Milton and Modernity
Politics, Masculinity and Paradise Lost
Matthew Jordan
Milton and Modernity
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Milton and Modernity
Politics, Masculinity and Paradise Lost
Matthew Jordan
Lecturer in Literature and Cultural History
Liverpool John Moores University
© Matthew Jordan 2001
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as the author of this work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2001 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan, Matthew, 1967–
Milton and modernity : politics, masculinity, and Paradise lost /
Matthew Jordan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0–312–23600–X (cloth)
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 2. Politics and literature–
–Great Britain—History—17th century. 3. Milton, John, 1608–1674–
–Political and social views. 4. Political poetry, English—History and
criticism. 5. Free will and determinism in literature. 6. Individualism in
literature. I. Title.
PR3562 .J67 2000
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Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
To my family,
and in memory of John Stachniewski
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Contents
Acknowledgements
viii
List of Abbreviations
ix
Introduction: Milton and Modernity
1
1 ‘Born to command and not to obey’: Milton and the
Political Force of Liberal Humanism
19
2 ‘No respecter of persons’: Individual Merit in
Milton’s Heaven
45
3 ‘Stronger then Death’: Masculinity and Marriage in
Paradise Lost
79
4 Labour and Love: the Individual and the Natural World in
Paradise Lost
115
Conclusion: ‘On even ground’ – Adam as Every Man
151
Notes
160
Select Bibliography
204
Index
226
vii
Acknowledgements
It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge all the many debts,
both personal and professional, I have run up during the writing of
this book. Nevertheless, I should like to thank my father and mother,
Tim and Elaine Jordan, Jane Jordan, Tamsin Spargo, Timothy Bewes
and Elspeth Graham, for reading and commenting on drafts. I am
also indebted to Gerald Hammond and Roger Pooley for their helpful
comments at an earlier stage of this work. I am grateful to David
Llewellyn (Lew), Kay Pont, and Sarah and Leah Llewellyn, for providing
a congenial and conducive environment during much of the writing
process. Thanks are due to all my friends and colleagues for their
company, support and encouragement, but most of all to John Stachniewski, a tolerant friend as well as an intellectual example.
viii
List of Abbreviations
Works by Milton
An Apology
Areo
CPW
PL
PR
Reason
Readie
SA
Tenure
An Apology against a Pamphlet Call’d A Modest Confutation
of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against
Smectymnuus
Areopagitica
The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, ed.
Douglas Bush et al.
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
The Reason of Church-governement
The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth
Samson Agonistes
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
Others
2Ts; 1T; 2T
Lev.
OED
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government; First Treatise;
Second Treatise. References to Locke’s texts are by paragraph (§).
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. References give the page
number of Macpherson’s edition, followed by the page
number of the original, ‘Head’ edition of 1651 (given by
Macpherson).
The Oxford English Dictionary
ix
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Introduction:
Milton and Modernity
To associate Milton with ‘modernity’ might seem odd. After all, it is now
almost a century since Walter Raleigh described Paradise Lost as ‘a
monument to dead ideas’. One of Milton’s champions of the middle
years of this century, Douglas Bush, produced an image of the poet as
in some respects behind even his own time, nearly three centuries
earlier: ‘a noble anachronism in an increasingly modern and mundane
world’. Milton continues, in the eyes of some, to appear principally in
the guise of ‘the last great Renaissance humanist’.1 In Milton criticism,
‘modern’ has tended to mean ‘these days’, as when Marcia Landy contends that ‘Few modern readers can wholeheartedly affirm the presence
of essential truths in Milton; many of his attitudes are alien to the
modern world’.2 For a long time, the terms ‘modernity’ and the
‘modern’ served mainly to describe, at a time when they seemed
the latest or dominant trend in the field, the various attacks on Milton
initiated by T. S. Eliot and furthered most influentially by F. R. Leavis.3
However, ‘modern’ has another generally current sense in the humanities. As David Kolb remarks, the term ‘quickly developed two uses, one
meaning “contemporary, present day” and the other adding the connotation that in modern times the world had changed from the classic
and medieval world’.4 Milton was intimately involved with many of
the developments which together made up this change. If today it can
appear that notions such as ‘self-esteem or self-respect’ are ‘not merely
possible values the self can have for itself, but constitutive of what it is
to have a self in the first instance’, then the fact that the term ‘selfesteem’ was quite possibly coined by Milton indicates his implication
in the formation of some of our fundamental ways of experiencing and
understanding the world.5 ‘Self-esteem’ appears in Paradise Lost, in
which it is recommended to Adam by the Archangel Raphael: ‘Ofttimes
1
2 Milton and Modernity
nothing profits more / Than self-esteem’ (PL 8.571–2). The earliest citation in the OED is from Richard Baxter’s Sancta Sophia (1657), where it
is bracketed with other forms of spiritual pride: ‘Independence, Selfeesteem, Selfe-judgment, and Self-will’. But this is considerably predated
by Milton’s use, in An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), of ‘self-esteem’
to suggest that his proper ethical regard for himself is a guarantee that
he cannot but conduct himself properly. Accused by his anonymous
polemical opponent of sexual incontinence, Milton rebuffs the charge
by appeal to his ‘self-esteem, either of what I was or what I might be’
(CPW 1.890). ‘Self-esteem’ functions here not only as a supposed guarantee of sexual propriety but as a principle of constancy through time,
a point of unity from which earlier and later versions of the self can be
surveyed. Milton’s use of the term attests to the process whereby identity came to be constituted less as a matrix of social affiliations and roles
than as an essence subtending them and persisting regardless of what
are increasingly seen as mere ‘circumstances’. The worth of the self is
supposed not to depend on the estimation of others but to consist in
the self’s independent consciousness of its own truth.6 In this respect,
Milton may be not only a ‘post-medieval’ figure, but a contemporary
one, insofar as he is one creator of our common sense, of ‘the individualistic configuration of ideas and values’ – the priority of the individual over the social whole – which, as Louis Dumont among many others
argues, ‘characterizes modernity’.7 Paradise Lost, Milton’s greatest work,
is, in Catherine Belsey’s words, the epic of ‘the moment of installation
of liberal humanism’. That is, if ‘The project of epic is to fix the values
(and not only the new values) of . . . society, to specify them as eternal
essences and immobilize them in the heightened and decorated textuality of verse’, then Paradise Lost does this for ‘the ruling assumptions,
values and meanings of the modern epoch’, above all its ‘commitment
to man, whose essence is freedom’.8 Paradise Lost helps construct this
figure by presenting a model of man who, by virtue of an essential
similarity to other men – his possession of the freedom that is supposed
to be part of his nature as a man – is ultimately answerable to none of
them.
Given that modernity is often contrasted with tradition, it is a pleasing paradox that understanding modernity in terms of individualism
has quite a long history, stretching back at least as far as Hegel, for
whom ‘The right of the subject’s particularity, his right to be satisfied,
or in other words the right of subjective freedom, is the pivot and center
of the difference between antiquity and modern times’.9 In essence this
book seeks to contribute to what David Aers has called the ‘history of
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 3
the subject’, defined by Aers as ‘the history of how interiority and the
subjectivity to which that belongs emerged in western culture’.10 In the
terms of this history, individualist discourses and the individuals they
invoke are not, as they are still often considered, the transparent reflections of naturally given facts.11 Rather, the ‘subject’ designates the
‘individual’ or ‘person’ understood ‘as the specifically subjected object
of social and historical forces and determinations’, of particular social
arrangements and the values and ideologies which contribute to their
reproduction. To possess subjectivity is to experience oneself nonetheless as the site of a significantly unified identity experienced as something essentially inward, marked by ‘interiority’ and therefore set
against an external world from which it is supposed to be essentially
distinct.12 Aers is critical of this project as it has been practised hitherto,
arguing that claims, by critics such as Catherine Belsey and Francis
Barker, that the emergence of this subject can ‘be quite precisely located
– in the seventeenth century’ actually, for all their apparent radicalism,
buy into ‘the story of pre-seventeenth century culture told in the deeply
conservative medieval establishment in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s’.13
Examples include Francis Barker’s claims that ‘Pre-bourgeois subjection
does not properly involve subjectivity at all’, understood as ‘interiorized
self-recognition’ (that is, subjectivity as a form of identity defined in
terms of a mental apprehension of oneself as essentially a distinct consciousness); and that under such conditions, ‘the social plenum is the
body of the king and membership of this anatomy is the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm’.14 According to Aers, such
statements draw on ‘a version of culture from prescriptive and largely
clerical texts’, repress ‘the heterogeneity of experience and belief in late
medieval communities’, and are guilty of unhistorical ‘idealism’.15 Elsewhere, Aers suggests that the description of a character in Langland’s
Piers Plowman as ‘so singuler by hymself’ that he considers himself ‘an
order by hymselue’ is evidence that ‘“individualism” was not quite as
new in 1611 as . . . much conventional chronology of cultural history,
and the history of the subject, currently maintains’.16
However, in his questioning of possibly crude generalizations about
medieval society Aers comes close to a rejection of historical periodization. Thus Aers advises that ‘we need at least to suspend the master
narrative of Dark Ages to Renaissance or of feudalism to capitalism’.
Arguing in similar vein, Lee Patterson draws directly on Lyotard’s notion
of a collapse of the ‘grand narratives’ – the overarching stories by
reference to which modern culture legitimates itself, such as that of
the emancipation of humanity from slavery and oppression – to suggest
4 Milton and Modernity
the practice of a postmodern, ironic history ‘which dispenses with historiographic grands recits not in order to escape from historicity but
to recover it in its local, concrete form’.17 Insofar as these arguments are
marshalled against what Lee Patterson describes as ‘the crude binarism
that locates modernity (“us”) on one side and premodernity (“them”)
on the other, thus condemning the Middle Ages to the role of allpurpose alternative’, and are advanced in favour of the practice of
‘microhistory’ they are unproblematic.18 But if we dispense with the
attempt to periodize, to engage in ‘the summation of those features that
protect the historian from leveling off the course of history into the
monotony of what is always the same, and thus from the error of
thinking that anything can happen at any time’, nothing is left but a
combination of random heterogeneity and repetitive homogeneity (if
anything can happen at any time then all times are much of a muchness). The results are intellectually and politically debilitating.19 An
exclusive concern with microhistories and ‘petits recits’ can, as David
Norbrook suggests, be ‘obfuscatory’, eliding the explosive changes
which took place in the seventeenth century.20 Margery Kempe, for
whose importance to the ‘history of the subject’ Aers argues, may have
experienced herself as an individual in ways which have been held to
be exclusively the result of later developments.21 But these later developments should not therefore be underestimated. Beginning in the
late sixteenth century and gathering pace throughout the seventeenth,
an explosion of the prefix ‘self-’ in compound words such as ‘selfknowledge’ and ‘self-consciousness’ (to take a couple of examples from
hundreds) is indicative of a profound cultural shift gathering pace.22
Individualism may have been sufficiently present at the time of Piers
Plowman for it to be worth attacking, but by the early seventeenth
century a campaign is being waged to render economically selfinterested behaviour respectable as of benefit to all.23 Most importantly
of all, in the 1640s a political revolution was made in the name of ‘the
people’, conceived as a collection of ultimately independent, rational
individuals.24 To periodize is to take account not only of the presence
or absence of any given phenomenon, but of its relative social weight,
the significance it is accorded, its general interpretation and legitimacy.
The implication is that, as Chantal Mouffe affirms, ‘modernity must
be defined at the political level, for it is there that social relations take
shape and are symbolically ordered’. This is not to say that in political
discourse social relations are totalized and unified, transparently represented or summed up without remainder. This is why the practice of
‘microhistory’ is both worthwhile and, in principle, interminable. But
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 5
it is to say that such discourse allows us to discern trends which have
become dominant. Thus it is at the political level that modernity can
be most clearly differentiated. Indeed, the narrative within which such
critics as Francis Barker and Catherine Belsey operate is, in its essentials,
a political one. Central to it are the English Revolution and the development of the liberal state – something one would find it hard to glean
from Aers’s account.25 However, Aers’s criticisms have some validity
insofar as Barker, in particular, tends to view this political narrative as
determinant of, or at the very least holding the interpretative master
key to, the whole of culture. Barker’s argument that the political
upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century established ‘a new set of connections between subject and discourse, subject and polity and in doing
so fundamentally altered the terms within which these mutually constitutive relations held’ is in itself unexceptionable.26 But his reliance,
in his elaboration of the relation between subject, discourse and polity,
on a combination of Althusser and Foucault, causes his text to replicate
their differing tendencies towards ‘pure structural determination’,
whereby the individual is merely a reflex of a larger system.27 For
Foucault, it is the state, ‘both individualizing and totalitarian’, which
constitutes our identity, a process which he sees as deriving from, and
presents as modelled on, a Christian pastorship which organized ‘a link
between total obedience, knowledge of oneself, and confession to
someone else’.28 It is this willingness to suggest that the individual or
‘subject’ is the creature of the state that causes Barker to give the impression that once ‘the subject’ arrived on the scene, everything was made
anew and we had entered a condition of ‘pure modernity’, unbeholden
to the past, of which Aers is right to be sceptical.29
Concomitant with such ‘structural determinism’ is a perspective on
freedom as at best a functional device for the efficient operation of
a society driven by the operations of the free market – in Graham
Burchell’s words, ‘a technical requirement of governing the natural
processes of social life and, particularly, those of self-interested
exchanges’. Since the individual, on this account, is construed as ‘the
essential atomic element’ of the ‘mechanics’ of society, it follows that
for Foucault it is no use ‘Opposing the individual and his interests’ to
the state. On the contrary, ‘individualization’ must be attacked as radically as ‘totalization’.30 Such a jaundiced view of the individual as merely
a cog in a malevolent social machine lies behind Barker’s reductive and
onesided conception of the ‘new state-form’ and ‘novel citizen-subject’
which he believes Milton’s Areopagitica ‘operates to call into being’. For
Barker, this is an arrangement in which ‘the state . . . by demarcating
6 Milton and Modernity
the public space of the state’s competence from the private realm of
individual freedoms . . . has secured its domination there too, by securing the recto of its public verso’. This ‘division itself is the very form of
the new power’ in which ‘is encoded an essential settlement which
accords civil liberty to the subject only on condition that it is indeed
civil’. His grounds for asserting this are that Milton’s proposal, in
demanding the right to publish as he sees fit, is not that anyone should
be allowed to say anything, but that, where previously censorship and
punishment had intervened before publication, Areopagitica places this
moment afterwards, a distinction which Barker equates with a shift from
a ‘vengeful’ to a ‘deterrent’ operation of power. For Barker, what the new
citizen-subject is deterred from is crossing ‘the point of transgression
where its activity will be arrested by the agents of the apparatus who
patrol the frontier between the two spaces’, these being ‘the public arena
of the state apparatus and another domain of civil life’ which the
‘subject’ occupies as a ‘private citizen’.31 This conflation of civil society
with the private tout court neglects that development, outlined by Jürgen
Habermas, whereby the private, defined in contrast to public authority,
is itself subject to a further division between private and public, between
‘civil society in the narrower sense’, comprising both ‘the realm of commodity exchange and social labour’ and ‘the family with its interior
domain’, and ‘the authentic “public sphere”’. The latter is the realm ‘in
which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public
opinion’ – the very public opinion which Barker dismisses as merely
private and policed by the state.32 Just as Foucault neglects, in Habermas’s phrase, ‘the revolutionary establishment of a constitutionalized
state power, which is to say, of a political order transferred ideologically
from the sovereignty of the prince to the sovereignty of the people’,
Barker is blind to the public sphere, a blindness reflected in the way his
account of the development of political modernity neglects to mention
the role of the people in the English Revolution.33 Milton does not.
Areopagitica is the text in which Milton lets out the revolutionary cry
against ‘prejudice and custom’ (CPW 2.565); asserts that there is no
authority but ‘reason and convincement’; and exhorts the people to
take truth ‘into [our own] hands again’ for it can only be found by
‘much arguing, much writing, many opinions’ (CPW 2.554). Gone, for
Milton, is the ‘iron yoke of conformity’ (CPW 2.563), for ‘all the Lord’s
people are become prophets’ (CPW 2.556).
The refusal to consider rights and ‘constitutionalization’ as anything
other than a ruse of power has a pedigree stretching back to Marx, pro-
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 7
ducing a similar neglect of freedom but for reasons which are the inverse
of Foucault’s. If Foucault sees freedom as merely an aspect of the state’s
social engineering, facilitating the operation of the economy, Marx sees
it as no more than the political reflex of economic practices. For Marx,
the ‘so-called rights of man’ are merely ‘the rights of egoistic man, of
man separated from other men and from the community’.34 But in so
regarding them he was, as Claude Lefort argues, ‘the prisoner of the
ideological version of rights, without examining what they mean in
practice, what profound changes they bring to social life’. He is ‘captivated . . . by the image of a power anchored in the individual’ which in
fact ‘disguises a new mode of access to the public sphere’.35 In other
words, ‘when he dismisses the upheaval in social and political relations
implicit in the bourgeois representation of these rights, he still occupies
the ideological terrain he claims to be undermining’. These rights, ‘Far
from having the function of masking a dissolution of social bonds
which makes everyone a monad’ (that is to say, representing as natural
a historical state of affairs in which men have come to see themselves
as having no ties to anything but their own private interests and
desires), actually ‘testify to the existence of a new network of social relations and bring it into existence’.36 Thus, for example, where Marx
argues that freedom of opinion is guaranteed only ‘at the moment when
it seems to be a spiritual equivalent of private property’, Lefort points
out that it is in fact ‘a freedom of relationships’, bound up with communication, suggesting ‘that man cannot be legitimately assigned to the
limits of his private world, that he has a right to public speech and
thought’.37 Furthermore, not only is the right to freedom of opinion
ineradicably public, such rights, in the words of John B. Thompson, ‘far
from expressing merely the egoism of isolated individuals in civil
society, . . . express the refusal to allow civil society to be absorbed by
the state and . . . provide the basis of opposition to the established
order’.38 To appreciate this is to ‘grasp the meaning of the historical
mutation in which power is assigned limits and right is fully recognized
as existing outside power’. From this moment, ‘the notion of human
rights . . . points towards a sphere which cannot be controlled; right
comes to represent something ineffaceably external to power’ because
‘nobody is able to occupy the place, at a distance from all others, from
which he would have authority to grant or ratify rights’: implicit in the
very notion of rights which belong to individuals as individuals is ‘a
society which accepts conflicting opinions and debates over rights
because the markers which once allowed people to situate themselves
in relation to one another in a determinate manner’ – for instance, by
8 Milton and Modernity
virtue of birth, or the favour of a monarch whose authority is unquestionable – ‘have disappeared’.39
A relevant example of the effects of Marxist reductiveness on the question of freedom and rights is the work of C. B. Macpherson, whose
notion of ‘possessive individualism’, argued to be the common assumption of the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Harrington, remains influential in literary studies and is not infrequently extended to include
Milton.40 Macpherson takes the broadly Marxist line that the freedom
these thinkers appeal to is the freedom of market man since they are
united in their conception of
. . . the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or
capacities, owing nothing to society for them . . . The individual, it
was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his own person
and his capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence
on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.
Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other
as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired
by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between
proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the
protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly
relation of exchange.41
However, in supporting this hypothesis, Macpherson is so overridingly
concerned with demonstrating that the thinkers he examines are operating with assumptions derived from the workings of market society
that he has nothing substantive to say about their very different conceptions of freedom and the nature of society, differences which have
markedly divergent consequences for their conceptions of political life
and the state. For instance, where both Milton and Locke believed that
the ‘people’ had the right to replace their governors, Hobbes held that
it was necessary for the sovereign power to be a self-perpetuating law
unto itself. Otherwise, he believed, there would be disagreement over
the succession, and in the absence of a guarantor of order holding
absolute power fundamentally antagonistic social forces would take
their natural course and war would break out. Macpherson’s ascription
of this position to Hobbes’s simply having ‘overlooked and failed to put
into his model . . . the centripetal force of a cohesive bourgeois class
within the society’ is less than satisfying.42
This inadequacy is testament to the need to appreciate that the force
and significance of such concepts as liberty ‘owes as much to the po-
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 9
litically functioning public sphere in which public opinion was formed
as it does to the market economy’.43 As David Norbrook declares, we
need to go beyond ‘the stereotyped notions of Renaissance individualism and bourgeois humanism’ and attend to ‘a history of the citizen as
well as of the bourgeois’.44 It is because of Milton’s implication in this
history that scholars with an interest in politics have always been the
most alive to his significance for the development of ways of thinking
about the world we now find habitual. Don M. Wolfe holds Milton ‘entitled to a place as a democratic reformer because in the course of history
the liberties for which he stood have gradually become identified with
those reforms demanded and achieved by an increasingly large number
of voters’. Arthur Barker notes Milton’s ‘considerable effect on democratic thought’, but also cautions against reading ‘into his phrases – the
good of the people, natural right, liberty and equality – the modern
meanings which they did not have for him’.45 The caveat is certainly
warranted. But it should not allow us to underestimate the importance
of the institution of a vocabulary whose terms are such that they have
remained continually open to redefinition.
The first two chapters of this book attempt to situate Milton’s ideal
of the individual in the context of the fundamental changes in conceptions of society and state which were taking place in the early
modern period, above all by noting some of the similarities between
Milton’s political works and those of Locke, often held to be a founding father of liberal political thought.46 Milton, whose influence on
Locke, according to Nicholas von Maltzahn, has been underestimated,
shares with him a tradition of political thought in which an emphasis
on individual moral freedom stands in opposition to the sanctification
of kingship and the naturalization, through the representation of the
king as father to his subjects, of the given order; to a Hobbesian view
of human nature as incapable of self-government and of liberty as mere
absence of impediment; to a broadly Calvinist view of political actors
as no more than functionaries in the service of God’s will; and to the
corporatist rationalism of Hooker, for whom the role of the individual
is to assent to the given.47 Both Milton and Locke construct their arguments around the idea that men are naturally free. Government is a
contrivance designed to further the ends of such men and is limited to
those actions which they recognize as performing this function. A government which fails to meet this criterion may legitimately be replaced
or overthrown (both Milton and Locke were active revolutionaries).48
There can be found in both Milton and Locke ‘the modern and strictly
political concept of a moral right of resistance’.49 Both believe in the
10
Milton and Modernity
political significance of individual men interpreting a law of nature
which transcends any government, unlike Hobbes, who in similarly
modern fashion understands government as an entirely human affair,
but reduces natural law to the sovereign’s will. The importance of this
difference is suggested by Herbert Marcuse’s admittedly ad hoc recourse
to natural law:
. . . appealing to the right of resistance is an appeal to a higher law,
which has universal validity, that is, which goes beyond the selfdefined right and privilege of a particular group. And there really is
a close connection between the right of resistance and natural law.
Now you will say that such a universal higher law simply does not
exist. I believe that it does exist. Today we no longer call it Natural
Law . . . If we appeal to humanity’s right to peace, to the right to
abolish exploitation and oppression, we are not talking about selfdefined, special, group interests, but rather, and in fact, interests
demonstrable as universal rights.50
Part of the intention of this book is to show some of the ways in which
the content of Milton’s (and, indeed, Locke’s) appeal to a higher law
in fact represents a specific and exclusive sectional interest, that of a
certain type of masculinity. But it also seeks to avoid eliding the way in
which the texts of both Milton and Locke contain an emphasis on moral
and political vigilance. Hobbes, by contrast, allows reason no role in
politics other than to recommend abstention, promoting the kind of
‘post-ideological’ cynicism and apathy which prevailed in certain
(powerful and privileged) quarters after the Restoration, and has been
periodically modish ever since. It is, of course, the most eminently
ideological of positions.
There are significant differences between Milton and Locke as political thinkers. J. G. A. Pocock overstates the case when he suggests Locke
was probably among the adversaries of the classical republican tradition
and its taste for civic virtue, and thus assimilates him a little too easily
to his narrative of the supercession of republican virtue by ‘liberal’ selfinterest.51 A conception of virtue as necessarily including action for the
public good is certainly present in Locke’s writings. But it is true that
this presence is much less insistent, particularly in the Two Treatises of
Government, than in Milton’s texts. The same applies in the case of
appeals to the will of God. In Locke’s texts political theory has, it seems,
effected a greater abstraction of its conceptual arguments from the social
and religious assumptions of the milieu from which it derives, although
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 11
this by no means amounts to an absolute separation. These shifts of
emphasis allow Locke to be more reticent than Milton on the question
of whose opinions count when it comes to judging the acceptability or
otherwise of a particular regime. But both display a rhetorical pattern,
derived from and contributing to the practices which constituted the
early modern public sphere, in which appeal is made to the reader’s selfimage, and a community of rational individuals, bearers of a natural
right to freedom, is constructed against various forms of unreason. For
both, this was a response of sorts to the dilemma of political modernity
described by Chantal Mouffe, following Claude Lefort, as follows:
The absence of power embodied in the person of the prince and tied
to a transcendental authority preempts the existence of a final guarantee or source of legitimation; society can no longer be defined as
a substance having an organic identity. What remains is a society
without clearly defined outlines, a social structure that it is impossible to describe from the perspective of a single, or universal, point
of view.52
This was a problem raised in response to invocations, by Milton and
others, of the name of ‘the people’. If the people decide who shall rule,
asked Sir Robert Filmer, who decides who the people are?53 Social and
political struggle has always determined the answer to this question.
For both Milton and Locke, one line of definition was certainly class.
Neither envisions the democratic inclusion of ‘the meaner sort of
people’, although it seems extremely difficult to be precise about exactly
where the line would have been drawn. The other, much clearer demarcation was in terms of gender. For both, politics is an exclusively masculine concern, and the liberty they uphold is, in Carol Pateman’s
phrase, specifically ‘the political liberty of sons’, asserted against political patriarchalism.54 However, the claims they advanced proved eminently amenable to appropriation. As Lefort remarks, ‘whilst reason and
justice become solemn references which are available to all, they are
subject to interpretation by all’, and consequently ‘The emergence of
the individual does not merely mean that he is destined to control
his own destiny; he has also been dispossessed of assurance as to his
identity.’55
It is true that both Milton and Locke had a reasonably clear conception of this identity. Their model of freedom is also a norm. However,
this normativity is not simply the crystallization of an apparatus
of domination. Despite the conflation, both implicit and explicit, of
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Milton and Modernity
Milton, Locke and Hobbes by critics inspired variously by Marx and
Foucault, Chapter 2 suggests that their different positions derive from
distinct and opposed social milieux. Hobbes, regardless of his social
origins, is best understood as not merely theoretically but socially and
culturally an absolutist thinker. It is true that his diagnosis of vainglory,
or excessive vanity, as one of the prime sources of conflict can be taken
as an attack on aristocratic attitudes, as can his assertion of the claims
of merit and his reduction of status to a question of the sovereign’s
favour. However, he is hardly more tolerant of the bourgeoisie and what
he held to be their grasping and hypocritical ways; and with respect
to property, ‘Hobbes abandoned the interests of the possessing classes
altogether’, holding the royalist position that ‘all property was subject
to the king’.56 The key to understanding this apparent detachment from
both nobility and bourgeoisie or ‘middle sort’ is to recognize that his
sense that status (rather than economic gain) is the overriding concern
of men, combined with a recognition that in a post-feudal epoch money
is important to status, expresses a moment in which, as Perry Anderson
says of the absolutist state, ‘noble power’ took on a ‘new form . . . determined by the spread of commodity production and exchange’.57 The
competitive egoism Hobbes takes as the essence of human nature is
modelled above all on the struggle for power and favour at court to
which the centralizing project of absolutism reduced the aristocracy.
It is true that, insofar as our society is organized around competitive
egoism, Hobbes’s analysis is of more general relevance, as the utilitarians found. But it is far from true that the liberal tradition is devoid of
potential for more collective and cooperative forms of interaction, as
can be discerned from an attentive reading of Milton and Locke. The
idea that ‘people’ were sufficiently capable of moral cognition to be
entrusted with ‘liberty’ and the power to judge governments was not
merely something which served the demands of philosophical coherence but was a practical assumption about the real capacities of men.
In the seventeenth century the conception of natural law as the basis
for social cohesion depended for its plausibility on the collectivist
nature of the seventeenth-century English bourgeoisie, on the social
practices and institutions – above all the various kinds of voluntary
associations – which worked to reconcile individual power and freedom
with cooperation and community. Such appeal to the bourgeoisie or
urban middle sort as Milton and Locke possessed (and for most of the
two centuries after the English Revolution this was considerable) rested
on precisely this foundation. Their view of social and political life articulates a context characterized by socialized individualism. In such a
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 13
context, both a potential to disorder and organizing oneself with others
to avoid it are natural. People feel themselves to be free and responsible for their own destiny but do not understand by this that they are
absolutely autonomous since they need the society into which they
freely opt. This is a society in which people are in principle equal, but
where this fundamental equality is not conceived in a way which precludes differences of rank, defined in terms of functions performed in
the pursuit of a common goal.58
Paradise Lost can thus be seen less as presaging ‘state-oriented social
organization’, as David Weisberg, inspired by Foucault, has it, than as
containing a political charge in its presentation of different types of
individual, or modes of subjectivity.59 Fredric Jameson has argued that
there are two worlds in Paradise Lost, the feudal world of God and Satan,
and that of Adam the first commoner or bourgeois, and, further, that
two narratives correspond to these two worlds, one of feudal revolt, and
one of privatization and monadization.60 However, while Satan’s revolt
is arguably feudal in form, the same does not really apply to Heaven. It
is true that Heaven is a monarchy (which some critics profess to find
confusing in the light of Milton’s politics, but which actually adds force
to his critique of earthly kings as blasphemous imitators of God), but
to see it as feudal renders illegible the political significance of events
there. Heaven is decked out in some feudal trappings, but it is more centralized than is consistent with the historical reality of feudalism, especially once all are brought ‘under one head,’ as Abdiel puts it (PL 5.830).
Heaven is a unified realm under a single law, not a patchwork of
parcellized sovereignty and privilege. Heaven is consistent with Milton’s
beliefs regarding the original nature of aristocratic titles: heavenly
society can be understood as a hierarchical system of offices or functions. But this interpretation of history, like Heaven, is best understood
as a projection of a middle-class vision of social organizations as voluntary associations, in which differences of rank (conceived in terms of
the holding of office for specific purposes) are subordinate to an essential moral egalitarianism. It is only Satan and his followers who care –
obsessively – for rank understood in terms of pedigree. The essence of
the politics of Paradise Lost resides in the division it presents between,
on the one hand, a self whose essence resides in its capacity to recognize the rational law of God and nature, and which esteems itself sufficiently to conduct itself accordingly; and on the other hand, a self
slavishly attached to the trivial tokens of ‘worldly’ greatness. In terms
of the heavenly narrative, the importance of the figure of Abdiel resides
not only in his obedience to God, but in his capacity for moral
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Milton and Modernity
cognition, his respect for his own nature as a rational being, and his
obscurity. If, as Gordon Braden and William Kerrigan suggest, Satan is
in many respects a type of the Renaissance man – engaged in the conscious self-fashioning of existentially unfettered subjectivity, obsessed
with power and display – then God, as David Norbrook has it of the
English Revolution, ‘makes a determined attempt to make sure that
Renaissance Man in his purest form should not be installed’.61 Certainly
Abdiel is best understood as a representative of the virtuous revolutionary waiting for the day when the true force of what opponents deem
his ‘sect’ will be revealed.
As the figure of Abdiel suggests, the privatization which Jameson
opposes to feudalism is not the only, and certainly was not the immediate, alternative to the feudal world. Milton did not see questions of
private happiness and the public good as mutually exclusive, nor even,
except at considerable cost, readily separable. A nation needs ‘faith not
without vertue, temperance, modestie, sobrietie, parsimonie, justice;
not to admire wealth or honour; to hate turbulence and ambition; to
place every one his privat welfare and happiness in the public peace,
libertie and safetie’ (Readie, CPW 7.443). Nevertheless, the private or
domestic sphere was important for Milton both for the happiness it
could bring and as an arena for the exercise of the virtue which fitted
a man to be free. Chapters 3 and 4 attend to the way these issues are
addressed in Paradise Lost. Jameson’s description of Paradise Lost is right
inasmuch as Milton’s poem is an epic in which the suppression of a
revolt inspired by ‘feudal’ desires is superceded by that concern with
ordinary daily life which for Charles Taylor so typifies modern versions
of the self.62 It is an epic in which the central characters are expected to
adhere to a (paradoxically and paradisiacally ‘unroutinized’) routine.63
The significance of this can be discerned in Milton’s definition of
magnanimity (great-mindedness or -souledness), one of the prime epic
motives. For Aristotle, megalopsychia applied to that man ‘who values
himself highly and at the same time justly’ and therefore ‘bears himself
as he ought in respect of honour and dishonour’ since the greatest good
is that we attribute to the gods, whom we consider worthy of honour.
Aristotle explicitly dissociates ‘great-mindedness’ from humility or
modesty: ‘The man who estimates himself lowly, and at the same time
justly, is modest; but not Great-minded, since this latter quality implies
greatness, just as beauty implies a large bodily conformation while small
people are neat and well-made but not beautiful.’64 Milton, by contrast,
associates ‘high-mindedness’, displayed when ‘a man behaves himself
as befits his own dignity, rightly understood’, with modestia, or ‘humil-
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 15
ity’, which ‘gives a man a modest opinion of himself and prevents
him from blowing his own trumpet, except when it is really called-for’.
The opposites of high-mindedness include ‘arrogance’, ‘a vain desire
for glory’, and ‘boastfulness’, while humility is contrasted with ‘pride
towards God’ (Christian Doctrine, CPW 6.735, 733, 734, 662). It is true
that Milton seems to have found ample occasions which required selfcommendation, but nevertheless this is a redefinition which would
allow commitment to a daily round, conceived as an expression of
rational freedom, or liberty, to be presented as heroic.65 Consequently
Chapters 3 and 4 attend to the poem’s evocation of an Edenic life of
perfect love and unalienated but self-disciplined labour.
Despite the importance of the public world of intellectual, political
and religious labour and duty, and despite the strident rhetoric of masculinity through which its boundaries are enforced, Milton is clear in
his writings on divorce that something is missing from this world, that
one face of a coin is impossible without the other. There needs to be a
space ‘where the different sexe in most resembling unlikenes, and most
unlike resemblance cannot but please best and be pleas’d in the aptitude of that variety’ (Tetrachordon, CPW 2.597). In this he clearly reflects
the modern division of life into public and private spheres, a phenomenon which may have predated the seventeenth century but comes into
its own at this time, becoming the structuring principle of the dominant mode of individuality. Milton charges the private with the power
to attend to all those intimate and secret delights which were to come
to seem the truth of us. In the process he produced the type of subjectivity which spawned psychoanalysis and is amenable to analysis in its
terms. It is unsurprising that Paradise Lost was one of Freud’s favourite
books.66 Although part of the pleasantness of Paradise resides in the lack
of a rigid divide between the world of work and domestic life, the poem
nonetheless bears the imprint of this social, psychic and gendered split.
The danger that the poem raises is that the intimate bond with another
so sorely desired is also a great threat to the commitment to autonomy
which characterizes conceptions of rational modern masculinity. Psychoanalytic theory is used to draw out the ways in which the poem is
unable to resolve this problem in conceptual terms. One strand of the
poem attempts to construe Adam’s situation as one in which reason fails
to control passion, and many critics collude in this attempt by describing, without direct warrant from the poem, Adam’s sin in terms of
intemperance, or failure to control the appetites. But the force with
which Milton distinguishes love from these more bodily concerns troubles the neat distinction between reason and passion and reveals that
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love is always in tension with the demand for masculine mastery of self
and other. This gap provides a space for a number of different readings
and reactions. It might, for instance, be argued that the poem thus
demonstrates the inadequacy of the conception of masculinity it promotes. But it does not, in itself, represent the breakdown of a certain
kind of masculine subjectivity. Rather, it reveals the extent to which this
subjectivity inhabits a freedom which is ultimately structured around
an unconditional, unarguable imperative to obey the dictates of masculine mastery. Consequently, the question arises of how paradisal such
a state of being can ever really be. It is with regard to gender identity
and relations between the sexes that Paradise Lost is perhaps most prescriptive in its view of the human nature whose claims it advances. It
is here that the Foucauldian critique of restrictive and dominative conceptions of human nature – indeed, of conceptions of human nature as
inevitably restrictive and dominative – seems most apposite. It may well
be necessary to abandon such ideas and their theological and metaphysical underpinnings, and instead to ‘substitute Freedom for Truth as
the goal of thinking and of social progress’.67
Chapter 4 looks at one way in which responsibility for the tensions
between Milton’s ideal individual and the paradise he envisages for that
individual is to some extent displaced onto the figure of Eve. It attends
to some of the strains consequent on Milton’s desire to present a world
with which humanity is in complete harmony yet which, nonetheless,
is such that labour is a necessity as well as a pleasure and source of
dignity. Milton – like Locke – was committed to, and helped further, the
seventeenth-century re-evaluation of labour whereby it took on, as
Foucault puts it, ‘a certain force of moral enchantment’.68 Adam and Eve
have a duty to live up to their humanity not only by partaking of pleasures which are beyond the animal, but also by taking pleasure in
the performance of their duties. The development of a ‘work ethic’ in
the seventeenth century was bound up with a shift in conceptions
of the world humans inhabited. The conception of a finite cosmos made
up of interlocking purposes was giving way to a possibly infinite universe of merely material objects, devoid of intrinsic significance, on
which humanity could impose its purposes: ‘man can make what he
wants of the world to the extent that it can be reduced to the characteristics of a mere substrate underlying what man constructs’.69 Milton
did not adhere to the kind of dualistic split between mind and matter
which has been held responsible for the exploitative relation to the
natural world typical of modern science and technology. He was a
‘monist’ rather than a ‘dualist’, refusing to see matter and spirit as ontologically distinct. Nonetheless, there are intimations in Paradise Lost of
Introduction: Milton and Modernity 17
the development of an exploitative relation to the world. The world presented in Paradise Lost is a harmonious and vitally interconnected
whole. However, the poem opens up room for propositions which contributed to the disintegration of the medieval cosmos, such as the possibility of a plurality of inhabited worlds, a hypothesis which tended to
entail scepticism about the privileging of one centre of perception, and
one model of hierarchical order, over others. If the medieval cosmos was
finite and closed, the universe in Paradise Lost is possibly infinite. The
world itself, however, is an ordered whole, despite the fact it is surrounded by Chaos. Within it, the experience is one of plenitude, a
happy fullness apparently without lack. Adam and Eve are at one with
their surroundings, every act an act of praise. They are ‘lords of all’, but
this expresses a kind of beneficent feudal relation, since Adam ‘dwells
not in his own’ but in a world that is God’s. The work they do, too, is
a kind of stewardship rather than an exercise in domination. In many
respects their relation to the world is akin to the version of the premodern to which Heidegger opposes the drive to technological domination characteristic of the ‘age of the world picture’.70 The urge to
dominate and transform the world is associated with Satan and his
cohorts, alienated, isolated, and unable to find a place where they
belong. But this distinction does not hold absolutely. Adam and Eve do
not simply have the task of keeping the world in order, but decisions
to make about how to maximize its potential for human habitation,
a future-oriented rather than a static vision, associated with kinds of
labour which other writers, such as the authors of aristocratic pastoral,
condemned as violent and sinful. At first, it is Adam who voices the
imperatives of future-oriented time-consciousness, allowing him to
remain properly masculine while experiencing the pleasures of Paradise
and a ‘feminine’ domestic sphere divorced from work and duty, as
expressed in Eve’s lyric ‘With thee conversing I forget all time’. But later
the roles are reversed, as Eve separates from Adam in the name of efficiency. This has provoked considerations of Eve’s failings as a character
from critics who do not generally note the close similarities between
her position and Adam’s. Here it is argued that this episode, which leads
to the Fall, is perhaps best understood as the displacement onto Eve of
tensions between modern subjectivity and the fulfilment it imagines for
itself.
It has been argued that Milton’s Paradise expresses the wishes deriving from the modern individual’s ‘shrunken’ and distanced relation
to the world.71 Despite itself, Paradise Lost reveals the incompatibility
between autonomy, conceived in terms of separation, and the dream of
unity to which it gives rise. In particular, Chapter 4 suggests that such
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nostalgic critiques of modernity as Heidegger’s may be products of the
very processes they decry. This might explain why so many accounts of
modernity amount to ‘nostalgic myths of Paradise Lost’, in Marshall
Berman’s phrase.72 As is suggested in the Conclusion, this essentially
melancholic stance towards the present may be intimately related to
modern masculinity. According to Juliana Schiesari, the period between
the Renaissance and the present can be described as ‘a great age of
melancholia . . . whose edges are coterminous with the historic rise and
demise of “the subject”’, whose ‘sense of ineffable loss’ is perhaps ‘only
the flip side of the modernist espousal of progress’. The melancholic is
characterized by a pathological fixation on an imaginary sense of loss,
construed by Lacan as the loss of being consequent upon separation
from the mother and assuming a place in the symbolic as a subject of
lack. For Schiesari, this is the dynamic underlying the modern picture
of the social world, ‘a universe of imaginary individuals, separate from
community and unified only in their nostalgic quest for the lost object’.
It underpins ‘a distinctly modern sensibility of a loss in time, of belatedness’.73 This alternation of optimism and near-despair has a counterpart in Milton’s career. In his ‘Seventh Prolusion’, written while he was
a student, the sense of a break with the past is conceived not as a loss
of plenitude to be lamented, but as an awakening from a dark night of
error to be celebrated: ‘Ignorance is breathing her last, and you are now
watching her final efforts and her dying struggle’. The future progress
of knowledge will cause man to ‘seem to be one whose rule and dominion the stars obey, to whose command the earth and sea hearken, and
whom winds and tempests serve; to whom, lastly, Mother Nature herself
has surrendered, as if indeed some god had abdicated the throne of the
world and entrusted its rights, laws, and administration to him as governor’ (CPW 1.301, 296). Paradise Lost, perhaps fortunately, ends up a
long way from the vaunting optimism of this Baconian vision. But the
loss of this aspiration to technological mastery is accompanied by an
absence of the commitment to collective endeavour and communicative action which characterized Milton’s social and political writings at
their best. However, apparent despair is counteracted by the poem’s
grand style and, above all, the continuing political defiance of which
that syle is the expression. Like subjectivity itself, conceived by Habermas as carrying ‘an unredeemed promise . . . in which the solidary selfdetermination of all was to be joined with the self-realization of each’,
Paradise Lost nurtures, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, ‘the energies which
the revolution quelled’.74
1
‘Born to command and not to
obey’: Milton and the Political
Force of Liberal Humanism
Asserting the legitimacy of executing Charles I, Milton declared, with
typical force:
No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men
naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God
himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to
command and not to obey.
(Tenure, CPW 3.198–9)
The texts in which Milton elaborated the implications of this premise
have caused him to stand for many as ‘the major intellectual
spokesman’ of the English Revolution.1 In William Haller’s judgement,
‘His pamphlets, their influence enhanced and sustained by the poems
which grew out of his revolutionary experience, would become one of
the main channels by which Puritan revolutionary ideas in their most
dynamic form would reach the age of John Locke.’2
Certainly Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government have earned him
general recognition as a founding father of liberal political thought, is
in accord with Milton in his fundamental assumption of the natural
freedom of man.3 Near the opening of the Second Treatise Locke declares
that ‘To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is,
a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their
possessions and persons as they think fit’ (2T §4). Part of this freedom
was the right of each man to execute on his own behalf the law of
nature, an objective guide to right conduct recognizable by rational
reflection on the design of the universe, ‘the material element of the
divine will, as revealed in the created order’.4 For Locke, ‘that all men
19
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Milton and Modernity
may be restrained from invading others’ rights, and from doing hurt to
one another, and the law of Nature be observed, which willeth the peace
and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of Nature is
in that state put into every man’s hands’. Likewise Milton, rendering
his account of the origins of government in the form of an historical
narrative, refers to ‘This autoritie and power of self-defence and preservation’ against ‘what was violated against peace and common right . . .
being originally and naturally in every one of them.’ However, there
are, as Locke puts it, ‘inconveniences’ in this ‘state of nature’. Not only
is there the possibility that some men will be guilty of ‘invading’ the
rights of others, but there is the further danger that in judging what
action to take in response men will be ‘partial to themselves and their
friends’ and too harsh towards others. Milton, too, recognizes the problems that would arise if ‘each man should be his own partial judge’.
Thus, as Locke puts it, ‘civil government is the proper remedy’. An end
is put to the state of nature, states Milton, when men agree ‘to ordain
som authoritie, that might restrain by force and punishment what
was violated against peace and common right’ (2T §7 and 13; CPW
3.199).
However, giving up the power personally to execute the law of nature
is not the end of the freedom which is the essence of man as God has
made him, because it is not the end of the power to judge whether those
charged with the responsibility of ruling, or executing the law of nature,
are acting in accord with this law. For Locke, ‘government has no other
end but the preservation of property’, defined a little later as the people’s
‘lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name – property’,
and ‘The people shall be judge’ of whether this trust has been kept (2T
§94, 123, 240). ‘Common right’ predates and exists independently of
the sovereign. Thus, even once magistrates were established they
remained accountable. The need for accountability underlies Milton’s
account, in Tenure, of how, since the power to execute justice ‘left
absolute in thir hands’ (that is to say, unrestricted by specific laws)
proved a ‘temptation’ to the first magistrates and ‘perverted them at
length to injustice and partialitie’, the people found they had to frame
laws so that ‘man, of whose failing they had proof, might no more rule
over them, but law and reason abstracted as much as might be from
personal errors and frailties’ (CPW 3.199–200). According to Locke, any
power which is not limited along these lines is ‘no form of civil government at all’ and is indeed worse than the state of nature, since a man
subject to such power is denied a right of redress:
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 21
. . . whenever his property is invaded by the will and order of his
monarch, he has not only no appeal, as those in society ought to
have, but, as if he were degraded from the common state of rational
creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or defend his right, and so
is exposed to all the misery and inconveniences that a man can fear
from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with flattery and armed with power.
(2T §90, 91)
Or, as Milton put it, ‘he that bids a man reigne over him above Law,
may bid as well a savage beast’ (CPW 3.206). Authority is not a matter
of will, but is essentially impersonal.
Although we may not express the idea in terms of the structure and
design of the universe, the notion that government is founded in law
and accountable to the people seems commonsensical to us. This is a
measure of how deeply ingrained the assumptions of liberal humanism
have become. But the notion of a ‘people’ independent of political
power yet entitled to call it to account is in fact historically specific, as
is demonstrated by the views of the Royalist Sir Robert Filmer, whose
Patriarcha is described by Gordon Schochet as ‘a concise statement of
the traditional political beliefs that had to be overcome before constitutional liberalism could become a dominant ideology’.5 Filmer was fundamentally opposed to the idea of an original natural liberty because
his theory of political obligation was founded in Genesis, specifically in
the beliefs that Adam’s fatherly power was political in kind, that it was
absolute because it consisted in a power of life and death over members
of the family he ruled, and that all earthly government was ultimately
derived from Adam’s rule and shared its fatherly nature.6 This is by no
means representative of all political thought prior to the seventeenth
century. Furthermore, Filmer is unusual even among patriarchalist and
royalist theorists in basing a systematic theory of political obligation on
Genesis, an effort which Locke demolished in his First Treatise.7 The
strength of the patriarchalist view of society was not essentially propositional but a matter of a ‘cast of mind’, intuitively convincing to many
who lived in a society characterized by the exercise of paternal power,
which the Stuarts and their supporters sought to exploit (with marked
if posthumous success in the case of Eikon Basilike, supposedly written
by Charles I himself).8 Thus, in a speech to parliament in 1609, James
I had the following to say about the relation between the king, his
subjects and their property:
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Milton and Modernity
As for the Father of a familie, they had of olde under the Law of
Nature Patriam potestatem, which was Potestatem vitae & necis, ouer
their children or familie . . . Now a Father may dispose of his Inheritance to his children, at his pleasure: yea, euen disinherite the eldest
upon iust occasions, and preferre the youngest, according to his
liking; make them beggers, or rich at his pleasure: restraine, or banish
out of his presence, as he finds them giue cause of offence, or restore
them in fauour againe with the penitent sinner: So may the King
deale with his Subjects.9
The most significant aspect of such accounts is that government is conceived as ‘natural and native’ rather than ‘voluntary and conventional’,
as Edward Gee put it in his critique of patriarchalist arguments.10 Milton
and Locke see government as the result of an agreement between rulers
and ruled, sometimes referred to as the ‘social contract’. The state is ultimately an expression of the ordering power of individuals.11 For patriarchalists, by contrast, men are not naturally free but are intrinsically
bound to a social whole, the cohesiveness of which is established by the
‘natural’ model of a father and his family. Milton argued that without
the right ‘to abolish any governour supreme’ men were effectively
deprived of ‘that power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to
dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as
Maisters of Family in their own house and free inheritance’ (CPW
3.236–7). For patriarchalist theorists, by contrast, this right to ‘oeconomize’, to manage one’s own affairs, far from providing a basis for the
right to determine the form of government under which one lives, can
in fact be removed by a king who is ultimately unquestionable. Property is not a natural right which it is the duty of government to protect,
and a vocabulary of ‘invasion’ such as that employed by Locke simply
would not apply (2T §91). As the Laudian clerics of James’s biological
son were to argue with regard to extra-parliamentary taxation, ‘what we
have is not our own, and what we gave was but rendering and restoring’.12 It may be desirable that government protect property – many royalists held that, morally speaking, a king should do so – but the fact
that a given king does not is not grounds for deposing him.13 Thus
Claude de Saumaise, or Salmasius (Milton’s adversary in the propaganda
war which raged over the execution of Charles) argued that
. . . as a natural father, although he may be too harsh, too wicked,
and even too cruel, cannot be removed by his children without the
greatest crime, so it is not right that he who plays the role of public
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 23
parent, although he may oppress his subjects with burdensome and
unjust rule, be killed without the crime of parricide. Indeed as a
father does not stop being a father, although he exercises the right
of a father’s power over his children too severely, so the king who
exercises his power over his subjects too harshly does not lose the
title, Father of his Country, as Justinianus says.14
Government is not the product of consent. In fact, a refusal to consent
to it would simply be wicked disobedience. Furthermore, it is a matter
not of common reason but of a father’s will. Power is utterly personalized, and the concern is not to determine its legitimate scope but to
emphasize the limitlessness of the power of even a bad or ‘unjust’ king
and the absolute obligation to obey him. Men in general are not
autonomous reasoners who have decided to ‘submit as free men’ to government (CPW 3.209), but dependants of the king. In The Trew Law of
Free Monarchies James buttresses the comparison of a king and ‘a father
of children’ with the similarly natural and organic image of society as
a body with the king as the reasoning head, ‘the seate of Iudgement’
from which ‘discourse and direction flowes’, and which the other
members must obey.15 Filmer, while prepared to outline the principles
on which the king’s power is based, makes a great show of not being
competent to pry into the particular workings of government: ‘I have
nothing to do to meddle with mysteries of the present state. Such arcana
imperii, or cabinet councils, the vulgar may not pry into’, and in any
case ‘the causes and ends of the greatest politic actions and motions of
state dazzle the eyes and exceed the capacities of all men, save only
those that are hourly versed in managing public affairs’.16 For both
James and Filmer, government is beyond the competence of any but the
head: the individual is not a judge of the given but is, rather, judged
according to his conformity with it. The expression of patriarchalist
conceptions of political society could take less extreme and one-sided
forms than those noticed here. Elsewhere there is more stress on the
reciprocity implicit in the relation between a father and a son, and thus
on the duty of a king to be loving towards his subjects. But, since order
is natural, the individual is still debarred from stepping outside it and
there is little or no scope for change. The individual is a merely empirical phenomenon, a component of a whole which is the bearer of value,
rather than himself a value.
For Milton and Locke, on the other hand, individual liberty is, if not
the supreme value, then at least the indispensable precondition for the
realization of the ultimate ends of human life.17 In this emphasis they
24
Milton and Modernity
are far removed from Hobbes, whose Leviathan, despite its advocacy of
vesting absolute power in the hands of the sovereign, is now regarded
by many as a classic text of early liberalism.18 Insofar as they see government as a human affair which can be understood as the rational
remedy for a governmentless state, both Milton and Locke share ‘artificialist’ terms of reference with Hobbes. However, Hobbes was the architect of an attempt to subvert the radical potential of contract theory,
associated as this was with arguments for limitations on the power of
governments.19 Fundamental to this attempt is Hobbes’s apparent neutralization of the subersive potential of appeals to the law of nature. For
Hobbes, desire is the measure of good and evil: ‘whatsoever is the object
of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth
Good; And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill.’ Freedom does not
consist in the recognition of an objective moral law, but amounts to
the liberation of desire from external constraint, a state of affairs about
which, as Hobbes stresses, there is nothing distinctively human or
moral. Liberty, for Hobbes, refers not to a quality of the subject but to
the nature of its circumstances. It is, he asserts, ‘Absurd, Insignificant, and
Non-sense’ to talk of ‘A Free Subject; A free-Will; or any Free, but free from
being hindred by opposition’. It is not a function of reason and so ‘may
be applyed no lesse to Irrationall, and Inanimate creatures, than to
Rationall’ (Lev. 120 / 24, 113 / 19, 261 / 107).
Since there are no moral constraints on behaviour, ‘during the time
men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are
in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every
man, against every man’. It is a situation in which ‘virtue’ is given a
Machiavellian twist: ‘Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall
vertues.’ Thus in the state of nature the life of man is, famously, ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. The ‘condition of meer Nature,
that is to say, of absolute Liberty . . . is Anarchy, and the condition
of Warre’. For Hobbes, self-preservation is paramount. Consequently,
each man has a ‘RIGHT OF NATURE’ to do ‘anything’ in the cause
of ‘the preservation of his own nature’. Given that ‘there is nothing he
[a man] can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition,
every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body’ (Lev.
185 / 62, 188 / 63, 186 / 62, 395 / 186, 189–90 / 64). Passages such as
this would seem to be the reason that Locke pointedly places his discussion of the state of nature and the state of war in different chapters
of his Second Treatise. (Milton’s state of nature is not so clearly defined
in opposition to a doctrine which would deprive men of what he saw
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 25
as their inherent rights.) Thus Locke asserts ‘the plain difference
between the state of Nature and the state of war, which however some
men have confounded, are as far distant as a state of peace, goodwill,
mutual assistance, and preservation; and a state of enmity, malice, violence and mutual destruction are one from another’. People are ‘equal
and independent’ because all belong to God and so no one has the right
to domineer over anyone else (2T §19, §6). For Hobbes, by contrast,
equality is a function of the fact that although there may be differences
between men in physical strength or mental acuity, no claims can be
based on these differences because ‘the weakest hath strength enough
to kill the strongest’, and (a little dry wit here) every man ‘is contented
with his share’ of wisdom (Lev. 183–4 / 60–1).
The law of nature figures in Hobbes solely as a means of strengthening the sovereign. On the one hand, it appears as a set of ‘prudential
maxims which will recommend themselves by their logical force to any
man desirous of avoiding violent death’, thus reducing ‘the natural law
to counsels of self-preservation’.20 The ‘Fundamentall Law of Nature
. . . is, to seek Peace, and follow it.’ Since the state of nature is the
antithesis of peace, the ‘law of Nature’ means that we are ‘obliged to
transferre to another, such Rights, as being retained, hinder the peace
of Mankind’ (Lev. 190 / 64, 201 / 71). It makes sense to seek peace
through submission to a common power. The law of nature determines
the extent of this power, but with consequences very different to those
to be found in Milton and Locke. Once a sovereign is instituted, the law
of nature is what he says it is. For Locke, laws ‘are only so far right as
they are founded on the law of Nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted’ and which is ‘plain to a rational creature’. The
law of nature can act as a standard by which such a creature can regulate his own actions and those of others, including the government.
Milton, too, is adamant on this point. In Tenure he argues that those
who can recognize ‘the Law of nature and right reason’ are entitled ‘to
judge as they find cause’ cases of tyranny. In Readie Milton asserts that
parliament is bound ‘by the law of nature only, which is the only law
of laws truly and properly to all mankinde fundamental; the beginning
and the end of all Government’ (2T §12; Tenure, CPW 3.197; Readie,
CPW 7.412–13). By contrast, for Hobbes, even if a sovereign breaks the
law of nature ‘this is not enough to authorise any subject, either to make
warre upon, or so much as to accuse of Injustice, or any way to speak
evill of their Soveraign’. No law, even one of his own making, is above
the sovereign, since this would imply ‘a Judge above him, and a Power
to punish him; which is to make a new Soveraign; and again for the
26
Milton and Modernity
same reason a third, to punish the second; and so continually without
end, to the Confusion, and Dissolution of the Commonwealth’
(Lev. 297 / 128, 367 / 169). Such a vision of infinite regress assumes an
absence of common interpretations of the law of nature. A chaotic state
of nature implies that it is useless to expect the law of nature or common
reason to keep men in order, not only because they have conflicting
interests, but also, more fundamentally, because they can’t agree. There
is ‘no common Rule of Good and Evill’ and so the buck of interpreting
the law of nature has to stop somewhere other than ‘the people’. The
‘unwritten Law of nature’ is denied any practical efficacy apart from
dictating the need for a sovereign and any other content it may be given
by state power, whose right and, further, duty it is to interpret and
enforce it (Lev. 120 / 24, 322–3 / 142–3).21 Partiality is not, as in Milton
and Locke, an unfortunate possibility which may prevent justice being
done, but is so pervasive that the law of nature ‘is now become of
all laws the most obscure; and has consequently the greatest need
of able Interpreters’. It is the sovereign who determines who is an able
interpreter: ‘The Interpretation of the Law of Nature, is the sentence
of the Judge constituted by the Soveraign Authority, to heare and
determine such controversies, as depend thereon.’ Without this determination by the sovereign power there would be ‘no end of such Interpretation’. Natural law (what is right according to reason) is dissolved
into positive law (the actual, written laws of a state), which denies it
any effective independent content while claiming its moral force (Lev.
322–3 / 143, 326 / 145, 120 / 24).22 Consequently, once out of the state
of nature, freedom, which is mere absence of impediment, consists only
in what the sovereign is prepared to allow:
The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which
in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted: such as
is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one
another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade
of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; and
the like.
(264 / 109)
As was discussed in the Introduction, the distorting effect of associating Milton with such a position can be seen in Francis Barker’s account
of Milton’s political modernity in The Tremulous Private Body. The inadequacy of this reductive account of political modernity as a description
of Milton’s politics opens the way to the misleading representation of
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 27
these politics as non-modern. An example is Stanley Fish’s acceptance
of Francis Barker’s characterization of the ‘modern settlement’ in terms
of a distinction between public and private realms, combined with a
denial of the applicability of these terms to Milton, in whose writings:
Rather than being segregated from one another, the realms of the
political and the private form an unbroken continuum united by the
overriding obligation to be faithful to an unwritten but always-inforce law. The result, as Barker observes, is an extraordinary (because
unrelenting) ‘inner discipline’ (47), but far from being in the service
of the state, it is a discipline that threatens to subvert the state (as it
will in 1649) because in the event of a clash between what it demands
and what the state would compel, the state will always be the loser.
Fish is quite right to emphasize Milton’s distance from modernity as
characterized by Barker, and to affirm that Milton ‘is much more revolutionary than Barker takes him to be’.23 But an ‘unbroken continuum’
between the political and the private is by no means foreign to modernity. Fish is misleading in distinguishing as sharply as he does between
the implication of Milton in the story of ‘the steady unfolding of a
classic liberal vision’ and a Milton understood in his preferred, theological terms as an ‘antinomian’, or one who privileges the promptings
of the spirit within over the externalities of the letter of the law. Fish’s
theological perspective on Milton is illuminating. But while an exclusive focus on the theological aspects of his texts may be of considerable
help in the search for ‘tensions and discontinuities’, it is not without
its costs.24 It obscures important continuities between Milton’s texts and
the discourses of an incipient liberal humanism. It also downplays significant differences between the writing of those whose view of politics
can properly be said to be theocratic, and Milton’s political texts, in
which an admittedly ultimately theological worldview underpins a
political freedom which, while not identical with our conceptions, is
nonetheless rooted in a recognizably modern conception of political
practice as the human business of free individuals.
It is true that Milton’s confidence in the freedom of men is ultimately
based on the idea that they are ‘the image and resemblance of God
himself’, as he puts it in Tenure (CPW 3.198). But this is not markedly
more theological a conception than Locke’s belief that men are free in
relation to one another because they are God’s property and can therefore be owned by no man.25 This emphasis on freedom distinguishes
both Milton and Locke from the literature of religious resistance to
28
Milton and Modernity
which they owe many debts. Such is the extent of this indebtedness
that Quentin Skinner actually describes the Two Treatises (Milton warrants only a footnote) as ‘the classic text of radical Calvinist politics’.
This is a tradition of thought which, in broad terms, seeks to define
states which go against the manifest word of God as merely human
rather than sacred institutions in order to deprive them of divine legitimacy, and to allow, in principle at least, resistance to one’s ruler in the
name of religion. In the case of an ungodly king one need not merely
look forward to his accounting with God but can actively resist him.26
Milton’s insistent denunciation of idolatry in relation to the office of
king is in large part grounded in this tradition. For example, Milton
rejoices in the fact that although Charles might have thought he could
‘scape unquestionable, as a thing divine’ he discovered that ‘the equal
and impartial hand of justice’ found him ‘no more to spare then another
ordinary man’ (Tenure, CPW 3.214, 234; see also Readie, CPW 7.426).
This echoes a phrase to be found in Calvin, among others: ‘if a king or
prince or magistrate conducts himself in such a way as to diminish the
honour and right of God, he becomes nothing more than an ordinary
man’.27 Milton cites opinions from a number of Protestant divines at
the end of Tenure, including Luther, Zwingli, Bucer and Christopher
Goodman, whom he quotes as follows:
When Kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and
murderers of thir Subjects, they ought no more to be accounted Kings
or lawfull Magistrates, but as privat men to be examind, accus’d, condemn’d and punisht by the law of God, and being convicted and
punisht by that law, it is not mans but Gods doing. . . .
(italics mine; CPW 3.250)
This implies a distinction between the office and person of the magistrate, which of course is incompatible with any idea that rulers are, in
themselves, God’s annointed on earth.28 The legacy of this position can
also be discerned in Locke when, for instance, he criticizes absolutist
theories because they put ‘a man’ above the laws. For Locke, obedience
to the magistrate is obedience not to a person but to law ‘which, when
he violates, he has no right to obedience, nor can claim it otherwise
than as the public person vested with the power of the law’. If he acts
‘by his own private will, he degrades himself, and is but a single private
person without power and without will’ (2T §94, 151).
Nonetheless, there is a crucial difference between the position of
Milton and Locke and that of radical Calvinism. Louis Dumont
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 29
describes Calvinist theories of the state as exemplary models of ‘modern
artificialism’: the given is without inherent value, and is instead subjected to the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value.29
But, as in the case of Hobbes, artificialism – the notion that government
is founded in some kind of contract – is not the key issue. Where Hobbes
subordinates religion to questions of political expediency, however,
Calvinist political theory conceives politics as entirely ancillary to religion. For Goodman, following Calvin, the institution of society, effected
by men, is sealed by a covenant with God, exemplified by God’s instruction to the Israelites to ‘put or conftitute a kinge to thee: but whò thy
Lorde thy God fhall chofe’.30 Similarly Samuel Rutherford, despite,
unlike Goodman, owing many debts to ‘natural-law constitutionalism’,
is above all concerned with ‘something that fallen natural reason could
never tell him – the covenant obligations of a godly nation’. Rutherford’s overriding concern with these obligations means that for him a
godly king ‘hath a political resemblance of the King of heavens, being
a little god, and so is above any one man’.31
While the given is not sacred per se, government which is not directly
contrary to God’s will is an expression of that will since ‘kings and
gouernors’ were ‘appoynted of God to preserve his people’. So far is this
the case for Goodman that even personally evil rulers, ‘fo longe as their
wikednesse bra[k]eth not out manifeftly agaynst God, àd his Lawes’,
have the same divine right to obedience as ‘euil and roughe Maifters’.32
By the same token, the political activity that overthrows an ungodly
monarch is a religious duty and is undertaken in order to establish a
state which will enforce a particular form of godly discipline. It is held
to please God first and man second, or rather, to please man only insofar
as it pleases God. Calvin’s concern is whether ‘a king or prince or magistrate conducts himself in such a way as to diminish the honour and
right of God’, not whether he trespasses on men’s right to ‘oeconomize’,
‘invades’ their property or disregards their liberty. The resistance which
is legitimized in this way is conceived as the work of God. As Christopher Goodman put it in the passage quoted earlier, a bad king is
‘punisht by the law of God’ and in consequence even though such punishment is meted out by men ‘it is not mans but Gods doing’. This duty
is couched in terms of contempt for the merely human, above all
human reason. Goodman refers to ‘vile man’ who ‘will meafure obedience with the crowked lyne of his owne corrupte iudgement, and not
with the infallible trueth of Goddes holie worde’, dismissing ‘corrupt
reafon’ by comparison with God’s ‘holie Lawes and preceptes’.33 Even
Rutherford, who lays less emphasis on the vileness of man, did not
30
Milton and Modernity
consider a merely human concern, such as Charles’s imposition of taxation without parliamentary consent in the form of Ship Money, to be
sufficient cause for disobedience.34 In Locke, by contrast, there can be
discerned, in Skinner’s phrase, ‘the modern and strictly political concept
of a moral right of resistance’.35 It is clear that Milton, too, has crossed
this threshold. Although there are appeals to God’s will in Tenure, these
are, as Michael Fixler has noted, restricted to the defence of the killing
of the king (that is to say, to the part of the tract which, given that the
execution was the act of a minority, was in need of whatever rhetorical
weapons were to hand), and any apocalyptic faith in England’s destiny
as a holy nation is, in the context of other writings of the time, ‘conspicuously absent’. Tenure is far removed from the theocratic sectarianism which would claim power ‘for the saints exclusively as saints’.36
People have not only a right of resistance but (a matter of emphasis here)
a right of changing their government as they see fit. Humans have the
power to ‘execute . . . the wrath of God upon evil doers without exception’, but God is wrathful in such cases because it is evil to abrogate
tyrannically men’s natural freedom. Tyrants ‘may bee as lawfully
depos’d and punish’d, as they were at first elected’. Indeed, since the
ruler’s authority stems from the people, ‘then may the people as oft as
they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine
him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right
of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best’ (Tenure, CPW
3.198, 202, 206). Not only can a ruler be resisted for contravening the
will of God in matters of religion, he is, simply, accountable to those
who have delegated their power to him. This is the language of liberty
and rights, not of sainthood.
Milton and Locke legitimize this greater concern with human affairs,
and with the right of men to manage their own destiny, by reference
to natural law.37 However, it is important to attend to the substance of
this law and the outlook it expresses, if unduly archaic conceptions of
the nature of their thought are to be avoided. One such is to be found
in Joan Bennett’s argument that in his formulation of natural law as the
basis of government by consent, Milton owes a specific debt to Hooker.38
As far as this goes, this is unexceptionable. Hooker was referred to and
used by everyone in the seventeenth century, from those Royalists who
founded government in an original but irrevocable contract, to the
Levellers, who wanted constitutional government selected by regular
elections, possibly based on a near-universal male franchise.39 The presence of some such influence on Locke, who is given to quoting ‘the
judicious Hooker’ at strategic points in his argument, is a commonplace,
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 31
although there is disagreement about its significance.40 But the distance
between Milton and Hooker (and, equally, between Locke and Hooker)
is brought out by Bennett in the very act of bringing them together.
According to Bennett, the legacy of Hooker in Milton’s thought is such
that for Milton only a ruler’s violation of the natural order of things
could justify revolution on earth.41 However, not only would it be difficult, empirically, to find many seventeenth-century governments
which did not, in Milton’s view, contravene natural law, but, further,
such an assertion totally excludes that side of Milton for whom, as discussed earlier, the people may change government as often as they see
fit. Keith Staveley is right to say, in his comparison of the myth of the
social contract in Hooker and Milton, that ‘The difference, and it makes
all the difference, is one of emphasis. In Hooker the accent is on orderly
submission to necessity, in Milton, on constructive actions that are
necessary.’42 The key to this difference is the presence in Milton and
Locke of epistemological and political individualism, and its absence
in Hooker and the scholastic natural law tradition on which he was
drawing.43 For Hooker, ‘The general and perpetual voyce of men is as
the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times
learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the
author of nature, her voyce is but his instrument.’ Hooker did believe
that political society had its foundations in the consent of the people,
‘an order expressly or secretly agreed upon, touching the manner of
their union in living together’. But the notion of such a decision being
‘secretly agreed’ is clearly of a piece with the idea that ‘to be commanded
we do consent, when that societie whereof we are part hath at any time
before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal
agreement’. Hooker liked the idea of consent, affirming that ‘for manifestation of this their [rulers’] right, and mens more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are to be governed,
seemeth necessarie’, but, as F. J. Shirley recognizes, ‘any real exercise of
that consent would have horrified him’.44 This is because the consent
of the governed is for him not a precondition of legitimacy and a right
to be exercised, but part of the perfection of a Christian commonwealth.
Unsurprisingly, as a defender of the status quo of the Elizabethan
Church settlement, Hooker was writing not with change in mind but
with a conviction of the benign and providential inevitability of
hierarchically ordered society as presently constituted.
By contrast with this rather static evocation of the wisdom of ages,
the will of the people is conceived by Milton and Locke as consisting
in an aggregate of epistemologically independent and pointedly
32
Milton and Modernity
individual conclusions. Unity is desirable, but real unity is contrasted
with forced incorporation. Rational behaviour consists, not in doing
what one is told, but in making up one’s own mind. For instance, the
opening to The Reason of Church-governement urges the importance of
embracing the good ‘not of custome and awe, which most men do, but
of choice and purpose, with true and constant delight’ (Reason, CPW
1.746). This is the impulse which lies behind Milton’s famous opinion
that ‘a man may be a heretic in the truth’ if it is not a truth he has
arrived at for himself (Areo, CPW 2.527), and Locke’s assertion that ‘The
floating of other men’s opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot
the more knowing, though they happen to be true.’45 Each man must
be left to exercise ‘his owne leading capacity’. When God gave Adam
reason, ‘he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing’
(CPW 2.513, 527). The ideal is of a host of individually directed,
dynamic and spontaneous harmonizations of energy: ‘To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth
as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportionall) this is
the golden rule in Theology as well as in Arithmetick, and makes up the
best harmony in a Church; not the forc’t and outward union of cold,
and neutrall, and inwardly divided minds’ (CPW 2.551). The political
nature of such a position is clear in Locke’s great work of epistemology,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke inveighs against those
who ‘taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of assent, by
lazily enslaving their minds to the dictates and dominion of others, in
doctrines which it is their duty to examine’. His well-known opposition
to the notion that certain truths are innate in us, most famously and
extremely expressed in his representation of the human mind as a tabula
rasa, or blank slate, is at least in part politically motivated. Once certain
truths had been declared innate, he opines:
. . . it was of no small advantage to those who affected to be masters
and teachers, to make this the principle of principles, – that principles must not be questioned. For, having once established this tenet, –
that there are innate principles, it put their followers upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them off
from the use of their own reason and judgement, and put them on
believing and taking them upon trust without further examination:
in which posture of blind credulity, they might more easily be governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had the skill
and the office to principle and guide them.46
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 33
Although Locke and Milton differ in their epistemologies, Milton confidently referring to ‘those unwritten lawes and Ideas which nature hath
ingraven in us’ (CPW 1.764), in this context it is more significant that
they are united in an individualist politicization of questions of knowledge. The activist strain of Areopagitica, and Milton’s contempt in that
tract for the man who finds ‘himself out som factor, to whose care and
credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs’ (CPW
2.544), is of a piece with Locke’s condemnation of those who are prepared, lazily, to take their truths on trust. Locke’s sensitivity to the
relation between credulity and servile manipulability in affairs of
government finds a precise parallel in Milton’s condemnation of tyrants
for indulging the ‘blind affections’ and licentiousness of their people in
order to keep them servile (Tenure, CPW 3.190).
Of course, as well as grounds for comparison there are important differences between Milton and Locke. Locke is less insistently religious in
his rhetoric. He is generally held to have favoured limited monarchy
while Milton’s sympathies were republican, a side to him which debates
in today’s Britain may have caused scholars to re-emphasize.47 Locke is
a more sophisticated political thinker than Milton, partly by virtue of
entering the debate later. Perhaps most significant is the relative absence
in Locke’s discourse of assertions regarding the rights of the virtuous
over the vulgar. It is impossible to work out, from his texts alone, who
has membership of political society (that is to say, without detailed and
disputed historical argument about what is meant, in which contexts,
by terms such as ‘men’, ‘the people’ and ‘society’).48 Milton, too, is
unspecific on the franchise and on who constitutes ‘the people’
(though, of course, for both he and Locke, ‘the people’ is a masculine
entity), but his discourse is shot through with a ‘classical republican’
strain which surfaces not only in his vibrant evocations of public
action, above all in Areopagitica, but in his exclusion from political
consideration of those lacking sufficient virtue. Central to Milton’s
political vision was ‘the middle class, which produces the greatest
number of men of good sense and knowledge of affairs. Of the rest some
are turned from uprightness and from their interest in learning their
country’s laws by excessive wealth and luxury, and others by want
and poverty’ (CPW 4: 1.472).49 Tenure begins by proclaiming that ‘none
can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom,
but licence’ (CPW 3.190). In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth, Milton suggests a sliding scale for the weight of votes
which unstably mixes social class and virtue.50 In the Second Defence
34
Milton and Modernity
Milton avers that ‘Those whose power lies in wisdom, experience, industry, and virtue will, in my opinion, however small their number be a
majority.’ Milton is always ready to oppose the qualitative question of
merit to the quantitative logic of election by an aggregate of preferences,
‘there being in number little vertue’ (CPW 4: 1.636; CPW 7.415).
Milton’s overriding concern with morality contrasts with Locke’s theoretical abstention from these questions and disqualifies him, despite
his having continued stridently to employ a language of popular
sovereignty and rights, from description as a liberal political thinker in
today’s terms.51
However, the political modernity of Milton and Locke resides in their
implication in the development of what Jürgen Habermas (among many
others) has termed the ‘public sphere’.52 As outlined in the Introduction, this was the arena, irreducible either to the private world of the
family and economic affairs, or to the public authority of the state, in
which ‘the private people, come together to form a public’ called on
‘public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’.53 Milton and
Locke’s belief in the individual exercise of reason in the light of the law
of nature expresses an ethos of debate ‘in principle without regard to
all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal
rules’, the results of which ‘lay claim to being in accord with reason;
intrinsic to the idea of a public opinion born of the power of the better
argument was the claim to that morally pretentious rationality that
strove to discover what was at once just and right’. Their belief in ‘depersonalized state authority’ is expressive of the belief that domination
could be replaced by the rule of reason and law. The principle of
accountability to the public was advanced in the name of the idea, the
inverse of Hobbes’s, that ‘veritas non auctoritas facit legem (truth not
authority makes law)’.54 Their emphasis on the individual’s use of reason
rather than reliance on authority becomes the watchword of a new
political dynamic. Government is not an intricate and providential
mystery to be apprehended rather than comprehended, as it is for
Filmer, whose declaration of his incompetence to pronounce on affairs
of state – ‘arcana imperii, or cabinet councils’ – explicitly valorizes those
‘secrets of state’ to which ‘the principle of publicity was . . . held up in
opposition’.55 People need not be happy with what they have whatever
it is, as recommended by Hobbes, whose lack of faith in an objective
law of nature reflected his disbelief in the efficacy of peaceable public
discussion and caused him categorically to exclude private men ‘from
the public sphere objectified in the state apparatus’.56 God’s will is
important, insofar as it is He who has made men free. But politics
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 35
belongs to rational participants in public debate, not saints following
the lead of expert interpreters of scripture. People are not assumed to
be happily subsumed in a mystical community, their reason taking the
form of recognizing that what they see is good, as Hooker’s rhetoric
implies. Instead, the rational exercise of natural rights, underpinned by
natural law, takes absolute precedence over custom (‘but error grown
old’) and ‘meer positive laws’. Reason has an active and critical rather
than a contemplative and apologetic role, and is exercised by free men
of whom government is the servant (CPW 3.485; CPW 7.425).
The significance of this commitment to a self essentially free and
capable of self-management is sometimes, surprisingly, overlooked in
accounts of modern political thought. Marx famously contrasted the
heroism of the bourgeois revolutions with the unheroic nature of the
societies they established, and argued that this was because the danger
inherent in such actions necessitated ‘self-deceptions’ on the part of
those who engaged in them. For the French, it was images of the Roman
republic, while
. . . at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and
the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from
the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim
had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English
society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habbakuk.57
This amounts to a considerable downplaying of the radical side of
Locke, aligning him with what is implicitly presented (by virtue of the
contrast with Old Testament zeal) as the more placid, stolid and sober
readjustment of 1688. Locke becomes the emblem of the subordination
of virtue to self-interest. But this seems an inadequate representation of
the outlook of a man who, over a number of years, exposed himself to
considerable risks in a revolutionary cause.58 A better understanding of
the motivation for such behaviour is to be gained from the work of
Edward Andrews, who criticizes Marx for underestimating the causal
role played by self-image (and therefore ideology) in the Revolution of
1688, and for downplaying the continuing importance of self-image
to the post-revolutionary middle class, not just as a cover for their
interests but as an ideal which could exceed them:
. . . Marx obscures both the ‘revolutionary’ side of Locke and the
problem of materialists risking their lives for a cause. First, the suggestion that Locke was an exponent of post-revolutionary doctrine,
36
Milton and Modernity
of the unheroic possessive individualist, is misleading. Habbakuk’s
vision of divine justice and prayer for violent deliverance from
tyranny was as present in Locke as in Marx . . . And the solid faith of
Habbakuk . . . that ‘the righteous man shall live by his faithfulness’
combines the self-righteousness and self-assertiveness of the revolutionary rights-claimant. Second, Marx enormously oversimplified in
presenting civic humanism to be a form of poetic self-deception necessary to cover the prosaic character of possessive individualism.
Perhaps possessive individualism and civic humanism are not incompatible but were in fact combined in the person of Locke and others.
Andrews goes on to suggest that a Hegelian perspective might redress
this deficiency in Marx, since ‘What Marx saw as class struggle, Hegel
understood as a struggle on the plane of ideals and self-images. The
master-slave conflict is a struggle for rights, not material things, a struggle for the recognition of personality.’59 Thus, it is misleading to emphasize only Locke’s distance from the classical republican or civic humanist
rhetoric of his political allies. In The Machiavellian Moment and elsewhere, J. G. A. Pocock takes Locke’s abstention from the language of
many of his closest associates as an indication that he was probably
among the adversaries of this tradition of ‘participant civic virtue’. He
is associated with a discourse of rights (that is to say, proprietary claims
against others) which emerges at the expense of active citizenship.60
However, the employment of a discourse of rights need not be taken to
imply that Locke is concerned only with private affairs, or that his preferred model of society is one in which atomized selves ask only to be
left alone to keep their noses to the grindstone of capital accumulation.61 Locke held that it was ‘every Man’s indispensible Duty, to do all
the Service he can to his Country; and I see not what Difference he puts
between himself and his Cattle, who lives without that Thought’.62 Such
a commitment was by no means incompatible with the conceptualization of political life in terms of natural freedom and rights. Indeed,
Andrews suggests that the shift in terminology from the ‘civil interests’
of the Letter Concerning Toleration to the ‘natural rights’ of the Two Treatises in fact indicates an activist turn: one looks out for one’s interests
but fights for one’s rights.63
The notion of rights as an individual possession can be problematic
insofar as it leads ‘every man to see in other men, not the realization,
but rather the limitation of his own liberty’.64 But in the political writings of Milton and Locke rights are associated with a dignified view of
human nature which operates not only as a theoretical postulate, but
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 37
as an ideal self-image in the name of which the text seeks, as it were,
to recruit the reader to the cause of reason. This underpins a politics
quite different to the kind of narrowly self-interested liberalism one can,
in manifest contradiction of his intentions, construct out of Hobbes’s
texts.65 A tone of indignation runs through the texts of both Milton and
Locke. Legitimate government is that which treats men as rational and
adult. Tyrannical force is that which treats men as slaves, cattle or children. The imagery of the man capable of rational liberty is perhaps more
compelling and insistent in Milton than it is in Locke. His is more obviously a rhetoric of mobilization, hitting a higher rhetorical pitch in
moments of more extreme crisis. Sometimes, in keeping with Marx’s
characterization of the revolutionary period, he dons the guise of an
Old Testament-style prophet, as at the end of Readie when he cries ‘with
the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her
perverse inhabitants are deaf to’. The legacy of the classical world is also
frequently evoked. Earlier in Readie, Milton, referring to those who
established the commonwealth, says that their actions and words
‘testifi’d a spirit in this nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty
of a Commonwealth, then in the ancient Greeks and Romans’. The
commonwealth is a matter of pride, as becomes even clearer when
Milton imagines what their enemies will say ‘scoffingly’ of ‘the whole
English name’ if they restore the king:
Where is this goodly tower of a Commonwealth, which the English
boasted they would build to overshaddow kings, and be another
Rome in the West? The foundation indeed they laid gallantly; but
fell into a wors confusion, not of tongues, but of factions, then those
at the tower of Babel; and have left no memorial of thir work behinde
them remaining, but in the common laughter of Europ.66
(CPW 7.463, 420, 422–3)
But more important here than the particular rhetorical reservoir being
drawn on is the appeal to the intended audience’s self-esteem. In Readie
Milton describes it as ‘madness . . . for them who might manage nobly
thir own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all on a
single person; and more like boyes under age then men, to committ all
to his patronage and disposal’ (CPW 7.427). Rational self-management
is counterposed to an insulting tutelage. Locke opens his First Treatise,
responding to Filmer’s Patriarcha, with the observation that ‘Slavery is
so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the
generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be
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Milton and Modernity
conceived that an “Englishman”, much less a “gentleman” should plead
for it.’ He rejects Filmer’s work as
. . . a rope of sand, useful, perhaps, to such whose skill and business
it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people the better to mislead
them, but it is not of any force to draw those into bondage who have
their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider that
chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken
to file and polish them.67
(1T §1)
In the Second Treatise he accepts that absolute rulers make laws and have
judges to interpret them, but, in terms which are revealing, does not
accept that this amounts to the rule of law: ‘this is no more than what
every man, who loves his own power, profit, or greatness, may, and
naturally must do, keep those animals from hurting or destroying one
another who labour and drudge only for his pleasure and advantage’
(2T §93). Law not based in the rational apprehension of a law of nature
in principle accessible to all is an insult to the humanity of those
expected to live under it.
This is not to say, however, that Milton and Locke simply have a rosy
picture of human nature. Both Milton and Locke, who consider that to
treat a man as though he is incapable of rational self-determination is
to insult his human nature and reduce him to the status of an animal,
are certainly ready thus to insult those they deem incapable of such
responsibility. It often seems that the most important issue is not to
describe the nature of political order but to decide, quite bluntly, who
is in and who is out, or rather, to lay the basis for such decisions by
asserting forcefully that some are in and some are out. Something more
seems to be at stake than the ideological masking of self-interest in terms
of which Habermas accounts for the exclusivity of the ‘bourgeois public
sphere’. According to Habermas, the ‘constitutional norms’ appealed to
in the discourses of the public sphere ‘implied a model of civil society
that by no means corresponded to its reality . . . the “private people” on
whose autonomy, socially guaranteed by property, the constitutional
state counted just as much as on the educational qualifications of the
public formed by these people, were in truth a small minority’, while
the whole idea of rule by ‘the people’ meant that ‘The public sphere of
civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access.’
However, restriction of the franchise ‘did not necessarily have to be
viewed as a restriction of the public sphere itself as long as it could be
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 39
interpreted as the mere legal ratification of a status attained economically in the private sphere’, that is to say, as the recognition not of a
privilege granted by virtue of one’s heredity, but of a right consequent
upon a position in principle open to all men. Of course, this disregarded
the differential distribution of opportunities to attain such a status, and
so the ideological dimension of the idea of a public sphere consisted
in this ‘identification of domination with its dissolution into pure
reason’.68
However, to interpret such exclusions simply as the result of selfinterest, gives little sense of how the ‘inside’ of the public sphere may
have been constituted by, and thus dependent on, the definition of
an ‘outside’. A dual view of human nature seems to be intrinsic to the
appeal to the righteous made by Milton and Locke. The category of ‘the
people’ is constructed through exclusions which help define, by contrast, a category of rational liberty, in a discourse which seeks to recruit
the reader as ‘subjects as well as the objects of social control’, as Michael
Walzer put it with regard to Calvinism.69 This urge would seem to be of
a piece with broader cultural developments. Aldon T. and Virginia
Mason Vaughan have discerned a ‘widespread concern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over distinctions between crucial
opposites – humans and beasts, civility and savagery, innocence and
corruption, order and anarchy’. Foucault describes in Madness and
Civilization what he calls ‘the great tragic caesura in human existence’
whereby ‘Nature’ ceased to be a cosmos ‘rich in internal communications and symbolisms’ and became instead ‘an extremely abstract
law, which nonetheless forms the most vivid and concrete opposition,
that of day and night.’70 For Claude Lefort, whose focus is more directly
political, these developments appear less metaphysically dramatic: ‘in
bourgeois ideology, the essence of man is affirmed with regard to a
subhumanity’. Once there is no fixed place of power, guaranteed by a
transcendent principle (for example, the king as God’s annointed), and
all is determined only through discourse, the bourgeois subject empowers himself through the production of a discourse which distinguishes
between himself, representative of the norm, and the other:
. . . it is essential . . . to bring out the distinction, at every level,
between the subject, who establishes himself by his articulation with
the rule and expresses himself in expressing the rule, and the other,
who, not having access to the rule, does not have the status of
subject. The representation of the rule goes hand in hand with the
representation of nature; and this opposition is converted into a
40
Milton and Modernity
series of manifest terms: for example, the ‘worker’ is represented in
opposition to the bourgeois, the uneducated in opposition to the cultured man, the uncivilized in opposition to the civilized, the mad in
opposition to the sane, the child in opposition to the adult.71
One is reasonable or mad, human or bestial, a part of the political nation
or politically disqualified, equal or an object of contempt. For Locke,
‘Madmen’ and ‘children’ cannot be free (the same applies to women,
though for Locke, as for Milton, this goes without saying) because
freedom is grounded in a man ‘having reason, which is able to instruct
him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how
far he is left to the freedom of his own will’. To leave such a being in
‘unrestrained liberty’ would be ‘to thrust him out amongst brutes, and
abandon him to a state as wretched and as much beneath that of man
as theirs’. Consequently, they are ‘never set free from the government
of their parents’ (2T §60, 63). Criminals, on the other hand, cast themselves out of community. A man who, ‘quitting reason’, uses force, ‘the
way of beasts . . . becomes liable to be destroyed’ (2T §181). Through
such assertions Locke constructs his audience not as Hobbesian pragmatists of power, caught up in a no-holds-barred battle for survival, but
as righteous extirpators of immorality. The assumed coherence of men
which derives from their adherence to the law of nature, a ‘rule . . . of
reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the
actions of men for their common security’, implies that those incapable
of such lawfulness are either subject to eternal surveillance or thrust out
of human community by individuals who, although perhaps acting in
isolation, are nevertheless by virtue of their reason representatives or
guardians of that community. Miscreants will deservedly meet an ‘executioner of the law of nature’ (2T §8). Universal ideals legitimize the
denial of liberty to those who cannot, and the use of force against those
who will not, recognize them (or recognize themselves in them), and
create by contrast a community of the just.
Similarly, Milton’s Tenure opens with the assertion that ‘none can love
freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence’
(CPW 3.190). The process of definition continues when Milton counsels that ‘milde and tender dispositions’ avoid being ‘foolishly softened
from thir duty and perseverance, with the unmaskuline Rhetorick of any
puling Priest or Chaplain’ (CPW 3.195). As is suggested by Milton’s connection of liberty to the right to ‘oeconomize . . . as Maisters of Family’
(CPW 3.236), this is business for hardened men, not whining women
or children. But the operation of exclusion which Tenure was expressly
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 41
written to perform begins when he considers the rational basis of kingship. For Milton, ‘he that bids a man reigne over him above Law, may
bid as well a savage beast’. Indeed, he says, there is:
. . . no Prince so native but professes to hold by Law; which when he
himself overturns, breaking all the Covnants and Oaths that gave
him title to his dignity, and were the bond and alliance between him
and his people, what differs he from an outlandish King, or from an
enemie? For look how much right the King of Spaine hath to govern
us at all, so much right hath the King of England to govern us tyrannically . . . Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and
brother-hood between man and man all over the World, neither is it
the English sea that can sever us from that duty and relation: a
straiter bond yet there is between fellow-subjects, neighbours, and
friends; But when any of these doe one to another so as hostility
could doe no worse, what doth the Law decree less against them, the
op’n enemies and invaders? . . . Nor is it distance of place that makes
enmitie, but enmity that makes distance. He therfore that keeps
peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as
farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour:
but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious,
offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his
behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk,
a Sarasin, a Heathen.
(CPW 3.206, 213–15)
Where, for instance, James I or Filmer is concerned to describe the form
of political order, asserting that it is an essentially familial relation, over
which the king presides as father, this passage is concerned not with the
description of a particular regime but with the principle which informs
any legitimate order, in the light of which an offending family member,
such as a brother, can suddenly become no more to a man than a Turk.
The most apparently natural relations, even those of the womb, are subordinated to the primacy of reason. The passage opens with a pun on
the word ‘native’. This is in response to the biblically derived argument
that since, in killing Eglon, King of Moab, in order to liberate the Jewish
nation, Ehud was killing a foreigner and an enemy, his act is not pertinent to the present case (the execution of Charles) (CPW 3.213 n85).
But since in its root ‘native’ is to do with birth per se (and not just to
do with having been born in a particular country), Milton is able to
make a neat transition from geographical place, through the notion of
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Milton and Modernity
holding a place by virtue of one’s birth, to an assertion that the king
holds his place not by birth but by virtue of an agreement of the people,
which is to say by ‘Law’ and by ‘all the Covnants and Oaths that gave
him title to his dignity’, because they signified an ‘alliance’ with his
people.72 These are, as Milton goes on to say, ‘the onely tie of our obedience to him’.73 Milton then, as Merritt Hughes points out, describes
the brotherhood of all men in words which ‘invoke the principle of a
universal human society resting upon man’s gift of reason and dictating a just law of nations, as Cicero repeatedly affirmed’ (CPW 3.214
n87). This is a model example of the way history can imbue ideas with
active significance. When Milton evokes Cicero, he is evoking more
than an ideal or aspiration, since he does so in the context of Puritanism’s internationalist thrust and draws the conclusion that this bond
implies duties to be fulfilled overseas. This text is a part of the Puritan
invention of politics, if politics is defined not as the stuff of intrigue
and ‘faction’ but as a programme aimed at changing the world so that
it conforms to reason.74 But in the midst of this internationalism, it
becomes clear that the bond of universal fellowship is consituted by a
force of exclusion so powerful that it questions the usual Protestant
order of things. To behave unreasonably or offensively is to be expelled
from the community of man as a representative of the (supposedly) barbaric Orient, menacing what becomes, by contrast, and rather surprisingly in the light of Milton’s views on Catholicism, a more or less
Christian Europe.75
The coherence of this Europe could take on quite material forms, such
as military cooperation. Milton himself wrote on behalf of Cromwell to
Catholic rulers asking them to unite with other Christians against the
Turk.76 Milton is caught up and active in the cultural project whereby
‘European political thinkers in the age of Absolutism repeatedly sought
to define the character of their own world by opposition with that of
the Turkish order.’77 Although the main thrust of the text seems to be
to undermine the claims of nativity, and although, in its applicability
to Charles, the term ‘Turk’ is clearly not conceived in exclusively racial
terms, it would seem that nativity – or race – nevertheless grounds and
defines what might otherwise be a limitless community of men. This is
implicit in the ghostly coherence of Europe, but also, with much more
apparent solidity, in the notion of being English. Nationhood, it
appears, is first and foremost a natural fact: a nation is the place where
one is born. Certainly, while a covenant is the only tie that binds the
English people and their king, the ties that bind the English people to
one another can simply be assumed. There is a ‘brotherhood between
Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism 43
man and man all over the World’, but ‘a straiter bond yet . . . between
fellow-subjects, neighbours, and friends’. So much can simply be
assumed. Certainly there is no mention of nationality having a basis in
a covenant. One can be excluded, in the light of the universal law of
nature, regardless of how ‘native’ one is, but this formulation does not
challenge the fact of nativity. In fact it seems that the law of nature in
this passage polices the boundaries of a naturally given community.78
Tenure disqualifies Charles, by virtue of his ungodly pride, from membership of both the English nation and European Christendom. He is
in a position analogous to that of the ‘Wen’ (Milton’s image for episcopacy) in Of Reformation, an excremental impurity which must be cut
off to leave the ‘lawfull and free-borne members’ whole and clean, and
to reaffirm England as an example of ‘liberty and the flourishing deeds
of a reformed Common-wealth . . . wherein we have the honour to
precede other Nations who are now labouring to be our followers’ (CPW
1.583–4). Through his execution in the name of the ‘mutual bond of
amity’ that unites all men, England leads the way to freedom, presumably leaving behind ‘the people of Asia’, who are ‘much inclinable to
slavery’ (CPW 3.202–3).
The combination of the natural fact of the nation with universal principles which it can incarnate and even export is a powerful one, and
has been massively destructive. At least one critic, Herman Rapaport,
has raised the question of Milton’s affinity with totalitarianism
(although Rapaport’s argument that this affinity consists in Milton’s
reflection of a situation in which, with the passing of religion, the state
has no transcendental imperative and is accountable to nothing beyond
itself, is both a little difficult to square with Milton’s writings, and a
perfect description of those of Hobbes).79 Milton’s political discourse
veers closer to totalitarianism as described by Claude Lefort, for whom
it is best understood as an offshoot of democracy in which a party,
instead of accepting that, once the nation is not conceived as united in
the body of the prince, power belongs to no one in particular and the
nation, the people and the state have lost absolute definition, seeks
rather ‘to give society a body once more’. The party claims ‘to represent
the aspirations of the whole people, and to possess a legitimacy which
places it above the law’. Such a representation of the people-as-one
requires a defined enemy to constitute them, by contrast, as a potentially unified entity: ‘the integrity of the body depends on the elimination of its parasites’.80 Clearly aspects of Milton’s political discourse are
reminiscent of this schema. In Of Reformation, in which he counsels the
excision of the parasitical tumour of episcopacy, Milton also declares
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Milton and Modernity
that ‘a Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest man, as big, and
compact in vertue as in body’ (CPW 1.572). The trial of Charles by the
Independents, which Tenure was written to justify, was characterized, as
Andrew Milner notes, by a marked indifference to technical legality,
since they felt themselves to be concerned simply with justice.81 But
Milton’s political discourse is too early and inchoate to be meaningfully
categorized in this way. There is too much emphasis on virtue for him
to be described as a liberal, but Milton is too preoccupied with freedom
and a natural law which transcends positive institutions for him
consistently to view any organization as embodying such principles
absolutely. Nonetheless, the intimate link in both Milton and Locke
between a community of rational individuals and a drive to expel those
who do not conform to the norms of rationality might well incline us
to favour Foucault’s response to Habermas’s search for consensus: ‘The
farthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.’82 Despite manifesting a principled wariness of any particular positive consensus, such
caution about siding with the majority nonetheless presupposes the
desirability of consent, an ethos intrinsic to the notion of the self as a
bearer of rights, the expansion of which is inseparable from the modern
discursive regime Milton and Locke helped to impose.83
2
‘No respecter of persons’:
Individual Merit in Milton’s
Heaven
In the last chapter it was suggested that any satisfactory account of
Milton’s political modernity would have to avoid dismissing liberal
ideals as the merely ideological derivations of market society, and recognize that, as Jay Bernstein puts it, their ‘original force . . . owes as
much to the politically functioning public sphere in which public
opinion was formed through unrestricted discussion as it does to the
market economy’.1 The blanket scepticism regarding such ideals often
displayed by Foucault is a similar disincentive to attentive analysis. To
the extent that appeal to ‘the people’ implied (and still implies) operations of definition, and therefore the exclusion of some individuals as
the counterpart to the inclusion of others, the analyses, by Foucault and
many others, of these practices and their effects in a whole range of
social institutions are salutary. Discourses of liberty and the formation
of people as individuals are bound up with the exercise of power: ‘The
“Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’2 But, notwithstanding his disclaimers, caveats, and methodological declarations, there is a consistent tendency in Foucault’s texts
to interpret those social practices which contribute to individualization
as reflexes of the state:
. . . although, in a formal way, the representative régime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all
to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines
provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and
bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of
the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded
as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism
[a series of techniques for instilling self-discipline by fostering a
45
46
Milton and Modernity
permanent sense of visibility] constituted the technique, universally
widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms
of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had
acquired.3
The reality of freedom is not that it is limited, or partial, or depends in
certain respects on self-restraint, or that it is wrongly extended to some
and not to others, or is in need of enlargement, conceptually or practically, but that ‘the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework’ and all its fine talk. The reality of freedom
is domination.4 Despite Foucault’s announcement that ‘we must eschew
the model of Leviathan in the study of power’ (meaning that we should
give up the post-Hobbesian story of the constitution of the state by its
subjects and instead attend to the construction of subjects by the state),
his account of political modernity is, in essence, Hobbesian: ‘The Liberty
of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating
their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted.’5 Where Hobbes disallows the concept of tyranny because to allow thinking along such lines
inevitably produces more misery for all in the form of civil war, Foucault, refusing to espouse any particular political principle, lacks any
grounds for distinguishing liberal democracies from totalitarian states.6
Where Hobbes, as Otto Gierke put it with reference to the intimate relation between the utter lawlessness of Hobbes’s state of nature and the
absolute lawfulness of his state ‘made the individual omnipotent,
with the object of forcing him to destroy himself instantly in virtue of
his own omnipotence’, Foucault simply inverts the humanist belief
in the individual as free origin of his own actions.7 Socialization is
synonymous with subjugation.8
It is necessary to get beyond Foucault’s principled hostility to socialization if the different assumptions about human nature and society
held by Hobbes, Milton and Locke are to be given their due weight. This
chapter will begin by suggesting – a fully developed account is beyond
the scope of the present work – that these different assumptions have
their roots in different social milieux. While Milton and Locke are recognizably partisans of those who were known in the seventeenth
century as ‘the middle sort of people’, Hobbes, regardless of his social
origins, is best understood as an absolutist thinker not merely philosophically or politically, but in social and cultural terms as well. The
distinction between these milieux and the types of individuality they
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 47
produce and promote is essential to understanding the politics of
Paradise Lost.
Hobbes is often described as a ‘bourgeois’ thinker. This characterization has a degree of validity insofar as the society on which Hobbes
reflected was increasingly characterized by market relations, but in
political terms it is misleading. It appears most plausible when Hobbes
is discussing the modes of living and the rights and privileges of the
aristocracy. Of the ‘three principall causes of quarrel’ in the ‘nature of
man’ – ‘First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.’ – only
the last of these, the desire ‘for Reputation’ derives not from models
suggested by natural philosophy but directly from social observation.
In society, this desire is liable to take the form of vainglory, or ‘boastfulness, excessive vanity’ (OED):
Of the passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one, is
Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth; as if difference of worth, were an effect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some
other naturall quality, not depending on the Will of those that have
the Soveraign Authority. From whence proceedeth a Presumption
that the punishments ordained by the Lawes, and extended generally to all Subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them, with the
same rigour they are inflicted on poore, obscure, and simple men,
comprehended under the name of the Vulgar.
(Lev. 341 / 154)9
It is clear that vainglory is inegalitarian in inspiration, that a belief in
the natural or inherent qualities of rank (‘bloud’) may be a key factor,
and that it is not associated with the ‘poore, obscure, and simple’ or
‘Vulgar’. Leo Strauss took such analyses as evidence that Hobbes’s was a
‘bourgeois’ worldview which substituted the values of peaceable hedonism for those of social vanity.10 Jean Hampton associates the critique
of vainglory and potential rebelliousness with Hobbes’s anti-feudal and
anti-Aristotelian worldview, which had no truck with the belief in
natural rulers (see particularly Lev. 211 / 77).11 In opposition to such
‘feudal’ ideas about human worth there is a strong meritocratic streak
in Hobbes. He recommends that counsellors be chosen on grounds of
merit not birth: ‘Good Counsell comes not by Lot, nor by Inheritance;
and therefore there is no more reason to expect good Advice from the
rich, or noble, in matter of State, than in delineating the dimensions of
a fortresse’ (Lev. 391–2 / 184). He argues that nobility is contingent and
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social, not inherent and natural: ‘Nobility is Power, not in all places,
but onely in those Common-wealths, where it has Priviledges: for
in such priviledges consisteth their Power’ (Lev. 151 / 41). He accepts
the suggestion of Selden’s research that titles once denoted ‘offices of
Honour’ but have since ‘by occasion of trouble, and for reasons of
good and peaceable government’, been ‘turned into meer Titles’ (Lev.
159 / 45). Opinions such as these led Clarendon to descibe his rejection
of natural hierarchy as a ‘levelling fancy’ and to chide him in general
for ‘his extreme malignancy to the Nobility, by whose bread he hath
alwaies bin sustain’d’.12
What is more, Hobbes seems to cut through such empty pretences
as ‘meer Titles’ in ruthlessly materialistic terms: ‘The Value, or WORTH
of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as
would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute;
but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’ (Lev.
151–2 / 42). This assertion is one of the key pieces of evidence in
Macpherson’s case that Hobbes’s theory of human nature, which posits
as ‘a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire
of Power after power’ (Lev. 161 / 47), is ‘a reflection of his insight into
the behaviour of men towards one another in a specific kind of society’.
By this Macpherson means a possessive market society, the only kind
which allows a continual and universal competition for power without
a degree of violence incompatible with the existence of society.13
Hobbes’s reference to the ‘price’ of a man’s power, or the potential value
of his services, reflects his assumption ‘that power is so generally transferable, that there is a pervasive market in power, which established the
value of every man’. Macpherson argues that since power is something
on which one can put a price, then Hobbes’s claim that the ‘Desire of
Power, of Riches, of Knowledge, and of Honour. . . . may be reduced to
the first, that is Desire of Power’ (Lev. 139 / 35) represents a reduction
of all human strivings and human value to the logic of market relations.
His models ‘of man and society . . . were bourgeois models’.14 A ruthless
and calculating streak of commercialization undercuts feudal claims to
natural superiority.
However, as Macpherson acknowledges, Hobbes appears much less
bourgeois when he is discussing the bourgeoisie.15 There is his advocacy
of sumptuary laws to prevent the flaunting of wealth.16 There is his condemnation of the acquisition of wealth as an end in itself and his apparent belief that it was usually acquired crookedly rather than by hard
work and talent. He criticizes the Presbyterian clergy, who ‘did never in
their sermons, or but lightly, inveigh against the lucrative vices of men
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 49
of trade or handicraft; such as are feigning, lying, cozening, hypocrisy,
or other uncharitableness’, an omission he suspects was welcome ‘to
the generality of citizens and the inhabitants of market-towns’. Perhaps
even more telling is Hobbes’s position on property, the holding of which
is, like everything else, dependent on the will of the sovereign, with
predictable consequences in terms of his position on the right of the
sovereign to tax without consent:
. . . in the one issue where property rights in Hobbes’s day were seriously disputed, Hobbes abandoned the interests of possessing classes
altogether. It was not surprising that his contemporaries classed
his views on property with those of the Royalist clergy, Sibthorp and
Manwaring, who taught that all property was subject to the king.17
Furthermore, Hobbes does not advocate the eradication of the
emotion of pride but only certain manifestations of it. Indeed he implies
that it should be put to use. Hobbes’s description of the titles of nobility as ‘meer titles’ means not that they are empty displays to be shredded by an egalitarian bourgeois rationalism but that they are filled with
meaning only insofar as they can be understood as spoken by the
sovereign. In a commonwealth it is not ‘the flattery of other men’ (Lev.
164 / 49) which determines differences of human worth, but the
sovereign: ‘The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him
by the commonwealth, is that which men commonly call DIGNITY’ and
is often signified ‘by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of
such Value’ (Lev. 152 / 42). Thus titles are a sign of the sovereign’s esteem,
an expression of his will, and the desire for them can be understood as
an expression of that ‘Desire of Praise’ which ‘disposeth to laudable
actions’ (Lev. 162 / 48). Given that the desire for esteem is potentially
asocial and destructive, it must be deprived of independent grounds and
instead organized around the will of the sovereign as a competition for
his favour, the element which will underlie all signs of status.
In its assertion of the centrality of the sovereign Hobbes’s theory sums
up the aspirations of the absolutist project. But Hobbes can be described
as an absolutist thinker not just in the sense that he asserts the incompatibility of sovereign power with external restrictions upon it, but in
the sense that his theory reflects the social base of absolutism. The
competitive desire for esteem displayed by Hobbesian individuals makes
them antisocial but it also opens the way to an organization of their
desire around the sovereign such that society can be conceived as
consisting, essentially, of a bunch of atoms or, more precisely, electrons,
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cohering only in as much as they dance around – attend upon, pay
obeisance to, a single nucleus. This is clearly a post-feudal ideal. But it
is also, arguably, aristocratic. Certainly the belief that ‘most men would
rather lose their lives . . . than suffer slander’ is redolent of an aristocratic code of honour.18 The reason Hobbes’s thought has appeared
to some as bourgeois and to others as aristocratic is that one finds in
it a sense that status (rather than economic gain) is the overriding
concern of men, combined with a recognition that in a postfeudal epoch status can be to some extent attained by wealth, is
certainly enhanced by it and, in the form of royal largesse, is often an
expression of it.19 Hobbes’s theory derives from an epoch in which, as
Perry Anderson says with respect to the absolutist state, ‘noble power’
took on a ‘new form . . . determined by the spread of commodity production and exchange’, in which ‘The political order remained feudal,
while society became more and more bourgeois.’20 The court itself was
a market. As one writer cited by Lawrence Stone put it: ‘All such as aspire
and thirst after offices and honours run thither amaine with emulation
and disdaine of others; thither are the revenewes brought that appertain to the state, and there are they disposed out againe.’ As Stone notes,
‘The most striking feature of the great nation states of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was the enormous expansion of the Court and
the central administration.’ One significant consequence of this was
that in the course of the sixteenth century the importance of the court
had increasingly overridden local loyalties. This concentration of the
activity of the noble class on the court did not happen by accident.
Stone cites Burghley’s advice to Elizabeth I that she ‘gratyfye your nobylyte, and the pryncypall persons of your realm, to binde them faste to
you . . . whereby you shall have all men of value in the realme to depend
only upon yourselfe’. According to Stone, ‘The first effect of attracting
the nobility to court by the lure of office and rewards was to turn them
from haughty and independent magnates into a set of shameless mendicants.’ Where once there had been ‘formidable local potentates’ there
were soon ‘fawning courtiers and tame state pensionaries’. Stone’s
account may overstate the abruptness of the change and the decline in
moral fibre that resulted, but it is revealing that he uses Hobbes’s evocation of the ‘perpetual and restlesse desire of power after power that
ceaseth onely in death’ to explain the impulse which drove the nobility to court.21 Paradoxically, the project of reducing the independence
of the nobility, because it made status dependent on a struggle for
favour, was responsible for the atomization (or the appearance of it)
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 51
which many have seen as the legacy of the bourgeoisie.22 According to
Norbert Elias, just as in our society the most influential human types
have come from or received the stamp of the city, with the result that
urban types may be decribed as ‘representative’ of our society, ‘It is precisely this representative and central significance that the court had for
most Western European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.’23 This was not altogether true of England, but it is suggestive
in respect of Hobbes, who was familiar with both the Versailles of Louis
XIV and the Court of Charles II. Certainly this would help explain
what Macpherson sees as the chief factor underlying Hobbes’s neglect
by the seventeenth-century middle class – his apparent lack of class
consciousness:
What Hobbes overlooked and failed to put into his model was the
centripetal force of a cohesive bourgeois class within the society. He
was so impressed with the divisive and destructive force of the competition for power which he put in his model (and rightly put in, for
this force is indeed present in the capitalist market society, to which,
as we have seen, his model closely corresponded), that he failed to
see that the model also necessarily generates a class differentiation
which can be expected to produce a class cohesion, at least in the
class which is on its way up to the top.24
Insofar as people seek and recognize power through market relations
Hobbes’s theory is applicable to these. But such consiousness of the
bourgeoisie as there is in Hobbes is by no means a bourgeois class
consciousness.
Milton and Locke, by contrast, appeal to that ‘vigorous and independent class of town dwellers’ which was ‘an indispensable element
in the growth of parliamentary democracy’.25 The idea that ‘people’ were
sufficiently capable of moral cognition to be entrusted with ‘liberty’ and
the power to judge governments was a practical assumption, with a class
basis, about the real capacities of people. This basis – the urban middle
class – is one which can usefully be termed bourgeois. For some time, a
denial that such a class existed as a meaningful entity in seventeenthcentury England became an orthodoxy among historians of the
period.26 The term was felt to be too vague, its range of referents, extending from the landed gentry in their capacity as agrarian capitalists to
small urban artisans, too wide. Furthermore, it was believed that even
those classes which might otherwise have been termed middle class
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(merchants, traders and the like) were notable for their lack of a distinctive class self-consciousness and their desire to emulate the culture
and values of their superiors. Jonathan Barry, however, who argues that
‘one of the virtues of studying the middling sectors of society’ may be
that ‘such analysis reveals the imprecision and variability of all efforts
to pin down social structure and social relationships’, also contends
that a compact and useful definition can be arrived at: ‘independent
trading households’.27 As Shani d’Cruze puts it in the volume Barry is
introducing:
A middling sort cohered out of lived experience and social relations,
through occupation, but also through other aspects of life. One
attribute in particular was shared by traders, artisans and professionals. All organised their working and family lives around the
small-producer household in which living and working space existed
in close proximity and household members, including wives, older
children, servants and apprentices, participated in both the household and business tasks.28
The importance of such arrangements not only as empirically
common actual facts but as a model for imagining society in general is
suggested, as Barry notes, by the way ‘the language associated with the
property rights of the freeholder provided a crucial metaphor in the
constitutional criticism that was directed by early Stuart MPs towards
unpopular royal policies’.29 Keith Wrightson traces a corresponding
increase in the use of the term ‘middle sort’ as a category of social
description in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century,
until the term
. . . finally seems to have come into its own in the pamphlet literature and memoirs occasioned by the English Civil Wars, above all
in those works which described the social basis of parliamentarian
allegiance and in those which attempted to define an interest group
in politics, religion, or taxation policy which was distinct from the
gentry and ‘meaner sort’ alike.30
The image of the head of household, endued with the right to ‘oeconomize’, upright and reasonable and on a footing of equality with others
like himself, is clearly important to the individual as figured by Milton
and Locke. It was a figure essential to middle-class identity in the
seventeenth century. As Barry observes:
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 53
Economically, the middling sort appears much more fragmented than
either the poor or the landed elite. What they all had in common –
the need to work for their income using skill and engaging in a trade
or profession, rather than relying on rentier income or labouring
in another’s employment, was also what separated them into a
thousand different categories . . .
In consequence, cultural assumptions were vital to the reduction of
potential tensions between different professions and to the reinforcement of those factors which united them.31 This may explain why the
notion of a ‘middle class’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ retained more interpretative
prestige among political theorists and literary critics than it did among
historians: they were not blithe to the evidence, but tended to be
looking at different evidence, at the political and cultural work which
served to cohere the potentially disparate interests historians were busy
identifying. The self-image produced by this work was far from a ‘mere’
image. It was an idealized version of the kind of identity which middleclass men in the seventeenth century derived from their participation
in a whole set of social practices whose collective nature undermines
what Barry calls ‘the myth of bourgeois individualism’. Rather than conceiving of themselves as atomized, it was generally recognized amongst
members of the ‘middle sort’ that ‘the achievement of individual aims
in urban society depended on collective action, both official and voluntary, at the level of family, neighbourhood, parish, association, and
the whole community’. Apparent obstacles to the formation of collective identity, such as economic diversity, a possible gulf within the
bourgeoisie between the elite and the rest, and the flux and mobility of
urban life, in fact operated as powerful factors ‘impelling the bourgeoisie
towards association and ensuring its centrality in their value-systems’.
There was a concern
. . . with the reinforcement of both the family and the wider community in the face of disorder of every kind. In addition to material
provision, this included the promotion of a series of values seen as
fundamental to the survival of urban society. Amongst the various
virtues so promoted are all those qualities, such as thrift, respectability and industry, often labelled the Protestant work-ethic and seen as
the foundation of individualism. We may observe not only that their
success was assumed to depend on collective rather than individual
action, but also that they were matched by a set of overtly collective
virtues, of sociability and good fellowship. The expression of these
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in communal gatherings, eating and drinking, and often in listening
together to sermons and marching through the streets on holidays
or anniversaries, was common to all these groups, old and new.32
Urban association in ‘voluntary organizations’ worked to ease or
render comparatively unproblematic what appears to us as a conceptual
tension between equality and inequality. On the one hand, ‘Fundamental to all such bodies was the notion of a common bond of fellowship – a fraternity – between members.’ On the other hand, ‘in a way
that seems paradoxical to us, the rules and procedures usually also established hierarchies within such groups’. Such bodies tended to ‘establish
an inner group of trustees, answerable in some often ill-defined sense
to a wider body of members or subscribers’. Nonconformist churches
became prime examples, but also ‘other groups with property to administer, such as library societies or significant charities’. Thus these
organizations ‘reproduced the socio-economic inequalities within the
bourgeoisie’, but it is also important ‘that the hierarchy within these
organisations was justified organisationally (rather than on principle),
that they brought different groups of the middling together, and that
they often combined their hierarchical side with another emphasis,
less often stressed by historians, on freedom and equality among and
between members’. These two dimensions were held together by the
notion that authority was held ‘in trust’, to be exercised in accordance
with agreed aims, and that the relationships within this hierarchy
were ‘not simple patron-client ones but ties strengthened by a sense of
common, essentially voluntary, commitment to a shared cause, most
notably in the case of churches’.33
Such an outlook is evident in Milton’s early expressions of a vision of
a model of church government according to which, as he puts it in Of
Reformation, ministers are responsible for the ‘instructing and disciplining of Gods people by whose full and free election they are consecrated
to that holy and equall Aristocracy’. Despite their relatively elevated position, ministers are accountable to their congregations, whose ‘free-borne
members’ have the right ‘as Christians and freeholders’ to full involvement in the life of the Church, including a say in appointments
to higher offices: ‘he that will mould a modern Bishop into a primitive, must yeeld him to be elected by the popular voyce, undiocest,
unrevenu’d, unlorded, and leave him nothing but brotherly equality,
matchles temperance, frequent fasting, incessant prayer, and preaching,
continual watchings, and labours in his Ministery’. As Milton affirms in
Reason, ‘every good Christian’ should ‘be restor’d to his right in the
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 55
Church, and not excluded from such place of spirituall government as
his Christian abilities and his approved good life in the eye and testimony of the Church shall preferre him to’ (CPW 1.600, 584, 600, 549,
844). These early assertions are part of the Presbyterian assault on the
established Church. Accordingly, they are written in the name of the
supremacy of divine ordinance over merely human tradition, and are
descriptions of the ideal workings of an organization which would not,
strictly speaking, be voluntary.34 But Milton was soon to break with the
Presbyterians. As William Haller recognizes, Milton’s attack on the hierarchy as it stood, whose ‘pyramid aspires and sharpens to ambition, not
to perfection, or unity’ (CPW 1.790), embodies a far more democratic
impulse than they would have found comfortable: ‘The argument for
the equality of bishops and presbyters, as he presented it, based as it
was upon the doctrine of the equality of all believers, came near to
overriding the distinction between lay and cleric.’35
Underpinning the worldview of the seventeenth-century bourgeoisie
was an experience and practice of a collectivist individualism which recognized that both a potential to disorder and organizing oneself with
others to avoid it are natural, which effected an ongoing, dynamic integration of freedom and equality with differences of rank, promoted
cooperation in the face of forces that pulled against these ends, and
was experienced not as inevitable but as opted into by people who saw
themselves as ‘fundamentally free’.36 The discourse of natural law
employed by Milton and Locke appealed above all to this urban audience. The wellspring of its moral egalitarianism was the democratic
element in the social practices of the town-dwelling middle classes.37
This was the context, made up of economically independent individuals who nonetheless experienced themselves as a social and political
collectivity, out of which arose the public sphere, that arena in which
‘the private people, come together to form a public’ called on ‘public
authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.’38
It is from this perspective that the political significance of events in
Paradise Lost can be understood. The relation between the poem and
Milton’s political writings is by no means direct, since heavenly society
is not really ‘political’. It is made up not of men who, in the absence of
authoritative access to God, must tolerate ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’ (Areopagitica, CPW 2.555), but of angels in His (virtually) immediate presence. The Son, in whom ‘all his Father shone / Substantially expressed’
(PL 3.139–40), is a truly transcendental signifier. Debate in Heaven
is either a pedagogical prelude to full understanding or the clash of
fixed metaphysical positions: there is no place for the contending
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perspectives of ‘civil society’. Brought down to earth, Heaven would be
a totalitarian state, but a critical reading based on such a translation
would be misleading.
There is no denying that on the one hand Heaven is a monarchy in
which can be discerned behaviour similar to that prescribed by courtly
etiquette on earth, while on the other hand Satan espouses a rhetoric
of liberty against tyranny.39 Thus Robert Fallon is able to compare God
with Louis XIV, while Roger Lejosne, not the first to note that Satan’s
arguments sound like Milton’s, describes Abdiel as ‘positively Salmasian’
in his support for a king appointed by God.40 Of course, even if these
alignments are taken at face value they have multiple possible significances. It has been argued that the poem demonstrates Milton’s
profound commitment (indeed, more profound than he knew) to
constitutional monarchy, and that the depiction of Satan and Hell
amounts to an analysis of the faults and failures of Cromwell, the army
and parliament. Alternatively, the opposite evaluations have been made
on the basis of similar interpretations of the textual ‘facts’. There are
those, like William Empson, who argue that Paradise Lost contains a
recognition on Milton’s part, at some level, that God is a tyrant, and
there are various attenuated forms of Blake’s assertion that Milton ‘was
a true poet and of the devil’s party’, such as Walter Bagehot’s judgement
that ‘though the theme of Paradise Lost obliged Milton to side with the
monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are often too much
for him; and his real sympathy – the impetus and energy of his nature
– sides with the rebellious element’.41 However, others have found
reasons in the poem to offer interpretations of the literal meaning of
Heaven and Hell which are partly or completely opposed to those on
which the aforementioned readings are grounded. Joan Bennett, for
instance, sees Satan as evil, and, along with Charles I, as one of ‘Milton’s
royal portraits’, while Andrew Milner’s God is ‘really’ an abstract principle of reason underwriting an egalitarian meritocracy, and Christopher Hill, although recognizing that Heaven is a monarchy, is concerned
to emphasize that part of the poem which looks forward to the time
when there will be no more need of the Son’s kingly sceptre since God
will be ‘all in all’ (PL 3.341). These readings assume commonsensical
evaluations of the moral standing of Heaven and Hell, and there do not
seem to be any examples of drawing the opposite evaluative conclusions from this way of construing the text (that is to say, readings which
argue that Satan resembles Charles and that this is evidence both of
Milton’s sympathy for the devil and of his retrospective sympathy with
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 57
the Royalist cause, or which contend that Milton is revolted by the rationally egalitarian nature of Heaven).42
This proliferation of interpretations suggests not incompetent
reading, since there is evidence to be found and reasonable arguments
to be made for most of the positions sketched out in the last paragraph,
but reading directed by concerns which throw light on aspects of the
political thrust of the poem which are incidental or, if not quite incidental, then certainly epiphenomenal manifestations of what Milton
would have perceived as a deeper underlying logic. For instance, monarchical ‘forms’ may or may not be rational, depending on the ‘content’
they express. Such an assumption (that attention should be diverted
from ‘appearances’ to the ‘reality’ or principle which ‘underlies’ them),
while no doubt philosophically questionable, is close enough to
Milton’s constant intellectual practice to seem plausible as an account
of his strategy. More specifically, it also mirrors the lack of concern
with the form (or appearance) of government, compared with its
content, generally (though not always) displayed by Milton and, indeed,
by Locke.43 Locke, nonetheless, made consent the principle of legitimate
government (in however compromised a way), while Milton, despite his
appeals to this principle in the name of good men, felt no compunction
about denying it to the bad. Consent is clearly not a basis on which the
governments of Heaven and Hell in Paradise Lost could be distinguished.
Everyone is where he has chosen to be. Milton is concerned only with
the quality of such consent, or its content, and this, ultimately, is a
question of good and evil, virtue and vice, godliness or rebellion.
The real question, therefore, is not ‘which side is right, which side
wrong, and what kind of earthly government/political figure does it/he
most resemble?’ but (and the question is meant literally not rhetorically) ‘Given that Milton describes God and Heaven in this way, and
Satan and Hell in that way, what on earth is the significance of the
poem’s presentation of what may be termed political events?’ If Abdiel
sounds rather Royalist, and Satan a bit parliamentarian, it is reasonable
to assume that Milton is aware of this, and then to ask how it might
further his ends. With regard to Heaven it would seem useful to note
that it is different from earth in at least two crucial respects: it is Heaven,
and therefore not earth, and it is ruled by a God who created everything
we encounter in the poem. The same principles are not at stake in a
realm ruled directly by God, and a monarchy, headed by a human, on
postlapsarian earth. Milton condemned earthly monarchs who believed
that the pattern of divine government could and should be replicated
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on earth, disgusted at the thought of ‘deifying and adoring’ a king ‘for
nothing don that can deserve it. For what can hee more then another
man?’ (Readie, CPW 7.426).44 Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the more Milton emphasizes the monarchical aspect of Heaven,
the more his critique of earthly kingship gains in legitimacy. Salmasius
opined that, given his liability to construe kingship as tyranny, it
followed that Milton must think ‘God himself should be called king
of tyrants and even the greatest tyrant himself.’45 But Paradise Lost
clears Milton of the implication of being, as it were, no more than the
inverse of the idolater, or doter on images and outward forms, revealing that he can concede kingship where kingship is due, and thus
implying that where he refuses it this is not the result of a rabid reflex,
but because it is illegitimate. The presentation of Hell, for its part, reinforces the irrelevance of mere form (or order). What is most significant
about it is that it is not chaos, and by virtue of this fact it removes de
facto legitimacy from earthly order, just as Milton’s refusal to make the
devils ugly, and his stress on their ability to create magnificently, severs
any link between virtue and earthly splendour and beauty.46 A simply
chaotic Hell might have had a rhetorical effect similar to that of
Hobbes’s state of nature, suggesting that order is a virtue in itself. Instead
the appearance of order masks a secret chaos of passion and fear in
which orators jockey for position rather than serve the truth, and
sentries leave their posts when their dread commander’s back is turned
(PL 2.1–505, 10.420–1). What is significant in the case of Hell is not
its distance from but its proximity to earthly governments of many
different kinds.47
This is not all that can usefully be said about the earthly significance
of heavenly society. Satan’s revolt is due to what he claims to perceive
as a change in the nature of this society. Opinions differ on the nature
of heavenly order. Andrew Milner has little specific to say about it,
simply describing it as meritocratic, and arguing that it was precisely
the remnants of feudalism inscribed in the theology of Calvinism which
led to Milton’s repudiation of the doctrine of predestination, citing
to this effect Milton’s assertion that ‘God is no respecter of persons’.48
However, while not denying this it must also be noted that the form,
at least, of heavenly society is such that Stevie Davies is able to argue
quite convincingly that, although Milton would not have wanted such
a form of social organization on earth, his Heaven is feudal, albeit in a
way which demonstrates a commitment to ‘the deepest meanings of
human liberty and equality’. Davies’s reading is one of a number which
suggest that the world of Paradise Lost embodies impulses characteristic
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 59
of different social orders. Christopher Kendrick describes the universe
of Paradise Lost in terms of a dynamization of the feudal ontology of
the hexameral tradition. Carol Cox believes that Milton’s combination
of hierarchy with meritocracy ‘empties hierarchy of real content’.
Charles Durham argues that in the course of the poem ‘merit’ comes to
surpass ‘birthright’.49 Broadly speaking, there seems to be a consensus
that both hierarchy and a meritocratic, dynamic principle are operative.
But there is less agreement about what kind of hierarchy, what kind
of merit, and the ways in which they are related, because Paradise Lost
does not present the issues terribly clearly. Rank exists in Heaven. In
Reason Milton describes the angels as ‘distinguisht and quaterniond into
their celestiall Princedomes, and Satrapies, according as God himselfe
hath writ his imperiall decrees through the great provinces of heav’n’
(CPW 1.752). In Paradise Lost, Satan, who was once himself ‘great in
power, / In favour and pre-eminence’ bows to Uriel ‘low, / As to superior spirits is wont in heaven, / Where honour due and reverence none
neglects’ (PL 5.660–1, 3.736–8). But despite the description of the angels
bearing ‘Standards, and gonfalons’ which ‘for distinction serve / Of
hierarchies, of orders, and degrees’ (PL 5.589–91), part of a passage
which Davies describes as ‘self-consciously chivalric, feudal, and oldfashioned’, the nature and implications of such ranks are uncertain.50
In principle, they could testify to a difference in nature, in the very
being of the various entities which appear before us. As Joan Bennett
points out, Milton’s opposition to feudalism on earth stemmed from his
belief that different ranks of men were not different kinds of being, not
from an opposition to the notion that there could be such variety.51
Milton was quite happy with man’s dominion over animals and women.
However, the ranks of angels do not seem to be made up of different
kinds of entity, something on which some clarity might be expected
were it the basis of heavenly order. In fact, such evidence as there is of
the heavenly hierarchy is rather vague. As Robert West puts it, ‘notoriously Milton uses the terms of rank so fluidly that no one has been
able to organize his use into a consistent pattern. . . . Obviously Milton
sometimes uses the hierarchical terms virtually without hierarchical
meaning.’52 Among the characters, only Satan is really attached to the
idea of pedigree so central to what we would understand by feudalism
on earth.53 Furthermore, in his prose Milton tends to find the idea of
fixed and hereditary titles ‘empty and vain’, and asserts instead that
when, in the past, such titles had meaning, it was as ‘names of trust
and office, and with the office ceasing’ (Tenure, CPW 3.220). In Paradise
Lost, the major angelic characters do seem to have characteristic tasks,
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fitted to their particular talents and dispositions: Uriel is a surveillance
officer, Raphael a sociable ambassador (as well as teacher and adviser),
Michael military commander-in-chief. As West writes of Milton’s use of
the term ‘archangel’, he ‘probably uses it to distinguish “offices”, not
“degrees” ’.54 The issue seems insusceptible of definite resolution (which
is itself a significant fact about the poem), but an association of role and
position would imply that Charles Durham’s belief, referred to above,
that merit supplants birthright in the course of the poem is not only
erroneous but Satanic. To have been created with certain aptitudes is
not to possess a birthright but to be fitted to one’s function in an order
which is rational but not, given the dynamic view of creation expressed
by Raphael when he holds out the prospect that Adam and Eve may be
‘improved by tract of time, and winged ascend’ (PL 5.498), necessarily
fixed. Given the possibility that the differences between the angels are
chiefly differences of role (which is not to say that some roles do not
bring more honour than others), the fact that all the angels are peers,
and the emphasis given to the voluntary nature of heavenly social order,
Milton’s view of heaven can be seen as a celestial projection of the social
ideals and practices of the ‘middle sort’.55 What even Satan recognizes
as ‘heaven’s free love dealt equally to all’ (PL 4.68) is part of a radical
middle-class vision.56
Certainly the clearest thing about hierarchy in Paradise Lost, apart
from the fact that it exists, is that its primary dramatic function is to
be undercut (though not necessarily contradicted) by moral egalitarianism in order to show that the moral individual, rather than his status,
is, in all senses of the phrase, the essential thing. Where you are in terms
of social rank may well be an accident, or beyond your control. That
you are good is your reponsibility. The poem turns not on subtle
gradations of rank and etiquette, but on ultimately stark (in terms of
destiny if not of definition) oppositions between reason and unreason,
self-esteem and pride against God, which are further used to assert a
distinction between goodness and greatness. We are told the Son is
‘good / Far more than great or high’ (PL 3.310–11). As the adverbial
phrase suggests, the poem goes further than affirming that the great
must be good: the two qualities are revealed as separable (although, in
a world with no need of poetic justice thanks to the presence of the
divine variety, once the goodness has gone the greatness follows).
Such issues allow more comparision between heavenly society and
earth than would be possible if the former displayed a uniformity of
status. Negotiations of the relation between rank and equality, and
of the disjunction between goodness and greatness, would have been
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 61
impossible had all the angels simply been the same. Instead, Milton
employs a ‘feudal’ language which not only fuses social order and sanctity in a way peculiarly appropriate to Heaven, but allows a narrative to
be told which shadows in some respects the historical changes Milton
felt had taken place on earth.57 The elevation of the Son suggests that,
despite Davies’s assertion that one of the advantages of feudal language
is that its ‘conservative structure’ makes it ‘perhaps inherently appropriate for the representation of a state of perfect changelessness’, change
is in fact intrinsic to the nature of things. Heaven’s perfection is not
static but, like the progress of Hegel’s Spirit, consists in a process and a
plan. Davies refers to Milton’s use, in his controversy with Salmasius,
of texts written by Huguenot co-religionists of his French opponent
(François Hotman’s Francogallia and the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, probably by Philippe Du Plessis Mornay) that ‘represented feudalism as an
institution that . . . vested sovereignty in the nation rather than in the
king’, regarded the monarchy as elective, and ‘pledged to guarantee the
liberty and welfare of the people’.58 The importance of these tracts to
the development of a concept of a right to resist, and thus ultimately
to Locke, has been analysed by Quentin Skinner. They represented a bid
by the Huguenots, many of whose congregations were protected by local
feudal magnates who had converted to Protestantism, to gain a base
of support wider than they could gain on purely religious grounds, by
exploiting the resentment of the hereditary nobility in general against
the centralization of royal power which increasingly excluded them
from government. Their response found theoretical expression in a form
of constitutionalism which asserted the legal rights and freedoms of
this class. Against this stood such texts as the Commentaries on the Customs of Paris (1639), written by Peter Du Moulin, later an adversary of
Milton’s in the propaganda war over the regicide. As part of an antifeudal absolutist project, this claimed to expose ‘the futile conjectures’
of those who sought to locate the invention and origin of fiefs in Roman
law, and thus founded a new orthodoxy whose principal thrust is
summarized by Skinner:
All these writers decisively question the image of society as a stratified hierarchy. . . . The new structure which begins in consequence to
emerge is recognisably that of an early modern absolutism: the feudal
pyramid of legal rights and obligations is dismantled, the king
is singled out as the holder of complete Imperium, and all other
members of society are assigned an undifferentiated legal status as
his subjects.59
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However, in Paradise Lost, it is Satan who articulates resistance in
the political language of feudalism, laying claim to a status which is
unshakeably his, regardless of what he does and how things change.
The key to this is the fact that although at times Milton may have had
recourse to a ‘feudal’ conceptual armoury, and although he (and Locke)
owed a historical debt to this tradition, he, like Locke (and Hobbes,
too) is above all concerned with a single law for all, as opposed to the
‘parcellized sovereignty, vassal hierarchy and fief system’ of feudalism
proper.60 As Milton put it in Eikonoklastes, ‘It were a mad law that would
subject reason to superiority of place’ (CPW 3.462). The opposition
between rational law and claims to privilege is central to the conflict
in Heaven. God declares the elevation of the Son and decrees that
the angels shall ‘Under his great vicegerent reign abide / United as one
individual soul / For ever happy’ (PL 5.609–11). In response Satan, in a
piece of smart rhetoric, makes the form of his address to his potential
adherents express the substance of his grievance:
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of King anointed . . .
(PL 5.772–7)
Satan appears to believe that power has been centralized without
consent, and is clearly sensitive to the possibility that once there is one
law for all, titles are, in a sense, ‘merely titular’, a phrase which echoes
not only Milton’s but also Hobbes’s judgement on the place of the
modern aristocracy.61 It is a possibility he vehemently rejects. How, he
asks, can one be ordained to rule over such as they? They are
. . . if not equal all, yet free,
Equally free; for 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? Or can introduce
Law and edict on us, who without law
Err not; much less for this to be our Lord,
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 63
And look for adoration, to th’abuse
Of those imperial titles which assert
Our being ordained to govern, not to serve
(PL 5.791–802)
As Carrol Cox points out, Satan appeals to ‘the most common understanding of freedom from at least the time of Plato, who was insistent
on the point that the artisan and the guardian in his republic were
“equally free” precisely because they acknowledged the rightness of
their places in a hierarchy’. This is a conception of freedom derived from
acceptance of the sheer givenness of hierarchical order. Satan appears as
the representative of a feudal order, which claims to be ‘the analogical
expression of its own inner reality’. What you see is what you get,
because in a sense it is all that there is. He ‘objects not to superior
“power and splendour” (which do not challenge the hierarchical
freedom and equality he defends) but rather to the claim to rule by merit
and through law, the leveling power of which dissolves all distinctions
based on hierarchical position.’62
This levelling power is embodied in Abdiel, the seraph ‘than whom
none with more zeal adored / The Deity’ (PL 5.805–6), who, according
to Cox, ‘incessantly returns to the theme of abstractly just law’.63
Certainly, while accepting the existence of a hierarchical order, Abdiel
seems sensitive to what, presumably, has only just become apparent –
that rank and identity are not seamlessly interwoven. He describes Satan
as ‘ingrate / In place thy self so high above thy peers’ (PL 5.812), a formulation which implies a potential disjunction between one’s place and
the self which occupies it. He is also emphatic in his conviction that
such external considerations as position and appearance should reflect
the conformity or otherwise of the self to a transcendent principle. As
he exclaims when confronting Satan before the first battle of the War
in Heaven, ‘O heaven! That such resemblance of the highest / Should
yet remain, where faith and realty / Remain not’ (PL 6.114–16). Where
Satan addresses ‘thrones’ and ‘dominations’, Abdiel refers to ‘every
soul in heav’n’, which Cox reads as a vigorous evocation of ‘the abstract
egalitarianism of bourgeois civil society’.64 One bases his appeal on the
hollow ring of big names, the other argues on behalf of a rational
essence abstracted from – indeed, transcending – place and rank.
The Son exemplifies the proper order of things in ruling ‘by right of
merit’ (PL 6.43). From Abdiel’s perspective, to be ruled by a superior is,
in effect, to be served rather than lorded over. All are now ‘under one
head more near / United’, and ‘more illustrious made, since he the head
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/ One of our number thus reduced becomes, / His laws our laws’ (PL
5.830–1, 842–4). ‘His laws our laws’ is ambiguous. The dominant
meaning would seem to be that the laws he gives are theirs to keep, but
it also implies that heavenly society will be constructed as a unified field
for the uniform operation of laws which are universal in their applicability, and given that the context is one of ‘reduction’, the sense that
the Son will be governed by the same laws as everyone else is also
present. He will be, as Davies puts it, ‘rex under lex’ in a way which
renders the angels ‘more illustrious’.65 This is quite consistent with the
principles which informed Milton’s political writings. As he writes in
Eikonoklastes:
Indeed if the race of Kings were eminently the best of men, as the
breed at Tutburie is of Horses, it would in some reason then be their
part onely to command, ours always to obey. But Kings by generation no way excelling others, and most commonly not being the
wisest or the worthiest by far of whom they claim to have the governing, that we should yeild them subjection to our own ruin,
or hold of them the right of our common safety, and our natural
freedom by meer gift, as when the Conduit pisses Wine at Coronations, from the superfluity of their royal grace and beneficence, we
may be sure was never the intent of God, whose ways are just and
equal; never the intent of Nature, whose works are also regular; never
of any People not wholly barbarous, whom prudence, or no more
but human sense would have better guided when they first created
Kings, then so to nullifie and tread to durt the rest of mankind, by
exalting one person and his Linage without other merit lookt after,
but the meer contingencie of a begetting, into an absolute and unaccountable dominion over them and thir posterity.
(CPW 3.486–7)
This meritocratic position is typically rationalist both in its assumption
of a ‘just and equal’ God, and in its opposition to the haphazard and
chance-ridden processes of mere physical nature (as opposed to reason
based on ‘Nature, whose works . . . are regular’, or a recognition of the
order of the world). But it does not discount kingship on principle. As
Abdiel says, ‘God and nature bid the same, / When he who rules is worthiest, and excels / Them whom he governs’ (PL 6.176–8).
The most striking difference between Satan and Abdiel resides in the
types of individuality they display. This is also where, despite sharing a
‘rationalist’ commitment to a single body of law, the poem’s distance
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 65
from a Hobbesian vision becomes most manifest. Hobbes’s God is to be
obeyed ‘not from his Creating them [those who might disobey], as if he
required obedience, as of Gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible Power’ (Lev. 397 / 187), a position implicitly refuted by Abdiel’s
exclamation against Satan the ‘ingrate’ (PL 5.811). This overriding
emphasis on power means that the only real virtue is peaceableness,
and even this is more properly described as prudent than virtuous.66 As
has been established, this perspective underlies an absolutist political
vision starkly opposed to those of Milton and Locke. But it also means
that when it comes to considering heroism in literary terms Hobbes
is forced to concede that, as it were, the devil has the best tunes, or at
least is able to perform passable cover versions of them. Despite asserting that ambition is ‘a fault’, Hobbes concedes that it ‘has somewhat
Heroick in it, and therefore must have place in an Heroick Poem’.67
Satan, whose descriptions of God are rather Hobbesian, characterizing Him only as powerful (for example, as he whom ‘force hath made
supreme / Above his equals’), and declaring that ‘To reign is worth
ambition though in hell’ (PL 1.248–8,262), is the closest thing to
such a hero in Paradise Lost.68 The only way in which Abdiel’s heroism
could really become visible in Hobbes’s scheme of things would be if it
were recoded as stemming from ambition rather than timorous prudence. And indeed, Hobbes tended to consider those who stand on principle as secretly seeking power and honour.69 But such a reading of
Abdiel is discredited by association with Satan: ‘well thou com’st / Before
thy fellows, ambitious to win / From me some plume’ ( PL 6.159–61).
While Hobbes would have considered Satan imprudent and irrational,
he would not necessarily have seen his motives as exceptional or
particularly deviant. Milton, on the other hand, casts him to a place
beneath political consideration (which is to say that he bases his political considerations on such an exclusion). For Milton, Satan’s ambition finds a place in the poem only so that it may be exposed as a
sham before ‘the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom’
(PL 9.31–2).
The Son is the epitome of Christian heroism.70 But his supreme
sacrifice is only foreshadowed in the form of his offer to lay down
his life.71 In Paradise Lost and elsewhere Milton appears comparatively
uninterested in the crucifixion itself, preferring to concentrate on the
principles which underlie it.72 Thus the markedly discursive Paradise
Regained centres not on the crucifixion and resurrection, but on the
Son’s temptation as a man. A large part of the effectiveness of the poem
depends on its capacity to evoke an identification on the part of the
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reader with the humanity of the Son, rather than provoke a reaction of
gratitude for His divine suffering.73 Abdiel, too, though a lesser figure,
is a potential focus for such identification.74 Not only are we given a
character to identify with (despite the fact that we are also told that
he is a ‘seraph’, Cox’s remark that Milton ‘provides only the principle
which explains Abdiel’s action, his zeal and obedience’ is correct insofar
as this is the most important thing about him, his defining characteristic), but this character is also obscure, ‘totally invented by Milton’, and
possessing a name which occurs only once in the Bible.75 He is not a
mythic or larger-than-life figure. Like the characters which come to
populate the novels of the eighteenth century, he is a representative of
his kind, typical.76 It may be due to his desire to present Paradise Lost
as working a complete inversion of the epic form that there is only one
reference to Abdiel in his index, but while Steadman says the lesson of
Paradise Lost is obedience, a version of the poem which Milner believes
is dead to us, the important question the Abdiel episodes raise is: obedience to whom?77 It is worthwhile recognizing that the Christian rationalism which gave both Milton and Locke the strength to resist earthly
power was not separate from or in opposition to their belief in God, but
intimately bound up with it. Absolute personal responsibility for the
fate of one’s soul is the ultimate reason why freedom is so essential.78 It
is of central importance that Abdiel’s obedience to God is of the kind
which allows one to disobey, or to reject the grounds for obeying, any
other pretended power. Abdiel shows, as does the Son in human form
in Paradise Regained, and through his own choice of virtue in Paradise
Lost, that heroism is not beyond the creature.79 Cox overstates the case
when she asserts that ‘Until he stands up the other angels are not individuals but places in a hierarchy.’80 But it is true that his rejection of
Satan’s leadership makes clear, and dramatically presents, the fact that
the basis of obedience and the foundation of identity is not hierarchical allegiance but individual moral choice. Stella Revard finds that ‘In
other Renaissance poems it is not the humble Abdiel, surrounded by
adversaries who is the one to denounce Satan, but most often the
mighty Michael in the midst of God’s camp.’ Since ‘all is done in the
safety of God’s presence . . . none of these Michaels becomes the striking figure that Abdiel does.’81 But it might be added that this enhanced
literary effectiveness also seems to spring from a different world, one
which is more interested in individual conscience than in rival commanders of equivalent rank exchanging words of scorn at the head of
armies whose loyalty is a given. Abdiel is God-fearing in a way which
does not detract from his heroism but displays what Milton would have
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 67
called a ‘filial’ rather than a ‘servile’ fear (PL 12.305–6; see also Christian
Doctrine, CPW 6.537), an attitude of mind allowing a cheerful boldness
stemming from a conviction of righteousness. He is presented as more
offended by Satan than fearful of God, animated less by concern for
himself than by a sense of right, and despite the fact that he is, as it
were, a social inferior of Satan’s, he leaves the scene ‘superior’ (PL 5.905).
Where Satan reveals his pride and ambition, Abdiel’s concern for God,
reason and law, and for himself as a rational being, overrides any regard
for rank. Satan, who even after defeat recognizes only power as the difference between himself and God, feels himself ‘impaired’ by the elevation of the Son. Seeking to compensate for the damage done to his
pride, Satan performs for an audience, conjuring with the names denoting angelic orders. He clings to these titles in response to what he feels
is a threat to his being, and, indeed, claims that they are intrinsically
related to this essence or being, when in fact he has rejected the principle which they only represent, and on which they depend for substance and meaning. He is so dependent on social opinion that he is,
paradoxically, anti-social.82 Abdiel is unconcerned about the surrounding crowd and, because he stands on principle, feels big enough to take
on the vice of a great one. But, as is shown on his return to God, he
can also cooperate and congregate joyfully with others of like mind
(‘gladly then he mixed’ ), a possibility parodied, since Satan is debarred
from the reality by his egotism, by the hollow shell of the name of the
place on which Satan’s palace stands (‘the Mountain of the Congregation’). Abdiel is in a condition of liberty by virtue of his freely chosen
obedience and gratitude to the One who gave him being, while Satan,
the ‘ingrate’ is, as Abdiel puts it ‘not free, but to [him] self enthralled’
(PL 6.21, 5.766, 811, 6.181).83
Two epochs of the nobility’s concern for status are condensed in the
figure of Satan. On the one hand he is the vainglorious feudal baron
who claims independence from the rule of law in the face of centralization and rationalization. That is to say, one aspect of his activity can
be associated with the defunctionalization of the knightly class that
went hand in hand with the strengthening of centralized power out of
which the nation-states of Europe eventually developed. The nobility
ceased to be a semi-independent, feudal warrior caste, becoming instead
a social stratum increasingly dependent on the state. The nobility was
‘aristocratized’ and ‘courtized’. Under Louis XIV, whose reign is itself
almost an ‘ideal type’ of this process, the nobility came to be more or
less captives at court, with nothing to do and no purpose except vying
for prestige. Elias refers to the tragic aspects of this process for those
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who failed to adapt, ‘people whose existence and self-confidence
are bound to a certain traditional attitude . . . which now, in a world
which has changed for uncomprehended reasons, condemns them to
failure and downfall’, and who saw no way out but doomed and futile
rebellion.84
On the other hand Satan appears in a guise which Milton associated
with the court. In Eikonoklastes Milton takes up Charles I’s reference
to his ‘honour’ and defines the dead king’s meaning as ‘complement,
Ceremony, Court fauning, and dissembling’ in ‘the language of the
Courtier’ (CPW 3.539). To repeat Lawrence Stone’s description of the
consequences of the centralization of the state and the enhancement of
royal power which made the court so centrally important for many, ‘Not
merely did the system turn all courtiers into sycophants, but it accentuated the psychological gulf between Court and Country, giving the
gentry a sense of clear moral superiority over the cringing courtiers.’85
A similar vocabulary is employed in the angry exchange between
Gabriel and Satan after the rebel has been discovered in the garden.
Satan dismisses the ‘easier business’ of the loyal angels, having only ‘to
serve their Lord / High up in heaven, with songs to hymn his throne,
/ And practised distances to cringe, not fight’. In response Gabriel terms
him a ‘sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem / Patron of liberty’ and
asks
. . . who more than thou
Once fawned, and cringed, and servilely adored
Heaven’s awful monarch? Wherefore but in hope
To disposess him, and thy self to reign.
(PL 4.943–5, 957–61)
William Empson believes that this retort is ‘quite enough to prove that
God had already produced a very unattractive Heaven before Satan
fell’.86 But it seems likely that Gabriel’s retort is not an appropriate
description (or even an unwitting revelation) of the nature of heavenly
society as a whole, but is a critique of Satan’s behaviour, the implication being that his obedience, unlike Abdiel’s, and unlike the displays
of mutual, though hierarchically organized, respect prescribed by heavenly etiquette, was ‘servile’ rather than ‘filial’ in a sense which is clarified in Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education. There, the ‘slavish Temper’
is born of fear and ‘slavish discipline’ rather than the ‘Love and Friendship’ which will hold the respect born initially of ‘Fear and Awe’. Such
a temper is disposed to obedience only when watched, an obedience
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 69
born not of inner conviction and moral strength, but out of immediate
expediency on the part of one who will be ‘ill and wicked in private’.
It is important that a son have ‘Habits woven into the very Principles
of his Nature, and not a counterfeit Carriage, and dissembled Outside,
put on by Fear, only to avoid the present Anger of a Father who perhaps
may disinherit him’.87 Self-discipline, as opposed to servile conformity,
must be instilled through a loving respect for the father. Gabriel’s accusation also captures a sense that servility is a kind of power-worship on
the part of the weak and envious who do not feel ‘grace’, or an empowering love for the father within, and consequently nurture a secret ‘pride
towards God’ in the form of a wish to occupy his place (PL 12.305; Christian Doctrine, CPW 6.662). Implicit in Gabriel’s rebuke is the suggestion
that Satan’s identity is structured around a struggle for power rather
than a desire to be in accord with a morally exemplary authority which
has become part of the self. Certainly Satan’s concern for status is competitive. His proud and scornful reply to the angels who arrest him in
Eden is typical:
‘Know ye not then’, said Satan, filled with scorn,
‘Know ye not me? Ye knew me once no mate
For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar;
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown,
The lowest of your throng; . . .’
(PL 4.827–31)
The sterile self-gratification of looking down on others is intrinsically
linked to a rejection of the happy congregation enjoyed by Abdiel on
his return to the ranks of the just.
The work of Norbert Elias usefully suggests a social explanation for
the types of individuality displayed respectively by Satan and Abdiel.
Elias distinguishes between ‘courtly’ and ‘bourgeois’ milieux. He argues
that the court rather than the market was the first crucible in which a
type of person was forged whose sense of himself as an individual was
a function of his self-restraint and the reflection on himself and his
behaviour that this necessitated.88 Only later did ‘the less visible and
more impersonal compulsions of social interdependence, the division
of labor, the market and competition . . . impose restraint and control
on the impulses and emotions.’ This impersonality produced an imperative which seemed to derive from the very nature of things, and the
restrictions it imposed were stronger, deeper, less conscious, or even
unconscious.89 What is more:
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. . . in a social field where money and profession have become the
main foundation of social existence, the individual’s actual social
environment is relatively interchangeable. The esteem he enjoys
among the people with whom he has professional contact naturally
plays a part, but he can to an extent always withdraw from it.
The courtier, on the other hand, was much more dependent on his
milieu. Social opinion was the foundation of his existence.90 Consequently, in courtly as opposed to bourgeois society, ‘the awareness that
this control is exercised for social reasons is more alive. Opposing inclinations do not yet wholly vanish from waking consciousness; selfconstraint has not yet become so completely an apparatus of habits
operating almost automatically and including all human relationships.’91 According to Elias, a less interchangeable social context creates
a stronger imperative to conform to norms rather than adhere to principles. The account of the ‘middling sort’ given earlier in this chapter
shows that it would be inaccurate to picture the bourgeoisie as oblivious to the social pressures which shape or even make them. But it
should be remembered that for both Milton and Locke the self wishes
to keep company only with those it considers to be good, is ultimately
responsible for choosing its milieu (unlike the courtier, who is faced
with a choice between life at court and what appears to have been experienced as isolation), and, in the end, should be possessed of a moral
rectitude which is appears to be prior to and transcendent of society (an
appearance which is actually a function of an environment which offers
constant occasions for the exercise of choice).92 Abdiel epitomizes this
pattern: ‘hostile scorn’ (PL 5.904) is unpleasant, and to mix gladly is
preferable, but when it comes down to it he can up and leave.
It is true that Satan, too, quits his milieu and decamps to the North,
his physical departure shadowing his spiritual rupture from God. But
he is still wholly concerned with his social standing, at first leaving with
the intention of returning still greater than before, and later seeking to
recreate a context – ‘High on a throne of royal state’ (PL 2.1) – which
can reflect back to him the glory he needs. His identity is structured
along courtly lines. An expert in the kind of intrigue consistently anatomized in descriptions of court societies, his inwardness consists not in
transcendence of context but in the gap between appearance and reality.
His behaviour exemplifies the oscillation between theatrical dissimulation and secret outburst typical of accounts of this environment. In the
case of the courtier’s self-observation, ‘We are not concerned . . . with a
religious self-observation that contemplates the inner self as an isolated
being to discipline its hidden impulses, but with observation of oneself
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 71
with a view to self-discipline in social life . . . he [the courtier] must
know his own passions if he is to conceal them effectively.’ Calculation,
rather than sincerity, is all-important. There is little room for spontaneous self-expression: ‘affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate. They reveal the true feelings of the person concerned to a degree
that, because not calculated, can be damaging.’93 Self-control is a matter
of expediency.
It is above all this courtly context, encouraging an ever-present awareness of self-control, which fosters the sense of ‘that complex, selfconscious, theatrical accommodation to the world’ which Stephen
Greenblatt sees as ‘a characteristic mode of modern individuality’. In
Thomas More he discerns both the acutely self-conscious creation of a
public role and an intense desire to escape it. More suffered both from
the fear that behind the fictional roles he played lay nothing, and from
an intense desire for such ‘a cancellation of identity itself, an end to all
improvisation, an escape from narrative’. Wyatt was perhaps more
typical in laying claim to an ‘unaffected self-expression’, and lamenting the demand ‘Rather than to be, outwardly to seem’ to which, as a
diplomat, he had to submit.94 The demands of courtly existence seem
to afflict Hamlet in a similar way when he disclaims the word ‘seems’
and proclaims he has ‘that within which passes show’ (Hamlet, 1.2.76,
85). Although the roles Hamlet will later play are part of a strategy
dictated by a troubled but upright conscience – and it is significant
that Hamlet identifies with a context altogether other than the Court,
the Protestant University of Wittenburg, to which he longs to return –
the alternation between a calculated role which he controls, and soliloquies in which an inner self is expressed, would have been recognized by an observer of the court such as Jean De La Bruyère: ‘A man
who knows the court is master of his gestures, of his eyes and his expression; he is deep, impenetrable; he dissimulates the disservices for which
he is responsible, smiles at his enemies, suppresses his moods, disguises
his passions, denies what is really in his heart, speaks, acts against his
feelings.’95
In the world of Paradise Lost, where virtue has nothing to fear and
therefore nothing to hide, such a pattern of behaviour (dissimulation
followed by soliloquy, an effective act succeeded by an affective outburst in – as he thinks – private) characterizes the devils, and Satan
above all. Linda Gregerson remarks, ‘Satan soliloquizes throughout his
sojourn in Paradise, where his function is stage villainy.’96 Indeed, his
soliloquy at the beginning of Book 4, possibly the first part of the poem
to have been written, was composed when Milton’s intention was to
write a tragedy.97 But in his theatricality Satan is the antagonist not only
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of Puritanism and its doubts about dramatization, but of the ‘middle
sort’ and its hostility to courtly self-fashioning.98 When Satan, ‘Soon as
midnight brought on the dusky hour / Friendliest to sleep and silence’,
wakes Beelzebub to speak to him ‘in secret’, reminds him of how ‘Thou
to me thy thoughts / Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart’,
but, after a brief indication of his displeasure at the latest events, seems
to realize that ‘More in this place / To utter is not safe’ (PL 5.667–8, 672,
676–7, 682–3), the atmosphere is that of a court in which order is a
matter of force (embodied in splendour), and covers a reality of intrigue,
deception, and whispering in dark corners. It is evocative of Wyatt’s
poetry, or of Versailles as described by Elias: ‘Great caution was needed
before people who did not know each other very exactly could open
their minds to each other at this court.’99
In his concern for status Satan does two kinds of work in the poem,
one theological, the other political, although both are intertwined.
As Defoe noticed, no real explanation of Satan’s fall is given.100 A
philosophical-cum-theological approach, such as Kant’s in his reading
of Genesis, might make reference to the radical irreducibility of the
problem of primal evil. Scripture ‘finds a place for evil at the creation
of the world, yet not in man, but in a spirit of an originally loftier
destiny. This is the first beginning of all evil represented as inconceivable by us (for whence came evil to that spirit?).’101 But when this fall
is brought within the ambit of Milton’s political-cum-ideological project
there is, as it were, an explanation to be found for this lack of explanation in the sheer folly of the high aristocrat’s absolute concern with
status from the point of view of one for whom social life is either a
‘private’ matter of friendship, or, as in the case of a church or other voluntary organizations, is a matter of collective organization in the name
of some larger purpose. There is a political stopping-point on the question, which is thus provided with finite and recognizable points of
reference. Conversely, Satan tars with the brush of primal evil much
that the middle classes had been, were, and would continue to define
themselves against. Satan’s revolt is one of the forms of unreason which
assure the solidity of reason and the coherence of the community of
the just in Milton’s writings. Satan’s attachment to the already-given
and visible renders him blind to the invisible principle at work behind
the scenes and changing them.
Although it is invisible, this principle certainly has force. In Paradise
Lost proclamations of expulsion and damnation are juxtaposed with
visions of community and purity in a proximity which testifies to the
unthinkability of the latter without the former. As in Locke’s Treatises
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 73
and Milton’s Tenure, purity is produced against the other and through
its expulsion – a correspondence which suggests that the splitting performed in Paradise Lost is not reducible to Milton’s psychic need to
separate his sense of himself from Satanic pride (although it is not
necessarily free of such an urge either).102 In Book 3, a vision of the
community of the just, so spontaneously orderly that sceptred rule is
unnecessary, is founded on the description, just a few lines earlier, of
the irrevocable exclusion of the damned from this community:
. . . thou shalt judge
Bad men and angels, they arraigned shall sink
Beneath thy sentence; hell her numbers full,
Thenceforth shall be for ever shut. Mean while
The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New heaven and earth, wherein the just shall dwell,
And after all their tribulations long
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With joy and love triumphing, and fair truth.
Then thou thy regal sceptre shalt lay by,
For regal sceptre then no more shall need,
God shall be all in all.
(PL 3.330–3; see also PL 5.609–27)
Michèle Le Doeuff sees a telling image for this process in the roof of the
church at Pont-Aven, upheld by grimacing gargoyles:
Our countryside offers a thousand examples of such an inclusion,
within a ‘sublime’ space, of a figure opposed to the sublime. This is,
however, a paradoxical inclusion, in the case of Pont-Aven at least:
these grotesque characters are at one and the same time crushed by
the roof and supporting it because they are trying to lift it up to free
themselves. A subtle use of negative values, which end up serving in
their very effort to escape servitude.103
The parallels between this schema and that elaborated in Paradise Lost
are obvious. Indeed, the poem virtually theorizes it. The angels hymn
to God:
. . . Who seeks
To lessen thee, against his purpose serves
To manifest the more thy might: his evil
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Thou usest, and from thence createst more good.
Witness this new-made world . . .
(PL 7.613–17)
Marcia Landy has argued that in Milton’s poem the threat of such exclusion is intended to encourage a disposition to socially acceptable behaviour: ‘Given his fierce emphasis on liberty and individualism, he had to
find a psychological mode for internalizing necessary restraints on
freedom. The threat of deviance, the fear of death and isolation, provide
a proper internal restraint.’
As Landy notes, Satan is not only cast out as a deviant. He is also
subject to surveillance.104 Given the potential gap between appearance
and inner reality to which he testifies, the poem works to expose
hypocrisy, for which this disjunction is a precondition, to the reader.
This exposure goes beyond presenting him as a master of the kind
of misleading constructions and false claims which characterize his
rhetoric in the early books, to include the staging of scenes in which he
is revealed for his true self. Sometimes this is enacted in quite literal
terms, as when, in what is perhaps an ironic take on the fairy-tale scenario, Ithuriel’s spear unmasks him as if it were a wand, turning him
from toad into archfiend (PL 4.810–13). More telling is the episode in
which Uriel spies him on the top of Mount Niphates. At the end of
Book 3, Satan fools Uriel with his ‘Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks /
Invisible, except to God alone’ (PL 3.683–4). Then, early in Book 4, Uriel
sees him soliloquizing in what might almost be private. Passion dims
his face, marring the ‘borrowed visage’ with which he had concealed
them. Soon he has once again ‘smoothed’ his face ‘with outward calm’,
but it is too late. While only God can see through the appearance
adopted by hypocrisy, Uriel’s ‘eye’ has ‘pursued him down / The way
he went’ and seen him ‘disfigured’ while he is ‘alone, / As he supposed,
all unobserved, unseen’ (PL 4.114, 116, 120, 125–7, 129–30). This
exposure befalls other fallen beings, too. After the Fall, Eve ‘reasons’ to
herself:
And I perhaps am secret; heaven is high,
High and remote to see from thence distinct
Each thing on earth; and other care perhaps
May have diverted from continual watch
Our great forbidder, safe with all his spies
About him.
(PL 9.1088–90, 811–16)
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 75
Eve seems to think of God in a manner more appropriate to an earthly
monarch, who would be dependent on spies, and who, unlike the
Creator, would be, largely, a forbidder. In similar spirit, Adam implores
of his surroundings: ‘cover me ye pines, / Ye cedars, with innumerable
boughs / Hide me’ (PL 9.1088–90). Adam ascribes this desire to hide to
his belief that should he ‘behold the face / Henceforth of God or angel’,
their ‘heavenly shapes’ would ‘dazzle now this earthly’ (PL 9.1080–3).
In its physicalization of his sense that he would be unable to look
them in the eye, this serves also to capture the sudden breach which
has opened between celestial and terrestrial realms. But the fact that
these thoughts are an elaboration of his dawning knowledge of ‘shame,
the last of evils’ (PL 9.1079) suggest that what is struggling to the surface
of his consciousness is a recognition that he is now sufficiently distinct
from the uncorrupted parts of God’s Creation to be at the receiving
end of that agon, anatomized by Sartre, whereby to be subject to the
gaze of the other is to be disempowered and humiliated.105 In the cases
of both Adam and Eve, the notion of being secret and invisible is
revealed as absurd, for nothing ‘can scape the eye / Of God all-seeing’
(PL 10.5–6).
This inevitability of visibility was expressed as an aspiration of social
policy by Jeremy Bentham, whose Panopticon Papers take their epigram
from the 139th Psalm, of which their may be echoes in Adam’s plea
to the cedars and pines: ‘Thou art about my path, and about my bed:
and spiest out all my ways. / If I say, peradventure the darkness shall
cover me, then shall my night be turned into day.’106 For Foucault,
Bentham’s Panopticon is the emblem of modern power, which operates
by means of surveillance rather than spectacular punishment. Rather
than a public display of the law’s ‘triumph’ over the body of the condemned, the ‘gentle way in punishment’ seeks to effect ‘the power of
the norm . . . within a system of formal equality’. In the Panopticon,
which disposes its inmates around a central surveillance tower, the
cells
. . . are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each
actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The
panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to
see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the
principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose,
to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of the supervisor
capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visiblity is
a trap.
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For Foucault, the Panopticon, which seeks ‘to induce in the inmate a
state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power’, is a microcosm of modern society itself, which
ensures its own functioning by means of ‘An inspecting gaze, a gaze
which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the
point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this
surveillance over, and against, himself.’107
Surveillance of the self is an integral part of the subject produced in
Milton’s texts. The kind of spying which Eve imagines should be beside
the point. In Paradise Lost, man is fit to govern the other animals
because, ‘Self-knowing’ (PL 7.510; according to the OED, the first formulation of this phrase), he is in command of himself. This self-control
is conceived by Milton elsewhere as a function of an inner visibility of
the self to itself. In Reason Milton asserts that, beyond the desire to
appear virtuous in the eyes of others
. . . there is yet a more ingenuous and noble degree of honest shame,
or call it, if you will, an esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own persons. And if the love of God, as a fire sent
from heaven to be ever kept alive upon the altar of our hearts, be the
first principle of all godly and virtuous actions in men, this pious
and just honouring of ourselves is the second, and may be thought
as the radical moisture and fountainhead whence every laudable
and worthy enterprise issues forth. . . . Nor can he fear so much the
offence and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the
reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should
see him doing or imagining that which is sinful, though in the
deepest secrecy.
(CPW 1.843–4)
In the Panopticon, the individual is isolated and passive: ‘the side walls
prevent him coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but
he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.’108 Here, however, the self, while subject to an inner agency
of discipline, is not divorced from others. It is simply that shame before
them is of a less ‘noble degree’ because it is less independent. Earlier in
the same tract, Milton proclaims that, should he fail to help further the
cause of reformation with ‘those few talents’ God has lent him, ‘I foresee
what stories I should heare within my selfe, all my life after, of discourage and reproach’ (CPW 1.804). It is as though Milton has internalized the social milieu in which values are established and reinforced
Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven 77
by the circulation of opinion and the fear of shame before others, a
process Foucault represents as the ‘reign of “opinion” . . . a mode of
operation through which power will be exercised through the mere fact
of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze’.109 For Foucault, such processes are responsible for the production of the ‘soul’, understood as ‘the seat of habits’,
which
. . . is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the
functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in
a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over
madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those
who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.
This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul
represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to
punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. . . . On this reality-reference, various concepts
have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche,
subjectivity, personality, consciousness etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. . . . The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is
already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound
than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence,
which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the
body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy;
the soul is the prison of the body.110
Taken at face value, Foucault’s critique of panopticism is an attack
on selfhood per se: ‘subjectivity itself would seem just a form of selfincarceration; and the question of where political resistance springs
from must thus remain obscure’.111 Not only do questions of agency
become problematic, so too does the object of action. To equate the
positions of ‘children’ and ‘the colonized’ is to announce an opposition
to socialization in general. In his later books, however, Foucault’s position is clarified somewhat. His object is not subjectivity tout court but ‘a
mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law’ which is
one form of the Christian legacy in Western modernity.112 For many,
the demand to develop oneself in relation to such universal norms has
been sufficiently oppressive to appear as scarcely more than a form of
domination. Arguably this has been due to the content and interpretation of these norms, rather than to normativity itself. Although norms
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will always proscribe some identities, it is an easy task to think of norms
we cannot imagine society lacking, and whose presence we cannot
readily think of in terms of arbitrary restraint; and it is impossible to
conceive the absence of norms. Nonetheless, something of this oppressiveness is apparent in Paradise Lost. The force behind the ideals it
expresses is evident from the different fates suffered by the fallen angels
and fallen humanity. Adam and Eve show a propensity to repent, unlike
Satan, who, although the voice of conscience is never quite muted, nevertheless grows more rather than less wilful and feels the wrath of God
in consequence. By contrast, Adam and Eve undergo a kind of corrective treatment in the wake of their transgression. The human is disciplined while the demonized is punished.
3
‘Stronger then Death’: Masculinity
and Marriage in Paradise Lost
For Milton, love was an essential part of human nature. As a result, marriage came to be the one earthly institution which he described in the
most intense, almost mystical, and, indeed, ‘sacralized’ and enchanted
of terms. In producing a conception of conjugal love so intense that,
according to Anthony Low, it ‘threatened to separate from Christianity
and become a substitute religion’, Milton was close to the core – indeed,
in the van – of the changes which were at work within his society, and
clearly prefigures the social and discursive developments that were to
follow.1 There were contemporaries of Milton who described marriage
as a Paradise, and no doubt the seventeenth century was not the first
to witness such plaudits for the married state, but when readers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw Paradise Lost as perhaps the
pre-eminent evocation of marriage as a haven of bliss in a world which,
while not necessarily heartless, was certainly less and less stable and personal, it was clear that Milton had struck a chord more powerfully than
most.2
However, to say that, for Milton, marriage could be a repository for
the sacred on earth is not to suggest that he regarded all marriages as
unchangeable and eternal. On the contrary, it was on this high ideal
that he founded his argument for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Specific marriages were no more possessed of a superhuman
aura than any other manifestation of human action. Or rather, true marriage, an institution of reason, nature and God (which, of course, all bid
the same) operated, as did the force of reason in all areas of life for
Milton, as a yardstick by which the given, in more intimate human relations as in church and state, could be measured, changed and, if necessary, rejected. By no means did the description of marriage as ideally
a paradise imply that relations between the sexes were necessarily
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harmonious. Almost from the first there were those who saw in Milton
the very model of an autocratic patriarch. Johnson believed that ‘there
appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females’, and
in the course of the twentieth century the scale and force of the critique
of Milton’s representation of gender has increased.3 This critique has not
gone unanswered. Many have pointed out the ways in which Milton
takes women possibly more seriously, and gives them more credit, than
previous male writers.4 It seems that the debate over whether, or the
ways in which, Milton is pro- or anti-feminist, misogynist or appreciative of female or feminine qualities, will not be resolved on purely
textual grounds. It is, however, possible to be clearer about the manner
in which Milton’s re-evaluation of married love, and, whether as a necessary consequence or parallel development, his re-evaluation of the
nature and importance of women, is bound up with a perception of
marriage and wives as the source not only of companionship and love,
but of intimate danger for men.5 Marriage is a prime proving-ground
for the practice of virtuous self-discipline in this world. That is to say,
issues to do with masculinity and individuality are at stake in the pleasures of Eden. In Paradise Lost the marital relation is the site of a drama
of private pleasure and virtue which looks ahead to the novel not only
in its particular concerns, but also in its importance relative to other
aspects of the poem (in particular the War in Heaven).6 The morality
and psychology of a man and a woman in their daily life together, rather
than worldly rank or martial valour, are at its heart.
Lawrence Stone has written of Milton’s divorce tracts that ‘The roots
of affective individualism in seventeenth century Puritan sectarianism
are clearly demonstrated in these writings.’7 In them, marriage is presented as a haven of relaxation and enjoyment away from the grave
male world at large:
. . . no worthy enterprise can be don by us without continuall plodding and wearisomnes to our faint and sensitive abilities. We cannot
therefore alwayes be contemplative, or pragmaticall abroad, but have
need of som delightfull intermissions, wherin the enlarg’d soul may
leav off a while her severe schooling; and like a glad youth in wandring vacancy, may keep her hollidaies to joy and harmles pastime:
which as she cannot well doe without company, so in no company
so well as where the different sexe in most resembling unlikenes, and
most unlike resemblance cannot but please best and be pleas’d in the
aptitude of that variety.
(Tetrachordon, CPW 2.597)
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 81
The existence of two genders is the ground on which a distinction is
established, for the male individual, between the world of ‘worthy enterprise’ with other men, carried on outside the home (‘abroad’), and the
‘delightfull intermissions’ for which a member of ‘the different sexe’ is
most suited. This distinction is the ground on which Milton not only
argues for a (male) right to divorce on the grounds of incompatibility,
but asserts that this should be a wholly private affair.8 Divorce must be
a matter for the individual, since it concerns matters which are too intimate and even idiosyncratic to be communicable in the public domain.
Such issues are for the husband to determine, not the gross grasp of
the law. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton instances ‘the
greatest and worthiest Roman of his time Paulus Emilius,’ who
. . . beeing demanded why he would put away his wife for no visible
reason, This shoo, said he, and held it out on his foot, is a neat shoo,
a new shoo, and yet none of you know where it wrings me: much lesse
by the unfamiliar cognisance of a fee’d gamester can such a private
difference be examin’d, neither ought it.
(CPW 2.348)
The ‘private difference’ of a bad wife can be like a physical pain in an
intimate place, the nature of which cannot fully be translated into the
language of the public forum. In articulating such an ‘affective individualism’, Milton’s divorce tracts reflect the ‘privatization of need’
analysed by Jessica Benjamin among others. For Benjamin, the ideal of
the self-sufficient individual ‘is the chief manifestation of male hegemony, far more pervasive than overtly authoritarian forms of male
domination’. It implies the banishment of nurturance, dependence and
relation to a private, domestic world: ‘The psychosocial core of this
unfettered individuality is the subjugation of woman by man, through
which it appears that she is his possession, and therefore, that he is not
dependent on or attached to an other outside himself.’9 The private
sphere is that which is included in the man. This is reflected in the following distinction, made by Seyla Benhabib: ‘The public sphere, the
sphere of justice . . . is regarded as the domain where independent, male
heads of household transact with one another, while the privateintimate sphere is put beyond the pale of justice and restricted to the
reproductive and affective needs of the bourgeois pater familias’.10 Thus
Milton argues that issues of divorce are not ‘judicial . . . for antiquaries
affirm that divorces proceeded among the Jews without knowledge of
the Magistrate’, but are instead a matter for ‘a pure moral economical
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Law’ (CPW 2.317–18). In other words, the right to divorce is part of that
right to ‘oeconomize’ as ‘Maisters of Family’, the right of free men to run
their own household affairs, in which Milton roots political liberty in
Tenure.
However, these tracts are also striking in their re-evaluation of conjugal relations, with Milton asserting that ‘the waies of God and his
divine Truth . . . are equal, easy, and not burdensome; nor do they ever
crosse the just and reasonable desires of men’ (CPW 2.342). Sexuality is
rescued from its Catholic interpretation as a shameful fact partly
redeemd by marriage, and, with higher ideals and expectations attached
to it, is rendered a need so fully human that it is practically divine.11 In
fact it becomes a key site on which the distinction between the human
and the bestial can be discerned and policed – a distinction which is
easily mapped onto differences in sexual mores with social implications.12 The distinction is made all the more sharply in Milton’s writings since, as James Turner among others has noted, Milton’s is a more
spiritualized ideal of marriage than is to be found in many of his contemporaries.13 Gouge defines a good marriage as one in which there is
to be found ‘louing mutuall affection . . . betwixt husband and wife, or
else no duty will bee well performed’. But for Milton this is all that
counts as marriage. Gouge exclaims against the argument from incompatibility which made implicit reference to such a high ideal: ‘O more
than monstrous impudency! Is not this directly to oppose against Gods
Ordinance, and against that order which hee hath fet betwixt man and
woman?’ Gouge’s definition of an adequate marriage – that the couple
dwell together, and are sexually faithful to and ‘benevolent’ towards one
another – is close to what Milton would denigrate as merely physical
and bestial.14 Milton’s central argument is that the law, as it stands, gives
the carnal precedence over the spiritual and human aspects to marriage.
To allow divorce ‘if it happen that nature hath stopt or extinguisht the
veins of sensuality’, but to deny it ‘though all the faculties of the understanding and conversing part after triall appeare to be so ill and so
aversly met through natures unalterable working, as that neither peace,
nor any sociable contentment can follow’ is ‘secretly to instruct us, that
however many grave reasons are pretended to the maried life, yet that
nothing indeed is thought worth regard therein, but the prescrib’d
satisfaction of an irrationall heat’. In other words, the law places ‘more
of mariage in the channell of concupiscence, then in the pure influence
of peace and love, whereof the souls lawfull contentment is the onely
fountain’. For Milton, by contrast, bodily urges seem to belong to a
merely contingent realm (of what may just ‘happen’) rather than
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 83
partaking in the rational necessity (and therefore unalterability) of the
truly natural. Milton argues that since ‘mariage is a human society’, and
thus ‘must proceed from the mind rather then the body, els it would be
but a kind of animal or beastish meeting’, then if the mind ‘cannot have
that due company by mariage, that it may reasonably and humanly
desire’, then ‘that mariage can be no human society, but a certain
formalitie, or gilding over of little better then a brutish congresse, and
so in very wisdome and purenes to be dissolv’d’ (CPW 2.248–9, 275).
Reflecting on St Paul’s words, ‘It is better to marry then to burn’, Milton
asks ‘what might this burning mean?’ and answers, in a passage worth
quoting at length:
Certainly not the meer motion of carnall lust, not the meer goad of
a sensitive desire; God does not principally take care for such cattell.
What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise
before he knew the sin of incontinence; that desire which God saw
it was not good that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire
and longing to put off an unkindly solitarines by uniting another
body, but not without a fit soule to his in the cheerfull society of
wedlock. Which if it were so needfull before the fall, when man was
much more perfect in himself, how much more is it needfull now
against all the sorrows and casualties of this life to have an intimate
and speaking help, a ready and reviving associate in marriage:
whereof who misses by chancing on a mute and spiritles mate,
remains more alone then before, and in a burning less to be contain’d then that which is fleshly and more to be consider’d; as being
more deeply rooted even in the faultles innocence of nature. As for
that other burning, which is but as it were the venom of a lusty and
over-bounding concoction, strict life and labour with the abatement
of a full diet may keep that low and obedient anough: but this pure
and inbred desire of joyning to it self in conjugall fellowship a fit
conversing soul (which desire is properly call’d love) is stronger then
death, as the Spouse of Christ thought, many waters cannot quench it,
neither can the flouds drown it. This is that rationall burning that
mariage is to remedy, not to be allay’d with fasting, nor with any
penance to be subdu’d, which how can he asswage who by mis-hap
hath met the unmeetest and most unsutable mind? . . . all ingenuous
men will see that the dignity and blesing of mariage is plac’t rather
in the mutual enjoyment of that which the wanting soul needfully
seeks, then of that which the plenteous body would jollily give
away. Hence it is that Plato in his festival discours brings in Socrates
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relating what he fain’d to have learnt from the Prophetesse Diotima,
how Love was the Sonne of Penury, begot of Plenty in the garden of
Jupiter. Which divinely sorts with that which in effect Moses tells us;
that Love was the Son of Lonelines, begot in Paradise by that sociable
and helpfull aptitude which God implanted between man and
woman toward each other.15
(CPW 2.251–2)
Milton’s distinction between a need for the ‘cheerfull society of
wedlock’ and ‘that which the plenteous body would jollily give away’
in common with ‘cattell’, between ongoing commitment and a bestial
absorption in the pleasures of the moment, is akin to Freud’s marking
of the transition from animal nature to human society at the point
when ‘the need for genital satisfaction no longer made its appearance
like a guest who drops in suddenly’ (presumably hoping to be entertained in a jolly and plentiful manner).16 Nevertheless the ideal marriage is not a solely spiritual relationship, if spiritual is understood as
excluding the physical. Irene Samuel believes that in the divorce tracts
‘Milton is doing little more than apply his Platonic theory of love to
the institution of marriage’, that ‘throughout the tracts on divorce,
Milton insists to the point of repetition that the essential union is of
the soul, and that the true mate is “another self, a second self, a very
self itself” ’, and that ‘Only union of this kind enables man to rise to
“such a love as Christ loves his Church”; all other union, under
whatever name, is lust.’ She further argues that this insistence depends
on a distinction between the material and the spiritual which ‘presumably’ Milton later discarded.17 But the physical is more important
than this. Marriage is conceived by Milton in Protestant, and therefore
this-worldly, terms, although it may well be Milton’s Platonism which
is responsible for the intense psychological significance he attributes to
it. What is important is that the physical be an expression of – indeed,
one might say, a form of – the spiritual. As Stephen Fallon rightly
remarks, the fit audience for these tracts would be monists who ‘sense
that sexual relations touch the soul as well as the body and that
loveless sexual relations brutalize and corporealize the soul’.18 Milton’s
reference to the desire for a ‘fit conversing soul’ expresses this nicely,
since in the seventeenth century ‘to converse’ denoted both to have
sex and to discourse with another, as the word ‘intercourse’ still can
today.19 Thus Milton describes ‘the desire and longing to put off an
unkindly solitariness by uniting another body, but not without a fit
soule’. This desire is neither ‘the meer motion of carnall lust’ known
to ‘cattel’, nor the ethereal and disembodied ascent to knowledge of
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 85
the divine typical of the conventional ‘Platonic’ schema. It is more
intense than either. Founded in lack rather than super-abundance, a
matter not of ‘that which the plenteous body would jollily give away’
but of ‘that which the wanting soul needfully seeks’, and so vital to
life that it is ‘stronger then death’, it begs to be read in terms of the
Lacanian conception of desire.20 The (masculine) individual seeks
the recognition of an other which can return his embodied being
to him.21
In stressing the paradisal and prelapsarian origin of marriage, ‘so
needfull before the fall’, Milton is following a whole host of thinkers,
both Protestant and Catholic, and going back at least as far as Erasmus,
who, in arguing for the value of marriage, held that since it had prelapsarian origins it could not be regarded as merely a remedy for irredeemable concupiscence or lustfulness, but was an expression of an
innate human need for companionship.22 Such a belief was in tension
with the desire to represent Adam as perfect and complete, as is perhaps
suggested by Milton’s description of Adam as ‘much more perfect in
himself’ than men are today: in admitting degrees of perfection it
removes from man the possibility of attaining it absolutely. The desire
that Adam be intrinsically complete is perhaps expressed most memorably in Augustine’s picture of relations between Adam and Eve. Augustine accepted that there had been a companionate aspect to their
marriage: ‘Between husband and wife there was a faithful partnership
based on love and honest respect.’ However, Augustine is most concerned with their ‘effortless observance of God’s command’ of reproduction. Indeed, as far as Augustine is concerned, if companionship
rather than procreation had been the prime concern in the creation of
Eve, God would have created another man. The ‘loyal partnership’ of
which he writes is less a fulfilment of their deepest nature than it is
comradely cooperation in carrying out a task, and Augustine’s description of the way in which that task was to have been achieved makes
clear his concern with ‘integrity’, or wholeness. Sex would have
involved no excitement of the flesh:
When mankind was in such a state of ease and plenty, blest with
such felicity, let us never imagine that it was impossible for the seed
of children to be sown without the morbid condition of lust. Instead,
the sexual organs would have been brought into activity by the same
bidding of the will as controlled the other organs. Then, without
feeling the allurement of passion goading him on, the husband
would have relaxed on his wife’s bosom in tranquillity of mind and
with no impairment of his body’s integrity.23
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For Milton, by contrast, the fundamental need for companionship is
paramount. What is more, it is specifically female companionship that
the male needs. (It is the need of the man on which Milton focuses, but
this need is clearly conceived as reciprocal: God implanted in man and
woman an ‘aptitude . . . toward each other’.) In Tetrachordon Milton
specifically rejects Augustine’s view that another man would have been
more suitable for purposes of companionship as a ‘crabbed opinion’
(CPW 2.596). The woman is ‘a ready and reviving associate’, a defence
‘against all the sorrows and casualties of this life’ in a sometimes heartless world.
However, as is suggested by Augustine’s concern for ‘integrity’, the
intensity of the marital relation makes it potentially dangerous for so
commitedly patriarchal a thinker as Milton, as is witnessed by an insistence in his texts on the wrongness of a contrary will within marriage
which is so vehement that it suggests, in fact, considerable ambivalence.
The possibility of two wills inhabiting this supposedly unified self or
intimate realm is a problematic prospect, threatening to transform this
realm or turn it inside out into a continuation of the public sphere. This
is most clearly brought out in Samson Agonistes. There, attempting to
explain her actions to Samson, Dalila asserts that what swayed her
‘might have awed the best-resolved of men, / The constantest, to have
yielded without blame’. The ‘magistrates’ and ‘princes’ of her country
appealed to ‘all the bonds of civil duty / And of religion’. Her intellect
won over, she tells him, ‘Only my love of thee held long debate’ with
them. ‘At length’, she tells him
. . . that grounded maxim,
So rife and celebrated in the mouths
Of wisest men, that to the public good
Private respects must yield, with grave authority
Took full possession of me and prevailed;
Virtue, as I thought, truth, duty, so enjoining.
(SA 847–8, 850–4, 863, 865–70)
The crux is clear. If Milton had merely wanted to present a picture of
a deceitful, worthless and dangerous woman, he need not have had
Dalila deny that her motive was gold (SA 849). As it is, Dalila is given
arguments which might well be weighty from the lips of a man, but in
order that Samson can rebuke her, a woman, for laying claim to them.
As a result of her position as his ‘intimate and speaking help’ (see
above), and ‘overpow’red’ by her request, unable to deny her anything,
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 87
he ‘unbosomed’ all his ‘secrets’ to her. He goes on to say, in effect, that
as a woman she was a part of the private sphere and should have stayed
there:
Being once a wife, for me thou wast to leave
Parents and country; nor was I their subject,
Nor under their protection, but my own;
Thou mine, not theirs.
It is to Milton’s credit that he has Dalila respond: ‘In argument with
men a woman ever / Goes by the worse, whatever be her cause’ (SA
879–81, 885–8, 903–4) But it is to his credit as an artist, as a piece of
verisimilitude. It is, as it were, what a woman like Dalila might be
expected to say, not a recognition of patriarchal unreasonableness.
This dynamic can be perceived in slightly less overt form in passages
such as that in Tetrachordon, where Milton expresses the wish that a
woman ‘be a wife, let her be a meet help, a solace, not a nothing, not
an adversary, not a desertrice’ (CPW 2.605). The desire for marriage to
be a state of ‘unfained love and peace’ (CPW 2.254) means in effect that
the wife must not oppose her husband’s will. Milton argues that divorce
for incompatibility must be permitted (to the man) because of the possibility that he may find himself ‘if not with a body impenetrable, yet
often with a minde to all other due conversation inaccessible’, or with
a ‘mute and spiritles mate’ (CPW 2.250, 251). What is desired is ‘the
uniting of another compliable mind’ (CPW 2.327). At stake here is not
just the necessity of getting along, but the question of the wife possessing a separate and independent will. In response to the argument
that divorce was intended ‘to release afflicted wives’, Milton exclaims:
Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for
man, and not man for woman; and that a husband may be injured
as insufferably in mariage as a wife. What an injury is it after wedlock
not to be belov’d, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in
point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any parity of
wisdome, for that were somthing reasonable, but out of a female
pride. I suffer not saith S. Paul, the woman to usurp authority over the
man.
(CPW 2.324)
These problems are played out in Paradise Lost. If Milton’s Paradise
expresses the wishes deriving from the modern individual’s ‘shrunken’
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and distanced relation to the world, Eve is a central component of its
wish-fulfilment.24 The result is, however, that she is not only a compensation for but also a threat to this individuality. She is Adam’s
paramount pleasure and Achilles’ heel. The assertion of the sexual relation as a core element of individual and domestic virtue and pleasure
implies a presentation of Eve which is considerable more complex,
nuanced and sympathetic than its precursors. Eve is in significant
respects an equal, a companion for Adam with considerable powers
of reasoning and, while a beautiful, sexual being, is by no means the
hollow temptress whose presence in earlier accounts of the Fall renders
them so inconsistent.25 Thomas Corns asserts that ‘Adam’s courtship
involves neither reverence nor servitude nor frustration. It follows
a rather conservative pattern of a patriarchally arranged marriage in
which the bride is passed from her father (and master) to her husband
(and master).’26 This is true, although it is hard to see how either
servitude or frustration could find a place in Paradise without the
question of God’s competence being raised. But it is also significant
that emphasis is given to Eve’s choice of Adam. As Adam describes to
Raphael, she would ‘not unsought be won’ (PL 8.503), and although
she is won over quite easily, her first impulse is to turn away from what
seems at first the ‘less fair’ form of Adam (PL 4.478). Nonetheless, it is
true that Eve is equal only insofar as she is a member of the same species
as Adam. Within the species she is subordinate. ‘Among unequals what
society / Can sort . . . ?’ Adam asks God, but Adam and Eve are nonetheless ‘Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed’ (PL 8.383–4; 4.296).
Diane McColley is right to point out that to be subordinate is not to be
in a position of absolute inferiority, but to have one’s own particular
sphere of action. Nevertheless to be virtuous, for a woman, is to consent
freely to this subordination.27 Eve’s relation to God is mediated through
Adam: ‘He for God only, she for God in him: / His fair large front
and eye sublime declared / Absolute rule’ (PL 4.299–301).28 Sexuality is
safe so long as Eve subordinates her will to Adam’s. The centrality of
sexuality and the relatively high valuation of the female, combined
with a concern for the integrity of the masculine individual, is what
renders the central events of Paradise Lost so amenable to psychoanalytical analysis.29 It is no surprise that it was one of Freud’s favourite
books.30
Man is fit to rule the other creatures because he is ‘self-knowing’,
which renders him ‘Magnanimous to correspond with heaven’ (PL
7.510–11). The principal testimony to this faculty of self-knowledge is
to be found in the scene in which Adam asks God for a ‘human consort’
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 89
(PL 8.392). Here, as later in the company of Raphael and Michael, Adam
is brought ‘to pronounce concerning himself’ with regard to his sexual
identity, or his identity as a subject of sexuality, in the presence of a
figure of authority. In other words, several times in Paradise Lost there
is a staging of the Foucauldian scenario in which ‘The truthful confession [about sexuality] was inscribed at the heart of the procedures
of individualization by power.’31 God in the end makes it clear that
their conversation was an examination which has confirmed Adam’s
knowledge of himself:
Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased,
And find thee knowing not of beasts alone,
Which thou hast rightly named, but of thyself,
Expressing well the spirit within thee free,
My image, not imparted to the brute,
Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee
Good reason was thou freely should’st dislike,
And be so minded still. . . .
The Almighty is particularly pleased that Adam desires a ‘nice and subtle
happiness’, having asked for a mate ‘fit to participate / All rational
delight’ (PL 8.437–44, 8.399, 390–1). This contrast between fully human
but definitely sexual love and the carnal lust of the beasts was a staple
of Protestant theorization of marriage. For instance, Daniel Rogers writes
that
. . . by conjugall love . . . I meane not onely Christian love, a grace of
Gods spirit: (for marriage borders much what upon nature and flesh)
nor yet a carnall and sudden flash of affection, corruptly inflamed
by Concupiscence: (rather brutish than humane) but a sweete compounde of both religion and nature, the latter being as the materiall, the former as the formall cause thereof: properly called Marriage
love.32
As described earlier, marriage, for Milton, is ‘a human society, and . . .
all human society must proceed from the mind rather then the body,
els it would be but a kind of animal or beastish meeting . . . a brutish
congresse’ (CPW 2.275). Sex, then, is not merely a passing urge. Its
expression as a fully human relation which is indissolubly mental and
physical is central to Milton’s strong assertion of its legitimacy, clearest
in the paean to wedded love in Book 4:
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. . . into their inmost bow’r
Handed they went; and eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid, nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused;
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain
But our destroyer, foe to God and man?
Hail, wedded Love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else.
By thee adulterous lust was driv’n from men
Among the bestial herds to range; by thee
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother first were known.
Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced,
Present or past, as saints and patriarchs used.
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile
Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared,
Casual fruition; nor in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton masque, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
These lulled by nightingales, embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flow’ry roof
Show’red roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
(PL 4.738–75)
This is an ideal with social implications. In the divorce tracts it allowed
the condemnation of humans whose practices did not match up: ‘God
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 91
cares not for such cattle’ (CPW 2.251). Such an impulse is discernible
also in Freud. In the history of the family there have been, Freud says,
group relations of sexual love (i.e. group marriages)
. . . but the more important sexual love became for the ego, and the
more it developed the characteristics of being in love, the more
urgently it required to be limited to two people – una cum uno – as
is prescribed by the nature of the genital aim. Polygamous inclinations had to be content in a succession of changing objects.
Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction,
in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against
the herd instinct, the group feeling. The more they are in love, the
more completely they suffice for each other . . . It is only when the
tender, that is, the personal, factor of a love relation gives place
entirely to the sensual one, that it is possible for two people to have
sexual intercourse in the presence of others or for there to be simultaneous sexual acts in a group such as occurs at an orgy. . . .33
The significance of what Freud construes as ‘a demonstration against the
herd instinct’ (italics mine) is suggested by a letter from Freud to his
fiancée, Martha Bernays, about her visit to Wandsbeck Fair. Freud agrees
that the self-indulgence of the common people is ‘neither pleasant nor
edifying’, and adds that their own pleasures – ‘an hour’s chat nestling
close to one’s love’ or ‘the reading of a book’ – have removed from them
the possibility of participating.34
The importance of defining married love, and the individuals who
engage in it, against ‘commonality’ is clear from the emphasis on
privacy in the paean to marriage. The reference to the nakedness of the
first humans contrasts their innocence with the fallen need for ‘troublesome disguises’. And yet the fact that they are entering their ‘inmost
bow’r’ makes it clear that however pure the rites of love may be they
are to be conducted in the utmost privacy. Elias suggests that a crucial
index of what he calls the ‘civilizing process’ is the increasing importance of the bedroom, signifying that sex itself is ‘increasingly removed
behind the scenes of social life and enclosed in a particular enclave, the
nuclear family’. Sleep, too, from the sixteenth century ‘becoming slowly
more intimate and private, is separated from most other social relations’.35 One sign of this is the circumspect tone that the text adopts.
There is a marked shift away from the description of action in the mode
of direct reporting towards editorial opinion (‘I ween’).36 Marriage is, in
a sense, an anomaly in Paradise, the sole ‘propriety’ to be found there.
The female has, in effect, to be the property of the male in order that
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propriety can be observed, and also to guarantee the integrity of the
masculine self, its boundaries and its own, ‘proper’ sphere. This assertion of a property-relation occludes dependence and defines a sphere
into which no outsider may intrude without impropriety.
Freud associates singularity and unity, genitality and procreation,
solitude and privacy, and a love which is tender, personal and psychological, and sets these traits against the sensual preoccupations of the
herd. For Milton, similarly, opposition to a brutish commonality of the
sensuous body produces a subject whose individuality is guaranteed
by having its own, proper sphere involving male familial relations (‘all
the charities / Of father, son, and brother’) and the purposive end
of procreation. The threat to individuality is presented as a matter of
collective bestial lust. Indeed, this is emphasized to an extent which
seems to threaten the coherence of the text. To say that lust was ‘by
thee [marriage] / Founded in reason’ is to imply a conception of lust as
an originary chaos which subsequently must be ordered, suggesting a
chronology incompatible with the priority of Adam and Eve as the
first wedded pair but similar to that expressed in Freud’s narrative of
a progression from group to individualized sexual relations. It also
exposes some tensions in Milton’s conception of marriage. When he
writes ‘Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame’, Milton is proclaiming his opposition to the view of marriage which was dominant
within Catholicism, for which the purposes of marriage were children
and the channelling of sexual drives. Sexual love, a focus on sexual
union within marriage, was a sin, and the only licit intercourse was that
undertaken without the intention of taking pleasure, but for procreation
or for alleviating one’s spouse’s lust to prevent adultery.37 As Lawrence
Stone notes, Milton stands out even from other Puritans in giving ‘the
spiritual nature of the marital union . . . priority over all other considerations’.38 In Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton protests
against the fact that the Church seems ‘to place more of mariage in the
channell of concupiscence, then in the pure influence of peace and
love’ (CPW 2.249). There is a significant difference between merely
confining and channelling what remains something base, and the
qualitative transformation of sexuality Milton claims is effected by its
foundation in reason and marriage. But the praise of marriage in
Paradise Lost, in which it is opposed to the ranging of ‘bestial herds’
renders it imagistically if not theoretically a containing or channelling
vessel.
Ostensibly dominant in the presentation of the Bower is its assertion
as a place of unity and transparency where Love’s ‘golden shafts’ and
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 93
‘constant lamp’ penetrate and illuminate, eliminating opacity and
uniting the lovers as one. But such an emphasis is inseparable from a
sense of possible deception. In Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton
describes how Love will tend to ‘meet with many fals and faining
Desires’ and will be ‘often deceiv’d’, but on discovering this ‘has no
longer the power to hold fellowship with such a personated mate’ (CPW
2.255). Even in the Bower the problem of deception is quite close at
hand. The fact that Satan enters so soon after the paean should give us
pause. Of course, in dramatic terms, his dark designs establish a contrast which emphasises the extent of the Bower’s difference from such
perversion. But he reiterates certain themes which were given a degree
of prominence in the paean due to the need to distance Edenic marriage from them. Satan is trying to taint purity, and ‘thence raise / At
least distempered, discontented thoughts, / Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires / Blown up with high conceits engend’ring pride’ (PL
806–9). He is trying to foster a will unamenable to male control, opaque
to ‘reason’, and this attempted tainting is not only of Eve but also of
the marriage which, were Satan to be successful, would be invaded by
a foreign body. This vision of being falsely ‘blown up’, full of ‘inordinate desires’ recalls the ‘Mixed dance, or wanton masque, or midnight
ball’, if wantonness is associated with both wilfulness and desire. Confusion and illusion taint the purity of reason and wedded Love.39 ‘Pride’
recalls the ‘proud fair’, self-concerned and inaccessible to male exhortation (the ‘starved lover’ cannot get his way). This realm of desire,
illusion, female pride and independence is not only that against which
the nuptial bower is defined, but is the threat which is raised in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. There, Milton refers to the prospect of
being ‘contended with in point of house-rule . . . out of a female pride’
(CPW 2.324). Later, tweaking his sources a little, Milton gives examples
from scripture and exegetical traditions in which ‘fornication is tak’n
. . . for such a continual headstrong behaviour, as tends to plain
contempt of the husband’, or as evident in acting ‘obstinately against
the will’ of a husband in such matters as ‘wilfull haunting of feasts’ and
‘the frequenting of Theaters’. ‘Whoredom’ is defined as ‘stubbornnes
and rebellion’ against a husband. Marriage should consist not in the
‘counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfained love and peace’
(CPW 2.334–5, 254). The fact that such perversity can help define the
Bower by contrast is founded on the fact that it is, potentially, an alternative, threatening the private sphere in which the male individual can
have his affective needs met in a manner which is fully human and
which, further, does not threaten his integrity because it consists in a
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relation not with another individual, but with a dependant whose will
should be subsumed under his.
It is the absence of this subordination which links the idealized
Petrarchan worship of a woman with the other more carnal situations
which Milton summons up. Milton describes marriage as having driven
away ‘adulterous lust’. Whether ‘adultery’ is taken in the dominant
modern sense, or in the sense of taking inordinate physical pleasure
in the sexual union, it is clearly not to be driven away by any old
marriage, or by mere formal ties.40 The kind of marriage that would
preclude pleasure in the physical alone would be one in which the
partners were truly joined, body and soul. However, the kind of
individual who is capable of and needs such a marriage is prey to more
dangerous threats than lust, such as falling in love and becoming potentially or actually subordinate to the will of his object of desire. It is best
to quit a ‘proud fair’ with ‘disdain’, to divorce or detach oneself from
her rather than have one’s sense of self confused. According to Linda
Gregerson:
Domestic love in Paradise Lost is a construct designed to be the final,
demolishing argument against Petrarchan and courtly models of
desire. Milton assigns to conjugal love the full force of the erotic
absorption that Western poetry had reserved, since the late Middle
Ages, for extramarital and otherwise circumambient or thwarted
paths of longing.41
However, in taking on this force the marital relation becomes charged
with a similar potential. One may find oneself attached to a wilful wife
who wanders.
This danger is also, possibly, the key to the lack of positive action in
the Bower noted by David Aers and Bob Hodge.42 Cupid, who reigns in
the Bower, is also to be found in the epilogue to A Mask, holding ‘his
dear Psyche sweet entranced’ (A Mask 1005), a scene which William
Kerrigan describes as ‘an apotheosis of narcissism’.43 Mutual agency
might threaten the unity of the subject which, together, they constitute. When the narrator turns back from his apostrophe to love to the
figures in the Bower they are asleep. Not only are they in repose, not
acting, but their eyes are closed.44 The Bower scene effects the joining
necessary to a desiring being while avoiding most of its problematic
implications. Once the parties to the join are recognized as physically
separate problems may arise due to the way desire undermines the
boundaries of the self. But for the moment they are one.
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 95
Later, Adam discloses to Raphael the strength of his feelings for Eve.
In so doing he gives voice to some of the dangers which lurk within the
Bower. He is ‘transported’ by Eve, feels ‘passion’, a ‘Commotion strange’,
and further admits
. . . when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded, wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discount’nanced, and like folly shows;
Authority and reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed.
(PL 8.529–31, 547–60)
Part of the archangel’s response to this threat to Adam’s authority is a
rather Sartrean reminder to Adam of a scene unlike that which closes
our glimpse into the Bower, one in which Eve’s eyes are open and she
occupies the position of one ‘who sees when thou art seen least wise’
(PL 8.578).45 Adam is reminded of the potentially agonistic presence of
another will even within the unity and transparency of the Bower. As
a whole Raphael’s response seeks not only to remind Adam of his duties,
but to put Eve in her rightful place in Adam’s mind:
For what admir’st thou, what transports thee so,
An outside? Fair no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honoring, and thy love,
Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thy self;
Then value. Ofttimes nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed; of that skill the more thou know’st,
The more she will acknowledge thee her head,
And to realities yield all her shows:
Made so adorn for thy delight the more,
So awful, that with honor thou may’st love
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Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.
But if the sense of touch whereby mankind
Is propagated seem such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed
To cattle and each beast; which would not be
To them made common and divulged, if aught
Therein enjoyed were worthy to subdue
The soul of man, or passion in him move.
What higher in her society thou find’st
Attractive, human, rational, love still;
In loving thou dost well, in passion not,
Wherein true love consists not; love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heav’nly love thou may’st ascend,
Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause
Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.
(PL 8.567–94)
Adam must guard against the danger of ‘subjection’. But the terms in
which Raphael counsels vigilance miss the point. He defines the correct
feelings according to the same oppositions through which the Bower
was constituted as a proper space: to love is to be rational rather than
‘sunk in carnal pleasure’ of a kind which has been ‘vouchsafed / To cattle
and each beast’. But it is revealing that in the course of so doing he presents the position in the theological tradition which gave the narrowest possible reason for the existence of woman, that of procreation
(‘female for race’) – the ‘crabbed opinion’ for which Milton criticized
Augustine.46 Furthermore, Adam has been confessing not to a desire to
leap outside the limits of the Bower (figuratively speaking), but to a worrying attachment to what is within it, the strength of which is directly
related to the fact that it is not merely carnal, sexual or animal, but
stems from the same desire he expressed to God.47 Overall, the exchange
expresses both the strength of male need for the female and a need for
vigilance in the face of this need. But this vigilance is of a kind which,
it seems, is inexpressible in the same terms as the need. The result is
that, at the level of definitions, ideas or theory, Raphael’s answer is no
answer at all.
This disjunction testifies to an underlying difficulty ignored by most
writing on the exchange, which tends to attempt to understand it in
terms of distinct characters with different views on love, one of which
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 97
will prove to be correct. It is true that different positions are taken by
narrative elements which in various ways produce the effect of character, and that it is therefore useful to refer to what ‘Raphael’ says or how
‘Adam’ responded. But the way these different positions on love relate
to one another is best understood not in terms of personalities, but as
an expression of the problems the text has in trying to reconcile love
with male mastery. In attending to these problems, the following argument uses psychoanalytic concepts as a means not of diagnosing Adam’s
personality, but of rendering more explicit the tensions Milton’s discourse both raises and attempts to control. The continuing prevalence
of modes of reading which accept or use the notion of character as the
basic unit of explanation or interpretation is exemplified in Claudia
Champagne’s reading of sexual relations in Paradise Lost. According to
Champagne, who uses Lacanian terms of analysis, Adam is given ‘a
name that signifies his identity – “Adam, rise, / First Man” – and a function within human society – “of Men innumerable ordain’d / First
Father” ’. His ‘response to God is to subordinate himself: “In adoration
at his feet I fell / Submiss” ’, whereupon God imposes a ‘ “pledge of thy
Obedience and thy Faith” . . . Thus, Adam is placed directly into the
realm of law, obedience to authority, and language: Eden is Symbolic.’
However, since he has been ‘denied a mother as well as any other form
of visual human contact that could serve as a mother substitute or
mirror’, his need for such recognition is ‘all the more acute, and as a
result his dependency upon Eve will constitute an arresting of his development at the narcissistic mirror stage, or rather a paradoxical regression to a mirror stage he has been forced to bypass.’ Eve, however, is
‘not just a mirror but a complement’. Despite this, and although she
‘certainly possesses substantial being . . . the woman Adam sees is the
one he wants to see . . . She is not the real woman: she is his fantasy,
and this misrecognition (méconnaissance) will be the source of the essential dissatisfaction Eve feels in her marriage.’ Champagne’s point is that
‘Adam’s perception of Eve is, from Lacan’s perspective, a construct of
typically male narcissistic desire.’ Thus ‘Adam’s tragic mistake with Eve
is that he tries to make her be his fantasy, instead of allowing her to be
herself.’ Champagne quotes Adam’s report to Raphael of his exclamation upon first seeing Eve:
I now see
Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self
Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man
Extracted; for this cause he shall forgo
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Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere;
And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soul.
Champagne comments: ‘In the transporting ecstasy of love, in his
Imaginary fantasy of Eve, Adam transcends his primal lack. But he
deludes himself: “man cannot aim at being whole”, Lacan says, especially not by splitting himself into two’. In feeling that Eve seems ‘in
herself complete’ Adam has ‘foreshadowed to Raphael the very delusion
that will later cause him to disobey the law of God, for he indicates that
she has taken the place of the Other in his psyche – she has become his
God.’ He is being drawn from the Symbolic into the Imaginary, his delusion that ‘of the mirror stage: self and other are one’. However, he ‘consistently makes Eve feel singularly inferior’, by continually referring to
her as his ‘other half’ and as ‘part’ of him, in contradiction of his feeling
that she is self-sufficient. It is this that ‘fuels her desire to transcend
herself and leads to her disobedience’. Adam’s fall, which occurs despite
his having been reminded by Raphael of his ‘duty’ to obey, is the
product of ‘his unmistakable and exclusive self-interest. He never
considers Eve’s feelings.’ But after the fall, he learns ‘selflessness’ and
therefore ‘love itself’ from Eve, but also from Michael: ‘Adam once more
accedes to the Symbolic, freeing himself from narcissism, from impossible desire, from alienation . . . In other words, Adam has learned
to love.’48
This use of Lacan to further the ends of ‘character-criticism’, however
insightful as an analysis of Adam’s flaws, nonetheless misrepresents
crucial aspects of the dynamics at work in Paradise Lost. The Symbolic,
in Lacan, is not just a stage to which one attains after having passed
through the Imaginary but is a wider framework of social demands
within which Imaginary gratifications (such as the image of ourselves
it pleases us to have) are controlled and organized. To understand it as
a stage, and thus to imply that it represents the attainment of a sensible and well-adjusted adulthood beyond the childish illusions of the
Imaginary, rather than as an ‘order’ which coexists with, shapes, and
is shaped by Imaginary concerns, is a profoundly if inadvertently
ideological operation. Every Imaginary identification implies a Symbolic
identification, and, conversely, the Symbolic determines the Imaginary
form in which we appear likeable to ourselves.49 It is our fantastic answer
to what the Other wants (our interpellation and construction as subjects of a certain type, our conformity to the different images of ourselves which we are offered, allows us to evade the Real, the void and
the unsymbolizable trauma around which the subject forms).50 It is true
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost 99
that there is, in Lacanian terms, an Imaginary aspect to Adam’s relation
to Eve. But this does not exist in direct opposition to the Symbolic order
in the poem, but is in fact sanctioned by God. God promises to Adam
the very things which Champagne cites as evidence of his illusion: that
Eve will be his other self and his wish exactly to his heart’s desire. The
‘Voice Divine’ tells him that He ‘Knew it not good for man to be alone’
and promises him ‘Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish
exactly to thy heart’s desire’ (PL 8.445, 450–1). Furthermore Raphael’s
advice (what Champagne calls Adam’s ‘duty’), while it may well exist
in the Symbolic insofar as the archangel represents the demands of a
larger order, largely revolves around an Imaginary construction of the
self as a self-sufficient and unified ego (for Lacan, the ego is modelled
on the pleasingly unified and complete image of itself which the child
perceives in a mirror, and as such belongs to the Imaginary). From
Raphael’s point of view this ego should supposedly be able to master
the problematic aspects of love as though it were a passion or bodily
urge external to the self, and thus maintain masculine superiority.51 It
is difficult to look forward with as much optimism as Champagne to
Michael’s education in love which, for such an education, makes
remarkably little reference to love and is a lot more emphatic about the
need to avoid ‘effeminate slackness’ (PL 11.634).
David Aers and Bob Hodge, in contrast to Champagne, side with
Adam against Raphael, seeing his love as quite proper. They express the
belief that Adam’s speech ‘is certainly an account of his difficulties with
the orthodox sexist view’ of women, and contrast their position
with that of ‘Neo-Christian’ critics, so awed by authority that they
assume Raphael must be right (‘whenever Adam deviates from a coldly
pragmatic egoism, he is to be condemned’). For Aers and Hodge the
exchange goes more or less as follows. Adam is in love with Eve (as he
should be, having God’s sanction), although he tries to discredit the
reality of his experience with the use of the word ‘seems’. Raphael’s
rebuke of Adam for being attached to an ‘outside’ and ‘sunk in
carnal pleasure’ is ‘a profoundly ungenerous response to Adam’s celebration of Eve’s loveliness, which troubled him precisely because it
did not remain simple and external’. Adam is only ‘half abashed’
by this, and later implicitly corrects Raphael by his reference to ‘the
genial bed of marriage’.52 This reading does respond to something in the
text. Adam is not ‘sunk in carnal pleasure’ but is in a state of ‘awe’, as
Aers and Hodge point out, and Adam does affirm the wonder of wedded
love (PL 8.558). But the exchange between Adam and Raphael can
only be understood if Adam’s problems are read not as opposing from
100 Milton and Modernity
outside the ‘orthodox sexist view’, but as difficulties internal to the
reformulation of patriarchal discourse which Milton plays a part in
articulating. The merits or demerits of Eve are at issue in this exchange mainly because they impinge on Adam’s subjectivity, and any
problems he may have, such as finding her opinions on what to do
‘wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best’, serve precisely to legitimate a
sexist strategy.53
Closer to the dynamics of these lines is Bush’s note to the passage,
the conclusion of which, that ‘neither intellectual pride nor human love
should come between man and God – or man and his integrity’ is cited
by Aers and Hodge as an example of ‘Neo-Christian’ criticism:
Adam’s speech, which contains the seeds of catastrophe to come, is
made a subtle revelation of mixed feelings, both right and wrong,
which rises steadily to an impassioned climax. The uniquely disturbing force of love it is natural and right to feel, but an excess (even
though passion is blended with reverence) leads Adam to ask if God
left a flaw in him. . . .
However, this is still not completely right insofar as it suggests that
which of Adam’s feelings are ‘wrong’ and which ‘right’ can be clearly
determined. The pleasure Adam takes in other things, ‘such / As used
or not, works in the mind no change’, is an example of the detached
enjoyment of the things of the world (rather than asceticism) advocated
in Puritan discourse. Increase Mather told his readers that they might
use things, but cautioned that they ‘be not wedded to them, but so
weaned from them, that you may use them, as if you used them not’.54
Mather’s choice of terms suggests the distinctive position occupied by
the marital relation. Presumably one should be wedded to one’s wife
(although one was always to put duty to God before love for one’s
spouse). Thus Adam defines his feelings for Eve against those he has for
other things. This in itself is unsurprising. His need for something distinct from ‘these inferior far beneath me’ was the starting point of his
request to God for a mate (PL 8.382). It would seem perfectly proper –
in fact it would seem to be the point of creating her – that Eve should,
unlike everything else, work a ‘change’ in Adam’s mind (PL 8.525). Sure
enough, when he first saw Eve, he tells Raphael, ‘I overjoyed could not
forbear aloud’, an exclamation of wonder at the way the Creator had
‘fulfilled’ this promise which testifies, however innocently, to an overcoming of conscious control, and certainly suggests that he was not
‘Superior and unmoved’ (PL 490–1, 532).
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101
It is true that Raphael’s reaction seems rather reductive. But to accept
this is not necessarily to agree with Aers and Hodge that Adam’s part in
the exchange amounts to a defence of love in the face of coldly egotistical authority. In fact, the ego and the discourses which both construct
it and pander to its demands inform not only Raphael’s advice but
Adam’s confession, the form of his attachment to Eve, and thus Milton’s
narrative of the Fall and Paradise Lost as a whole. Raphael’s response is
not arbitrary but picks up on a strain in Adam’s speech. Adam associates touching with ‘passion’, a ‘commotion strange’ (that is to say, not
only odd but perhaps foreign to the self as Adam would like to construe
it). He sets it against being ‘Superior and unmoved’, the extreme opposite of being ‘weak’ (PL 8.530). Such a dichotomy has been argued to be
symptomatic of an aspiration to an identity defined in terms of total
autonomy and total integrity. As Jessica Benjamin says, idealization and
surrender on the one hand, and denigration and mastery on the other,
are both expressions of the relation to the feminine and dependence
implicit in the ideal of masculine autonomy or the independent ego.
The emphasis on separation from the mother and the feminine means
that woman comes to be perceived either as possessing all man lacks,
and is thus to be worshipped, or as lacking all he possesses, and is thus
to be despised: ‘either we differentiate or remain dependent; either we
stand alone or are weak; either we relinquish autonomy or renounce
the need for love. No doubt many individuals are flexible enough to
forge less extreme solutions, but the polarities tug mightily whenever
dependency is an issue.’55 Weakness was part of the rationale which
informed Adam’s request for a companion. As he says to God:
Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
Is no deficience found; not so is man,
But in degree, the cause of his desire
By conversation with his like to help
Or solace his defects.
(PL 8.415–19)
Here, however, the question concerns not the difference between the
human and the divine but between man and woman. Adam describes
himself as ‘weak / Against the charm of beauty’s powerful glance’ and
feels that he is ‘Not proof enough such object to sustain’ (PL 8.532–3,
535), evincing a desire for integrity which seems to be based on a
physical model – proof as in waterproof – but in the context of the
closeness of an ‘object’ (Eve) whose idealization (as something far
102 Milton and Modernity
greater than the other objects in the world around him) is both a function of his autonomy and intensely threatening to it: ‘In the oedipal
experience of losing inner continuity with women and encountering
instead the idealized, acutely desirable object outside, the image of
woman as the dangerous, regressive siren is born. The counterpart of
this image is the wholly idealized, masterful subject who can withstand
or conquer her.’56
From the point of view of the ego love can be unfortunate. Thus
Adam’s account of his feelings must be understood not as a simple
expression of love, but as a complaint in which his feelings are revealed
as ambivalent: that is to say, according to Laplanche and Pontalis’s psychoanalytic definition, they are marked by ‘The simultaneous existence
of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in the relationship to
a single object – especially the coexistence of love and hate.’57 The application of a concept which involves the notion of ‘hate’ might seem
rather extreme in this context, but it begins to explain the exchange if
we bear in mind Freud’s remark in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ that
‘the true prototypes of the relation of hate are derived not from sexual
life but from the ego’s struggle to preserve and maintain itself’. Or, as
Lacan puts it, the libidinal investment characteristic of the moment of
primary narcissism in which the ego is forged
. . . throws light on the dynamic opposition between this libido and
the sexual libido, which the first analysts tried to define when they
invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to explain
the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in any relation to
the other. . . .58
In ‘On Narcissism’, Freud maintains that object-cathexis (the investment of libido in an object other than the self) lowers self-regard as a
result of the dependency involved; that the sexual ideal may substitute
for the ego-ideal when an object-choice is narcissistic (when what is
chosen is perceived as possessing an excellence the ego lacks); and that
such an object-cathexis may leave the ego impoverished.59 Many have
termed Adam’s love narcissistic.60 He refers to Eve as his ‘other self’, and
when talking to Raphael she appears as the kind of ideal that possesses
what Adam lacks. Adam’s sense that she is ‘absolute’ and ‘in herself complete’ (PL 8.548), is an expression of precisely how he did not feel when
he asked God for a mate. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘in
dealing with the self-preservative instincts Freud singles out the activ-
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103
ity of assuring mastery over the object’.61 Adam’s speech expresses both
a sense that the object of his love possesses an excellence he lacks, and
concern, given the implications this has for his sense of mastery, that
this should be so. This is coupled with an assertion that she is ‘in
outward show / Elaborate, of inward less exact’ (PL 8.538–9). Raphael
responds to this in terms of a dichotomy between reason (true love is
reasonable, judicious, and keeps things in their proper place) and
passion (associated with the purely physical lust of cattle). The key to
the former is ‘self-esteem’, a diagnosis which fits very neatly with that
side of Freud which models the self in economic terms, for which love
is an expenditure of libido on an other rather than on the ego.62 By
these lights, what the object gains the ego loses, and conversely, what
is focused on the ego cannot be lavished elsewhere. Thus Raphael suggests an adjustment of the balance in favour of the ego, a cathexis of
the ‘self’, and reinforces this with his denigration of Eve and assertion
that Adam is overvaluing his object.63
But although Freud, like Raphael, sometimes referred to ‘sexual overestimation’ of the object, he did not reduce the relation to it to one of
mere lust.64 It is a matter of fixation on an object which seems to possess
what the ego lacks. This side of Freud’s text opens the way to other readings of the ego which suggest that Raphael’s advice depends on a
fantasy, that it panders to or is structured around an illusory and alienated construction, the ego (which really exists but is founded in an illusion). Raphael’s advice, like Adam’s complaint, displays the twinned
tendencies to narcissistic idealization and denigration of the object (a
dichotomy also present in Lacan’s discussion of the object of desire) outlined by Benjamin.65 He admits, of course, that Eve is ‘fair’, and worthy
of Adam’s ‘love’, but while to say ‘What higher in her society thou
find’st / Attractive, human, rational, love still’ may refer to the nature
of the relations between them (‘keep your behaviour fully human’), it
nevertheless creates by contrast an aspersion of subhumanity or bestiality which adheres to Eve ( it is ‘her society’, and she is in a sense the
cause of all this). He then cautions Adam against sinking ‘in carnal pleasure’. Not only is this not the problem, it cannot realistically be seen as
a problem which might lead to catastrophe. To say, as Adam does when
Eve returns, fallen, ‘Should God create another Eve, and I / Another rib
afford, yet loss of thee / Would never from my heart’ is not, however
inadvisable one might hold it to be, a sentiment that can be described
as typical of ‘cattle and each beast’ (PL 9.911–13, 582).
In fact, the dramatization and discussion of issues concerning sexuality in Paradise Lost reveals the traditional duality between reason and
104 Milton and Modernity
the passions as falsely comforting. It is a duality which is problematized
in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where love is described as a ‘uniting’,
and is also precisely that concerning which, unlike lust and the objects
of the other passions, one cannot be temperate: ‘The same [love] also is
that burning mention’d by St. Paul, whereof marriage ought to be the
remedy; the flesh hath other naturall and easie curbes which are in the
power of any temperate man.’ Later, Milton denies that a wife is no
more than ‘an accidentall companion of propagation’, and asserts that
she is intended ‘to remedy mans lonelines’ (CPW 2.251, 252–3, 309). In
other words, she is no random object for the ranging lust of the ‘plenteous body’, but a partner the desire for whom is ‘stronger then death’.
Of course, Milton presents this as a ‘rational burning’, but it is hardly
one which testfies to a calm and undisturbed self-identity, and, as was
elucidated earlier, it is by no means a disembodied and ethereal desire.
When rendered in Lacanian terms, this corresponds to an understanding of the ego as an Imaginary construction, a closure which is really
a limitation, or somehow a hole in the being of the subject, and of
desire as what dreams of overcoming this limitation.66 In terms of
the exchange between Adam and Raphael, it suggests that Raphael’s
dichotomy may be pandering to this illusory construction at the
expense either of textual coherence or of relevance to Adam’s predicament. Raphael’s response makes sense only in the limited ‘economic’
terms of the ego. It misses that side of Adam’s feelings which, although
he may be wrong in his emotional estimation of Eve as complete, results
from the fact that he is not complete either and that the ‘self’ Adam
should ‘esteem’ is not the whole story. Adam’s experience is a consequence of, and testifies to a desire for compensation for, what might figuratively be termed the psychic development costs of the ego. The body
can jollily spend or give away, but there is little trouble in reining it
in. It is merely a matter of temperance (or thrift). But the very soul
which can rein in lust is lacking and needy for something more which
exceeds these terms. This is not a passion which can be separated from
the real and essential self, but is a force which questions the boundaries
of the self insofar as it stems from a lack which demands completion:
the ego is not finished and masterful (though it may wish to be). Love
is less an expenditure than a swamping of this spurious closure,
although (to historicize Lacan as part of the psychoanalytic tradition)
the particular form this swamping takes is largely directed by the terms
on which individualization has taken place, that is to say, by the nature
of the social formation in relation to which the tenuous achievement
of identity takes place and whose dictates are represented by Lacan as
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105
the Symbolic order.67 Adam may wish he were ‘proof’ against Eve, but
his attachment to her reveals the ‘extimate’ thing, the something ‘in
me more than me’, that can’t be objectified.68 Adam exemplifies an
identity whose constitution produces a fundamental sense of lack, but
which nevertheless has immense problems with relatedness. Adam,
created as a desiring being, separate from something that is essential to
him, confesses to both God and Raphael the internal motion inevitable
in such a being. In doing so, he reveals his distance from the imperturbably self-sufficient and self-identical Adam presupposed in Augustine’s theory of prelapsarian sex. It may be that Adam’s explicitly carnal,
postlapsarian reaction to Eve is supposed to point up a distinction
between the involuntary goadings of lust and a prelapsarian situation
in which such urges were absent or at least fully under control, but in
this exchange the idea that the control of lust constitutes self-sufficiency
is revealed as a fantasy. To counsel against a surrender to the group
lust of the herd is beside the point. At stake is what Lacan calls the
hommelette.69
The tension between Raphael’s dichotomy of self-possessed reason
and bestial lust, and the fact of Eve’s difference from the rest of Creation cannot, it seems, be directly confronted in the text. The terms in
which Raphael construes the threat to Adam’s authority seem to be disavowed in Adam’s response:
To whom thus half abashed Adam replied.
Neither her outside formed so fair, nor aught
In procreation common to all kinds
(Though higher of the genial bed by far,
And with mysterious reverence I deem)
So much delights me as those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies that daily flow
From all her words and actions, mixed with love
And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned
Union of mind, or in us both one soul;
Harmony to behold in wedded pair
More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear.
Yet these subject not; I to thee disclose
What inward thence I feel, not therefore foiled,
Who meet with various objects, from the sense
Variously representing; yet still free,
Approve the best, and follow what I approve.
(PL 8.595–611)
106 Milton and Modernity
Aers and Hodge note that Adam is only ‘half abasht’ and argue that his
emphasis on the ‘mysterious reverence’ due the ‘genial bed’ contradicts
what they see as Raphael’s underestimation of sexual conjunction, but
they do not notice that Adam also partly contradicts himself. Not only
does he make a claim to an inner sufficiency his earlier complaint at
not being ‘proof’ seemed to suggest he was lacking (he stresses that his
judgement remains ‘free’, although earlier he claimed to feel that ‘what
she wills to do or say / Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best’), but
he now talks of her ‘sweet compliance’. In other words, Adam rejects
Raphael’s description of his experience, but removes the part of his
own complaint which made this a problem. In Marshall Grossman’s
Lacanian reading of the modern self, ‘The subject as ego installs itself
on the objectified other.’ However, the other (in this case Eve) is not an
object, but another subject, and tends to act. Thus, paraphrasing Adam’s
original description of his predicament, Grossman relates his problems
to the need or desire to ensure absolute female compliance:
The excess that is Eve, ‘more than enough’ because she discloses the
self by being another like the self, requires a reorganization of the
economy of man, and the need of a peer, a partaker in ‘Collateral
love’, ironically, installs a hierarchy. The price of the subjectification
of Adam is to be the subjection of Eve. In the economy of Milton’s
Eden, Eve is to be for Adam; she becomes excessive when she is for
herself.70
Adam now denies the danger that she may be ‘for herself’. His Imaginary relation to Eve was sanctioned by authority, but led, in fact, to a
disturbance in his Imaginary self-image. For Adam to recognize this, as
he does in bringing it to Raphael’s attention, is less overwhelmingly
Imaginary – though it contains Imaginary components – than seeking
to maintain this self-image either by denigrating Eve so that an Imaginary relation of mastery can be constituted (Adam is complete, Eve is
separate), or, as he does here, by claiming that Eve is not separate, that
she actually is no more than his other self.
This persistence of the Imaginary dichotomy of reason and passion
cannot be explained away by its attribution, as a trait, to particular characters. Throughout the poem, the deleterious effects of lust and appetite
are prominently displayed and associated with a need for male mastery.
Milton does his best to present Eve’s fall in terms of unregulated
appetite. It is built up to in a crescendo not only of reasoning, persuasion and, possibly, sexual seduction, but of sensual urging and gratifi-
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost
107
cation which traces a descent through the senses from the most elevated
in the Neo-Platonic schema, sight, through to smelling, touching and
tasting (hearing, which generally came second, is present in the form
of Satan’s persuasive discourse).71 First she gazes on the fruit, ‘which to
behold / Might tempt alone’. Soon, however, the different senses begin
to incite one another:
Meanwhile the hour of noon drew on, and waked
An eager appetite, raised by the smell
So savory of that fruit, which with desire,
Inclinable now grown to touch or taste,
Solicited her longing eye. . . .
(PL 9.735–6, 739–43)
That her desire is now ‘Inclinable’ implies a sloping off from the erect
ideal, and soon Eve, ‘Intent . . . wholly on her taste, naught else /
Regarded’ (PL 9.786–7). It is significant that the gratification of this
sense soon leads to ambition, a taste for power the uncontrolled nature
of which is suggested by the fact that her imagination immediately
begins to discard her initial goal, equality, in favour of a potential
mastery over Adam which would deny him freedom:
In female sex, the more to draw his love,
And render me more equal, and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superior; for inferior who is free?72
(PL 9.821–5)
After the Fall, Adam and Eve are fully equated in the way the roar of
sensuality drowns out the cries of the mind: ‘As with new wine intoxicated’, they ‘swim in mirth’ and soon ‘in lust they burn’ (PL 9.1004–5,
1015). However, despite these postlapsarian consequences, it seems that
the language of lust – or its counterpart, the rendering of women as
merely bodily – comes into play most readily in response to female vice,
or the possibility of a woman gaining the upper hand. The proud fair
is associated by proximity with wantonness, while the distance of the
Bower from bestial lust is measured by the harmony, or female acquiescence, to be found within. When Eve threatens Adam’s supremacy
(although at this point there has been no evidence of such a threat) she
is called hollow, an ‘outside’. Her fall is a consequence of pride, vanity
108 Milton and Modernity
and greed with an admixture of sexual seduction. Similarly, after the
Fall, the temptresses of Michael’s history are good not for love, but for
carnality and, in enticing the ‘Sons of God’ to ‘yield up all their virtue’
(PL 11.622–3), follow the lead of the fallen Eve’s approach to the as yet
unfallen Adam, working to reassimilate her to the temptress tradition
from which she was dissociated earlier.73 In the divorce tracts, female
wilfulness is associated with debauchery. The description of a husband’s
sexual relations with such a wife as ‘grinding in the servile mill of copulation’ (CPW 2.258), while it might refer to a self-incurred and inner
servility, nevertheless also has connotations of forced labour (especially
if it is taken as an allusion to Samson’s captivity, brought on not so
much by lust as by fondness).74 The sense of captivity and lack of agency
is still clearer in Milton’s description of a marriage ‘where no correspondence is of the minde’ as equivalent to the condition of ‘two
carkasses chain’d unnaturally together; or as it may happ’n, a living
soule bound to a dead corps’ (CPW 2.326). It is as though the language
of lust is important less as a description of the male subject’s motivation than as a means of denigrating the object it implies. Although it is
not specified in the passage just quoted, it is hard not to feel, given the
context, that it is the wilful female who is like a carcass.
However much it is presented in terms which highlight its egocentricity, Adam’s fall, by contrast with Eve’s, is clearly affiliated not with
the random rangings of boundless lust but with the lover’s need,
stronger than death, for a single object:
. . . with thee
Certain my resolution is to die;
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no! I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.75
(PL 9.906–16)
Fowler’s note to the passage remarks that in contrast with Adam’s earlier
declaration that they are ‘one flesh, one heart, one soul’, here Adam
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost
109
‘refers only to the bond of flesh and of heart, . . . not to that of soul’ (PL
8.499, 9.913). The pairing of soul and body of the divorce tracts would
seem to have been complicated by a further subdivision of that which
is not strictly or merely bodily into a faculty of earthly emotion, the
heart, and one which bears an overriding responsibility towards God.
Nevertheless, as Fowler recognizes, ‘By making Adam use the Dominical institution of the married state of one flesh to counter the prohibition, M. [Milton] has fined down the choice to the point of sublimity.’
As Leopold Damrosch, Jr. puts it, Adam’s fall tests ‘to the very limit, the
Puritan prejudice against “love of creatures” ’.76
After the Fall, Adam understands that questions of the relation
between two wills have been raised but, again partly echoing Raphael’s
terms, his solution is to obliterate, at least in wish, the other will,
blaming its existence for the woes of the human race. Eve comes to
occupy the same position in relation to Adam as the devil did in relation to her. She is a ‘serpent’ and a thing of ‘hellish falsehood’, characterized by ‘pride / And wand’ring vanity’, who ‘disdained / Not to be
trusted’ and whose loveliness, it is now revealed, ‘was but show / Rather
than solid virtue’ (PL 10.867, 873, 874–5, 876–7, 883–4). Adam comes
close to blaming God for his fall, lamenting His creation of ‘this fair
defect of nature’ and arguing that if had not been for Eve,
This mischief had not then befall’n,
And more that shall befall, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares,
And strait conjunction with this sex. For either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake,
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse, or if she love, withheld
By parents, or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame;
Which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and household peace confound.
(PL 10.891–2, 895–908)
Of course, Adam vilifies Eve in proportion to his desire to disclaim
responsibility for his own actions. But it doesn’t follow from this that
110 Milton and Modernity
what he says is (in the poem’s frame of reference) altogether fantastical. Whatever the inadequacies of his position as a character, Adam’s
speech is a repository of themes and motifs which lead out through
other loci in Paradise Lost to the rest of Milton’s poetry and prose and
the larger discursive context, in which they are embedded, of modern
masculinity and its affective relations. His outburst is a catalogue of the
pain caused by women and the hatred it produces, both of which are
functions of an aspiration to freedom, independence and separateness
for which attachment, unless it is to something fully under control, is
a threat. This need to control has the effect of a magnifying glass
through which the least lack of accord can appear dire and devilish. In
the distinction between lovely appearance and a hellish or at least inadequate inside there are resonances with the earlier exchange between
Adam and Raphael. Adam’s reference to ‘female snares’ is a recurrent
motif in Milton’s descriptions of the activity of women. Not only does
the word ‘snare’ appear twice in this outburst (see also 873), it is used
by Eve when she repents of having been a ‘snare’ for Adam (PL 11.165).
In Paradise Regained Belial employs the idea if not the word when he
suggests that they tempt and then trap the Son by setting ‘women in
his eye’ such as those who ‘beguiled the heart / Of wisest Solomon’,
women ‘Expert in amorous arts’ and ‘Skilled to retire, and in retiring
draw / Hearts after them tangled in amorous nets’ (PR 2.153, 169–70,
158, 161–2). The idea recurs during Michael’s re-education of Adam,
when ‘A bevy of fair women, richly gay / In gems and wanton dress’
attract men who
. . . though grave, eyed them, and let their eyes
Rove without rein, till in the amorous net
Fast caught, they liked, and each his liking chose . . .
The scene affects the freedom and separateness not only of the men
beneath but of its beholder, too, since the ensuing weddings ‘attached
the heart / Of Adam’ (PL 11.582–3, 585–7, 595). Perhaps the closest parallels are to be found in Samson Agonistes, in which Dalila’s ‘snares’ are
condemned (SA 409, 931).77 A further echo of Adam’s outburst, both in
the idea of unveiling a fraudulent woman and in the nature of what is
revealed, is the Chorus’s opinion that Dalila is ‘a manifest serpent by
her sting / Discovered in the end’. In this they echo Samson, whose
anger at himself is of a piece with his denigration of Dalila. The Chorus
goes on to reiterate the terms of Adam’s complaint to Raphael – the
excess of ‘outward ornament’ combined with a deficiency of ‘inward
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost
111
gifts’ – before taking them further. A woman, the Chorus opines, will
seem ‘Soft, modest, meek, demure’, but
Once joined, the contrary she proves, a thorn
Intestine, far within defensive arms
A cleaving mischief, in his way to virtue
Adverse and turbulent; or by her charms
Draws him awry enslaved
With dotage, and his sense depraved
To folly and shameful deeds which ruin ends.
(SA 997–8, 1025, 1026, 1036, 1025–43)
The Chorus is not necessarily reliable in all respects, but in this instance
its diagnosis seems to be confirmed by the action. Samson manages to
resist the blandishments of Dalila, but the very fury with which he does
so seems testament to how difficult it is to externalize her: it is difficult
to be proof against one who is ‘far within defensive arms’. The logic of
the story suggests that her denial, the agonistic assertion of the mastery
of the male ego over the effeminate desire to slacken, is achieved at the
cost of the extinction of the self.78 Husband and wife can neither be an
Imaginary one, nor can the husband easily make himself ‘one’ since the
wife is not a masterable object readily separable from the self. He can
only wrench himself away at the expense of much pain. The other is
within, not without, the desire to exteriorize it is Imaginary, and to
manage to expel it may mean death. The only real answer is for the one
who occupies the position of the other within to know her place. Thus
one lesson of Paradise Lost, and certainly what Eve learns, is the need
for female obedience. Adam’s bitter postlapsarian denunciations of Eve
are symptoms of his fallen condition, but this is far truer of his wishing
that women had not been created, which amounts to questioning God’s
providence, than of, for instance, his condemnation of Eve’s ‘strange /
Desire of wandering this unhappy morn’, a condemnation in which
many critics have implicitly joined in their discussions of the rights and
wrongs of the separation scene.79 Although she may have had a ‘good’
reason for going off, and even a ‘good’ reason for falling, in the sense
that it is not merely a piece of feminine imbecility, this possibly makes
her behaviour even more suspect from a male supremacist point of view.
It seems futile to deny that the upshot of the argument ‘demonstrates’
the dangers of separating two who are one, or of these two having
separate wills.80 Satan is able to use one to gain a hold over the other.
112 Milton and Modernity
Adam may be presented as wrong to blame Eve and not himself, but
the presentation of sexuality in Paradise Lost means that the poem ends
up blaming her a lot.81 Retrospectively, Adam’s condemnation of Eve
makes perfect sense. It is flawed only insofar as it reveals an urge to put
off the burden of masculinity.
Adam’s lesson – the need for male mastery – is the complementary
converse of Eve’s education in obedience. Perhaps the most important
theme in Michael’s exemplary history – as in Raphael’s advice to Adam
– is the need for a self-mastery represented by the regulation of appetite.
As Stevie Davies describes the effects of Michael’s efforts on Adam, ‘His
reason has been overhauled and taught the wholesome but unlovely
virtue of temperance.’82 After showing Adam the murder of Abel by Cain
Michael tells him that some
. . . by violent stroke shall die,
By fire, flood, famine; by intemperance more
In meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear, that thou may’st know
What misery th’inabstinence of Eve
Shall bring on men.
(PL 11.471–7)
Later Adam is told that ‘the earth shall bear / More than enough, that
temperance shall be tried’ (PL 11.804–5). Michael describes ‘inordinate
desires / And upstart passions’ (PL 12.87–8) as responsible for the downfall of free reason and man’s descent into tyranny. Temperance is among
the virtues Michael specifically recommends to Adam (PL 12.583).
Perhaps most significantly, the women who lead astray the ‘sons of God’
are described in terms of appetite: ‘Bred only and completed to the
taste / Of lustful appetance’ (PL 11.622, 618–19).
Yet it is acute of Stevie Davies to be alert to the unloveliness of temperance, since such a reaction is symptomatic of the disjunction
between the nature of Adam’s sin and the educative response to it. This
is a disjunction tacitly affirmed by the fact that Adam is not condemned
for lustfulness or intemperance. It is Eve’s guilt which is described, by
Michael, in terms of ‘inabstinence’ and ‘ungoverned appetite’ (PL
11.476, 516–17). Adam’s sin, however, although somehow associated
with lust and intemperance, especially with regard to its consequences,
is not described in these terms. It seems that he actually falls as a result
Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost
113
of something which merely has analogous effects – ‘effeminate slackness’, as Michael puts it (PL 11.634).83 The Son condemns Adam
for having followed Eve, for having resigned his ‘manhood, and the
place / Wherein God set thee above her’, and for having ‘hearkened
to the voice of [his] wife’ (PL 10.148–9, 198). In other words, the fear
which partially surfaced in earlier descriptions of his relation to Eve –
that he might succumb to the will of another – has been realized, and
is construed in gendered terms as the resignation of his ‘manhood’. The
Son’s rhetorical enquiry as to whether Eve was made ‘Superior, or but
equal’ to Adam summons up an inversion of the terms in which they
were first presented, ‘Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed’. Then,
Adam’s appearance declared ‘Absolute rule’ and his love was ‘superior’
(PL 10.147, 4.296, 301, 499). However, such denials of equality and
assertions of superiority might be taken to suggest not confidence but
a certain lack of it. If it goes without saying why should it be said? Such
assertions share a kinship with the desideratum, ‘We would that the
man when he loveth should remember his superiority.’84 The simple
injunction to mastery with which the Son confronts Adam testifies, in
its silence about Adam’s feelings, to the tensions inherent in an ideology which wants to combine love, filling the lack in the masculine
subject, with male mastery of both the self and the other. Adam might,
strictly speaking, be accused of intemperance, since for Augustine, at
least, temperance demanded that one’s love be rightly directed (Milton’s
definition of the term in Christian Doctrine contains no such formulation and considers it solely in terms of the regulation of appetite, CPW
6.724–5).85 But he is not so accused. Although Champagne argues that
Adam learns to love, the intended lesson is surely that, given the
dangers of loving, one should always be on one’s guard. This is a lesson
which is not spelt out in explicit statements, but is implicit in the
dramatization of the Fall, in the gap between on the one hand the
denigrated (and rehabilitated) object of love, who wanders abroad
before realizing that to be with Adam is to remain in Eden (PL
12.615–16), and on the other hand emotions in Adam which seem to
be presented as transcending this object.86
In other words, although some theoretical problems of Milton’s sexist
sexual ideology are thrown into relief by their dramatization in Paradise
Lost, this ideology is not thereby deprived of efficacy. Areopagitica
remarks that one sign of Adam’s reason and ‘freedom to choose, for
reason is but choosing’ was that God ‘set before him a provoking object,
ever almost in his eyes’ (CPW 2.527). Milton is referring to the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge, but Paradise Lost underlines the need for this
114 Milton and Modernity
dialectic to remain in play, even in relation to a unique object which
isn’t really an object at all. Slavoj Žižek believes that ideology is, in
essence, a simple, absolute, and unexplained injunction. Its real aim is
the attitude it demands, a consistency of ideological form. One must
keep walking as straight as one can. Such positive reasons as are proffered exist only to conceal this fact, that the necessary obverse of
Enlightenment reason is obedience, that the truth of Kant is de Sade.87
The imperative of male mastery fits the bill exactly. Like the injunction
against eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, conformity to the
law of male supremacy is a sign of the possession of reason, not something about which one can reason: it brooks no argument. This is
affirmed even where Milton’s rationalism seems to have attenuated to
the utmost the sexism of his sexual ideology. In Tetrachordon, he concedes that if a wife ‘exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and
he contentedly yeeld’, she may take charge, ‘for then a superior and
more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse wise,
whether male or female’ (CPW 2.589). But perhaps more significant
than the potentially egalitarian force of reason is the fact that, whatever the respective merits of the husband and wife, whoever is the better
reasoner, such an arrangement requires the agreement of the man. The
Miltonic subject freely reasons within a space bounded by an unconscious horizon, or rather constituted by an unconscious anxiety which
seizes on the gap between subjective experience and absolute injunction. By showing the cost of transgressing the law of male mastery,
although it is not absolutely clear in what the transgression consists or
when it takes place (in fact, perhaps, because of this), Paradise Lost works
towards enforcing the exclusion zone of Enlightenment.
4
Labour and Love:
the Individual and the Natural
World in Paradise Lost
Work was just as central as love and sexuality to Milton’s conception of
humanity. Thus, as Marshall Grossman has noted, from at least the time
of ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ Milton can be seen to invert traditional
anxieties about the taint of labour, seeking not to distinguish his
studies from the baseness of everyday work, but to legitimize them by
bringing them under this category.1 Milton is afraid of the charge
of idleness. Like Locke, he was committed to, and helped further, the
seventeenth-century re-evaluation of labour whereby it took on, as
Foucault puts it, ‘a certain force of moral enchantment’.2 The conjunction of a disciplined commitment to work and a sense of self-esteem
reveals itself in Paradise Lost in Adam’s reminder to Eve that while the
other animals are ‘unemployed’ and ‘unactive’, man has work to do,
‘which declares his dignity, / And the regard of heaven on all his ways’
(PL 4.617, 621, 619–20). Milton’s Paradise is not a place of pure hedonism, but differs from the earthy and unsublimated Cockaigne not only
in its bid to refine and elevate sensual pleasures but in seeking to make
duty a component of the pleasure principle. Adam and Eve live up to
their humanity not only by partaking of pleasures which are beyond
the animal, but also by taking pleasure in the performance of their
duties.3
The development of a ‘work ethic’ is often associated with changes
in conceptions of the universe and the natural world. In broad terms
the seventeenth century can be said to have witnessed an ‘epistemological revolution’ in which a shift took place in dominant
conceptions of the universe from the – broadly speaking, Aristotelian –
picture of a unified and hierarchical whole, or cosmos (an ordered
and finite everything), in which different types of substance naturally
occupied different places in their own different ways according to their
115
116 Milton and Modernity
own different natures; to a possibly infinite universe made up of objects
constituted by the interactions, understood in terms of mechanical
cause and effect, of a homogeneous single matter. A vision of the universe as a meaningful order was rejected and in its place there developed a view of a ‘disenchanted world . . . correlative to a self-defining
subject’. That is to say, there issued from this revolution on the one
hand a subject which was not defined in terms of its place in a larger
order that prescribed its proper purposes, but which was itself the
exclusive locus of categories such as purpose; and on the other hand
a world of contingent relations, devoid of inherent significance: a
world which had become ‘objectified’, no longer possessing any of the
characteristics of a subject.4
Such a vast shift will not be susceptible of a simple causal explanation, and there are a variety of different accounts. Hans Blumenberg
emphasises primarily the role of theology in clearing a space for a new
conception of human action in the world. In the wake of an increasing
perception of the incompatibility of the absolute power of God with
conceptions of an order recognizable by humanity and incarnating
Reason (since such an order would be a restriction on God’s omnipotence, suggesting that He could not have made things otherwise), the
task for the intellect was to find a way of apprehending and acting upon
the world which did not depend on God’s purposes. Raising theology
‘to its maximum pretension over against reason had the unintended
result of reducing theology’s role in explaining the world to a
minimum’, and so ‘The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of
the death of God, but as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus – and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead.’ This had
radical implications both for knowledge and for the conception of the
world to be known:
It was not a matter of indifference which of the possible worlds God
had in fact created; but since man could not hope to fathom this
decision, it had to be made a matter of indifference. The search for
a set of instruments for man that would be usable in any possible
world provides the criterion for the elementary exertions of the
modern age: the mathematizing and the materializing of nature . . . the
postulate of pure materiality was the ideal premise of an attitude to
the world that can be defined by the concept of technicity. According to that attitude, man can make what he wants of the world to
the extent that it can be reduced to the characteristics of a mere substrate underlying what man constructs.5
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
117
This shift in conceptions of the world was accompanied by changes in
ideas about humanity’s place in it, and about the value of different types
of activity in the light of this position. These changes are generally presented in terms of a transition from the representation of reason as
a faculty which enables man to recognize his place in the scheme of
things, to its apprehension as an ability to construct order out of materials which themselves exhibit no meaningful pattern. Significance is
imposed on a world which has been ethically neutralized.6 The emphasis is less on harmonious and even mystical cosmic interactions and
more, and more simply, on power. Implicit in such changes is a shift
from contemplation of a higher plan to action in the down-to-earthhere-and-now. Knowledge is figured less as a matter of correct vision
and more as a dynamic and effortful process: as work. Thus Descartes,
who is often taken as emblematic of this process, presented knowledge
in the image of a craft:
. . . it is possible to arrive at knowledge which is most useful in life
. . . instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a
practical philosophy can be found by which, knowing the power and
the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other
bodies which surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades
of our craftsmen, we might put them in the same way to all the uses
for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it
were, masters and possessors of nature.7
As Blumenberg recognizes, the theological and philosophical work
necessary for such a stance towards the world was not in itself sufficient
cause for its adoption. The fourteenth century ‘possessed to a large
extent the mathematical methods and instruments with whose help
the seventeenth century was to accomplish the awakening of science.’
However, it lacked the necessary ‘interpretation of the human spirit and
the legitimacy of its theoretical pretensions’ in seeking not knowledge
of the divine but ‘man’s mastery of his objects’.8 It is this new sense of
human responsibility for the state of the world on which Charles Taylor
places emphasis when he describes this attitude not as rushing in to fill
a vacuum left by theology, but instead as railing against the constraints
of a theological perspective on the natural world. An increasing sense
of the dynamic and constructive possibilities of human action on the
world rendered the notion of an order in which man had set purposes,
if not implausible, then certainly less imaginatively compelling. The
affinities between a disenchanted world and a work ethic do not mean
118 Milton and Modernity
that a high valuation of work is only compatible with such a universe.
A role can be found for such activity in a divinely ordered cosmos if its
ends are set by this order, if it is seen as one of the ways in which
humanity brings creation to completion. Nevertheless a stress on the
role of labour in completing cosmic order seems to Charles Taylor to
have paved the way for its subversion. It is difficult to separate labour
from the exertion and assertion of power in the creation of new orders.9
Thus Giordano Bruno, one of the key figures in Blumenberg’s account
of the transition from mediaeval to modern sttitudes toward the world,
rejoiced in the combination of ‘intellect and hands’ which enabled man
‘not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but
also to operate outside the laws of that nature, in order that by forming
or being able to form other natures, other paths, and other categories
with his intelligence – by means of that liberty . . . he would succeed in
preserving himself as god of the earth’.10
Milton’s world does not seem to be ‘disenchanted’, if this means a
world made up of the mechanical interactions of dead, spiritless
matter.11 Milton is a thoroughgoing materialist, rejecting forms of mind
/ body dualism which posit an essential distinction between the two
(though he believes very strongly that there are higher and lower functions within the body); but he opposed the exclusively mechanistic
materialist monism of Hobbes, who banished spirit from his universe.
For Milton matter was alive and animate, and the categories of ‘spirit’
and ‘matter’ were relative terms: ‘Spirit and matter become for Milton
two modes of the same substance: spirit is rarefied matter, and matter
is dense spirit.’12 According to Carolyn Merchant, ‘As a philosophy of
nature, vitalism in its monistic form was inherently anti-exploitative’
since it implied an ethic of the inherent worth of everything: nothing
was merely material, devoid of spirit. This cast of thought often produced a modified version of the medieval ‘great chain of being’, which
injected dynamism into this conception in the form of a ‘transmutation to higher forms, based on the acquisition of goodness and perfection’.13 Raphael articulates just such a vision in Paradise Lost. Creation
is made of
. . . one first matter all,
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spiritous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
119
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. . . .
(PL 5.472–9)
The similarities between this view of matter and that of the Cambridge
Platonists, who developed their ideas in conscious and sometimes indignant opposition to the mechanistic philosophies and lifeless view
of matter held by Descartes and Hobbes, and are credited by Ernst
Cassirer as precursors of Romanticism, reveals that judgements such as
that of Thomas Corns, that ‘Perhaps only Wordsworth among the major
English poets so fully understood the connectedness of things’ as Milton
did, are the result of intellectual underpinning as well as poetic feeling.14
Indeed, the terms in which Paradise Lost represents the contrast
between fallen and unfallen states implicates it in what might be called
the perennial critique of modernity, in which images of natural and
organic plenitude are either explicitly presented as that from which we
have fallen or are summoned up as ghostly negatives or inversions
of our philosophies of representation, our technological imperative,
our disciplinary regimes and our ‘artificialist’ theories of the state as
mechanical device of order. Heidegger’s essays on technology epitomize
this tendency.15 For Heidegger ‘the essence of technology is nothing
technological’ but consists, rather, in a certain relation to the world.
Techne is a mode of ‘challenging’ (Herausfordern) nature. For instance, in
contrast to the use of ‘the old windmill’, left to the wind’s blowing, ‘it
puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can
be extracted and stored as such’. In the age of the hydroelectric power
plant, ‘What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives
from out of the essence of the power station.’16 These examples are historically quite recent, but for Heidegger they are expressions of a more
fundamental operation which he sees as originating in the philosophy
of Descartes and consists in
. . . the projection within some realm of what is – in nature, for
example – of a fixed ground plan of natural events . . . the plan or
projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature
that is sought after, be nature: the self-contained system of motion
of units of mass related spatiotemporally . . . Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible
as such an event.
120 Milton and Modernity
For Heidegger, the result of this mathematizing and materializing of
the world is that ‘Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is
grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes
the relational center of that which is as such.’17 Among the consequences of this change is what might be called, after Walter Benjamin,
the loss of an auratic relation to both God and the world:
. . . where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a
cause-effect coherence, even God can, for representational thinking,
lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance.
In the light of causality, God can sink to the level of a cause, of
causa efficiens. He then becomes, even in theology, the god of the
philosophers. . . .18
As for human activity in the world, there occurs what Heidegger terms
Entgotterung, the ‘loss of the gods’, or ‘degodization’, as a result of
which mankind’s relation to the gods is changed into mere ‘religious
experience’.19
Just after his reference to the windmill Heidegger has this to say about
the modern relation to the world:
In contrast [to the relation to the world implicit in the windmill], a
tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The
earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral
deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in
order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order
meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does
not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places
the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its
increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come
under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon
[stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.
Although, according to Heidegger, the ‘age of the world picture’ is an
inevitable epoch in the coming to presence of Being, and man himself
is challenged into this challenging of nature to the extent that he can
describe the forester as ‘subordinate to the orderability of cellulose’,
the terminology he employs in describing this epoch is neither free of
reproach toward man nor without regret for what he believes has been
lost. The peasant is in tune with and at home in an order in which he
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
121
accepts his place. When passages such as this are combined with references to the ‘degodization’ of the world it is clear that Heidegger’s
reading of modernity refers back to a time of wholeness when man was
in a symbiotic relation with an order which met his needs, when all
experience was holy, and when to care for a field was in itself an act of
praise. Set against this is the arrogance of modern man, at ‘the very brink
of a precipitous fall’ while he ‘exalts himself to the posture of the lord
of the earth’, whose every gesture is inherently violent since his activity
is founded on a representation or rendering which is also a rending.20
Prelapsarian life in Paradise Lost evinces unity and wholeness, memorably evoked in scenes in which Adam and Eve look around them and
up at the stars above, completing creation with their praise, while
prominent among the tableaux presented to Adam after the Fall is that
in which the offspring of Cain, ‘inventors rare’, are ‘Unmindful of their
maker’ and his greater art (PL 11.610–11). Generally, ‘bad art’ and the
drive to subjective domination are associated with Satan in the form of
subordinating an objective order, in which he refuses to accept a place,
to a perverted individual will. Charles Taylor notes that an objective
moral order proved incompatible with the independence of a selfdetermining subject.21 Where a subjective theory of the good allows
one to make sense of one’s own life in a number of ways, the former
scheme limits the range of choice to the options of belonging or exile,
and it is significant that Satan cannot define himself except in God’s
terms. He is capable only of empty parody, as in his ‘throne of royal
state’, and inversion, as when he proclaims ‘Evil be thou my good’.
Thus God can announce the recuperation of his actions within a
larger providential scheme (PL 2.1, 4.110, 7.613–16, 10.629–40). This
ineluctable moral order is linked with a universe which is not a neutral
realm in which any ends one might choose may be pursued, but is a
harmonious whole from which Satan is excluded (an exclusion he
feels as an absence within). The privative notion of evil, derived from
Augustine, in which evil is not itself a substantial thing but is instead
an absence of substance (God), here takes on an almost physical force.
Consequently Satan and his followers are presented as destructive not
only in the pursuit of activities, such as mining, which are indifferent
to, and therefore disruptive of, their context, but in ways which are
irrational even in narrowly instrumental or utilitarian terms: only in
destroying do they find ease because otherwise what exists provokes a
sense of their emptiness.
Satan’s soliloquies are expressions of this self-exile. Their content
reveals an urge to destroy, while their very form testifies to his
122 Milton and Modernity
alienation from and lack of participation in his surroundings. In Paradise Lost, not only does soliloquy consist in voicing thoughts and feelings which cannot find expression in other contexts of speech, but it is
inseparable from a consciousness of self as an entity set over against an
object confronted as alien and external.22 And so the act of soliloquizing is often apprehended primarily as an experience of exclusion from
one’s surroundings. This exclusion, this burden of an interiority produced by consciousness of a radical difference between the self and what
is exterior, is one of Satan’s constant themes. The narrator describes
Satan as one who
. . . within him hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place. . . .
(PL 4.20–4)
The implications of this are brought out in Satan’s speech just before
he enters the serpent. Satan’s exclamation that earth is a ‘terrestrial
heaven’ (PL 9.103) is partly a response to its simple and immediate
physical beauty. But before he progresses to an appreciation of its particular attributes and their ‘sweet interchange’ (PL 9.115), he perceives
that what lies before and around him is a system of intimately and
essentially related parts: a cosmos, to use the word in its precise sense.23
The stars seem to focus ‘all their precious beams / Of sacred influence’
on the earth as part of a relation of mutual interdependence. The earth
depends on their light, while without the earth the stars’ ‘virtue’ would
not appear (PL 9.106–7, 109–11). Indeed, such words as ‘system’ and
‘parts’ may be misleading insofar as they have mechanistic connotations, since it is clear from this and other descriptions that the world is
an organic and animate whole.24
Haunting Satan’s perception is a recognition that he is ‘alienate’ from
this whole, a recognition that takes the form almost of physical sensation. His difference from his surroundings hardens into an absolute
distinction figured in terms of conflict:
. . . the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries. . . .
(PL 9.119–22)
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
123
Satan is at war with the world. It causes him pain and he fights back,
for ‘only in destroying’ does he ‘find ease’ to his ‘relentless thoughts’
(PL 9.129–30). He must assert himself against what surrounds him,
unwilling as he is to ‘Find place or refuge’ or anywhere to ‘dwell’
without first overturning the order of things to suit himself – ‘unless by
mastering heaven’s supreme’ (PL 9.119, 125). In this guise, he is
emblematic of the characterization of the seventeenth century as
witnessing a fall in which
. . . terms previously held in a more flexible relation to each other
became consolidated as binary oppositions. The product of this fall
is the individual, a unified and coherent being defined by and against
others . . . The subject overcomes duality and creates itself as a unified
being by knowing these others as separate objects that it can master
and possess.25
It is this tension which is responsible for much of Satan’s literary impact:
‘the intensity of the passage for the reader depends on the difference
between inner and outer’, and the consequence of this difference is that
‘Satan’s state of mind dominates and determines his relationship to the
landscape.’26
The appeal to abstract individual merit against any sense of a larger
scheme is typical of Satan. Such an appeal is in the nature of a being
which can find no ‘place’ or ‘dwelling’ within the given order. When
he arrives in Hell he stakes a claim to possession intrinsically linked to
a declaration of his independence from context: both involve what
might be called a subjectivization of value:
. . . Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free. . . .
(PL 1.249–59)
124 Milton and Modernity
When Satan proclaims that he and his fellow rebels ‘shall be free’ the
primary sense would seem to be political. But it is a word which applies
equally well to their relation to their environment. As Heidegger wrote
in a discussion of the technological relation to the world: ‘The essence
of the modern age can be seen in the fact that man frees himself from
the bonds of the Middle Ages in freeing himself to himself.’27 For Hans
Blumenberg, a ‘disappearance of order’ (Ordnungsschwund) was the
precondition for:
. . . a general conception of human activity that no longer perceives
in given states of affairs the binding character of the ancient and
medieval cosmos, and consequently holds them to be, in principle,
at man’s disposal. . . . In turn, the ‘disappearance of order’ is bound
up with a new concept of human freedom.
The question of human freedom first claimed a position of central
importance in Christian thought through the writings of Augustine,
who managed to reconcile monotheism with a sense of the evil of
this world (in other words, overcame his Manichean inheritance) by
stressing humanity’s free choice of sin in Eden, and thus human responsibility for this state of affairs. Now, however, freedom implies ‘responsibility for the condition of the world as a challenge relating to the
future, not as an original offence in the past’.28 Perhaps Satan reflects
the dark side of this process whereby original sin takes second place to
future possibility.
At this point it may appear that too much is being read into the text.
But just before Satan refers to being ‘free’ in an apparently political
sense, he asserts that ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can
make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ Satan’s words might be seen
as drawing on heresies which saw Heaven and Hell as states of mind, a
point made by Fowler. But his assertion of independence from or indifference to context would also seem to have Stoic resonances.29 However,
Satan and his cohorts do not remain indifferent to their context. To
‘make a heaven of hell’ is less a reference to attitude than a resolution
to act. Stoic indifference had depended on a basic trust in nature and
Pronoia (providence) which manifested itself in a reassurance about the
urgency of knowledge and rendered possible apatheia (nonsuffering, dispassion). For Bacon and Descartes, on the other hand, retreat into selfpossession was not an option because of their perception of nature as
ruthless and indifferent to man. Satan’s mind is not concerned merely
to create a state of affairs ‘in itself’. As they render Hell habitable then
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
125
set off to explore its extremities the devils resemble a cross between
Crusoe and Cortes. The combination of a claim to a detached interiority and a drive to transform one’s surroundings is similar to what
Blumenberg observes with regard to Descartes’ appropriation of a Stoical
ethics. The ideal of the Stoic man, withdrawn ‘from the accident and
uncertainty of worldly fate into the undisputedness of his disposition
over himself’ became an attractive ‘countermove against the unreasonable demands of theology’s contesting of freedom’. But in the hands of
Descartes this ideal was transformed. Whereas the Stoic secured ‘the
space of his undisputedness by not meddling with what is not open to
his power of disposition’, the Cartesian premise ‘is that man does not
meet the boundary between what is and what is not at his disposal as
a fixed determination, but rather that he begins to understand nature
also as something potentially masterable’. Now, ‘Knowledge makes
nature into man’s property.’ According to Blumenberg ‘The connection
between property and freedom persists also and particularly in this conception.’30 John Stachniewski has shown that Paradise Lost is very much
the work of a mind whose imaginative categories have been formed by
Calvinism: ‘Paradoxically Milton gives choice such awesome significance that it turns itself into a form of determinism. Satan shows how
the reprobate are trapped by their choice, handcuffed to their experiential destiny.’31 Trapped in his choice, Satan turns to what Blumenberg
calls the ‘countermove’ of a Stoicizing ethics. As in the Cartesian
schema, an assertion of possession and a drive to master and transform
his surroundings, associated with a mind and interiority heterogeneous
to these surroundings, is an integral part of this countermove. Or, as
Maggie Kilgour puts it, underlying the hope of scientific mastery over
nature is a dream of eliminating the outside, of bringing everything
‘inside’ and eliminating difference.32
The Cartesian schema presupposes what was described earlier as a
‘subjectivization of value’ insofar as it depends on one’s context having
no intrinsic ‘weight’ or significance, no purpose or value outside that
which it may be given by the self. The subject’s surroundings are confronted as material to be shaped and brought within a project the ends
of which are determined by the subject (the nihilism anatomized by
Nietzsche and the existential freedom declared by Sartre are implicit in
Descartes). Representation, the picturing of the world for the purpose
of control, presupposes the absence of an order of ends or of auratic
presences in nature (at best, such essences are beyond its purview).33
Final causes are disregraded.34 Thus we are told of Satan that ‘God
and his Son except, / Created thing nought valued he nor shunned’
126 Milton and Modernity
(PL 2.678–9). One reading would be that Satan only valued or shunned
God and the Son, presumably because of their great power which he
acknowledges elsewhere. This might suggest a Satanic perversion of the
nature of valuing such that its basis is sheer power rather than goodness. Implicit in such a reduction of value is Satan’s nihilism, to which
Fowler’s note calls attention: once God and His Son are except (past participle, OED A 3b: excluded) no basis for value remains. This gives added
significance to the devils’ activities in Hell. It is not only that they
find themselves in an inhospitable environment, a ‘universe of death’
(PL 2.622), but that, given their nature, they could find no environment
hospitable in the paradisal sense of a context that accords with one’s
nature and vice versa.
In Book 2 Mammon links the location of value in the purposes of the
self to a determination to assert himself against a hostile environment
and turn it to his ends. The devils should, he counsels, ‘seek / Our own
good from ourselves’ (PL 2.251–2), a desire which prefigures liberal
capitalism in its binding together of moral subjectivism and a commitment to the amelioration of their lot. He goes on to argue that
Our greatness will appear
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so’er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance.
(PL 2.257–62)
It is true that the devils find themselves in a context which is genuinely
bad, but an indifference to context and a subjectivization of value was
evident (rather oddly) in Mammon, at least, even before the fall. He
was:
. . . the least erected spirit that fell
From heaven, for even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
127
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. . . .
(PL 1.679–90)
Attitudes to mining are a crucial index of changing attitudes towards
the world. Pliny thought earthquakes and other tremors were Mother
Earth’s expressions of indignation at the way she was violated by it: ‘We
penetrate into her entrails, and seek for treasures.’ Man should not look
for what is concealed but accept what is openly provided. While mining
gold has led to avarice, extracting iron is the source of human cruelty
in the form of war, murder and robbery. Seneca asked ‘What necessity
caused man, whose head points to the stars, to stoop below, burying
him in mines?’35 There are proper and improper directions in which to
cast one’s gaze. The influence of these ancient accounts is very much
in evidence in Paradise Lost, both in the feeling that mining is a violation of a nurturing mother, and in Mammon’s choice to look down
rather than up, a choice which seems explicable only if the perversion
of his judgement is assumed as a given. However, while something
of the inexplicability characteristic of the merely given adheres to
Mammon, while to some extent he exists as the personification of an
abstract vice, his stance toward the world can also be understood as of
a piece with other activities of the devils.
After Satan has departed on his expedition to earth, each devil goes
‘where he may likeliest find / Truce to his restless thoughts’, and
indulges in activities familiar to those conversant with the content of
classical epic and the activities of the societies which produced the
genre. They engage in contests similar to the ‘Olympian games’. They
stage mock battles. They seek refuge from the pain of self-consciousness
in the realm of the aesthetic, composing epics which ‘suspended hell’,
and ‘complain that fate / Free virtue should enthral to force or chance’.
They philosophize along similar lines, trying to develop a place for their
consciousness of themselves, in a universe which to them has become
a realm of mere and grim necessity, by recourse to the Stoic virtue of
‘apathy’, of freedom from passion (PL 2.525–6, 530, 532–8, 554, 550–1,
555–69). Not all are so contemplative:
Others with vast Typhoean rage more fell
Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air
In whirlwind; hell scarce holds the wild uproar.
As when Alcides from Oechalia crowned
128 Milton and Modernity
With conquest, felt the envenomed robe, and tore
Through pain up by the roots Thessalian pines,
And Lichas from the top of Oeta threw
Into the Euboic sea. . . .
(PL 2.539–46)
The devils, unlike Hercules (Alcides), are trying to ease a pain that is due
not to an external cause but to something in the nature of their consciousness. Their destructiveness is not a physiological reflex. Instead,
the physical is reduced to the status of simile, an outward emblem of
an inner state which is alienated from its environment and as a result
driven to transform it and destroy it, a ‘technological’ consciousness in
whose operations the difference between transformation and destruction is not always clear.
This technological consciousness is evident almost from the first.
The invention of cannon and gunpowder associates the subjective
manipulation of words with the perverted use of things. Satan asks his
followers:
Which of us who beholds the bright surface
Of this ethereous mould whereon we stand,
This continent of spacious heaven, adorned
With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold,
Whose eye so superficially surveys
These things, as not to mind from whence they grow
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fiery spume, till touched
With heaven’s ray, and tempered they shoot forth
So beauteous, opening to the ambient light.
These in their dark nativity the deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,
Which into hollow engines long and round
Thick-rammed, at the other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate shall send forth
From far with thundering noise among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces, and o’erwhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmed
The thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
(PL 6.472–91)
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
129
According to Hans Blumenberg, ‘Part of the consciousness of the
Enlightenment is that for the first time it has become aware of the fact
that man lives “only on the surface of the earth”, and that this is
perhaps an indication that in general he exists on and orients himself
to what is only the surface of a hidden reality.’36 The imprint of this
new consciousness is visible in Satan’s reference to the impossibility of
viewing heaven so ‘superficially’ as to see only the surface beauty and
not its ‘dark nativity’. But this new consciousness is articulated within
a context formed by older theories of the nature of things. Two important motifs are at work in Satan’s speech. One, implicit in the reference
to the birth of what is seen on the surface (‘nativity’), and also suggested
by the description of these materials as ‘pregnant’ with fire, is that of
the earth as mother, found also in the description of Mammon’s later
mining operation. The earth was thought to give birth to stones and
metals through marriage with the sun. The other is that of the golden
tree, according to which the earth produces metals deep down, which
then rise as mist through the trunk and branches of a giant tree whose
roots are at the earth’s centre.37 Implicit in such explanations is a conception of the cosmos as an organic whole. If anything Milton’s picture
is more integrated still. The ‘dark and crude’ materials beneath give birth
not only to ‘gems and gold’ but to ‘plant, fruit, flower ambrosial’: ‘one
first matter all’, in Raphael’s phrase, which takes different forms at
different points of an interdependent chain as a plant leads up to the
‘bright consummate flower’ which ‘Spirits odorous breathes’. Satan’s
intervention interferes with the proper order of things, ‘shortcircuiting’
the chain. Before the matter of Heaven can reach the surface to be
‘tempered’ by the sun in due course, he rips it out, an explosive
abortion the result of which is an (apparent) inversion of the larger
order they inhabit. Satan imagines their opponents believing they have
‘disarmed / The thunderer of his only dreaded bolt’, imagining himself
as possessing the power that belongs to God.
This perversion of order by the subjective will is accompanied by a
similar perversion of language. Fowler notes Walter Savage Landor’s
remark to the effect that ‘the first overt crime of the refractory angels
was punning’, or as Raphael puts it, ‘scoffing in ambiguous words’ (PL
6.568), but this is not quite right. From the play on ‘fruit’ in the first
line of the poem through to the ambiguities in the words with which
it closes, taking in on the way Raphael’s suggestion in the conversation
currently under examination that future men may produce cannon
and other engines of war, ‘inspired / With devilish machination’, the
possibilities of language are also such as can produce truth, a calling of
130 Milton and Modernity
things by their right names (PL 6.503–4). Satan’s misuse of language
resides in his rhetorical stance and deliberate deceit, in a split between
actual and apparent meaning, and in an exultation ‘in his power to
wrest Heaven’s vocabulary to his own meanings’.38 For example, he
refers to the possibility that his opponents may ‘like / Our overture’, a
word which would apply equally well to a peace initiative or the bore
of a cannon. In Raphael’s account, on the other hand, the opening up
of the ‘hollow cube’ of the devils’ formation reveals the ‘hollowed
bodies’ of the trees emptied out of their substance to suit Satan’s plans,
and this portends ‘hollow truce’ (PL 6.561–2, 552, 574, 6.578). The connotations of hollowness sum up both the devils’ use of language and
their reliance on mere physical power emptied of spirit. As Stephen
Fallon notes, Ralph Cudworth accused Hobbes’s philosophy of ‘hollowness’, and here their position could certainly be described as similar
to that of the thinker who asserted ‘Force, and Fraud, are in warre the
two Cardinall vertues.’ (Lev. 63 / 188.)39 Satan consciously employs the
possibilities of language for his own ends, rather than following them
to lead his audience to an intimation of the truth. It is an instrument
of interest rather than a locus of knowledge.40 His use of a potentiality
internal to language emphasizes the way his subjective will perverts
things from their right use. As Milton dramatizes it this involves furthering a hidden intent by both expressing and concealing it. Raphael’s
punning, on the other hand, seems to imply that truth can be produced
through activity in language. Certainly we might say that for Raphael
language is a means to the truth rather than an instrument of subjective
desire. His puns do not – or do not exclusively – express his consciousness but are directed towards their object, or rather, are inseparable from
it. They bring forth the essence of the matter at hand.
This contrast can also be further developed in terms of the difference
between Satan’s reactions to the beauty around him, and those of Adam
and Eve. While Satan’s sense of exclusion, of an absolute distinction
between his self and what it confronts, provokes envious and evil plans,
Adam and Eve experience a universe with which they are at one, and
their speech, like Raphael’s, adds something to its object without distorting it, making it more itself. Satan’s first soliloquy in Book 4 is followed by a passage in which he surveys the wonder of Paradise,
significantly speechless. When ‘at length’ he has ‘failed speech recovered sad’, he plaintively soliloquizes again, feeling he could pity Adam
and Eve were it not for what the narrative voice calls ‘necessity, / The
tyrant’s plea’ (PL 4.357, 393–4). Satan can either give himself up to
beauty or he can express himself. An exchange between Adam and Eve
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131
follows, introduced by lines which emphasize the reciprocal and dialogic character of their existence: ‘when Adam first of men / To first of
women Eve thus moving speech, / Turned him all ear to hear new utterance flow.’ (PL 4.408–10) Throughout this exchange we are aware of
Satan’s presence, and after seeing them embrace he is spurred into a
renewed statement of destructive intent (PL 4.505–35). When next we
see them Adam and Eve are still talking. Eve asks why the stars continue to shine when ‘sleep hath shut all eyes’ (PL 4.658), and Adam’s
reply, while he hesitates to assert that stellar bodies exist solely for the
benefit of the human race, is nevertheless shot through with anthropocentricity. The stars are responsible for ‘Ministering light’ to ‘nations
yet unborn’, in the process preventing darkness from regaining ‘Her old
possession’ and extinguishing the life on an earth which the stars ‘Not
only enlighten’ but ‘nourish’ and make ‘apter to receive / Perfection
from the sun’s more potent ray’ (PL 4.663–4, 666, 668, 670, 672–3). To
minister light implies care. The stars’ heat is ‘kindly’ (PL 4.668), a pun
which emphasizes both the living unity of the universe and its care for
man: it is in their nature, a defining feature of their kind, to be kind
and heat the earth. Furthermore, Adam points out, not all eyes are shut:
. . . nor think, though men were none,
That heaven would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night: how often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other’s note
Singing their great creator. . . .
(PL 4.675–84)
It is significant that reflection on the nature of a cosmos which is full
of life leads to – is in fact superseded or, rather, subsumed by – praise,
first as a perceived activity of these spiritual creatures which keep the
world in a state of enchantment and song, and then on the part of Adam
and Eve. While Satan is struck dumb until he regains sufficient consciousness of himself to reflect on what is around him as it is refracted
through his experience, for the creatures to which Adam refers there is
an internal link between contemplation and praise. Their music and
132 Milton and Modernity
songs are a response to the harmony they behold and feel within. The
syntax of the last line quoted suggests something of this indistinguishability: the tune they sing to praise God is itself God. They are in
the state to which Merleau-Ponty aspired in trying to develop a conception of knowledge as something that happens in the world, as
opposed to the idea inherent in modern science that it is something
that is possessed of the world: ‘When man contacts Being it is not possible to say where Nature ends and expression begins.’41 Self-expression
is an expression of all-embracing harmony. Selfhood is not such that it
distorts perception. There is no tension between self and outside which
necessitates self-assertion. Conversely the self need not be lost or struck
dumb if beauty is to be experienced. Their situation is akin to that
evoked by Charles Taylor in his description of the ‘ontic logos’ lost to
modernity. In the epoch of the ontic logos, ideas and valuations are
located in the world, not just in subjects. Corresponding to this is, first,
a model of knowledge different from that implied by the philosophy of
representation. Taylor quotes Aristotle – ‘actual knowledge is identical
with its object’ – and elaborates: ‘Knowledge comes when the action
of the Forms in shaping the real coincides with its action in shaping
my intelligence (nous) . . . knowledge and valuation comes from our
connecting ourselves rightly to the significance things already have
ontically.’ Associated with this is a conception of praise whereby it
can be both in the objects of praise and in the act of praising
them. Taylor quotes from The Merchant of Venice: ‘How many things
by season season’d are / To their right praise and true perfection!’42
Adam and Eve’s evening prayer, which follows soon after, is similarly
spontaneous:
Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood
Both turned, and under open sky adored
The God that made both sky, air, earth and heaven
Which they beheld. . . .
(PL 4.720–3)
This is so much of their essence that they are ‘unanimous’ (PL 4.736)
in their praise, or of one mind, an impression which is reinforced if one
accepts, as Fowler does, that there is no comma between lines 720 and
721. Here, the two actions are unpunctuated. That is to say, there is no
hesitation or pause: in Milton’s terms they are the perfect couple, acting
in spontaneous unison, perfect harmony. No wonder ritual – ‘other rites’
(PL 4.736) – is needless.
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133
A similar pattern occurs in Book 9. Satan’s soliloquy, in which he
laments his inability to ‘joy in aught’, besieged as he is by his surroundings, is followed immediately by dawn in Paradise:
Now when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things that breathe,
From the earth’s great altar send up silent praise
To the creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair
And joined their vocal worship to the choir
Of creatures wanting voice. . . .
(PL 9.115, 192–9)
Adam and Eve’s vocal worship is as much a part of their being as
perfume is part of the flowers’, while the implication of the creatures
‘wanting’ voice is that the human couple is essential to creation.
They are so much part of it that without them its being and its praises
would be incomplete, in a manner analogous to Heidegger’s formulation of the relationship between dasein (the mode of being whose
essence takes the form of existence, and lives itself most typically in and
through the human) and Being. Being requires dasein to articulate
and interpret it: ‘In the naming, the things are called into their
thinging.’43 The idea of ‘wanting’ ascribes to the world not a mere state
of lack but a positive desire. The praise is as much a part of the world
as it is of Adam and Eve. It is expressive of the kind of relation of
mankind to the world one finds articulated in the work of those Renaissance Neoplatonists who sought to strike a balance between humanity
and nature through the motif of man as microcosm, whereby ‘As a
symbol, as an image of nature, man is as much related to nature as
he is distinct from it. He embraces nature within himself, without
being completely absorbed by it; he contains all its powers, and
also adds a specifically new one, the power of “consciousness”.’ This
was a framework which, Cassirer argues, at times seems to anticipate
Hegel’s attempt to reintegrate ‘consciousness’ and ‘nature’ through the
description of a process in which ‘substance’ becomes ‘subject’. If Hegel
sought to ‘re-enchant’ the world by providing enlightened critique on
behalf of ‘the liberating force of modern individualism’ with the ‘natural
telos’ and ‘natural context’ it seemed to need if anarchy were to be
avoided, Paradise Lost evokes a state before this apparent necessity
arose.44
134 Milton and Modernity
The fundamental contrast is between a natural unity and a perverse
solitude abstracted from context which, either speechless or sadistic, has
nothing to add. This is confirmed by the episode of Eve’s dream. Just as
Satan’s soliloquies are accompanied by signs of passion (PL 4.114, 9.98),
Adam finds Eve asleep ‘With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek, /
As through unquiet rest’ (PL 5.10–11). Once awake, she tells Adam that,
unusually, she has been away from him in her dreams (PL 5.30–4). A
stranger tempted her to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that she
might ‘Ascend to heaven’, supposedly hers ‘by merit’. She succumbed,
she tells Adam, and then flew, ‘wondering at my flight and change / To
this high exaltation’ (PL 5.80, 89–90). Eve has been taken from her
natural place, by the side of Adam, and then ‘exalted’ after a temptation
which appealed to an estimation of her worth based not on her place in
the scheme of things, but on a conception of a self abstracted from its
relation to the rest of creation. When she awakes, the trouble is cleared
by a resumption and reaffirmation of this relation. First she discusses her
experience with Adam, seeking his guidance, and then they jointly
praise the morning and God’s works which ‘declare’ His goodness. The
morning star sounds God’s praise in its ‘eternal course’: it praises merely
through keeping its place in the scheme of things (PL 5.158, 173).
The key to Adam and Eve’s position, in which they are ‘lords’ of
creation in a way which implies custodianship rather than domination
and exploitation, is a rather ‘feudal’ conception of life on earth. Adam
and Eve belong to what the Encyclopaedists called a more ‘princely’
order of creation.45 Adam recalls to Raphael the scene in which God bids
Adam and his race ‘as lords / Possess’ the earth and brings the animals
before him to receive ‘From thee their names, and pay thee fealty / With
low subjection’. As he named them, says Adam, he ‘understood / Their
nature, with such knowledge God endued / My sudden apprehension’
(PL 8.339–40, 343–5, 352–4). The notion of Adamic naming was important to Walter Benjamin’s critique of modern instrumental rationality.
Heavily influenced by kabbalistic doctrine, he tended to see truth as
divine in origin and therefore objected to the subjective constitution of
truth he found in Kant and which was foreshadowed in Descartes. Like
Adorno, who had less of a tendency to formulate his thoughts in terms
of negative theology, or was less explicit about it, Benjamin saw in this
the seeds of the modern preponderance of subject over object (that is,
of humanity over the world). Against this Enlightenment idea of knowledge, Benjamin employed the regulative concept of a pure, nondominative language. Thus, in ‘On Language as Such’, he asserts that
man as knower has the task of completing creation by translating the
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
135
mute language of things into that of names, a pure language that knows
no separation between word and thing and so has no need of ‘knowledge’ to bridge the gap between subject and object. The task of philosophy should be to assist the world to language, rather than behaving,
as it has, as a master.46 In Paradise Lost this harmony is of a piece with
human power. Adam’s position as lord of creation is confirmed by his
ability to name each one of the creatures. Nevertheless Adam has a
feudal superior: he ‘dwells not in his own’ (PL 8.103). His is a power
which stems not from self-assertion against nature, but from acceptance
of a God-given position within it. Although the world looks after him
it is not his property in an absolute sense: it is anthropocentric rather
than anthropossessed.
Unlike Satan, who confronts a world to which he is heterogeneous
and which he must penetrate and transform, Adam and Eve are at one
with an environment that is thoroughly hospitable and organized
around their needs. Much like praise, work in Eden is for the most part
an activity of self-fulfilment in keeping with and completing the rest of
creation. In a vision of labour more or less seamlessly integrated with
the rest of life in a manner Marx could not fault, we are told that Adam
and Eve did
. . . no more toil
Of their sweet gardening labour than sufficed
To recommend cool zephyr, and made ease
More easy.
(PL 4.327–30)
Labour actually makes their life more pleasant than it would otherwise
be, and there is no need to do more of it than conduces to this end.47
What makes this possible is the thoroughly anthropocentric nature of
their surroundings. While ‘About them frisking played / All the beasts
of the earth’, as if for their amusement, ‘compliant boughs’ offer up
‘nectarine fruits’ (PL 4.340–1, 332–3). Early in Book 5 Adam wakes Eve:
‘the fresh field / Calls us, we lose the prime’, but what they are losing
is not so much time in which to get things done as the chance to go
for a ramble and
. . . mark how spring
Our tended plants, how blows the citron grove,
How nature paints her colours, how the bee
Sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet.
136 Milton and Modernity
This is close to the activity of praise as it is presented in Paradise Lost –
a marking of the parts of creation. Sure enough, ‘soon prompt eloquence
/ Flowed from their lips’ in the form of a prayer organized around a
naming of these parts ‘Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise’,
as Adam and Eve put it in unison (PL 5.20–1, 21–5, 149–50, 204).
After this prayer, their work is described in terms which suggest it is an
activity in essence continuous with that which preceded it:
On to their morning’s rural work they haste
Among sweet dews and flowers; where any row
Of fruit trees over-woody reached too far
Their pampered boughs, and needed hands to check
Fruitless embraces: or they led the vine
To wed her elm; she spoused about him twines
Her marriageable arms, and with her brings
Her dower the adopted clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves.
(PL 5.211–19)
The well-known figure (especially common in the seventeenth century)
of man imposing order on an essentially unruly nature is not at work
here.48 To be sure, Adam and Eve are needed to supervise the processes
of nature, but discipline is an instrument of harmony rather than a
means to subjugation. As J. B. Broadbent remarks with reference to this
passage, ‘Adam and Eve do not exploit nature but literally educate her.’49
Discipline, according to Milton in Reason, is ‘the very visible shape and
image of vertue’, and consists partly in things keeping their places even
where ‘no disorder is fear’d’, as among the angels – those who did not
fall with Satan, at least (CPW 1.751–2). Discipline does not imply disorder. The role of labour in Eden is to perfect discipline, that is to say,
it is to encourage things into their true and fertile nature by gently
separating them or bringing them together. Adam and Eve’s task, much
like that of Heidegger’s peasant, is one of completion, guiding and
releasing the processes of nature, setting it in order rather than setting
upon it, allowing it to burgeon into full perfection.50 It is another way
of bringing to creation the last thing it lacks, as in praise they bring it
to vocal language. Taken as a whole, however, Milton’s conception of
creation is rather more dynamic and open-ended than this might
suggest. The universe in Paradise Lost is clearly marked by ideas which,
finding their fullest elaboration in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, had
put paid to the Aristotelian cosmos of mediaeval physics, a physics
summarized by Cassirer as one which
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137
. . . orders the element of the heavens and the four elements of the
earth in a spatial relationship that also implies a gradation of values.
The higher an element stands in the cosmic stepladder, the closer
it is to the unmoved mover of the world, and the purer and more
complete is its nature.
The Cusan rejects any such notion of proximity between the sensible
and the supersensible, and the infinite distance between these two categories annihilates all notion of relative distance. There is thus no difference of value between the sublunar and the celestial. He points out
that from the sun, the earth would seem a shining star. And because
God is both centre and infinite circumference of the universe (since his
essence includes all others), there is no absolute above or below in the
new cosmology. The universe is
. . . dissolved into an infinite multiplicity of infinitely different movements, each circling around its own centre, and all held together
both by their relationship to a common cause and by their participation in one and the same universal order.51
Despite Raphael’s evocation of a relation between the parts of creation
and God in which they are ‘nearer to him placed or nearer tending’ (PL
5.476), there are many similarities between this universe and possibilities evoked in Paradise Lost, as might be expected in a poem in which
can be found one of the first uses of ‘space’ in ‘its all-encompassing,
astronomical sense’.52 There is Satan’s voyage ‘Amongst innumerable
stars, that shone / Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds’, a
voyage of whose course it is ‘hard to tell’ whether it is ‘up or down’ (PL
3.565–6, 574–5). Raphael mentions not only the possibility of a plurality of worlds (an idea which did not originate with the Cusan but was
drawn by him from Epicurus), but also the idea that the appearance of
the universe depended on the point from which you were looking at it,
so that the earth itself might appear a star (implying the possibility of
a multiplicity of perspectives on a universe not hierarchically ordered
but consisting of myriad points all in direct relation to God): Raphael
refers to how things may ‘seem / To thee who hast thy dwelling
here on earth’, and says the earth may be ‘as a star’ when seen from
elsewhere (PL 8.118, 142). In fact, as Malabika Sarkar points out, ‘The
whole universe which contains mankind, the earth, the sun, moon,
planets and stars is, from one point of view, no bigger than a star in the
night sky.’53 Such possibilities not only give an almost ‘science fiction’
sense of the sheer vastness of the universe, but are of a piece with a
138 Milton and Modernity
more general rejection in the poem of the Aristotelian assumption of
an intrinsic relation between physical location and being or identity.
The Aristotelian doctrine that the rise or fall of objects is a matter of
their seeking their natural place of rest or home is invoked only by
Moloc to argue ‘That in our proper motion we ascend / Up to our native
seat: descent and fall / To us is adverse’ (PL 2.75–7). Of course, there is
irony in his recourse to this doctrine: if the laws of nature did operate
in such a way, the fallen nature of the devils would ensure that they
would be stuck right where they are.54 But Raphael’s journey to earth
(‘Down thither prone in flight / He speeds’, PL 5.266–7) and Satan’s
sudden plunge, ‘Fluttering his pennons vain’ when he meets ‘A vast
vacuity’ in Chaos (PL 2.932–3), show that in Paradise Lost place and
motion, while their effects may be used poetically to emphasize a moral
point (Hell is, after all, beneath Heaven, and the devils do undergo a
literal fall), are not moral phenomena. That is to say, they are not moral
qua phenomena or natural facts. The possibility of such a perpetual fall
is entirely incompatible with Aristotelian physics and conceptions of
the cosmos.55 Furthermore, one set of natural laws operate throughout
creation without regard to the distinction between sublunar and superlunar regions.56 This is not to say that Svendsen is wrong to assert that
there is in Milton’s work in general, and in Paradise Lost in particular, a
unity between physical and moral being that is alien to the assumptions of modern science.57 But this interrelation is dynamic and changeable (although there are limits to this after the Fall). Moral virtue is
associated with an ever-increasing refinement of matter, as Raphael tells
Adam and Eve, and there may be places to which beings of a certain
type physically cannot gain access, as is implicit in his promise that if
they remain virtuous their bodies may be ‘Improved by tract of time’
such that they can ‘winged ascend ethereal’ and dwell in heaven or on
earth ‘at choice’ (PL 5.498–500). But virtue itself is irrespective of place.
Raphael is able happily to share their food ‘with keen despatch / Of
real hunger’ (PL 5.436–7), and later assures Adam, with regard to the
stars above, that ‘great or bright infers not excellence’. The earth ‘may
of solid good contain / More plenty than the sun that barren shines’
(PL 8.90–4).
In other words, central elements of mediaeval cosmology appear to
be in question. Nonetheless, in Paradise Lost the prelapsarian world
is a circular cosmos, ordered according to the purposes of a higher
being: ‘As we move in from the outer reaches of Milton’s universe to its
centre, we enter the familiar Christianized, anthropocentric world of
Aristotelian science, with the stars and their respective spheres moving
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139
in circles round the earth, which stands ready at the centre receiving
their influences.’58 Thus, after his voyage through Chaos Satan alights
upon
. . . the firm opacous globe
Of this round world, whose first convex divides
The luminous inferior orbs, enclosed
From Chaos and the inroad of darkness old.
(PL 3.418–22)
Beneath the steps ascending to Heaven is ‘A passage down to earth’ (PL
3.528), and peering through this, Satan spies ‘The golden sun in splendour likest heaven’ which ‘Aloof the vulgar constellations thick, / That
from his lordly eye keep distance due, / Dispenses light from far’ (PL
572, 577–9). The world is represented as an integrated and even hierarchical whole which, given the highway down to it, seems to be organized around the earth, and above all man; while nonetheless finding
a lordly place for the sun which implies a kind of centrality for it, too.
The world in Paradise Lost sits in an infinite universe, much of which is
Chaos, the antithesis of such integration.59 It is, however, insulated from
the concern with infinity which helped to destroy notions of a cosmic
order (which had to be finite, since the notion of hierarchy requires that
one can apprehend a definite relation between all the elements in question, a necessity which motivates Aristotle’s denial of the existence of
space beyond the universe).60 If, as Marjara argues, ‘Milton, as a Christian humanist, attempted to reconcile God’s omnipotence with the
Aristotelian concept of the autonomy of nature as best he could’, the
most striking way in which this effort at reconciliation is evident is in
his portrayal of a vibrant nature with autonomous laws of its own which
nevertheless has to be kept in place continually, sheltered and sustained
by the will of God.61 A full-blown Aristotelian like Hooker had been
unable, as Michael Walzer points out, to find a convincing place either
for chaos or even for Satan in a world conceived as a manifestation of
God’s Reason.62 Conversely, according to John Morgan, ‘For Puritans,
the earth did not prove a firmament, but rather a perilous island which
could stand strong against the ravaging storms of spiritual desolation
only as it was protected by a meaning which stood outside time and
space, and was the only unchanging Essence.’63 Paradise Lost finds a
place, before the Fall at least, for both order and chaos. The world is
both a firmament and a potentially perilous and imperilled island
kept in place by God’s power which itself is in man’s power, through
140 Milton and Modernity
obedience, to keep in operation. If the notion of the world as a cosmos
was under threat on one side from the incomprehensibility of God’s
power, and on the other side from the exercise of man’s, Paradise Lost
seeks to present both as intrinsic to its preservation.64
This more dynamic and precarious perspective finds its way into
Milton’s presentation of prelapsarian labour. Prelapsarian nature is not
perfect in the sense that there is nothing to be done. Adam and Eve are
responsible for the world in a way which goes beyond mere custodianship, if by this is meant no more than preservation of the status quo.
The garden must be kept in order by Adam and Eve just as Creation as
a whole must be kept in place by God. Furthermore, their responsibility is oriented toward the future in the sense that it allows for change
in the form of the progressive taming of Eden. In fact, they are free to
order the garden such that it is appropriate to their needs. As Adam says
to Eve:
These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us.
(PL 9.244–7)
How wide they will need to walk later is an open question. Theirs is a
labour not just of preservation but of culture and civilization. Peter Lindenbaum has argued that ‘Milton’s personal contribution’ on the question of work in the garden ‘is his emphasis not so much on the mere
fact of Adam and Eve’s labor as upon the extensive need for it’. Whereas
certain passages, such as that discussed earlier, in which they toil no
more ‘than sufficed / To recommend cool Zephyr, and made ease / More
easy’ are ‘in full accord with the comments of the medieval and Renaissance exegetes who (like Augustine) distinguished sharply between our
labor since the fall and that “pleasant exercise” assigned to Adam and
Eve in Eden’, others present nature as unruly and perhaps even a
threat.65 This is reflected in critical recognition that Milton’s picture of
Paradise seems to combine elements of both pastoral and georgic
modes.66 Such a responsibility necessitates a working through of the
relation between the commitment to principle (and consequent subordination – or change – of that which does not conform to the principle) on the one hand, and on the other the harmony with what exists
and an adjustment to its norms which in the post-Weberian tradition
functions as the other of the Protestant ethic.67
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141
However, while considerable effort is made in Paradise Lost to present
prelapsarian labour as continuous with the activity of praise, there also
exists in the poem a conception of labour as having to oppose certain
inherent tendencies in the natural world. Even if Joseph E. Duncan is
going a bit too far in describing Adam as in need of ‘a chain saw more
than a plow’, this is a point of some tension in the bid to reconcile
human action and oneness with nature. It is a tension which is registered in such assertions as that of J. B. Broadbent for whom ‘Adam and
Eve’s sweet gardening labour seems absurd’ and ‘an anachronism . . .
because neither the garden nor the microcosm and macrocosm it represents should need pruning and weeding in innocence’.68 Adding to
this tension is the fact that Milton appears to take certain attitudes to
labour head-on. Some of what goes on in Milton’s Eden was the kind
of activity which had been condemned, in representations of rural life,
as wantonly destructive. While some were able to distinguish innocent
ploughing from real malice, others were, as James Turner puts it, ‘less
rational’. Tools were often seen merely as weapons of death, and Joseph
Beaumont saw ploughing not as the initiation of growth but as a
wanton destruction of it, associated with storms and the breaking of
buds. Turner notes the presence of non-violent labour such as cheesemaking but the absence of activities which might be apprehended as
violent, such as ‘pruning’, from Jonson’s Penshurst.69 If Turner is correct
in his belief that this stemmed from an ‘aristocratic’ refusal to engage
with and inability to comprehend the realities of the countryside and
rural labour, then such parts of Paradise Lost constitute a critique of
unreal aristocratic pastoral through the language of the georgic mode.
The different stance towards nature is signalled by a preoccupation
with time, which appears in two forms in Eden. There is the natural
cycle of day and night implicit in Adam’s description of how ‘the fresh
field / Calls us, we lose the prime’. The other is far less ‘natural’, and
appears, alongside the former, in this speech by Adam:
. . . Fair consort, the hour
Of night, and all things now retired to rest
Mind us of like repose, since God hath set
Labour and rest, as day and night to men
Successive, and the timely dew of sleep
Now falling with soft slumbrous weight inclines
Our eyelids; other creatures all day long
Rove idle unemployed, and less need rest;
Man hath his daily work of body or mind
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Appointed, which declares his dignity,
And the regard of heaven on all his ways;
While other animals unactive range,
And of their doings God takes no account.
To morrow ere fresh morning streak the east
With first approach of light, we must be risen,
And at our pleasant labour, to reform
Yon flowery arbours, yonder alleys green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands than ours to lop the wanton growth:
Those blossoms also, and those dropping gums
That lie bestrewn unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease;
Meanwhile, as nature wills, night bids us rest.
(PL 4.610–33)
There exists in this passage a wholly natural form of time with which
Adam and Eve are in tune. The onset of night is accompanied by ‘the
timely dew of sleep’. But that they must be up before morning comes
suggests an inner discipline not synchronized with the alternation of
day and night: if night bids rest, why should not morning similarly bid
labour?70 Perhaps something of Milton’s own habits has crept in here.
Whether or not this is so, a ‘daily work of body or mind’ is certainly
more applicable to the seventeenth century, when people such as
Milton were intellectual labourers, than it is to Paradise, where the only
work seems to be gardening and the preparation of meals, and such
mental operations as cosmological speculation are explicitly represented
as leisure activities. Labour is ‘paradisized’ to some extent by Adam’s reference to it as ‘pleasant’. Moreover, Adam’s description of the state of
the garden as one in which vegetable extrusions ‘ask’ to be cleared maintains the sense that it is ‘animate’, and perhaps modulates the dominant resonances of the fact that the alleys ‘require’ more hands so that
the word is suggestive less of an impersonal appraisal than of a dialogue,
or even of the need to submit to the dictates of nature. Nevertheless
the emphasis is on necessity or compulsion. Parts of the garden are
‘unsightly’ (a possibility it is hard to believe is envisaged in many
accounts of Eden), and so they must rise.
Weber uses Paradise Lost as an illustration of his famous thesis concerning ‘the Protestant ethic’. He contrasts the end of the Divine Comedy
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143
(the poet in Paradise speechless in contemplation of the secrets of God),
with the ending of Milton’s poem (Adam and Eve setting off into the
world), and comments: ‘One feels at once that this powerful expression
of the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his life
in this world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of
a medieval writer.’71 Certainly Adam’s speech is clear about the importance of work. Man’s labour ‘declares his dignity / And the regard of
heaven on all his ways’, while God ‘takes no account’ of the doings of
the animals (‘account’ being a word whose connotations of bookkeeping are interesting in this context). The concept of time which
demands that they rise before the sun does is one connected with the
demands of duty as opposed to inclination and is evidently internal to
the self. It is a function of the ‘investment of duration by power’ the
technical details of which are analysed by Foucault, who relates it to
the Cartesian conception of the self.72 Corresponding to this inner compulsion is a conception of the world which similarly demands activity.
Only a few hundred lines earlier the pair needed to labour only so much
as ‘sufficed / To recommend cool zephyr’. It was something that made
‘ease / More easy’. Now ease itself must be earnt with labour because
whereas before the fruit trees were ‘compliant’, they are now faced with
nature as confusion, disorder, unsightliness. The vocabulary for this
labour has changed accordingly. It is no longer a matter of gently separating branches, but of lopping them off, imposing order.
Labour was increasingly central to new constructions of masculinity,
while accompanying the development of the ‘work ethic’ as its counterpart was a new emphasis on marriage as a necessary part of life.
According to Lawrence Stone, the rise of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie
was ‘critical’ to the cultural dominance of ‘affective individualism’.73
Not only was a wife to be a ‘help-meet’, she and the home she ran were
a vital refuge from the world of public business, duty and social time.
Milton was one of the foremost ideologists of this social transformation,
and it is clear that this is the pattern at work in the shift in emphasis
in the presentation of labour. Adam’s speech is followed by Eve’s lovelyric, ‘With thee conversing I forget all time’ (PL 4.639), a lyric which
evokes in its content and enacts in its dilatory form a ‘feminine’ sphere
of love, repose and timelessness.74 Before the Fall, Mother Earth herself
holds out the promise of a sexualized plenitude and wholeness which
now tends to be located behind the closed doors of the bedroom, flowers
making ‘gay / Her bosom, smelling sweet’ (PL 7.318–19). However, paradisal scenarios were liable to raise fears about gender distinctions
insofar as they threatened to make work and discipline appear redun-
144 Milton and Modernity
dant. One response of voyagers to the ‘New World’ was to compare it
with Eden. Columbus wrote, in 1498: ‘I am completely persuaded in my
own mind that the Terrestrial Paradise is in the place I have described.’
But this was not without its dangers, as can be seen in Peter Martyr’s
response to the New World: ‘Smooth and pleasing words might be
spoken of the sweet odors, and perfumes of these countries . . . which
we purposely omit, because they make rather for the effeminating of
men’s minds, than for the maintenance of good behaviour.’75 Adam and
Eve’s speeches are the product of both an intense longing for a release
from duty and social time, and a fear of the emasculation or effeminacy
which might result from such a release. Eve’s inclinations towards the
timeless bonds of love are expressed, but kept in their proper place by
Adam’s attention to their duties and his recognition of the need for disciplined and regular habits. This structure to some extent allows Milton
to have his cake and eat it: they are clearly in Paradise, but Adam
remains clearly masculine. David Mikics argues that the garden’s presentation as a place full of ‘signs of power and rule’ ill suits ‘the seductive lure of Milton’s paradise, which presents itself as a beautifully
attuned “blissful bower”.’76 Such juxtapositions as this, between Adam’s
speech and Eve’s, testify to an effort to ease this tension by assigning to
different genders the two poles which constitute it.
However, the next day the roles seem to be reversed. Eve takes up
Adam’s refrain:
Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb and flower,
Our pleasant task enjoined, but till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild. Thou therefore now advise
Or hear what to my mind first thoughts present,
Let us divide our labours, thou where choice
Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
The clasping ivy where to climb, while I
In yonder spring of roses intermixed
With myrtle, find what to redress till noon:
For while so near each other thus all day
Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
Looks intervene and smiles, or object new
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145
Casual discourse draw on, which intermits
Our day’s work brought to little, though begun
Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned.
(PL 9.205–5)
Eve ‘puts efficiency before community’, according to J. B. Broadbent,
while Maureen Quilligan contrasts this commitment with Adam’s less
economic and more Puritan conception of labour as a vocation, remarking that God is more like a feudal lord than the capitalist taskmaster
Eve appears to envisage. Boyd M. Berry argues that she is wrong to distinguish ‘the pleasures of “our labours” from the work’.77 It is, however,
surprising that critics do not more regularly note the parallels between
Eve’s speech and Adam’s.78 It repeats, or nearly repeats, phrases and ideas
– for instance, the need for ‘more hands’ to help them. More than this,
the whole thrust of the speech is to detach their activity from the
natural course of their existence and subordinate it to the over-arching
goal of the use of time apprehended not in terms of any natural cycle,
but as something to be rationally exploited. It is not the medium of
alternating pleasures, but something of which maximum use must be
made. Eve’s concern is whether the hour of supper will be earnt, as Adam
argued their ease in walking would have to be, and the obstacle to this
is their enjoyment of one another’s company. She has, perhaps, gone
one step further than Adam, since he was referring to the practical consequences of their labour, while for Eve, as in Weber’s description of the
work ethic, the word is used in a more abstract and ‘moral’ sense: will
they have done enough work to deserve supper?79 But despite these slight
deviations, her stress on the need to work produces a similar stance
toward nature, which ‘derides’ their efforts (Adam used the word
‘mock’), its ‘wanton growth . . . / Tending to wild’, and, despite her references to winding the woodbine and directing the ivy, her speech
repeats Adam’s use of the word ‘lop’, with its possible intimations of a
rather more aggressive form of activity. This time it is Adam who speaks
up for pleasure:
Yet not so strictly hath our lord imposed
Labour, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight
146 Milton and Modernity
He made us, and delight to reason joined.
These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us. . . .
(PL 9.235–47)
Now it is ‘this sweet intercourse / Of looks and smiles’ rather than the
dignity of labour that distinguishes man from beast. And whereas Adam
said previously that if they were to walk with ease they would have to
be up before dawn to cut back excessive growth, now to ‘keep’ the paths
from wilderness is itself a matter of ease. A shift with regard to the place
and nature of labour is accompanied by an alteration in the presentation of their environment. If, as Boyd M. Berry suggests, one of the
lessons of the poem is that ‘Adam and Eve simultaneously had to keep
busy and had to avoid becoming too interested in their business’, it is
not without significance that it is Eve who is portrayed as becoming
inappropriately engrossed.80
Eve gets her way, and whatever conclusions can be drawn from this
about her character and Adam’s – from the point of view of character
it might be argued that she is an overenthusiastic learner who has stumbled in her attempt to run before she can walk – it is indicative of a
logic at work which concerns both gender relations and the relation
between the modern individual and nature. As Eve goes off alone on
the way to her fall, we are suddenly told that she carries with her ‘such
gardening tools as art yet rude, / Guiltless of fire had formed, or angels
brought’ (PL 9.391–2). Up until now, only Satan and his followers have
been associated with fire. But until these exchanges, only they had been
associated with acting against the tendencies of nature. The word ‘lop’
is used by C. Day Lewis in his translation of the following advice in
Virgil’s Georgics. Once the vines have
. . . shot up and are holding the elms in strong embrace,
Dock the leaves, lop the branches:
Till now they could not bear the steel; now you must show
them
Greater severity, curbing their frisky wanton growth.81
As in the speeches by Adam and Eve, the severe action of lopping is
called for when growth is ‘wanton’. Dr Johnson used the word ‘lop’ with
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
147
reference to his criticism of Milton, arguing that his remarks could not
harm the ‘everlasting verdure of Milton’s laurels . . . nor can my attempt
produce any other effect, than to strengthen their shoots by lopping
their luxuriance’.82 In other words, from certain points of view ‘lop’
designates an action which is beneficial to its object. Thus Leopold
Damrosch puts it in the same category as the rest of their labours:
‘Nature’s fecundity cannot be indulged unchecked; the plants in Eden
must be pruned lest they sprawl too far. But that is labor in the
service of life, shaping rather than repressing.’ Diane McColley
instances the activity of lopping in the course of her argument that
art is alright in Eden so long as there is no ‘cleavage’ (an interesting
choice of word, given that it derives from the verb ‘to cleave’) between
it and nature.83 But one might reasonably ask how one can go off
lopping with tools which Milton is keen to tell us, just before the Fall,
are ‘yet guiltless of fire’. In the Georgics the word is used at the point
when the plants are so hardy that ‘fingernails’ are no longer enough
and metal tools become necessary.84 Of course, it might be possible to
conceive of ‘natural’ tools which could do the job – stone, for instance,
as long as one did not have to dig for it. But in making such an aside
at such a moment, in intervening in this manner, Milton seems to
show an awareness that labour of this kind could be seen as a violation
of the natural order, not as part of it. The remark that Eve’s tools are
such as have been formed by ‘art yet rude’ or else have been by ‘angels
brought’ appears to be a further indication of Milton’s consciousness
of the problem. The denial of the presence of fire testifies to the proximity to the form of identity Milton is promulgating in Paradise Lost of
the motif of Prometheus, who brought to humanity fire stolen from the
gods, and is styled by Marcuse ‘the culture-hero of toil, productivity,
and progress through repression’.85 Milton takes care to distinguish
Eve from such a figure. But it certainly seems that the importance and
necessity of labour can only be emphasized at the expense of some of
its pleasantness as a gentle guiding of a nature with which one is in
harmony.
However, this problematic is rendered as a domestic problem. Milton’s
commitment to the sexual division of labour is such that it is clear,
earlier in the poem, that the separation in Book 9 is not the first time
Adam and Eve have been apart. When Raphael arrives Adam reveals an
ignorance about Eve’s domestic arrangements which could only be
explained by his absence elsewhere at certain times. Seeing Raphael
approach, Adam bids Eve ‘go with speed, / And what thy stores contain,
bring forth and pour / Abundance’. But, as she points out, ‘small store
148 Milton and Modernity
will serve, where store, / All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk’.
Later, Eve leaves to tend her flowers while Raphael and Adam discourse
(PL 5.313–15, 322–3, 8.40–57).86 Thus the key to this exchange cannot
be the pros and cons of separation per se, but whether it is wise to separate at this time: a matter of domestic authority. In this context Eve’s
desire to get on with things on her own cannot be entirely free of the
taint of a female wilfulness which is married with an inversion of their
proper concerns. This enables the projection onto her of certain difficulties. Whether or not ‘lopping’ is a violent act may, in some ways, be
undecidable. It certainly raises questions. What becomes, as an image
of death having entered Paradise, of the rose petals that fall from the
garland Adam has woven for Eve, if excess growth has been lopped off
from the start? Such questions are not necessarily unanswerable. The
death of the rose is premature, while pruning provokes further life and
what has been cut off will enter the circle of life as compost. Nevertheless, in such cases a notion of the right is more easily conveyed and
impressed on the reader by a dramatization of the wrong. Eve’s error
shows that these distinctions depend less on the activity itself than on
the motive which informs it. Along with the sheer violence of the devils’
activities in Hell, Eve’s efficiency drive serves as a distraction from the
problems concerning technology and natural plenitude in a way which
enables Milton not only to engage in his critique of idle aristocratic
ignorance while playing down some of the implications of the georgic
mode he employs to do this, but also to reinforce the patriarchal division of labour. Adam’s only problem, the sole cause of his Fall, is within
the home. Eve’s problem is going beyond it.87
If Milton’s Paradise expresses the wishes deriving from the modern
individual’s apparently ‘shrunken’ and distanced relation to the world,
then it also displays the supposed inception of the lack of fullness and
closeness that characterizes that individual, an inception whose first
cause is a wilful desertion of Adam by the ‘mother of mankind’ (PL
5.388).88 That nature is wounded by the Fall both shows how Adam and
Eve were at one with their surroundings and indicates the mode of their
future relation to them. In typically Protestant fashion, the prelapsarian cosmos is destroyed.89 Milton refuses to do more than hypothesize
about the precise changes that are made, reporting that ‘Some say’ the
earth’s axle was displaced while ‘some say’ the sun’s course was altered,
but the result is a ‘change / Of seasons to each clime’, extremes of
‘pinching cold and scorching heat’, and a generally hostile environment. The animals, too, become fierce, warring with each other and
glaring at man (PL 10.668, 671, 677–8, 691, 692–715, 710–14). There is
The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
149
now a disjunction between inner and outer worlds, the outer world now
indifferent to the human drama, ‘All unconcerned with our unrest’. The
world Adam and Eve must confront is ‘obscure / And wild’, and Adam
laments that they will be exiled from the places where God had
appeared, places he wishes he could ‘frequent, / With worship, place by
place where he vouchsafed / Presence divine’. Michael tells Adam that
God is present everywhere, but contact with him will no longer be
direct. Instead there will be ‘of his presence many a sign’. But this is not
the same as his actual presence ‘in person’. If God is everywhere he is
nowhere in particular. Man must recognize that value resides not in the
external world but within himself, and for this reason Eden will later
be destroyed in the Flood, ‘To teach thee that God attributes to place /
No sanctity, if none be thither brought / By men who there frequent,
or therein dwell’ (PL 11.174, 283–4, 317–19, 351, 836–8). This articulates the desacralization of the world that Protestantism opposed to
what it considered Catholic superstition about holy places. Implicit in
this are the other consequences of the Fall. The world can no longer be
assumed to be the expression of a divine scheme, but is a challenge for
humanity which must now construct order rather than merely discover
and implement it. Diane McColley has recently argued that Paradise Lost
is an ‘environmental epic’, emphasizing the literal meaning of ‘ecology’
– ‘knowledge of the house’ – to suggest that, while in the garden, ‘Adam
and Eve demonstrate what we would now call an ecological consciousness.’90 But after the Fall the world is no longer a home, demanding,
instead, human self-assertion, and nature takes on the aspect of a resistant object to be manipulated.91 The change in climate requires both
clothes, ‘the skins of beasts, or slain, / Or as the snake with youthful
coat repaid’, and ‘fire to use, / And what may else be remedy or cure /
To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought’ (PL 10.217–18,
1078–80). All places apart from Eden ‘Inhospitable appear and desolate,
/ Nor knowing us nor known’ (PL 11.306–7). Humanity and nature are
now strangers to one another. Eve is doomed to pain in childbirth, and
it is emphasized that labour will now be irksome – although, as Adam
says, ‘Idleness had been worse’. It will be necessary to ‘earn’ their bread
in the sense that emerges from Adam and Eve’s discussion of their work.
Labour is no longer quite the unalienated and self-fulfilling activity it
was in Eden, a difference underlined by the lack of utilitarian justification for Eve’s work tending the flowers, whose loss she now laments (PL
10.1055, 11.273–9). Milton’s remark, in De Doctrina Christiana, that evidence of ‘some traces of the divine image . . . in us’ can be gathered not
only from the prohibition against murder but also from God’s promise
150 Milton and Modernity
in Genesis 9: 2 that ‘every beast shall have fear of you’, presented not as
a lament but as a sign of God’s relative favour, seems to suggest a forceful and pragmatic stance.92
This is not to deny the potential force of Milton’s vision of prelapsarian nature, the kinship of which with the Romantic sense of the
interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world was referred to
earlier. But it is perhaps significant, with regard to Milton’s own writings, that although he wrote a grammar, a logic, a history and a theological treatise, as well as many tracts on political and religious issues,
Paradise Lost is far and away the principal source referred to by writers
on Milton, nature, science and the cosmos. Elsewhere in his work it is
not the natural world but the spirit within which is the overwhelming
focus of his concern: nature is not notably apprehended as the manifestation and revelation of the living God.93 David Mikics contrasts
Spenser, who ‘places the trials of the separated self in the reconciliatory
context of a mutable yet harmonious cosmos’, in whose works ‘Self and
world cohere’ and ‘poetic wonder elicits the meeting of subjectivity and
cosmic order’, with ‘the new consciousness of loss’ to be found in
Milton’s works.94 If there is any accuracy in E. M. W. Tillyard’s belief
that ‘Milton against unbelievable odds prolongs . . . in a later age’ the
spirit of the Elizabethans, it may be due to the fact that the world of
Paradise Lost embodies a sense of cosmic harmony so that its passing
may be portrayed.95
Conclusion: ‘On even ground’ –
Adam as Every Man
Perhaps despite itself, Paradise Lost reveals the tension between a certain
mode of subjectivity, defined in terms of autonomy conceived as separateness, and the compensatory plenitude it imagines for itself, whether
the locus of that plenitude is the figure of Woman or a nurturing
Mother Earth. In particular, Chapter 4 suggests that nostalgic accounts
of modernity may be products of the very processes they decry. It is,
indeed, arguable that Paradise Lost presents us with the individual who
will come to invent ‘modernity’ as a general description of the present.
Indeed, one of the most interesting things about working on Paradise
Lost and modernity is that accounts of modernity are often ‘nostalgic
myths of Paradise Lost’, as Marshall Berman puts it.1
Teresa Brennan has recently suggested that modernity is the ‘ego’s era’.
The ego’s construction of boundaries between itself and others, modelled of course on the pleasingly unified image of itself the infant beholds
in its reflection, and the sense of individual subjectivity and agency
this underpins, are secured by projecting passivity and object-status onto
environment and mother, allowing the subject to think of itself as
self-contained. Brennan cites Baudrillard as an example of how ‘in the
Zeitgeist what is lost, in fact explicitly rejected, is any notion of an original; an original is a notion of a foundation, hence suspect’, in order to
argue, against this, that this suspicion is merely an intensification of
our disavowal of ‘the mother’s body, an origin before the foundation’.
Brennan’s ultimate point of reference is the ‘intra-uterine state’, in the
womb, in which gratification is truly instant since ‘perception and need
coincide’, and she argues that, ‘Any strategies let alone solutions to the
ego’s era thus begin with recognizing the explicitly maternal nature of
the origin that is denied.’ The ego, with its aspirations to unity and totality, is a perverted imitation of the wholeness of its origin: ‘By reading
151
152 Milton and Modernity
the inverted path of the imitation, which is envious and fragmenting,
we can deduce that the original is generous and cohering’.2
This appeal to a state which is the inverse of the diagnosis of the
present is very much the method of critics of modernity such as
Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.3 But it is difficult to see how such
attempts to get back behind the present can amount to more than assertions that what is felt to be lacking in the present represents a loss by
comparison with another notional time. Perhaps ultimately more suggestive is Juliana Schiesari’s thesis that stories of individualization-asloss are themselves the work of the ego. For Schiesari the Renaissance
and our current perhaps postmodern era may well be ‘the historical
boundaries of a great age of melancholia . . . whose edges are coterminous with the historic rise and demise of “the subject” ’, and ‘the melancholic sense of ineffable loss in conceptual, affective, and historical
terms’ may be ‘only the flip side of the modernist espousal of progress’.
The melancholic alternates between prideful independence and ‘a
pathological fixation on an imaginary sense of loss’, construed by Lacan
as the loss of being consequent upon separation from the mother and
assumption of a place in the symbolic as a subject of lack. For Schiesari,
this is the dynamic underlying the modern picture of the social world,
‘a universe of imaginary individuals, separate from community and
unified only in their nostalgic quest for the lost object’, which underpins ‘a distinctly modern sensibility of a loss in time, of belatedness’.4
It may well be that what is most significant about the mode of individuality in terms of which modernity has been characterized is that
haughty detachment is achieved at the cost of a sense of loss which is
ultimately fictional: ‘It is because we have conceived of ourselves under
the sign of lack that we have posited an other time, place or being
which would fill the lack, satisfy the desire, redeem our finitude and so
complete the story of our longing.’5
The alternation of optimism and near-despair anatomized by Schiesari
has a counterpart in Milton’s career. In his ‘Seventh Prolusion’, written
while he was a student, the sense of a break with the past is conceived
not as a loss of plenitude to be lamented, but as an awakening from a
dark night of error to be celebrated: ‘Ignorance is breathing her last, and
you are now watching her final efforts and her dying struggle.’ (CPW
1.301, 296). He declares in ringing terms his confidence in the future
progress of knowledge:
So at length, my hearers, when universal learning has once completed its cycle, the spirit of man, no longer confined within this dark
Conclusion: Adam as Every Man
153
prison-house, will reach out far and wide, till it fills the whole world
and the space far beyond with the expansion of its divine greatness.
Then at last most of the chances and changes of the world will be so
quickly perceived that to him who holds this stronghold of wisdom
hardly anything can happen in his life which is unforeseen or fortuitous. He will indeed seem to be one whose rule and dominion the
stars obey, to whose command the earth and sea hearken, and whom
winds and tempests serve; to whom, lastly, Mother Nature herself has
surrendered, as if indeed some god had abdicated the throne of the
world and entrusted its rights, laws, and administration to him as
governor.
(CPW 1.301, 296)
The roots of this vision in Renaissance humanist optimism about
human potential are suggested by Milton’s reference, near the opening
of this piece, to Prometheus as ‘the wisest of gods and men’.6 The most
immediate influence is that of Bacon, for whom ‘the true ends of knowledge’ are to further ‘the benefit and use of life’ by laying ‘the foundation . . . of human utility and power’. Science, according to Bacon, will
‘restore and exalt the power and dominion of man himself, of the
human race, over the universe’.7 As Anthony Low has noted, this
emphasis on the potential of the application of practical scientific
knowledge to improve materially the human condition meant that for
Bacon ‘the fall was less a permanent curse than an opportunity’, and
had the effect of giving labour ‘a new pioneering role as the shaper of
history and the benefactor of humanity’.8 In the Instauratio Magna
Bacon entreats ‘men to believe that there is not an opinion to be held,
but a work to be done, and to be well assured that I am labouring to
lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility
and power’.9 Paradise Lost, however, despite being, in Max Weber’s
words, a ‘powerful expression of the Puritan’s serious attention to this
world, his acceptance of his life in this world as a task’, is markedly
unenthusiastic with respect to this Baconian spirit.10 Insofar as the
Baconian attitude sought to further the ‘technological trend’ in man’s
relation to nature, it is overwhelmingly associated with evil, first in the
form of the activities of the devils discussed in Chapter 4 and then, after
the Fall, in the vision of the descendants of Cain.11 At their encampment we see a blacksmith, ‘at the forge / Laboring’, smelting ore from
which ‘he formed / First his own tools; then, what might else be
wrought / Fusile or grav’n in metal’ (PL 11.564–5, 571–3). It is the
women from this camp who seduce the godly men that come their way
154 Milton and Modernity
from righteousness, and Michael condemns all those who inhabit ‘the
tents / Of wickedness’, remarking of them:
. . . studious they appear
Of arts that polish life, inventors rare,
Unmindful of their Maker, though his Spirit
Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledged none.
(PL 11.607–8, 609–12)
The notion that the capacity for these arts stems from God, and the
implication that their sin consists in not practising them with due gratitude, suggest that such arts are not intrinsically bad. But if the legacy
of Bacon, among the Hartlib circle and others, consisted in the sense
that with due application it should be possible to achieve the ‘best of
moderne miracles, Namely to turne the most hopelesse Willdernes, on
a suddaine, into a rich and beautifull paradyse’, there is no sense of this
in Paradise Lost after the Fall.12
One reason for this, no doubt, is that the collapse of the Commonwealth resulted in the capture by the Monarchy of the Baconian project
for the material advancement of humanity, in the form of the Royal
Society. But Milton’s attitude to the application of intellect in the cause
of ‘improvement’ is of a piece with a more general despair regarding the
condition of the world, a despair it is hard not to see as stemming from
‘the experience of defeat’.13 It is inseparable from the conviction that,
as Michael puts it, until the Second Coming the world will ‘go on, / To
good malignant, to bad men benign’ (PL 12.537–8). If Milton’s Baconian optimism in the ‘Seventh Prolusion’ is seen as part of the ‘Georgic
Revolution’ of the seventeenth century, whereby a newly dynamic sense
of the world gave rise to a social vision in which the application of
labour, thought and invention by ‘individuals who perform small tasks
the cumulative effect of which is to transform society’, then this spirit,
as Low suggests, is carried into his political writings. To cite but one
example instanced by Low, it lies behind Milton’s urging of Cromwell,
in the Second Defense, to lead ‘the people from corrupt institutions to a
better plan of life and discipline . . . to watch, to foresee, to cavil at no
toil . . . these are those arduous things, in comparison of which war is a
playgame’.14 In Paradise Lost, however, the prospect of being ‘improved
by tract of time’, the possibility Raphael holds out to Adam that humans
may ‘turn all to spirit’ and choose whether to dwell in Eden ‘or in
heav’nly paradises’ is lost with the Fall (PL 5.498, 497, 499). As Bill Readings puts it, this ‘modernist project’ (understanding modernist in the
Conclusion: Adam as Every Man
155
sense, evidenced in Bacon and others, of a belief in progress) is replaced
by a fallen world that is ‘ “postmodern”, in the sense of the modernist
critique’:
The condemnation to history is thus to a pointless succession. The
history into which man falls is a postmodern temporality, and
endless treadmill of struggle . . . He is condemned to work to transform the earth, to make it fitter, and at the same time to stay where
he is, not to progress from the point at which he began. The paradox
of postlapsarian labor is to toil without hope of actual improvement.
Work thus changes to take its place in a history that is mere succession, without any hope of meaning as a result of accumulation.
History simply happens, again and again, without adding up to anything, in meaningless contiguity.
According to Readings, the historical vision of the last two books returns
man to ‘Edenic modernity’, in the sense that meaning is returned to
history: ‘Divine truth can only be understood by contemplation of
wider historical processes.’ This is a process Readings is keen to resist,
by showing how the reduction of history to meaning founders on the
impossibility of temporally locating the Fall (as is evident from various
critical positions, it is impossible to say exactly when it happens).15 If
we turn from questions of metaphysical inadequacy to the political
implications of the sense of history Readings so accurately evokes,
however, it is clear that history has become chiefly something that the
individual must steel himself against.16 If history has any value it is as
an education in the need for individual integrity. In Areopagitica, by contrast, integrity is important, but what figures most prominently is a
sense of the loss of truth as also a gain, in the form of positively valued
and almost endless collective endeavour, ‘the reforming of Reformation
it self’ (CPW 2.553). Adam, by contrast, is exhorted to seek ‘A paradise
within’ (PL 12.587). A belief in collective politics seems to have disappeared along with faith in technological advancement.
The position in which Adam is educated, atop a mountain, might be
taken as a model of his future relation to the world. Although there
seems to have been an edict against looking down on the world among
the ancients, by the seventeenth century the equal, wide survey from a
commanding height was becoming quite a commonplace. Such a position seemed to allow a degree of detachment which allowed clearer
vision.17 Thus Adam is taken up to a commanding height, from which
the earth ‘Stretched out to amplest reach of prospect lay’ (PL 11.380),
156 Milton and Modernity
in order to foster the temperance and self-control which will enable him
to act judiciously. But he is not allowed a position of complacent
command and self-possession.18 Not only does he have to learn how to
regard the world, having his misconstructions and misinterpretations
corrected by the angel, but even after Michael has ‘purged’ his ‘visual
nerve’ Adam’s ‘mortal sight’ begins to fail and, having started out by
staging masque-like scenes for his edification, the archangel has to tell
him the rest (PL 11.515–25, 603–37, 414–15, 12.9, 11). Adam begins life
looking up into an order of which he is a part, and after the Fall finds
himself looking down on scenes in which he is implicated but from
which he is necessarily separate, before it is affirmed that in his relation
to the world he remains dependent on aid and instruction from above.19
In the face of history as ‘meaningless succession’ the only thing that
keeps him from the melancholy typical of cultural modernity is divine
illumination.20 However, the promise of an alternative to the melancholic position suggested by Schiesari, ‘a desire for community . . . not
for a pre-oedipal indifferentiation but for the indefinite exchange of
social and discursive differences’, which she associates with the female
poet Isabella di Morra, but which is also potentially present in Areopagitica’s advocacy of ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’ (CPW 2.555) is not altogether absent.21
Although the poem cannot fruitfully be read as a political tract, this
is a far cry from conceding that it is not a profoundly political work.22
That Adam progresses from distressed and occasionally reviving
onlooker to a more paternal role in which he is ‘fatherly displeased’ with
humanity is not without significance (PL 11.450–2, 461–5, 500–14,
870–8, 12.63). More pointed, given that, as Gordon Schochet notes, in
the political debates of the Restoration ‘the central questions were
always the nature of familial authority and its relations to politics’, is
the emphatic dissociation of Adam’s position as father of mankind from
any political consequences.23 Had it not been for the Fall, the injunction to ‘honour thy father’ might have had, if not the same force as
Filmer and many others had tried to give it, at least a quasi-political
aspect (although the need for properly political organization is a consequence of the fall). As Michael says, Eden might have been Adam’s
‘capital seat’ at which ‘All generations’ could ‘celebrate / And reverence
thee their great progenitor’ (PL 11.343–6). The raising of this prospect,
however, is the occasion for an assertion that Adam has lost ‘this preeminence’ and has been ‘brought down / To dwell on even ground’ with
his sons (PL 11.347–8).24 Any attempt to trace the rights of kingship
back to Adam is, by implication, ungodly. Adam’s male descendants
Conclusion: Adam as Every Man
157
have the choice to live on equal terms with him and, indeed, with any
other man.25
In other words, despite the possible implications of the view of history
promulgated at the end of the poem, it would be misleading to read
Paradise Lost as an expression of political quietism, or simply as ‘the first
and greatest epic of the pessimistic modern European consciousness’.26
Since ‘pre-modern’ consciousness cannot be said to have been terribly
optimistic about human nature, what is implicit in such a description
is a recognition that in Paradise Lost pessimism and anger are expressed
in the context of an ideal optimism, of a sense of how people and things
ought to be. This larger framework is the reason that Paradise Lost could
be used as a touchstone by those with a sense of human dignity and
potential, an optimistic modern consciousness. Tony Davies has argued
that ‘Paradise Lost supplied some of the core mythology and subjectivity of the revolutionary enterprise’ in America.27 Thus the Fall can be
construed as a warning or a lesson. The most memorable anger in
Paradise Lost is directed against those, such as Nimrod, who ‘arrogate
dominion undeserved’ over their ‘brethren’, a vocabulary familiar from
Milton’s political writings (PL 12.27–8).28 Michael, in response to Adam’s
outraged reaction – God, says Adam, ‘human left from human free’ –
says that if reason is ‘obscured, or not obeyed’ as a result of ‘upstart passions’, then ‘tyrrany must be’ (PL 12.86, 88, 95). His words can be read
in at least two ways. On the one hand, his reference to Adam’s ‘original lapse’ (PL 12.83) may be taken to indicate that this is the permanent postlapsarian state of affairs. However, it could also be read as
meaning that since, after the Fall, many men will often be irrational, in
the course of things tyranny is bound to feature prominently among
the horrors of this world.29 Either way Michael’s position, which gives
to the tyrant ‘thereby no excuse’ is far from that of Hobbes, for example,
who would always recommend aquiescence over revolt (PL 12.96). Paradise Lost is a product of what had become a culture of Dissent or Nonconformity and had made a virtue of necessity in turning inwards, as
Christopher Hill has described. But that culture was to turn outwards
again, and this possibility is encrypted in the text.30 As David Loewenstein notes, the apparent detour through the desert by the Chosen
People fleeing Pharaoh are described as taking ‘not the readiest way’ (PL
12.216), an indication that although The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth was not taken in 1660, all is not necessarily
lost.31 If Paradise Lost is a Dissenter document of the 1660s, Locke’s Two
Treatises is a Dissenter document of the 1680s, written to legitimate
another uprising in the name of the people.32
158 Milton and Modernity
Of course, for Milton and Locke, as for many others, this politics of
reason defined against passion is intimately related to the sexual division of labour. At the end of Paradise Lost Adam’s authority in the private
sphere is fully restored. Adam is taught the dangers of women while
Eve, in her sleep, is re-educated into the delights of obedience. In her,
from now on, there will be ‘no delay’, none of the deferral or difference
implicit in the presence of another will. Adam and Eve are, once again,
‘unanimous’, though now they are ‘sad’ (PL 12.615, 603; see also 4.736).
The need for attachment is addressed in a way which removes its problematic implications for Adam. Adam, says Eve, will be her home (‘with
thee to go, / Is to stay here’): the bond is hers more than her husband’s
(PL 12.615–16).33
A conception of the political subject in terms of autonomy, defined
as an essential separateness from others, has been the target of much
criticism, and rightly so: ‘The psychosocial core of . . . unfettered individuality is the subjugation of woman by man, through which it appears
that she is his possession and therefore, that he is not dependent on or
attached to an other outside himself.’34 The notion of politics as ‘based
on a specific form of rationality’, and consisting in the exercise of this
faculty by individuals must be abandoned: ‘How can we grasp the multiplicity of relations of subordination that can affect an individual if we
envisage social agents as homogenous and unified entities?’35 An individuality conceived in Oedipal terms, effected through identification
with the father and separation from the mother, will always tend to
oscillate between proud independence and despair at the loss of a forbidden Eden.36 To read Paradise Lost is not only to be amazed at ‘words
of such a compass’ (Marvell, ‘On Paradise Lost’, 41), but to realize that
it is a repository of myths whose potency must be deconstructed: above
all a chain of equivalences, by no means unquestioned within the poem
itself, between masculinity, an individuality over-committed to separateness and hence prone to construe relation as a fearful fusion which
threatens the self, and a unitary or monolithic conception of reason.
Nonetheless, it would be a shame – indeed, shameful – to dismiss from
our presence ‘the greatest English revolutionary who is also a poet, the
greatest English poet who is also a revolutionary’.37 His tone and style,
full of force, excitement, and no more intrinsically elitist than the
Golden Gate Bridge, stand for possibility. Paradise Lost is refreshingly
free of the kind of irony which is now the pervasive mode of accommodation with impotence, the distinctive tone of ‘enlightened false
consciousness’.38 It is a glorious and expansive achievement, widening
horizons and bursting through constrictions. In some repects it is deeply
Conclusion: Adam as Every Man
159
flawed and to be guarded against. Robert Adams once amusingly
remarked that ‘Milton would not, in a best-adjusted poet contest, any
more than in a humility competition, come out a winner.’ There is, he
writes, ‘something strident and inflexible about many of Milton’s ideas,
something buried and beyond control about many of his feelings.’39 It
would be hard today to regard him as ‘the type of the free personality’.40 One’s impression, rather, is of a character which might have benefited from more of that ‘communicative fluidization’ hoped for by
Habermas.41 Nonetheless, at a time when we have brought ourselves to
such a ‘postmodern’ political pass that, as Slavoj Žižek remarks, our
culture finds it ‘easier to imagine the “end of the world” than a far more
modest change in the mode of production’, Milton’s ability ‘to disregard the account of the world offered by the world’ seems ever more
impressive.42
Notes
Introduction: Milton and Modernity
1. Walter Raleigh, Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1900), 88; Douglas Bush,
English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1945), 360; John Mulryan, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’: Milton’s
Reinvention of the Mythological Tradition (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1996), 290.
2. Marcia Landy, ‘ “A Free and Open Encounter”: Milton and the Modern
Reader’, Milton Studies 9, 3–36, 5.
3. Thus Douglas Bush produced a defence of Milton entitled ‘The Modern
Reaction Against Milton’, published in Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1945); and Robert Adams produced
a book responding to the debate called Ikon: John Milton and the Modern
Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955). The most influential defence
of Milton against the assault inspired by Eliot has been that of Christopher
Ricks, in Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). For the most part,
Milton and the ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’ are paired only to be dissociated,
as in E. L. Marilla’s Milton and Modern Man: Selected Essays (Birmingham:
University of Alabama Press, 1968), in which Milton’s outlook is contrasted
with Baconian technological progressivism.
4. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and After
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–2.
5. The quotation is from J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), 112.
6. Compare Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 152–3, on Descartes. For
Taylor, the ‘modern theme of the dignity of the human person’ arises out
of such an ‘internalization’: ‘It will become an explicitly central theme with
Kant more than a century later. But Descartes’s ethical theory is already
moving in its orbit. We can see this in the great emphasis he places on the
satisfactions of self-esteem in describing the rewards of the good life’.
Dignity, as Peter Berger puts it in a quotation cited by Taylor (152n19),
‘always relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed
rules or norms’. An excellent anatomy of the psycho-social dynamics
at work in the formation of the notion of ‘self-esteem’ can be found in
John Guillory, ‘Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male
Self-Esteem’, in Christopher Kendrick, ed., Critical Essays on John Milton
(New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 194–233. I would like to thank Tom Luxon
for bringing this article to my attention.
7. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological
Perspective (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 17, 25.
8. Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 36; and, for her formulation of liberal humanism, The Subject
160
Notes 161
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen,
1985), 7–8.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821), #124z; cited in
Kolb, Critique of Pure Modernity, 20.
David Aers, ‘Reflections on Current Histories of the Subject’, Literature and
History, 2nd Series, 2: 2 (Autumn 1991), 20–34, 20.
An influential example of such asumptions is Max Weber, for whom, in
traditional societies with unreflectively held values, the individual’s ‘basic
freedom was concealed, but modernity has demystified man’s situation’.
Kolb, Critique of Pure Modernity, 28.
Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), xxvii, 32; and, for an account of Descartes’s modern redefinition of the mind–body distinction as not (as in Aristotle) that between
‘reason-as-grasp-of-universals and the living body which takes care of
sensation and motion’ but as that between ‘consciousness’, including
feelings, and ‘what is not consciousness’, ‘more like a distinction between
two worlds than between two sides, or even parts, of a human being’,
see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989), ch. 1, ‘The Invention of the Mind’ (for my quotations see
51–2).
Aers, ‘Reflections’, 20.
The quotations, from Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on
Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 31, are cited in Aers, ‘Reflections’, 24.
Aers, ‘Reflections’, 21, 29.
David Aers, ‘Rewriting the Middle Ages: Some Suggestions’, Journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18: 2 (Fall 1988), 221–40, 233.
Aers, ‘Reflections’, 31; Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism,
Ironic History, and Medieval Studies’, Speculum (1990), 87–108, 90. See also
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984).
Patterson, ‘On the margin’, 93; Aers, ‘Reflections’, 31.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 460–1. One example among many of the
drawbacks of such a stance vis-à-vis periodization is Bill Readings and
Bennet Schaber, eds., Postmodernism Across the Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity That Wasn’t Born Yesterday (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
The essays in this collection contain much interesting material, but either
effect a flattening-out of any sense of historical process – the same themes
crop up all over the place – or, despite the editors’ professed suspicion of
the practice of history (see esp. xiii, 2–8, 14–20), in fact rely on a conception of modernity as a historical period.
David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public
Sphere’, in Richard Burt, ed., The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship,
Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–33, 6. Norbrook has developed this
perspective in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics,
1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which combines a clear sense of historical significance with a firm grip on the specific,
162 Notes
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
as does Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).
Aers, ‘Rewriting’, 234–9.
The OED remarks, ‘The number of self- compounds was greatly augmented
towards the middle of the 17th cent., when many new words appeared in
theological and philosophical writing, some of which had apparently
a restricted currency of about 50 years (e.g. 1645–1690), while a large
proportion became established and have a continuous history down to
the present time’.
Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: an Intellectual
History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 128–34.
Blair Hoxby, ‘The Trade of Truth Advanced: Areopagitica, Economic Discourse, and Libertarian Reform’, Milton Studies 36 (1998), 177–202, is an
interesting discussion of the undoubted interrelation of ‘pleadings for an
open marker’ and ‘libertarian thought’ (178), although a casual reader
might form rather too sanguine an impression of their compatibility.
Chantal Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’, trans. Paul
Holdengräber, in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of
Postmodernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 31–45, 33.
See e.g. Barker, Tremulous Private Body, 10, 15–16, 42–52; Belsey, Subject of
Tragedy, 7–8, 118, 146–7, and Milton, 13, 36.
Barker, Tremulous Private Body, 10.
Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber on Economy and Society
(London: Routledge, 1990), 41; Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber: From History to
Modernity (London: Routledge, 1992), 129. David Couzens Hoy, in his
‘Introduction’ to Foucault: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986),
notes that there are affinities between Foucault’s methodology and sociological functionalism, which subordinates everything to the workings of a
systemic whole, but argues that ‘Foucault paints the picture of a totally normalized society, not because he believes our present society is one, but
because he hopes we will find the picture threatening. He could hope for
this effect on us only if we have not been completely normalized’ (8–9, 14).
It is always problematic to identify any position as definitively Foucauldian,
since there is virtually no interpretation of his work which he has not radically qualified or from which he has not distanced himself. As Jürgen
Habermas notes, Foucault’s later work on techniques of the self – the ability
of the subject to self-fashion an ethical identity – implied a recognition
of the onesidedness of his outright denunciation of subjectivity. Jürgen
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans.
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987), Lecture X, esp. 273.
Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and Reason’, in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel
Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other Writings 1977–
1984, trans. Alan Sheridan and others (London: Routledge, 1990), 57–85,
84, 70.
For a critique of such a ‘pure’ modernity, see Kolb, Critique of Pure
Modernity.
Notes 163
30. Graham Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing “The
System of Natural Liberty” ’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter
Miller, eds, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures
and an Interview with Michel Foucault (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991),
119–50, 139; Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and Reason’, in Politics, Philosophy,
Culture, 57–85, 84–5.
31. Barker, Tremulous Private Body, 42, 48, 46.
32. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance
of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 198, 30, 25–6.
33. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 289; Norbrook, ‘Early
Modern Public Sphere’, 4, 28n6. In ‘In the wars of truth: violence, true
knowledge and power in Milton and Hobbes’, in Thomas Healy and
Jonathan Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Barker produces a more nuanced reading of
Areopagitica, conceding that, as well as ‘a post-revolutionary discursivity of
apparently depoliticized private utterance’ it also contains ‘a revolutionary
figuration of true discourse not yet willing to surrender itself to private
obscurity’ (101), but his account of modernity, and of the main tendency
of Areopagitica, is unchanged.
34. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 3: 162, cited in Claude Lefort, The
Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureacracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John
B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge: Polity in association with Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), 245.
35. Lefort, Political Forms, 248, 249.
36. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 32.
37. Lefort, Political Forms, 245, 250.
38. John B. Thompson, ‘Introduction’ to Lefort, Political Forms, 22.
39. Lefort, Political Forms, 254, 256, 257; Democracy, 34.
40. Such extension is often tacit, as in Barker’s Tremulous Private Body, but
Christopher Kendrick, for one, makes the connection explicitly: ‘the “philosophy of possessive individualism” . . . presents in its clearest and most
basic form the ideological unit or framework of which the monistic ethos
and monism are peculiar variants’. Milton: a Study in Ideology and Form (New
York and London: Methuen, 1986), 55. Christopher Hill describes Milton’s
central characters as ‘as solitary as Hobbist man before Leviathan set up a
law-abiding community’. Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber,
1979), 49.
41. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 3.
42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 246–8 / 99; C. B. Macpherson, ‘Introduction’ to Leviathan,
55–6; Possessive Individualism, 93.
43. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 39.
44. Norbrook, ‘Early Modern Public Sphere’, 8.
45. Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities Press,
164 Notes
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
1963), 336; Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma 1641–1660
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), xiii, xx.
For Locke as a ‘founding father’ see e.g. Edward Andrew, Shylock’s Rights: a
Grammar of Lockian Claims (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 198, 4–5.
Von Maltzahn briefly discusses Milton and Locke in ‘The Whig Milton,
1667–1700’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds,
Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
229–53, 229, 237.
Locke’s activities as a revolutionary are often overlooked, or their significance is misunderstood. For a corrective, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics amd Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986).
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2, The Age of
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 239.
Quoted in Jürgen Habermas, ‘Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity’, in Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity
(Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985),
67–77, 76–7.
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975), 423–4, 436, 460–1, 523.
Chantal Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’ trans. Paul
Holdengräber, in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 31–45, 33.
Having asked this question of Aristotle, Filmer exhorts his reader to ‘come
to our modern politicians, and ask them who the people is, though they
talk big of the people, yet they take up and are content with a few representors (as they call them) of the whole people . . . If the sounder, the better,
and the uprighter part have the power of the people, how shall we know,
or who shall judge who they be?’ Filmer, ‘Observations on Mr Milton
against Salmasius’, in Laslett, ed., Patriarcha, 252.
Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity in association with
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 78.
Lefort, Democracy, 180.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in K. C.
Brown, ed., Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1965), 185–236, 223.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1993), 18.
This account of the social milieu of the ‘middling sort’ is based largely on
the essays collected in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds, The
Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800
(London: Macmillan, 1994).
David Weisberg, ‘Rule, Self, Subject: the Problem of Power in Paradise Lost’,
Milton Studies 30 (1993), 85–107, 85.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Religion and Ideology: a Political Reading of Paradise
Lost’, in Francis Barker et al., eds, Literature, Politics, Theory: Papers from the
Essex Conference 1976–84 (London: Methuen, 1986), 35–56, 52, 54.
William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 23, 13, 208; David Norbrook, ‘Life
and Death of Renaissance Man’, Raritan 8: 4 (1989), 89–110, 110.
Notes 165
62. Taylor, Sources of the Self. Part 3 is entitled ‘The Affirmation of Ordinary
Life’, and among his texts is (227) PL 8.192–4: ‘but to know / That which
before us lies in daily life, / Is the prime wisdom’.
63. Satan returns to earth seven days after he was first discovered there (PL
9.67). Adam and Eve have had time to go through a whole weekly round.
John R. Knott, Jr., who believes that ‘the bliss of paradise cannot be understood except in terms of the pattern of their daily activity’ and ‘the routine
of the individual day’ describes this shift in emphasis in terms of literary
forms. Milton’s innovation is to elevate ‘scenes in a predominantly pastoral
mode to a position of critical importance’, such that ‘the earthly paradise
rather than the battlefield’ is ‘the main stage for the action of his epic’,
and in consequence ‘heroic values’ are replaced by ‘others that can be
characterized as pastoral’. John R. Knott, Jr., Milton’s Pastoral Vision: an
Approach to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 88,
xi–xii.
64. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV, iii, 1123b. I have used D. P. Chase’s translation, since W. D. Ross’s renders megalopsychia as ‘pride’ which obscures
the potential distinction Milton makes in his discussion of the quality. The
Ethics of Aristotle, trans. D. P. Chase (London: J. M. Dent, 1911). For Ross’s
translation see e.g. The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols, ed. Jonathan
Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2: 1773.
65. It thus transmutes the choice between vocation and happiness which C. S.
Lewis sees as typical of ‘secondary epic’ into a rather modern form, that of
virtue in domestic relations. For the importance of vocation in ‘secondary
epic’, see A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
34–9. According to Christopher Hill Paradise Lost is about a married couple
in a hostile universe, a subject for the novel rather than epic. See A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 360. Dustin Griffin makes a similar
point in Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 90.
66. Freud, Standard Edition 11: 245, cited in Elizabeth J. Bellamy, ‘Milton’s Freud:
the Law of Psychoanalysis in Eve’s Dream’, Literature and Psychology 42: 3
(1996), 36–47, 47.
67. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), xiii.
68. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967), 55.
69. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 164.
70. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977).
71. Maggie Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism: an Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 231.
72. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity
(London: Penguin, 1988), 15.
73. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and
the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 2–3, 5, 27–8, 93, 255.
166 Notes
74. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 337–8; Terry Eagleton,
‘The God that Failed’, in Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds, Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York: Methuen,
1987), 342–9, 345.
1. Milton and the Political Force of Liberal Humanism
1. Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: a Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981), 52. See also Perez Zagorin, A
History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: RKP, 1954), 107:
‘no account of political thought in the English revolution may overlook
Milton. He was the greatest man who wrote on the Parliamentary and
Cromwellian side. His defence of the commonwealth was, with John
Goodwin’s, the most effective it received.’
2. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1955), 353–4. In fact, Tenure was republished
in 1689 as a Williamite tract under the title Pro Populo Adversus Tyrranos,
and was much referred to in the debates of that year. Merrit Y. Hughes,
‘Introduction’, CPW 3.187–8.
3. For Locke as a ‘founding father’ see e.g. Andrew, Shylock’s Rights, 4–5.
4. Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 136.
5. Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: the Authoritarian
Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century
England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 121.
6. James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 12, 61, 67–8.
7. Daly, Filmer, 12. Locke suggests, for instance, that if the right of kingship
is truly inherited from Adam, then ‘the first thing to be done is to find out
this true heir of Adam, seat him in his throne, and then all the kings and
princes of the world come and resign up their crowns and sceptres to him,
as things that belong no more to them than to any of their subjects’
(1T §104).
8. Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political
Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949),
26. Space precludes meaningful consideration of Eikon Basilike and Milton’s
rejoinder, Eikonoklastes, as it does also of Patriarcha and Locke’s First Treatise. For an account of Milton’s response to the King’s Book, see Bruce
Thomas Boehrer, ‘Elementary Structures of Kingship: Milton, Regicide, and
the Family’, Milton Studies 23 (1987), 97–117.
9. James I, ‘A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at WhiteHall . . . 1609’, in Charles Howard McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James
I (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 308.
10. Edward Gee, The Divine Right and Original of the Civil Magistrate From
God . . . (1658), quoted in Daly, Filmer, 97.
11. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 263–4. For descriptions of the ‘artificial’
nature of modern political order see Collins, Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State,
Notes 167
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
30–1; Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 56; Martin Seliger, The Liberal
Politics of John Locke (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 17.
Quoted in Johann Somerville, ‘Ideology, Property and the Constitution’, in
Richard Cust and Anne Hughes, eds, Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies
in Religion and Politics 1603–42 (London: Longman, 1989), 50–1.
Daly, Filmer, 53.
Quoted in Boehrer, ‘Elementary Structures’, 103.
James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: or the Reciprock and Mutuall Duetie
Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subjects, in McIlwain, ed., Political Works,
64–5.
Filmer, Patriarcha, 54. Compare Milton’s contempt for the king’s ‘suttleties
and mysterious arts’ in Eikonoklastes, CPW 3.598.
For the contrast between holistic societies and societies in which the individual is the primary unit of value, see Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 9, 65–6, 211. As Zagorin argues, liberty for Milton was a means to
the end of religious and civic virtue. Perez Zagorin, Milton. Aristocrat and
Rebel: the Poet and his Politics (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 54–6, 96–7.
John Dunn argues that Locke’s crucial difference from Filmer lies in his
replacement of providential structures of social authority by his own
account of God’s imposition of individual religious duties. In brief, the
capacity to know one’s religious duty and act on it underpins political
freedom. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: an Historical
Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), 121.
Macpherson considers that ‘Hobbes, as amended by Locke in the matter of
the self-perpetuating sovereign . . . provided the main structure of English
liberal theory.’ See his ‘Introduction’ to Hobbes, Leviathan, 25; and Possessive Individualism, 270.
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 757–8.
Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Politics of Motion: the World of Thomas Hobbes
(London: Croom Helm, 1973), 116, 121.
Hampton notes the particular emphasis Hobbes places on this ‘second law
of nature’ in Hobbes, 49.
For the relation between sovereignty and questions of interpretation in
Hobbes and Filmer see Hampton, Hobbes, ch. 4, esp. 98–107; Daly, Filmer,
ch. 2, esp. 29–33.
Stanley Fish, ‘Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s
Areopagitica’, in Nyquist and Ferguson, eds, Re-membering Milton, 234–54,
253–4 n12. A similar example, which cannot be fully investigated here, is
the judgement of Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker that ‘We cannot fail
to discern in Milton’s verse a tone which by the 1660s often rang with
anachronism. Politics has marked off its own world. . . . in his religiosity
Milton seems to speak to us from within the civil war and, in his insistent
moralizing of politics, from even earlier decades.’ See the ‘Introduction’ to
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse: the Literature
and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 9. As a localized description of Restoration discourse this
judgement has some weight, but to claim that ‘Politics has marked off its
own world’ ascribes to this change of tone the character of a punctual, once-
168 Notes
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
and-for-all event whose significance extends beyond the contingencies of
a particular moment and is instead to be registered as an epochal break in
the story of secularization. Secularization, however, is not an important
marker of modernity. Once we abandon the notion that we can produce
an account of the world the veracity of which is determined by its ‘correspondence’ to some extra-cultural set of facts, the Enlightenment story of
the emergence of the light of truth from the darkness of superstition and
the falsehoods of organized religion itself appears rather religious, appealing to Truth or Nature in much the same way as the worldview against
which it reacted appealed to God. From a ‘late modern’ perspective both
Milton and Locke, for whom politics is a matter of a natural law understood as the revealed will of God, and the secular Enlightenment, for which
politics is a matter of natural law understood to be revealed by Reason, are
examples of foundationalist thought (thought which believes in the possibility of certain knowledge of the world). For ‘late modern’ as a better term
than ‘postmodern’ to describe our era, based on a conception of the break
with foundationalism as the process whereby modernity comes to understand itself and becomes reflexive, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences
of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990), 45–53. See also Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans.
Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 115.
Fish, ‘Driving from the Letter’, 248, 251, 248.
See 2T §6: ‘no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the
world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose
workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure’.
Skinner, Foundations 2, esp. chs 5–6. The quotation regarding Locke is taken
from 2: 239.
Quoted from Calvin’s Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles by Skinner,
Foundations 2: 220.
Skinner, Foundations 2: 220–5.
For Dumont this structure can also be found in Descartes and underlies
Weber’s account of modern rationality. Essays on Individualism, 56.
Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd (1558; New
York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 48
John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: the Mind of Samuel
Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16, 155; Samuel
Rutherford, Lex, Rex (1644), cited in Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British
Revolutions, 163. Similarly, Richard Baxter, repeatedly used as a gloss on
Milton in Fish, Surprised by Sin (see e.g. 212, 241–4), yearns for a godly
prince on the model of Constantine, a model Milton thought simply antiChristian. See John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 47–8.
Goodman, Superior Powers, 149, 118.
Goodman, Superior Powers, 9–10, 11–12.
Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 181.
Skinner, Foundations 2: 236, 239–40.
Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London: Faber and Faber,
Notes 169
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
1964), 162–5, 155, 134–5. See also Perez Zagorin, Milton. Aristocrat and Rebel,
65–73, which affirms that Tenure is fundamentally based on reason and
natural right.
Calvinist political theory was not altogether devoid of reference to natural
law. For instance Rutherford remarks that ‘God hath implanted in every
creature natural inclinations and motions to preserve itself’ and elsewhere
refers to ‘nature’s law of self-preservation’ as well as ‘God’s law of defending religion against papists in arms’. Cited in Coffey, Politics, Religion and
the British Revolutionso, 175, 183. However, in its stress on self-preservation
rather than liberty this conception is similar to Hobbes’s, and, being merely
natural, is always liable to be overriden by God’s will.
Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great
Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 13, and ch. 1 passim.
Daly, Filmer, 98; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 571; and esp. ‘The Radical
Dimensions of Locke’s Political Thought: a Dialogic Essay on Some Problems of Interpretation’, History of Political Thought, 13: 4 (Winter 1992),
754–5.
Locke refers to Hooker thus at both 2T §5 (as an authority for his contention
that men are equal by nature), and at 2T §15 (to back up his reference to
an original state of nature). These are by no means isolated instances.
Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 46.
Keith Staveley, The Politics of Milton’s Prose Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 12.
Dumont puts this in terms of a distinction between ancient and modern
natural law. The basis of the former is a social order in conformity with the
order of nature, while the latter is rooted in a conception of men as selfsufficient, independent individuals. He also notes that although both tend
to describe all men as equal, for the former this is an ‘outworldly’ message,
concerned with mens’ spiritual dignity and without political consequences
in this world. Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 72–3, 37.
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols, ed. Georges Edelen
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.8.3; 1.10.1; 1.10.8;
1.10.4; F. J. Shirley, Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas (London:
SPCK, 1949), 227.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), bk. 1, ch. 4, §23.
Locke, Essay, bk. 1, ch. 4, §22, 24. The phrase tabula rasa does not actually
appear in the Essay, and is by no means his only image for the mind,
his conception of which appears to have been drastically simplified in its
reception. See William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Seliger, Locke, esp. ch. 8; Armitage et al., eds, Milton and Republicanism. This
is a difference of emphasis without significant implications in terms of the
structure of their theories. That there were both monarchists and republicans in the ranks of the radicals who sought to restrain Stuart power in
the 1680s testifies to their essential compatibility. Ashcraft, Revolutionary
Politics, 393.
Interpretations of (or assertions about) the implications of his thought tend
to address these questions in terms of social class, although positions on
170 Notes
the Two Treatises in this regard range from seeing Locke’s position as one
intended to buttress the power of an aristocratic elite, to arguing that it
assumes near-universal male suffrage. The issue of membership of society
and the right to give consent is one which, it seems, has to be addressed
by every major study of Locke. It is disputed whether the category of ‘the
people’ applies only to those who have the franchise, or whether those who
do not have the franchise are nonetheless members of society. With regard
specifically to the franchise, Locke’s silence on the issue is taken by some
as a sign that ideally it should apply to all men in possession of reason, and
by others as a sign of his satisfaction with existing property-qualifications.
With regard to these property-qualifications, some believe these arrangements with which he may have been satisfied excluded most of the male
population, while others believe most had the vote and that in some areas,
at least, the franchise was almost universal. For a recent debate in which
these issues are disputed, see David Wootton, ‘John Locke and Richard
Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics’, and Richard Ashcraft, ‘Simple Objections
and Complex Reality: Theorizing Political Radicalism in Seventeenthcentury England’, both in Political Studies 40 (1992), 79–98, 99–115; Ron
Becker, ‘The Ideological Commitment of Locke: Freemen and Servants in
the Two Treatises of Government ’; Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Locke Against
Democracy: Consent, Representation and Suffrage in the Two Treatises’;
Martin Hughes, ‘Locke, Taxation and Reform: a Reply to Wood’, Richard
Ashcraft, ‘The Radical Dimensions of Locke’s Political Thought: a Dialogic
Essay on Some Problems of Interpretation’, all in History of Political Thought
13: 4 (Winter 1992), 631–56, 657–89, 691–702, 703–72; Ellen Meiksins
Wood, ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Contexts: Not Only a Reply
to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke’, History of Political Thought 15: 3
(Autumn 1994), 323–72. No doubt the debate continues still.
49. This is the translation by Donald Mackenzie in CPW 4: 1.472. In J. A. St.
John, ed., The Prose Works of John Milton, 2 vols (London and New York:
George Bell and Sons, 1904), 1: 155, ‘middle class’ is rendered ‘middle sort’,
which is truer to seventeenth-century usage. For Milton as a ‘classical republican’ see for instance Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: an Essay in the
Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Sevententh-Century England (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1945), ch. 4; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s
Classical Republicanism’, in Armitage et al., eds, Milton and Republicanism,
3–24.
50. ‘Another way will be, to wel-qualifie and refine elections: not committing
all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those
of them that are rightly qualifi’d, to nominat as many as they will; and out
of that number others of a better breeding, to chuse a less number more
judiciously, till after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice,
they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices
the worthiest. To make the people fittest to chuse, and the chosen fittest to
govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education . . .’ (Readie, CPW
7.442–3).
51. Zagorin, Milton, Aristocrat and Rebel, 54. Locke, too, might well be excluded.
John Dunn, who emphasizes the importance of religion to Locke’s theoretical structure, professes himself unable to ‘conceive of constructing an
Notes 171
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters’, and
concludes ‘We have, it seems, come to accept in the broadest of terms the
politics of Locke but, while doing so, we have firmly discarded the reasons
which alone made them acceptable even to Locke.’ John Dunn, John Locke,
x, 267.
Despite his reference to Areopagitica, Habermas continually dates the establishment of a public sphere in England to the late seventeenth century,
sometimes specifically 1695, the year of the establishment of the Bank
of England. Public Sphere, 134, 32, 53, 57. David Norbrook attributes this
simplification, which ignores the English Revolution, to ‘his highly rationalistic portrait of the bourgeoisie’ which ‘fails to acknowledge the strong
religious motivations behind the emergence of the public sphere in
England’. ‘Early Modern Public Sphere’, 5. For an alternative account of
Milton’s implication in this history, the focus of which is more ‘street-level’
and historically specific, see Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Habermas, Public Sphere, 26–7.
Habermas, Public Sphere, 54–5, 19, 53.
Filmer, Patriarcha, 54; Habermas, Public Sphere, 52.
Habermas, Public Sphere, 90.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 11. Marx’s description, passing reference that it is, does
not do justice to the extensive use of Roman and republican imagery during
the English revolution, although the ascendancy of this language after 1660
was a function of a perceived need for compromise for which the language
of the Old Testament offered no room. Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language
in Dryden’s Poetry: the Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984) and, more specifically, ‘England, Israel, and the Triumph of Roman
Virtue’, in R. H. Popkin, ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).
For an account of Locke’s career as a revolutionary, and of the place of the
Two Treatises in this movement, see Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics.
Andrew, Shylock’s Rights, 100–1.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’,
in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History,
Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 65–6; Machiavellian Moment, 423–4, 435–6.
John Dunn argues persuasively against Macpherson’s view that Locke is primarily concerned to defend the right to unlimited accumulation (a reading
which reduces Locke’s concerns to issues of mere material interest). Locke
often sees the rich as mostly corrupt, and the virtuous as likely to remain
poor. Labour in one’s calling and the right to religious autonomy are the
central issues for Locke. John Locke, 214–19.
John Locke, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Edward Clarke in Thoughts Concerning
Education, ed. R. H. Quick, lxi–lxiv, lxii.
Andrew, Shylock’s Rights, 105–6. See also Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 188, where she concludes that for Locke private interest is excluded from political judgement
172 Notes
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
and, similarly, Seliger, Locke, who affirms that material interest and selfpreservation do not replace virtue in Locke’s politics.
Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, cited in Habermas, Public Sphere, 124.
Thus Chantal Mouffe, among others, argues that rights should not be
understood in terms of an ‘individualist framework’ but viewed ‘as “democratic rights” ’, ‘Radical Democracy’, 41.
Filmer remarked of Hobbes that ‘I consent with him about the rights of
exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it.’
‘Preface’ to the ‘Observations Concerning the Originall of Government,
Patriarcha, 239. But the means of acquiring it undo the rights. As Jean
Hampton argues, Hobbes’s insistence on the primacy of self-preservation is
ultimately incompatible with absolute obedience, and this incompatibility
spreads far wider than the few cases where Hobbes concedes its force.
However, the reconstruction she effects on this basis remains, as she shows,
devoid of the moral resources – the fundamental respect for liberty – which
would allow condemnation of such abuses of power as the persecution of
minorities or the technological mastery of subject-populations. Hampton,
Hobbes, chs 7–8.
As Laura Lunger Knoppers remarks of Milton’s position in this tract, ‘He
seems to fear the scandal that will come almost as much as the bondage.’
See ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’, in James
Grantham Turner and David Loewenstein, eds, Politics, Poetics, and
Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 223.
Filmer denied the distinction between servant, subject and slave: ‘As for the
names of subject, slave, and tyrant, they are not found in scripture, but
what we now call subject or slave, is there named no other than a servant:
I cannot learn that either the Hebrew, Greek or Latin have any proper
and original word for a tyrant or a slave, it seems these are names of later
invention, and taken up in disgrace of monarchical government.’ See
‘Observations Upon Aristotles Politiques’, Patriarcha, 188.
Habermas, Public Sphere, 84, 85, 88.
Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: a Study in the Origins of Radical
Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 47. Duncan
Ivison quotes Foucault’s reminder that ‘Liberty is a practice’ in the course
of an analysis, with specific reference to Locke, of the ‘governmentality,
wrapped up in the social contract tradition’ the liberal historiography of
which has tended to interpret power ‘only in terms of, first, its limitations
and, second, the prevention of its abuse – i.e. the supposed traditional concerns of juridical social contract theorists’. Ivison finds that ‘liberal theory
has always concerned itself with “the self”; not only by assuming a certain
relation to self, but by actively and practically seeking to promote and
produce this self through various institutions and means of socialization’.
Duncan Ivison, ‘Liberal Conduct’, History of the Human Sciences 6: 3 (1993),
25–59, 25, 27, 45.
Aldon T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: a
Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 278–9;
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967), 109.
Notes 173
71. Lefort, Political Forms, 223, 206–7.
72. Milton also uses the term ‘outlandish’ in its initial sense, ‘Of or belonging
to a foreign country’ (OED 1) in a way which nonetheless takes advantage
of the connotations it has accrued: ‘Foreign-looking . . . unfamiliar, strange;
hence odd, bizarre, uncouth. Also, immoderate, exceeding proper limits’
(OED 2). This is a prominent rhetorical strategy in Paradise Lost.
73. CPW 3.214. Charles’s coronation oaths were construed by the Independents
as just such a covenant or promise, which allowed him to be accused of
having broken faith with them and thus of having acted like a tyrant.
Hughes, ‘Introduction’ to CPW 3.88–90.
74. See e.g. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, ch. 1.
75. At the beginning of the passage the ‘King of Spaine’ served as the possible
external threat to whom a lawless ‘English’ king would be equivalent
(although, of course, the thrust of the comparison is that in being unreasonable he is disqualified from the title of Englishman). But this is a threat
from a tyrannical ruler, not from an entire people defined in terms of unreasonable lawlessness in a way which produces the ghostly coherence of a
‘European’ culture.
76. In letters written according to Cromwell’s orders the Doge of Venice, for
example, is congratulated on naval successes ‘against an enemy of the
Christian name’, and a later missive recommends that Richard Bradshaw,
ambassador to the Grand Duke of Muscovy, praise the Duke for frightening ‘the great Turk, the common foe of Christendome’ (The Miltonic State
Papers, CPW 5: 2.715, 786).
77. Perry Anderson, Lineages, 397. The classic analysis of the way ‘the Orient
has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea,
personality, experience’ is, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism (London:
Penguin, 1985).
78. Something similar is at work when Locke says of Filmer that he is popular
with ‘every one who would be as fashionable as French was at Court’,
or identifies his theory with the right of the ‘Grecian Christians’ to cast
off the ‘Turkish yoke’ (1T §5, 2T §192). For Locke, nationality is precontractual, although it appears – his treatment is inconclusive – that
one can expressly opt out of or into a nation. Grant, Locke’s Liberalism,
124–7. For the importance, in the formation of nationalism, of notions of
the nation as a community one’s ties to which are ‘natural’ see Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 143–4.
79. Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska, 1983), 172–8.
80. Lefort, Political Forms, 301, 272, Democracy, 233, 13, Political Forms, 287.
81. Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution, 56.
82. Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and Ethics: an Interview’ in Paul Rabinow, ed.,
The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 373–80, 379.
83. As Lefort remarks, ‘whilst reason and justice become solemn references
which are available to all, they are subject to interpretation by all’, and
consequently ‘The emergence of the individual does not merely mean that
he is destined to control his own destiny; he has also been dispossessed
of assurance as to his identity’. Democracy, 180.
174 Notes
2. Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven
1. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 39.
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), 222.
3. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 222. Of course, Foucault holds that the state
‘can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole
series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary
basis for the great negative forms of power’, but these more positive (in the
sense of productive, creative) power relations are always apprehended as
forms of domination, and the emphasis is always on how ‘the State consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations which render
its functioning possible’. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’ (interview
with Allesandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino) in Colin Gordon, ed.,
Power / Knowledge: Selected Interiews and Other Writings 1972–77, trans. Colin
Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980), 109–33, 122.
4. Compare Richard Rorty, ‘Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: the Case of
Foucault’, in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 197: from the
position, shared by Rorty, that ‘human subjectivity’ is ‘a contingent product
of contingently existing forces . . . he concludes, at least in his anarchist
moments, that every social institution is equally unjustifiable, that all of
them are on a par. All of them exert “normalizing power”.’
5. Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Gordon, ed., Power / Knowledge, 78–108,
102; Hobbes, Leviathan, 264 / 109. Michael Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel
Foucault’, in Foucault: a Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986), 51–68, 59–60 makes a similar point: ‘For neither
Hobbes nor Foucault does the constitution or the law or even the actual
workings of the political system make any difference.’
6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 698–700 / 377–8; Rorty, ‘Moral Identity and Private
Autonomy’, 197.
7. Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500–1800, trans. Ernest
Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 61; Thomas
McCarthy, ‘Introduction’ to Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
xv: ‘the social-theoretical reading of modernity inspired by the theory of
power turns out to be simply an inversion of the standard humanist reading
it is meant to replace’.
8. Habermas finds Foucault guilty of ‘purifying the concept of individuation
of all connotations of self-determination and self-realization’ in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 287.
9. The other two ‘causes of quarrell’ are ‘Competition’, which ‘maketh men
invade for gain’, and ‘Diffidence’, which causes men to do likewise ‘for
Safety’ (Lev. 185 / 61–2). These are desires for power as a means to liberty,
in the sense of the ability to do things, the ‘present means, to obtain some
future Good’, and power as a means to enhance the capacity for selfpreservation (Lev. 184–5 / 61; 150 / 41). As Thomas Spragens argues in Politics of Motion, 63–5, 182–3, both of these are continuous with a notion of
‘Life it selfe’ as ‘but motion’ (Lev. 130 / 29) in a universe made up of matter
Notes 175
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
in endless motion (with endless meaning both ‘unceasing’ and ‘without a
larger goal or telos’).
Leo Strauss, ‘On the Spirit of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in K. C. Brown,
ed., Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 1–29, 18–19.
Hampton, Hobbes, 26–7.
Quoted in Hampton, Hobbes, 26–7.
Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 13, 54–6. By contrast, customary
status society, ‘while it permits perennial forcible invasion between rivals
at the top, and occasional forcible invasion between classes or sections of
classes, does not permit perennial invasion, either forcible or otherwise, of
individuals by individuals throughout the society’ (50).
Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 37, 40, 44; ‘Introduction’ to Hobbes,
Leviathan, 12.
Macpherson, ‘Introduction’ to Leviathan, 51–2: Macpherson argues that
despite his dislike of the bourgeoisie, he nonetheless unwittingly produced
models of man and society which ‘were valid only as models of bourgeois
man and society’.
Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes and Individualism’ in G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan,
eds, Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 81–105, 101.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in K. C.
Brown, ed., Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 185–236, 217,
219, 223.
Quoted in Thomas, ‘Social Origins’, 190.
Compare Thomas, ‘Social Origins’, 189–90: ‘The picture of human nature
which Hobbes constructs is . . . reminiscent of a feudal society, or at least of
one in which status is all-important. . . . the obsessive passion of Hobbes’s
men seems to be not acquisitiveness but pride. . . . They are ready to engage
in money-making, it is true, yet not from possessiveness, but vanity.’
Anderson, Lineages, 18, 23.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1965), 403, 385, 261, 464, 385, 401.
Neal Wood also argues that Hobbes ‘transformed the crisis of the aristocracy into the universal condition of humanity’, but does so from the
position that ‘Seventeenth-century England cannot be accurately termed
“bourgeois”, or “capitalist” or a “market society”.’ See ‘Thomas Hobbes and
the Crisis of the English Aristocracy’, History of Political Thought 1: 3
(Autumn / December 1980), 437–52, 452, 438.
Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell 1983), 36.
Macpherson, ‘Introduction’ to Leviathan, 55–6; see also Possessive Individualism, 93.
Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and
Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977),
418.
See Jonathan Barry, ‘Introduction’ to Barry and Brooks, eds, Middling Sort,
1: ‘Though literary critics, politicians and students have continued to see
early modern England in terms of the rise of the middle class, few professional historians have dared to do so; indeed, the issue has hardly seemed
worthy of discussion. With a few exceptions, even Marxist historians have
176 Notes
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
adopted alternative social classifications, playing down the importance of
middle-class or bourgeois groups during this period.’
Barry, ‘Introduction’, 6–9, 2.
Shani d’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester:
Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’, in Barry and
Brooks, eds, The Middling Sort, 181–207, 186–7.
Barry, ‘Introduction’ to Barry and Brooks, eds, The Middling Sort, 5.
Keith Wrightson, ‘ “Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Barry
and Brooks, eds, The Middling Sort, 28–51, 45.
Barry, ‘Introduction’, 17–18.
Jonathan Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds, The Middling
Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994), 84–5, 86, 89, 98.
Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 100, 101.
Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 23.
Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 53.
Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 103.
Ashcraft, ‘Radical Dimensions’, History of Political Thought 13: 4 (Winter
1992) 703–72, 741, 763–4, 752–3. These classes were not politically
uniform, but any discourse which was to appeal to them had to address
their worldview, or incorporate their political imaginary.
Habermas, Public Sphere, 26–7.
Michael C. Schoenfeldt argues that Satan’s rebellion is against courtly deference, and that his account of heavenly behaviour is ‘distressingly corroborated by the non-Satanic glimpses of heaven we are granted’, as when
God decrees that to the Son ‘shall bow / All knees in heaven’ (PL 5.607–8).
The ironies of Satan using the language of freedom for a servile cause,
according to Schoenfeldt, ‘do not fully assuage the anxiety generated by
the proximity between Milton and Satan as revolutionary propagandists’.
See ‘ “Among Unequals What Society?”: Strategic Courtesy and Christian
Humility in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 28 (1992), 69–90, 69, 72, 71.
Fallon recognizes Milton’s contempt for earthly monarchs who try to
imitate God. Robert Thomas Fallon, Captain or Colonel: the Soldier in Milton’s
Life and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 223, 217; Roger
Lejosne, ‘Milton, Satan, Salmasius and Abdiel’, in Armitage et al., eds, Milton
and Republicanism, 106–17, 107, 109.
G. Wilson Knight believes that Milton has a ‘royalistic imagination’ and
repeatedly asserts that the Son embodies Milton’s commitment to constitutional monarchy (e.g. ‘We are, I think, forced to the equation: Milton’s
Messiah = the Crown of our constitutional monarchy.’). Knight concedes
that ‘Milton as a great poet is probably telling us more about himself and
his life’s work than he can be supposed as a man to have understood’, but
takes this as licence to refer to ‘the bishops and the Stuart tyranny’ as ‘his
opponents (as Milton saw them)’. G. Wilson Knight, Chariot of Wrath: the
Message of John Milton to Democracy at War (London: Faber and Faber, 1942),
66, 184 (see also 132, 150, 154), 136, 138, 127, 134. Knight also sees a
relation between Satan and Cromwell and the Puritan and parliamentary
cause more generally, as do, rather differently, Robert Fallon and Sharon
Notes 177
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
Achinstein. Robert Fallon, Captain or Colonel, 152–4; Sharon Achinstein,
Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), ch. 5, esp. 205–6; William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1961), esp. ch. 3; William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’,
in W. H. Stevenson, ed., William Blake: Selected Poetry (London: Penguin,
1988), plate 6, lines 10–12; Walter Bagehot, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’, in
Literary Studies, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911), 2: 321.
Bennett, Reviving Liberty, ch. 2; Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution, 156–7; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London:
Faber and Faber, 1979), 393.
Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution, 107; Seliger, John Locke,
ch. 11.
C. S. Lewis, commenting on critical views in which ‘there is felt to be a disquieting contrast between republicanism for the earth and royalism for
Heaven’ argues that ‘all such opinions are false and argue a deep misunderstanding of Milton’s central thought’. This thought allows kingship
where there is natural superiority, although in asserting that in holding this
position Milton ‘belongs to the ancient orthodox tradition of European
ethics’ Lewis, while correct, downplays the significance of Milton using this
tradition against kings rather than to bolster their position by affirming
that society, and above all the king, embody such relations of natural superiority. Preface, 73. Lejosne argues that Milton ‘made monarchy in Heaven
justify republicanism on earth’ in ‘Milton, Satan, Salmasius and Abdiel’,
106.
Quoted from Salamsius, Defensio Regia Pro Carolo I in CPW 4:1.367 n92.
As Knott notes, Milton seems to have been ‘unwilling to compromise
Satan’s dignity by endowing him with the attributes of a medieval demon’.
Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 131. Milton compromises Satan’s dignity in other,
more psychological ways. Robert Fallon describes ‘the allegorical figure of
medieval iconography, a hairy-shanked, cloven-hoofed, horned monster,
thwarted at every turn by the forces of good, skewered by serene angels
with golden lances and outfaced by faithful saints armed with the dazzling
light of their sanctity’. Robert Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s Political
Imagery (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1995), 55.
Robert Fallon notes that it seems close to the form of government (representative) Milton recommended, but it should also be recognized, as Stevie
Davies has outlined, that it seems close to Turkish, Oriental, Imperial
Roman and generally barbarian forms of government which Milton
despised. Fallon, Captain or Colonel, 152–4; Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship
in “Paradise Lost”: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), ch. 2.
Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution, 155–7, 91–9.
Davies, Images of Kingship, ch. 4, esp. 163: ‘Within the unlikely structure of
feudal lordship, the poet has been able to demonstrate the deepest meanings of human liberty and equality’. Christopher Kendrick, Milton: a Study
in Ideology and Form ( New York: Methuen, 1986), 181–5. Carrol B. Cox,
‘Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost’,
178 Notes
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
Milton Studies 23 (1987), 165–96, 176. Charles Durham, ‘ “To stand approv’d
in sight of God”: Abdiel, Obedience, and Hierarchy in Paradise Lost’, Milton
Quarterly 26: 1, 15–20, 17.
Davies, Images of Kingship, 135.
Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 28–9.
Robert H. West, Milton and the Angels (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1955), 134–5.
Davies, Images of Kingship, 144.
See West, Milton and the Angels, 133. Uriel is ‘one of the seven / Who in
God’s presence, nearest to his throne / Stand ready at command, and are
his eyes / That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth’. Raphael
is described as ‘the sociable spirit’. Michael is ‘of celestial armies prince’
(PL 3.648–51, 5.221, 6.44).
Davies remarks: ‘it will be noticed that Milton excluded from his class
system of Heaven any of the serf or thrall class. His feudal structure, confined to a community of peers, each with heraldic emblems, does not rest
upon any unfree element.’ Images of Kingship, 130.
A similar pattern can be found in Locke’s Two Treatises (2T §54): ‘Though I
have said above (2) “That all men by nature are equal”, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of “equality”. Age or virtue may give men a
just precedency. Excellency of parts or merit may place others above the
common level. Birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to
pay an observance to those to whom Nature, gratitude, or other respects,
may have made it due; and yet all this consists with the equality which all
men are in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another, which was
the equality I there spoke of as proper to the business in hand, being that
equal right which every man hath to his natural freedom, without being
subjected to the will or authority of any other man.’ See also 1T §67.
For the social vocabulary of feudalism as one imbued with the necessary
sacred overtones, see Davies, Images of Kingship, 136–7, 153–4.
Davies, Images of Kingship, 131–2.
Skinner, Foundations 2: 254–63, 264.
Perry Anderson, Lineages, 402. This historical process is perhaps the key to
the fact that, as Stella Revard notes, Renaissance versions of the War in
Heaven gave Satan’s pride and ambition ‘specific political ramifications’, by
contrast with the ‘medieval tradition’ which had tended to make them
‘private or personal sins’. Stella Purce Revard, The War in Heaven: Paradise
Lost and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1980), 200–1. Milton’s deployment of a ‘feudal’ vocabulary is apparent not
only in the Defences, to which Davies refers, but from the first, in Tenure,
in which, as Victoria Kahn has noted, Milton reactivates the ‘literal
meaning of feudal tenure’ to suggest that ‘the king is a bondsman who
holds his office or “tenure” from the people on the condition that he fulfil
his covenant with them’, while, conversely, he argues that ‘For the king to
hold his subjects in feudal subjection is to arrogate to himself divine authority.’ Victoria Kahn, ‘The Metaphorical Contract in Milton’s Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates’, in Armitage et al., eds, Milton and Republicanism, 82–105,
100–1. This conforms closely to Skinner’s account of Mornay in Foundations
2: 332–3.
Notes 179
61. Hobbes’s analysis of the present significance of noble titles includes an
implicit historical narrative of turbulent nobles faced with increasing
redundancy: ‘In processe of time these offices of Honour, by occasion of
trouble, and for reasons of good and peaceable government, were turned
into meer Titles; serving for the most part, to distinguish the precedence,
place, and order of subjects in the Commonwealth’ (Lev. 45 / 159).
62. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels’, 180, 176, 177.
63. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels’, 188.
64. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels’, 187. Cox is not quite right to say (176) that Abdiel
is described only in terms of the principle that explains his action. He has
a place ‘among the Seraphim’ (PL 5.804), and this is significant: that Abdiel
is of lower rank than Satan emphasizes still further the extent to which
what is important in the new order is not the person but the principle.
There are disagreements regarding the precise details of Abdiel’s status.
Revard, for instance, describes him as ‘humble’, while Lejosne argues that
as a seraph he ‘cannot rank far beneath his leader in the angelic hierarchies’. War in Heaven, 63, 241; Lejosne, ‘Milton, Satan, Salmasius and
Abdiel’, 117 n58.
65. Davies, Images of Kingship, 129.
66. Leo Strauss, ‘On the Spirit of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, 18. Hobbes did
recognize that a few noble spirits were capable of an obedience to law
inspired not by fear but by ‘a glory, or pride’ in their honesty, but this was
too rare to be a subject of political consideration. Thomas, ‘Social Origins’,
202–3.
67. Hobbes, ‘The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sr. William D’avenant’s Preface before
Gondibert’, in J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3
vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 2: 61. In another essay Hobbes declares
that a ‘Heroick Poem’ should profit the reader by ‘accession of Prudence,
Justice, Fortitude, by the example of such Great and Noble Persons as he
introduceth’, but he also asserts that ‘the work of an Heroick Poem is to
raise admiration, principally, for three Vertues, Valour, Beauty, and Love’,
and describes the glory of a hero as residing ‘in Courage, Nobility, and other
Vertues of Nature, or in the Command he has over other men’, suggesting
a less moralized way of apprehending the genre. ‘Preface to Homer’s
Odysses, translated by Tho. Hobbes of Malmsbury . . . concerning The
Vertues of a Heroick Poem’ in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays, 2: 67–8.
68. Stephen Fallon notes the resemblance between Satan’s view of God and
Hobbes’s in the course of his argument that ‘Milton makes devils out of
Hobbesian men.’ Milton Among the Philosophers, 220–1.
69. This is most evident in his remarks on the subordination of politics to religion, e.g. ‘The most frequent pretext of Sedition . . . hath a long time proceeded from a difficulty, not yet sufficiently resolved, of obeying at once,
both God, and Man, then when their Commandements are one contrary
to the other’ (Lev. 609 / 321; see also 627–8 / 333–4, 704–8 / 381–3).
70. John M. Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967), xvi.
71. According to William Empson, no one in the poem ‘ever mentions that the
Son is to die by torture’ because ‘Milton would not dirty his fingers with
the bodily horror so prominent in the religion’. Milton’s God (London:
180 Notes
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
Chatto and Windus, 1961), 128. Another possible reason is the Puritan
assertion that Christ’s exaltation was due to his divinity and not causally
related to his human suffering, although Milton is at odds with this line of
thought in asserting Christ’s merit. Boyd M. Berry, Process of Speech: Puritan
Religious Writing and ‘Paradise Lost’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), 26–7.
For instance, in the discussion between Father and Son in Paradise Lost the
Son offers ‘life for life’, and the Father replies that by taking on human
nature the Son can ‘redeem’ it and be ‘in Adam’s room / The head of all
mankind’ (PL 3.236, 281, 285–6).
This distinction would seem to fit Lewalski’s description of the difference
in emphasis in Protestant as opposed to Catholic and specifically Ignatian
spiritual meditation. Important to the Ignatian method was ‘compositio loci,
or vivid imagination of a scene by means of the memory and the senses’.
The crucifixion was one such scene. Protestant meditation, by contrast,
sought less ‘to recreate and imagine biblical scenes in vivid detail’ than to
‘engage the mind in an effort to penetrate deeply into the motives and
motions of the psyche, and also to understand the self as the very embodiment of the subject meditated upon. The Word was still to be made flesh,
though now in the self of the meditator.’ Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant
Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 147, 150.
Durham notes that he is ‘the only character in the poem except the Son
who is directly praised by the Father’. ‘To stand approv’d’, 18.
Cox, ‘Citizen Angels’, 176–7; John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and
the World (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993), 260.
For typicality as a defining trait of the novel see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30. Of course Paradise Lost, unlike the novel as defined by Lukàcs,
is not ‘the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’. But although
for Lukàcs ‘the epic cosmos creates a whole which is too organic for any
part of it to become so enclosed within itself, so dependent upon itself, as
to find itself as an interiority – i.e. to become a personality’, something akin
to or perhaps prefiguring this occurs in the scenes of isolated trial which
are so recurrent in Milton’s poems. Georg Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel:
A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans.
Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 88, 66.
Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford University Press, 1967);
Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution, 151.
Consequently it was a belief Hobbes tried to combat: ‘But suppose that a
Christian King should from this Foundation Jesus is the Christ, draw some
false consequences, that is to say, make some superstructions of Hay, or
Stubble, and command the teaching of the same; yet seeing St. Paul says,
he shal be saved; much more shall he be saved, that teacheth them by his
command; and much more yet, he that teaches not, but onely beleeves his
lawfull Teacher’ (Lev. 624 / 330).
Revard regards the Son as ‘the finest example of creaturely heroism’. War
in Heaven, 252.
Cox, ‘Citizen Angels’, 177.
Revard, War in Heaven, 165, 166.
Notes 181
82. The foremost vice of Hobbesian man is pride. According to Alan Ryan’s
interpretation of Hobbes, ‘To be proud is to wish to emerge on top of whatever competition is at issue’, and since ‘the only test of success is the envy
of others’, it ‘demands the simultaneous abasement of others. It is therefore intrinsically antisocial and must be stamped out’. Ryan, ‘Hobbes and
Individualism’, 103. My argument suggests that Hobbes is less concerned
with ushering in a new era of Christian humility than in allowing the desire
for recognition legitimate expression in the form of competition for the
sovereign’s favour, so that other manifestations can be denounced as pride.
83. Stanley Fish’s account of these episodes is no doubt theologically accurate
and is certainly illuminating, but it hardly does justice to their social
meaning, which is responsible for much of their charge. For Fish, Abdiel,
in his fidelity to God, is an exemplar of ‘true heroism’, but his actions are
in no sense ‘necessary’ to God. The overall lesson is that ‘The desire to serve
God is a particularly subtle form of pride if in fact it is a desire to feel needed
and important.’ Surprised by Sin: the Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (London:
Macmillan, 1967), 184, 185, 188. The partial nature of this reading is suggested by Fish’s recurrent use of Richard Baxter, and other Calvinists and
Presbyterians, as glosses on Milton’s texts (for Baxter see 12, 241–4). The
title of Baxter’s The Arrogancy of Reason, to which Fish refers several times,
is itself strikingly un-Miltonic; as is Baxter’s attitude to self-esteem, a
Miltonic virtue which Baxter includes in the following catalogue of vices:
‘Independence, Selfe-esteem, Selfe-judgment, and Self-will’ (Baxter, Sancta
Sophia, cited in OED). John Rumrich makes cognate criticisms of Fish’s
reading in Milton Unbound, 14, 30–2, 47, and ‘Uninventing Milton’, Modern
Philology 87: 3 (February 1990), 249–65, 263: ‘Abdiel himself describes his
resistance as a triumph of reason.’
84. Elias, Court Society, 199, 194.
85. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 478.
86. Empson, Milton’s God, 111.
87. Locke, Thoughts Concerning Education, §50, 42.
88. Elias, Court Society, 240–6.
89. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 1, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 150–2.
90. Elias, Court Society, 94–5.
91. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2, State Formation and Civilization, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 272.
92. Roy F. Baumeister, Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 164–5: the notion of an inner self is a
modern reification (a rendering concrete of something abstract) whereby
the causes of choices – motives – have come to seem ‘to be located in . . .
persons themselves . . . in some mysterious, inaccessible container called
the self’. See also 183: ‘The inner self is the repository of hidden metacriteria that supposedly form the structure of one’s motives and intentions
and explain one’s acts. It therefore follows that we teach our children to
have inner selves by forcing them to develop and to elaborate just such a
set of metacriteria.’ Reason (CPW 1.843–4) recognizes the importance of an
‘approved good life in the eye and testimony of the Church’ In the Second
Defence Milton proclaims with satisfaction that ‘What I have done hath, of
182 Notes
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
it self, given me a Good Conscience within, a good Esteem among the
Good, and, with all, this Just and Honest Liberty of Speaking.’ It should be
noted that conscience takes priority over esteem. Quoted in Griffin, Regaining Paradise, 27. Locke considers ‘Reputation . . . though it be not the true
Principle and Measure of Virtue, (for that is the Knowledge of a Man’s Duty,
and the Satisfaction it is to obey his Maker, in following the dictates of that
Light God had given him, with the Hopes of Acceptation and Reward) yet
it is that which comes nearest to it.’ Thoughts Concerning Education, §61.
Elias, Court Society, 105, 111.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 37–8, 32, 129.
This is my translation of Jean de La Bruyère, ‘De la cour’ §2, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 215: ‘Un homme qui sait
la cour est maître de son geste, de ses yeux et de son visage; il est profond,
impénétrable; il dissimule les mauvais offices, sourit à ses ennemis, contraint son humeur, déguise ses passions, dément son coeur, parle, agit
contre ses sentiments.’
Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the
English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 190.
Edward Phillips, ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton’, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The
Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable and Company, 1932), 49–82, 72–3.
As Margot Heinemann has argued, Puritan hostility to the public stage was
due not to an aversion to drama in principle, but to doubts about its
content. See Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama
under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Milton, of course, wrote several dramas of different kinds, and Paradise Lost
itself started life as a tragedy.
Elias, Court Society, 202. It is true that it is also a typically ‘dramatic’
moment, but this has much to do with the fact that a great deal of the most
memorable Elizabethan and Jacobean drama deals with a courtly context.
This is referred to in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 367.
Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore
M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 39.
For such a suggestion, see Kenneth Gross, ‘Satan and the Romantic Satan:
a Notebook’, in Nyquist and Ferguson, eds, Re-membering Milton, 328.
This is my translation of Michèle Le Doeuff, Recherches sur L’Imaginaire
Philosophique (Paris: Payot, 1980), 167: ‘Nos campagnes offrent mille examples d’une telle inclusion, dans un espace ··sublimeÒÒ, d’une contre-figure
du sublime. Inclusion paradoxale cependant, dans le cas de Pont-Aven au
moins: ces personnages grotesques sont en même temps écrasés par le toit
– ils soutiennent le toit parce qu’ils s’efforcent de le soulever pour s’en
libérer. Une subtile mise en service des valeurs négatives, qui servent, dans
leur effort même pour cesser de servir.’
Marcia Landy, ‘ “Bounds Prescrib’d”: Milton’s Satan and the Politics of
Deviance’, Milton Studies 14 (1980), 117–34, 130, 118.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London:
Methuen, 1969), 351, 267–8.
Quoted in Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1981), 120.
Notes 183
107. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 34, 104, 184, 200, 201; ‘The Eye of Power’,
in Gordon et al., eds, Power / Knowledge, 146–65, 155.
108. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
109. Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, 154.
110. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 128, 29–30.
111. Terry Eagleton, ‘Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism’, in Slavoj
Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 179–226, 218. This is an
excerpt from chs 4 and 5 of Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991).
112. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 3: the Care of the Self, trans. Robert
Hurley (London: Penguin, 1986), 239.
3. Masculinity and Marriage in Paradise Lost
1. Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney
to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 195.
2. James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations
in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1–2, quotes William Heale
on marriage as ‘a state which either imparadizeth a man in the Eden of
felicitie, or else exposeth him unto a world of misery’. Griffin notes that
Milton’s ‘divine Hymn on Marriage’ (Thomson) ‘was cited with extraordinary frequency in the eighteenth century’. Griffin, Regaining Paradise, 125.
3. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, Lives of the English Poets (London: Dent,
1925), 93.
4. The literature is so copious that only a sample can be referred to here.
Perhaps the classic case for the prosecution is the chapter drafted by Sandra
Gilbert, ‘Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s
Bogey,’ in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Christine Froula’s ‘When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing
the Canonical Economy’, Critical Inquiry 10 (1983), 321–47, is perhaps a
more frequent point of reference. Defences and partial defences are perhaps
more noteworthy, since they are harder to make. The longest is certainly
Joseph Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987),
which tends to credit the activities of Milton’s female and feminist readers
to Milton. William Shullenberger’s ‘Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost
and Feminist Criticism’, Milton Quarterly 20: 3 (1986), 69–85, is an interesting engagement with much of the literature, although Shullenberger is
brave to defend Milton’s thinking on sexual difference by reference to feminist theories which affirm the value of certain traits which are accepted to
be more highly developed in women. Stevie Davies, while recognizing
the problematic aspects of Milton’s views on these issues, nevertheless seeks
to emphasize his openness to the value of the feminine in The Feminine
Reclaimed: the Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1986). Representative of the ‘liberal’ defence
of Milton is Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Milton on Women – Yet Once More’,
Milton Studies 6 (1974), 3–20, as is Diane Kelsey McColley’s Milton’s
Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). More recently Regina
Schwartz, ‘Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: the Case of Paradise Lost’,
184 Notes
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Representations 34 (Spring 1991), 85–103, and Deirdre Keenan McChrystal,
‘Redeeming Eve’, English Literary Renaissance 23: 3 (1993), 490–508, have,
in rather different terms, argued that Eve exceeds any attempt to reduce
her to the logic of orthodox patriarchalism.
This chapter shares common ground in this respect with Mary Nyquist, who
argues for an excavation of the discursive moment which produces the
various interpretive possibilities explored by the critics referred to in the
last footnote in ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts
and in Paradise Lost’, in Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds, Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York: Methuen,
1987).
Nyquist calls Paradise Lost, in its treatment of marriage and sexuality, ‘a
bourgeois proto-novel that is distinctively modern’ in ‘Fallen Differences,
Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History’, in Geoff
Bennington and Robert Young, eds, Post-structuralism and the Question of
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 212–43, 236. Griffin,
Regaining Paradise, 90, and Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People,
360, make similar points, as do many others.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 103.
Milton is unusual in arguing for divorce on the grounds of ‘unfitness’.
Furthermore, by making love the essence of marriage Milton removed
marriage from the realm of law and into that of ‘affective psychology’. Only
a wife could be unfit since, while women were made for marriage, marriage
was made for men. John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony: a Study
of the Divorce Tracts and ‘Paradise Lost’ (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), 51–2, 8, 89.
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the
Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1990), 172, 185, 188.
Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Generalized and the Concrete Other: the
Kohlberg–Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory’, in Seyla Benhabib
and Drucilla Cornell, eds, Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender
in Late-Capitalist Societies (Cambridge: Polity and Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987), 83.
A very useful history of the Catholic Church’s attitude to sexuality is to be
found in John T. Noonan, Contraception: a History of Its Treatment by the
Catholic Theologians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). Noonan
quotes, among many others, Saint Augustine’s opinion, expressed in The
Good of Marriage, that ‘no one perfect in piety seeks to have children except
spiritually’, and Saint Gregory’s belief that ‘This pleasure cannot be without
fault’ (129, 151).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 120–6. The installation of sexuality at the heart of the self described by Foucault was by no means merely
repressive in its implications, since otherwise it would make no sense that
it was applied first ‘in the economically privileged and politically dominant
classes’. It was in fact, at first, a question more of the self-affirmation of a
class than of the subjugation of another (although perhaps the two are
inseparable); a matter of the discursive development of, identification with,
Notes 185
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
and conformity to a class body. The blue blood of the nobility had given
way to the sound organism and healthy sexuality of the bourgeoisie.
Turner, One Flesh, 75; Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony, 1, 63.
William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London: Printed by John Haviland
for William Bladen, 1622), Second Treatise, pt. 2, 131–2, 133, 125–31.
Unless noted otherwise, quotations on pages 84–6 are from this passage.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James
Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis,
1953–74), 21: 99.
Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 157.
Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 90.
This is noted by Marshall Grossman in ‘Augustine, Spenser, Milton and the
Christian Ego’, New Orleans Review 11 (1984), 16.
Bruce Thomas Boehrer makes the same point in ‘Paradise Lost and the
General Epistle of James: Milton, Augustine, Lacan’, Exemplaria: Journal of
Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4: 2 (1992), 295–316, 304, and
develops it in a similar direction to that which will be taken in the present
chapter. The chief convergence between his argument and mine is that
Raphael misses the point that desire is intrinsic to love, and is consequently
unhelpful in telling Adam to be rational, ‘for rationality is Adam’s biggest
single problem’ (308–9). However, Boehrer teases out the deconstructive
implications of the similarities between the supposed effects of lust and
those of divinely sanctioned desire (313), whereas I suggest that it is the
ultimate impossibility of such a conflation which both exposes and enforces
the poem’s masculinism. It is precisely insofar as desire cannot be reduced
to the merely fleshly experience of lust that Adam’s authority and Eve’s
obedience become unquestionable imperatives.
This point will be developed in the course of this chapter. Woman can be
the vestige of something left behind by the almost total phallus. In other
words, she is the objet a which enables man to enjoy everything, an Encore
or surplus of enjoyment. Or, as Luce Irigaray puts it in her critique of Lacan,
woman becomes the guardian of the corporeality masculinity has had to
sacrifice. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979), 195, 198, 267–70; ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic
of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Tavistock, in association with Routledge, 1989), 322–3; Malcolm
Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), 149–56; Bice Benvenuto and Roger
Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1986), 189; Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 118.
For the Puritan adoption of this line of argument see Edmund Leites,
The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1986), 80–4.
Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), 590–1 (bk. 14, ch. 26).
Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism, 231. As Halkett puts it, ‘the relation-
186 Notes
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
ship between Adam and Eve, the enjoyment of human love, is the epitome
of all the delights of the Garden itself’. Milton and the Idea of Matrimony,
102.
The inconsistency is due largely to an inability to conceive of sexuality in
anything other than fallen terms. For instance Giovanni Francesco
Loredano’s Life of Adam (1640) contains an Adam made for perpetual virginity but, rather puzzlingly, a dazzling Eve with ‘everything proper for a
woman in reference to Procreation and Love’. The narrator remarks that
‘Women have derived from heaven so sweet a Tyranny into their faces, that
the denying them the subjection of all hearts is an effect rather of stupidity than of prudence.’ Thus, as Turner puts it, ‘Loredano effectively antedates the fall, accuses God of entrapment, and “pleads Adam’s excuse.” ’
One Flesh, 251–2, 274–5.
Thomas N. Corns, Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (Harlow: Longman, 1994), 65.
McColley, Milton’s Eve, 35–9; see also Pateman, The Sexual Contract, ch. 6.
This is a formula which, in its negation of a direct female relation to the
divine, cuts the ground from under the assertion of the right of women to
active participation in religious matters based on the equality of all souls
before God, and bolsters the nuclear family. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s
Spenser: the Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 224–5.
It is in this overarching sense that Milton’s conception of individuality is
oedipal. John P. Rumrich, in Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), makes an interesting
argument that Milton should be understood as typifying ‘a narcissistic, preOedipal problematic’ deriving from insufficient separation from the mother
at the father’s behest (81). However, as Benjamin argues, ‘The elevation of
the paternal ideal of separation is a kind of Trojan horse within which is
hidden the belief that we actually long to return to oceanic oneness with
mother, that we would all sink back into “limitless narcissism” were it not
for the paternal imposition of difference. The equation oneness = mother =
narcissism is implicit in the oedipal model’ (148).
Freud, Standard Edition 11: 245, cited in Bellamy, ‘Milton’s Freud’, 47. Since
Stephen Greenblatt’s essay ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, in
Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds, Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), the possible anachronism of
the use of psychoanalytic theory in the interpretation of early modern texts
has been the source of some anxiety, an anxiety in which this chapter does
not share for the following reasons. First, such fears can result in an excessive caution which underestimates the extent to which historical interpretation is impossible without the assumption of a measure of resemblance.
See Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in
Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 228. More specifically, the
historical constitution of the subject of psychoanalysis, whereby individualization increases as consciousness becomes more regularized and opaque
to the drives, and gratification is privatized, seems particularly far advanced
in Milton. See Elias, Civilizing Process, 2: 233–4; 240–1; 286. Anthony Low
argues that ‘Freud drew heavily on Milton when creating his theories. . . .
Together with Moses . . . Milton was one of the two fatherly figures with
whom Freud felt a particular need to struggle – a need to fear and depose
him.’ Low, Reinvention of Love, 249 n45.
Notes 187
31. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 58–9 (see also 61). Laura Lunger Knoppers
ponders the implication of Paradise Lost in discourses in which love and
marriage become sites of discipline in ‘Rewriting the Protestant Ethic: Discipline and Love in Paradise Lost’, English Literary History 58 (1991), 545–9,
but her concern is primarily with the subjection of the wife.
32. Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour: or, A Treatise of Marriage (London:
Printed by Th: Harper for Philip Nevil, 1642), 150.
33. Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in John Rickman,
ed., A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1953),
240–1.
34. Quoted in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 190.
35. Elias, Civilizing Process, 1: 180, 166.
36. According to Quilligan, the use of this word, which protects against trespass on their privacy, is Spenserian and unique in Milton’s oeuvre. Milton’s
Spenser, 235–6.
37. There had been a movement of reappraisal since Erasmus, and the Roman
Catechism of 1566 contradicted Augustine and Catholic orthodoxy in
making mutual support and comfort a chief purpose of marriage. But,
perhaps as a consequence of a need to define the Church’s doctrine against
that of the reformers, the position affirmed at the Council of Trent, that to
hold that marriage was a superior condition to celibacy was ‘anathema’,
remained the orthodox view. Edmund Leites, Puritan Conscience and Modern
Sexuality, 77–8, 82.
38. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 102.
39. Knott interprets the phrase as evocative of ‘a devious battle of the sexes’ in
Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 139.
40. The belief that ‘behaving too ardently with one’s wife amounts to treating
her as an adulteress’, dates back to classical times and persists ‘for a very
long time’, according to Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, 3, The
Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1988), 177.
41. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 153. Lewalski describes the Bower in
terms of its difference from ‘Petrarchan idolatry’, but nevertheless describes
Eve’s lyric ‘With thee conversing I forget all time’ as ‘akin’ to a Petrarchan
sonnet, albeit without postlapsarian ‘frustrations and anxieties’. Barbara
Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 194, 188–9
(referring to PL 4.639–56).
42. David Aers and Bob Hodge note the preponderance of passive constructions
and of actions which are scarcely less passive in this passage. They ‘straight
side by side were laid’, Eve does not refuse the rites of love, and Adam
doesn’t turn away from her (PL 4.741–3). David Aers and Bob Hodge,
‘ “Rational Burning”: Milton on Sex and Marriage’, in David Aers, Gunther
Kress and Bob Hodge, Literature, Language and Society in England 1580–1680
(London: Gill and Macmillan, 1981), 27.
43. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of ‘Paradise Lost’
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 58.
44. It might also be usefully recalled, in the light of the argument to come, that
Freud refers to sleep as a state in which libido is withdrawn into the self,
obviating the need for competition between the ego and potential objects
of cathexis. ‘On Narcissism: an Introduction’, Standard Edition 14: 82–3.
188 Notes
45. Sartre was acutely sensitive to the possibility, given one’s embodiment, of
being rendered the passive object of the gaze of an other. The body is the
‘point of view on which he has no point of view’, and ‘With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object’,
the alienating experience of losing the sense of self-mastery and discovering that ‘I have my foundation outside myself’. This look has the effect that
‘I exist for myself as a body known by the Other’ and is responsible for feelings of fear, shame, pride, and, most revealingly, slavery. Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969), 351,
267–8. Raphael’s warning expresses a concern to be found also in Gouge,
who notes that ‘it commeth to passe, that many husbands who are highly
honoured and greatly accounted of by others, are much despised by their
wives, because their wives alwayes conversing with them, are privy to
such infirmities as are concealed from others.’ Of Domesticall Duties, third
treatise, 162.
46. Turner argues that elsewhere Augustine ‘is less narrowly procreational and
less dogmatically subordinationist’ and ‘elaborates on the comfort and
mutuality of marriage’ which ‘he had eliminated from God’s purpose in
creating Eve’. One Flesh, 100–1.
47. As Halkett puts it, ‘One of the central paradoxes of Paradise Lost is that
Milton has so constructed his argument that it is exactly the perfection of
his marriage with Eve which acts upon Adam as the greatest incentive to
succumb to the temptation to disobey.’ Milton and the Idea of Matrimony,
122.
48. Claudia M. Champagne, ‘Adam and His “Other Self” in Paradise Lost:
a Lacanian Study in Psychic Development’, Milton Quarterly 25: 2, 50–
8. Champagne’s references are from PL 8.296–8, 315–16, 325, 494–9,
546–50.
49. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 105–6,
108. Žižek’s perhaps rather provocative example (216) concerns the passive
victim-mother, who, on the ideal-imaginary ego-level, likes this image of
herself, but whose point of symbolic identification is with the formal structure of the (patriarchal) intersubjective field which enables this role: thus
(according to Žižek, at least) she will sacrifice anything but the sacrifice
itself.
50. Žižek, Sublime Object, 180–1, 122, 132–3.
51. For Lacan’s account of the formation of the ego, see ‘The mirror stage as
formative of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ in Ecrits, 1–2.
52. Aers and Hodge, ‘Rationall Burning’, 24–7, referring to PL 8.568, 593, 595,
598.
53. It is not insignificant, given that Adam has just told Raphael that ‘what she
wills to do or say, / Seems wisest’, that the only time we are shown Eve counselling Adam on a course of action (the argument about whether to divide
their labours, in which Eve claims to be self-sufficient), it leads to disaster
(PL 9.205f.; Eve assumes that she, like Adam, possesses ‘integrity’ at 9.329).
54. Quoted in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 223.
55. Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 172.
56. Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 164.
57. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald
Notes 189
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1988), 26.
Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, Standard Edition, 14: 138–9. Lacan,
‘The mirror stage’, Ecrits, 6.
Freud, Standard Edition, 14: 98, 101.
For example Champagne, discussed above. Mary Nyquist makes the point
that whereas Adam’s narcissistic desire for another self is provoked and satisfied by the creator, Eve’s narcissism is shown to be constituted by illusion
in the form of her attachment to her appearance in the pool, ‘The Genesis
of Gendered Subjectivity’, 120–2.
Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 19.
Laplanche and Pontalis define ‘economic’ as qualifying ‘everything having
to do with the hypothesis that psychical processes consist in the circulation and distribution of an energy (instinctual energy) that can be quantified, i.e. that is capable of increase, decrease and equivalence’. Language of
Psychonalysis, 127.
Kerrigan notes a similar, ‘almost physical conception of desire’ in Paradise
Regained, in which to desire is to expel strength and ‘one can feel the might
of Christ grow as his desire is withheld again and again from the objects of
the world Satan parades before him’. Sacred Complex, 110.
Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Rickman, ed.,
General Selection, 221.
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 172–3: ‘There are really two major aspects
of desire as it may emerge in the fall of sexualization – on the one hand,
disgust produced by the reduction of the sexual partner to a function of
reality, whatever it may be, and, on the other hand, what I have called, in
relation to the scopic function, invidia, envy.’
Richard Boothby’s account in death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in
Lacan’s return to Freud (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) is particularly lucid. Citing, among other accounts, Lacan’s description of the ego as
an ‘illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to
self-mastery’ (29), he shows how, for Lacan, ‘the ego is not coextensive
with the organism, nor even with the psychic individual or subject’ (33).
For the ego, desire and sexuality ‘constitute a force of death’ opposed to
its ‘self-preservative tendency’ (94) because, founded in the Imaginary, it
is responsible for the ‘alienation of desire’, of all that cannot readily be
mastered. Desire thus ‘originates from a primordial lack, a hole or gap, a
manque-à-être (lack, or want, of being)’ (108). The ego’s response is anxiety
at ‘the felt encounter with the real [all those aspects through whose exclusion the ego is constituted], the experience of a traumatizing economic
overload’ (144).
In other words, if Paradise Lost anxiously registers the historical transition
whereby woman replaces God as ultimate object of desire, this does not
simply follow upon ‘secularization’, but is the product of a particular historical arrangement. As Judith Butler declares with respect to the psychoanalytical desire to universalize the Oedipal scenario and the ordering of
gender which it reflects (or effects): ‘if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an “outside,” we are not thereby
committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of
190 Notes
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma)’. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), 205. For Lacan see Jacques-Alain Miller,
ed., Le Seminaire Livre XX: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 64–5.
Žižek, Sublime Object, 180.
If the infant starts as an hommelette, a ‘little man’, but also, on the analogy
of an omelette, a mass of scrambled and incoherent impulses, it is precisely
this that the subject lacks and must fight down. Lacan, Four Fundamental
Concepts, 197–8; Benvenuto and Kennedy, Works of Jacques Lacan, 187.
Marshall Grossman ‘Servile / Sterile / Style: Milton and the Question of
Woman’, in Julia M. Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 150.
Frank Kermode describes the hierarchy of the senses in ‘The Banquet of
Sense’, in Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge
Kegan Paul, 1971), 94. Halkett, for one, believes that ‘Satan’s “seduction”
of Eve has obvious sexual overtones.’ Milton and the Idea of Matrimony, 125.
Halkett argues that matrimonial ambition, the worst trait of all in a wife,
is Eve’s ‘first specifically domestic crime’. Milton and the Idea of Matrimony,
125.
Turner, One Flesh, ch. 7, although Turner argues that this process begins
earlier: ‘Raphael’s cynical condemnation is particularly appalling because,
in equating Eve with “shows”, he declares her intrinsically fallen: when we
first encountered her nakedness and sexual purity, Milton had explicitly
contrasted it with “sin-bred” hypocrisy – “shows instead, mere shows of
seeming pure”; now he seems to agree with the archangel’ (280). Lewalski,
for one, argues that the wedding of the daughters of Cain with the sons of
God ‘relates more closely’ than the killing of Abel by Cain ‘to Adam’s own
form of intemperance’. ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 260.
Annabel Patterson makes the connection in ‘No Meer Amatorious Novel?’,
in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics,
and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 97–8.
William Myers reacts particularly strongly: ‘These are the words of a man
who has just deliberately committed himself and his offspring to radical
corruption, but one can read and re-read them over a period of twenty years
or more without perceiving the evil they contain, Adam’s total lack of
concern for his frightened, lonely, malicious and endangered wife.’ William
Myers, Milton and Free Will: an Essay in Criticism and Philosophy (London:
Croom Helm, 1987), 229.
Leopold Damrosch, Jr., God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional
Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 110.
Dalila, too, uses the word to describe the enticements which led her to
betray Samson (SA 845).
John C. Ulreich, Jr, in ‘ “Incident to All Our Sex”: The Tragedy of Dalila’,
200, argues that ‘If his putative divorce had in fact freed him from Dalila’s
influence, he would not need to hate her so violently.’ Jackie DiSalvo, in
‘Intestine Thorn: Samson’s Struggle with the Woman Within’, 212, argues
that ‘Samson, it appears, must destroy his male identity in order to save it.’
Notes 191
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
Both essays are in Julia M. Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1988).
PL 9.1135–6. Thus Broadbent argues that in the course of their discussion
about whether they should work separately, we ‘feel that Adam is relapsing
into reasonable generalisation when he ought to be enforcing his will’.
J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’ (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1960), 250. Joan Bennett comes to the conclusion that
Adam should be more patient and continue to reason with Eve. Reviving
Liberty, 113. Such positions do not absolve Adam from blame, but they
tacitly accept, and elaborate on, the ideological implication that a wife with
a desire to wander away from her husband is a dangerous prospect.
McColley, by contrast, notes that only Milton gives Eve a reason for separating which springs from God’s word (the command to work in the
garden), rather than presenting it as an act of innocent incompetence or
feminine vanity, and sees the account of Eve’s fall as a whole as amounting to a deliberate acquittal of her. Milton’s Eve, 147; 169. But as Quilligan
argues, the narrative logic of the poem virtually insists that Eve’s desire to
separate leads to the Fall. Milton’s Spenser, 230. Turner remarks that it was
generally forgotten that Adam is ‘with her’ in the Genesis account,
although he refers in a note to McColley’s finding that several Renaissance
commentators did indeed assume this. One Flesh, 15 and 15 n8 (which refers
to McColley, Milton’s Eve, 181 n1).
This greater blaming of the woman is also present in the following passage
in Tetrachordon. A man who wishes to divorce ‘may acquitt himself to
freedom by his naturall birthright, and that indeleble character of priority
which God crown’d him with. If it be urg’d that sin hath lost him this, the
answer is not far to seek, that from her the sin first proceeded, which keeps
her justly in the same proportion still beneath. She is not to gain by being
first in the transgression, that man should furder loose to her, because already
he hath lost by her means’ (CPW 2.589–90; italics mine).
Davies, Feminine Reclaimed, 224.
However, many critics hold that Adam’s re-education is calculated to
address the intemperance of which he has been guilty. Halkett argues that
the visions Michael produces for Adam’s benefit show the ‘murder, intemperance, and lust’ that were involved in the original sin. Milton and the Idea
of Matrimony, 136. Lewalski describes ‘Eve’s sharp noontime appetite for the
fruit and Adam’s uxorious love for Eve’ as ‘varieties of intemperance’ and
sees in the pageants with which Michael presents Adam ‘a reprise of his
. . . sins of intemperance, vainglory, and ambition’. ‘Paradise Lost’ and the
Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 256, 259.
Quoted by Roberta Hamilton without specific attribution in The Liberation
of Women: a Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1978), 74.
Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 279.
It is true that Eve gains credit by initiating the reconciliation which follows
the fall, but the credit accrues to her by virtue not only of her acceptance
of responsibility but also of her recognition that she is subordinate, as she
falls at Adam’s feet ‘submissive in distress’ (PL 10.942). As Halkett puts it,
Book 10 ‘redeems Eve psychologically’, but the reasons he gives for this are
192 Notes
‘her meekness and her suggestion of self-sacrifice’. Milton and the Idea of
Matrimony, 130–1, 133.
87. Žižek, Sublime Object, 80–4.
4. The Individual and the Natural World in Paradise Lost
1. Marshall Grossman, ‘The Fruits of One’s Labour in Miltonic Practice and
Marxist Theory’, English Literary History 59: 1 (1992), 77–105, 93.
2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 55. As Neal Wood remarks, ‘Locke
was the first classic political theorist to place such great emphasis on labor,
making it the cornerstone of his edifice of political ideas.’ John Locke and
Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 53. For
a general account of these changes, see Low, Georgic Revolution.
3. Turner writes, ‘Milton’s Paradise is no hedonistic fantasy or Antinomian
Land of Cockaigne. . . . “Difficulty and labour” are virtues from the beginning, determining the “growth and compleating” of the human character.’
One Flesh, 94–5. McColley argues that in Paradise Lost Milton placed an
emphasis on labour which was unusual even by comparison with other
Puritans, who tended to see it as a mere antidote to idleness. Milton’s Eve,
115–24.
4. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 4, 8–10.
5. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 347, 346, 164. See also 153, 170.
6. Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History, trans. Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981), 51.
7. René Descartes, ‘Discourse 6’ in Discourse on Method and The Meditations,
trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 78. For Descartes as
emblematic of philosophical modernity, see e.g. Martin Heidegger, ‘The
Question Concerning Technology’ and ‘The Age of the World Picture’, both
in Question Concerning Technology; Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: the Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
8. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 351.
9. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 200.
10. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, cited in Paolo Rossi,
Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator
Attanasio, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 79. See
also Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 136–8.
11. It should be noted that disenchantment refers not to a specific scientific
philosophy but to a process whereby, initially, the world loses inherent
value and can thus be the object of God’s will executed by men. Schluchter,
Western Rationalism, 171; Weber, Protestant Ethic, 118, 153, 176–82.
12. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 80.
13. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 253, 260. John Rogers
suggests that vitalist monism was closely though not exclusively related to
political radicalism, and that the ‘Vitalist Moment’ of the mid-seventeenth
Notes 193
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
century in general, and Paradise Lost in particular, opened the way (historically unrealized) to ‘a massive liberalization of the cosmos’ in The Matter
of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 113.
Corns, Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’, 106. The principal difference between the
Cambridge Platonists and Milton resided in their maintenance of a spirit /
body dualism (although they believed, nonetheless, that the whole of
nature was animated by spirit). For their philosophy of nature and their
antipathy to mechanism see Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, ch. 2;
Merchant, Death of Nature, ch. 10; and above all, Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic
Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (London: Thomas Nelson,
1953), esp. ch. 5.
Richard Dienst describes Heidegger’s as ‘one of the best-sealed, most irreversible models of modernity ever: we can only say that it has always
already happened’. Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 114.
Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, in Question Concerning Technology, 14, 16.
Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Question Concerning Technology, 128.
Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 26. Benjamin, discussing
the fate of the unique work of art in an age in which copies proliferate, suggests that ‘To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark
of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has
increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by
means of reproduction.’ See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 219–54, 225.
Heidegger, ‘World Picture’, 116–17.
Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 14, 18, 27. William Lovitt,
Heidegger’s translator, notes that the German for ‘ground plan’, Grundriss,
is cognate with the verb reissen, meaning ‘to tear, rend, sketch, design’, and
the noun riss, a ‘tear, gap, outline’. Thus he remarks that the word connotes
‘a fundamental sketching out that is an opening up as well’. ‘World Picture’,
118.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, 82.
The Hegelian schema is perhaps paradigmatic. The ‘agonistic’ element in
such subjecthood is suggested by the German for object’, Gegenstand (rendered more literally, something standing there, opposed to a subject which
confronts it).
The OED defines ‘cosmos’ as meaning ‘The world or universe as an ordered
whole’, and quotes the following (from 1874): ‘Were it not for the
indwelling reason the world would be a chaos and not a cosmos.’
See Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Adam on the Grass with Balsamum’, English Literary History 36 (1969), 168–92, 170–1, 174.
Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism, 167.
Belsey, Milton, 87.
Heidegger, ‘World Picture’, 127.
Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 137.
194 Notes
29. Belsey quotes from the late sixteenth-century Christian Stoic William Dyer
in Subject of Tragedy, 35: ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’. She also notes that
such sentiments occur at some of the most dramatic moments on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage: ‘I am / Anthony yet’; ‘I am Duchess of Malfi
still’.
30. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 257–8, 182, 541. Stephen Fallon identifies Satan’s
claim that ‘the mind is its own place’ with ‘the Cartesian “error” ’, and goes
on to quote from the Discourse on the Method: ‘I knew I was a substance
whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not
require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist.’ The
‘modern’ relation to the natural world is often associated with freedom as
a result of this independence from place. Milton among the Philosophers,
203–4.
31. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the
Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 337.
32. Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism, 226.
33. This is the view of Weber, for whom the disenchantment of the world
ushered in an era of irreconcileable value conflict: ‘The fate of an epoch
which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that we cannot learn the
meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect;
it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself.’ Quoted in
Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21.
34. After Bacon, ‘the essentialist search for real essences and ultimate causes or
the reality behind appearances was largely abandoned’. Barbara J. Shapiro,
Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: a Study of the
Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 63.
35. Quoted in Merchant, Death of Nature, 30–2.
36. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 408.
37. Merchant, Death of Nature, 25–9.
38. John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 171; see also Robert L. Entzminger, Divine Word:
Milton and the Redemption of Language (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1985), 144, who sees tyranny in Satan’s ‘imposing meanings on
words’.
39. Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 211.
40. Belsey correlates the use of language as an instrument with the distinction
between a knowing subject who is sole source of meaning and a world of
inert objectivity in Subject of Tragedy, 65. For Benjamin, modern language
is as such emphatically postlapsarian, consisting in nothing more than the
hollow play of an arbitrary will directed by subjective intention. See Terry
Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New
Left Books, 1981), esp. 152–3.
41. Quoted in Remy C. Kwant, From Phenomenology to Metaphysics (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1966), 212.
42. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 186–8.
43. Quoted in Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault,
Derrida (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 102.
Notes 195
44. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 109, 88–91; Cascardi, Subject of Modernity,
64–6. As Cascardi notes, Hegel could only effect this philosophically by
‘totalizing the scope of philosophical discourse’ (93).
45. For instance Maplet, cited by Svendsen, terms mankind ‘another kind of
life in degree more Princely’ than other beings. Milton and Science, 115.
46. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 33–43, 214, 248.
47. According to Knott, ‘There is little emphasis on the repose of Adam
and Eve in the tradition of the earthly paradise before Milton; the closest
thing to it is the enervating repose shown in the false paradises of Ariosto,
Tasso, and Spenser.’ It would seem reasonable to suggest that Milton’s
ability to evoke relaxation without implying enervation is related to the
fact, noticed by Knott, that their labouring ‘distinguishes them from
the more sedentary shepherds of pastoral tradition’. Milton’s Pastoral Vision,
48, 11.
48. Merchant, Death of Nature, ch. 5.
49. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 177.
50. Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 14–15.
51. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans.
Mario Danandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963),
25–8. Nicolas of Cusa was of sufficient interest to a contemporary readership for his Idiota dialogues to be ‘translated into English in 1650, at a time
when numerous works expressing the alliance between Puritanism and
Baconianism issued from British presses’. See Braden and Kerrigan, Idea of
the Renaissance, 95.
52. Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 184.
53. For Epicurus, see Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 511. Malabika Sarkar, ‘ “The
Visible Diurnal Sphere”: Astronomical Images of Space and Time in Paradise
Lost’, Milton Quarterly 18: 1 (1984), 1–5, 2. Sarkar is referring to PL 2.1052–3:
‘This pendant world, in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by
the moon.’
54. That Moloch is an Aristotelian has also been noted by Harinder Singh
Marjara, ‘Angelic Motion and Moloch’s False Rhetoric’, Milton Quarterly 19:
3 (1983), 82–7, 82. For Aristotle’s conception of movement, see also Spragens, Politics of Motion, 56–8.
55. Again, this is a point also made by Marjara, ‘Angelic Motion’, 85–6. For
Aristotle, heaviness was a trait of heavy elements, which gravitated toward
the centre of the universe, the earth. This is incompatible with a postCopernican universe, in which the earth does not occupy a central position, and which consequently demands a different concept of heaviness.
This was provided by Galileo, among others, for whom the heaviness of an
object is relative to the medium in which they are placed. Thus ‘even lighter
elements could move downwards if they were placed in a medium that was
even lighter or as vacuous as Chaos may be supposed to be’.
56. In this respect ‘His physical world is much closer to that of Galileo and
other seventeenth-century scientists than to that of medieval Aristotelians.’
Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, 46.
57. Svendsen, Milton and Science, 247.
58. Harinder Singh Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in ‘Paradise
196 Notes
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
Lost’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 108. See also Svendsen,
Milton and Science, 48–9.
Berry argues that ‘the new developments provided Milton with the necessary space and poetic elbow room within which to pan his cosmic, zooming
movie camera; he could not have penned his soaring lines in anything but
an apparently limitless universe’. Process of Speech, 150–1.
For the indistinguishability of space and place in Aristotle see Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 174–88.
Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, 255–6. Thus Milton rejects the
Aristotelian notion of God as a First Principle, who is pure act, that is, whose
essence is fully realized in Creation: ‘There seems, therefore, an impropriety in the term of actus purus, or the active principle, which Aristotle applies
to God, for thus the deity would have no choice of act, but what he did he
would do of necessity, and could do in no other way, which would be inconsistent with his omnipotence and free agency.’ He also emphasizes God’s
continuing active power: ‘His ordinary providence is that whereby he
upholds and preserves the immutable order of causes appointed by him in
the beginning. This is commonly, and indeed all too frequently, described
by the name of nature; for nature cannot possibly mean anything but the
mysterious power and efficiency of that divine voice which went forth in
the beginning, and to which, as to a perpetual command, all things have
since paid obedience.’ De Doctrina Christiana, chs 14, 15; cited in Walter
Clyde Curry, Milton’s Ontology Cosmogony and Physics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 34, 39.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 154–9.
Morgan, Godly Learning, 21. It should be noted that Neil Keble, discussing
a slightly later period, presents a more mixed picture. N. H. Keble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1987), 257–9.
The principal focus of arguments about Milton’s cosmos has been the discussion between Adam and Raphael concerning the respective merits of
geocentric and heliocentric worldviews. The issues are too vexed and the
literature too extensive to be addressed in this chapter, but it is worth
noting that there has been a general shift from seeing Milton as primarily
‘mediaeval’ in emphasis, condemning astronomical speculation as sinful
curiositas while tending if anything toward the traditional geocentric view,
toward a sense of a ‘Cusan’ or Galilean excitement about the process of
hypothesis, combined with a marking of the cards in favour of heliocentrism and, overall, a sense that the poem’s imagination of space is pervaded
by a post-Copernican opening-out of the (itself vast) Ptolemaic cosmos.
Some recent contributions include John S. Tanner, ‘ “And Every Star Perhaps
a World of Destined Habitation”: Milton and Moonmen’, Extrapolation: a
Journal of Science-Fiction and Fantasy 30: 3 (1989), 267–79; Donald Friedman,
‘Galileo and the Art of Seeing’, and Judith Scherer Herz, ‘ “For whom this
glorious sight?”: Dante, Milton, and the Galileo Question’, both in Mario
di Cesare, ed., Milton in Italy: Contexts Images Contradictions (Binghampton,
NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991); and Joseph
Wittreich, ‘ “Inspir’d with Contradiction”: Mapping Gender Discourses
in Paradise Lost’, in Diana Treviño Benet and Michael Lieb, eds, Literary
Notes 197
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994),
esp. 142–6.
Lindenbaum, Changing Landscapes, 154, 151 (quoting from PL 4.327–30 and
Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s The Divine Weeks and Works, Second
Week, First Day, Part I (‘Eden’), lines 299–330), 152. Perhaps paradoxically,
it is the fact that labour is a necessity which allows it to be an expression
of freedom and responsibility, as is suggested by the Geneva Bible’s gloss
on Genesis 2: 15, cited by Lindenbaum (153): ‘God would not have man
idle, though as yet there was no neede to labour.’ This typifies the Calvinist stress on God’s will and the demand for obedience to his specific
commands.
Thus, for instance, Low sees in Eden ‘the true pastoral otium, about which
the Greek and Roman poets could only dream and fable’. But ‘The fall transforms their state.’ However Low also recognizes that ‘there is no denying
that Milton’s pastoral Eden has at least some of the elements of georgic –
those that are most satisfying, and that define humanity as more dignified
than the idle beasts’. The georgic mode is that which is concerned with the
hard labour necessary to the advance of civilization. Georgic Revolution, 310,
311, 318, 8–12. Lewalski affirms that ‘Pastoral is the dominant mode for
the portrayal of Eden and the life of prelapsarian Adam and Eve.’ But she
also recognizes that ‘There are, from the outset, georgic and romance concerns in Eden’ which are integrated into the pastoral mode through dialogue concerning and reflection upon them. However, Lewalski pays more
attention to the educative and self-shaping aspect of the Georgic mode than
to manual labour. Lewalski, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms,
173, 174, 189, 208. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor suggest that the
‘ “georgicization” of pastoral is symptomatic of a general process of generic
change during the seventeenth century, a process which culminated in
georgic’s rise to the pinnacle of the generic hierarchy.’ ‘Introduction’ to
Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds, Culture and Cultivation in Early
Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 5.
For the distinction between principle-oriented and norm-oriented ethics see
Schluchter, Western Rationalism, 61.
Joseph E. Duncan, Milton’s Earthly Paradise: a Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 159; Broadbent, Some Graver
Subject, 177. Thus Kendrick argues that because it is ‘perforated’ with pastoral elements and allusions ‘paradise assumes the timeless and helpless
evanescence of these other loci amoenae,’ as a result of which the narrative
of Adam and Eve tends to be separate from this context. The potential
disjunction between pastoral and georgic modes is testified to by Davies
when she reads the withering of the garland Adam has woven for Eve as
an emblem of ‘pastoral loss’, and the reminder that Eve’s tools are guiltless
of fire as pointing forward to ‘a world liberated into culture’ (an equation
of technology, civilization, and progress which is archetypally georgic,
although she describes this as ‘a rich pastoral world outside Eden’).
Kendrick, Milton, 192–3, 195; Davies, Feminine Reclaimed, 241, 246–7.
James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English
Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 167–8, 165.
198 Notes
70. Adam’s speech here is in some tension with Knott’s assertion that ‘The welldefined pattern of life in the Garden is governed by the rising and falling
of the sun.’ Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 88.
71. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 88.
72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160, 136.
73. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 174.
74. Lewalski describes its ‘elaborate patterns of repetition and circularity’.
‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 187.
75. Both this and the lines from Columbus are quoted in Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 180–1.
76. David Mikics, The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and
Milton (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; and London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses, 1994), 136. Mikics quotes from PL 4.429, 690.
77. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 255; Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, 229–30, 231;
Berry, Process of Speech, 248.
78. An exception is Lindenbaum, who believes that Eve is wrong in ‘viewing
their work too literally as necessary and effective in itself’, yet emphasizes
that it is impossible to see Eve as simply wrong, for her ‘suggestion that
they work apart has been expressed in a speech reiterating many of the very
phrases that have been used earlier, often by Adam himself, to describe the
garden and to convey the idea that its growth provides very real work for
them’. Changing Landscapes, 156, 155.
79. Although Berry seems implicitly to read this as a more economic way of
apprehending the issues when he suggests that ‘Eve is predicating a kind
of exchange over time – “dayes work” for “hour of Supper” ’. Process of
Speech, 246. The moral and the economic, however, are not as readily separable as it might at first appear, at least according to Weber in Protestant
Ethic, 159–61. For an analogue to Eve’s morality of labour, see Weber’s comparison of the ‘traditional’ attitude to labour, which involved working as
hard as one needed to, with Benjamin Franklin’s ‘idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital’, an ethos for which labour has
become ‘an absolute end in itself, a calling’, and which ‘can only be the
product of a long and arduous process of education’ (59, 51, 62).
80. Berry, Process of Speech, 79.
81. The Georgics of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940),
2.367–70.
82. Rambler 140 in The Works of Samuel Johnson, 12 vols (London, 1806), 5: 443.
83. Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 113; McColley, Milton’s Eve, 130.
84. Virgil, Georgics, 2.365–6.
85. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 161. It is to say the least ironic that, as
Marcuse notes following Norman Brown, the Prometheus motif is generally associated with the repudiation of women as idle, unproductive drones.
86. Halkett remarks that ‘Obviously Milton wishes to show some natural superiority of Eve over Adam in the management and disposition of household
goods.’ Milton and the Idea of Matrimony, 110.
87. Milton would probably agree with critics who argue that the poem depicts
a strong Eve who escapes patriarchal logic. Examples would include Deirdre
Keenan McChrystal, ‘Redeeming Eve’, English Literary Renaissance 23: 3
Notes 199
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
(1993), 490–508; and Regina Schwartz, ‘Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: the Case of Paradise Lost’, Representations 34 (Spring 1991), 85–103.
For the modern individual’s shrunken and distanced relation to the world,
see Kilgour, Communion to Cannibalism, 231.
According to Ellen Goodman, ‘the idea of an “unfallen” world’ was ‘a
notion quite foreign to Thomistic thought’. For Aquinas, the operations of
the natural world were completely unaffected by the Fall. The Fall consisted
simply in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from an Eden particularly well
suited to them in such respects as the complete absence of animals, into a
world full of beasts and other inconveniences. The darker view of the world
held by Calvin and Luther, on the other hand, led them to postulate by
contrast an utterly idyllic and harmonious prelapsarian world. Thus, in Paradise Lost, ‘Rather than being banished from a protected place into a harsher
domain, Milton’s Adam and Eve, like Luther’s and Calvin’s, undergo a temporal exile from the concord of nature as a whole before the Fall into the
discord of a world that has been subjected to a curse for their sake.’
Goodman, ‘Sway and Subjection: Natural Causation and the Portrayal of
Paradise in the Summa Theologica and Paradise Lost’, in John Mulryan, ed.,
Milton and the Middle Ages (London and Toronto: Associated University
Presses, 1982), 77, 75, 76, 85.
Diane Kelsey McColley, ‘Benificent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly’,
in Charles W Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan, eds, Spokesperson Milton:
Voices in Contemporary Criticism (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 229–48, 245, 231.
Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 192.
Quoted in Turner, One Flesh, 218.
This would provide an explanation for the fact that ‘he kept natural science
pretty much out of Christian Doctrine, even though Polanus’ Syntagma, probably one of his sources for the treatise, was full of it; which is to say that
he did not regard exact science as proper or necessary to the expounding
of a formal “system” of divinity’. Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 62.
Mikics, Limits of Moralizing, 131–3.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and
Windus 1963), 100–1.
Conclusion: Adam as Every Man
1. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 15.
2. Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993), 82, 11–12,
97, 105, 167, 196.
3. Indeed, Brennan suggests that ‘Benjamin’s “prelapserian [sic] state”, in
which the expressive value of a word was tied to the signifier, may have
something to it.’ History After Lacan, 98 n18.
4. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and
the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 2–3, 5, 27–8, 93, 255.
5. Jay Bernstein, ‘Whistling in the Dark: Affirmation and Despair in
200 Notes
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Postmodernism’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds,
Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 250–73, 253.
For Prometheus as an emblem (variously negative and positive) of Renaissance individualism and its sense of man’s creative potential, see Cassirer,
Individual and Cosmos, 92; and Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts,
Appendix III, ‘The New Science and the Symbol of Prometheus’.
Quoted in Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1982), 207, 219.
Low, Georgic Revolution, 139, 142.
Quoted in Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, 153.
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 88.
For Bacon and the ‘technological trend’, see Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance,
45–6.
The phrase is from a letter from John Beale to Samuel Hartlib, cited in
Michael Leslie, ‘The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale’, in Leslie and Raylor,
eds, Culture and Cultivation, 155.
The title of Christopher Hill’s The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1984).
Low, Georgic Revolution, 10, 6, 302–3.
Bill Readings, ‘Milton at the Movies: an Afterword to Paradise Lost’, in Readings and Schaber, eds, Postmodernism Across the Ages, 88–108, 92–3, 93, 96.
The reasons for making such a turn are summarized acutely by Timothy
Bewes: ‘Postmodern theory colonizes the space opened up by the deferral
of meaning precisely by theorizing it so exhaustively. Postmodernism has
imported the condition of metaphysical inadequacy (of the signifier regarding the signified, for example) into politics, thereby undermining the faith
that Weber talks of as necessary to political engagement. Disillusionment
with enlightenment, the loss of faith in modernity and rationality, is not
primarily the result of enlightenment’s failure to fulfil its promises . . . It is
the consequence of the formalization of an endemic disappointment –
unknowability, undecidability – as the definitive modern condition, by way
of the concept “postmodern”.’ Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso,
1997), 6.
Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 341 n29: ‘For the ancient world, just as for the
Middle Ages, there is an odd inhibition against viewing the world from
above or thinking of it as viewed from above by man. . . . The gaining of
the view “from above” in painting is one of the innovations of the beginning of the modern age, especially on the part of Leonardo.’ For the high
prospect as an image of political foresight, and for a discussion of a new
way of seeing the world as landscape, see Turner, Politics of Landscape, 5–6
and ch. 1. For the use of such a prospect as an image of wisdom in a private
letter from a father to a son see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics,
118. Descartes describes in Discourse 3 how, when he wandered the world,
he tried ‘to be spectator rather than actor in all the comedies which were
being played there’. Discourse on Method, 50.
For the connection between the mapping and mastery of space implicit in
the painting of Leonardo da Vinci (referred to in the last footnote), ‘the
geometral laws of perspective’, and ‘the institution of the Cartesian subject,
Notes 201
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective’ see Lacan,
Four Fundamental Concepts, 85–6.
Compare the following, from Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity:
Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 133: ‘In
the earliest linguistic usage of the term by the Greeks, theoria is not primarily a formalized conceptual construct that entails an “objectifying” split
between subject and object. It is, rather, related to the participation in the
gods’ procession . . . It is thus a “looking at” which is also a “participating
in” and, in a certain way, a “belonging to”, rather than a possessing of the
object.’
The construction of modernity in the terms of cultural lament tends
to focus on secularization. Thus Wendy Wheeler associates postEnlightenment subjectivity with ‘the fact of a meaningless death’ and thus
with a new dimension of the uncanny, the unsymbolizable ‘fantasy of the
self-completing object’, a dimension which had previously been obscured
by the sacred, which, in the form of an Ideal Subject, promised an end to
the division (between meaning and being) out of which the subject
emerges. For Wheeler, ‘postmodern’ nostalgia is a form of collective mourning for such wholeness, and points toward ‘a possible future community of
interest’. Wendy Wheeler, ‘After Grief? What Kinds of Inhuman Selves?’,
New Formations 25 (Summer 1995), 77–95, 84–7. The thrust of this
Conclusion, which is less preoccupied with the death of God, is that
collective action is the alternative to melancholy.
Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, 181.
As Robert Fallon remarks, ‘Paradise Lost is a poem, not a political testament,
one, moreover, whose purpose is to delineate universal spiritual values, not
partisan ideologies.’ Divided Empire, ix. Of course, whatever the intention,
the delineation of universal spiritual values can be a thoroughly partisan
act. Cedric C. Brown, in ‘Great senates and godly education: politics and
cultural renewal in some pre- and post-revolutionary texts of Milton’, in
Armitage et al. eds, Milton and Republicanism, considers the question of ‘just
how fully the political is figured in the text’ and, while not denying its presence, rightly counsels against arguments to the effect that Milton ‘really
wanted to write a political poem, as twentieth-century discourse might
require, instead of one about spiritual discipline, but was constrained’
because of post-Restoration conditions (47, 58).
Scochet, Patriarchalism, 194. The separation of political from paternal power
is often taken to be a defining trait of political modernity. See for instance,
Seliger, John Locke, ch. 7; Pateman, Sexual Contract, 90–1; Grant, Locke’s Liberalism, ch. 2. Filmer specifically objected to Suarez’s distinction between
Adam’s ‘oeconomical’ and political power. Daly, Filmer, 67, 70.
An opposing position was held even by Harrington, who conceded that ‘If
ADAM has [sic] liv’d till now, he could have seen no other than his own
Children; and so that he must have been King by the right of Nature,
[which] was his peculiar Prerogative.’ Quoted in Schochet, Patriarchalism,
168.
Annabel Patterson makes a similar point about Adam’s position in her
admirable ‘Imagining New Worlds: Milton, Galileo, and the “Good Old
202 Notes
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
Cause” ’, in Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, eds, The Witness
of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1993), 252–3.
Hugh H. Richmond, The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 128. Richmond works an interesting inversion of the conventional paradigm, contrasting Milton with Dante’s ‘epic
of medieval Christendom, with its more confident expectations’ regarding
‘human capacity’ (128–9).
Tony Davies, in ‘Borrowed Language: Milton, Jefferson, Mirabeau’, in
Armitage et al., eds, Milton and Republicanism, 260, argues that ‘Paradise Lost
supplied some of the core mythology and subjectivity of the revolutionary
enterprise’ in America. Obviously such episodes in interpretative history say
as much about the interpreters as they do about Milton and Paradise Lost,
but it is nonetheless unlikely that an essentially or exclusively pessimistic
work could play much of a part in such a history.
Compare, for example: ‘no Christian Prince, not drunk with high mind,
and prouder than those Pagan Caesars that deifi’d themselves, would arrogate so unreasonably above human condition, or derogate so basely from
a whole Nation of men his Brethren’ as to argue that he was not accountable to them (Tenure, CPW 3.204).
Fowler’s note to the passage recognizes that it can be read in the context
both of the regicide tracts and of a more resigned Augustinianism. Warren
Chernaik, in response to the ‘quietist’ reading of this passage, emphasizes
the importance of its stress on the role of free choice. Liberty is something,
even after the Fall, which is not impossible but is actively thrown away.
Warren L. Chernaik, ‘Christian Liberty in Marvell and Milton’, in R. C.
Richardson and G. M. Ridden, eds, Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays
in History and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986),
63–4. Michael Wilding sees the interpretative choice as one between tragic
acceptance and strategic realism. Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature
in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 258.
Christopher Hill has argued that the strength of the regime in the 1660s
led to a turn inward and a passive millenarianism among radicals, which
was then repoliticized in the changed situation of the 1680s. Christopher
Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church
1628–1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 342–3.
David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision,
Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 122.
Thomas Corns describes Paradise Lost thus in Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’
(Harlow: Longman, 1994), 133. The reference to Locke is one based on the
seminal account of the context of production of Locke’s Two Treatises,
Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics. See e.g. ix–x.
Michael’s instruction to Eve, that where her husband ‘abides, think there
thy native soil’ (PL 11.292) echoes Samson’s condemnation of Dalila for
failing to acknowledge precisely this duty.
Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 188.
Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy’, 32, 34.
Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 161: individuality-as-separation means that ‘the
Notes 203
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
good mother is no longer inside; she is something lost – Eden, innocence,
gratification, the bounteous breast – that must be regained through love on
the outside’ – an impossible demand.
Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1979), 4.
A paradoxical phrase coined and defined by Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of
Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London: Verso, 1988), 5: ‘Cynicism
is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in
vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the
same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of
ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.’
Adams, Ikon, 221, 206.
This is James Holly Hanford’s description of Milton’s significance for Shelley
and Byron in John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays by James Holly Hanford
(Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1966), 172.
Albrecht Wellmer cites the phrase from Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, in ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’ in
Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity, 35–66, 58.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Introduction: the Spectre of Ideology’, in Slavoj Žižek,
ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 1; Bewes, Cynicism and
Postmodernity, 1.
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Index
Abdiel 13, 14, 56–7, 63–70
Adam 15, 17, 75, 78, 85, 88, 89, 92,
95–113, 115, 121, 130–49, 155–8
Adams, Robert 159
Adorno, Theodor 134
Aers, David 2–5, 94, 99–101, 106
Althusser, Louis 5
Anderson, Perry 12, 50
Andrews, Edward 35–6
Aristotle; Aristotelian 14, 115, 132,
136, 138–9
Augustine, St 85, 86, 96, 105, 113,
121, 124, 140
Bacon, Francis 124, 153–5
Bagehot, Walter 56
Barker, Arthur 9
Barker, Francis 3, 5–6, 26–7
Barry, Jonathan 52–4
Baudrillard, Jean 151
Baxter, Richard 2
Beaumont, Joseph 141
Beelzebub 72
Belial 110
Belsey, Catherine 2, 3, 5
Benhabib, Seyla 81
Benjamin, Jessica 81, 101, 103
Benjamin, Walter 120, 134, 152
Bennett, Joan 30–1, 56, 59
Bentham, Jeremy 75
Berman, Marshall 18, 151
Bernstein, Jay 45
Berry, Boyd C. 145–6
Blake, William 56
Blumenberg, Hans 116–18, 124,
125, 129
Braden, Gordon 14
Brennan, Teresa 151–2
Broadbent, J. B. 136, 141, 145
Bruno, Giordano 118
Burchell, Graham 5
Burghley see Cecil
Bush, Douglas 1, 100
Calvin; Calvinism 9, 27–30, 39, 125
Cambridge Platonists 119
Cartesianism see Descartes
Cassirer, Ernst 119, 133, 136–7
Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley
50
Champagne, Claudia 97–9, 113
Charles I 21, 22, 41–4, 56, 68
Charles II 51
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 42
Clarendon see Hyde, Edward
Columbus, Christopher 144
Corns, Thomas 88, 119
Cox, Carol 59, 63, 66
Cromwell, Oliver 35, 42, 56, 154
Cudworth, Ralph 130
Cusa, Nicholas of 136–7
Dalila 86–7, 110–11
Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. 109, 147
Davies, Stevie 58, 59, 61, 64, 112
Davies, Tony 157
D’Cruze, Shani 52
Defoe, Daniel 72
De la Bruyère, Jean 71
De Sade, Donatien (Marquis) 114
Descartes; Cartesianism 117, 119,
124, 125, 134, 143
Divine Comedy, The 142
Dumont, Louis 2, 28
Du Moulin, Peter 61
Duncan, Joseph E. 141
Du Plessis Mornay, Philippe 61
Durham, Charles 59–60
Eagleton, Terry 18
Elias, Norbert 51, 67, 69, 72, 91
Eliot, T. S. 1
Elizabeth I 50
Empson, William 56, 68
Epicurus 137
Erasmus 85
226
Index
Eve 16, 17, 74–6, 78, 85, 88, 92,
93, 95, 97–113, 115, 121, 130–49,
158
Fallon, Robert Thomas 56
Fallon, Stephen 84, 130
Filmer, Sir Robert 11, 21, 23, 34,
37–8, 41, 156
Fish, Stanley 27
Fixler, Michael 30
Foucault, Michel; Foucauldian 5–7,
12, 13, 16, 39, 44, 45–6, 76–7,
89, 115, 143
Fowler, Alastair 109, 124, 126, 129,
132
Freud, Sigmund 15, 84, 91, 92, 103
Gabriel 68–9
Gee, Edward 22
Gierke, Otto 46
God 13, 56–7, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67, 88,
89, 96–101, 105, 111, 121, 125–6,
132, 134, 137, 140, 149, 157
Goodman, Christopher 28–9
Gouge, William 82
Greenblatt, Stephen 71
Gregerson, Linda 71, 94
Grossman, Marshall 106, 115
Habermas, Jürgen 6, 18, 33–4, 38,
44, 159
Haller, William 19, 55
Hamlet; Hamlet 71
Hampton, Jean 47
Harrington, James 8
Hartlib, Samuel 154
Hegel, G. W. F. 2, 61, 133
Heidegger, Martin 17–18, 119–21,
124, 133, 136, 152
Hill, Christopher 56, 157
Hobbes, Thomas; Hobbesian 8, 9,
10, 12, 24–6, 29, 34, 37, 43,
46–51, 57, 62, 65, 118, 119, 130,
157
Hodge, Bob 94, 99–101, 106
Hooker, Richard 9, 30–1, 35, 139
Hotman, François 61
Hughes, Merritt 42
Hyde, Edward, 1st Earl Of Clarendon
48
Ithuriel
227
74
James I 21–3, 41
Jameson, Fredric 13, 14
Johnson, Samuel 80, 146–7
Jonson, Ben, ‘To Penshurst’ 141
Kant, Immanuel 72, 114, 134
Kempe, Margery 4
Kendrick, Christopher 59
Kerrigan, William 14, 94
Kilgour, Maggie 125
Kolb, David 1
Lacan, Jacques; Lacanian 18, 85,
97–9, 102–6, 152
Landor, Walter Savage 129
Landy, Marcia 1, 74
Langland, William, Piers Plowman 3
Laplanche, J 102
Leavis, F. R. 1
Le Doeuff, Michèle 73
Lefort, Claude 7–8, 11, 39, 43
Lejosne, Roger 56
Levellers 8, 30
Lewis, C. Day 146
Lindenbaum, Peter 140
Locke, John 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, ch. 1
passim, 46, 52, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65,
66, 68, 72, 115, 157–8
Loewenstein, David 157
Louis XIV 51, 56, 67
Low, Anthony 79, 153–4
Macpherson, C. B. 8, 48, 51
Mammon 126–7, 129
Marcuse, Herbert 10, 147
Marjara, Harinder Singh 139
Martyr, Peter 144
Marvell, Andrew, ‘On Paradise Lost’
158
Marx, Karl 6, 12, 35–6, 135
Mather, Increase 100
McColley, Diane 88, 147, 149
Merchant, Carolyn 118
Merchant of Venice, The 132
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 132
Michael 60, 66, 89, 98, 99, 108, 112,
113, 149, 154, 156–7
228 Index
Mikics, David 144, 150
Milner, Andrew 44, 56, 58, 66
Milton, John
Apology Against a Pamphlet 2
Areopagitica 5–6, 32–3, 113, 155–6
De Doctrina Christiana (Of Christian
Doctrine) 15, 67, 69, 113, 149
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
81–7, 93
Eikonoklastes 62, 64, 68
‘L’Allegro’ 115
‘Il Penseroso’ 115
Of Reformation 43, 54
Paradise Lost Intro., chs 2–4,
Conclusion, passim.
Paradise Regained 66, 110
Readie 14, 25, 28, 33, 37, 57, 157
Reason 32, 59, 76, 136
Samson Agonistes 86, 110–11
Second Defence 33, 154
‘Seventh Prolusion’ 18, 152–4
Tenure ch. 1 passim., 59, 73, 82
Tetrachordon 15, 80, 86, 87, 114
Moloc 138
More, Sir Thomas 71
Morgan, John 139
Mouffe, Chantal 4, 11
Rogers, Daniel 89
Royal Society, The 154
Nietzsche, Friedrich 125
Nimrod 157
Norbrook, David 4, 9, 14
Taylor, Charles 14, 117–18, 121, 132
Thompson, John B. 7
Tillyard, E. M. W. 150
Turner, James 82, 141
Pateman, Carol 11
Patterson, Lee 3
Paul, St 83, 104
Plato; Platonic 63, 84
Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus) 127
Pocock, J. G. A. 10, 36
Pontalis, J. B. 102
Prometheus 147, 153
Quilligan, Maureen 145
Raleigh, Walter 1
Rapaport, Herman 43
Raphael 1, 60, 88, 89, 95–106, 112,
118, 129–30, 137–8, 147–8
Readings, Bill 154–5
Revard, Stella 66
Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise) 22,
61
Samson 86, 108, 110–11
Samuel, Irene 84
Sarkar, Malabika 137
Sartre, Jean Paul; Sartrean 75, 95,
125
Satan 13, 14, 17, 56–72, 78, 93, 107,
111, 121–39
Schiesari, Juliana 18, 152, 156
Schochet, Gordon 21, 156
Selden, John 48
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 127
Shirley, F. J. 31
Skinner, Quentin 28, 30, 61
‘Son of God’ 60, 62–6, 110, 113,
125–6
Spenser, Edmund 150
Staveley, Keith 31
Steadman, John 66
Stoicism 124–5, 127
Stone, Lawrence 50, 68, 80, 92, 143
Strauss, Leo 47
Svendsen, Kester 138
Uriel
60, 74
Vaughan, Aldon T. 39
Vaughan, Virginia Mason 39
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro),
Georgics 146–7
Walzer, Michael 39, 139
Weber, Max 142, 145, 153
Weisberg, David 13
West, Robert 59–60
Wolfe, Don M. 9
Wordsworth, William 119
Wrightson, Keith 52
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 71–2
Žižek, Slavoj 114, 159