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Theodicies
This essay joins the chorus of those from Blake to Tillyard and beyond
who have seen Paradise Lost as a poem deeply divided against itself.1 The
essay is not a “Satanist” reading, although it does adopt a number of
premises of the “Satanist” view. It adopts Blake’s idea that Milton wrote
“in fetters” of God and the good angels, and it will adopt Shelley’s view of
Heaven and Hell in the poem as, in a sense, morally equivalent.2 It will try
to address Empson’s feeling that even though the Shelleyan view is true, it
“leaves the mind unsatisfied” because, in holding it, one “becomes so baf-
fled in trying to imagine how Milton came to write as he did.”3 The most
problematic and unsatisfactory aspects of the poem will be seen as flowing
directly from Milton’s conscious and articulated intentions: to show God
to be good, or at least, not to be wicked. Where I differ from many other
critics is that while they think that the aesthetic (and religious) success of
the poem depends on the success of its theodicy,4 I think that the attempt
at theodicy – whether one regards it as successful or not – produces most
of the aesthetic and religious failures of the poem. I see the great aesthetic
and religious success of the poem, where Milton wrote without fetters, as
being in an area free of the Great Argument: the presentation of Eden and
of unfallen human life within it.
Portions of this essay appeared in “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better than Heaven,” in Michael
Lieb and Albert Labriola (eds.), “John Milton: the Author in His Works,” Milton Studies 38 (2000),
169–97, and are here reproduced with permission from Duquesne University Press. The current ver-
sion is updated and revised.
25
Satan seems to have a clear and recognizable sense of himself. The discon-
tented courtier, servant, or military figure suffering from “sense of injur’d
merit” was a familiar figure in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – think of
Bosola, Iago, or Coriolanus. We know how complex these figures can be.
We do (or should) immediately recognize that we are witnessing here one
of these complex portrayals. The challenge the poem is setting for itself is
not in Satan’s self-description but in his portrayal of God.
For Satan, God is “the Potent Victor”; he sees God’s only attribute
(aside from wrath) as power.20 For this, God desires to be worshipped
(that others “bow … / … and deifie his power” [1.111–12]). This character-
ization continues throughout Book 1. In Satan’s third speech, he presents
a completely Nominalist view of God: through power, God “can dispose
and bid / What shall be right” (1.246–7). The whole situation is entirely
a product of power – “Whom reason hath equald, force hath made
supream” (1.248). Satan’s insistence on his unchanged mind is part of his
recognition of the limits of physical coercion. The picture of God that the
fallen angels consistently present is of a sadistic, vindictive, and implac-
able conqueror who takes pleasure in their suffering. They see God’s con-
sciousness as exactly parallel to their own: “tearms of peace” have been
neither “Voutsaf ’t or sought” (2.331–2). The key point, again, is not “none
… sought” but “none / Voutsaf ’t.” The challenge that Milton has set for
All the major verbs here denote divine action – “begot … declare …
anointed … appoint.” The responses of the angels are commanded –
“shall bow / All knees … and shall confess.” The next lines attempt to
present this event as beneficent toward the angels – “Under his great
Vice-gerent Reign abide / United as one individual Soule / For ever hap-
pie” (5.609–11) – but this vision is still governed (not just grammatically)
by an imperative (“abide”), and is, in any case, quite obscure. Rather
than explicating this benevolent command, God immediately turns to
a warning in which only Milton’s Latinate treatment of English keeps
the focus on the Son rather than on the wicked (“Him who disobeyes /
Mee disobeyes” [5.611–12]), and then to a detailed, terrifying threat: “Cast
out … / Into utter darkness … / without end” (5.613–15). I do not mean
to suggest that Satan’s response to this speech, “envie against the Son of
God, that day / Honourd” (5.662–3), is an admirable one. But I do mean
to suggest that his specific claim, “new Laws thou seest impos’d” (5.679),
is true; and that the lie he tells – “I am to haste / … Homeward … / …
there to prepare / Fit entertainment to receive our King” (5.686–90) – is
plausible.
The only answer to Lucifer/Satan’s account in Book 5 is Abdiel’s. He
accuses Satan of ingratitude – given Satan’s high and favored position
in Heaven – and then asks the great Job-like Nominalist–Reformation
question, “Shalt thou give Law to God …?” (5.822). Luther or Calvin
could leave the matter there, but Milton cannot. Abdiel then argues that
the angels have abundant evidence of God’s beneficence, and notes that
God in fact proclaimed beneficence to them in the “Under his … Vice-
gerent … abide / United” lines. After producing another argument from
power – the Son was the instrument of God’s Creation of “All things, ev’n
This argument is clearly hard going, since the key line – “One of our num-
ber thus reduc’t becomes” – is, even by Miltonic standards, contorted.
The idea seems to be that the Son, by becoming the “Head” of angels,
is “reduced” to being one of them, which in turn raises the status of the
angels. This is tricky, and the next lines sound like a sophistical argument
for how special treatment of one member of a group is not special treat-
ment (“all honour to him done / Returns our own”).
What is central, however, is not the claim that the Son’s exaltation ben-
efits the angels but the claim that the exaltation is rational. Satan and his
followers must be seen as refusing not an arbitrary decree but reason. God
implies this in asserting that the Son “by right of merit Reigns” (6.43).
In perhaps the most important speech in Book 6, Abdiel explains that
there is a difference between service and servitude, and that it cannot be
servitude to serve one who is objectively worthier (6.174–8). Much in
Greek philosophy supports this view,22 but the question remains as to in
what does the Son’s objective worth (“merit”) consist. This was putatively
demonstrated in Book 3 – though there is a specious quality to the Son’s
unnecessary heroism (a “heavenly” parallel to Satan’s heroism in Book 2) –
but it is important to recognize that the events of Books 2 and 3 follow
those narrated in Books 5 and 6, so an event dramatized in Book 3, what-
ever its status, cannot be used in relation to Satan’s earlier actions.23 The
issue of merit, moreover, was not even mentioned in the key passage in
Book 5, the Exaltation quoted above.
God, in Book 5, speaks of Satan intending “to try / In battel, what
our Power is, or our right” (5.727–8), a line that leaves the two abstrac-
tions uneasily related, with “right” appearing almost as an afterthought.24
In Book 6, after the (I do not believe intentionally grotesque) Sturm
und Drang of the war between the angels,25 God decides “To honour his
Anointed Son” (6.676) by having him end the war:
that the Glorie may be thine
Of ending this great Warr, since none but Thou
This is another brilliant but desperate maneuver. The “might equals right”
perspective that has dominated this entire section of the poem is pre-
sented, retroactively, as a kind of accommodation to the diabolical per-
spective – which it does not, in any case, accurately capture, since the
fallen angels seem, in fact, to appreciate many kinds of “excellence” (as in
the account of their music-making, athletic contests, and philosophical
discussions in Book 2 [528ff.]). In the final lines of Raphael’s narrative,
moreover, the “Saints,” meaning the good angels, are presented as seeing
the Son’s military triumph as what proves him to be “Worthiest to Reign”
(6.882, 888).27 Milton cannot keep this framework demonic.
As the impersonal syntax here suggests, this does not seem to be a moment
of choice or will on anyone’s part. It seems merely to happen – “while God
spake … fragrance fill’d” – and the agent of the “Sense of new joy” in the
“Spirits elect” is the fragrance itself.35
The angels simply respond to what is “diffus’d” into them. Milton
knows the importance of such moments, but his ideological framework
does not allow him to give them much value. As in On Christian Doctrine,
this is true even in high metaphysical and ontological moments. In speak-
ing of creating the cosmos, God explains (as Raphael reports):
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I uncircumscrib’d my self retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not, Necessitie and Chance
Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate.
(7.168–73)
In this context, the fact that this “vertue” is of the power rather than the
moral sort makes it more, rather than less, benign. The account in Book
7 of the Creation of the non-human cosmos happily celebrates “vital ver-
tue” and benign natural processes like fermentation and generation (7.236,
281, 387).40 Genesis and Lucretius happily mix. This presentation allows
Milton to evoke a sense of divine goodness independent of the (for him)
tense realm of freedom. The sense in which the Creation is seen as “good,”
here and in Genesis, has little to do with passing a test. But even more
than the account of the Creation, it is the presentation of nature in Eden
that is Milton’s great success in the evocation of benign process independ-
ent of moral categories. Edenic nature is notably un-rule bound:
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine.
(4.241–3)
In Book 5, Milton repeats the theme, making the rejection of any kind of
regulation or inhibition even more emphatic; Eden is:
A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wilde above Rule or Art, enormous bliss.
(5.294–7)
Note s
1 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in David V. Erdman (ed.), The Poetry
and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 35; E. M. W.