Professor John
Rogers: In Book Four of Paradise Lost,
Milton had sketched the origins of human freedom.
You remember this. Eve's first memory,
or her reflection on her reflection in the pool,
had established the importance of freedom and also the
importance of independence for not only her relation with Adam
but essentially all of human relations.
Milton's concern in Book Four was to establish something like
the viability of a freedom that was able,
in some way, to coexist with what we
discussed as the hierarchical set of power relations.
This coexistence of freedom, on the one hand,
and social hierarchy, on the other,
is something that this poem continues to assert.
I would also add that it's something that this poem
continues to worry about. It's an extraordinarily
problematic but crucial element of Paradise Lost.
Now, I want to review a couple of moments in Book Four.
Think back to what Eve had told Adam after she had been
compelled by him, and also by the warning voice,
after she had been compelled to channel all of her erotic
energies away from the beautiful,
sympathetic, responsive watery image toward
Adam. Eve had said,
"thy gentle hand / seiz'd mine, I yielded."
Theirs is a continual dance of seizing and yielding.
You have his assertion of power and her gracious resignation,
although it's a gentle use of power,
on the one hand, and it's an independent and
consensual resignation, on the other.
Through this dance Milton, I think, was trying to
establish a model of human interaction really distinct from
simple coercion, or completely distinct from
simple coercion. It's distinct from the simple
exercise of brute force that, I think, we often associate
with life in a hierarchically organized society.
Human interaction in this poem is founded on the principle of
consent. In the Miltonic commonwealth of
Eden -- and we think of it as a commonwealth -- no one can be
forced to act. Eve has to choose to act.
She has to consent to act. She yields, which is for Milton
not actually a resignation. It's a positive,
deliberate action, and she has the right of
consent because she possesses for Milton an inalienable
capacity for free will and free choice.So,
this account of Eve's first exercise of free will,
the one that I've just given you -- her yielding to Adam when
he seizes her hand -- that's at least,
I think, the official one that the poem urges us to accept,
according to what I'm thinking of as the poem's official
philosophy, because it seems to be a
guarantee, in some way, subtended by the narrator and
authoritative forces in the poem.
According to this philosophy, Eve yields to Adam freely and
willingly because she comes to recognize his superior nature.
The poem presses on us a philosophy whereby Eve's freedom
is entirely compatible with what we're asked to take as the fact
of her inferiority to Adam. Satan himself explains
perfectly this philosophy, and I think ironically it's
Satan who gives us the best formulation of this coexistence
of freedom and hierarchy in the poem: that freedom and hierarchy
are absolutely compatible. Satan will tell Abdiel in Book
Five: [F]or Orders and Degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist.
Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedom equal? But Milton's poetry -- well,
think how odd it is, [laughs]
first of all, that it's Satan who's giving us
something like the only carefully articulated
authoritative position on this, to say the least,
controversial matter. Milton's poetry is invariably
more sophisticated than what we can think of as the official
dogma or the authoritative line of the poem.
Perhaps that fact is revealed or exposed to us by the fact
that it's Satan who's giving us, in this instance,
the authoritative line. It's important to keep this
distinction in mind because this poem simply cannot be reduced.
Sometimes it tries to be reduced, but it cannot be
reduced, to those ringing declarations of what sound like
the official positions of the poem.Think how complicated
it is with Eve. Eve's account of that beautiful
pool-side reverie was so filled with pathos and longing that
it's impossible, I think, not to feel at least a
little bit of disappointment when she consents finally to her
union with Adam. It's almost -- I don't know --
this kind of a sense in which she's sold out.
Of course, we're happy that she has a mate who's another person
and not merely a smooth, watery image.
Nonetheless, there's a sense of
disappointment that attends that choice that she makes.
Initially for Eve, I am at least convinced there
seemed to be nothing like freedom at all.
She remembers having gazed at that pleasing image in the
reflective pool and she recalls being pulled away from that
smiling and sympathetic image by that mysterious voice that had
guided her to Adam. I think this is one of the most
moving lines in the entire poem when Eve recalls the feeling of
helplessness that she experienced when she heard that
voice. This is how she explains it
later to Adam: "what could I do,
/ but follow straight, invisibly thus led?"In
other words, "What could I do?" Not a bad question:
what could she do? The subordination of woman to
man in heterosexual union in Paradise Lost seemed
entirely compulsory at that moment,
and Eve, it seemed, on some level had to be coerced
to unite herself with this less pleasing Adam.
For a moment at least, Milton seemed to be on the
brink of something like a powerful critique of the
so-called naturalness of normative sexual behavior;
because there's at least some suggestion here that Eve's
attraction to Adam was not freely chosen at all.
It was chosen for her, it was assigned to her.All
of this is a way of saying that Milton is doing something
extraordinary complicated in Paradise Lost.
He justaposes -- he does this consistently -- the rhetoric of
rational consent, on the one hand,
with the competing rhetoric of coercion: maybe that word's a
little strong, but a competing rhetoric of
something like a gentle compulsion, if that oxymoron
makes any sense. There's a way in which this
entire scene, which is intended to assert the
politics of rational consent, provides at the very same
moment something like a critique of the politics of rational
consent. We know that Eve's freely
willed act of yielding followed in time Adam's exertion of
force. However gentle Adam is,
"thy gentle hand / seiz'd mine," he's still seized Eve,
and Milton's, I think, remarkably
honest.So this is why I'm always pushing you to agree with
me, [laughs]
or compelling you to agree with me, that Milton deserves a
little bit of credit here. Milton's amazingly honest in
his account of Eve's first exercise of her free will,
and I think we can think of this as her first free act.
Of course, it is an unduly circumscribed act of freedom.
Milton's poetry in a lot of ways is constantly questioning
the legitimacy of a doctrine of free will in a world that has
been arranged and conjugated like the one that Eden has been.
It's along a principle of hierarchy.So Book Four had
explored in extraordinary detail the complexities of hierarchy
and freedom with respect to the relation between the sexes.
Book Five is also interested in this uneasy but important
relation between hierarchy and freedom.
It's almost as if Book Four hadn't sufficiently put to rest
the logical problem that on some level is constantly eating away
at the center of the poem. Book Five takes up this problem
once again, but it takes it up -- as we, of course,
should have been led to expect -- from an entirely different
perspective.So, as I just said,
in Book Four the hierarchical principle of superiority and of
excellence was the superiority of man to woman.
In Book Five, the central hierarchical access
is a little different, or a lot different.
It involves the superiority of angels over human beings,
and this new hierarchical opposition -- it's performing a
lot of work. One of the things that it's
certainly doing is forcing us to rethink the hierarchical
opposition that Milton had established in Book Four,
and that's because hierarchy is no longer gendered in Book Five.
Milton's not concerned here with sex.
He's concerned rather with degrees of materiality among all
of God's creatures. Angels are less material,
less corporeally burdened creatures than Adam and Eve,
and therefore, within this system they're
superior. In this larger vision of a kind
of cosmic principle of hierarchy in which lighter,
more ethereal things are superior to heavier,
denser, grosser material things,
we can see a way in which the gender distinction simply drops
out of the equation, because Milton gives us no
reason to think that Adam and Eve are anything but equal in
the degrees of their corporeality.
Sexual inequality simply seems insignificant here from this new
perspective in Book Five.So Raphael descends into Eden --
the Archangel Raphael -- in Book Five in order to warn Adam and
Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit.
In doing so, he provides an elaborate
account of -- and I've already discussed this,
but I have to discuss it again because for me it's so
outrageous and so daring and such an absolutely lovable
religious heterodoxy, maybe it's even a heresy -- the
heterodoxy of monism. I'll remind you briefly of what
monism is. It's the philosophy whereby
there can be no such thing as a firm and absolute distinction
between body and spirit. The world can't be divided into
soul and matter as it could be divided with absolute clarity
for Milton's contemporary, Descartes.
The entire cosmos for Milton is made of one huge blob of matter,
and this matter is nothing other, ultimately,
than the body of God. This is what Raphael explains
to Adam at line 469 of Book Five.
This is page 313 in the Hughes edition.
So this is Raphael to Adam: O Adam,
one Almighty is [that's God], from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu'd with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live,
of life. "One first matter all," all
things derived from the "one first matter" which is,
of course, God: this is the ex deo
theory of creation (creatio ex deo),
as opposed to the orthodox theory of creation,
which is creatio ex nihilo -- the notion that
God created the universe out of nothing.
Milton has God creating the universe out of God himself,
from the body of God. In this ex deo creation
scenario, there's no qualitative difference between the substance
comprising men and the substance comprising angels.
The difference is simply one of degree.
This has been brilliantly argued by the critic William
Kerrigan. It's a difference of degree
rather than a difference of kind: angels are simply lighter.
The corporeal substance that makes up their bodies is more
attenuated, it's more rarefied, than that in human beings.
We are all more condensed, we are "grosser" creatures,
to use one of Milton's favorite words here.
Our grosser bodies are more compacted, they're of a denser
consistency than the light and airy bodies of heavenly
angels.Except for this differentiation by the degree of
substantiality, human beings and angels are
qualitatively identical. We're made of the same stuff,
it's just a matter of how closely packed the stuff is.
Milton even treats us to a scene of Adam and Eve -- because
it's thinkable in such a monistic universe,
although it's wild -- of Adam and Eve actually eating with the
Archangel Raphael. I think this must have blown
Milton's contemporaries away, because from any orthodox
perspective this attribution of what Milton would call a "gross"
activity like eating to one of God's heavenly minions,
one of the angels, would have to be seen as -- if
it's not blasphemous, it's certainly indecorous.
But this is, of course, a poem that's
centered around an illicit act of eating;
and so Milton will turn the entire activity of eating into
the premise of an entire philosophy of the relation of
human creatures to their God.In that "all" of God,
all of God's creatures need to eat.
Angels and men can be seen to be equals.
This is essentially Raphael's logic.
Look at line 411 of Book Five. Raphael tells Adam,
this is page 312, that angels are a lot like
human beings: "they hear,
see, smell, touch, taste, / tasting concoct,
digest, assimilate." We're soon to learn that angels
also have sex because, as we know, spirits "can either
sex assume," or both. But we're about to find out
here something, I think, that's a little more
shocking even than the fact of angelic eroticism:
angels have digestive tracts in Milton's heaven,
and like human beings they have within their bodies some kind of
mechanism for the elimination of ingested substances -- the
elimination of substances that cannot be assimilated into the
body. Milton's angels actually
excrete. This is a remarkable feat of
literary daring, to be sure, but it's also a
magnificent feat of the human imagination on Milton's part.
This is what the narrator seems to be referring to when he
discusses Raphael's hunger. This is line 437:
"what redounds, transpires / through Spirits
with ease…" It's so easy to miss:
"what redounds, transpires / through Spirits
with ease…" What stays, what can't be
assimilated into the body, gets expelled easily.Milton
is so eager here -- now, we have to ask ourselves,
why is Milton doing this? He's so eager,
I'm convinced, to demonstrate the essential
metaphysical equivalence of human beings and angels that he
is quite prepared to ask us to imagine the unimaginable.
Angels are exceedingly regular, Milton is telling us.
"What redounds," that food which remains in excess in the
angel's body, "transpires / through Spirits
with ease." Of course, as we know,
Milton was acutely interested in his own gastrointestinal
tract, having blamed his blindness on
a digestive problem.But there's a lot more here than
merely a personal interest. Eating is so central to this
poem that it's actually something like a digestive
process of assimilation and excretion that would have
enabled the unfallen Adam and Eve to become angels eventually
themselves. Turn to line 493.
This is page 313. It was to be Adam and Eve's
good fortune to watch their own gross corporeal bodies slowly,
gradually shed their dense matter as they assumed the airy
lightness of angels. How will they attain this
extraordinary achievement, this wafting up to heaven?
They'll do it by eating. Look at line 493.
Raphael's explaining that as things are now,
in a pinch angels are capable of a nutritional kind of
condescension. They can eat the same food that
human beings eat when they don't have a choice.
Right now, Adam and Eve probably couldn't survive on
angelic nectar if that is all they had to live on,
probably, but Raphael adds: [T]ime may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improv'd by tract of time, and wing'd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell;
[and this is obviously the kicker:]
If ye be found obedient. Milton is going out of his way
to provide Adam and Eve with a motive for remaining obedient.
By a simple process of eating -- virtuous eating,
virtuous digestion, and the consequent activity of
the virtuous subliming, that's Milton's term,
of gross matter into spirit -- Adam and Eve will eventually,
gradually begin to ascend to the winged state of angelhood.
They will metabolize themselves into angels.
It's one of the most extreme visions and one of the most
beautiful visions, [laughs]
however cockamamie, of human progress ever
depicted, I think.Raphael's account of the superiority of
spiritual matter over gross matter is without question
another one of the poem's hierarchical visions,
but the amazing process of what we could think of as what would
have been the angelization of men and women does something
really quite alarming, I think, to the principle of
hierarchy as it's been presented so far.
The metaphysical hierarchy of the degree of material density,
which is the concern of Book Five, isn't fixed.
It's not static in Milton's universe.
This is a mobile society that Raphael is imagining.
The hierarchy here is flexible. It's much more flexible than
the gendered hierarchy was among human beings in Book Four.
If Adam and Eve manage not to fall, they will arrive,
we have to assume, equally at a state of angelic
perfection in a state in which gender differences simply don't
obtain because angels, as we know, "can either sex
assume," or both.There were a few other radical thinkers in
the seventeenth century who embraced a monistic vision of
the universe like Milton's. Almost invariably,
this monism had a kind of leftist, progressive,
and in some cases actually a communist energy to it.
I've written the name of one of Milton's contemporaries,
Gerrard Winstanley, who was maybe not England's
first communist but England's first important communist,
writing fifteen or so years before Paradise Lost.
The bodies of all men and women are for Winstanley -- as
later for Milton -- are equally infused with heavenly spirit and
heavenly soul. For Winstanley -- Milton
wouldn't permit himself to go quite this far -- this
physiological equality seemed to guarantee their political
equality. In adopting this doctrine of
monism that had been developed or worked out by much more
radical thinkers like Gerrard Winstanley,
Milton is really on some level consciously adopting a
philosophy of body and spirit that works to undo,
and maybe it works to undermine, that patriarchal
insistence on Adam's superiority over Eve.
On some level, some of the philosophy in Book
Five, I think, is working at some subterranean
stage to undermine or dismantle the Edenic,
the paradisal, hierarchy.So Adam and Eve
before the Fall are given the opportunity to reach their
heavenly destinations on their own.
Now just think how radical that is when you compare it to any
mainstream notion of the way Christianity works.
Adam and Eve, had they never fallen,
had they never sinned, would never have needed to rely
on a God or a Messiah to intervene -- an external
redeemer to move in and save them,
or even to reward them, for their virtue.
Their virtuous behavior would have been itself a reward.
We can think of them as having been in a position almost to
save themselves, and Milton is arriving at this
-- it's a wild and really daring alternative to the orthodox
Christian vision of redemption and salvation.I think it's
this orthodox notion of Christianity that Milton always
felt so uncomfortable with. Were it not for the Fall,
there would have been no need for the heavenly Father to
sacrifice the Son in order to save fallen humanity.
Human beings would [laughs] just waft up to the pearly
gates like helium balloons, lighter even than air,
and with no need for an external redeemer.
In some ways Milton is flirting with something -- and I think
the young adult book writer, Philip Pullman,
absolutely has put his finger on something important in
Milton, and he's a great leader and fan
of Milton's -- is flirting with something that we would
recognize as science fiction. It's a secular image of
salvation certainly, but it's a proto-scientific
image of salvation. Unfallen salvation is something
like a scientific process. It's the logical and inevitable
result of just a particular type of virtuous,
natural behavior.Milton arrives at a theology that does
something that a theology is never supposed to do:
it's a radical theology of bodily transformation that
essentially does away with God or does away with God as we know
him. Who needs God?
Adam and Eve will continue to eat.
They'll eat virtuously. They'll be good people.
They'll become angels, and eventually they will be
subsumed into that universal ball of spiritual matter at that
later point when God becomes "All in All."
That's that distant point in time where there will simply be
no ontological difference between man and woman,
between angel and man, or between us and
God.Raphael's philosophy of monism offers a truly radical
vision of an exaltation -- this prelapsarian notion of an
exaltation of Adam and Eve up to heaven.
They could have exalted themselves, and presumably we
all could have exalted ourselves simply by being good,
by doing it ourselves, but this daring vision of a
radical self-determination couldn't possibly be more
violently opposed to the version of exaltation that Raphael
explains to Adam and Eve elsewhere in Book Five.
This scene I know you remember, because it's so upsetting and
so unforgettable: on Adam's prompting,
Raphael goes on to describe the exaltation, the anointing,
of the Son of God. It's an event that comes as
close to anything as explaining the very first mystery of the
poem, or the central mystery of the
poem -- that being the cause, the origin, of Satan's fall.
You can refer here to your handy little chronology,
written by Alastair Fowler, of events in Paradise Lost.
The origin of Satan's fall is without question one of the
most crucial problems that we have when we confront this poem.
On some level, God's ways can't be justified
until the origin of man's Fall can be explained or understood,
and man's Fall can't be understood or explained or
justified until Satan's fall is explained.
To account for Satan's fall, Milton relies -- he makes
all this up and it's magnificent.
He's relying here on the text of the second Psalm,
a chapter of the Bible that he had himself translated into
English in 1653. Now the second Psalm imagines
the Messiah speaking. This is that verse:
"[T]he Lord to me hath said, Thou art my Son;
I have begotten thee this day." No one has ever known what to
do with that passage from the second Psalm.
The idea that the Messiah could actually remember the day that
God had begotten him had for centuries and millennia provided
biblical commentators with a paradox that really bordered on
the absurd. What could God have meant when
he said, "I have begotten thee this day"?Milton worries and
worries this problem of this begetting.
He does this throughout Paradise Lost and he does
it in a number of ways. He transforms this mysterious
declaration that he has lifted from the second Psalm into --
he's turned it into what is essentially the originary event
of the entire poem. As you can see from the
chronology of the poem that Fowler gives us,
the exaltation of Milton's Son of God (and Fowler unfortunately
calls him Christ) doesn't really function as a Christ.
Milton would never in a million years, certainly,
in Paradise Lost call this fellow Christ.
He doesn't call him Jesus either because the Son of God
isn't Jesus yet. He's preexistent but he's not a
Christ, I think, in part because Milton doesn't
want us to confuse or to construe this Son of God with
anything that we've learned from any of our Sunday school classes
or any exposure to traditional, orthodox, mainstream Christian
Protestant or Catholic thinking.This is the event
-- you'll remember how important first events are in Paradise
Lost -- this is the event that seems to have happened
first. What occurred in heaven before
this moment, the poem gives us no definitive clue of,
although Satan knows there is something important that
happened before this moment, and he makes an important
conjecture about it prior to this.
(We don't have time to look at this today, but you may want to
study for yourself Satan's own theory of a first Creation,
and that's the creation of the angels.) So God the Father
assembles all of the angels. This is page 316 in the
Hughes, Book Five, line 600.
God delivers at line 600 a pronouncement that is by any
standards absolutely shocking. Satan, like the other angels,
was a son of God but, unlike the other Son of God --
or the other sons of God -- Satan had been one of the first
archangels in heaven. The narrator suggests (this is
coming from the narrator) that Satan may have been the first
archangel in heaven, first both in God's favor and
also in his general preeminence over the other angels because
God liked him most, liked him best,
and also because he was simply better than all of the other
angels; and Milton continues his
meditation on the multiple meanings here of "first."Now
I'm going to read this passage to you,
and you tell me if you think Satan might have just a teensy
bit of a reason to be miffed at God's exaltation of another one
of his sons, or what we have to assume is
another one of his sons. This is God at line 600:
Hear all ye Angels, Progeny of Light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues,
Powers, Hear my Decree,
which unrevok't shall stand. This day I have begot whom I
declare My only Son,
and on this holy Hill Him have anointed,
whom ye now behold At my right hand;
your Head I him appoint; And by my Self have sworn to
him shall bow All knees in Heav'n,
and shall confess him Lord:Under his great
Vice-gerent Reign abide United as one individual Soul
For ever happy. What's the tone of voice?
I'm [laughs] going to interrupt myself for a
moment. How are we [laughs]
to imagine God pronouncing that word "happy" after what he's
just told us? Under his great
Vice-gerent Reign abide United as one individual Soule
For ever happy: him who disobeys Mee disobeyes,
breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness. This, of course,
is a vision of an exaltation almost diametrically opposed to
the exaltation of the unfallen Adam and Eve,
their wafting up. The Son of God,
the Messiah, doesn't seem to have exalted
himself. Along what has already been
established is the recognizable pattern of a kind of natural,
physiological ascent, and you can imagine Milton
could have pulled that off because he could pull off
anything. It's possible to imagine a
scenario whereby the Son had on some level eaten his way into
God's favor and achieved the status of Messiah through an
Adam and Eve-like virtuous metabolism,
floating up to the very top of God's throne before any of the
other angels. That's how damn good he was,
but that's not the story that we get.
According to the narrative we have, God the Father seems quite
simply to have decided arbitrarily to appoint one of
the angels over all of the others.
Why has he done this? God does mention something
about the Son's merit. Well, he will mention something
about the Son's merit later in another scene of exaltation,
but it's one that's already been narrated and that's the
scene that we've already read in Book Three.As for this
moment right now, the motives for this
declaration seem perfectly inexplicable and absolutely
inscrutable, and it also seems clear that
this inscrutability is the point of the Father's declaration.
As William Empson writes convincingly and brilliantly,
although mischievously, in a wonderful book called
Milton's God, the Father's declaration
sounds like a challenge, like it's intended to be taken
as a challenge. By saying, "On this day I have
begot the Messiah," God seems almost to be suggesting that --
I don't know, that he's just created this guy
out of whole cloth for this very occasion, just made him and
raised this nobody to the rank of favorite.
It's possible that God has just bequeathed all of his power to
someone who hasn't even been around, someone who hasn't spent
eternity paying his dues. What could God have been
thinking? The Father knows this is an
extraordinary thing to be declaring, and so he tries to
soften the blow, I guess, this blow of this show
of favoritism by inviting the other angels to abide "under his
great Vice-gerent Reign… / united as one individual Soul
/ for ever happy." By "individual" the Father
means "indivisible here." I'm convinced that the word
"individual," which only appears twice in Paradise Lost,
is one of the poem's most important words;
but it has its original meaning, its etymological
meaning, which simply means "can't be divided."On some
level, the Father seems to be making a
stab at Milton's own monistic vision of egalitarianism.
The angels will all be united as one individual soul,
but the Father will only invoke this harmonious,
indivisible union -- when? After he's placed the Son of
God at the head of the other angels.
We're left to wonder just how we're supposed to reconcile this
image of an indivisible egalitarianism with the
competing image of an unyielding,
rigorously enforced angelic hierarchy.
You can recognize in this scene the opposition of
irreconcilables that we've already encountered,
the ones that had characterized the power relations in Milton's
Eden. Milton charges this scene in
heaven with its power, I think, by juxtaposing just
those two forces that he was continually attempting to unite
in Book Four. He yokes together the
principles of freedom and equality, on the one hand,
and the opposing principle of hierarchical order,
on the other hand.Think how the politics in heaven here
parallel the political dynamic that we've already been exposed
to, that we've already seen
operative on earth. In Book Four at that beautiful
originary moment at the pool side, Eve had -- I think quite
like Satan -- Eve had imagined herself great in favor and
preeminence. She's shaken from this
assumption of power and of absolute self-sufficiency when
she's suddenly told that there's another creature,
Adam, who has been appointed her head.
Just as God does with Satan, Adam tries to soften the blow
[laughs] of this arbitrary declaration
of hierarchical supremacy by claiming to be united
indivisibly to Eve, so Adam declares to Eve -- he
seizes her hand, she yields, and he declares to
her that he will have her by his side "henceforth an individual
solace dear..."Milton's clearly doing something here in
these two scenes with these noisy protestations of
indivisibility. He invokes the beautiful notion
of the interconnectedness of all of God's creatures that's
implicit in this monistic vision of the first matter,
but he only employs this beautiful image of a monistic
unity when he's placing an absolute divide between a
superior creature and an inferior one,
between a greater and a lesser being.
On some level, and it's very troubling,
monistic indivisibility is always invoked at the most
divisive moments in the poem. We can think of these as the
crisis moments in Paradise Lost.
At these critical moments of the arbitrary subjection of one
party over the other, whether it's Adam over Eve or
the Son of God over Satan and the other angels,
you can see the emergence of another meaning,
the modern meaning of that word "individual":
"individual" as a noun rather than "individual" as an
adjective. Dictionaries and historians of
the English language claim that the modern meaning of the word
"individual," a noun referring to a person
who is self-sufficient, autonomous, independent,
a being -- that this noun doesn't appear in England until
later in the seventeenth century;
but I think that it's precisely at these crisis moments in
Paradise Lost that Milton uses the original,
the traditional sense of "individual," an adjective
meaning "indivisible," only to begin pushing that word and
forcing it into something like its modern sense of
"individual," the modern, essentially liberal
idea of a human being as an absolutely isolate,
self-determining, fundamentally unaffiliated
person.Here at the scene of the Son's exaltation Milton -- I
don't know. For a lot of readers,
this is really a repellant scene.
It's a scene of a tyrannical and arbitrary ordering of a
society. Milton does this only to
display a little window, I think, onto a totally
different kind of society. You can see in this word
"individual" a glimpse into the world of what we can think of as
modernity. Paradise Lost is just on
the cusp of a liberal worldview, and the poem provides us a
glimpse of the liberal world of equal individuals,
a world of rational self-determination and
self-exaltation rather than the arbitrary subjection of one
class of creatures over another class.So it's one thing for
Satan to witness this seemingly arbitrary exaltation of the Son.
This arouses in him, as you can imagine,
feelings of injustice that, of course,
famously leave him to coax a third of all of the other angels
in a rebellion against God. That was bad enough,
but it's an entirely different matter, I think,
when Satan learns -- I don't know if "learns" is the right
verb -- when Satan hears in his discussion with Abdiel that God
created everything including the angels themselves by means of
the agency of the Son, through the Son.
For Satan this is a mind-blowing revelation,
and it's hard to miss as so surprising because we take this
as just orthodoxy that any right-thinking Christian might
accept. Look at page 322.
This is line 835 of Book Five. When Abdiel tells Satan,
"Why are you so upset, Satan?
Of course, he would exalt the Son.
It was the Son through whom we were all created" -- this notion
just pushes Satan further than anything pushes him.
This new revelation pushes him into making one of the greatest
formulations of the modern -- an outrageous one,
but it's central to the modern principle of
individualism.Let me give you a little background.
Abdiel has traveled with Satan and the other disloyal angels,
the rebel angels, to the northern quarter of
heaven; but Abdiel, like Milton himself
during the English Revolution -- and Abdiel was in some way
Milton's self-portrait -- Abdiel was willing to distance himself
from the mob sensibility of the rebels.
He stands up to Satan with the pious rage, the zeal,
that Milton always fancied himself capable of.
So Abdiel asks Satan, and this is at the top of page
322, how he can dare to question God's justice in exalting the
Son over the other angels. Abdiel tells Satan it was the
Son, by whom As by his Word,
the mighty Father made All things, ev'n thee,
and all the Spirits of Heav'n By him created in thir bright
degrees… Abdiel tells Satan that if it
weren't for the Son of God, Satan would never have been
created. It's Satan- [laughs]
who certainly seems to be shocked here,
and it's his response to Abdiel's claim that is,
I think, one of the most stunning, one of the most
outrageous moments in Paradise Lost.
Line 852. Satan is aghast that we were:
[F]orm'd then sayest thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferr'd
From Father to his Son? strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt:
who saw When this creation was?
remember'st thou Thy making, while the Maker
gave thee being? We know no time when we were
not as now; Know none before us,
self-begot, self-rais'd By our own quick'ning power,
when fatal course Had circl'd his full Orb,
the birth mature Of this our native Heav'n,
Ethereal Sons. Now, nearly everyone agrees
that -- all Milton critics agree that this claim for angelic
self-creation is in one way or the other crucial to our
understanding of the fall of the rebel angels and Satan's
justification of the rebellion. This claim of self-creation
obviously prepares Satan for that pronouncement that he will
make later in hell but which comes at the beginning of the
poem, that claim for the absolute
priority of the mind: the mind is its own place and
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.Now Abdiel
surely is right to insist that not only were the -- we have to
give it to Abdiel that he's on to something,
that the angels were created and not only that,
they were created in all likelihood through the agency of
the Son; but even though Abdiel's right,
Satan's theory of angelic origin isn't easily dismissible.
It's not as easily dismissible as it is by C.S.
Lewis in the little quotation at the bottom of the handout.
I always try to make a little plug for the validity of at
least a little of a part of Satan's claim.
I want to do this because on some level, I think Satan's
outrageous argument here is one of the greatest things that
anybody gets to say in Paradise Lost,
because if we're going to understand the origin of
Satan's fall, we have to understand something
about the origin of Satan himself.You have the
chronology on the handout. It's right to place the
exaltation of the Son as the first event officially described
in Paradise Lost, but there's of course
an event that happened before that which Milton's narrative
very carefully never describes, and that's the creation of the
angels. So we get Satan's theory of the
creation of the angels and Abdiel, as we would expect,
takes great offense, but it's important -- and
Abdiel's right and Satan's wrong -- but it's important to
determine exactly what is wrong about Satan's theology here and
how it would counter Milton's. Satan's obviously wrong to
ascribe the creation of the angels to something like a
random occurrence of fate when Satan says,
"when fatal course / had circl'd his full Orb."
Milton's explained a number of times in the poem that there's
no such thing as a power called "fate,"
so that's easily dismissible.But it's not
absolutely clear to me that Satan is wrong to claim that the
angels are "self-rais'd / by their own quick'ning power."
I think on some level this has to be seen as true,
at least according to what we know of the dynamic processes in
Milton's account of the monistic Creation.
God has impregnated matter with spirit, and after this initial
act of impregnation he seems able to allow this spiritualized
matter pretty much to organize itself on its own into all these
beautiful and varied forms of creation.
If we're not completely shocked to hear Satan's claim for having
raised himself by his own quickening power,
at least upon a rereading of Paradise Lost that might
be because it looks an awful lot like the theory of creation that
we get in Book Seven. It also sounds like a moment in
Book Three that we've already encountered: when the angel
Uriel -- the angel that Milton credits for having the best
eyesight in heaven, rather remarkably -- when Uriel
gives us his eyewitness account of the Creation,
it sounds a little bit like Satan's.Satan's argument
that the angels are self-raised has something,
I think, like a foundation even in Book Five itself.
It begins to resemble that condition of absolute
self-determination that Raphael had promised to Adam and Eve if
they remained obedient. If Adam and Eve will only
remain sinless, they'll be able to raise
themselves to that ethereal state of angelic status.
This is a world in which individuals -- rational,
self-determining individuals -- determine their own status
rather than accept one that has been arbitrarily imposed upon
them. This is an egalitarian world
that Milton is introducing us to, and I think that in moments
such as these, we see Milton laboring to
arrive at a theory of matter and a theory of creation that can
support something like a poetics;
a poetics but also a philosophy, a political
philosophy of egalitarianism. To claim that matter can move
itself to organize itself into stars and into angels,
which is what Uriel will claim happens, is essentially to lay
the philosophical foundation for a political philosophy that's
not authoritarian by any stretch.
It's not even hierarchical: it's egalitarian.
This is a physics, a theological physics that can
bolster the claims of a politics.
It's a philosophy that can imagine human beings as being
equally capable of organizing themselves and creating their
own sense of order without the meddlesome intervention of an
arbitrary God.Now, many of my colleagues in the
Milton community dismiss the possibility that there could be
anything even remotely like something valid in Satan's
wonderful rejoinder to Abdiel. They nearly always overlook the
Creation account that we get from Uriel in Book Three,
which I think supports on some level part of Satan's claim.
They're also eager to dismiss Eve's feelings of injustice at
her inferior status. They dismiss it as just another
one of Milton's unquestioning acts of misogyny -- but I don't
think it's unquestioning at all. All three of these examples for
me demonstrate Milton's willingness to question nearly
every form of religious and social and political orthodoxy.
Milton is continually putting the official doctrines of even
his own poem on trial. He's continually pitting the
narrator's own celebration of hierarchy -- Milton's own
celebration of hierarchy -- against a more subversive and a
more questioning philosophy of egalitarianism.Milton's
narrator -- and Milton is with him to some extent -- comes down
most firmly on the side of a divinely established hierarchy,
but this exquisitely textured, richly textured poem can be
distinguished, and in fact I think it has to
be distinguished, from the views of the narrator.
On some incredibly important level that's not on the level of
what the narrator tells us, the poem is itself insistently
egalitarian, and I mean that in a special sense:
it's egalitarian in the sense that it's a poem rather than a
dogmatic treatise or a work of political philosophy.
As a poem, Paradise Lost places all of its divergent
theories and all of its competing ideologies and visions
of the way the world works -- places them all side by side on
something like a level playing field,
the playing field of the poetic line.
The poem connects these competing ideas with nothing
more leading than that most liberal of all conjunctions,
or. This poem makes the reader the
equal of the poet because either this is the case or that is the
case, and Milton is always telling us
to decide ourselves. The poem lays down -- and I'll
conclude here -- a range of ideological possibilities,
and it does that from its opening line to its closing
line; and then it permits the reader,
or maybe I should say it forces the reader, to choose among
these possibilities.Okay. We're on a roll,
this is our big week: Books Seven and Eight for next
time.
