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Reserve Text Matthew Jordan, from Milton and Modernity Chapter 2 'No respecter of persons': Individual Merit in Milton's Heaven In the last chapter it was suggested that any satisfactory account of Milton's political modernity would have to avoid dismissing liberal ideals as the merely ideological derivations of market society and recognize that, as Jay Bernstein puts it, their 'original force ...owes as much to the politically functioning public sphere in which public opinion was formed through unrestricted discussion as it does to the market economy'.(1) The blanket scepticism regarding such ideals often displayed by Foucault is a similar disincentive to attentive analysis. To the extent that appeal to 'the people' implied, (and still implies) operations of definition, and therefore the exclusion of some individuals as the counterpart to the inclusion of others, the analyses, by Foucault and many others, of these practices and their effects in a whole range of ; social institutions 'are salutary. Discourses of liberty and the formation; of people as individuals are bound up with the exercise of power: The "Enlighten-ment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.(2) But, notwithstanding his disclaimers, caveats, and methodological declarations, there is a consistent tendency in Foucault's texts; to interpret those social practices which contribute to individualization: as reflexes of the state: |
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[46]
The reality of
freedom is not that it is limited, or partial, or depends in certain
respects on self-restraint, or that it is wrongly extended to some and
not to others, or is in need of enlargement, conceptually or practically,
but that 'the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to
the formal framework' and all its fine talk. The reality of freedom
is domination.(4) Despite Foucault's announcement that 'we must eschew
the model of Leviathan in the study of power' (meaning that we should
give up the post-Hobbesian story of the constitution of the state by
its subjects and instead attend to the construction of subjects by the
state), his account of political modernity is, in essence, Hobbesian:
'The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which
in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted.(5) Where
Hobbes disallows the concept of tyranny because to allow thinking along
such lines inevitably produces more misery for all in the form of civil
war, Foucault, refusing to espouse any particular political principle,
lacks any grounds for distinguishing liberal democracies from totalitarian
states.(6) Where Hobbes, as Otto Gierke put it with reference to the
intimate relation between the utter lawlessness of Hobbes's state of
nature and the absolute lawfulness of his state 'made the individual
omnipotent, with the object of forcing him to destroy himself instantly
in virtue of his own omnipotence', Foucault simply inverts the humanist
belief' in the individual as free origin of his own actions.(7) Socialization
is synonymous with subjugation.(8) It is necessary to get beyond Foucault's principled hostility to socialization if the different assumptions about human nature and society held by Hobbes, Milton and Locke are to be given their due weight. This chapter will begin by suggesting a fully developed account is beyond the scope of the present work --that these different assumptions have their roots in different social milieux. While Milton and Locke are recognizably partisans of those who were known in the seventeenth' century as 'the middle sort of people', Hobbes, regardless of his social origins, is best understood as an absolutist thinker not merely philosophically or politically, but in social and cultural terms as well. The distinction between these milieux and the types of individuality they [47] produce and promote is essential to understanding the politics of Paradise Lost. Hobbes is often described as a 'bourgeois' thinker. This characterization has a degree of validity insofar as the society on which Hobbes reflected was increasingly characterized by market relations, but in political terms it is misleading. It appears most plausible when Hobbes is discussing the modes of living and the rights and privileges of the aristocracy. Of the 'three principal causes of quarrel' in the 'nature of man' -'First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.' - only the last of these, the desire 'for Reputation' derives not from models suggested by natural philosophy but directly from social observation. In society, this desire is liable to take the form of vainglory, or 'boastfulness, excessive vanity' (OED):
[48] social, not inherent and natural: 'Nobility is Power, not in all places, but onely in those Common-wealths, where it has Priviledges: for in such priviledges consisteth their Power' (Lev. 151 / 41). He accepts the suggestion of Selden's research that titles once denoted 'offices of Honour' but have since 'by occasion of trouble, and for reasons' of good and peaceable government', been 'turned into meer Titles' (Lev. 159 / 45). Opinions such as these led Clarendon to descibe his rejection of natural hierarchy as a 'levelling fancy' and to chide him in general for 'his extreme malignancy to the Nobility, by whose bread he hath' alwaies bin sustain'd'.(12) What is more, Hobbes seems to cut through such empty pretences as 'meer Titles' in ruthlessly materialistic terms: 'The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price;. that. is to say, so much as ' would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another' (Lev. 151-2 / 42). This assertion is one of the key pieces of evidence in Macpherson's case that Hobbes's theory of human nature, which posits' as 'a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power' (Lev. 161 / 47), is 'a reflection of his insight into the behaviour of men towards one another in a specific kind of society'. By this Macpherson means a possessive market society, the only kind which allows a continual and universal competition for power without a degree of violence incompatible with the existence of society.(13) Hobbes's reference to the 'price' of a man's power, or the potential value of his services, reflects his assumption 'that power is so generally transferable, that there is a pervasive market in power, which established the value of every man'. Macpherson argues that since power is something on which one can put a price, then Hobbes's claim that the 'Desire of Power, of Riches, of Knowledge, and of Honour. ...may be reduced to the first, that is Desire of Power' (Lev. 139 / 35) represents a reduction' of all human strivings and human value to the logic of market relations. His models 'of man and society. ..were bourgeois models'.(14) A ruthless' and calculating streak of commercialization undercuts feudal claims to : natural superiority. However, as Macpherson acknowledges, Hobbes appears much less bourgeois when he is discussing the bourgeoisie. (15) There is his advocacy of sumptuary laws to prevent the flaunting of wealth.(16) There is his condemnation of the acquisition of wealth as an end in itself and his apparent belief that it was usually acquired crookedly rather than by hard work and talent. He criticizes the Presbyterian clergy, who 'did never in their sermons, or but lightly, inveigh against the lucrative vices of men [49] of trade or handicraft; such as are feigning, lying, cozening, hypocrisy, or other uncharitableness', an omission he suspects was welcome 'to the generality of citizens and the inhabitants of market-towns'. Perhaps even more telling is Hobbes's position on property, the holding of which: is, like everything else, dependent on the will of the sovereign., with; predictable consequences in terms of his position on the right of the sovereign to tax without consent: of the one, issue where property rights in Hobbes's day were seriously disputed, Hobbes abandoned the interests of possessing classes altogether. It was not surprising that his contemporaries classed' his views on property with those of the Royalist clergy, Sibthorp and Manwaring, who taught that all property was subject to the king. (17) Furthermore, Hobbes does not advocate the eradication of the emotion of pride but only certain manifestations of it. Indeed he implies that it should be put to use. Hobbes's description of the titles of nobility as 'meer titles' means not that they are empty displays to be shredded by an egalitarian bourgeois rationalism but that they are filled with meaning only insofar as they can be. understood as spoken by the sovereign. In a commonwealth it is not 'the flattery of other men' (Lev. 164 / 49) which determines differences of human worth, but the' sovereign: 'The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the commonwealth, is that which men commonly call DIGNITY' and is often signified 'by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of such Value' (Lev. 152/42). Thus titles are a sign of the sovereign's esteem, an expression of his will, and the desire for them can be understood as an expression of that 'Desire of Praise' which' disposeth to laudable actions' (Lev. 162 / 48). Given that the desire for esteem is potentially asocial and destructive, it must be deprived of independent grounds and! instead organized around the will of the sovereign as a competition for his favour, the element which will underlie all signs of status. In its assertion of the centrality of the sovereign Hobbes's theory sums i up the aspirations of the absolutist project. But Hobbes can be described as an absolutist thinker not just in the sense that he asserts the in compatibility of sovereign power with external restrictions upon it, but in the sense that his theory reflects the social base of absolutism. The competitive desire for esteem displayed by Hobbesian individuals makes them antisocial but it also opens the way to an organization of their desire around the sovereign such that society can be conceived as consisting, essentially, of a bunch of atoms or, more precisely, electrons, [50] cohering only in as much as they dance around -attend upon, pay obeisance to, a single nucleus. This is clearly a post-feudal ideal. But it is also, arguably, aristocratic. Certainly the belief that 'most men would rather lose their lives ...than suffer slander' is redolent of an aristocratic code of honour.(18) The reason Hobbe's thought has appeared to some as bourgeois and to others as aristocratic is that one finds in it a sense that status (rather than economic gain) is the overriding concern of men, combined with a recognition that in a post- : feudal epoch status can be to some extent attained by wealth, is certainly enhanced by it and, in the form of royal largesse, is often an expression of it.(19) Hobbes's theory derives from an epoch in which, as Perry Anderson says with respect to the absolutist state, 'noble power' took on a 'new form ... determined by the .spread of commodity production and exchange', in which 'The political order remained feudal, , while society became more and more bourgeois.'(20) The court itself was a market. As one writer cited by Lawrence Stone put it: 'All such as aspire and thirst after offices and honours run thither amaine with emulation I and disdaine of others; thither are the revenewes brought that appertain to the state, and there are they disposed out againe.' As Stone notes, 'The most striking feature of the great nation states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the enormous expansion of the Court and the central administration.' One significant consequence of this was that in the course of the sixteenth century the importance of the court; had increasingly overridden local loyalties. This concentration of the activity of the noble class on the court did not happen by accident. Stone cites Burghley's advice to Elizabeth I that she 'gratifye your nobylyte, and the pryncypall persons of your realm, to binde them faste to you. ..whereby you shall have all men of value in the real me to depend only upon yourselfe'. According to Stone, 'The first effect of attracting: the nobility to court by the lure of office and rewards was to turn them' from haughty and independent magnates into a set of shameless mendicants.' Where once there had been 'formidable local potentates' there were soon 'fawning courtiers and tame state pensionaries'. Stone's account may overstate the abruptness of the change and the decline in moral fibre that resulted, but it is revealing that he uses Hobbes's evocation of the 'perpetual and restlesse desire of power after power that ceaseth onely in death' to explain the impulse which drove the nobility to court.(21) Paradoxically, the project of reducing the independence! of the nobility, because it made status dependent on a struggle for favour, was responsible for the atomization (or the appearance of [51] which many have seen as the legacy of the bourgeoisie.(22) According to Norbert Elias, just as in our society the most influential human types have come from 'or received the stamp of the city, with the result that urban types may be decribed as 'representative' of our society, 'It is precisely this representative and central significance that the court had for most Western European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.'(23) This was not altogether true of England, but it is suggestive! in respect of Hobbes, who was familiar with both the Versailles of Louis XIV and the Court of Charles II. Certainly this would help explain what Macpherson sees as the chief factor underlying Hobbes's neglect by the seventeenth-century middle class --his apparent' lack of class consciousness: What Hobbes overlooked and failed to put into his model was the centripetal force of a cohesive bourgeois class within the society. He was so impressed with the divisive and destructive force of the competition for power which he put in his model (and rightly put in, for this force is indeed present in the capitalist market society, to which, as we have seen, his model closely corresponded), that he failed to see that the model also necessarily generates a class differentiation' which can be expected to produce a class cohesion, at least in the class which is on its way up to the top.(24) Insofar as people seek and recognize power through market relations Hobbes's theory is applicable to these. But such consciousness of the bourgeoisie as there is in Hobbes is by no means a bourgeois class consciousness. Milton and Locke, by contrast, appeal to that 'vigorous and independent class of town dwellers' which was 'an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy.(25) The idea that 'people' were sufficiently capable of moral cognition to be entrusted with 'liberty' and I the power to judge governments was a practical assumption, with a class basis, about the real capacities of people. This basis --the urban middle class --is one which can usefully be termed bourgeois. For some time, a denial that such a class existed as a meaningful entity in seventeenth century England became an orthodoxy among historians of the period.(26) The term was felt to be too vague, its range of referents, extending from the landed gentry in their capacity as agrarian capitalists to small urban artisans, too wide. Furthermore, it was believed that even those classes which might otherwise have been termed middle class [52]
A middling sort cohered out of lived experience and social relations, through occupation, but also through other aspects of life. One attribute in particular was shared by traders, artisans and professionals. All organised their working and family lives around the small-producer household in which living and working space existed in close proximity and household members, including wives, older children, servants and apprentices, participated in both the household and business tasks. (28) The importance of such arrangements not only as empirically common actual facts but as a model for imagining society in general is suggested, as Barry notes, by the way 'the language associated with the property rights of the freeholder provided a crucial metaphor in the, constitutional criticism that was directed by early Stuart MPs towards unpopular royal policies'.(29) Keith Wrightson traces a corresponding: increase in the use of the term 'middle sort' as a category of social description in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, until the term
The image of the head of household, endued with the right to 'oeconomize', upright and reasonable and on a footing of equality with others, like himself, is clearly important to the individual as figured by Milton' and Locke. It was a figure essential to middle-class identity in the seventeenth century. As Barry observes:
Economically, the middling sort appears much more fragmented than either the poor or the landed elite. 'What they all had in common--the need to work for their income using skill and engaging in a trade or profession, rather than relying on rentier income or labouring in another's employment, was also what separated them into a thou,sand different categories. .." In consequence, cultural assumptions were vital to the reduction of potential tensions between different professions and to the reinforcement of those factors which united them.(31) This may explain why the! notion of a 'middle class' or 'bourgeoisie' retained more interpretative prestige among political theorists and literary critics than it did among historians: they' were not blithe to the evidence, but tended to be looking at different evidence, at the political and cultural work which served to cohere the potentially disparate interests historians were busy identifying. The self-image produced by this work was far from a 'mere' image. It was an idealized version of the kind of identity which middle-class men in the seventeenth century derived from their participation in a whole set of social practices whose collective nature undermines what Barry calls 'the myth of bourgeois individualism'. Rather than conceiving of themselves as atomized, it was generally recognized amongst members of the "middling sort" that "the achievement of individual aims in urban society depended on collective action, both official and voluntary, at the level of family, neighbourhood, parish, association, and the whole community'. Apparent obstacles to the formation of collective identity, such economic diversity, a possible gulf within the bourgeoisie between the elite and the rest, and the flux and mobility of urban life, in fact operated as powerful factors 'impelling the bourgeoisie towards association and ensuring its centrality in their value-systems'. There was a concern with the reinforcement of both the family and the wider community in the face of disorder of every kind. In addition to material provision, this included the promotion of a series of values seen as fundamental to the survival of urban society. Amongst the various virtues so promoted are all those qualities, such as thrift, respectability and industry, often labelled the Protestant work-ethic and seen as the foundation of individualism. We may observe not only that their success was assumed to depend on collective rather than individual action, but also that they were matched by a set of overtly collective virtues, of sociability and good fellowship. The expression of these [54]
Urban association in 'voluntary organizations' worked to ease or render comparatively unproblematic what appears to us as a conceptual tension between equality and' inequality. On the one hand, 'Fundamental to all such bodies was the notion of a common bond of fellowship --a fraternity --between members.' On the other hand, 'in a way that seems paradoxical to us, the rules and procedures usually also established hierarchies within such groups'. Such bodies tended to 'establish: an inner group of trustees, answerable in some often ill-defined sense to a wider body of members or subscribers'. Nonconformist churches became prime examples, but also 'other groups with property to administer, such as library societies or significant charities'. Thus these organizations 'reproduced the socio-economic inequalities within the bourgeoisie', but it is also important 'that the hierarchy within these organisations was justified organisationally (rather than on principle), that they brought different groups of the middling together, and that they often combined their hierarchical side with another emphasis, less often stressed by historians, on freedom and equality among and between members'. These two dimensions were held together by the notion that authority was held 'in trust', to be exercised in accordance' with agreed aims, and that the relationships within this hierarchy were 'not simple patron-client ones but ties strengthened by a sense of common, essentially voluntary, commitment to a shared cause, most' notably in the case of churches'.(33) Such an outlook is evident in Milton's early expressions of a vision of a model of church government according to which, as he puts it in Of Reformation, ministers are responsible for the 'instructing and disciplining of Gods people by whose full and free election they are consecrated to that holy and equall Aristocracy'. Despite their relatively elevated position, ministers are accountable to their congregations, whose 'free-borne members' have the right' as Christians and freeholders' to full involvement in the life of the Church, including a say in appointments to higher offices: 'he that will mould a modern Bishop into a primitive, must yeeld him to be elected by the popular voyce, undiocest, unrevenu'd, unlorded, and leave him nothing but brotherly equality, matchles temperance, frequent fasting, incessant prayer, and preaching, continual watchings, and labours in his Ministery'. As Milton affirms in ' Reason, 'every good Christian' should 'be restor'd to his right in the
Church, and not excluded from such place of spirituall government as his Christian abilities and his approved good life in the eye and testimony of the Church shall preferre him to' (CPW 1.600, 584, 600, 549, 844). These early assertions are part of the Presbyterian assault on the established Church. Accordingly, they' are written in the name of the supremacy of divine ordinance over merely human tradition, and are descriptions of the ideal workings of an organization which would not, strictly speaking, be voluntary.(34) But Milton was soon to break with the Presbyterians. As William Haller recognizes, Milton's attack on the hierarchy as it stood, whose 'pyramid aspires and sharpens to ambition, not to perfection, or unity' (CPW 1.790), embodies a far more democratic' impulse than they would have found comfortable: 'The argument for the equality of bishops and presbyters, as he presented it, based as it was upon the doctrine of the equality of all believers, came near to overriding the distinction between lay and cleric.'(35) Underpinning the worldview of the seventeenth-century bourgeoisie; was an experience and practice of a collectivist individualism which recognized that both a potential to disorder and organizing oneself with others to avoid it are natural, which effected an ongoing, dynamic integration of freedom and equality with. differences of rank, promoted cooperation in the face of forces that pulled against these ends, and: was experienced not as inevitable but as opted into by people who saw' themselves as 'fundamentally free'.(36) The discourse of natural law employed by Milton and Locke appealed above all to this urban audience. The wellspring of its moral egalitarianism was the democratic element in the social practices of the town-dwelling middle classes.(37) This was the context, made up of economically independent individuals" who nonetheless experienced themselves as a social and political collectivity, out of which arose the public sphere, that arena in which 'the private people,' come together to form a public' called on 'public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion:,(38) It is from this perspective that the political significance of events in Paradise Lost can be understood. The relation between the poem and Milton's political writings is by no means direct, since heavenly society is not really 'political'. It is made up not of men who, in the absence of authoritative access to God, must tolerate 'brotherly dissimilitudes' (Areopagitica, CPW 2.555), but of angels in His (virtually) immediate presence. The Son, in whom' all his Father shone / Substantially expressed' (PL 3.139-40), is a truly transcendental signifier. Debate in Heaven is either a pedagogical prelude to full under-standing or the clash of fixed' metaphysical positions: there is no place for the contending [56] perspectives of 'civil society'. Brought down to earth, Heaven would be a totalitarian state, but a critical reading based on such a translation would be misleading. There is no denying that on the one hand Heaven is a monarchy in which can be discerned behaviour similar to that prescribed by courtly etiquette on earth, while on the other hand Satan espouses a rhetoric of liberty against tyranny.(39) Thus Robert Fallon is able to compare God with Louis XIV, while Roger Lejosne, not the first to note that Satan's arguments sound like Milton's, describes Abdiel as 'positively Salmasian' in his support for a king appointed by God.(40) Of course, even if these alignments are taken at face value they have multiple possible significances. It has been argued that the poem demonstrates' Milton's profound commitment '(indeed, more profound than, he knew) to constitutional monarchy, and that the depiction of Satan and Hell amounts to an analysis of the faults and failures of Cromwell, the army and parliament. Alternatively, the opposite evaluations have peen made on the basis of similar interpretations of the textual 'facts'. There are those, like William Empson, who argue that Paradise Lost contains a recognition on Milton's part, at some level, that God is a tyrant, and there are various attenuated forms of Blake's assertion that Milton 'was' a true poet and of the devil's party', such as Walter Bagehot's judgement that 'though the theme of Paradise Lost obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real sympathy --the impetus and energy of his nature --sides with the rebellious element'.41 However, others have found reasons in the poem to offer interpretations of the literal meaning of Heaven and Hell which are partly or completely opposed to those on which the aforementioned readings are grounded. Joan Bennett, for instance, sees Satan as evil, and, along with Charles I, as one of 'Milton's royal portraits', while Andrew Milner's God is 'really' an abstract principle of reason underwriting an egalitarian meritocracy, and Christopher Hill, although recognizing that Heaven is a monarchy, is concerned to emphasize that part of the poem which looks forward to the time when there will be no more need of the Son's kingly sceptre since God will be 'all in all' (PL 3.341). These readings assume commonsensical evaluations of the moral standing of Heaven and Hell, and there do not seem to be any examples of drawing the opposite evaluative conclusions from this way of construing the text (that is to say, readings which argue that Satan resembles Charles and that this is evidence both of Milton's sympathy for the devil and of his retrospective sympathy with [57]
This proliferation of interpretations suggests not incompetent reading, since there is evidence to be found and reasonable arguments' to be made for most of the positions sketched out in the last paragraph, but reading directed by concerns which throw light on aspects of the political thrust of the poem which are incidental or,' if not quite incidental, then certainly epiphenomenal manifestations of what Milton; would have perceived as a deeper underlying logic. For instance, monarchical 'forms' mayor may not be rational, depending on the 'content' they' express. Such an assumption (that attention should be diverted from 'appearances' to the 'reality' or principle which 'underlies' them), while no doubt philosophically questionable, is close enough to Milton's constant intellectual practice to seem plausible as an account of his strategy. More specifically, it also mirrors the lack of concern with the form (or appearance) of government, compared with its content, generally (though not always) displayed by Milton and, indeed, by Locke.(43) Locke, nonetheless, made consent the principle of legitimate i government (in however compromised a way), while Milton, despite his' appeals to this principle in the name of good men, felt no compunction about denying it to the bad. Consent is clearly not a basis on which the governments of Heaven and Hell in Paradise Lost could be distinguished. Everyone is where he has chosen to be. Milton is concerned only with' the quality of such consent, or its content, and this, ultimately, is a question of good and evil, virtue and vice, godliness or rebellion. The real question, therefore, is not 'which side is right, which side wrong, and what kind of earthly government/political figure does it/he most resemble?' but (and the question is meant literally not rhetorically) 'Given that Milton describes God and Heaven in this way, and Satan and Hell in that way, what on earth is the significance of the poem's presentation of what may be termed political events?' If Abdiel sounds rather Royalist, and Satan a bit parliamentarian, it is reasonable to assume that Milton is aware of this, and then to ask how it might further his ends. With regard to Heaven it would seem useful to note that it is different from earth in at least two crucial respects: it is Heaven, and therefore not Earth, and it is ruled by a God who created everything we encounter in the poem. The same principles are not at stake in a realm ruled directly by God, and a monarchy, headed by a human, on postlapsarian earth. Milton condemned earthly monarchs who believed that the pattern of divine government could and should be replicated [58] on earth, disgusted at the thought of 'deifying and adoring' a king 'for nothing don that can deserve it. For what can hee more then another man?' (Readie, CPW 7.426).44 Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the more Milton emphasizes the monarchical aspect of Heaven, the more his critique of earthly kingship gains in legitimacy. Salmasius opined that, given his liability to construe kingship as tyranny, it followed that Milton must think 'God himself should be called king of tyrants and even the greatest tyrant himself.'(45) But Paradise Lost clears Milton of the implication of being, as it were, no more than the inverse of the idolater, or doter on images and outward forms, revealing that he can concede kingship where kingship is due, and thus implying that where he refuses it this 'is not the result of a rabid reflex, but because it is illegitimate. The presentation of Hell, for its part, reinforces the irrelevance of mere form (or order). What is most significant about it is that it is not chaos, and by virtue of this fact it removes de facto legitimacy from earthly order, just as Milton's refusal to make the devils ugly, and his stress on their ability to create magnificently, severs any link between virtue and earthly splendour and beauty.(46) A simply chaotic Hell might have had a rhetorical effect similar to that of Hobbes's state of nature, suggesting that order is a virtue in itself. Instead the appearance of order masks a secret chaos of passion and fear in which orators jockey for position rather than serve the truth, and sentries leave their posts when their dread commander's back is turned (PL 2.1-505, 10.420-1). What is significant in the case of Hell is not its distance from but its proximity to earthly governments of many different kinds.(47) This is not all that can usefully be said about the earthly significance of heavenly society. Satan's revolt is due to what he claims to perceive as a change in the nature of this society. Opinions differ on the nature of heavenly order. Andrew Milner has little specific to say about it, simply describing it as meritocratic, and arguing that it was precisely the remnants of feudalism inscribed in the theology of Calvinism which led to Milton's repudiation of the doctrine of predestination, citing to this effect Milton's assertion that 'God is no respecter of persons. (48) However, while not denying this it must also be noted that the form, at least, of heavenly society is such that Stevie Davies is able to argue quite convincingly that, although Milton would not have wanted such a form of social organization on earth, his Heaven is feudal, albeit in a way which demonstrates a commitment to 'the deepest meanings of human liberty and equality'. Davies's reading is one of a number which suggest that the world of Paradise Lost embodies impulses characteristic [59]
But there is less agreement about what kind of hierarchy, what kind of merit, and the ways .in which they are related, because Paradise Lost does not present the issues terribly clearly. Rank exists in Heaven. In Reason Milton describes the angels as 'distinguisht and quatemiond into 'their celestiall Princedomes, and Satrapies, according as God himselfe. ' hath writ his imperiall decrees through the great provinces of heav'n' (CPW 1.752). In Paradise Lost, Satan, who was once himself 'great in power, / In favour and pre-eminence' bows to Uriel 'low, As to superior spirits is wont in heaven, / Where honour due and reverence none neglects' (PL 5.660-1, 3.736-8). But despite the description of the angels bearing 'Standards, and gonfalons' which 'for distinction serve / Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees' (PL 5.589-91), part of a passage which Davies describes as 'self-consciously chivalric, feudal, and oldfashioned', the nature and implications of such ranks are uncertain.(50) In principle, they
could testify to a difference in nature, in the very being of the various
entities which appear before us. As Joan Bennett points out, Milton's
opposition to feudalism on earth stemmed from his belief that different
ranks of men were not different kinds of being, not from an opposition
to the notion that there could be such variety.(51) Milton was quite happy with man's dominion over animals and women. However, the ranks, of angels do not seem to be made up of different kinds of entity, something on which some clarity might be expected were it the basis of heavenly order. In fact, such evidence as there is of the heavenly hierarchy is rather vague. As Robert West puts it, 'notoriously Milton uses the terms of rank so fluidly that no one has been able to organize his use into a consistent pattern. ...Obviously Milton sometimes uses the hierarchical terms virtually without hierarchical meaning.(52) Among the characters, only Satan is really attached to the idea of pedigree so central to what we would understand by feudalism on earth.(53) Furthermore, in his prose Milton tends to find the idea of fixed and hereditary titles 'empty and vain', and asserts instead that when, in the past, such titles had meaning, it was as 'names of trust and office, and with ,the office ceasing' (Tenure, CPW 3.220). In Paradise Lost, the major angelic characters do seem to have characteristic tasks (60) fitted to their particular talents and dispositions: Uriel is a surveillance officer, Raphael a sociable ambassador (as well as teacher and adviser), Michael military commander-in-chief. As West, writes of Milton's use of the term 'archangel', he 'probably uses it to distinguish "offices", not "degrees" .(54) The issue seems insusceptible of definite resolution (which is itself a significant- fact about the poem), but an association of role and position would imply that Charles Durham's belief, referred to above, that merit supplants birthright in' the course of the poem is not only erroneous but Satanic. To have been created with certain aptitudes is not to possess a birthright but to be fitted to one's function in an order which is rational but not, given the dynamic view of creation expressed by Raphael when he holds out the prospect that Adam and Eve may be 'improved by tract of time,' and winged ascend' (PL 5.498), necessarily fixed. Given the possibility that the differences between the angels are chiefly differences, of role (which is not to say that some roles do not bring more honour than others), the fact that all the angels are peers, and the emphasis given to the voluntary nature of heavenly social order, Milton's view of heaven can be seen as a celestial projection of the social ideals and practices of the 'middle sort'.(55) What even Satan recognizes as 'heaven's free love dealt equally to all' (PL 4.68) is part of a radical middle-class vision.(56) Certainly the clearest thing about hierarchy in Paradise Lost, apart from the fact that it exists, is that its primary dramatic function is to be undercut (though not necessarily contradicted) by moral egalitarianism in order to show that the moral individual, rather than his status, is, in all senses of the phrase, the essential thing. Where you are in terms of social rank may well be an accident, or beyond your control. That you are good is your reponsibility. The poem turns not on subtle gradations of rank and etiquette, but on ultimately stark (in terms of destiny if not of definition) oppositions between reason and unreason, self-esteem and pride against God, which are further used to assert a distinction between goodness and greatness. We are- told the Son is 'good / Far more than great or high' (PL 3.310-11). As the adverbial phrase suggests, the poem goes further than affirming that the great must be good: the two qualities are revealed as separable (although, in a world with no need of poetic justice thanks to the presence of the divine variety, once the goodness has gone the greatness follows). Such issues allow more comparision between heavenly society and earth than would be possible if the former displayed a uniformity of status. Negotiations of the relation between rank and equality, and of the disjunction between goodness and greatness, would have been
(Francois Hotman's Francogallia and the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, probably by Philippe Du Plessis Mornay) that 'represented feudalism as an institution that...vested sovereignty in the nation rather than in the king', regarded the monarchy as elective, and pledged to guarantee the liberty and welfare of the people'.(58) The importance of these tracts to the development of a concept of a right to resist, and thus ultimately to Locke, has been analysed by Quentin Skinner. They represented a bid by the Huguenots, many of whose congregations were protected by local feudal magnates who had converted to Protestantism, to gain a base of support wider than they could gain an purely religious grounds, by exploiting the resentment of the hereditary nobility in general against the centralization of royal power which increasingly excluded them from government. Their response found theoretical expression in a form of constitutionalism which asserted the legal rights and freedoms of this class. Against this stood such texts as the Commentaries on the Customs ofP~n's (1639), written by Peter Du Moulin, later an adversary of Milton's in the propaganda war over the regicide. As part of an anti-feudal absolutist project, this claimed to expose 'the futile conjectures of those who sought to locate the invention and origiin of fiefs in Roman law and thus founded a new orthodoxy whose principal thrust is summarized by Skinner: All these writers decisively question the image of society as a stratified hierarchy.... The new structure which begins in consequence to emerge is recognisably that of an early modern absolutism: the feudal pyramid of legal rights and obligations is dismantled, the king is singled out as the holder of complete Imperium, and all other members of society are assigned an undifferentiated legal status as his subjects. (59) [62] However, in Paradise
Lost, it is Satan who articulates resistance in the political language
of feudalism, laying claim to a status which is unshakeably his, regardless
of what he does and how things change. The key to this
is the fact that although at times Milton may have had recourse to a
'feudal' conceptual armoury, and although he (and Locke) owed a historical
debt to this tradition, he, like Locke (and Hobbes, too) is above all
concerned with a single law for all, as opposed to the
[63]
This levelling
power is embodied in Abdiel, the seraph 'than whom none with more zeal
adored / The Deity) (PL 5.805-6), who, according to Cox, 'incessantly
returns to the theme of abstractly just law'.(63)
/ One of our number
thus reduced becomes, / His laws our laws' (PL: 51830-1, 842-4). 'His
laws our laws' is ambiguous. The dominant meaning would seem to be that
the laws he gives are theirs to keep, but it also implies that heavenly
society will be constructed as a unified field for the uniform operation
of laws which are·universal in their applicability, and given
that the context is one of'reduction', the sense that the Son will be
governed by the same laws as everyone else is also present. He will
be, as Davies puts it,'rex under lex' in a way which renders the angels
'more illustrious',"" This is quite consistent with the principles
which informed Milton's political writings. As he writes in
This meritocratic
position is typically rationalist both in its assumption of a 'just
and equal' God, and in its opposition to the haphazard and chance-ridden
processes of mere physical nature (as opposed to reason based on 'Nature,
whose works...are regular', or a recognition of the order of the world).
But it does not discount kingship on principle. As Abdiel says,'God
and nature bid the same, / When he who rules is worthiest, and excels
/ Them whom he governs' (PL 6.176-8). The most striking difference between Satan and Abdiel resides in the types of individuality they display. This is also where, despite sharing a ''rationalist' commitment to a single body of law, the poem's distance [65]
from a Hobbesian
vision becomes most manifest. Hobbes's God is to be obeyed 'not from
his Creating them [those who might disobey], as if he required obedience,
as of Gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible Power' (Lev.
397 / 187), a position implicitly refuted by Abdiel's exclamation against
Satan the 'ingrate' (PL 5.811). This overriding emphasis on power means
that the only real virtue is peaceableness, and even this is more properly
described as prudent than virtuous." As has been established, this
perspective underlies an absolutist political vision starkly opposed
to those of Milton and Locke. But it also means that when it comes to
considering heroism in literary terms Hobbes is forced to concede that,
as it were, the devil has the best tunes, or at least is able to perform
passable cover versions of them. Despite asserting that ambition is
'a fault', Hobbes concedes that it 'has somewhat Heroick in it, and
therefore must have place in an Heroick Poem'(.67) Satan, whose descriptions
of God are rather Hobbesian, characterizing Him only as powerful (for
example, as he whom 'force hath made supreme Above his equals'), and
declaring that 'To reign is worth ambition though in hell' (PL 1.248-8,262),
is the closest thing to such a hero in Paradise Lost.68 The only
way in which Abdiel's heroism could really become visible in Hobbes's
scheme of things would be if it were recoded as stemming from ambition
rather than timorous prudence. And indeed, Hobbes tended to consider
those who stand on principle as secretly seeking power and honour.(69)
But such a reading of Abdiel is discredited by association with Satan:
'well thou com'st / Before While Hobbes would
have considered Satan imprudent and irrational, he would not necessarily
have been his motives as exceptional or particularly deviant. Milton,
on the other hand, casts him to a place The Son is the
epitome of Christian heroism.(70) But his supreme sacrifice is only
foreshadowed in the form of his offer to lay down his life.(71) In Paradise
Lost and elsewhere Milton appears comparatively uninterested in
the crucifixion itself, preferring to concentrate on the principles
which underlie it.(72) Thus the markedly discursive Paradise Regained
centres not on the crucifixion and resurrection, but on the Son's temptation
as a man. A large part of the effectiveness of the poem [66] reader with the
humanity of the Son, rather than provoke a reaction of gratitude for
His divine suffering.(73) Abdiel, too, though a lesser figure, is a
potential focus for such identification.(74) Not only are we given a
character to identify with (despite the fact'that we are also told that
called a 'filial'
rather than a 'servile' fear (PL 12.305-6; see also Christian Doctrine,
CPW 6,537), an attitude of mind allowing a cheerful boldness stemming
from a conviction of righteousness. He is presented as more offended
by Satan than fearful of God, animated less by concern for Where Satan reveals
his pride and ambition, Abdiel's concern for God, reason and law and
for himself as a rational being, overrides any regard for rank. Satan,
who even after defeat recognizes only power as the difference between
himself and God, feels himself'impaired' by the elevation of the Son.
Seeking to compensatefor the damage done to his pride, Satan performs
for an audience, conjuring with the names denoting angelic orders. He
clings to these titles in response to what he feels is a threat to his
being, and, indeed, claims that they are intrinsically related to this
essence or being, when in fact he has rejected the principle which they
only represent, and on which they depend for substance and meaning.
He is so dependent on social opinion that he is, paradoxically, anti-social.(82)
Abdiel is unconcerned about the surrounding crowd and, because he stands
on principle, feels big enough to take on the vice of a great one. But,
as is shown on his return to God, he can also cooperate and congregate
joyfully with others of like mind ('gladly then he mixed' ), a possibility
parodied, since Satan is debarred from the reality by his egotism, by
the hollow shell of the name of the place on which Satan's palace stands
('the Mountain of the Congregation'). Abdiel is in a condition of liberty
by virtue of his freely chosen obedience and gratitude to the One who
gave him being, while Satan, Two epochs of the
nobility's concern for status are condensed in the figure of Satan.
On the one hand he is the vainglorious feudal baron who claims independence
from the rule of law in the face of centralization and rationalization.
That is to say, one aspect of his activity can be associated with the
defunctionalization of the knightly class that went hand in hand with
the strengthening of centralized power out of which the nation-states
of Europe eventually developed. The nobility ceased to be a semi-independent,
feudal warrior caste, becoming instead a social stratum increasingly
dependent on the state. The nobility was 'aristocratized' and 'courtized'.
Under Louis XIV, whose reign is itself
who failed to adapt,
'people whose existence and self-confidence are bound to a certain traditional
attitude...which now, in a world which has changed for uncomprehended
reasons, condemns them to On the other hand
Satan appears in a guise which Milton associated with the court. In
Eikonoklastes Milton takes up Charles I's reference to his 'honour'
and defines the dead king's meaning as 'complement, Ceremony, Court
fauning, and dissembling' in 'the language of the Courtier' (CPW 3.539).
To repeat Lawrence Stone's description of the consequences of the centralization
of the state and the enhancement of royal power which made the court
so centrally important for many, 'Not A similar vocabulary is employed in the angry exchange between Gabriel and Satan after the rebel has been discovered in the garden. Satan dismisses the 'easier business' of the loyal angels, having only 'to serve their Lord / High up in heaven, with songs to hymn his throne, / And practised distances to cringe, not fight'. In response Gabriel terms him a 'sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem / Patron of liberty' and asks
William Empson believes that this retort is 'quite enough to prove that God had already produced a very unattractive Heaven before Satan fe11'.(86) But it seems likely that Gabriel's retort is not an appropriate description (or even an unwitting revelation) of the nature of heavenly society as a whole, but is a critique of Satan's behaviour, the implication being that his obedience, unlike Abdiel's, and unlike the displays of mutual, though hierarchically organized, respect prescribed by heavenly etiquette, was 'servile' rather than 'filial' in a sense which is clarified in Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education. There, the 'slavish Temper' is born of fear and 'slavish discipline' rather than the 'Love and Friendship' which will hold the respect born initially of 'Fear and Awe'. Such a temper is disposed to obedience only when watched, an obedience [69]
born not of inner conviction and moral strength, but out of immediate expediency on the part of one who will be 'ill and wicked in private'.
The sterile self-gratification
of looking down on others is intrinsically linked to a rejection of
the happy congregation enjoyed by Abdiel on his return to the ranks
of the just. The work of Norbert
Elias usefully suggests a social explanation for the types of individuality
displayed respectively by Satan and Abdiel. Elias distinguishes between
'courtly' and 'bourgeois' milieux. He argues that the court rather than
the market was the first crucible in which a type of person was forged
whose sense of himself as an individual was a function of his self-restraint
and the reflection on himself and his behaviour that this necessitated.(88)
Only later did 'the less visible and [70]
The courtier, on the other hand, was much more dependent on his milieu. Social opinion was the`foundation of his existence.(90) Consequently, in
courtly as opposed to bourgeois society,'the awareness that this control
is exercised for social reasons is more alive. Opposing inclinations
do not yet wholly vanish from waking consciousness; self-constraint
has not yet become so completely an apparatus of habits It is true that
Satan, too, quits his milieu and decamps to the North, his physical
departure shadowing his spiritual rupture from God. But he is still
wholly concerned with his social standing, at first leaving with the
intention of returning still greater than before, and later seeking
to recreate a context - 'High on a throne of royal state' (I-'L 2.1)
- which can reflect back to him the glory he needs. His identity is
structured along courtly lines. An expert in the kind of intrigue consistently
anatomized in descriptions of court societies, his inwardness consists
not in transcendence of context but in the gap between appearance and
reality. His behaviour exemplifies
the oscillation between theatrical dissimulation and secret outburst
typical of accounts of this environment. In the case of the courtier's
self-observation, 'We are not concerned...with a religious self-observation
that contemplates the inner self as an isolated
with a view to
self-discipline in social life...he [the courtier] must know his own
passions if he is to conceal them effectively.' Calculation, rather
than sincerity, is all-important. There is little room for spontaneous
self-expression: 'affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate.
They reveal the true feelings of the person concerned to a degree that,
because not calculated, can be damaging.''" Self-control is a matter
of expediency. It is above all
this courtly context, encouraging an ever-present awareness of self-control,
which fosters the sense of 'that: complex, self-conscious, theatrical
accommbdation to the world' which Stephen Greenblatt sees as 'a characteristic
mode of modern individuality'. In Thomas More he discerns both the acutely
self-conscious creation of a public role and an intense desire to escape
it. More suffered both from the fear that behind the fictional roles
he played lay nothing, and from In the world of
Paradise Lost, where virtue has nothing to fear and therefore
nothing to hide, such a pattern of behaviour (dissimulation followed
by soliloquy, an effective act succeeded by an affective out-burst in
- as he thinks - private) characterizes the devils, and Satan above
all. Linda Gregerson remarks, 'Satan soliloquizes throughout his sojourn
in Paradise, where his function is stage villainy'" Indeed, his
soliloquy at the beginning of Book 4, possibly the first part of the
poem to have been written, was composed when Milton's intention was
to write a tragedy.(97) But in his theatricality Satan is the antagonist
not only [72] of Puritanism and
its doubts about dramatization, but of the 'middle sort' and its hostility
to courtly self-fashioning.(98) When Satan, 'Soon as midnight brought
on the dusky hour / Friendliest to sleep and silence', wakes Beelzebub
to speak to him 'in secret', reminds him of how 'Thou to me thy thoughts
/ Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart', but, after a brief
indication of his displeasure at the latest events, seems to realize
that 'More in this place / To utter is not safe' (PL 5.667-8, 672, 676-7,
682-3), the atmosphere is that of a court in which order is a matter
of force (embodied in splendour), and covers a reality of intrigue,
deception, and whispering in dark corners. It is evocative of Wyatt's
poetry, or of Versailles as described by Elias: 'Great caution was needed In his concern
for status Satan does two kinds of work in the poem, one theological,
the other political, although both are intertwined. As Defoe noticed,
no real explanation of Satan's fall is given.(100) A philosophical-cum-theological
approach, such as Kant's in his reading of Genesis, might make reference
to the radical irreducibility of the problem of primal evil. Scripture
'finds a place for evil at the creation of the world, yet not in man,
but in a spirit of an originally loftier destiny. This is the first
beginning of all evil represented as inconceiv-able by us (for whence
came evil to that spirit?).'(101) But when this fall is 'brought within
the ambit of Milton's political-cum- ideological project there is, as
it were, an explanation to be found for this lack of explanation in
the sheer folly of the high aristocrat's absolute concern with status
from the point of view of one for whom social life is either a 'private'
matter of friendship, or, as in the case of a church or other voluntary
organizations, is a matter of collective organization in the name of
some larger purpose. There is a political stopping-point on the question,
which is thus provided with finite and recognizable points of reference.
Conversely, Satan tars with the brush of primal evil much that the middle
classes had been, were, and would continue to define themselves against.
Satan's revolt is one of the forms of unreason which Although it is invisible, this principle certainly has force. In Paradise Lost proclamations of expulsion and damnation are juxtaposed with visions of community and purity in a proximity which testifies to the unthinkability of the latter without the former. As in Locke's Treatises
Michele Le Doeuff
sees a telling image for this process in the roof of the
The parallels between
this schema and that elaborated in Paradise Lost
[74]
Marcia Landy has
argued that in Milton's poem the threat of such exclusion is intended
to encourage a disposition to socially acceptable behaviour:'Given his
fierce emphasis on liberty and individualism, he had to find a psychological
mode for internalizing necessary restraints on freedom. The threat of
deviance, the fear of death and isolation, provide a proper internal
restraint.' As Landy notes, Satan is not only cast out as a deviant.
He is also subject to surveillance.'(104) Given the potential gap between
appearance and inner reality to which he testifies, the poem works to
expose hypocrisy, for which this disjunction is a precondition, to the
reader. This exposure goes
beyond presenting him as a master of the kind of misleading constructions
and false claims which characterize his rhetoric in the early books,
to include the staging of scenes in which he is revealed for his true
self. Sometimes this is enacted in quite literal terms, as when, in
what is perhaps an ironic take on the fairy-tale scenario, Ithuriel's
spear unmasks him as if it were a wand, turning him from toad into archfiend
(PL 4.810-13). More telling is the episode in which Uriel spies him
on the top of Mount Niphates. At the end of Book 3, Satan fools Uriel
with his 'Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to
God alone' (PL 3.683-4). Then, early in Book 4, Uriel sees him soliloquizing
in what might almost be private. Passion dims his face, marring the
'borrowed visage' with which he had concealed them. Soon he has once
again 'smoothed' his face 'with outward calm', And I perhaps
am secret; heaven is high, (PL 9.1888-90, 811-16) [75] Eve seems to think
of God in a manner more appropriate to an earthly monarch, who would
be dependent on spies, and who, unlike the Creator, would be, largely,
a forbidder. In similar spirit, Adam implores of his surroundings:'cover
me ye pines, / Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs / Hide me' (PL 9.1088-90).
Adam ascribes this desire to hide to his belief that should he 'behold
the face I Henceforth of God or angel', their 'heavenly shapes' would
'dazzle now this earthly' (PL 9.1080-3). In its physicalization
of his sense that he would be unable to look them in the eye, this serves
also to capture the sudden breach which has opened between celestial
and terrestrial realms. But the fact'that This inevitability
of visibility was expressed as an aspiration of social policy by Jeremy
Bentharn, whose Panopticon Papers take their epigram from the 139th
Psalm, of which their may be echoes in Adam's plea to the cedars and
pines: 'Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all
my ways. / If: I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then
shall my night be turned into day.'(106) For Foucault, Bentham's Panopticon
is the emblem of modern power, which operates
[76] For Foucault, the
Panopticon, which seeks 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious
and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power',
is a microcosm of modern society itself, which ensures its own functioning
by means of 'An inspecting gaze, a gaze Surveillance of the self is an integral part of the subject produced in Milton's texts. The kind of spying which Eve imagines should be beside the point. In Paradise Lost, man is fit to govern the other animals because, 'Self-knowing' (PL 7.510; according to the OED, the first formulation of this phrase), he is in command of himself. This self-control is conceived by Milton elsewhere as a function of an inner visibility of the self to itself. In Reason Milton asserts that, beyond the desire to appear virtuous in the eyes of others
In the Panopticon, the individual is isolated and passive: 'the side walls prevent him coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.''(108) Here, however, the self, while subject to an inner agency of discipline, is not divorced from others. It is simply that shame before them is of a less 'noble degree' because it is less independent. Earlier in the same tract, Milton proclaims that, should he fail to help further the cause of reformation with 'those few talents' God has lent him, 'I foresee what stories I should heare within my selfe, all my life after, of discourage and reproach' (CPW 1.804). It is as though Milton has internalized the social milieu in which values are established and reinforced [77] by the circulation
of opinion and the fear of shame before others, a process Foucault represents
as the 'reign of "opinion"...a mode of operation through which
power will be exercised through the mere fact of things being known
and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze'.(109)
For Foucault, such processes are responsible for the production of the
'soul', understood as 'the seat of habits',
Taken at face value,
Foucault's critique of panopticism is an attack on selfhood per se:
'subjectivity itself would seem just a form of self-incarceration; and
the question of where political resistance springs from must thus remain
obscure',"' Not only do questions of agency become problematic,
so too does the object of action. To equate the positions of'children'
and 'the colonized' is to announce an opposition to socialization in
general. In his later books, however, Foucault's position is clarified
somewhat. His object is not subjectivity tout court but 'a mode of subjection
in the form of obedience to a general law' which is one form of the
Christian legacy in Western modernity.(112) For many, [78]
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