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Reserve Text, from Milton Studies 23 (1987) CITIZEN ANGELS: CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE ABSTRACT INDIVIDUAL IN Paradise Lost Carrol B. Cox War, or at least civil war, implies a social order of sufficient internal complexity to generate those antagonisms which only force can resolve. So much is tautological. But heaven being (as Raphael informs Adam) more like to earth than we might assume, we would do well to explore not only the theological or moral meaning of Milton's angelic actors but to ask what earthly serial relationships are the shadow of those which we see angels enact in heaven. Two episodes in particular offer windows onto those relations--that is, exhibit angels acting outside the presence of divine or human agents. The first is that of Uriel and the "cherub"; the second, Abdiel's challenge to Satan's rebellion. Milton's immediate concern in each of these episodes, of course. was hardly to elaborate a "heavenly sociology." But for that very reason they may exhibit Milton's spontaneous assumptions -- assumptions which would be more immediately grounded in his own tacit social experience rather than in any self-conscious theology. And what we find, I believe, is neither a monarchy nor a feudal hierarchy, but something much closer to Dickens's London or Austen's bourgeois gentry than to either Dante's heaven or Homer's Olympus. |
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A. S. P. Woodhouse flatly rejected the label "bourgeois" for Milton. The "bourgeois tradition" in literature, he argued, began with Defoe, while Milton "proudly takes his place in the humanistic, the predominantly aristorcratic, tradition of Sidney and Spenser."(1) If by "bourgeois" we mean not Eliot's "small house agent's clerk" but that class which, beginning with rioting artisans in twelfth-centujry France,(2) had by the end of the nineteenth century brought about a transformation in human relations without parallel since neolithic times--if that is the bourgeoisie, then what had Defoe to do, more than marginally, with the bourgeois tradition in literature? Rather than attending to life-styles or political principles, what we might first seek out are those works which created the forms of perceiving that made and make it possible for "bourgeois [166] man" and "bourgeois woman'" to imagine the conditions of their lives in capitalist society. |
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Although the explosive burst of commodity production in Classical Greece gave such foreshadowings of the modern hero as Aeschylus's Orestes, Sophocles's Oedipus, and Plato's Er, in Milton's epics we see the "abstract isolated human individual" for the first time fully separated from tribal ties or feudal hierarchy."(3) And directly or indirectly most critics of Milton honor this achievement, John Arthos, for example, seeing Dante as featuring the "immediacy of experience," and Milton as providing "the long view of the journey through yet undetermined tracts of time," suggests that "One of the great advantages of Milton's manner is that it largely frees the Christian view from the limited contexts of contemporary society and draws us instead to think of Adam and Eve as ourselves at any moment in history and at any place entering apon an unknown life."(4) "The individual" in abstraction from such a "limited context" of concrete social relations is an ideological illusion, but one grounded in and drawing historical reality from the actual conditions of capitalist society- and :he great task of modern literature has been to make imaginable this unreal reality which is both fundamental to experience in capitalist society ond wholly beyond the reach of human sense. |
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As Arthos notes,. Adam and Eve are separated from any historical context, any web of social relations, "entering upon an unknown life frorn without. Arthos presumably sees this as reflecting a basic reality, corresponding to the human rendition or the permanent (ahistorical) nature of man, rather than a powerful and necessary illusion grounded in historically determinate social relations. This latter assumption, however, would have the advantage of freeing the critic from either engaging in ideological quarrels with Milton or from attempting to defend Milton or any other poet for his moral or political profundity, as Barbara Lewalski, for example, does when, embroiled in the conflict over Milton's male supremacy, she finds it necessary to argue that the great poets "are gloriously and supremely right about the most essential things, presenting us with a vision of the human condition which astonishes by its profundity."(5) The greatness of Milton's epic should be more, not less, visible when its "ideas" (or "vision") are indeed dead--as unfortunately they are not yet. Paradise Lost does, in Lewalski's phrase, present a vision which can astonish by its "profundity," but the content of that vision is historically specific rather than generically human. In denying that a "Marxist" interpretation of Milton is possible, Woodhouse assumes that such an interpretation must be tied to a par- [167] ticular construal of the poem's meaning. A "Marxist" interpretation, he argued,
More recently critics (particularly Christopher Hill) have insisted on a closer and more overt connection than Woodhouse allows between Milton's fundamental concerns and his participation in revolutionary politics. But Woodhouse himself in this passage pointed to how Milton' experience could have prepared him to write the prototypical works of the capitalist era: "Education and his subsequent pursuits largely cancelled out the influernces of his social class." Precisely the lack of such a profoundly revolutionary experience would partly explain the ambiguous mixture of old and new elements in the consciousness of the great Elizabethan writers, for they did not live so fully the fundamental modern experience of being compelled to a consciously free choice of career. Since so profound a historical change as the rise of capitalism covers centuries and proceeds unevenly, with the new incorporating much of the old, to name any one author or period as founding the capitalist tradition in literature is absurd. Nevertheless, in Milton's epic we have, I think for the first time in such completeness, a developed vision of what by the late eighteenth century had become a spontaneous assumption, the abstract individual existing prior to and autonomously of concrete social relations. Though to create this individual and his (or her) modes of perception could hardly have been Milton's intention (conscious or unconscious), he could and did effect such a creation insofar as he found himself living in a world in which social relations were in material reality no longer given but created by the acts of isolated individuals acting independently--in necessary and imposed independence--of the material and social conditions which gave meaning to their actions. Though a London scrivener might well escape the influence of the partirular interests of scriveners, the experience of that escape-- the experience, that is, of having to choose to be a scrivener, a lawyer, a clergyman, a poet could be profoundly radical in its results. The very process of escaping a par- [168] ticular background through the repeated choice of pursuits (none of which imposed itself as visibly necessary) would fix and deepen a view of the world as a field of necessary free choices by the isolated individual. Milton consistently introduces his characters from nowhere, in isolation from all social relations. By the choices they make they then create new social relations within which their action can take on meaning not inherent in the action itself. The characters, rather, create that meaning through grounding their motive in a principle which operates in abstraction from the visible actuality which it explains or controls. This freedom of characters from prior social relations is the material content of the freedom to choose which the poem endlessly reiterates. This separation (freedom) of an act's meaning from its visible consequences is the precondition for such freedom, end whenever in Paradise Lost characters ascribe meaning (including analogical meaning) to an act's visible consequences or to the act itself, they fall, cutting themselves off from all possible social relations. But when they base their choice on correct principle, in abstraction from all visible or analogical meaning, then their free choice enacts a society in which the coherence of motive and act and of act and result is guaranteed by the providence to which they have freely submitted themselves. The compulsion here lies not in the submission of the will to Providence (which is the condition of their freedom) but in the total freedom of choice itself, in the freedom inherent in the separation of action from result which compels the individual to choose freely the action which will embody her motive. In Paradise Lost we can see this compulsory freedom most simply in the episode of Uriel and the cherub, particularly if we view the latter (as Uriel must) as a cherub rather than as Satan in disguise, for the whole dialogue makes clear that there was nothing in the direct "cherubic" experience of the cherub or in his hierarchical place to initiate his action. This cherub has received from must critics the cruelest possible treatment, that of ignoring his very existence. Seeing him only as Satan in the guise of a cherub, they seldom explore the fact that for Uriel he is only a cherub. Milton is as explicit as possible on this point: "So spake the false dissembler unperceived: For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy"(III, 681-83).(7) If Satan's hypocrisy is perceivable only to God, then the overt narrative, a meeting of two angels, merits consideration in its own right, uncolored by the knowledge that it is Satan who speaks. So considered the scene introduces us to social relations in Milton's heaven, the poem's one example of the everyday life of the unfallen angels. The premise of Satan's ruse, the possi- [169] bility that all might be as it seems to, be, reveals the most radical distinction between Milton's heaven and Dante's to be that in Milton's heaven anything can happen, including an angel on a solitary sight-seeing tour. Both Uriel and the cherub exhibit what Marx called the "dot-like isolation" of the agent in capitalist society, and no sooner does Uriel appear than he is confronted with an imposed free choice under conditions which, in themselves, give no indication of the meaning of that choice. Uriel's judgment may be incorrect, but the text seems to insist that he was correct in assuming the cherub's declared mission a possible one in itself, its legitimacy depending only on the legitirnacy of the motive and understanding that inspired it. Meritt Hughes, recognizing that independently of the cherub's motives the situation requires some explanation, notes that "Like the writer of Job (ii.l), Milton calls the angels Sons of God and thinks of them as living scattered through the provinces of heaven. except on the days when they must "present themselves before the Lord."(9) Biblical precedent or not, the scene would be unimaginable in Dante's world, in which agents do not appear from nowhere, with their ro!es (or relationships) undefined until by an abstractly free choice they enact a role. In Homer the contrast is perhaps sharper yet, for Odysseus separated from his oikos is "no man" in simple reality and not merely as a clever ruse. Jon Lawry, however, has challenged Uriel's choice, seeing the episode as a temptation bearing some similarity to the temptation of Eve herself: Nearly as foolish as Limbo's refusal to choose is the credulity that chooses blindly:
Uriel is such an unguarded sleeper, for he takes Satan's professed desire for knowledge to be praiseworthy. The wiser Raphael later will have some properly "suspicious" words when such a wish is voiced by Adam. (10) The "professed desire" is not Satan's but that of a wandering cherub, one a complete stranger to Uriel, and even Lawry does not condemn Uriel's failure to be suspicious of that material fact itself, nor does he even find the basic situation, the encounter of strangers, to require remark. His concern, it seems, is as unremarkable in Milton's heaven as it is in the everyday experience of his modern interpreters. Lawry further underlines the centrality of abstract principle in Uriel's [170] judgment when he draws a comparison to Raphael and Adam, for the question is not who the cherub or Adam is but only the invisible motive which controls their desire for knowledge. Raphael, of course, knows both who Adam is and what he will be, but Uriel has no prior reason to suspect a cherub, it being a tacit premise of the poem that no further defections will occur among the loyal angels, though they may still make mistakes of judgment. Uriel simply examines the cherub's judgment, not his will. This cherub is perhaps Milton's most remarkable presentation of the "abstract--isolated--individual human" concretely imagined and made imaginable. By the poem's implicit premises it is possible for him to be wandering through space and to have had no prior or given relationship to Uriel, that relationship having to be created or enacted through a wholly indirect grounding in the abstract will of God rather than in terms of any shared visible actuality. Uriel judges that the cherub's declared motive is in harmony with the will of Providence (or abstract law), and on the basis of that assumed harmony they can enter into one of those "inevitable relationships which," according to Desmond Hamlet, "all men are required to establish and vigilantly to pursue."(11) This bourgeois reality of a world of invisible relationships and motives judgable only on the basis of abstract principle is the material basis for seeing hypocrisy as the one sin visible only to God. The episode has generated its own train of conflicting interpretations, all of which serve equally to underline how it dramatizes the plight of the isolated individual forcd to choose freely on abstract principle. William Empson, no less moralistic than Lawry, focuses on Satan's motive for choosing hi particular disguise: "Uriel finds it natural for a promoted proletarian to be a busybody, trying to curry favour no doubt." Alastair Fowler, rejecting this construal, suggests the motive "would be that the order of cherubim was supposed to excel in knowledge; so that in asking questions [Satan] is pursuing his proper vocation." Stanley Fish brings in the episode to gloss his commentary on Eve's willingness to follow the serpent: "At this point (Fish's italics), "Eve is in Uriel's position, involved in an evil which cannot be imputed to her without distorting the facts." That, Fish argues, would be to deny "the spontaneousness of the Fall."(12) Many critics do find Eve virtually fallen already when she follows the serpent, but however that may be, the very disagreement among critics reveals the occasion (whether the appearance of a wandering cherub or of a talking serpent) bears no necessary or visible relationship to its meaning. When Lawry reprimands Uriel or when J. M. Evans claims that Eve's quarrel with Adam has prepared her "to listen [171] sympatheticallv to tributes to her dignity,"(l3) both critics must appeal to the very same grounds for their arguments as do Uriel and Eve: some abstract principle which is argued or assumed both to be the will of God and to be knowable, the isolated individual prior to and independent of the occasion (the particular social relationship) that instances it. The disagreement between Lawry and Uriel is grounded in their differing interpretations of the principle which the cherub's request for knowledge expresses and whether that principle is or is not in harmony with divine will. The episode tells two stories simultaneously (that of Satan and that of the cherub, as in allegorical fictions, hut it is wholly unallegorical in that the two stories bear no necessary relationship, analogical or otherwise, to each other. If we are to link them, it is only by appealing to a principle which is abstractly valid independent of any particular visible manifestation, for the meaning of Satan's story does not express the meaning of the cherub's, nor does that visible narrative express the meaning of the real story. The principle that hypocrisy is visible only to God (or that, temperature remaining constant, the volume of gasses varies inversely with the pressure) explains but neither causes nor is caused by the phenomena to which it refers.(14) The "law of gravity," for example, does not cause an object to fall; it is a theoretical formulation which explains (makes intelligible and sometimes controllable) the material relations involved in that falling. What all critic describe in the Uriel episode is the encounter of two social monads, who must enact or create a serial relationship where none existed before, under conditions which do not in their visible actuality impose any given form of action. And in describing that encounter they also link Paradise Lost to the later tradition of the bourgeois novel. Whether or not Lawry correctly construes the episode, his judgment of Uriel happens to be nearly a paraphrase of the self-judgment of a famous heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Bennet, as she reviews her earlier willingness to believe Wickham: "She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions with his conduct." (15) Elizabeth sees that she ought not to have required the facts of Wickham's history, since a grasp of principle would have led to correct judgment of his immediate conduct. Lawry, similarly, claims that Uriel did not need the fact provided by seeing Satan on Mount Niphates but could have judged the "impropriety" of the cherub's request through a wiser grasp of the principle of proper and improper knowledge. [172] Though Lawry's specific construal of the episode is strained, he is correct in posing the kind of question appropriate to the classical bourgeois novel. a principle-obsessed literary form. In both Paradise Lost and the novel the motive of action is necessarily abstracted from the action itself since there is no direct relation between act and intended results. The cobbler in bourgeois society makes shoes not to wear them (and hence his own reality is not analogically present in his visible action) but on bthe faith or calculation that through sale he will realize their exchange value-- a purely spiritual attribute not detectable by an examination of the shoes' material reality. Separated in time and space from all the human activities which must constitute an equilibrium if his activity is to have meaning, he trusts to abstract principle to give that meaning -- he can only stand and wait. Similarly, there is nothing in the material actuality of the cherub`s request which allows Uriel to judge it. Not even Lawry faults Uriel for failing to raise the kind of challenee which Virgil and Dante regularly encounter even in purgatory: Why are you out of your "place"? Clearly the cherub is not out of place, that place being wherever his knowledge of divine will leads him to be, and only the validity of that knowledge is in question either in Uriel's reply or in Lawry's commentary. No other critic has taken up Lawry`s suggestion that Uriel himself is being tempted, and indeed that construal clutters reading of the episode. Uriel, Lawry says, is an "ethical meaning," but to define that meaning as consisting in showing the ill effects of "dew innocence and credulousness" as opposed to "exacting skill and caution" undercuts the ethical meaning Milton explicity attaches to the episode, that hypocrisy is the only evil that is invisible to created beings (III, 683-84). The choice the episode poses is the correctness or incorrectness of the principle the cherub offers to explain his desire. The choice is only obscured by seeing Uriel as tempted to place himself before Christ: "he [Satan] temptingly nominates Uriel as 'first' in doing God's will (displacing Christ) and as 'interpreter through highest Heav'n' (ignoring Christ as Word [III, 657]. If "exacting skill and caution" were sufficient to unmask Satan here, the hypocrisy would not be visible to God alone but to any unfallen creature. The temptation Lawry names, of displacing Christ, is the temptation to assert a direct connection, bypassing Providence, between act and result, and it is that possibility to which Uriel does, with exacting skill and caution," attend, concluding that the cherub's motive is sound. Each temptation in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained urges such a direct route to some goal, bypassing the divine will which alone can connect act to result. In Milton's eyes Satan's naturalism or empiricism is [173] indistinguishable from Catholic sacramentalism, being merely a different form of the same error: that of finding meaning somehow to inhere in the visible itself. Lawry's interpretation
of the episode makes doubtfully legitimate use of the reader's knowledge
that the cherub is in fact Satan. The episode is enriched, not impoverished,
by abstracting from that fact and seeing only two angels who, through
recourse to shared knowledge of providential intent, create between
them a set of social relations where none had existed before. So viewed,
the scene has a possible connection to the later temptation of Eve more
interesting than Lawry's suggestion that Satan is staging an "aerial
temptation . . . foretelling those on earth."(17) From this premise,
Lawry can only see Uriel as misguided in declaring the cherub's desire
to see the new creation to be not only praiseworthy but to reveal, by
contrast, something like lesser merit on the part of those who "Contented
with report hear only in Heaven" (III, 701). There are, it seems,
degrees of merit and not simply hierarchical places in heaven, and,
if so, Empson does reflect part of the episode`s tone when he calls
the cherub a "promoted proletarian." Only it is Uriel himself
who confirms by his words what is, in effect, the cherub's self-promotion
through merit. Achievement of that higher level of merit depends on
the recognition of the divine will in the abstract, independent of any
visible embodiment of that will. If Satan as a cherub has successfully
mimicked a higher virtue (recognition of the divine will in abstraction
from experience of it), the cherub then provides a foreshadowing not
of the serpent's temptation but of what might have been Eve's response
to that temptation The question one critical tradition insistently raises
is whether Eve possessed the necessary defenses to resist Satan`s arguments.
John Armstrong is typical:
Armstrong, like Lewalski, wishes to find the great poets "right about the most essential things" and is willing to dismember their poems to adjust their vision to his own. In particular, he is among those who see a split between the poem's real and official themes because Eve must ground [174] her choice on adherence to an abstract principle rather than a concretely experienced relationship.(19) He thus takes direct issue with those critics who see such adherence as nearly the unifying pattern of the poem, shown centrallyt in the Son's offer of sacrifice, reflected in the actions of the loyal angels, and providing a model for Adam and Eve. A recent assertion of this view is Stella Revard's comparison of the trials of Abdiel and Eve:
Abdiel, Eve, and the cherub must make decisions in isolation, separated from direct knowledge or experience of the grounds of their decision. (The cherub is explicit that his knowledge of God's "wondrous works," like Eve's knowledge of her "absentee landlord," is only by hearsay.) The lines Lawry quotes as tempting Uriel to displace Chrirt can have the different thrust of exhibiting the isolated individuality of the angels, their abstract relationship to the divine will. He addresses Uriel as one who is "wont his great authentic will / Interpreter through highest heaven to bring, / Where all his sons thy embassy attend" (III, 656-58). This asserts a fact of Uriel's own practice, and if it is false Uriel's failure to challenge it reveals him as more obtuse or more sorely tempted than even Lawry suggests. If true, then even for the angels God is indeed a sort of "absentee landlord," and if the cherub's mission is valid it will be because he honors the divine will in abstraction from direct knowledge of its content in the instance at hand. Uriel's reply takes the factual accuracy of the cherub`s statements as given and comments on motive, giving praise to the desire
This is not Eve succumbing to temptation but the Father himself greeting Abdiel:
[175] Armstrong and Revard disagree not in their construal of the Fall but in their ideological judgment of whether or not life ought to be that way. If, however, we abstract from that quarrel, accepting the poem's premises without concerning ourselves with their existential validity, we can see in the cherub's lonely decision to view the "wondrous works" of God a first foreshadowing of the imitation of the Son which Abdiel achieved and which Eve could not maintain. The common kernel in all is precisely that of honoring (or of not honoring) a divine will known only as abstract principle. Writing in an age of capitalist collapse. Armstrong attemnts to extract from myth and art a refurbished version of the abstract individual's inner paradise; Revard construes, what she takes to be Milton's version and implicitly reaffirms it as valid for "us." Milton, however, held to a sturdier version of that bourgeois ideal than Armstrong (and perhaps than Revard) and could demand of Eve a faith not based on "personal intercourse or affection." The confrontation
of the cherub and Uriel, then, can be construed as exemplifying Satan's
capacity to mimic true virtue rather than merely to make a vicious principle
seem virtuous. But suppose Lawry's construal is correct. As already
pointed out, to support his judgment he must, like Uriel and the cherub
themselves, appeal to an abstract principle not inherent in the occasion.
That action is purely neutral -- empty of concrete content unless we
suppose that the cherub has no business on any grounds to have left
his proper place among the cherubim, an assumption which not even Lawry
makes. Satan's hyprocrisy would consist of his putting forth a vicious
principle which is made to seem legitimate in part by its appeal to
the vanity or weakness of his victim, in part because the victim naively
assumes that the deceiver's role, being proper in itself. thereby authenticates
the rightness of his motive. Again, the novel offers the best parallels
for Uriel's error: Osmond's deception of Isabel in Portrait of a
Lady, Mrs. Norris's of Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park, and
Prince Vasili's of Pierre in War and Peace. In each case interpretation
hinges on judgment of whether or not the victim had potential access
to the correct principles on which to base choice. In the case of Isabel,
some critics have seen her as "involved in an evil which cannot
be imputed: to her, while others have judged her as Lawry judges Uriel,
or Elizabeth Bennet herself.
tional data. Lawry, construing the episode to be one of interpretation and thereby narrowing its range of connections, has only underlined the extent to which Milton consistently creates actions which do not express their own meaning for either the characters involved or the reader. The reader, too, as so much recent criticism has insisted, is radically individualized by being compelled freely to judge the propriety of the cherub's declared motive. In contrast, any attempt to exercise a free judgment of motive in most prebourgeois literature tends to make reading a nearly impossible act. As soon as the reader feels called upon to judge why or whether Odysseus should choose home over immortality, for example, the Odyssey loses coherence. The question cannot be asked, and because it cannot be asked no new social relationship is created between author and reader as abstract individuals. In Abdiel's confrontation with Satan we see a feudal hierarchy claiming to be the analogical expression of its own inner reality, transformed by Abdiel's abstractly free act into a civil society of autonomous individuals, each in his own isolation responsible for his action. In opposition to the inherent validity of the angelic order which Satan claims, Ahdiel dissolves that order by subordinating it to abstract law or princciple. To make place depend on merit empties hierarchy of real content, creating in its stead an empirical chaos of phenomena which must then he made to exhibit order by appeal to law existing independently of the chaos it explains. Abdiel's courage is the very opposite of that courage which Alien Tate thought needed to "face the spiritual truth in its physical body."(21) On the contrary, Abdiel seems to insist that it requires extraordinary courage to accept that "spiritual truth" has no physical body Abdiel appears abruptly, like Uriel and the cherub, one of the sheer inventions of the poem:
The powerful abstractness of this contrasts sharply with the careful placing of characters in most or all precapitalist narrative. A minor detail from Boccaccio instances the practice: "In Messina there were three young brothers, all of them merchants, who became very rich after the death of their father (who was from San Gimagno)."(22) The italicized detail is not novelistic but feudal. It places the father rather than contributes to developing plot or character. Milton, in contrast, provides only [177] the principle which explains Abdiel`s action, his zeal and obedience. Abdiel's only preexisting relationrhip (expressed in his zeal) is the unmediated relationship to an abstract divine will. Until he stand up the other angels are not individuals but places in a hierarchy to which Satan ascribes autonomous reality; "Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers" (V, 772). They have, according to Satan. a given and unchallengable existence within that fixed order of visible social relations:
Satan objects not to "power and splendour" (which do not challenge the hierarchical freedom and equality he defends) but rather to the claim to rule by merit or law, the leveling power of which dissolves all distinctions based on hierarchical position. Satan's rhetorric appeals to his followers to defend those places, to resist the tvranny of imposed free choice of having their status dissolved in their abstract individuality. Abdiel's shifting of the debate to a question of the son's merit and the justice of law dissolves that hierarchical stability. Milton himself may or may not have distinguished sharply between feudal dominion and corrupt republican tyranny. Wii!lam Empson assumes that Satan does express republican sentiments much like Milton's ownn arguing that the poem's first readers "would not be at all sure how far the author meant the devil's remarks to be wrong." Hughes is close to Empson in substance in his note to Book V, line 799: to be cannot be definitely related to any verb; much less seems to compare the idea of a lord, or law-giver with the only less obnoxious idea of laws." (23) In practice, "Lord" and "law-giver" are more apt to be contrary than synonymous, and from a trud feudal perspective laws are not less but more obnoxious than a lord. Thognis of Megara was clear on this: "Shame has perished; pride and insolence have conquered justice and possess the earth .... The city is still a city but the populace is change: once they knew nothing of laws." (24) Alastair Fowler, citing Blachandra Rajan's claim that Satan's appeal is a "perfectly orthodox version of the claim that monarchy is not grounded on the law of Nature," respondes that "Satan omits altogether the value of obedience or discipline, which M. regarded as the essential condition of republican freedom." (25) Rajan, Fowler, and Empson all substantially agree that Satan's argument is some- |
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[178]
Whether or not Satan by this point is trapped in celf-deception does not affect the significance of his overt stand: still denying the abstract individuality of the angels, he repudiates their subjection to any measure of abstract merit, simply refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of any principle operating independently of visible actuality but giving meaning to it. Satan's opening speech to the angels, then, defends feudal order with a polemic against bourgeois civil society and its unifying principle of abstract law--abstract because it is not embodied in or drawing sanction from a visible reality but rather invoked as the sanction for the exercise of power: "Messiah, who by right of merit reigns" (VI, 43). For Satan, the angels without law "Err not" because they possess by status a right not subject to abstract judgment. It is an indignity for "angel wings," an attribute of their angelhood, to be subjected to human service, for such subjection has no basis in any visible hierarchy of degrees of being. Abdiel's free act, dissolving that visible hierarchy of fixed relations and transforming the angels into isolated individuals who must freely choose, calls into being a whole racial microcosm in the remaining hundred lines of Book V. But the relationships which characterize that society are all after the fact, emerging from the action of wills existing independently of and prior to the society which they enact. Satan despite [179] himself becomes a dcmagogue rather than a feudal lord and his followers citizens of a modern republic (however totalitarian) Rejoicing at Abdiel's failure to gain adherents. Satan replies "more haughty." Presumablyy this show of support emboldens him, but that very need is a sign of the usurper (or caudillo) who must depend on the abstractly (and therefore freely) offered assent of his follower. And his reply, beginning with the accusation of newness, ends with the threat of overt violence. Milton fuses feudal violence with the terrorism of the modern capitalist state, but in this scene at least Satan seems primarily the feudal lord, intolerant of any appeal to law not embodied in a visible hierarchy. A critical commonplace is that in hell Satan establishes a parody of heaven -- but it should he added more often that the heaven he parodies is one which exists only in his own perception For Satan, heaven is a hierarchy, and it is a hierarchy modeled after that illusory heavenly one that he tries to establish in hell. A certain irony, then. enters into that modern criticism of Milton which makes hierarchy Milton's own principle. "The hierarchic principle of order and degree," Douglas Bush wrote in 1945 gave "hierarchic order to man's own faculties and values. Thus while the doctrine provided a metaphysical philosophy, it was far more religious and ethical than scientific."(26) If I understand this at all, Bush claims that hierarchy is the grounds of true freedom. Satan would seemingly have agreed: "and if not equal all, yet free; / Equally free; for orders and degrees / Jar not with Liberty, but well consist." (V, 791-3) "Order frees the person from the intolerable tyranny of compulsory free choice in a world in which no relationships are fixed, in which no act contains its own meaningn and in which ail relations must be continually recreated through new and equally free (unattached, isolated) choices. Critics who construe Satan as a rebel against rather than a defender of hierarchy see as pure hypocrisy the lines in which he defends "order and degree." Harold Toliver is typical in arguing that "Satan obviously cannot have it both ways . . . if all angels are equal, Satan has no inherited right to his position; and if hierarchy prevails. he should not have rebelled." (27) In fact, Satan nowhere claims that all angels are equal; rather, he consistently denies equality in order to assert that (aristocratic) "freedom" which consists in the secure possession of one's appointed place in a hierarchy not subject to either challenge or "reform." Michael Lieb is equally confident: "In his rebellious attitude, Satan equates freedom and equality with reference to God in order to reveal the supposed injustice of God's dominion over the angels, but he does not in the least equate thee terms with reference to his own assumed omnipotence."(28) Milton may have intended Satan's argument to be so interpreted, but [180] both Toliver and Lieb assume that it is inherently inconsistent in abstraction from Milton's intentions--that one can, in fact, read Milton`s intentions from the fact of the inherent inconsistency of Satan`s position rather than having, first, to determine Milton's intentions in order to judge Satan's consistency. This is not true, for in itself Satan's position is quite consistent. (Moreover, since Milton seems to give something like historical location for the granting of power to the Son, which occasioned Satan's rebellion, it is at least debatable whether Satan had always viewed "God's dominion over the angels" as unjust.) Satan's speech, taken by itself, is consistent in terms of the most common understanding of freedom from at least the time of Plato, who was insistent on the point that the artisan and the guardian in his republic were "equally free" precisely because they acknowledged the rightness of their places in a hierarchy. But that acknowledgement, as Socrates's proposed lie of the three metals reveals, was grounded ultimately in the sheer givenness of the social order. And Plato would have been as appalled as Satan at the concept of hierarchy being dissolved by the tyrannical imposition of an abstract principle of merit. Though the decay of virtue (merit) in the guardians leads to the decay of the ideal state. Plate simply could not have conceived of that decay being countered by replacing hierarchy with an endlessly shifting "meritocracy." No more could Satan. Satan's speech, therefore, is contradictory if (and only if) Milton intended Satan to represent a corrupt republican leader or demagogue; if, on the other hand, Satan's position is a feudal or royalist one, his speech is perfectly consistent; and, finally, out of context the speech can be either a consistent expression of feudal outlook or an instance of bourgeois demagoguery. Joan Webber assumes Milton intended Satan's argument to be a consistent expression of the royalist outlook:
Toliver is simply
wrong, in the abstract, in arguing that "if hierarchy prevails,
he should not have rebelled." God's begetting of the Son overturned
(or dissolved from within) an established hierarchy which guaranteed
the freedom of each of its members. Satan launches a counter-revolution
in defense of that hierarchy. Just because he believes that hierarchy
prevails Satan finds not only justification for rebellion but hopes
. [181]
. Rajan's account of hierarchy as the informing principle of Paradise Lost has, in fact, a curious twist. After quickly summarizing Renaissance conceptions of "order," "degree," and "harmony," and noting the disintegration of the tradition in the mid-seventeenth century, he poses what he calls the "problem" of why Milton should have chosen a "symbolism so evidently dying" for a poem which was to be a "unifying and permanent embodiment of the consciousness and culture of his age." The twist comes in the solution to this problem: "There are times when a man can only preach effectively by preaching in the wilderness." Milton abstractly chose a tradition, a "massive, unchallengable synthesis of knowledge," which was, Rajan adds, "far richer and far more reassuring than the fragile, limited substitutes which have replaced it."(30) This could be correct, for Milton as well as Rajan could have shared the idealist assumption of "ideas as autonomous entities which develop independently and are subject only to their own laws"(31)--from which it follows that such autonomous ideas can (in Pounds phrase) "go into action" independently of real historical conditions. Given such an assumption, one could as an "abstract--isolated--human individual" abstractly and magnificently re- [182] assert a "massive, unchallengeable synthesis of knowledge" originally grounded in material social relations within which such abstract acts of will would have been simply unintelligible. Neither Homer nor Dante chose abstractly among alternative world views or traditions the one which his poem would express, but this, according to Rajan, was precisely Milton's practice. And Rajan's own commentary on crucial elements of that expression brings out the strangeness inherent in an individilalist affirmation of a hierarchical world. He relates the angelic dance (V, 618 27) to the symbolism of degree, primarily because "the cosmic dance is made an analogue of the celestial," construes "references to Satan's 'hierarchical standard' and to triple hierarchies of angels" as "evocations of degree," and then claims "an ironical climax in Satan's treatment of the Son's exaltation as a violation of the hierarchical principle." Here Rajan, in the comment Fowler quoted, finds Satan to be expressing standard republican theory and describes Abdiel's reply as not a challenge to Satan's logic, but rather a shifting of the grounds of judgment to the facts of Satan's creation and to the principle that "obedience to a hierarchic superior is a confirmation. not a denial, of freedom."(32) But the relationship between celestial and cosmic dances is not analogical- it is a simple ("modern") comparison. The irony is there only if one accepts the conclusion to be proved. And as to the last point, Rajan cannot have it both ways: both Abdiel and Satan cannot be defenders both of republican theory and of the rightness of hierarchic obedience (and, in hierarchical terms, Satan is Abdiel's hierarchic superior). By any reading of the text, the confrontation contains evocations of "degree," but Rajan along with Satan assumes "degree" to be self-explanatory and self-justifying rather than a fact requiring explanation and justification. Abdiel, not Satan, offers such a justification--the abstract principle of merit. Both Satan and Abdiel, according to Rajan, assert that hicrarchy is a confirmation rather than a denial of freedom -but when Satan says it Milton is "ironic"- and besides, "To Milton's reader ... he [Satan] was wrong because he was the devil, and doubly damned by quoting scripture for his purpose."(33) Robert Adams was to note how Rajan, attempting to identify Milton's "reader," reached the "discouraging" conclusion "that such a person scarcely existed after 1660," a conclusion which, Adams said, failed to solve the problem of audience "except by the indirect device of admitting that none actually existed." Accodingly, it would seem that Milton "created his audience out of his own fantasy."(34) Raian could not follow up on his discovery that the poem had no actual audience while remaining so anxious to present it as "keeping alive" a [183] given cultural synthesis-- and one which, moreover, made no sense except in terms of an audience which already not only accepted but lived that synthesis. Rajan solved this problem with the brute-force device of refusing to follow up the implications of his characterization of Milton as a "voice preaching in the wilderness" by exploring the historical content of that wilderness and the preacher's relationships to it. Malcolm Ross had already discovered essentially the same "problem," but his solution was to deny that Milton had discovered a solution. The problem for Ross was the question of the relationship of divine to secular monarchy: The vanity of evil
of earthly monarchies are suggested in poetic terms indistinguishable
from those which suggest the splendor of Heaven. By inserting signposts,
by telling us when to feel "This is vain" and "This is
glorious," Milton seeks to keep his distinctions clear, to keep
God innocent of associations with British royalism. That he fails is
evident, and that he is conscious of the dilemma in which he finds himself
is equally evident.(35) . The crucial assumption Rajan and Ross share is that the world view a poem expresses is abstractable from the relationship of the author to that world view and to the real social relations which ground it -- or, at least, that the relationship is always essentially a passive one. And yet both recognize that the relationship may be, and in the case of Milton was, an active one, for every page of both studies honors the fact that Milton self-consciously "chose" his world view as prebourgeois writers typically did not. To say, as Rajan does, that Milton chose a symbolism which no longer reflected the "consciousness or culture of his time" or, as Ross does, that Milton was conscious of the"dilemma" posed by his royalist imagery, is to say that Paradise Lost does not assume a preexisting relationship between author and reader-- or between reader and the poem's world view. These relationships must be created by the free act or choice of author and reader. The absence of any preexisting relationship between author and reader is the essential burrden of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, for independently of the correctness or incorrectness of his interpretations, Fish is certainly correct in seeing that the relationship between writer and reader m ust be continuously recreated at almost every step throughout the poem it is never given. And when Malcolm Ross focuses on Milton's "signposts," what he brings out is simply that on the occurrence of each such signal the reader is compelled to judge freely the rightness or wrongness of the signpost. What each critic looks for, and finds, in his or her examination of the confrontation of Abdiel and Satan is either [184] confirmation of his own values or evidence that Milton failed to express properly the correct values. Rajan looks for reaffirmation of the medieval synthesis (finding subsequent syntheses "fragile," in fact because capitalism has failed to deliver on its early utopian promise at the same time that it has developed its own actual potential so much more rapidly and explosively than had earlier modes of production). Ross looks for a revolutionary purism (defined as coherence of image and idea according to some abstract criterion of such coherence) and finds Milton lacking. Neither can entertain the possibility that the Abdiel-Satan clash, by imposing free choice upon the reader, was profoundly revolutionary in its enactment of the characteristic social relationship or bourgeois civil society. Satan's arguments
on order and liberty, then, can be either contradictory or consistent,
depending on whether they express feudal or bourgeois relations. Moreover,
either reading leads the reader to acknowledge the compulsion exercised
on him or her to judge--, to judge on the basis of some abstract principle
which he or she either brings to the text or accepts, as abstractly
stated, from the narrator. The action never carries its own meaning.
If the narrator has invoked the right principle, and if the reader in
turn accepts that principle as the correct basis for judgment of the
narrated event, then a social relationship of writer and reader - a
miniature bourgeois civil society - will have been created where none
existed before. These "ifs" can be qualified in various ways.
Stanley Fish argues that in the final book the reader who has successfully
navigated all its "good temptations" receives as a reward
something like a mystical experience. "If he has done his part,
the reader is raised to an imaginative, almost mystical apprehension
of what the poem has continually asserted from a thousand varying perspectives
-- salvation is through Christ." All the conditions; that is; for
establishing temporarily, a society of writer and reader have been met.
Fish stresses the impermanence of the relationship: "And as Adam
must descend from the mount of speculation to take up his new life on
the subjected plain, so must we dsecend... from this total and self-annihilating
union with the Divine, to re-enter the race of time." Reading the
poem reunites for the reader the "shattered visage of truth,"
but such "direct apprehension cannot be prolonged," only its
"memory" can be "a source of energy."(36) Fish's
claim is that together author and reader have established a social relationship
grounded in a shared recognition of and obedience to an abstract principle
of social unity, that of "salvation through Christ." [185] were in one way more perceptive than many of his defenders in their insistence that Milton's narrative and imagery did not visibly embody his meaning--that, in Ross's version, they required "signposts" for their proper interpretation. The error lay only in dogmatic insistence that such organic unity of action and meaning was a sensible literary criterion We can contrast to almost any passage in Paradise Lost part of the passage from Saint Catherine of Siena that Allen Tate quotes in his essay, "The Symbolic Imagination." Catherine is recounting her experience in comforting a young man unjustly convicted of treason, and she tells of his execution.
Tate comments, "It is deeply shocking, as all proximate incarnations are shocking." going on to argue that only those "of extraordinary courage .. . carl face the spiritual truth In its physical body." However that may be, it is clear that for Saint Catherine, but not for Milton, truth was available only in its "physical body." She "does not," Tate claims "report it [the blood]; she recreates it, so that its analogical meaning is confirmed again in the blood that she has seen." (37) The rise of capitalism (in its usual oligarchic as well as in its occasional democratic forms) liberated humanity forever from the fetters of analogical thought and from subservience to visible social relations or physical appearances as embodying their own meaning. The most reactionary aspect of much twentieth-century criticism was its effort (as in Tate's essay) to reimpose those fetteres on criticism and literature. Boyd Berry, contrasting the "Establishment," to the puritans and Milton. almost inadvertently reveals how reactionary even attenuated expressions of analogical thinking could be. According to Berry, the Establishment conceived of God's immutable plan as incorporating within itself elements if historical change; the plan itself was unchanging, but the contents were occasional, temporary, and fluid. Milton and the Puritans, on the other hand, "before they turned their attention to this world ... first pursued an eternal vision. Only after that vision did they descend to reform this world."(38) Recognizing that for the seventeenth-century conservatives "God's plan" was knowable only through the "physical body," as exhibited in visible social relations, Berry fails to recognize that the [186] new social reality of the seventeenth century could be understood and controlled only by those who searched for its reality in principles existing independently of the visible. Both positions are ahistorical in their reduction of history to a manifestation in time of a reality (or telos) which is beyond history. The sense of history or recognition of "elements of historical change" which Berry ascribes to the Establishment acted in practice to conserve an order in which change was only an incarnation of unchanging reality. The problem for the Puritan revolutionaries was to change the world without denying God's "immutable plan." a premise they shared with their adversaries. How difficult that task was is still evident in the glibness with which too many of Milton's modern critics can declare (as Joan Webber does) that the execution of Charles I was neither "right nor legal ... despite all Milton's claims..''(39) Michael Fixler, exploring the same question, quotes from a letter of Cromwell's canvassing grounds on which the army might impose its will on Parliament. Fixler notes approvingly that even Cromwell dropped his third reason as too ambiguous; nevertheless it clearly provided the real grounds that made the execution not only right and legal but necessary. "Thirdly," Cromwell wrote, "whether this Army be not a lawful power, called by God to oppose and fight against the King upon some stated ground, and being in power to such ends, rnay not oppose one name of authority, for those ends, as well as another, the outward authority which called them, not by their [the Parliament's] power making the quarrel lawful, but it being so in itself." (40) However torturously, what Cromwell was articulating is that necessary premise of every revolution, whatever its class basis, the premise which Plato incorrectly associated with despotism: justice is the interest of the stronger. Between two fundamentally opposed social orders, the only higher authority is force. The Puritans were, in practice, transforming history, and to do so they had to subvert not only feudal ideology but that earliest form of capitalist ideology, the divine right of kings. Whereas feudal ideology conceived history as narrowly cyclic, the Puritans went outside it to appeal to an eternal ground or larger cycle (their version of "God's immutable plan") to subvert the given of the established order. Tested against that "eternal vision" the actualities of recorded history proved to be a usurpation (on earth) of divine omnipotence; justice was, in metaphysical terms. indeed the interests of the stronger, of divine Providence itself, and injustice was that rebellion which accused others of rebellion. Abdiel's own final argument (V, 891-99) is also an appeal to force. [187] Satan sees the Son as rebel, from outside the given hierarchy, and presents hinl\elf a defending the old order:
This is an instance of the kind which so disturbed Ross and led him to ascribe to the poem a conflict of symbol and idea." But Ross was too mechanical. Liberal democracy is not even the most characteristic mode of rule in capitalist societies but an exceptional case maintained only so long as the working class accepts capitalism as not only the best but, essentially, the only possible form of society. Abdiel's reply vigorously evokes the abstract egalitarianism of bourgeois civil society, which he captures in the substitution of "every soul" for Satan's thrones and dominations. This ideal egalitarianism of capitalist society creates and justifies rather than contradicts rather than contradicts the material inequality of such societies. That material inequality seems imposed by the working of abstract law rather than direct personal power, and though liberal bourgeois consciousness finds obedience to personal power intolerable, it honors power or authority embodied in law rather than a person--or even embodied in a person in material fact so long as, ideologically, that power can be viewed as the expression of some abstract principle (such, for example, as German "nationhood" or "authoritarianism" as opposed to "totalitarianism"). Even the divine
right of kings was ideologically a transitional form to the bourgeois
rule of law, and it was contradictory to medieval royalism as was parliamentary
rule or Cromwell's military dictatorship. Bruce Coggin has drawn the
distinction nicely in his essay, "Sir John Fortescue on Organic Politics." Coggin begins with a distinction which, though he himself admits it is "perhaps ... too fine," is important ideologically, however detached from reality. "A constitutional monarch." he says, "is limited by statute," while in Fortescue's theory the king is limited "only by essence and role." The history to be found in a one-volume desk encyclopedia could reveal that the reality of that limitation was the economic and military power of the feudal nobility and that both Fortescue in 1476 and Coggin in 1979 were spinning fairy tales. Coggin concludes by contrasting Fortescue to all "modern" political theory: There is no question of rights surrendered or powers usurped, only the matter of a proper stewardship of a set of given political facts, facts that were fairly commonplace in medieval political thought. The king ruled according to law, checked by the authority which dwelt thickset in the fabric of the body politic of which he, as king, was part. It was a conservative view, really, despite its later expansion and exploitation at the hands of revolutionaries. Its very strangeness is a clear indicator how far the Western experience is now removed from its reassuring synthesis.(41) Both constitutional monarchs and those who ruled by "divine right" were, ideologically, above rather than part of the "body politic" in which Coggin finds such a "reassuring synthesis" were simply the relations of personal dominion and servitude which characterized precapitalist modes of production.
These lines provide perspective on the carping of those critics who though recognizing Milton as a revolutionary, tend to regret that he was not a consistent forerunner of (say) John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. Boyd Berry is again representative: [189] . it would be foolish to forget that there were severe limits to what changes did occur and blithely to glorify the Puritans for having developed fullblown religious toleration as well as modern democracy and physical science . The Puritans seldom tolerated atheists and Catholics. They most frequently feared democracy, and they almost always set their scientific pursuits within the old hierarchy, subordinate to theology.(42) Leaving aside the
fact that what Berry calls "modern democracy" has so tenuous
a material content, the simple and very nearly sufficient answer to
his complaint is, "Why should it have been otherwise?" The
objective content of the rise of capitalism (however Milton subjectively
defined A monarch who claims to rule by merit thereby dissolves the grounds of royalim and feudal hierarchy, the differrence between such a monarch and a parliament or a military junta being techical, not fundamental. This holds especially if merit is primarily an ideological expression of strength. The person or class that rules on the basis of greater strength (however expressed ideologically) being subject to tests of that strength. God's reliance on his omniipotence in Paradise Lost is an expression, ultimately, of democratic ideology. However Milton in the poem or in his theology might have worked out the doctrinal implications, to assert that the Son rules by right of merit is indeed to reduce him, in principle, to "One of our number"--and, translated into secular terms, the doctrine of rule by merit provides full justification for the execution of a king should he fail of that merit. Abdiel has transformed not only the fallen angels but the whole of Milton's heaven into a bourgeois civil society of "abstract --isolated" citizens. Modern reactionaries, attempting to reassert feudal values on a basis of capitalist commodity production, are as outraged as Satan by this state of affairs. Jaques Maritain fulminates against theodicies which, "setting out to comprehend the divine ways in order to render them acceptable, will religiously prepare the way for atheism."(43) jjBut, nostalgia for the lost fedieval harmony or synthesis apart, the attempt to justify God's law was indeed, as Abdiel saw, a historically liberating force, by smashing the fetters of direct personal dominion and isolating the individual from all visibly determining social relations it creates the world of abstractly and compulsory free choice which Paradise Lost celebrates. Satan sees law as [190] the destruction of legitimate authority and true liberty. Abdiel sees it as the very principle of freedom since only abstract law can sanction and maintain the autonomous choices of the free and isolated --free because iolated-- individual. The characters in Milton's poems, emerging suddenly from nowhere, and immediately facing the imposed necessity of a free choice which determines their possible relations, must then confront an unending series of such choices, continuously recreating new social relations which in turn never become fixed or visibly given. This endless recreating of relations as though all relations -- all choices -- were yet to be made is part of the substance both of the classical novel and of the great romantic poets. Each act and each subsequent set of relations are as new as the responses of the newly created Adam because the relations formed are never direct; they are never direct because the action which they constitute does not materially embody its own motive. Motive and action are linked, rather, only through forces or principles which are beyond the direct experience of the agents-and often beyond their possible knowledge. Adam at the moment of his creation becomes the model for all human action. Because no relationship is ever given, hrlmans must endlessly rediscover that principle ("God"), which makes relationships always a new and unaccomplished obligation. This is only to paraphrase, in abstraction from theology, a repeated perception in criticism of Milton. Stanley Fish remarks near the end of Surprised by Sin:
Fish offers here an account of the abstract or separated individual`s entrapment in a world of compulsory free choice--choice the agent exercises without knowledge of his act's meaning. And though the Father's phrase is "breoking union," the material content of this is jailing to establish union. The phrase is from the Father's decree of the Son's power:
[191] The abstract individual is isolated (without "identity") until by a new choice he or she recreates a new union (or set of social relations). Joseph Summers's comment on an earlier passage applies equally to the dance in Book V:
And Summers quotes the lines on the cosmic dance (III. 579-86). He defines a "society" a term which does not usefully designate feudal and prefeudal social orders in which social relations were visible (however fetishized), and the "origin of the wills" was the given place the agent held within these visible social relations. |
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The origin of the concord was an intuitive recognition of divine will. When the angels lose or repudiate that recognition, concord collapses into chaos, and then (This is the burden of Desmond Hamlet's argument) the mercy of God is expressed in the justice of God. (46) In the world of Paradise Lost order does not depend on anything like Coggin's "set of given political facts" or authority which dwelt thickset in the fabric of the body politic"-- those are satanic notions. Society, an invisible abstraction, had come into existence when, with the triumph of commodity production and the progressive individuation of all social relations, and the consequences of human acts escaped the agent's direct control: The contrast between th epower, based on the personal relations of dominion and servitude, that is conferred by landed property," Marx writes, "and the impersonal power that is given by money, is well expressed by the two French proverbs, "Nulle terre sans seigneur, and "L'argent n'a pas de maitre."(47) A "society" is a social order in which agents are freed from personal relations of dominion and servitude and in which, accordingly, there is no longer "a set of given political facts" in which authority can "dwell." As Summers implicitly recognizes (even while denying its relevance) the origin of the wills in such a social order is wholly problematic. Coggin describes that new world (though this is hardly his intention) when he describes what he regards ac a perversion of Fortescue's political theory by later "Whig" theoreticians: "The integrity-in-separation between [192] power and authority collapses into a fusion, both functions passing to a state with limitless police power and erastian religion."(48) That is, in a society of abstractly free individuals, in which action is separated from its consequences, order can emerge only from the (invisibly) willed adherence of each social monad to some (invisible) principle of harmony. In the unfallen state there is "no necessity" but only "spontaneously willed action" --or so it seems, for among the participants in the angelic dance Is that Lucifer who immediately thereafter will launch his rebellion with, as we know, extraordinarily violent consequences. In the utopian civil society of Milton's heaven, disruption of harmony comes only from feudal attempts to usurp power. There is even a suggestion that the motive of Eve's fall is to gain something like the independence of a feudal barony: she will achieve status (overcome Adam's "merit") by a usurpation of power paralleling Nimrod's usurpation in Book XII. Abstracting from all particular construals either of the revolt in heaven or of the Fall itself, however, in both Milton's fallen and unfallen worlds the guarantee of order is the "limitless police power" (freed from implicit hierarchical restraints) to which Coggin objects. Though Coggin fetishizes both feudal and capitalist states, he does offer an abstractly accurate account of the relationships of Milton's God to his creatures. His objections to the modern state are precisely those of John Armstrong to the unfair conditions imposed on Eve at her temptation. She has recourse only to an "absentee landlord" of a God rather than (in Coggin's terms) to a "given set of political facts: as grounds of her choice.The authority of Milton's God neither dwells "thickset in the fabric of the body politic" nor is it in any "separation" from his power -- and therefore it had to be justified by its goodness, by having attributed to it a complex of abstract principles not even analogically available to "human sense." Under such conditions of "fair equality, fraternal state" (XII, 26) society exists as the whole web of invisible relations which are continuously created and recreated by the objectively free choice of individuals who are, ideally, prior to the society ("concord") which they create by the continual exercise of their free choice. Such individuals experience themselves as well as others as coming from nowhere, as being able to enter into social relations only through submitting to the necessity of freely choosing among alternatives not dictated by the visible reality of the dance in which they perform. The angelic dance seems "irregular" because each angel acts independentlv of the visible pattern of the dance, in both ignorance and independence of the intentions of others. It is "regular" because each, independently, incorporates the divine will (or abstract principle) which gives that regularity. [193] "And the faithful," Malcolm Ross wrote in 1954, offering to summarize Milton's world, "enter this invisible fellowship, if at all, by equally invisible means. The old lines of communication between the visible and the invisible art: discarded. The Mystical Body is retained as a thoroughly bodiless concept."(49) Ross and Armstrong (however opposed otherwise) make essentially the same point, and again the proper answer to the complaint is not to deny, with many of Milton's medievalizing defenders, that he breaks "the lines of communications between the visible and the invisible," but rather to insist that he does indeed discard them, and that that bold divorce constitutes precisely the greatness of the poem. Illinois State University NOTES 1. A.S.P Woodhouse.
The Heavenly Muse: A Preface to Milton. ed Hugh MacCallum (Toronto,
1972) p.l02.
4. John Arthos,
"Milton, Andreini, and Galileo. Some Considerations on the Manner
and Form of Paradise Lost," in Approaches to Paradise
Lost": the Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (Toronto,
1968), pp. 163-64. [194] or already historically
developed form. The individual can never appear here in the dot-like
isolation [Punktualitat] in which he appears as mere free worker. [195] 20. Stella Revard.
The War in Heaven: "Paradise Lost" and the Tradition
of Satan's Rebellion (Ithaca, 1980), p. 281. 27. Harold Toliver,
"The Splinter Coalition," in New Essays on "Paradise
Lost", ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 50-51.
29. Joan Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition (Seattle, 1979), p. 120. 30. Balachandra Rajan, Seventeenth Century Reader (London, 1947), pp. 58-59. 31. Engels, Feuerbach,
p. 55. 34. Robert Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics (Westport, 1972), p. 200. 35. Malcom Ross, Milton's Royalism: A Study of the Conflict of Symbol and Idea in the Poems. (Westport, 1972), p. 200. 36. Fish, Surprised by Sin, pp. 328, 330-31. 37. Tate, Man of Letters, pp. 99, 98. 38. Boyd Berry, Process of Speech: Puritan Religious Writing and "Paradise Lost" (Baltimore, 1976), pp. 71-41. 39. Webber, Epic Tradition, p. 106. Webber does honor an essential point, for she writes that "By an act of illegality and violence, the country irrevocably committed itself to the primacy of law and individual conscience" (p. 106). But Webber failed to recognise that since under feudalism (or even the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, however subversive they were of feudal independence) the primacy of law was itself "illegal," only through illegality and violence could that primacy be achieved. Hopes for a peaceful or legal transition to socialism involve a similar contradiction. (The history of the twentieth century might have suggested to Webber that the phrase "Law and individual conscience" is something of an oxymoron). Milton also shared the view, common among many later revolutionaries, that the revolution was in fact a restoration, that the "Establishment" was a usurping power: "And from rebellion shall derive his name, / Though of rebellion others he accuse" (XII, 36-37). The fullest argument that Miltojn intended a specific parallel between charles I and Stan is Joan S. Bennett, "God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits," PMLA XCI (1977), 441-57. My own presentation of Satan as feudal lord and counterrevolutionary does not depend on the validity of such attempts to construe the poem's intentional historical references. William Empson (Milton's God, p. 77) seems, curiously, to believe that [196] he is offering
some sort of extenuation of Satan when he calls him a "rippingly
grand aristocrat" and argues that a "Norman lord in England
did not entertain the modern idea of a nation; his obligations of loyalty
were often complicated, and his main view of the English throne was
that he would only let one of his cousins have it." Fowler (Poems,
p. 22, note to Book V, line 756) is certainly correct in pointing out
that the "analogy would hardly have seemed creditable to M."
Baronial autonomy, or aspiration to it, must have seemed to Milton to
be close to the heart of human evil. 44. Fish, Surprised
by Sin, p. 337 |
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