Episode 182: Paradise Lost II

by | Nov 13, 2024 | Episodes | 0 comments

It’s another day with you and me and Paradise.

 

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  • From Peering into Paradise, Euzcil Castaneto 2013: After Paradise Lost was published in 1667, it was met with immediate reception from major critics of the time. John Dryden was influenced by Paradise Lost so much that he had created his own adaptation of the epic in the form of a play in rhyming prose, and Dryden felt that Satan, not Adam, was the hero of the epic. Dryden was also a Royalist, a political opponent of Milton, but despite the political tensions, Milton’s creation was still met with open arms. Not everyone in the literary world took Paradise Lost as a great achievement: the epic was also met with constant criticism. Writers have even opted to attempt to rewrite the epic to their standards of poetry. But overall criticism involving Paradise Lost actually enriched the poem itself, putting it on a pedestal for future generations of critics. Paradise Lost  influenced Voltaire, who mentioned Milton and his epic in his French satire Candide. In a particular scene, the main character  visits the palace of a Venetian nobleman who completely belittles Milton’s epic, “[…] that barbarian who made a long commentary in ten books of turgid verse on the first chapter of Genesis? That clumsy imitator of the Greeks […] This poem, which is obscure, bizarre, and disgusting […]” Although these were harsh words written from Voltaire’s hand, Voltaire was simply satirizing literary criticism of the day by having a nobleman character deliver negative opinions about great authors. Voltaire actually holds Milton’s epic up to a high esteem as he writes “The Paradise Lost is the only poem wherein are to be found in a perfect degree that uniformity which satisfies the mind and that variety which pleases the imagination.” https://www.paradiselostinmodernenglish.com/2010/01/contemporary-critical-reception-and.html#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20first%20major,in%20rhyming%20prose%20(Fletcher). 
  • From Robert Burns To William Nicol, 1787: MY DEAR FRIEND, I AM now arrived safe in my native country, after a very agreeable jaunt, and have the pleasure to find all my friends well. I breakfasted with your gray-headed, reverend friend, Mr. Smith; and was highly pleased both with the cordial welcome he gave me, and his most excellent appearance and sterling good sense. I have been with Mr. Miller at Dalswinton, and am to meet him again in August. From my view of the lands and his reception of my bardship, my hopes in that business are rather mended; but still they are but slender. I am quite charmed with Dumfries folks-Mr. Burnside, the clergyman, in particular, is a man whom I shall ever gratefully remember; and his wife, god forgive me, I had almost broke the tenth commandment on her account. Simplicity, elegance, good sense, sweetness of disposition, good good humor, kind hospitality, are the constituents of her manner and heart.I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of any thing generous; but the stateliness of the Patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren, (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance,) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species. I have bought a pocket Milton which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the dauntless magnanimity; the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage of SATΑΝ. Tis true, I have just now a little cash; but misfortune dodges the path of human life; the poetic mind finds itself miserably unfit for the walks of business, until, in the words of the Bard, ” He falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.” God grant this may be an unreal picture with respect to me! But should it not, I have very little dependance on mankind. But from you, my ever dear sir, I look with confidence for the Apostolic love that shall wait on me through good report and bad report”-the love which Solomon emphatically says strong as death.” P. S. I shall be in Edinburgh about the latter end of July.
  • From Inquiry on Political Justice, Wiliam Godwin, 1793: From the whole of the subject it seems to appear that men of talents, even when they are erroneous, are not destitute of virtue, and that there is a degree of guilt of which they are incapable. There is no ingredient that so essentially contributes to a virtuous character as a sense of justice. Can great intellectual energy exist without a strong sense of justice? It has no doubt resulted from a train of speculation similar to this that poetical readers have commonly remarked Milton’s devil to be a being of considerable virtue. It must be admitted that his energies centered too much on personal regards. But why did he rebel against his maker? It was, as he himself informs us, because he saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed. After his fall, why did he still cherish the spirit of opposition? From a persuasion that he was injuriously treated. He was not discouraged by the apparent inequality of the contest, because a sense of reason and justice was stronger in his mind than a sense of brute force. He bore his torments with fortitude because he disdained to be subdued by despotic power, and he sought revenge because he could not think with tameness of the authority that assumed to dispose of him. In real history, we shall find that even Cæsar and Alexander had their virtues, however mistaken was their system of conduct. Great talents are great energies, and great energies cannot flow but from a powerful sense of fitness and justice.
  • Fom Defense of Poetry, Percy Shelley, 1821: Dante may be considered the bridge which unites the modern and ancient world, and Milton’s poem contains a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnifi-sense of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost: It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement anguish on an enemy, these things are evil, and are not to be forgiven in a tyrant, and although redeemed by much that ennobles one in defeat, all dishonors conquest in the victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his god as one who perseveres can be to one who in the cold security of triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy. Milton has so far violated the popular creed as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his god over his devil. And this bold neglect is the proof of Milton’s genius. The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form. Milton is the third epic poet. Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilized world, and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe.
  • From Preface to Paradise Lost, CS Lewis, 1941: It may be that Milton’s presentation of Satan is a magnificent poetical achievement which excites the admiration of the reader; on the other hand, it may mean that the real being whom Milton is depicting, if any, ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy. The first, so far as I know, has never till modern times been denied; the second, never affirmed before the times of Blake and Shelley. I shall not labor directly to convert those who admire Satan, but only to make a little clearer what it is they are admiring. That Milton could not have shared their admiration I hope, need no argument. Milton cannot exclude all absurdity from Satan, and does not even wish to: The whole nature of reality would have to be altered in order to give him such immunity, and it is not alterable. The cause from which the Sense of injured Merit arose in Satan’s mind  is that ‘He thought himself impaired.’ because the Messiah had been pronounced–these are the ‘wrongs’ which Shelley described as ‘beyond measure,’ a being superior to himself in kind, by whom he himself had been created, a being far above him in the natural hierarchy, preferred to him in honor by an authority whose right to do so was not disputable. No one had in fact done anything to Satan; he was not hungry, nor over-tasked, nor removed from his place, nor shunned, nor hated-he only thought himself impaired. In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. And his own prestige, it must be noted, had and could have no other grounds than those which he refused to admit for the superior prestige of Messiah. His revolt is entangled in contradictions; he wants hierarchy and does not want hierarchy. Throughout the poem he is engaged in sawing off the branch he is sitting on, not only in the quasi political sense already indicated, but in a deeper sense still, since a creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers
  • From Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish, 1967: Milton’s program of reader harassment begins in the opening lines ; the reader, however, may not be aware of it until line 84 when Satan speaks for the first time. The speech is a powerful one, moving smoothly from exclamation to regret to grand defiance. This is our first view of Satan and the impression given is of fortitude in adversity, enormous endurance, splendid recklessness, and extraordinary qualities of leadership. It is the nature of sophistry to lull the reasoning process; logic is a safeguard against a rhetorical effect only after the effect has been noted. The deep distrust, even fear, of verbal manipulation in the seventeenth century is a recognition of the fact that there is no adequate defense against eloquence at the moment of impact. The appeal of rhetoric was traditionally associated with the weakness of the fallen intellect, the defect of our hearers. Not to say that the reader falls and becomes one of Satan’s party: our involvement in the speech does not directly compromise our position in a god-centered universe, since the response is to a performance rather than to a point of view. The readers for whom Milton wrote  were prepared for a devil equipped with what appears on the surface to be the best of arguments. As a Christian who has been taught every day to steel himself against diabolical wiles, the reader is more than prepared to admit the justness of the judgment against Satan. The danger is not so much that Satan’s argument will persuade, as one does not accord the father of lies an impartial hearing, but that its intricacy will engage the reader’s attention and the larger contexts in which it exists will be forgotten. The reader proceeds determined not to be caught out, but invariably he is. This mental armor is never quite strong enough to resist the insidious verbal power. As the poem proceeds and this little drama is repeated, the reader understands that his responses are being controlled, and realizes that while his efforts to extricate himself from this sequence are futile, that very futility becomes a way to self-knowledge.
  • From The Madwoman In the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1979: reflection on Paradise Lost should remind us that, despite Eve’s apparent passivity and domesticity, Milton himself seems deliberately to have sketched so many parallels between her and Satan that it is hard at times for the unwary reader to distinguish the sinfulness of one from the other. As Stanley Fish has pointed out, Eve’s temptation speech to Adam is a tissue of Satanic echoes. Moreover, where Adam falls out of a self-sacrificing love for Eve which, at least to the modern reader, seems quite noble, Milton’s Eve falls for exactly the same reason that Satan does: because she wants to be “as gods,” and because, like him, she is secretly dissatisfied with her place, secretly preoccupied with questions of “equality.” After his fall, Satan makes a speech to his fellow angels in which he asks, “Who can in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live by right?” After her fall, Eve considers the possibility of keeping the fruit to herself “so to render me more equal.” And just as Satan is humbled and enslaved by his desire, so Eve is humbled by becoming a slave not only to Adam the individual man but to Adam the archetypal man, a slave to the species. Her bond with the fiend is strengthened not only by the striking similarities that link her to him, but also by the ways in which she resembles Sin, his female avatar and the only other female who graces (Paradise Lost. For not only is Sin female, like Eve, she is serpentine as Satan is. Despite Milton’s well-known misogyny, all these connections, parallels, and doublings among Satan, Eve, and Sin are shadowy messages, embedded in the text, and for sensitive female readers brought up in the bosom of a “masculinist” patriarchal church, the content is bruisingly real. To such women the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin and Eve must have seemed even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illustrate that historical dispossession and of the female.
    • From the Satanic Epic, Neil Forsyth, 2003: I think Milton did indeed invite his readers to adopt a satanic reading of scripture and a human experience. He lived in an age of controversy almost as dynamic as that in which the New Testament itself was written. Satan was the vehicle for the articulation of such controversies. I think that Milton also hoped the main lines of the satanic reading were wrong, but he had no way of knowing for certain. Some of the fascination of this poetry lies in this uncertainty, after years of murderous Civil War over the politics of doctrine, church, and Nation. At the very least the unpleasant god of the Old Testament in Milton’s reconstruction makes Satan’s Rebellion understandable. The result is that when Adam finally learns the true and secret meaning of redemption of the World by Christ’s sacrifice, he begins his response by saying “full of doubt I stand.” Doubt is not abolished by the end speech of the poem–or by Christian doctrine. Nor are we much helped by the reflection that doubt comes from the Latin for “to hesitate” and that the English word is also used in the Latin sense. What Adam hesitates about after all is a stark choice between two ways of reading the poem and human fate: to repent of sin or to Rejoice in sin. Satan then is the main challenge to Christian belief within the terms of the poem, the great doubter. That is one reason why I had called this book The Satanic epic: It is Satan who questions and probes and wonders and gives voice to many moving arguments that Christianity has provoked. The history of the Christian polemic is full of strident voices raised against one another. Milton knew these things and knew above all that Christianity had formed itself as a religion of controversy, indeed that many of its fundamental doctrines arose from that which came to be called heresy, and that conflict he’d dramatized in the figure of Satan and His opposition to God. Satan’s defenders have tended to be left or liberal in their politics, but these distinctions can be very subtle. The Marxist historian Christopher Hill thought Satan contained a good deal of Milton but nonetheless explained that Satan’s position shows how the good old cause of revolution had gone wrong. But these sorts of discourses are political, and usually divide readers according to their political commitments .https://newsadvance.com/entertainment/features/behind-the-screams-the-untold-story-of-lus-scaremare/article_6c955bbe-8c57-53eb-bf42-55d31c65b2bb.html 
  • From Evil Be My Good, Derek Murphy, 2016: When I read Paradise Lost for the first time during a graduate course of literature, I was surprised to find Satan eloquently defending Libertine ideals I also valued and using poetic language that echoed revolutionary heroism. When I mentioned that Milton gave Satan all the qualities of an epic hero, I was quickly corrected: Apparently not only was that assertion flatly untrue, it was also exactly the mistake that Milton purposely and cleverly lured me into. I pointed out that Milton himself was a revolutionary who tried to overthrow a king and wrote political essays supporting regicide and people’s right to self-govern, but I was told Milton had created a marvelously shifty text full of “reader harassment” and complication, and although on the surface Satan appears sympathetic, that’s just one of his many tricks; you can’t trust him, you can’t trust yourself, and you can’t trust the text. I was just a graduate student and the most reputable scholars in Milton studies agreed that viewing Satan as the hero was a rookie mistake. But as I read deeper, I discovered that interpretation and discussion of Paradise Lost has for decades faced a peculiar form of censorship: Satan was viewed as a hero for centuries, just by common readers but by literary elites, artists, and poets, some of them history’s greatest minds. But Scholars began to screen Paradise Lost to make sure it didn’t inspire readers to take it the wrong way. Literary commentaries focused on the obvious problem of Satan and argue that Milton’s writing was meant as a temptation or challenge for the people the faithful. Stanley Fish cemented this reading of the text claiming that the poem tempts the reader in the same way that Satan tempted Adam and Eve. The reader’s job was to overcome the Temptation and see Satan as the villain. When confusion arose, commenters on Paradise Lost would assume that Milton just didn’t know what he was doing, or that the book was simply inscrutable. 
  • Even though Satan seemed like a revolutionary hero, and even though other revolutionary Heroes were being celebrated and popular culture, Satan alone needed to be refused. In dealing with Milton, scholarship has remained abnormally conservative. Not all scholars are willing to continue this academic Orthodoxy, and have begun resurrecting a more obvious and immediate reading of Paradise Lost: Neil Forsyth argues Paradise Lost is not an orthodox poem and it needs to be rescued from its orthodox critics, and that Milton knew what he was doing. Satan seems heroic because he IS heroic, and if Satan is not heroic, Paradise Lost becomes a farce. But this kind of silencing, a refusal to hear and trust the words of Satan and to evaluate them logically and rationally, is being used today by conservatives who depend on this peculiar attribute of Satan to not only silence dissenters but to deny rights to those whom they wish to suppress. Any controversial issue can be won by appealing to the legacy of Satan: Not long ago it was satanic to let women vote and to free slaves, and today it is satanic to let transgender persons use the bathroom. How we read Paradise Lost is a political issue with real world consequences. It is possible to dehumanize human beings by branding them as satanic and obscuring their rights under Satan’s magical cloak of taboo. Milton himself identified the same issue against the term heresy: “there are some bigots who, by a perversion of justice, anything they consider unconventional with the title heretic or heresy. By branding anyone out of hand with this hateful name, they silence him with one word and need take no further trouble.”

 

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