Godly versus Satanic
Happiness in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Two conflicting modes of living—happiness pursued obediently (Godly)
versus happiness pursued disobediently (Satanic)—produce persistent problems
with conceptions of free will in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Godly mode of happiness recognises that one is
free to choose their path to human happiness, but only within God’s bounds; the
Satanic mode of happiness recognises that one is entitled to human happiness,
but not limited by God’s bounds. It is the relationship between these two modes
of living that reveals a Miltonic paradox—free to choose human happiness but
only within bounds—that continues to resist resolution by the poem’s end. This
essay will explore Milton’s paradox of free will through narrowing
investigation down to the most pivotal figure of disobedience within Milton’s
didactic project—Eve—through tracking her transgression of God’s bounds in the
pursuit of her own human happiness. The result of such an investigation reveals
a catalogue of contradictions that undermine Milton’s claims to explain and
justify the actions and commandments of a perfect but limiting God.
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Happy though thou art,
Happier
thou may’st be,
For the modern reader, the essence of Satan’s
argument quoted as epigraph strikes a familiar note because it sounds like a
distillation of our own common motivations for good living. Satan’s argument is
built on the seemingly modern notion that humans are entitled to happiness
without bounds; an entitlement driven by an endless restlessness in need of a
cure that can only be delivered with the chimerical perfection of humanity.
John Milton’s argument, on the other hand, is built on the seemingly limiting
notion that humans are entitled to happiness only within God’s bounds; an
entitlement shaped by an authority that grants the cure to an essentially
submissive humanity. It is the conflict created between these two opposing
modes of happiness—happiness pursued obediently versus happiness pursued disobediently—that
will be scrutinised within this essay’s investigation of Paradise Lost (PL).
Particular attention will be directed toward the temptation and fall of Eve—arguably
the most pivotal figure of disobedience within Milton’s didactic project—in
order to narrow discussion down to the allegorical implications of human
transgression committed in the pursuit of happiness. Such a focus exposes a
persistent problem with Miltonic conceptions of free will—free to choose but
only within bounds—revealing itself as a paradox that continues to resist
resolution by the poem’s end. This paradox of free will is by no means unique
to PL, but more an inherent feature of Milton’s theology that causes
problems for the consistency of his message found throughout his poetry and polemical
prose. For the purpose of this essay, such a paradox is interpreted as a result
of the conflict created between obedient and disobedient modes of pursuing
happiness in PL.
It has become a critical
commonplace in any assessment of PL to flag the problem of distance
between the era of Milton and that of the modern reader as a potential
inhibitor to any thoroughgoing assessment of Milton’s work. In an attempt to
avoid such a pitfall this essay will incorporate C. S. Lewis’s famous pragmatic
suggestion that we should ‘plunge right into [Milton’s] world as if we believed
it’, since ‘Milton’s thought when purged of its theology does not exist’.[2]
Literally, Lewis wants neophytes and novitiates to approach PL with a
sound grasp of Milton’s theology as it is set down in his polemical tracts and
treatises; figuratively, this must entail a trying-on of Milton’s clothes to
help us ‘judge the work in the same spirit that its author writ’.[3]
Inhabiting the body and consciousness of a seventeenth-century Protestant
polemicist is Lewis’s suggested approach here, if only to gain access to contemporaneous
insights that facilitate a better appreciation of PL on its own terms.
With Lewis’s prompting in mind, key points within this essay will be buttressed
with excerpts drawn from Milton’s Areopagitica, Of Education, and The Reason of Church Government, all
of which exhibit clear indications of Milton’s theology and hold the key to
enabling a fuller grasp of PL’s
polemical import.[4]
Milton’s expressed
rationale for his poem is to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, but it should be
acknowledged that Milton writes with an agenda that goes well beyond the aims
set down in the opening lines of PL. Audience edification is the
subtextual aim for Milton, and the poetic form serves him well in this respect,
not only as the most effective means of mass communication available to him
under the Licensing Order of 1643, but also as one of the preferred literary
forms for any Renaissance moralist wanting to direct his readers toward the
highest end. For Milton, ‘doctrinal and exemplary’ is the quality of writing he
wants to present, and ‘honour and instruction of [his] country’ is the effect he
wants to achieve.[5] Such
aims for the long-term betterment of an audience have long been associated with
poetry’s purported potential to instruct and delight its audience. It is a common
enough principle passed down to us from Renaissance theorists who commonly
regarded poetry as a form of expression well-established as a ‘pedagogue of ethics,
politics, and theology’; a function promoted and practised in the works of
classicists such as Horace, through to neo-classicists such as Edmund Spenser.[6] We
find one example of Milton’s support for poetry’s didactic potential in his
conspicuous approval of that ‘sage and serious poet Spenser’, whom he views as
a ‘better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’.[7] In Milton’s opinion, The Faerie Queene’s ‘survey
of vice’ through the figure of Guyon is the best teacher of the virtue of ‘true
temperance’.[8] Milton
here is specifically promoting Spenser’s use of allegorical example as ‘better’ than ‘reading all manner
of tractates’, since an uncritical consumption of dogma from those tracts merely
leaves a ‘cloistered’ virtue ‘unexercised’ by the faculty of reason.[9]
Such an attitude toward
the instructive role of poetry, with its ability to refine faith through the
sharpening of audience reason, goes some way to explain Milton’s titanic effort
to deliver a poem that compels readers to revisit the work, again and again, in
order to clarify their own interpretations of his allegory. It is through this
ceaseless reassessment of the poem that Milton aims to purify his audience
through the continual ‘trial’ and ‘scanning of error to the confirmation of
truth’.[10]
The trial of Eve in PL is a case in point and exemplary of the kind of
teaching-by-example that Milton’s prose promotes. Satan’s success in diverting
Eve from God’s way—by steering her through an episode of extended deliberation
toward transgression and eventual expulsion from that seemingly happy
Paradise—represents Milton’s overarching lesson in disobedience-by-example. His
lesson hinges on Eve’s enjoyment and loss of an exalted form of happiness
(prelapsarian beatitude); a quality of life originally bestowed through God's
benevolence, and contingent upon obedience to his injunction not to eat fruit
from a forbidden tree. Herein lies the problem for Eve, for as we discover,
Eve’s dissatisfaction with beatific life allows Satan to direct her discontent
toward the supposed empowering qualities of the prohibited fruit. It is Satan’s
very reasoning with Eve that exposes a prolonged tension between modes of happiness
pursued obediently and disobediently within PL.
This tension requires detailed analysis as a first step to better understanding
the paradox of free will that results.
We can situate Satan’s
intriguing penetration of Eve’s dream as his first attempt to lead her toward
any serious contemplation of transgression, and it is deserving of our
attention due to the insight it gives into Satanic notions of happiness. During
the dream, Satan accesses an unguarded, sleeping Eve, as he squats ‘like a toad
close at [her] ear’, allowing him to present a number of arguments sotto voce that challenge Eve’s
enjoyment of Paradisal beatitude (4.800). Satan’s grounds for transgression will
be assessed in sequential order as they appear in Eve’s dream. First, Satan
tries to foster anthropocentricism in Eve with his appeal to her as the centre
of all that is valuable in Paradise. He suggests that all of the beauty bestowed
by God in the natural surroundings is valueless without the presence of Eve’s
gaze. For Satan, nature exists ‘in vain if none regard’—thereby marking Satan’s
first attempt to inflate Eve’s sense of self-worth to that of a human god
(5.44). Second, Satan directs Eve’s attention to the apparent wisdom-giving
qualities of the ‘Tree of Interdicted Knowledge’ (5.22). She is urged to ease
the overabundance of knowledge that sits waiting to be plucked by ‘god [or] man’—thereby
marking Satan’s democratic insistence that Eve is entitled to participate
equally in wisdom with the gods (5.60). Third, Satan casts doubt on Eve’s
current state of happiness in suggesting she will be happier once she attains
god-like wisdom from the fruit. He proposes that Eve will be ‘happier’ when she
can metaphorically live ‘among the gods…
not to earth confined’, if only she had the chance to enjoy the knowledge she
rightly deserves—thereby marking Satan’s interrogation of Eve’s Paradisal
happiness in the service of kindling her curiosity to know more like a god
(5.75-8).
To sum-up Satan’s case, we
can see that a high level of self-worth, leading to an inflated sense of
entitlement, teamed with limitless curiosity, are the key attitudes that he
tries to induce in Eve to fuel her disobedient pursuit of an imaginary form of
happiness. All of these motivations are familiar in that they resemble the key
drivers of humanity’s universal restlessness that have come to surface in every
age. As Darrin M. McMahon reminds us, we only have to look to our own modern
creed that cries out ‘we can be happy, we will be happy, we should be happy’.[11] So
it follows that pride, and entitlement, both of which kindle the curiosity to
push forward in our never ending projects of self-improvement, appear as the three
most familiar traits of modernity’s pursuit of happiness, and we have seen that
all three traits are captured so succinctly within Satan’s arguments presented
in Eve’s dream. Yet all three traits are treated as undesirable within PL, and ought to be curbed by the
presence of Milton’s God—whose presence is in all things—or glutted in his
precepts. If we turn momentarily to the closing books of PL, we quickly learn that Milton’s chief lesson for his audience is
that ‘God whom to behold’ represents the ‘heighth of happiness’ (10.724-25). This lesson in repression culminates
in the denouement when Adam finally learns that he should ‘hope no higher’ than
God’s limits because it is the height of ‘folly to aspire’ outside those limits
(12.576, 12.560). We can see then, that Milton’s God and his offerings, whether
in the natural world or in his commandments, are presented as the sweeping cure
for humanity’s restless pursuit of happiness. Clearly, in light of these doctrines
set out so explicitly in the final books of PL,
Eve’s dream is just one chapter contributing to Milton’s overarching lesson
against humanity’s aspiration for a form of happiness that escapes the
authority of God.
Looking at the narrative
structure of PL, we can see the dream episode performs a number of functions within
the plot. First, it provides in microcosm a rehearsal of Satan’s arguments that
he will further expand on later in the narrative during his successful
temptation of Eve when she is awake and fully conscious. Second, it allows
Milton to show his audience that Satan cannot influence Eve toward
transgression without the consent of her will that is left sitting
out-of-action while she sleeps. The work of Diana Trevino Benet is helpful here
for assessing the status of Eve’s will during the dream. She notes that any
‘notion that Satan could infect the unconscious [Eve] with sin runs
counter to the linchpin of Milton’s moral philosophy’; a philosophy that places
so much value on free will to accept or reject sin [emphasis added].[12] We
can locate a correlative comment on this very principle within Milton’s prose
that supports Benet’s conclusion about Eve’s innocence. Milton says ‘to the
pure... the knowledge cannot defile... if the will and conscience be not
defiled’.[13] If we
interpret Eve’s dream in line with Milton’s thought, we can conclude that
Satan’s attempt to instill disobedience in Eve fails because her will does not
have the chance to assess his arguments for transgression. One indication that
Satan fails to sway Eve is that she feels ‘glad’ to have ‘waked to find
[Satan’s reasoning] but a dream’—not a lived reality with real consequences
(5.92). It necessarily follows that Eve does not approve of Satan’s sinful
suggestions. Such a conclusion finds additional support in Eve’s memory of the
dream as possible ‘trouble’ when she
wakes, which gives a strong indication that she is still ‘innocent’ after the
dream, and can still enjoy her ‘happy state’ with Adam whom she still
recognises as her ‘glory’ and ‘perfection’—a sentiment marking obedience that
befits her station in God’s order (5.96, 5.209, 5.234, 5.29).
According to Peter A.
Fiore, Eve’s dream dramatises the operation of an Augustinian principle that
identifies ‘deliberation of the will’ as a necessary and constituting part of
‘the very essence of sin’.[14]
As we have just seen, Eve’s dream with its sinful associations does not involve
the operation of her will, leading us to conclude at this point in the
narrative that she has not yet sinned. Deliberation of the will plays an
essential role in maintaining Eve’s Augustinian integrity. Her integrity is
represented by Milton as a preternatural gift bestowed on Eve that grants her freedom
from concupiscence (sin); a freedom that can only be maintained ‘with the
dictates of [her] reason’.[15]
Fiore reminds us that Eve’s potential to sin through concupiscence encompasses
not only the pressure of ‘fleshly desire’, but also ‘any and every motion or
impulse of the lower faculties or appetites’
not governed by reason [emphasis added].[16] If
we turn our attention now to Milton’s various depictions of humanity’s appetitive
pursuit of happiness, we see he uses a selection of metaphors similar to those
used by Augustine in The Happy Life
to describe humanity’s appetitive drive for happiness.[17] For
Milton, the bodily effects of thirst and hunger are repeatedly used to convey
the drive for happiness; for Augustine, the essential drives of thirst and
hunger are similarly shown as embodiments of an elemental yearning for
happiness. Augustine describes the unhappy as ‘hungry and famished’ in their pursuit
of ‘nutrition’.[18] They
are driven by an appetite that can only be satisfied through the attainment of
‘understanding and knowledge’.[19] We
quickly detect these Augustinian metaphors when we shift our focus back to Eve’s dream and notice that
Satan presents the forbidden fruit as a sure avenue to happiness, with its own overpowering
appeal emitted via a ‘savory smell’ that ‘quicken[s]’ Eve’s ‘appetite’ almost
tipping her toward tasting the fruit (5.84, 5.85). In the hands of Satan, this
lure of god-like knowledge is presented as tapping into an essential human
drive, like hunger, for a higher form of happiness. Extending this metaphor to
its extreme, Eve later yields to her pressing hunger when ‘greedily she
engorge[s]’ the fruit ‘without restraint’ while ‘nor was godhead from her
thought’ (9.791, 9.790). These descriptions show that Satan’s eventual corruption
of Eve weakens her will to such an extent that she can no longer govern her
appetite. Consequently, she falls into the sin of concupiscence led by an
unbridled will to know more like a god in her disobedient pursuit of an
illusory path to a happier life. The chief lesson for Milton’s audience is
found in Eve’s punishment by expulsion from Paradise; a punishment for
deliberately choosing a path that breached God’s bounds.
Looking more broadly now at
how Eve’s disobedience is figured throughout PL, John. K Hale is helpful in turning our attention to Milton’s
use of voice—whether it be Satan’s, Adam’s, or God’s—for directing Eve during
key episodes of her development.[20]
Hale identifies the word voice as one
of the ‘major words’ that ‘lead us to the centre’ of the poem’s highly unified
narrative.[21] He does
this through highlighting Leo Spitzer’s discussion of the ‘philological circle’
in order to trace how the word voice steers
the reader in a cyclical movement through the poem.[22] Put
briefly: at every instance of encountering the word voice, we are forced to oscillate our attention between episodic
detail and the poem as a whole, all with the aim of building a more
comprehensive interpretation of the word as our reading progresses.[23]
This observation rings true in our reading of PL when we recollect the various influences of voice on Eve’s treacherous
trajectory: first, Eve’s dangerous fixation on her reflected image in the lake
is broken by God’s warning ‘voice’ just hours after she is first created
(4.463); second, Eve is then ‘guided’ by God’s ‘voice’ alone toward Adam to
whom she should direct her gaze (8.484); third, Satan’s ‘gentle voice’ calls
Eve to join him on a tempting nocturnal excursion foreshadowing serious
consequences for Eve later in the narrative (5.37); fourth, Satan’s sophistic ‘voice’
makes its way ‘into the heart of Eve’ ultimately causing her fall (9.550);
fifth, ‘the voice of God’ brings Eve’s ‘ears’ to attention in anticipation of
God’s judgement (10.97, 10.99). At each instance Eve has to decide whether to
heed what the voice is telling her, and at each instance the voice represents a
test of her obedience to God. To gain a richer, trans-historical interpretation
of the word voice as it is used in
these key episodes, Hale shows us that it is helpful to look at the etymology
of the related verb to hear, which is
found to be derived from Latin oboedire (to
obey).[24]
Hale does not go so far as to suggest Milton is intentionally restoring this
Latin meaning for his audience, but Hale does use the etymology to remind us of the relevant Biblical
commandment set down in Exodus that
instructs believers to ‘diligently hearken
to the voice of the Lord thy God
[emphasis added]’.[25] This
added etymological information helps us interpret Milton’s various uses of voice as contributing to one grand
lesson for his audience—who would be familiar with the Biblical quotation—that
they should always ‘give’ their ‘ear to [God’s] commandments’ (Exodus 15:26). This precept is effectively conveyed through Eve’s conduct in
her successes and failures to listen correctly to the voices she
encounters. Through viewing Eve as
Milton’s chief figure of disobedience in his didactic project, we can track her
eventual fall as a clear demonstration of how an incorrect hearing of Satan’s
convoluted arguments beguiles her into thinking a breach of God’s bounds will
bring her happiness.
It is instructive to look
at how other creation myths explain humanity’s elemental yearning for happiness,
if only to prosecute a better critique of the restlessness that lies at the
heart of Eve’s disobedience. David
Malouf is helpful in this respect for turning our attention to the role of
Epimetheus and Prometheus in the creation myth recounted in Plato’s Protagoras. In this genesis story,
Epimetheus is given the task of assigning various ‘powers’—including ‘strength’,
‘speed’, ‘flight’, ‘size’, and ‘protection’—to all ‘non-rational creatures’, only
to find that once he has finished the task there are no other powers left to
assign ‘human kind’.[26]
Man is left ‘naked and unshod without any covering for his head or any fangs or
claws’, leaving him weaker than the animals.[27] To
make up for the deficiency in man, Prometheus gives man the ‘skill’ to ‘use
fire’ as a means of self-preservation, thereby aligning man with the gods in
his enjoyment and exploitation of such a ‘divine gift’.[28]
This new skill gives man the ‘practical art’ to cultivate food, and produce
clothing and housing for the benefit of his protection and survival.[29]
The advantage man gains over animals is through his ability to create
solutions—through curiosity, ingenuity, productivity—that help overcome his
inherent weaknesses. Malouf rightly observes that in this narrative the restlessness
that drives human innovation can be interpreted as a strength in man, since it
allows him to become the ‘shaper of his world, of his environment and
conditions’.[30] Man can
be the figurative author of himself when granted such agency. When we compare
this story to the myth of creation recounted by Raphael in PL, we are left with a markedly more passive picture of man.
Raphael recounts that ‘on the sixth day’ man was created as the ‘master work’
and ‘endued with reason’ in the image of God (7.504-510). At the centre of this
creation myth is the emphatic reminder that man should be ‘grateful’ and ‘acknowledge’
God from ‘whence his good descends’, with the added encouragement to direct his
‘heart and voice and eyes’ upward ‘in devotion to adore and worship God
supreme’ (7.512-515). In this story, God is the figurative author of man, and
man should repeatedly show signs of obeisance acknowledging this fact. As for
man’s agency, he is left little when he is told that he will be ‘thrice happy’
when he is content ‘in all the earth yields’, and that he should best spend his
time ‘to dwell and worship’ God and ‘multiply a race of worshippers’ (7.625-630).
Through the juxtaposition of these two creation myths, we see in PL that there is little promotion of the
kind of human ingenuity that is described in Protagoras.
We quickly learn from such
a comparison that Milton invests much confidence in the ability of God to curb
and sufficiently satisfy humanity’s hunger to make, create, and innovate. In
the hands of Milton, God is presented as the great ‘nourisher’, with a power to
satisfy humanity’s restlessness (5.398). This purported power can be detected
in the genial features of Paradise offering the utmost variety in ‘all trees of noblest kind for sight,
smell, taste’, ‘flowers of all hue’,
food ‘the choice of all tastes’, and
generally ‘all sorts... variety
without end’ (emphasis added) (4.215, 4.254, 7.40, 7.54). The common feature in
these descriptions is the capping of variety that is signified by the
ever-present, all-encompassing, adjectival all,
which indicates there is no room for more variation or improvement in Paradise.
All of God’s subjects must be content with the variety nature offers, and they
are instructed to ‘enjoy [their fill] what happiness this happy state’ can
offer ‘incapable of more’ (5.503). Paradisal contentment appears unsustainable
if we consider for a moment the eventual dissatisfaction Eve will experience in
that ‘narrow room [of] nature’s whole wealth’ (4.207). E. M. W. Tillyard
suggests such confining conditions ‘provide no adequate scope for [Adam and
Eve’s] active natures’.[31]
This poses a problem for Milton’s message, since his portrait of beatitude sits
at odds with what Tillyard calls the ‘primal requirements of the human mind’.[32]
When Tillyard talks of the primal he is surely referring to humanity’s drive
toward perfection that would ultimately trigger Eve’s curiosity to develop methods
to produce, for instance, the seedless watermelon, SPF50+ sunscreen, or
synthetic contraception—all promising to facilitate a seemingly more easeful
existence in her pocket of Eden. But God’s plan doesn’t allow for such human
innovation. In an enlightening exercise in turning the fruits of Milton’s
imagination back onto himself, Tillyard envisions that ‘Milton, stranded in his
own Paradise, would very soon have eaten the apple... and immediately justified
the act in a polemical pamphlet’ since ‘any genuine activity would be better
than utter stagnation’.[33]
It appears then, that the static features of Milton’s Paradise provide yet
another example of the tension between the propensity of humanity to progress
in its pursuit of happiness and the propensity of God to cap that potential to
progress. The problem of course is revealed in Milton’s varied descriptions of
God-ordained Paradise with its infinite offerings—‘I am who fill infinitude’
(7.168). The result produces a paradox that suggests any purported infinite variety
in Paradise is in effect made finite by the authoring presence and perpetual prescription
of a God who limits such variety.
Adam comes to understand
such limits in the closing book of PL
when he is ‘greatly instructed’ to ‘sole depend’ on God for the ‘fill of
knowledge’ that he ‘can contain’ (12.558, 12.564). This is yet again another
example of Milton deploying Augustinian metaphors to represent God as a ‘fountain
of truth’ providing the primary source of satiety for his audience.[34]
Such a lesson for Milton’s audience leaves little freedom to seek happiness
outside the limits imposed by God—who is figured as the end of perfection—which
could be viewed as problematic for Milton’s project if we take into account
humanity’s incessant pursuit of perfection throughout history. Malouf directs
our attention to Marquis de Condorcet’s Outlines
of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, which interprets
history up until the late eighteenth century as a slow, intensifying ‘march of
understanding’, revealing our inherent inability to recognise any ‘limits’ to
our own hopes for perfection.[35]
Indeed, Condorcet reminds us that there will never be a limit to these hopes
‘but the absolute perfection of the human species’.[36]
His survey has particular relevance for our inquiry since he suggests
humanity’s pursuit of perfection has always been synonymous with its pursuit of
happiness. What we take from Condorcet’s study of progress is the historically
informed notion that humans will always be under the dominion of an unappeased
irritation to always move toward some imagined form of perfection. With this general
assessment of humanity in mind, Milton’s scheme appears lacking in its failure
to recognise that the limiting principles of God, and his limited offerings in
nature, cannot be considered sufficient to satisfy the inherent, and arguably
enduring, restlessness of humanity. We can additionally say that Milton doubly
fails when his scheme instills guilt or shame in his audience—through the
example of Eve—for their pursuit of perfection undertaken with the aim of
attaining a version of happiness that is illusory or otherwise. Milton’s failure
sits at the heart of this unresolved conflict between representations of
happiness pursued obediently and disobediently within PL.
Turning to yet another permutation
of such tension, we shift our focus to Milton’s well-established reputation as
a champion of freedom. His defence of the civil virtues of reading have played
a significant role in shaping such a reputation, especially in his urging that
everyone should be given ‘the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all liberties’.[37]
Indeed, the high value Milton places on a person’s faculty of reason in their
enjoyment of freedom is exemplified through the example of Eve’s correct use
and misuse of such reason in the choices she makes throughout PL. Milton reinforces this point repeatedly
when he reminds his audience that ‘God [chooses] not to captivate [them] under
a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts [them] with the gift of reason
to be [their] own chooser’.[38]
Yet the precepts set down by Milton’s God limits the very nature and number of
choices passable under the scrutiny of his audience’s well-exercised reason,
since all action and thought, according to Milton, should be centred on ‘the
highest perfection’ of God.[39]
For Milton, this steady gaze on God should lead his audience to ‘love’, ‘imitate’,
and ‘be like’ God.[40]
In Milton’s paradox of free will, God sets the standard of action and thought,
leaving humanity to direct their course within the limits of that standard. Put
another way, humanity is left with the task of colouring in between the lines
of a picture of life that is drawn by the creator in his colouring-in
book—surely an apt vision of infancy that rebuts any claim that humans are
treated as anything but children under Milton’s theology. Indeed, there is
enough evidence within PL depicting
God’s supernal and terrestrial subjects as existing under the care of a
guardian who is figured as their ‘parent’ and ‘eternal father’ (5.153, 7.504).
Yet this aspect of existence for God’s subjects appears to be mocked by Milton’s
insistence that they should see themselves as ‘lords of the world’, ‘lords of all’, and ‘over all other creatures’ (1.32, 4.288, 4.429). Herein lies another
instance of that familiar conflict we repeatedly find between the will of God
and the will of God’s subjects that continually escapes resolution throughout PL and Milton’s polemical prose.
All in all, we are left
with an image of Milton that is riddled with a myriad of contradictions
surrounding his conception of free will. On the one hand, a person’s faculty of
reason is put forth as a function of the freedom that every person is entitled
to enjoy under Milton’s God; yet that very faculty of reason is required to
operate within the God-ordained bounds of faith, thereby limiting the essential
but wandering nature of humanity in its pursuit of an illusory form of
perfection promising happiness. We might better think of free will for Milton
in this respect as working with blinkers that are operated first by Milton
himself through his well-reasoned examples published for the education of his
audience, and second by his God in the commandments of faith delivered to that
audience as guides to good—albeit curbed—living. This essay is by no means
putting forward a meliorist approach to the general movement of humanity
through history and beyond, and it certainly is not within the scope of this
essay to assess the benefits or otherwise of anything that might be described
as humanity’s progress. What this essay is putting forward is an interrogation
of the paradox of free will that sits at the centre of a poem that claims to
explain and justify the actions and commandments of a perfect but limiting God.
We must remember that Milton lauds the ability of a poem to help his readers
‘apprehend and consider vice with all [its] baits and seeming pleasures, and
yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better’.[41] But
what is ‘truly better’ is dictated by Milton’s God and herein lies the paradox
of free will—free to choose but only within God’s bounds. After such an interrogation
we are left with the conclusion that God’s chief detractor, Satan, appears to
have a sounder grasp of humanity’s restless and disobedient nature when
compared to the prescriptive and hierarchical nature of Milton’s God. If
posterity is considered the only true judge of a poem’s value, then it is
surely the figure of Satan, and more importantly the essence of his argument
quoted in introduction to this essay, that contributes to any assessment of PL as an enduring epic carrying lasting
relevance for successive generations of readers to come.
[1] Paradise Lost: John Milton, ed. Gordon Teskey
(New York, 2005).
[2] Lewis,
C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost (New
York, 1961), 65.
[3] Lewis,
64.
[4] Areopagitica and The Reason of Church Government (Reason) from Paradise Lost: John Milton, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York, 2005); Of Education (Education) from John Milton ed. Stephen Orgel and
Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford, 1991).
[5] Reason, 335-6.
[6]
Steadman, John M. ‘Felicity and End in Renaissance Epic and Ethics’, Journal of History and Ideas, 23.1
(1962), 117.
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