Milton's Satan by Professor Paul Stevens

the people are very engaging and to have passion and who are entertaining but I also think that there's a poetic student I guess I'm looking for people who are going to be passionate about sharing their passion so the power of his imagination he will offer us revelation the revelation that he offers us is an imaginative reworking of Scripture ok this is the point this is why I've been emphasizing that term Tran sumption Milton reads scripture actively he reads it understands it reinterpreted and reshapes it ok within the analogy of faith and that's what he's doing I was really quite moved by the eloquence of of the lecturer but then I kind of felt it sometimes was too subdued as if there were points where he had me in the palm of his hand but he wasn't taking advantage of that and I thought that was most demonstrated by the quote that I almost wished he had the quote memorized because he had me and then lost me when he went back to the podium but then had me again halfway through the quote and that his voice was so commanding that if he just kept moving if he had the book in his hand II of him to read that quote it would have been a longer than I wanted that he seems to me to to be very shy man it obviously it's silly watching a lecture to come to a conclusion like this but he seems to me to be very moral person very decent the way that he said to the class when someone started to giggle yes I know it's obscene there was something very honest about that yeah I thought it was really he was very passionate there's kind of this sad passion that almost made you tearful it moved you in that kind of a way I felt he really conveyed sort of the divinity of the work and there's a sense of power you know he's talking about scripture but you also get that sense of spiritual power that he's being spiritually moved and I felt spiritually moved you know I have to say I have a bias towards that kind of historical context but I really felt you know he I really felt totally taken in how long we known each other since 76 what is that 33 years or something I remember when we stood on that spot in Victoria College right outside the door to Amanda you're willing your bicycle you were wearing a babushka you had a grey Mackintosh on and my walk and you had your wallaby shoes on it was a very sexist world and I had to make sure that no one ever ever ever looked at me as a woman and I thought oh she looks nice and I didn't have anything other than that I just thought you look like though she looks nice and you said yes I'm Lynn Magnussen and I with my boy and you live with my boyfriend and it was like so so keep your hands off and you don't get any keep anything than ideas and yeah and I felt you know I didn't have any ideas then the ideas came later I haven't lived permanently in Cardiff since I was 18 or 19 I don't think I've ever left Cardiff I think the Cardiff is you know it's just just a powerful shape in my mind we're very much a working-class family it was a large extended Catholic family which was obsessed with getting on it had a very strong sense that the ways in which you could improve your condition was through hard work and education the radio always seemed to be on there would be all kinds of wonderful things that my mother loved which were the science fiction things like journey into space you would get things like Sherlock Holmes and at the you know in the next program on or bit later would be one of Plato's dialogues but the actors were the same so there was a way in which Plato's dialogues were kind of you know assimilated back into popular culture the radio was was both a powerful communal thing but it was both it was also an amazingly effective educational thing it certainly gave working-class people you know like my family a sense that they were not to be limited by class my father left school when he was twelve and but my father read a lot and there's no question that he had an extraordinarily acute mind and was passionate about that we should do well you know my mother loved the idea of imagination she constantly talked about imagination and her argument against my father was that he was not imaginative enough my father I fought all our lives and I think the problem was that we were simply too much alike which is a familiar issue he spent the war in that the local regiment the Welsh regiment in the in the Western Desert in Italy in Austria but he didn't particularly like the war but he loved the regiment and the community of the regiment and so it was family parish and regiment we went to to st. Davids Cathedral you know on the on the eastern coast because this is a Cathedral that's built in a kind of about in a dip it's right near the ocean but you can't see it from the ocean so that the Vikings they wouldn't see it when they went past so that brought together our two Heritage's my Viking background and his Welsh background I was ready to go and rape and pillage that's true you've got it much more meek and mild Iike the meek and mild sure when I finished a level instead of going to university I enlisted in the army there was a way in which joining the army was was the most obvious way in which you you become something you acquire an identity which is of value when I failed to get a commission after six months I had the option of leaving the army or staying for another two and a half years and I was so infatuated with the army just loved it so much that in despite of all those kinds of things I decided to stay as a soldier I commanded a rifle platoon in in Belfast for seven months and we did our best to do good by the people that we were there trying to protect the Catholics and the Protestants you're always so proud of having come come out of the army and you were always trying to tell people about this and thinking that reaction of all the graduate students would be would be oh that's amazing and there's always this guy wanted to be a soldier as a captain in the army and nobody could tell me anything I knew all there was to know about the whole world and the whole of Western history was leading up to the point where Northrop Frye and I would come together and what actually happened was nothing like that he basically taught his books and almost word-for-word he would lecture and then ask a question and then he pick out one and they'd say something and he'd say yes and it was the ultimate affirmation they'd largely done courses with Frye before or they'd read the books very carefully or whatever so they had an idea of what the you know the moves would be where I thought was gonna pay off was when Frye was teaching the Four Quartets in my mind he was clearly something to do with Kipling short story they he started asking about this passage and just before it there's an image of two figures or figures working on the dead leaves and he said who are these and I thought well that's close enough so before anybody get I got my hand up and I said well surely you know professor fry this has to do with Kipling short story they and I sort of this is great you know and then he just turned to me and he said looked at me in an incredibly cold glassy way he could and said he said the mechanical identification of illusions is not really gonna get us very far is it and at that moment this great black hole opened in front me and I felling from what height fallen so much the stronger proved he with his thunder till then who knew the force of those dire arms I first read Milton the first two books of Paradise Lost when I was about 15 and I could not believe how easy it was to read and what a great story it was and I just got completely wrapped up in the thing this was a story about this wonderful figure I mean you know Satan who was in rebellion at that point reading that poem was not really that much different to watching some great epic movie or something and I never got past it in a way no student reads Paradise Lost without being affected by Satan in trying to solve that problem of why they like Satan you can actually open up the continuity between the 17th century in our culture in such a way that illuminates both you have a background in the army right it is interesting it's unusual early atypical yeah at least for a professor I honestly don't know I mean I got my stereotypical answers to you know the army and everything but I win the end of the day I don't know why I was in the army I what I do know is that is that a lot of the experiences were so important powerful overwhelming that I would not give them up for anything and I would not be Who I am now in my feeling was that with teaching there was a very easy transference from the way that he behaved but to the way that you behave with classes one of the things that you realize is that you're not in control that it really is about the students is the quality of that class as the students last year was the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth in 1608 what it seems to me to have happened over the course of that year is that people became aware that Milton has little or no popular audience okay what I mean by that is outside of school or university people don't really read that much Milton they don't know that much about Milton and you know if you think about it there's no movie called Milton in love Al Pacino you know Al Pacino and Gwyneth Paltrow and are busting you know to play the blind poet and his wife the scent of Mary Powell what this produced what this produced was enormous among Milton is an enormous Shakespeare envy because the guy who is does have the popular audience obviously is Shakespeare and what this led to was all kinds of of increasingly wild claims for Milton or about Milton one book a harvard book took it took the bull by the horns and said look the point is Milton is better than Shakespeare and in the whole that book he actually never said anything about Shakespeare just went on and on about Milton the other move is to say things like Milton is the father of the American Revolution without without Milton had not Jefferson read Areopagitica there would be no declaration of independence there would be no Barack Obama and that guy remember that wonderful hat that Aretha Franklin was wearing we would not have got that okay the third move is that Milton is the father of science fiction and had it not been for Milton we would not have got the novels of CS Lewis not the most compelling argument it seems to me all right what I want to suggest is that what everybody remembers about Milton is Satan it's almost like it's Satan stupid what Satan does what Milton's Satan does it leads us to the heart of Milton's relevance and what I want to do in the next 45 minutes is to work through the phases of the historic phases of reception of Milton's say Satan since the publication to the present day and there seem to me to be three major phases the first one is the one that develops over the 18th century which is the romantic Satan the second one which develops over the 20th century through the efforts of scholars and academics is what we might call for the sake of argument the academic Satan and the third one is what I think or what I want to call Milton Satan the point of our Paradise Lost as its name suggests is that it's about loss it's about suffering it's about pain it's about the things that we most most fear in life and it's attempted and it's an attempt to come to some kind of understanding of what those things are the first question it represents it sets itself up as a mystery it's a mystery story how did it happen how did it happen that we have to live like this how did it happen that we were expelled from the garden from the locusts of desire how did it happen the death was introduced into the world how did it happen that we inherit a universe of death the great synecdoche in our culture for that universe of death is Auschwitz and so it doesn't seem to me it's not irrelevant to recall that because there's a way in which that's what Milton is talking about is the capacity for human beings for human life to reproduce this universe of death Milton's immediate answer being a good Christian is simply biblical who got us into this situation and he says straight away he it was the infernal serpent Satan and okay the problem is that Milton's Satan doesn't seem to be terribly biblical as soon as you start reading it becomes immediately apparent that there's something odd with this Satan that was the reaction of people as soon as the poem was published Dryden who had worked with Milton as a young man in Cromwell's government said straight away this cuts us all out we got no chance none of us can produce a poem like this the thing that worried people from the beginning or disturbed them was the representation of Satan so another one of milton's earlier colleagues from the cromwell government andrew marvell doubted the intent of the poem he says is in his own poem on Paradise Lost and he said he wondered whether in the representation of Satan Milton would ruin the sacred truths another correspondent another reader of the poem somebody that Marie Rupp there is familiar with john beal this is a royalist country parson and he writes to john evylyn about the poem and this is only a few years after milton's death he says that milton's the only decent poem poet that the Puritans the fanatics ever produced he said but the problem is even he mistakes the main point of poetry to put such long and horrible blasphemies in the mouth of Satan as no man that fears God can endure to read it or survive it without a poisonous impression Satan was clearly a problem and you can understand why they felt he was a problem you know most of you are familiar with those those those the the speeches in book 1 as soon as mill as soon as Satan starts speaking in book 1 you know you've got a problem on your hand there's nothing like this if this is certainly not biblical Milton's this is the first speech that Satan makes you're not for those nor what the potent victor in his rage can else inflict do I repent or change though changed in outward lustre that fixed mind and high disdain from sense of injured merit that with the mightiest raised me to contend and to the fierce contention brought along innumerable force of spirits armed that Durst dislike his reign and me preferring his utmost power with adverse power opposed in dubious battle on the plains of heav'n and shook his throne but though the field be lost all is not lost tusu and seek for grace bollocks to that you can imagine how that got to me reading that as a 15 year old schoolboy it's terrific the point about Satan is he's not simply indomitable he's also sympathetic and sensitive but Satan is not lacking in imagination or resourceful and he's a bit like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair in imagining a third way rather than a direct confrontation with heaven or sitting on our asses here in hell and building an empire what he imagines is a is a third way and that third way is a colonial what we're going to do is we're going to get out of here we're going to cross the ocean of chaos and we're going to colonize this new world a new world this which is at the moment inhabited by God's new indigenes these puny creatures called humankind and that's exactly what he does it's no accident that that colonial venture occurs to Satan Milton was obsessed with colonial event adventures he came from a family that was heavily involved in those things he actually planned to produce an edition of purchase his pilgrims which is a collection of great voyages of discovery the impact of this reading of Satan became the orthodoxy over the course of the 18th century and by the time we get to what's usually called the Romantic period you cannot move for versions of Satan he appears everywhere you cannot pick up a novel where there isn't somebody who sounds like Milton's Satan if you think of fenimore cooper's last of the mohicans it's mag WA if you if you think of a the one that most interests me or the one that I found compelling just because it was on the TV recently was was weathering Heights and Satan there appears as Heathcliff and it's it's a dead ringer you know it's straight away you even told it because Heathcliff in the movie is carrying a copy of Ivanhoe every time you see him he's got a copy of Ivanhoe and what he would read in Ivanhoe is that there's another satanic character there brian de bois-guilbert okay all these guys are untamed unbounded relentless the problem with the movie with Heathcliff is he looks too much like Fabio that he has a he has a really thick set hair and he's warming across the Moors instantly say ooh Kathy I do love thee okay I'm I'm being obviously I'm being facetious but but there is something substantial in this and it's quite extraordinary how that rebellious attractive figure of Satan permeates our culture and you sometimes you I mean I was preoccupied was watching the other day something about the artist formerly called Prince and you could see that this was this was a kind of left--oh or this guy's persona was was some kind of gesture towards the Byronic hero the Byronic hero of course is is Byron's version of Milton's Satan the locust class occurs for the classical place where you can identify what people the romantics ate this is a lots of places but this is a quotation from Haslett and this is about 1812 hazlit was really bowled over by Milton Satan and this is what he says Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem and the execution is as perfect as the design is lofting the deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust Milton was to open an antagonist to support his argument by the bitrex of a hump and cloven foot he relied on the Justice of his cause and did not scruple to give the devil his due it's when you read that that you wonder if Haslett ever read the poem the most obvious thing is when he says that Satan has no physical deformity the opening image of Satan is not of that heroic figure the art angel with the scars but the opening image of Satan is of the chaos monster he's this great monstrous Leviathan lying on the burning lake when you enter the poem Satan is drawn directly from the Book of Apocalypse the chaos monster that's the Beast that's the 666 guy okay the Beast is the consolidated image of evil it's what in Scripture in Christian scripture it's the its this is what it is at the end now we see evil in one place consolidated and that's what happens at the beginning of book 1 by the time you get to the end of book when Satan is completely changed and you say well why did this happen well it happened you're being told about it all the way through you've been warned this that image of Satan as a Leviathan there's that odd simile of this is like a whale which our Norwegian sailors land on thinking it's an island what appears to be the truth is not the truth it's quite clear that that's the message even more powerfully towards the end of book 1 there's a wonderful image of pandemonium's being built and the rebel angels are trying to get into pandemonium they've been likened to bees at this stage so they're imagined as as insects but the door is too narrow they can't get in there all squeezing and shuffling then all of a sudden whoop the door opens and they all go in or sorry they shrink even further and they all get in but once they're inside they expand to what they really are the tell-tale words are that these are the kinds of images that a belated peasant at night beyond the Indian mount might see or dreams he sees the illusion is to a midsummer night's dream and midsummer night's dream is being invoked because what you're being told has is happening is that it's all illusory that all these grand speeches the grand venture everything is a fantasy what has happened when you enter book 1 when you enter hell is you enter the mind of Satan you enter the phantasmagoric mind of Satan you're not seeing things as they really are okay this seems this seems now obvious and and it's pretty well incontrovertible there's not many people that would that would argue with that it's not until the end of the 19th century that Paradise Lost began to be studied programmatically in universities and it's really over the course of the 20th century that the scholars will let loose on it and the achievement of the scholars is to have dismantled or qualified or radically changed our perception of the Romantic Satan and there are all kinds of ways in which you can point to how this happened but the key players are in the sort of pantheon of great Milton scholars people from CS Lewis to most importantly in terms of this dismantling process or the guy that culminates the process is Stanley fish with his 1967 book surprised by sin which is a great book as is as is Louis's book there and what you begin to see is how what happens when these guys look extremely closely at the poem what you begin to see first of all is unlike hazlit's assertion the poem is not about satan at all in fact there are three epic poems each one nestled inside the other the first one begins with Satan and it begins with a council which sets a course of action and that course of action is the great colonial venture that Satan undertakes to conquer the world and seduce mankind and bring death and sin into the world and it comes to fruition in book nine when he actually does seduce Adam and Eve and precipitates the fall but the real epic the second epic begins in book three and it's the divine council in book three which also precipitates the course of action and the heroic heroic figure there is the son of God in relation to human kind and that heroic action will culminate in books 10 through 12 and it's and those and there what you see is the regeneration of Adam and Eve the possibilities for redemption the third epic is the one that is nestled in the middle and it's the means by which God actually begins the process of regeneration it's meant to defend Adam and Eve initially from say and that's the angelic epic that's a Rafiel story of the war in heaven that ultimately leads to the cook to creation in a way that middle story epitomizes the relationship between the Satanic epic and the divine epic what fish realized and it wasn't just fish fish articulated it so that it became the new orthodoxy but people had figured out this people like Joseph summers and Anne ferry had figured out this sometime before and so they anticipate him is that what is happening with Satan and this is the way you would have been probably all taught it in school was that what is happening with Satan is not that he's a hero but it but that Milton is seducing you Milton is testing you it's an entangling it's a teaching by entangling what I mean by that is is that you are being put on your mettle for those first two books it's you any reader is being has to work through this stuff and think through this stuff the essential ground tone or ground note for Milton's thinking is the activity of reading reading is an active critical process and it's a divine process it's in the act of reading that we receive God's grace and this comes out of his Protestantism it comes out of the doctoring of so Sola scriptura scripture alone what he's doing with Paradise Lost is creating a poem in which you have to read in the same way that you read scripture this is this is not just fish's argument but but but the the academic orthodoxy of how you're supposed to read this thing the great proof text for that is in Areopagitica and this is where Milton actually explains what he what he thinks or how he imagines what we have to do and the first point is this good and evil we know in the world in the field of this world grew up together almost inseparably and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge evil and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned that those confused seeds which were imposed upon psyche as an incessant labor to Cal out and sort asunder were not more intermixed it was from out of the rind of one Apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world and perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil that is to say of knowing good by evil as therefore the state of man is what wisdom can there be to choose what countenance to forbear without the knowledge of evil that passage and what Milton goes on to say is that that's why reading poetry reading Spencer is of more value than reading philosophers of reading Aquinas because you experience the problem you don't it's not simply an appeal to your reason to your understanding you actually have to go through it what Milton understands is that we have Milton is a humanist and a Protestant and what he understands is that we have two principal weapons at our disposal and the first one is our god-given reason and the second one is Revelation itself and as soon as you start thinking this through you begin to see how it might work on on his representation of Satan it means that when Satan says things like or Beelzebub say things like fearless we endangered heavens perpetual King you know he's talking a load of rubbish because you can't endanger something that is perpetual the whole of the rhetoric is run through like that but even more importantly the fundamental metaphor of which the poem uses to figure its truth of a subject in rebellion against a king you are required to go beyond the vehicle of the metaphor and understand it's 1010 a' the point is that there is a radical difference between a subject being in rebellion against a king and a creature being in rebellion against a creator or his creator or her creator the point is if you are rebelling against your creator you are rebelling against the source of your being you are rebelling against the your very power to rebel Abdiel actually explains this to Satan he mixed this clear to him at the end of book 5 he says this is what is this is what your rebellion means it's nonsense this is the point of CS Lewis's phrase when CS Lewis says when when Satan says in book for evil be thou my good what CS Lewis says is well that's rather like saying nonsense be thou my cents the thing is that the satanic position is illogical but the genius or cleverness of Milton is to also involve revelation or to root this in Revelation so that when Satan says evil be thou my good he's actually quoting scripture and if you know Scripture if you can hear the echoes then scripture guides you because this is because what he's doing is he's he's quoting Isaiah 5 and this is what Isaiah 5 says Satan says evil be thou my good and Isaiah 5 says 5:20 says woe unto them that call evil good and good evil that put darkness for light and light for darkness woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes that's the argument if you think of that first speech when Satan talks about shaking God's throne he never shook God's throne it's a fantasy and you know it's a fantasy because it's a quotation from Isaiah 14 this is the most famous passage on Satan Lucifer in Scripture how art thou fallen from heaven o Lucifer son of the morning how art thou cut down to the ground they that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee saying is this the man who made the earth to tremble that did shake kingdoms my point is that the echo the scriptural echo corrects the reading it's not only our reason but it's our reason in tandem with the book of Revelation so what you get is that if you if the the tag of the most famous way of talking about the romantic or the most famous articulation with the romantic Satan is that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it that's Blake what you might now say is that the devil of is of Milton's party without knowing it and that party is guards party that's the academic Milton and its formidable it's the orthodoxy Stanley fish articulated this wonderful argument not entirely in the way that I put it but basically this in 1967 and it's reigned supreme for 40 years and Stanley loves it and he will not give in and one of the great dramas of Milton Studies is to see Stanley defending this position against all comers it's quite heroic I mean it's it's almost job like in it sir you know and I mean I'm not bit I don't know I'm not being mean you know Stanley's formidable and if Stanley was here he he'd run rings around me but there's a problem and the problem is that the Milton that emerges from the academic account is somebody that you simply don't recognize in the pros there's masses of prose that he wrote masses of pamphlets and books and the Milton that you see there and the academic Milton that is controlling Paradise Lost they're just not the same people what you get with the academic Milton is this kind of Nowell figure who's completely in control of everything who's manipulating you and making you do things and kind of laughing when you screw up I think Satan's a good guy that's the first problem the second problem is that it tends to encourage a loss of focus on what exactly does evil mean I'm not sure exactly how to get into what now it seems to me is so we got the romantic Milton and the academic Milton and what I want to suggest is that there's sorry the the academic of the romantic Satan and the actor and the academic site and what I want to suggest is there's Milton's Satan and Milton's Satan is actually neither of these guys one way into it is to go back to the great synecdoche for evil in our century which is the Nazi persecution and and the culminating synecdoche of Auschwitz the the book that seems most helpful is Hannah Arendt's great analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the early 60s what is interesting about that analysis is not the banality of evil the banality of evil is the idea that Eichmann was not a monster he was not the chaos monster he was not the Beast of the apocalypse he was an ordinary man he was an ordinary man who got caught up in a vast bureaucratic machine a vast bureaucratic machine that just happened to be dedicated to the industrialized mass production slaughter of millions of people and there's something to that argument I said to some of you that the story that I can never get past with Eichmann is his insistence it's not in a rents book it's in the trial to his insistence that he had not been cruel when he put a hundred and twenty people into a railway carriage going to Auschwitz and he said that this carriage was designed to carry a hundred soldiers and those soldiers would all be carrying their equipment so the the Jews who were in this carriage didn't have any equipment so obviously you could put in another twenty he could not see he simply could not see that this was a problem it just seemed to him logical at this point what you can talk about instrumentalism and you can say that the instrumental ism of his occupation was blinding him but the thing that I'm most interested in is not so much the instrumental ISM more but is much more to do with the way that icon is locked into a particular narrative and the particular narrative is his life when he joined the Nazi Party when he joined the SS it suddenly had meaning because he joined this great national narrative and this is the way that that Arendt from a hundred life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into history as he understood it namely into a movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him already a failure in the eyes of his social class of his family and hence his own eyes as well could start from scratch and still make a career in all the course of the trial Eichmann will never step out of that story the story of Germany's struggle to realize its destiny it seems to me that this is exactly the same or much like Satan Satan has a number of grand stories but most importantly the grand story of his struggle with God and he will never really step outside it in but before he comes close to it in book four he does do some kind of self analysis but he returns to the story I'm going to continue to go on unlike either Eichmann or Satan Milton was capable of stepping outside his story and the evidence for that I want to suggest is the creation of his character called Satan that Satan is an auto critique Satan is Milton analyzing himself people say who's Milton's Satan oh it's Charles the first and the latest flurry which has been going for about 10 years is that it's Cromwell obviously it's Cromwell because Cromwell betrayed the revolution it may be both of these guys but more most importantly it's Milton it's Milton analyzing himself it's Milton admitting his culpability it's Milton admitting his failures and his failures were considerable Milton was wedded to a great national narrative in exactly the same way that Eichmann was and exactly the same way that Satan is you cannot move for Milton talking about that narrative until 1660 and the King returns to power it's the idea and to use his phrase a new Rome in the West England will become a new Rome in the West it will be the locus of civility it will be the locus of freedom of conscience it's a great image and the images most powerfully articulated in Areopagitica he never gets it as powerfully as that again Milton in some ways knows what kind of dangers adherence to this particular narrative will produce the narrative instead of being liberating or enabling can become a subsystem it can become simply a self reflection that you're caught in it and you say well I can and Satan clearly went on to perpetrate or become the instruments of extraordinary atrocity this is irrelevant to Milton well I would suggest it's actually not Milton was no Eichmann and he's certainly not Satan but there are there is certainly blood on Milton's hands and there are a number of ways that you can demonstrate this the first way is the way that he advocated encouraged and advocated the English retribution in in Ireland in 1649 to fifty some of his articulations are extreme this is from iconoclast ease and this is just after he published this just after the massacre adroit er he didn't know about the massacre of Troy de but he knew about other atrocities in or excesses in Ireland and this is what he says a nation by just war and execution has the right to slay whole families of them who so barbarously had slain whole families before if somebody has slain your family you have the right to slay their family not the person culpable but the family did not all Israel do as much against the Benjamites for one right could rape committed by a few even more powerfully than this is his role in the execution of the King in the honor 23rd of February in 1642 Stephen Marshall made a sermon gave a sermon to Parliament and in that sermon the argument was for moral clarity which about to go to war against the king the argument is for moral clarity you're either for us against us and this is this is not a cheap shot against George Bush this is what he says he actually quotes that you are either for us or against us but more importantly he produces an analysis of star 137 and is devastating the farm that the psalmist is disturbing whichever way you run it but Marshalls analysis is even worse or is even more problematic 1:37 is one that you all know by the rivers of Babylon there we sat down yay we wept when we remembered Zion how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land if I forget the ol Israel let my right hand forget her cunning remember Oh Lord the children of Adam in the day of Jerusalem those who said raise it raise it even to the foundation thereof Oh daughter of Jerusalem sorry Oh daughter of Babylon who are to be destroyed happy shall he be that rewarded ly as thou has served us happy shall he be that taketh and dashes thy little ones against the stones Marshall takes this Psalm head-on he's talking to the assembled houses of parliment the speech was an enormous hit and it was republished over and over again Marshall is a friend of Milton and this is what Marshall says what soldier's heart would not start at this not only when he is in when he is hot in blood to cut down armed enemies in the field but afterward deliberately to come into a subdued City and take the little ones upon Spears point to take them by the heels and beat out their brains against the walls what in humanity and barbarous Ness would this be thought yet if this work be to revenge God's church against Babylon he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stones Milton's response to that the great cry that Marshall put up in this speech was no cold neuters no neutrals you're either for it or against it Milton repeats it in his apology of April 1642 he repeats that call no cold neuters but the problem gets complicated because seven years later there faced both Marshall and Milton are faced with the moral decision to sweater the support or not support the execution of the King the morality of the Kings execution is dubious to say the least but Parliament or really Parliament dominated by the army led by Cromwell decided that the King had to go they had an enormous difficulty trying to figure out a way in which they could make charges stick but they decided and the king was executed Marshall backed off Marshall and other Presbyterian ministers produced a pamphlet saying this was wrong Milton produced a pamphlet saying was right but the pamphlet is extraordinary because in the pamphlet he represents Marshall and the Presbyterians as the weird sisters in Macbeth they juggled they eluate us they led us on no cold Newt as they said and we followed and now they back off and in what seems to me to be the most devastating para praxis or Freudian slip Milton likens himself to Macbeth and he actually says we're so far forward in blood now it's easier to go on as to come back he doesn't literally say those words but the allusions are so powerfully there that it's unmistakable the Milton in the tenure of kings and magistrates is an intensely conflicted guilt ridden person myself am he'll the idea that he's somebody who is utterly removed from Satan is untenable it then comes as it should then come as no surprise that the model for Satan or one of the principal models for Satan is Macbeth something that Helen Gardner pointed out years ago is that Satan is not biblical he comes out of the Renaissance drama he comes out of Faustus and he cargo and Macbeth it doesn't simply have to be Macbeth but what I'm trying to do is suggest that there's a connection there what I'm trying to suggest then is that Milton's Satan is certainly about Milton it's that Milton was of the devil's party he knew it and he despised himself for it and in the the sanity of Milton it seems to me the greatness of Milton is understanding this and representing it and pulling it out so that we can see it there are innumerable other examples of Milton's devastating ability to step outside the grand narrative unlike Eichmann or Satan himself and that it seems to me is his Redemption the Satan does not the virtues that the remember people who all of us that read Satan and see this great figure the virtues of Satan are not lost what it seems to me that what seems to me to happen is that in Paradise Lost they are recreated and they survive they are alive and well in a self-knowing version of Satan a self-knowing version of the figure who is willing to challenge authority and not take things are on are on writ and that's the Sun and the passage that I return to over and over again the thing that seems to me to be Milton at is Milton at his finest moment is when in book three the Sun challenges God the Father he does not accept that horrible teacherly God the father's account of justice and he says there has the son says there has to be mercy and you can hear Satan in this for should man finally be lost should man thy creature late so loved the youngest son Falls circumvented the spy fraud so should thy goodness and thy greatness both be questioned and blaspheme without defense the sons no wanker what I'm trying to suggest them is that there's a way in which Milton's Satan takes us once you begin to read Milton's Satan in terms of the things that actually happen in Milton's life it takes on a new force it doesn't blank it out either the Romantics Satan or the academic Satan but it's a new dimension and that new dimension leads to all kinds of other places but that's for another day thanks very much

Channel: Department of English University of Toronto

Views: 35,428

Keywords: Big Ideas (TV Program), Paul Stevens, Milton's Satan

Id: N1Dr9JnBGJk

Length: 55min 25sec (3325 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2013