly and indisputably proven.  Satan refuses in this speech to deify the power of the conquering enemy and in this refusal Satan resembles no one so much as John Satan.  John Milton the political leftist who refused to deify the power of the English King Charles l, whom so many of his contemporaries considered to be God’s anointed.  John Milton who wrote hundreds of pages of anti-monarchic propaganda until King Charles’ head was safely severed from his body.  Like Milton, Satan is in the business of demystifying power; of exposing political or cultural power as something that is not inherently there; or naturally there.  Power is something that is created by a human process of deification; a process of king worship; or a process of God worship; or book worship.  Or a process for that matter of poet worship.  Now later on in Paradise Lost, Satan comes to the conclusion that that old man in Heaven who had assumed the authority to issue all those arbitrary decrees.  Satan finally relents and concedes that he is actually an omnipotent God and that that God is or was the omnipotent creator of all things.  But despite this enormous concession and this realisation, Satan is still justified in his cynical demystification of God’s behaviour before the defeat of the rebel angels.  And Satan complains now that God never bothered to demonstrate to the angels just how powerful he was. 

 

But he who reigns monarch in heaven till then as one secure sat on his throne upheld by old repute, consent or custom and his regal state put forth at all but still his strength concealed which tempted our attempt and wrought our fall.

 

Satan is saying that before the war in Heaven, God’s power just seemed like any other king’s power.  As if God sat on the throne Heaven merely because of the humanly constructed reasons of tradition or of old repute or of consent or custom.  Now, alas, for Satan it turns out that God’s monarchy was based on genuine  happened to be sitting in the best chair.  But in Satan’s articulation of what we can think of as dialectical power on authority, he provides us with a useful analysis of the problems besetting any understanding of power.  The kinds of authority established by the bogeys of traditional and custom and conservative tradition are not always distinguishable from the kinds of authority that are based on genuine strength.  And even if we locate a source of some kind of genuine strength, authoritative strength, it is still usually possible, as it is for Satan, to argue that that  power is really base, a concealed product of custom or what we would think of as cultural construction.  To be a king, one need merely put forward one’s regal state; one simply needs to act kingly. 

 

Now the matter of Satan’s critique of God’s power is raised because the evaluation and criticism of Milton, and especially Milton’s poetry has hinged for a couple of centuries now on a related set of questions about this poet’s power.  ‘Is Milton powerful for the very straight forward reason that he is in possession of this tremendous literary strength; this unimaginable talent? Or does Milton only seem powerful because of the traditional religious values which he is so intimately associated?  Does Milton only seem powerful because he has the force or the strength of the age old literary canon behind him?  Does Milton only seem powerful because he is the very literary embodiment of patriarchy and masculine bias?  It goes without saying that these are questions that are impossible for us to try to answer, certainly now.  But Milton lets us know later in Paradise Lost that Satan was wrong to embark on his dangerous deconstruction of divine power.  Milton ultimately is a pious man, wants us to frown critique of the Judeo Christian conception of divinity.  But Satan, regardless of Milton’s ultimate dismissal of Satan’s position, and Satan’s analysis of power and of God’s power especially, isn’t that easily dismissible.   And that is not simply because Satan bears such a strong resemblance to Milton, as of course he does.  Satan looks ahead to us; Satan resembles us as readers, as we attempt to dissect and to anatomize the power of Milton’s poetry.   A satanic sensibility may be one of our best guides in our reading of Milton.  It is Milton’s satan who best prepares us to explore what we can think of as the labyrinth of Miltonic power.  He puts us in a position to explore that truly weird, but undeniable process whereby the very word Milton, the name Milton stops referring to a particular middle class Londoner who was born in 1608 and begins to embody the very essence of that strange and inexplicable phenomenon that we call ‘literary power’.