Does Milton’s biography have anything to do with Paradise Lost? Firstly, we should assume,
the Apology Milton had written, “The author is ever distinguished from the person he introduces”
(YP I 880); but he also says in the Pro Se Defensio that it is “The custom of poets to place their own opinions in the mouths of their great characters (qtd. in Forsyth 193).
As Gordon Campbell writes, Milton is a “restoration nonconformist struggling to discern a pattern of divine intervention in his life” (85). Stevie Davies comments, “as in many other ways, Satan’s journey though Chaos implies Milton’s journey” (129). Shattuck writes, “In the flamboyant figure of Satan, Milton alludes to the momentous events through which he himself had just lived: a revolution that failed” (78). According to Riggs, Milton invites us “to compare his portrait of the poet with his portrait of Satan. The similarities are not hidden; the differences are consciously and carefully defined” (17).
What are these similarities? Milton devoted his life to republican idealism and political revolution, in the name of resisting all forms of idolatry and external authority (including religious, social and political customs and rules). Nevertheless, his cause was defeated and himself publically scorned, despite all of his best arguments. Towards the end of his life, he wrote two major characters, Satan—an updated version of Comus, a proud tempter, who is degraded and defeated by a more powerful force; and Samson, who is similarly brought low by his enemies, but who rises up again in an act of revenge-terrorism. While Milton may not deliberately associate himself with his characters, given his biographical details, as well as his pride and stubborn refusal to give up his ideals and work for the new government, we also shouldn’t expect him to meekly roll over and give in to his enemies.
As Forsyth points out,
It is hard to resist seeing the blind hero of Samson Agonists as a version of Milton himself after the Restoration… in this light the poem, cased as a Greek tragedy, is a
in fact, herded together into the theatre and then crushed under the weight of the falling masonry. (192)
You could argue that the aim of Paradise Lost is a subtle, covert attack on the monarchy, by poisoning the ears of the people against tyranny—to make them confused and perturbed, to make them doubt and question the tyrant’s omnipotent rule, a counter-propaganda to the king’s rule.
According to Annabel Patterson, censorship after the Restoration demanded a coded form of language—an “oblique discourse”—that demanded readers “read between the lines” and infer submerged political intentions in a text.
For what we find everywhere apparent and widely understood, from the middle of the sixteenth century in England, is a system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence. (qtd. in Shears 48)
While this reading of Paradise Lost (Satan as a representation of Milton, rebelling against the monarchy and being ultimately defeated) may be too speculative, it is easy to compare
Milton’s strong opinions with specific issues and voices in his poetry. It’s also likely, given Milton’s personality, that he used his poetry to make some kind of political statement.
Eloquent theorist though he was, Milton never remained merely in the realm of abstraction. Not only did he live and work in a culture in which reading was for action, not in place of action, but he, unlike most other writers, was involved, day-by-day, in matters of state. Whether government servant or political prisoner, advocate of religious freedom or critic of monarchy, Milton learnt, because he had to learn, how to deal with censorship and intolerance, how to make his voice heard in the clamorous debates of his time. He was immersed in, and exploited, the rapidly
changing, edgy, disreputable public print culture that was growing up around him, (Beer preface).
It was, after all, common to write literature as a veiled allegory for political events. In 1681, Dryden (who, unlike Milton, had switched sides and gone to work for the new Monarchy) published Absolom and Achitophel, which uses the rebellion of Absalom against King David as an allegory to discuss the Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion Crisis (1679-1681). Since Charles II was getting older with no heirs, Protestants feared his openly Roman Catholic brother James II could get the throne. The Earl of Shaftesbury sponsored the Exclusion Bill to prevent James from becoming king, and prompted Charles to legitimize Monmouth. When Monmouth was caught preparing to rebel and seek the throne, Shaftsebury was suspected of fostering the rebellion. Absolom and Achitophel was published just before Shaftesbury’s arrest. Monmouth and Shaftesbury were acquitted, but after James did get the throne in 1685, Monmouth raised a new rebellion, and was executed for it. According to Bryson in The Tyranny of Heaven,
In presenting the entire course of universal history as revolving around kingship, both the having and the desiring, Milton makes the case that it is not kings who must be overthrown, but kingship itself. In portraying God as king, Milton graphically illustrates the primary hierarchical metaphor that in his time rendered the English incapable of liberty, or, as Milton so acerbically declared in the face of the Restoration of 1660, “worthie. . . to be for ever slaves.” (29)
Orthodox critics refuse to recognize in Satan a potential symbol for Milton’s failed revolution, mainly on the grounds that Milton himself was religious—but given Milton’s extreme
antinomianism, it isn’t hard to argue that the God of Paradise Lost is not the God he believes in.
I would argue that Milton’s ideas of God, sin, evil, and justice were heavily influenced by Boethius’s sixth-century On the Consolations of Philosophy. Although assumed to be linked
with Christianity, The Consolation is more a summary of Platonic philosophy, in which the mind can elevate itself towards the True Good through will and reason, by resisting the fleeting
passions or desires towards wealth or fame.
In The Consolation, a philosopher has been jailed unfairly and is lamenting his fate, asking why evil should triumph over good, and why good men are victimized. The main conclusion of the book is that, despite appearances, the good is always stronger than the weak.
This is the conclusion of Comus as well; the language used in Comus, and later Paradise Lost, shows many close similarities with the author of The Consolation; for example, in Comus the Lady’s brothers debate “providence, foreknowledge, will and fate” but “found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” The Consolation reads, “‘Art thou mocking me,’ said I, ‘weaving a labyrinth of tangled arguments, now seeming to begin where thou didst end, and now to end where thou didst begin?’”
As Laurie Kuribayashi points out,
Boethius is cited only twice, for instance, in the notes to Merritt Hughes’ standard edition of Milton’s work, and without any implication that Milton drew directly from the earlier author. The neglect is surprising in view of the considerable scholarship on Boethian influence upon Milton’s predecessors, but these studies concentrate their attention on the Middle Ages and stop well short of Milton. The neglect is even more surprising because of the great many concerns that Boethius and Milton have in common, and because Boethius provided precisely reasoned formulations for some of the very problems that Milton had to deal with in his “justification” of the “ways of God to men”.
E.H. Dye comments, “John Coolidge has labeled Lycidas, ‘Milton’s ‘Consolatio Poeticae,’” on the basis of some resemblances between a passage in the elegy and “a place in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.”
By comparison, the bonds between Comus and The Consolation we have found truly do go deep. Extending far beyond the Christian Humanism and “progress toward beautitude” Coolidge observed in both Lycidas and The Consolation, there are numerous other vital points of similarity between Comus and Boethius’ immensely popular dialogue share in common. Prominent in both stories are: The trials their protagonists suffer, the Circe myth, deprecation of the passions, a chase ideal of temperance of Neoplatonic idealism, and the liberating intervention of divine grace that endows both heroine and hero with sufficient judgemental wisdom for them to achieve individual happiness. Such close concord suggest that Milton was influenced by the Consolation from the earliest moments of the Mask’s creation. (Dye 1-7)
Already an influential text therefore, The Consolation would have resonated deeply with Milton after the Restoration, when the majority of his life’s greatest efforts had failed and he found himself (like Boethius) imprisoned unfairly for defying a tyrant. According to The Consolation, the way to free oneself from a tyrant’s wrath is by cultivating wisdom and moving beyond hope and fear, beyond good and evil:
Let men compose themselves and live at peace, Set haughty fate beneath their feet,
And look unmoved on good and bad, And keep unchanging countenance:
Unmoved they’ll stand before the ocean’s rage Which churns up waves from deep below,
Unmoved by Mount Vesuvius, Her furnace blast and hurling flames, Unmoved by fiery thunderbolts in flight Which sweep in ruin towers on high.
Why then are miserable men in awe When tyrants rage impotently?
If first you rid yourself of hope and fear You have disarmed the tyrant’s wrath:
But whosoever quakes in fear or hope, Drifting and losing mastery,
Has cast away his shield, has left his place,
And binds the chain with which he will be bound. (9)
In Paradise Lost, instead of the True Good we find in Milton’s writing or Platonic philosophy, we find instead a Christianized version of Zeus, hurling thunderbolts and raging against those that defy him. Boethius is suffering, we are told, not because of his current dejected
circumstances, but because he has been estranged from wisdom, which is his fault.
However, it is not simply a case of your having been banished far from your home;
you have wandered away from yourself, or if you prefer to be thought of as having been banished, it is you yourself that have been the instrument of it. No one else could ever have done it. (16)
Heaven is described as peace of the inner mind, a state of grace one can free enter into (or fall out of). “So there can be no fear of exile for any man within its walls and moat. On the other
hand, if anyone stops wanting to life there, he automatically stops deserving it.” The Consolation shows us, then, two different gods: the tyrant god of thunderbolts, which could be seen as the arbitrary forces of fate; and the True Good, for which “submitting to His governance and obeying His laws is freedom” (17).
Likewise, in Paradise Lost, Satan’s suffering and exile is his own doing, because happiness is a state of mind. His desire led to estrangement, and to reclaim it he must, like Boethius, move beyond hope and fear, good and evil (which he does):
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost. (4.108-109)
Boethius also tackles the issue of free will in the face of divine omnipotence, claiming that “all human activity depends on will and power” (88) and that creatures with innate reason have the power to choose to will or not will: however they are more free when they contemplate God and less free when they descend into bodies, and even less when they are “imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” Likewise, Milton’s Satan (eventually) recognizes that he had the “Will and Power to stand” but also the freedom to fall. He has no one to blame but “Heavn’s free Love dealt equally to all” (4.66-68).
There are far more textual comparisons, but this is enough to establish Milton’s
familiarity with Boethius’s The Consolations, and demonstrate how Milton’s Satan has more in common with a soul seeking wisdom than a universal principle of hate and malice (whose only aim is to do harm).
The orthodox reading, promoted by Stanley Fish and his successors, is that Milton wrote Paradise Lost to educate readers about the temptation of Satan, and to teach them to ignore him and stay strong, to not be won over by his rhetoric and guile. The romantic or “satanic” reading,
is that Milton was, either deliberately or accidently, more sympathetic to Satan’s rebellion, even though it failed.
For now, it’s not important to side with either, but only to recognize what these adverse reactions to Paradise Lost symbolize, and which has triumphed in modern culture. In the face of divine omnipotence, there are two basic responses. Jesus represents absolute obedience, without thought or reflection. The other path—of Satan, Adam and Eve—is the path to knowledge and freedom: this is the Faustian belief, that man should always strive to improve himself in
knowledge, that no knowledge is harmful. This is also the Gnostic or Neoplatonic belief, in the purification or edification of the soul, a process of refinement. These two responses are not exclusive, but are more likely dependent on each other: blind obedience is not really virtue because it isn’t really a free choice until after the fall. Obedience to God is freedom and
happiness, but cannot be chosen until after the separation and exile. We will take up these themes again in Chapter 5, when we explore Paradise Lost’s in light of postmodern theory. Before that, we need to recognize that Satan’s ambitious efforts towards independence, and his refusal to submit to an unjust tyrant, were far more in line with the emerging Enlightenment thinkers, as well as Milton’s republican revolutionary ideals, which is why he was so easily embraced by many writers as heroic.
2.12 Conclusion
The basic issues Milton’s Satan struggles with are the same as those found in Boethius’s The Consolation.
1. Tyrannical kingship is bad, even if by gods.
3. God is natural order; there is no getting out
4. Submitting to His governance and obeying His laws is freedom.
The important thing to note here, is that Milton’s ideas were too early for his times, but in many ways bore fruit after his death:
What is particularly impressive about these imprecations . . . is the company into which Milton is put in terms of intellectual, political and social history. Milton, in the eyes of those who would brand him as either a heretic or atheist or both, stands with those whose ideas will take root and come to full flower in the Enlightenment and beyond. Milton’s story—even as told by his contemporary opponents—is one of progress, and as unfashionable as it may have been for some time to subscribe to a
“Whig” narrative of history, Milton himself subscribed to something very much like a narrative of historical progress, hoping, in fact, that England would take the lead role.”
(Bryson, Atheist Milton 13)
The whole Milton—including the politics; the theology; the insistence on freedom to read, to write, and think his own thoughts and those of no other; the willingness to die rather than be silent—needs to be brought into play in the discussion of Milton’s vision of heaven and earth. To assume that there is little—or no—political critique represented in Milton’s heaven is effectively to silence a man in death who would not tolerate being silenced in life (Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven 29)
Whatever he owes to medieval predecessors, then, this interior and troubled
dimension of Satan makes him a product of the early modern world. He is so resolute in his determination to explore this dangerous consciousness that, in this respect, he is
Faustian about the risk the Renaissance took. . . It is the association of all this with Hell (or at least with Chaos), with what is Godless or forbidden or beyond
redemption, that made the Miltonic images exemplary of a period and a whole cultural shift. (Forsyth, Satanic Epic 57)
Milton is in the middle of a shift between two opposing cultures: one believes in a literal hell and devil, and the importance of submission, obedience and self-denial. For the other, hell is only a psychological state, and we are free to use our Will and Power to choose our own personal good, which we can discover through reason.
One can say, then, that Milton’s Satan was invented at the last possible moment, at the very time when belief in the Devil and the combat myth was in decline,
undermined by the new forms of rationalism or liberal religion—or the excesses of the great witch-persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Is Hell a place or a psychological s Hell a place or a psychological state, for example? In Paradise Lostit is both: Hell is there, indeed created by God, yet Milton’s Satan, echoing Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, also says in famous words “Myself am Hell.” In Milton theDe doctrina Christiana, written at the same time as Paradise Lost, Satan rarely appears. There Milton is more interested in the symbolic and interior aspect signaled by George Herbert when he wrote in “Sinne (II)”: “devils are our sins in perspective.” In Milton’s poem, on the other hand, Satan is what he became for the Romantics, the vehicle for the imagination. (Forsyth 79)
Milton isn’t unique in these concerns: in 1643 Sir Thomas Brown wrote “The heart of man is the place the devill dwels in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself” (Religio Medici). But he is unique is his deep and thorough arguments for political freedom and human rights, including the
1910, Milton wrote ferociously in a time when these ideas were still controversial, but through his influence he changed the world.
Into the very midst of all this welter of evil, at a point in time to all appearance hopeless, at a point in space apparently defenseless, in a nation of which every man, woman, and child was under sentence of death from its sovereign, was born a man who wrought as no other has ever done for a redemption of civilization from the main cause of all that misery; who thought out for Europe the precepts of right reason in international law; who made them heard; who gave a noble change to the course of human affairs; whose thoughts, reasonings, suggestions, and appeals produced an environment in which came an evolution of humanity that still continues. Andrew Dickson White wrote in Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason. (55)
Milton has made a massive impact on human history and civilization, not only in his direct and indirect literary influences, but also as the character of the Devil continues to play a major role in philosophy, psychology, and politics. What I hope to demonstrate over the next two chapters is that the idealogy of Satanism—the revolutionary heroism, the passionate quest for personal autonomy, the primacy of will, power and passion—has all shifted from demonic
Milton has made a massive impact on human history and civilization, not only in his direct and indirect literary influences, but also as the character of the Devil continues to play a major role in philosophy, psychology, and politics. What I hope to demonstrate over the next two chapters is that the idealogy of Satanism—the revolutionary heroism, the passionate quest for personal autonomy, the primacy of will, power and passion—has all shifted from demonic