Professor John
Rogers: In Book Four of
Paradise Lost,
Milton had sketched the origins
of human freedom.
You remember this.
Eve's first memory,
or her reflection on her
reflection in the pool,
had established the importance
of freedom and also the
importance of independence for
not only her relation with Adam
but essentially all of human
relations.
Milton's concern in Book Four
was to establish something like
the viability of a freedom that
was able,
in some way,
to coexist with what we
discussed as the hierarchical
set of power relations.
This coexistence of freedom,
on the one hand,
and social hierarchy,
on the other,
is something that this poem
continues to assert.
I would also add that it's
something that this poem
continues to worry about.
It's an extraordinarily
problematic but crucial element
of Paradise Lost.
Now, I want to review a couple
of moments in Book Four.
Think back to what Eve had told
Adam after she had been
compelled by him,
and also by the warning voice,
after she had been compelled to
channel all of her erotic
energies away from the
beautiful,
sympathetic,
responsive watery image toward
Adam.
Eve had said,
"thy gentle hand / seiz'd mine,
I yielded."
Theirs is a continual dance of
seizing and yielding.
You have his assertion of power
and her gracious resignation,
although it's a gentle use of
power,
on the one hand,
and it's an independent and
consensual resignation,
on the other.
Through this dance Milton,
I think, was trying to
establish a model of human
interaction really distinct from
simple coercion,
or completely distinct from
simple coercion.
It's distinct from the simple
exercise of brute force that,
I think, we often associate
with life in a hierarchically
organized society.
Human interaction in this poem
is founded on the principle of
consent.
In the Miltonic commonwealth of
Eden -- and we think of it as a
commonwealth -- no one can be
forced to act.
Eve has to choose to act.
She has to consent to act.
She yields, which is for Milton
not actually a resignation.
It's a positive,
deliberate action,
and she has the right of
consent because she possesses
for Milton an inalienable
capacity for free will and free
choice.So,
this account of Eve's first
exercise of free will,
the one that I've just given
you -- her yielding to Adam when
he seizes her hand -- that's at
least,
I think, the official one that
the poem urges us to accept,
according to what I'm thinking
of as the poem's official
philosophy,
because it seems to be a
guarantee, in some way,
subtended by the narrator and
authoritative forces in the
poem.
According to this philosophy,
Eve yields to Adam freely and
willingly because she comes to
recognize his superior nature.
The poem presses on us a
philosophy whereby Eve's freedom
is entirely compatible with what
we're asked to take as the fact
of her inferiority to Adam.
Satan himself explains
perfectly this philosophy,
and I think ironically it's
Satan who gives us the best
formulation of this coexistence
of freedom and hierarchy in the
poem: that freedom and hierarchy
are absolutely compatible.
Satan will tell Abdiel in Book
Five:
[F]or Orders and Degrees
Jar not with liberty,
but well consist.
Who can in reason then or right
assume
Monarchy over such as live by
right
His equals, if in power and
splendor less,
In freedom equal?
But Milton's poetry -- well,
think how odd it is,
[laughs]
first of all,
that it's Satan who's giving us
something like the only
carefully articulated
authoritative position on this,
to say the least,
controversial matter.
Milton's poetry is invariably
more sophisticated than what we
can think of as the official
dogma or the authoritative line
of the poem.
Perhaps that fact is revealed
or exposed to us by the fact
that it's Satan who's giving us,
in this instance,
the authoritative line.
It's important to keep this
distinction in mind because this
poem simply cannot be reduced.
Sometimes it tries to be
reduced, but it cannot be
reduced, to those ringing
declarations of what sound like
the official positions of the
poem.Think how complicated
it is with Eve.
Eve's account of that beautiful
pool-side reverie was so filled
with pathos and longing that
it's impossible,
I think, not to feel at least a
little bit of disappointment
when she consents finally to her
union with Adam.
It's almost -- I don't know --
this kind of a sense in which
she's sold out.
Of course, we're happy that she
has a mate who's another person
and not merely a smooth,
watery image.
Nonetheless,
there's a sense of
disappointment that attends that
choice that she makes.
Initially for Eve,
I am at least convinced there
seemed to be nothing like
freedom at all.
She remembers having gazed at
that pleasing image in the
reflective pool and she recalls
being pulled away from that
smiling and sympathetic image by
that mysterious voice that had
guided her to Adam.
I think this is one of the most
moving lines in the entire poem
when Eve recalls the feeling of
helplessness that she
experienced when she heard that
voice.
This is how she explains it
later to Adam:
"what could I do,
/ but follow straight,
invisibly thus led?"In
other words, "What could I do?"
Not a bad question:
what could she do?
The subordination of woman to
man in heterosexual union in
Paradise Lost seemed
entirely compulsory at that
moment,
and Eve, it seemed,
on some level had to be coerced
to unite herself with this less
pleasing Adam.
For a moment at least,
Milton seemed to be on the
brink of something like a
powerful critique of the
so-called naturalness of
normative sexual behavior;
because there's at least some
suggestion here that Eve's
attraction to Adam was not
freely chosen at all.
It was chosen for her,
it was assigned to her.All
of this is a way of saying that
Milton is doing something
extraordinary complicated in
Paradise Lost.
He justaposes -- he does this
consistently -- the rhetoric of
rational consent,
on the one hand,
with the competing rhetoric of
coercion: maybe that word's a
little strong,
but a competing rhetoric of
something like a gentle
compulsion, if that oxymoron
makes any sense.
There's a way in which this
entire scene,
which is intended to assert the
politics of rational consent,
provides at the very same
moment something like a critique
of the politics of rational
consent.
We know that Eve's freely
willed act of yielding followed
in time Adam's exertion of
force.
However gentle Adam is,
"thy gentle hand / seiz'd
mine," he's still seized Eve,
and Milton's,
I think, remarkably
honest.So this is why I'm
always pushing you to agree with
me,
[laughs]
or compelling you to agree with
me, that Milton deserves a
little bit of credit here.
Milton's amazingly honest in
his account of Eve's first
exercise of her free will,
and I think we can think of
this as her first free act.
Of course, it is an unduly
circumscribed act of freedom.
Milton's poetry in a lot of
ways is constantly questioning
the legitimacy of a doctrine of
free will in a world that has
been arranged and conjugated
like the one that Eden has been.
It's along a principle of
hierarchy.So Book Four had
explored in extraordinary detail
the complexities of hierarchy
and freedom with respect to the
relation between the sexes.
Book Five is also interested in
this uneasy but important
relation between hierarchy and
freedom.
It's almost as if Book Four
hadn't sufficiently put to rest
the logical problem that on some
level is constantly eating away
at the center of the poem.
Book Five takes up this problem
once again, but it takes it up
-- as we, of course,
should have been led to expect
-- from an entirely different
perspective.So,
as I just said,
in Book Four the hierarchical
principle of superiority and of
excellence was the superiority
of man to woman.
In Book Five,
the central hierarchical access
is a little different,
or a lot different.
It involves the superiority of
angels over human beings,
and this new hierarchical
opposition -- it's performing a
lot of work.
One of the things that it's
certainly doing is forcing us to
rethink the hierarchical
opposition that Milton had
established in Book Four,
and that's because hierarchy is
no longer gendered in Book Five.
Milton's not concerned here
with sex.
He's concerned rather with
degrees of materiality among all
of God's creatures.
Angels are less material,
less corporeally burdened
creatures than Adam and Eve,
and therefore,
within this system they're
superior.
In this larger vision of a kind
of cosmic principle of hierarchy
in which lighter,
more ethereal things are
superior to heavier,
denser, grosser material
things,
we can see a way in which the
gender distinction simply drops
out of the equation,
because Milton gives us no
reason to think that Adam and
Eve are anything but equal in
the degrees of their
corporeality.
Sexual inequality simply seems
insignificant here from this new
perspective in Book Five.So
Raphael descends into Eden --
the Archangel Raphael -- in Book
Five in order to warn Adam and
Eve not to eat the forbidden
fruit.
In doing so,
he provides an elaborate
account of -- and I've already
discussed this,
but I have to discuss it again
because for me it's so
outrageous and so daring and
such an absolutely lovable
religious heterodoxy,
maybe it's even a heresy -- the
heterodoxy of monism.
I'll remind you briefly of what
monism is.
It's the philosophy whereby
there can be no such thing as a
firm and absolute distinction
between body and spirit.
The world can't be divided into
soul and matter as it could be
divided with absolute clarity
for Milton's contemporary,
Descartes.
The entire cosmos for Milton is
made of one huge blob of matter,
and this matter is nothing
other, ultimately,
than the body of God.
This is what Raphael explains
to Adam at line 469 of Book
Five.
This is page 313 in the Hughes
edition.
So this is Raphael to Adam: 
O Adam,
one Almighty is [that's God],
from whom
All things proceed,
and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good,
created all
Such to perfection,
one first matter all,
Indu'd with various forms,
various degrees
Of substance,
and in things that live,
of life.
"One first matter all," all
things derived from the "one
first matter" which is,
of course, God:
this is the ex deo
theory of creation (creatio
ex deo),
as opposed to the orthodox
theory of creation,
which is creatio ex
nihilo -- the notion that
God created the universe out of
nothing.
Milton has God creating the
universe out of God himself,
from the body of God.
In this ex deo creation
scenario, there's no qualitative
difference between the substance
comprising men and the substance
comprising angels.
The difference is simply one of
degree.
This has been brilliantly
argued by the critic William
Kerrigan.
It's a difference of degree
rather than a difference of
kind: angels are simply lighter.
The corporeal substance that
makes up their bodies is more
attenuated, it's more rarefied,
than that in human beings.
We are all more condensed,
we are "grosser" creatures,
to use one of Milton's favorite
words here.
Our grosser bodies are more
compacted, they're of a denser
consistency than the light and
airy bodies of heavenly
angels.Except for this
differentiation by the degree of
substantiality,
human beings and angels are
qualitatively identical.
We're made of the same stuff,
it's just a matter of how
closely packed the stuff is.
Milton even treats us to a
scene of Adam and Eve -- because
it's thinkable in such a
monistic universe,
although it's wild -- of Adam
and Eve actually eating with the
Archangel Raphael.
I think this must have blown
Milton's contemporaries away,
because from any orthodox
perspective this attribution of
what Milton would call a "gross"
activity like eating to one of
God's heavenly minions,
one of the angels,
would have to be seen as -- if
it's not blasphemous,
it's certainly indecorous.
But this is,
of course, a poem that's
centered around an illicit act
of eating;
and so Milton will turn the
entire activity of eating into
the premise of an entire
philosophy of the relation of
human creatures to their
God.In that "all" of God,
all of God's creatures need to
eat.
Angels and men can be seen to
be equals.
This is essentially Raphael's
logic.
Look at line 411 of Book Five.
Raphael tells Adam,
this is page 312,
that angels are a lot like
human beings:
"they hear,
see, smell, touch,
taste, / tasting concoct,
digest, assimilate."
We're soon to learn that angels
also have sex because,
as we know, spirits "can either
sex assume," or both.
But we're about to find out
here something,
I think, that's a little more
shocking even than the fact of
angelic eroticism:
angels have digestive tracts in
Milton's heaven,
and like human beings they have
within their bodies some kind of
mechanism for the elimination of
ingested substances -- the
elimination of substances that
cannot be assimilated into the
body.
Milton's angels actually
excrete.
This is a remarkable feat of
literary daring,
to be sure, but it's also a
magnificent feat of the human
imagination on Milton's part.
This is what the narrator seems
to be referring to when he
discusses Raphael's hunger.
This is line 437:
"what redounds,
transpires / through Spirits
with ease…"
It's so easy to miss:
"what redounds,
transpires / through Spirits
with ease…"
What stays, what can't be
assimilated into the body,
gets expelled easily.Milton
is so eager here -- now,
we have to ask ourselves,
why is Milton doing this?
He's so eager,
I'm convinced,
to demonstrate the essential
metaphysical equivalence of
human beings and angels that he
is quite prepared to ask us to
imagine the unimaginable.
Angels are exceedingly regular,
Milton is telling us.
"What redounds," that food
which remains in excess in the
angel's body,
"transpires / through Spirits
with ease."
Of course, as we know,
Milton was acutely interested
in his own gastrointestinal
tract,
having blamed his blindness on
a digestive problem.But
there's a lot more here than
merely a personal interest.
Eating is so central to this
poem that it's actually
something like a digestive
process of assimilation and
excretion that would have
enabled the unfallen Adam and
Eve to become angels eventually
themselves.
Turn to line 493.
This is page 313.
It was to be Adam and Eve's
good fortune to watch their own
gross corporeal bodies slowly,
gradually shed their dense
matter as they assumed the airy
lightness of angels.
How will they attain this
extraordinary achievement,
this wafting up to heaven?
They'll do it by eating.
Look at line 493.
Raphael's explaining that as
things are now,
in a pinch angels are capable
of a nutritional kind of
condescension.
They can eat the same food that
human beings eat when they don't
have a choice.
Right now, Adam and Eve
probably couldn't survive on
angelic nectar if that is all
they had to live on,
probably, but Raphael adds:
[T]ime may come when men
With Angels may participate,
and find
No inconvenient Diet,
nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal
nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn
all to spirit,
Improv'd by tract of time,
and wing'd ascend
Ethereal, as wee,
or may at choice
Here or in Heav'nly Paradises
dwell;
[and this is obviously the
kicker:]
If ye be found obedient.
Milton is going out of his way
to provide Adam and Eve with a
motive for remaining obedient.
By a simple process of eating
-- virtuous eating,
virtuous digestion,
and the consequent activity of
the virtuous subliming,
that's Milton's term,
of gross matter into spirit --
Adam and Eve will eventually,
gradually begin to ascend to
the winged state of angelhood.
They will metabolize themselves
into angels.
It's one of the most extreme
visions and one of the most
beautiful visions,
[laughs]
however cockamamie,
of human progress ever
depicted, I think.Raphael's
account of the superiority of
spiritual matter over gross
matter is without question
another one of the poem's
hierarchical visions,
but the amazing process of what
we could think of as what would
have been the angelization of
men and women does something
really quite alarming,
I think, to the principle of
hierarchy as it's been presented
so far.
The metaphysical hierarchy of
the degree of material density,
which is the concern of Book
Five, isn't fixed.
It's not static in Milton's
universe.
This is a mobile society that
Raphael is imagining.
The hierarchy here is flexible.
It's much more flexible than
the gendered hierarchy was among
human beings in Book Four.
If Adam and Eve manage not to
fall, they will arrive,
we have to assume,
equally at a state of angelic
perfection in a state in which
gender differences simply don't
obtain because angels,
as we know, "can either sex
assume," or both.There were
a few other radical thinkers in
the seventeenth century who
embraced a monistic vision of
the universe like Milton's.
Almost invariably,
this monism had a kind of
leftist, progressive,
and in some cases actually a
communist energy to it.
I've written the name of one of
Milton's contemporaries,
Gerrard Winstanley,
who was maybe not England's
first communist but England's
first important communist,
writing fifteen or so years
before Paradise Lost.
The bodies of all men and
women are for Winstanley -- as
later for Milton -- are equally
infused with heavenly spirit and
heavenly soul.
For Winstanley -- Milton
wouldn't permit himself to go
quite this far -- this
physiological equality seemed to
guarantee their political
equality.
In adopting this doctrine of
monism that had been developed
or worked out by much more
radical thinkers like Gerrard
Winstanley,
Milton is really on some level
consciously adopting a
philosophy of body and spirit
that works to undo,
and maybe it works to
undermine, that patriarchal
insistence on Adam's superiority
over Eve.
On some level,
some of the philosophy in Book
Five, I think,
is working at some subterranean
stage to undermine or dismantle
the Edenic,
the paradisal,
hierarchy.So Adam and Eve
before the Fall are given the
opportunity to reach their
heavenly destinations on their
own.
Now just think how radical that
is when you compare it to any
mainstream notion of the way
Christianity works.
Adam and Eve,
had they never fallen,
had they never sinned,
would never have needed to rely
on a God or a Messiah to
intervene -- an external
redeemer to move in and save
them,
or even to reward them,
for their virtue.
Their virtuous behavior would
have been itself a reward.
We can think of them as having
been in a position almost to
save themselves,
and Milton is arriving at this
-- it's a wild and really daring
alternative to the orthodox
Christian vision of redemption
and salvation.I think it's
this orthodox notion of
Christianity that Milton always
felt so uncomfortable with.
Were it not for the Fall,
there would have been no need
for the heavenly Father to
sacrifice the Son in order to
save fallen humanity.
Human beings would [laughs]
just waft up to the pearly
gates like helium balloons,
lighter even than air,
and with no need for an
external redeemer.
In some ways Milton is flirting
with something -- and I think
the young adult book writer,
Philip Pullman,
absolutely has put his finger
on something important in
Milton,
and he's a great leader and fan
of Milton's -- is flirting with
something that we would
recognize as science fiction.
It's a secular image of
salvation certainly,
but it's a proto-scientific
image of salvation.
Unfallen salvation is something
like a scientific process.
It's the logical and inevitable
result of just a particular type
of virtuous,
natural behavior.Milton
arrives at a theology that does
something that a theology is
never supposed to do:
it's a radical theology of
bodily transformation that
essentially does away with God
or does away with God as we know
him.
Who needs God?
Adam and Eve will continue to
eat.
They'll eat virtuously.
They'll be good people.
They'll become angels,
and eventually they will be
subsumed into that universal
ball of spiritual matter at that
later point when God becomes
"All in All."
That's that distant point in
time where there will simply be
no ontological difference
between man and woman,
between angel and man,
or between us and
God.Raphael's philosophy of
monism offers a truly radical
vision of an exaltation -- this
prelapsarian notion of an
exaltation of Adam and Eve up to
heaven.
They could have exalted
themselves, and presumably we
all could have exalted ourselves
simply by being good,
by doing it ourselves,
but this daring vision of a
radical self-determination
couldn't possibly be more
violently opposed to the version
of exaltation that Raphael
explains to Adam and Eve
elsewhere in Book Five.
This scene I know you remember,
because it's so upsetting and
so unforgettable:
on Adam's prompting,
Raphael goes on to describe the
exaltation, the anointing,
of the Son of God.
It's an event that comes as
close to anything as explaining
the very first mystery of the
poem,
or the central mystery of the
poem -- that being the cause,
the origin, of Satan's fall.
You can refer here to your
handy little chronology,
written by Alastair Fowler,
of events in Paradise Lost.
The origin of Satan's fall
is without question one of the
most crucial problems that we
have when we confront this poem.
On some level,
God's ways can't be justified
until the origin of man's Fall
can be explained or understood,
and man's Fall can't be
understood or explained or
justified until Satan's fall is
explained.
To account for Satan's
fall, Milton relies -- he makes
all this up and it's
magnificent.
He's relying here on the text
of the second Psalm,
a chapter of the Bible that he
had himself translated into
English in 1653.
Now the second Psalm imagines
the Messiah speaking.
This is that verse:
"[T]he Lord to me hath said,
Thou art my Son;
I have begotten thee this day."
No one has ever known what to
do with that passage from the
second Psalm.
The idea that the Messiah could
actually remember the day that
God had begotten him had for
centuries and millennia provided
biblical commentators with a
paradox that really bordered on
the absurd.
What could God have meant when
he said, "I have begotten thee
this day"?Milton worries and
worries this problem of this
begetting.
He does this throughout
Paradise Lost and he does
it in a number of ways.
He transforms this mysterious
declaration that he has lifted
from the second Psalm into --
he's turned it into what is
essentially the originary event
of the entire poem.
As you can see from the
chronology of the poem that
Fowler gives us,
the exaltation of Milton's Son
of God (and Fowler unfortunately
calls him Christ) doesn't really
function as a Christ.
Milton would never in a million
years, certainly,
in Paradise Lost call
this fellow Christ.
He doesn't call him Jesus
either because the Son of God
isn't Jesus yet.
He's preexistent but he's not a
Christ, I think,
in part because Milton doesn't
want us to confuse or to
construe this Son of God with
anything that we've learned from
any of our Sunday school classes
or any exposure to traditional,
orthodox, mainstream Christian
Protestant or Catholic
thinking.This is the event
-- you'll remember how important
first events are in Paradise
Lost -- this is the event
that seems to have happened
first.
What occurred in heaven before
this moment, the poem gives us
no definitive clue of,
although Satan knows there is
something important that
happened before this moment,
and he makes an important
conjecture about it prior to
this.
(We don't have time to look at
this today, but you may want to
study for yourself Satan's own
theory of a first Creation,
and that's the creation of the
angels.) So God the Father
assembles all of the angels.
This is page 316 in the
Hughes, Book Five,
line 600.
God delivers at line 600 a
pronouncement that is by any
standards absolutely shocking.
Satan, like the other angels,
was a son of God but,
unlike the other Son of God --
or the other sons of God --
Satan had been one of the first
archangels in heaven.
The narrator suggests (this is
coming from the narrator) that
Satan may have been the first
archangel in heaven,
first both in God's favor and
also in his general preeminence
over the other angels because
God liked him most,
liked him best,
and also because he was simply
better than all of the other
angels;
and Milton continues his
meditation on the multiple
meanings here of "first."Now
I'm going to read this passage
to you,
and you tell me if you think
Satan might have just a teensy
bit of a reason to be miffed at
God's exaltation of another one
of his sons,
or what we have to assume is
another one of his sons.
This is God at line 600: 
Hear all ye Angels,
Progeny of Light,
Thrones, Dominations,
Princedoms, Vertues,
Powers,
Hear my Decree,
which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I
declare
My only Son,
and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed,
whom ye now behold
At my right hand;
your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to
him shall bow
All knees in Heav'n,
and shall confess him
Lord:Under his great
Vice-gerent Reign abide
United as one individual Soul
For ever happy.
What's the tone of voice?
I'm [laughs]
going to interrupt myself for a
moment.
How are we [laughs]
to imagine God pronouncing that
word "happy" after what he's
just told us?
Under his great
Vice-gerent Reign abide
United as one individual Soule
For ever happy: him who disobeys
Mee disobeyes,
breaks union,
and that day
Cast out from God and blessed
vision, falls
Into utter darkness.
This, of course,
is a vision of an exaltation
almost diametrically opposed to
the exaltation of the unfallen
Adam and Eve,
their wafting up.
The Son of God,
the Messiah,
doesn't seem to have exalted
himself.
Along what has already been
established is the recognizable
pattern of a kind of natural,
physiological ascent,
and you can imagine Milton
could have pulled that off
because he could pull off
anything.
It's possible to imagine a
scenario whereby the Son had on
some level eaten his way into
God's favor and achieved the
status of Messiah through an
Adam and Eve-like virtuous
metabolism,
floating up to the very top of
God's throne before any of the
other angels.
That's how damn good he was,
but that's not the story that
we get.
According to the narrative we
have, God the Father seems quite
simply to have decided
arbitrarily to appoint one of
the angels over all of the
others.
Why has he done this?
God does mention something
about the Son's merit.
Well, he will mention something
about the Son's merit later in
another scene of exaltation,
but it's one that's already
been narrated and that's the
scene that we've already read in
Book Three.As for this
moment right now,
the motives for this
declaration seem perfectly
inexplicable and absolutely
inscrutable,
and it also seems clear that
this inscrutability is the point
of the Father's declaration.
As William Empson writes
convincingly and brilliantly,
although mischievously,
in a wonderful book called
Milton's God,
the Father's declaration
sounds like a challenge,
like it's intended to be taken
as a challenge.
By saying, "On this day I have
begot the Messiah," God seems
almost to be suggesting that --
I don't know,
that he's just created this guy
out of whole cloth for this very
occasion, just made him and
raised this nobody to the rank
of favorite.
It's possible that God has just
bequeathed all of his power to
someone who hasn't even been
around, someone who hasn't spent
eternity paying his dues.
What could God have been
thinking?
The Father knows this is an
extraordinary thing to be
declaring, and so he tries to
soften the blow,
I guess, this blow of this show
of favoritism by inviting the
other angels to abide "under his
great Vice-gerent Reign…
/ united as one individual Soul
/ for ever happy."
By "individual" the Father
means "indivisible here."
I'm convinced that the word
"individual," which only appears
twice in Paradise Lost,
is one of the poem's most
important words;
but it has its original
meaning, its etymological
meaning, which simply means
"can't be divided."On some
level,
the Father seems to be making a
stab at Milton's own monistic
vision of egalitarianism.
The angels will all be united
as one individual soul,
but the Father will only invoke
this harmonious,
indivisible union -- when?
After he's placed the Son of
God at the head of the other
angels.
We're left to wonder just how
we're supposed to reconcile this
image of an indivisible
egalitarianism with the
competing image of an
unyielding,
rigorously enforced angelic
hierarchy.
You can recognize in this scene
the opposition of
irreconcilables that we've
already encountered,
the ones that had characterized
the power relations in Milton's
Eden.
Milton charges this scene in
heaven with its power,
I think, by juxtaposing just
those two forces that he was
continually attempting to unite
in Book Four.
He yokes together the
principles of freedom and
equality, on the one hand,
and the opposing principle of
hierarchical order,
on the other hand.Think how
the politics in heaven here
parallel the political dynamic
that we've already been exposed
to,
that we've already seen
operative on earth.
In Book Four at that beautiful
originary moment at the pool
side, Eve had -- I think quite
like Satan -- Eve had imagined
herself great in favor and
preeminence.
She's shaken from this
assumption of power and of
absolute self-sufficiency when
she's suddenly told that there's
another creature,
Adam, who has been appointed
her head.
Just as God does with Satan,
Adam tries to soften the blow
[laughs]
of this arbitrary declaration
of hierarchical supremacy by
claiming to be united
indivisibly to Eve,
so Adam declares to Eve -- he
seizes her hand,
she yields, and he declares to
her that he will have her by his
side "henceforth an individual
solace dear..."Milton's
clearly doing something here in
these two scenes with these
noisy protestations of
indivisibility.
He invokes the beautiful notion
of the interconnectedness of all
of God's creatures that's
implicit in this monistic vision
of the first matter,
but he only employs this
beautiful image of a monistic
unity when he's placing an
absolute divide between a
superior creature and an
inferior one,
between a greater and a lesser
being.
On some level,
and it's very troubling,
monistic indivisibility is
always invoked at the most
divisive moments in the poem.
We can think of these as the
crisis moments in Paradise
Lost.
At these critical moments of
the arbitrary subjection of one
party over the other,
whether it's Adam over Eve or
the Son of God over Satan and
the other angels,
you can see the emergence of
another meaning,
the modern meaning of that word
"individual":
"individual" as a noun rather
than "individual" as an
adjective.
Dictionaries and historians of
the English language claim that
the modern meaning of the word
"individual,"
a noun referring to a person
who is self-sufficient,
autonomous, independent,
a being -- that this noun
doesn't appear in England until
later in the seventeenth
century;
but I think that it's precisely
at these crisis moments in
Paradise Lost that Milton
uses the original,
the traditional sense of
"individual," an adjective
meaning "indivisible," only to
begin pushing that word and
forcing it into something like
its modern sense of
"individual,"
the modern, essentially liberal
idea of a human being as an
absolutely isolate,
self-determining,
fundamentally unaffiliated
person.Here at the scene of
the Son's exaltation Milton -- I
don't know.
For a lot of readers,
this is really a repellant
scene.
It's a scene of a tyrannical
and arbitrary ordering of a
society.
Milton does this only to
display a little window,
I think, onto a totally
different kind of society.
You can see in this word
"individual" a glimpse into the
world of what we can think of as
modernity.
Paradise Lost is just on
the cusp of a liberal worldview,
and the poem provides us a
glimpse of the liberal world of
equal individuals,
a world of rational
self-determination and
self-exaltation rather than the
arbitrary subjection of one
class of creatures over another
class.So it's one thing for
Satan to witness this seemingly
arbitrary exaltation of the Son.
This arouses in him,
as you can imagine,
feelings of injustice that,
of course,
famously leave him to coax a
third of all of the other angels
in a rebellion against God.
That was bad enough,
but it's an entirely different
matter, I think,
when Satan learns -- I don't
know if "learns" is the right
verb -- when Satan hears in his
discussion with Abdiel that God
created everything including the
angels themselves by means of
the agency of the Son,
through the Son.
For Satan this is a
mind-blowing revelation,
and it's hard to miss as so
surprising because we take this
as just orthodoxy that any
right-thinking Christian might
accept.
Look at page 322.
This is line 835 of Book Five.
When Abdiel tells Satan,
"Why are you so upset,
Satan?
Of course, he would exalt the
Son.
It was the Son through whom we
were all created" -- this notion
just pushes Satan further than
anything pushes him.
This new revelation pushes him
into making one of the greatest
formulations of the modern -- an
outrageous one,
but it's central to the modern
principle of
individualism.Let me give
you a little background.
Abdiel has traveled with Satan
and the other disloyal angels,
the rebel angels,
to the northern quarter of
heaven;
but Abdiel, like Milton himself
during the English Revolution --
and Abdiel was in some way
Milton's self-portrait -- Abdiel
was willing to distance himself
from the mob sensibility of the
rebels.
He stands up to Satan with the
pious rage, the zeal,
that Milton always fancied
himself capable of.
So Abdiel asks Satan,
and this is at the top of page
322, how he can dare to question
God's justice in exalting the
Son over the other angels.
Abdiel tells Satan it was the 
Son, by whom
As by his Word,
the mighty Father made
All things, ev'n thee,
and all the Spirits of Heav'n
By him created in thir bright
degrees…
Abdiel tells Satan that if it
weren't for the Son of God,
Satan would never have been
created.
It's Satan- [laughs]
who certainly seems to be
shocked here,
and it's his response to
Abdiel's claim that is,
I think, one of the most
stunning, one of the most
outrageous moments in
Paradise Lost.
Line 852.
Satan is aghast that we were: 
[F]orm'd then sayest thou?
and the work 
Of secondary hands,
by task transferr'd
From Father to his Son?
strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know
whence learnt:
who saw
When this creation was?
remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker
gave thee being?
We know no time when we were
not as now;
Know none before us,
self-begot, self-rais'd
By our own quick'ning power,
when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orb,
the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n,
Ethereal Sons.
Now, nearly everyone agrees
that -- all Milton critics agree
that this claim for angelic
self-creation is in one way or
the other crucial to our
understanding of the fall of the
rebel angels and Satan's
justification of the rebellion.
This claim of self-creation
obviously prepares Satan for
that pronouncement that he will
make later in hell but which
comes at the beginning of the
poem,
that claim for the absolute
priority of the mind:
the mind is its own place and
can make a heaven of hell,
a hell of heaven.Now Abdiel
surely is right to insist that
not only were the -- we have to
give it to Abdiel that he's on
to something,
that the angels were created
and not only that,
they were created in all
likelihood through the agency of
the Son;
but even though Abdiel's right,
Satan's theory of angelic
origin isn't easily dismissible.
It's not as easily dismissible
as it is by C.S.
Lewis in the little quotation
at the bottom of the handout.
I always try to make a little
plug for the validity of at
least a little of a part of
Satan's claim.
I want to do this because on
some level, I think Satan's
outrageous argument here is one
of the greatest things that
anybody gets to say in
Paradise Lost,
 because if we're going
to understand the origin of
Satan's fall,
we have to understand something
about the origin of Satan
himself.You have the
chronology on the handout.
It's right to place the
exaltation of the Son as the
first event officially described
in Paradise Lost,
 but there's of course
an event that happened before
that which Milton's narrative
very carefully never describes,
and that's the creation of the
angels.
So we get Satan's theory of the
creation of the angels and
Abdiel, as we would expect,
takes great offense,
but it's important -- and
Abdiel's right and Satan's wrong
-- but it's important to
determine exactly what is wrong
about Satan's theology here and
how it would counter Milton's.
Satan's obviously wrong to
ascribe the creation of the
angels to something like a
random occurrence of fate when
Satan says,
"when fatal course / had
circl'd his full Orb."
Milton's explained a number of
times in the poem that there's
no such thing as a power called
"fate,"
so that's easily
dismissible.But it's not
absolutely clear to me that
Satan is wrong to claim that the
angels are "self-rais'd / by
their own quick'ning power."
I think on some level this has
to be seen as true,
at least according to what we
know of the dynamic processes in
Milton's account of the monistic
Creation.
God has impregnated matter with
spirit, and after this initial
act of impregnation he seems
able to allow this spiritualized
matter pretty much to organize
itself on its own into all these
beautiful and varied forms of
creation.
If we're not completely shocked
to hear Satan's claim for having
raised himself by his own
quickening power,
at least upon a rereading of
Paradise Lost that might
be because it looks an awful lot
like the theory of creation that
we get in Book Seven.
It also sounds like a moment in
Book Three that we've already
encountered: when the angel
Uriel -- the angel that Milton
credits for having the best
eyesight in heaven,
rather remarkably -- when Uriel
gives us his eyewitness account
of the Creation,
it sounds a little bit like
Satan's.Satan's argument
that the angels are self-raised
has something,
I think, like a foundation even
in Book Five itself.
It begins to resemble that
condition of absolute
self-determination that Raphael
had promised to Adam and Eve if
they remained obedient.
If Adam and Eve will only
remain sinless,
they'll be able to raise
themselves to that ethereal
state of angelic status.
This is a world in which
individuals -- rational,
self-determining individuals --
determine their own status
rather than accept one that has
been arbitrarily imposed upon
them.
This is an egalitarian world
that Milton is introducing us
to, and I think that in moments
such as these,
we see Milton laboring to
arrive at a theory of matter and
a theory of creation that can
support something like a
poetics;
a poetics but also a
philosophy, a political
philosophy of egalitarianism.
To claim that matter can move
itself to organize itself into
stars and into angels,
which is what Uriel will claim
happens, is essentially to lay
the philosophical foundation for
a political philosophy that's
not authoritarian by any
stretch.
It's not even hierarchical:
it's egalitarian.
This is a physics,
a theological physics that can
bolster the claims of a
politics.
It's a philosophy that can
imagine human beings as being
equally capable of organizing
themselves and creating their
own sense of order without the
meddlesome intervention of an
arbitrary God.Now,
many of my colleagues in the
Milton community dismiss the
possibility that there could be
anything even remotely like
something valid in Satan's
wonderful rejoinder to Abdiel.
They nearly always overlook the
Creation account that we get
from Uriel in Book Three,
which I think supports on some
level part of Satan's claim.
They're also eager to dismiss
Eve's feelings of injustice at
her inferior status.
They dismiss it as just another
one of Milton's unquestioning
acts of misogyny -- but I don't
think it's unquestioning at all.
All three of these examples for
me demonstrate Milton's
willingness to question nearly
every form of religious and
social and political orthodoxy.
Milton is continually putting
the official doctrines of even
his own poem on trial.
He's continually pitting the
narrator's own celebration of
hierarchy -- Milton's own
celebration of hierarchy --
against a more subversive and a
more questioning philosophy of
egalitarianism.Milton's
narrator -- and Milton is with
him to some extent -- comes down
most firmly on the side of a
divinely established hierarchy,
but this exquisitely textured,
richly textured poem can be
distinguished,
and in fact I think it has to
be distinguished,
from the views of the narrator.
On some incredibly important
level that's not on the level of
what the narrator tells us,
the poem is itself insistently
egalitarian, and I mean that in
a special sense:
it's egalitarian in the sense
that it's a poem rather than a
dogmatic treatise or a work of
political philosophy.
As a poem, Paradise Lost
places all of its divergent
theories and all of its
competing ideologies and visions
of the way the world works --
places them all side by side on
something like a level playing
field,
the playing field of the poetic
line.
The poem connects these
competing ideas with nothing
more leading than that most
liberal of all conjunctions,
or.
This poem makes the reader the
equal of the poet because either
this is the case or that is the
case,
and Milton is always telling us
to decide ourselves.
The poem lays down -- and I'll
conclude here -- a range of
ideological possibilities,
and it does that from its
opening line to its closing
line;
and then it permits the reader,
or maybe I should say it forces
the reader, to choose among
these possibilities.Okay.
We're on a roll,
this is our big week:
Books Seven and Eight for next
time.
