the marriage of heaven and hell: Milton's gods and Paradise Lost
Written: Jun 13 '01 (Updated Jun 13 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It's not really appropriate for me to presume to say.
Cons: n/a
The Bottom Line: infernally good and required reading for any student of the sublime.
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| mangiotto's Full Review: John Milton - Paradise Lost: Books 1-2 |
John Milton was stone blind when he composed the most important and influential epic in the English language. The apocryphal tale goes that Milton would sit all night in his chair composing perfect verse in his head, and, in the morning, his wife and his daughter would come in and transcribe as the poet dictated. The feat of genius required for such an act rivals that of Beethoven’s ability to compose something as perfect as the “Ode of Joy” while stone deaf, and Coleridge’s ability to compose “Kublai Khan” while stoned.
There are many misconceptions about Paradise Lost, the chief among them is that it is boring (the so-called “Milton-Bogey”), following fast is that the work is heretical. Yet without Paradise Lost the caste stratum of the angels as well as the detail of the war in a Christian Heaven would be formless today, just as the Christian Hell had no geography until a 14th century Italian poet gave it shape. Like Dante, Milton wrote in a language that had only recently become accepted as appropriate for important works, Italian for Dante, English for Milton. Though Dante created something of a sensation for eschewing Latin in favor of his more “vulgar” native vernacular, Milton owed a debt to Shakespeare for lending his native tongue legitimacy – a debt he acknowledges in a 1630 poem entitled, aptly enough, “On Shakespeare:”
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-y pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Has built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
Yet Milton had a strong tie to Latin (being the outrageously powerful Latin translator for Cromwell’s doomed Reformation) and Dante both, and, eventually, from his training and affection for the sensual poetry and idealism of Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, and Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Milton predicts the Romanticist fascination with Satan as “doer” in opposition to God as “observer.” As an exercise, trace Romanticism to Naturalism (not only in the poetry of Pound and Whitman, but the bridging literature of Faulkner) then Naturalism, when mixed with The Great War, to Modernism in Eliot’s rat’s alley, full of bones. Milton is the keystone, you see, in the arch from the Bible to the Wasteland, and Paradise Lost is his keenest vision.
A voracious linguist, philosopher, scribe, Milton, drilled in the rigidity of the scholarly mold, expressed at the end of his seven years at Cambridge a dissatisfaction with what he saw as the “drab and dour” methodology of contemporary erudition. It is the first inkling of that element of detachment which will typify the Miltonian godhead – the thinly veiled criticism which prompted William Blake (an illustrator for a famous printing of Paradise Lost), to call Milton “a poet of the devil’s part” with the quick qualification: “without knowing it.”
Satan as the petulant teen
Such is the crux of the argument, really, but author internationality is basically a load of bollocks – whatever Milton intended, his Satan is easily the most vital and interesting (not to mention empathetic) character in the poem. The amount to which we still identify with the fallen lightbringer is a testament to what Christians would no doubt call our fallen natures – I prefer to take a look at it from a different perspective. Milton’s Paradise Lost, reclaimed from the realm of the rigidly theological and the unimaginative, is a cry from a child who has lost his sight to an uncaring father whom he shall never exceed. The paradox being, of course, that it is innate in the human male psychology to desire to exceed the father – and if that father is the lamentable fallacy of a flawless deity, then there exists an eternal dissatisfaction in personal achievement and developmental age.
Make of that what you will.
When Satan proclaims that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, he echoes the eternal defiant lament of adolescent boys given the choice of living under a set of draconian rules or being turned out into the cold world. What to do, though, when the father is never wrong nor capable of being wrong: never flawed nor capable of being flawed?
It is this magnificent irony – this unbridgeable gap (which is most often bridged in the Christian faith by the Father browbeating: “how dare you question me?” as he does to his good son Job, or by the Father’s other children reassuring that we are not to know Father’s design – and how dare you question it?) – that forms the vital universal conflict festering at the core of Paradise Lost. The controversy of the poem, then, is not that it portrays the Christian God in a poor light, but that it portrays the Christian God in terms that we can understand – and the Christian Satan in a form that we recognize as ourselves.
Milton’s invocation to the muse, then, the classical introduction to the epic form, carries a special resonance when it ends this way:
What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
“Justify the ways of God to men.” Is that beautiful, or what?
the Madonna/whore dichotomy, and Keats
Romanticist poet John Keats takes a different look at this irony – introducing it into the realm of the sexual a little more than a century before Freud would detail his own thoughts on object choice.
Keats was a man obsessed by the idea that the ideal, once known, becomes mundane and, more often than not, horrible. Keats outlines the Madonna/whore syndrome in which the woman, in the mind of the ravager, is idealized to such a degree that if the woman were ever to acknowledge the unrequited pursuer, much less acquiesce to his caresses, she would be egregiously and irretrievably corrupted.
Keats’s Madeline, dreaming of her demon lover Porphyro in The Eve of Saint Agnes, consummates their relationship in that dream:
she uttered a soft moan.
He ceased – she panted quick (Keats, 293-4)
only to wake to find:
a painful change, that nigh expelled
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep (Keats, 299-300)
Once sought, now used.
John Milton (himself a secondary creator) creates female characters in Paradise Lost who are the products not of the reason of a masculanized God, but of the fancy and flesh of His creations. The characters of Eve and Sin are created in the idealized realm of the imaginary and function in the role of the arrested Dante-esque immortal beloved: to be pursued, to be known, and to fall. They are also, problematically, the only female characters of the piece (problematical for some old school feminist readings of the epic).
primogenesis vs. secondary genesis, and Freud
Eve is a product not only of Adam’s rib, but of his dream predicting her creation, while Sin springs fully grown from the center of Satan’s wicked thoughts (another kind of dreaming/fantasizing).
Both characters are products of a secondary genesis in Milton, both have been formed with the imperfections of created beings burdened by the curse of choice and the fantasies of the puerile masculine. What occurs in Paradise Lost is essentially a diagram of an eternally frustrated Oedipal split as outlined in Freud’s A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men (1910), in which the sons, Satan/Adam, experience a desire for identification with the father while never being allowed to progress to an identity independent of the father.
The male creations are stuck, in other words, in a developmental phase which necessitates that women remain in an idealized and imaginary state between mother/Madonna, and the harlot/whore. Without the ability to establish an identity independent from but equal to the Father, the only options for the woman are one or the other extreme.
the difference between the mother and a whore is after all not so very great, since at bottom they both do the same thing (Freud, p.169)
In other words, the male creations (Satan and Adam), in their desire to identify with their father, procreate with thought first, and then with flesh (as their father had before them, as in – “the word, and the word made flesh”), and then, in an act of incest, Satan and Adam desire a union with the product of their own mind and of their own flesh.
Milton establishes an Oedipal triangle between the father, the mother fertility figure (Eve and Sin), and the son who wishes to usurp the father and procreate with the mother figure. However, because of the nature of Christianity, the sons are never to be allowed to split from the father under the penalty of eternal damnation and assured destruction. The women of Milton’s Paradise Lost are doomed to fall because of the presence of a father who may never be imitated, denying the sons an opportunity to split from the father, thereby allowing the women transcend male projections of Madonna or whore.
Note that this struggle is reflected in the traditional way that Mary is seen in contrast to Mary Magdalene in contrast to the eternally upward-beseeching Christ. A trinity of a kind established between the arrested male and his infantile projections of women between one polarity and another.
The reflexive bond between the Satan figure and the Christ figure is important to establish so that the behavior of Satan/Adam, might be explained through the psychoanalytic lens of Freud’s (and Sophocles’s, for that matter) theories on the father/son tension. It is important to note that Freud identifies the mother as an inappropriate object choice – recalling that the Oedipus Rex drama ends with the realization of evil resulting in a similar exile from “Eden” (the womb) – into a world in which there is sexual knowledge and an appropriate object choice.
Adam and Satan
Once Paradise Lost is established as an archetypal struggle between father/son (God/Satan, God/Adam), the behavior and characterization of the women (Eve and Sin), may be clarified as the product of the male’s Madonna/whore complex. Satan/Adam are male creations who are, to no small degree, established by Milton as mirror-darkly reflections of God the father. Tellingly Adam/Satan both assert, to varying degrees, the desire to become more like God: a compulsion Freud explains:
(the male) identifies himself completely with the father. All the instincts, the loving, the grateful, the sensual, the defiant, the self-assertive and independent – all are gratified in the wish to be the father of himself. (Freud, p.171)
Milton establishes Satan as Adam’s doppelganger through action and word. In action, Satan volunteers to traverse chaos to find Eden (Paradise Lost II, 450), just as Christ volunteers to become separated from heaven for man’s sake (PL. III. 245). In words, Satan claims his mantle of godhead:
Wherefore do I assume
There royalties, and not refuse to reign (P.L. II 450-1)
Milton strengthens the connection between Adam/Satan through narration:
hell’s dread emperor, with pomp supreme
And god-like imitated state (P.L. II, 510-1)
and the similar ways in which the host of hell and the host of heaven admire their respective kings’ sacrifices (P.L. II 520 & III, 271). Adam, literally, is created in God’s image and favored above all angels (P.L. II, 351). As the sovereign of the Earth realm, he is the “first father” (P.L. VIII. 298) and the center of that mundane demesne as much as Satan is of Hell and that God/Christ is of Heaven:
Likening spiritual to corporeal forms,
As may express them best. . . if Earth
be but the shadow of heaven (P.L. V, 573-5)
Freud, again
For Freud’s theory on object choice to be applicable to a reading of the female characters of Milton’s Paradise Lost, there must be a connection made between sexual desire for the image of the mother and an actual incestual acting out of that desire above a merely onanistic one. There are three major parts to Freud’s theory:
first that the male identifies with the father,
second that the male wishes to reciprocate the gift of life given by the mother through creation:
the son wishes to show his gratitude by wishing to have a son by his mother that shall be like himself (Freud, p.171)
and lastly that the son views his mother, after coition, as the fallen harlot (Freud. p.164).
brief restatement of intent
Having already established that there is an identification between Satan and Adam with their father, there remains the task of identifying Sin and Eve as at once the reciprocated creations (of pt.2 above), the mother figures ancestrally defiled, and the images of decadence and fall. Further, it is my intention to show that through the lens of Freud’s theoretical complex, the figures of Eve and Sin are not so much characters as they are fantasy projections of the male characters whose only function is to facilitate the loss of paradise.
Satan and his daughter, the fertile mother, Sin
Sin, literally, is created by Satan in Paradise Lost as a result of his thoughts – springing like Athena of Greek mythology, fully grown from her creator’s forehead (P.L. II, 758). A connection (Sin vs. the Goddess of Wisdom), that would not be lost on the classically trained Milton. Sin is a creation of a son who wishes to create like the father: an identification of the father as in pt. 1 above, but more than that, it is the birth of a thing which is:
likest to thee (Satan) in shape and countenance bright (P.L. II, 756)
a creation of his un-reasonable thoughts of an offspring which shall be like himself (Freud, p.171). Satan has, in aspiring to be akin to his Father/God, created something in his own infernal image. Prometheus/Man, Frankenstein and his monster, Richard Attenborough and Jurassic Park - we recognize the folly of unnatural creation – now we come closer to better understanding how that fear and innate recognition is a product of our collective well of memory and mythology.
Satan’s eventual physical defilement of his “daughter,” the fertile mother, has as its offspring not only Death, but the outward appearance of Pollution. Sin, post-coitus, has metamorphosed. Compare:
seemed woman to the waist, and fair/But ended in many a scaly fold (P.L, II, 650-1)
after, with this description from before:
I pleased. . . . with attractive graces (P.L. II, 762)
A startlingly crystalline manifestation of the Keatsian fall from Madonna to whore pre- then post-copulation combined with Freud’s theory of object choice and the arrested Oedipal separation of the adolescent who never usurps the king and thus defiles the mother. Who knew; Satan was a mama’s boy.
Because Sin is Satan’s mind made manifest, literally a product of his imagination; that she exhibits a physical change as a result of her sexuality points directly to the masculine process of fantasy redefinition from the immortal beloved into the mortally corrupted. In a situation in which it is impossible to ever usurp the father, the child may never refocus upon an appropriate object choice for affection, and the fall of the mother is inevitable.
Adam and his daughter, the fertile mother, Eve
Adam dreams of a mate in book eight of Paradise Lost and, by dreaming it, he awakens to find it reality. The power that is Adam’s is the power to name and the power of fancy and imagination and, in these respects, the creation of Eve is in essence the creation of Sin. Both are products of the mind of their male creators, both are also made of the corporeal stuff of their creators. Stop here for a second and savor the implication that man and Satan are created in God’s image while woman and Sin are created in man and Satan’s image. Milton, you sly devil, you.
A product of himself, Adam ancestrally desires Eve:
All things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight (P.L. VIII 475)
who is described by Milton as, like Sin, the fertile mother:
Hail mother of mankind, whose fruitful womb
Shall fill the world more numerous with they sons
Than with these various fruits the trees of God
Have heaped this table (P.L. V, 386-90)
As the mother, the sharer of his flesh, Eve is, though her fall is not physically manifest as with Sin, doomed to her fall at the hands of a son who may never refocus upon an appropriate object choice for affection because of his inability to usurp the father. Adam was a Mama’s boy, too.
the injured third party
Jealousy of God’s creative powers, when taken from a psychoanalytical point of view, reduces to the jealousy of the son for the father’s reproductive privileges with the mother. Freud explains the choice of mate in males experiencing frustrated development as often exhibiting a need “for an injured third party” (Freud, p. 163). This need to injure a third party, whether that third be a fiancé, a husband, a boyfriend, is linked to the need of the son to injure the father in order to obtain the sexually active and fertile mother.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost a charge of misogyny would seem, at first, to be grounded in the clear-cut fact that it is the women characters, both of them, which are responsible for, literally, sin and fall.
A charge of misogyny, however fails from a psychoanalytic perspective in that it is clear that the women are not so much characters as they are projections of the male mind. They function as scapegoats for those thoughts that do not fall beneath the aegis of “right reason.”
If one were to scandalously extend these conclusions, a case could be made that God himself is projecting his shadow onto the exploded image of Satan that, like Sin springing from Old Scratch, Satan has, at some time previous, sprung from God’s own evil thoughts.
Such a contention, however, is blasphemy in the Christian religious structure and all suggestions that God may have had a role (as is logical as he is posited as the creator of all things) in the genesis of Sin is dismissed as heretical. The repression of flaw in the character of God manifests itself in Paradise Lost as not only Satan, but as the similarity and weaknesses of the two women in the poem. The creation of the Keatsian “sexual sublime” – the Madonna/whore you see, is obviously not the fault of the women, but rather the fault of oppressive fathers, and frustrated sons.
conclusions
Endlessly beautiful and possessed of a rare sublimity, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a complicated and magnificent work. A unique achievement (and a sadly controversial one) in that it seethes with an understanding and a sympathy of foible and humanity. Freud has said that he should not be credited for the mapping of the unconscious for the Romanticists (especially essayist Thomas de Quincey), had discovered and mapped the unconscious more than a hundred years before. I would go a step farther to suggest that Milton first purposely shines a light into the Jungian basement with Paradise Lost by illustrating the experiential truth buried beneath the Christian myth – or any myth – the truth that draws the imaginations of humans from every walk and every epoch like moths to a an unblinking sun.
Paradise Lost inspires one of my favorite quotes from William Blake – in a nutshell, Blake suggests that we have forgotten that all gods were born in the breast of man; that all gods owe their birth to a collective memory of sun, mother, and undeniably human tensions.
Paradise Lost doesn’t so much explain the ways of god to man, as remind that it is in the ways of man that we create our gods. Is that beautiful, or what?
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Freud, Sigmund. "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" (1910). On Creativity and the Unconscious. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Harper and Row, 1958.
Keats, John. "The Eve of St. Agnes." Romanticism: An Anthology. (p.1039). Ed. Duncan Wu. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
Milton, John. "Paradise Lost."
Recommended:
Yes
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mangiotto
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