"...long is the way, and hard That out of Hell leads up to light" Paradise Lost, II, 432-3. "If a nation decides to live by lies,  it has chosen a course of intellectual stagnation, and ultimately of political decay." Peter Dale Scott, The Assassinations, 1975 (ix).

The Void Profound: Denial and Repression in Doctor Faustus, Paradise Lost, and These United States by Jamey Hecht, PhD INTRODUCTION

This project originated in a strange combination of circumstances. If I had not been simultaneously teaching Paradise Lost, exploring psychotherapy and psychology, and studying American political culture, I never would have undertaken a writing project that sought to integrate such apparently disparate materials. But integration is the work we're all here to do, and when I followed where it led, I was amazed to discover that I had been drawn onward by an unperceived, underlying coherence. Given the immediate human interest that inheres in the issues of repression and denial, and the urgent-yet-chronic legitimation crisis that seems to haunt American political life, it seems to me possible that a fresh approach like this (with its unfamiliar, almost shocking inter-disciplinarity) might have something valuable to contribute, not only to the "false consciousness problem" familiar from sociology, but to the living of more fully human lives, a traditional motive already common to literary and political criticism. But for whom?

Milton for his part sought "fit audience, though few." Though Miltonists (persons who might so identify, for reasons comprising the poetic, the crazy, and the professional) are a few thousand people, the number of human beings reading Paradise Lost in or out of school is several hundred thousand per annum.[1]? And though that's still less than one percent of all humanity currently on the globe, it's an absolutely Christian poem, and Christians are legion the world over. In that regard, a frank and critical look at the conceptual purview of PL is a timely exercise in self scrutiny on the part of Christians and, I think, monotheists everywhere.?

So there's a small but highly educated readership for Milton criticism that could use a more urgent motivation for its concerns than the narrow limits afforded by academic discourse. And there is a readership on the JFK assassination (and the unofficial history and psychology of American presidential politics) that could benefit from the Humanist perspective and historical depth of the Miltonists. These two readerships share a certain ethical high seriousness, as well as a deep concern with justice, denial, repression, and legitimacy. For almost entirely different reasons, both remain marginal to the reading public: Miltonists suffer from the alleged irrelevance of their work (which after all is devoted to an epic poem whose critical reputation barely survived a twenty-year blight near the middle of the last century). Critics of the national security state are marginalized as dreamers, sometimes brilliant in their efforts at information gathering and critique, but finally unable to change the brutal order of realpolitik which they naively indict before an indifferent, powerless public. There may be almost nobody listening. But in each case, somebody does listen, and there is good reason: Milton's poem is a troubled but sublime attempt to put God on trial, the very God in whom a majority of Americans still claim to believe. Similarly, the literature on government erosion of popular sovereignty is a vexed but noble attempt to think past the limits of official opinion and earnestly diagnose the legitimacy of our political institutions. In each case, revulsion at the sight of the abyss causes the investigation to lapse, and a series of substitutions is interposed between the seeker and the intolerable truth. Religion becomes the process of protecting oneself from religious insight;[2]; systemic politics becomes the process of preventing insurgent democracy.[3]???

The literature of the JFK Assassination usually simmers with a low flame of utopian longing, that the files will be released in their entirety, or further, that a "truth for amnesty" committee will be established before the last persons directly involved have died off. The old hope, that all those directly involved would be brought to justice, has long since gone by the board. But according to the "Deep Politics" paradigm articulated by Peter Dale Scott, the systemic aspect of the JFK murder is at least as important as the conspiratorial aspects. Since the CIA had a central role in the President's murder, the individuals involved were probably responding to the wish Kennedy had uttered in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, to "shatter the CIA in a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds." Somebody else must do this now that Kennedy can't: and if the research community is correct, and the President was murdered because he had ceased to cooperate with the national security state, then a restructuring of that state would amount to a justice more fitting, more poetic, and more important than the arrest of the whole web of participants from the shooters on up. What such an institutional return to constitutional principles would entail I have little idea; a rebirth of authentic popular sovereignty in the U.S. seems to me as unlikely as, say, a military Emperor like Diocletian or Czar Alexander carrying out the will of his own puppet parliament.  Instead, the permanent warfare / oil / bankling / narcotics State and its deep political system (which killed so many civil leaders in, for instance, the 1960's) persists, occasionally sacrificing the jobs of a few individuals (like Richard Nixon and Oliver North) to provide the vast majority of its participants with a sort of homeopathic immunity from Justice.

This is the principle by which law enforcement and organized crime maintain one another in symbiosis: informant criminals betray their rivals and their own subordinates into the hands of the police, in exchange for protection and the freedom to sell their wares. The compromised law enforcement officials benefit from access to contraband goods and services furnished by the informant criminals who continue to operate. Deep politics is in part a system of scapegoating in which one tiny subset of a larger group of criminals is sacrificed, in exchange for the remaining criminals'  freedom to operate without fear of law enforcement.

Satan is, of course, this sort of scapegoat in Paradise Lost, just as people still use the phrase "the great Satan"  to refer to whatever serves that function (Communism, "the" Jews, U.S. imperialism, etc). Long after the fall from Heaven that opens Paradise Lost, God allows Satan to take up his permanent job as corruptor of human affairs, the Devil. It is he who invents guns and artillery, the weapons of warfare used not by God's loyal Angels, but by the rebels (PL 500-506) and later by us human moderns (see table below). Why God permits this, or rather just how God can permit it without impairing his goodness, is never made entirely clear (PLI. 210-220 is one attempt). Chronically in PL and acutely in various episodes, Milton's theodicy and God's well-being (whether more narrowly construed, as his legitimacy, or more broadly construed, as his existence) evidently depend upon Satan's responsibility for the potentially meaningless suffering that we call evil. Like the State in Peter Dale Scott's Weberian dystopia, the God in Milton's poem successfully seeks a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; maintains this monopoly through a contemptuous symbiosis with the successful claimants to the illegitimate use of force (Satan; deep political processes); contrives the legitimacy of this monopoly through projecting evil onto the symbiotic partner, disguising but reinforcing the symbiosis.

This may suggest that the roots of the deep political system lie buried in the monotheist psyche, not least in the Puritan version. [4]Milton's unthinkable anxiety is that the villain of the Christian story isn't Satan, nor the Pope, the Jews, Pilate, nor ancient Rome: God is the villain. And if our loving God does not love, he may not be God at all: we ourselves may be the only available culprits for the woe of history, without a revealed religion to help us put it right. To experience this loss of God seems to me part of growing up and reconciling oneself to what Freud called the Reality principle, and Lacan called the Real. While such a loss affords an opportunity for reassessment of a broad range of important issues, many people fend off this experience with elaborate structures of denial, of which Paradise Lost is among the most sublime. From my perspective, their failure to confront their own magical thinking has profound collective implications for the rest of society. This is part of why I find the trial of familiar Christian notions in Milton so intellectually urgent.

The corresponding nightmare of deep politics is that the political killings of 1963 and 1968 were part of an ongoing, murderously wrongheaded trend in our national life and that not even a Nuremberg tribunal would restore American politics to Constitutional principles. Bringing individuals to justice without restructuring the system will only stabilize the abuses by soothing the public, diminishing the popular interest in more radical reforms. To be unusually frank, dear Reader, it is with patriotic heartache that I admit to the following: I find a collective guilt in the American failure to restrict the intelligence services from: collaborating with organized crime, engaging in drug commerce, destabilizing sovereign governments foreign and domestic, assassination of the leadership of citizens' movements all over the globe, and generally fulfilling the fears of Thomas Hobbes:

"also all men that are ambitious of military command, are inclined to continue the causes of war and to stir up trouble and sedition: for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game as by causing a new shuffle." (Leviathan XI.)

Intelligence operatives still behave this way, sabotaging democracy's efforts to survive, while the popular energies that alone might overcome the resulting militarism are dissipated in worship of the Invisible. Our collective failure to outgrow monotheism and our collective failure to protect the constitution are somehow deeply connected.? Perhaps salient aspects of Christianity (e.g., the strong father presiding over the humiliation of the crucifixion, the depravity of man) facilitate the authoritarian tendencies of the political right and its supporters. Perhaps the Pauline mythologizing of "Christ's death" effaces the life of Jesus of Nazareth in a way that helps Americans to tolerate the mythmaking of their own contemporary authorities.?

Plato's Euthyphro shows Socrates asking a few very dangerous questions about piety and the gods. "Then, if piety is ministering to the gods, does it benefit the gods and make them better? And would you grant that whenever you do something pious, you're making some god better?" (13c). Christianity gave a new answer to this question: that you owe worship to Jesus Christ because he has already died in your stead, to expiate (your) original sin, of which you can't be guilty (Adam and Eve did it) but for which you (or as it turns out, Christ) must be responsible. In Work on Myth, Hans Blumenberg wrote: "Dogma's late discovery of Original Sin crystallized out, as the question that had been absorbed in it, what it actually was that redemption had to redeem people from." (183).? Ethically, this is a debt of gratitude: you are to consider yourself a formerly condemned criminal whom the Christ has saved from death and devilry. For Augustine as for Luther, the consequences of Adam's fall are transmitted to all his progeny as a matter of course. Our depravity is the result of Adam's.

As the audience of Paul's letters (and of most of the documents that became the ";New Testament"), Greco-Roman pagans are told that they all need the grace offered by Christ, lest they remain polluted by Original Sin. These beneficiaries of Greco-Roman civilization (and its tendency toward syncretism) would be heartily motivated to expunge any magical guilt said to have accrued to them. In Greek literature, Oedipus gets told by divine sources that the city and he himself are both polluted and must seek purification.? In Apuleius' novel The Golden Ass, Lucius must follow divinely revealed instructions in order to transform himself from a beast back into a human being.? Original Sin is not so different a problem; one is told that one is polluted, and then told how to purify oneself of this particular pollution.?

?????????????? ...? them who renounce Thir own both righteous and unrighteous deeds, And live in thee transplanted, and from thee Receive new life.????????? PL III, (289-294).

We are told that we must be desperately grateful to God for His Son's sacrifice on our behalf. This makes it quite unlikely that we will turn toward the Father-God at the back of this story and discover whether the responsibility for evil may lie there, with Monotheism, and not in the Garden with Adam or in an earlier Heaven with Lucifer.[5]? Since mankind invented God, the responsibility for evil (a category that now includes the loss of integrity incurred in the worship of what William Blake called "Nobodaddy") lies once again with us and, as Friedrich Nietzsche came to insist, with Jews for having invented monotheism and with Christians and Muslims for having extended it.

The very beginning of Satan's dissent is the moment when he interprets the advent of the Son's reign as an impairment of his own dignity and acknowledgement. He can have had no experience of such a situation in the past, just as, after his Fall, he can appeal to no model for repentance (no one having ever repented of anything before, despite Heaven's having already been populated for some time). First he refuses to submit; then he refuses to repent his initial defiance, which prolongs it indefinitely. Compare the following passage of the German psychologist Arno Gruen:

[The] aggression is a reaction to a decrease in autonomy, even in those cases where a person tries to struggle against this loss. The whole history of our childhood is repeated here, parental suppression of the child's feelings and spontaneous responses succeeds in making the child obedient, but that only conceals and at the same time intensifies the aggression. (Gruen, 40)

The link between what Milton portrays as Heaven's first political event (The Appointment of God's Son at V 605 and Satan's initial refusal to submit to it) and the cascade of its eternal repetitions by Satan, is God's punitive paternal fiat: eternal damnation. Although Satan's own spite quickly ruins his claim to much more of our sympathy,[6] it seems only fair to admit that the fallen cherub might never have become so spiteful (and heaped damnation [PL I, 215]) had God responded to this episode of sibling rivalry with something more gentle.? Indeed, from Lucifer's initial error the Fall of Satan, the Fall of Man, "and all our Woe," all the suffering in history (including the English Revolution and all the political travails of John Milton), are supposed to be derived. Indeed, nothing less than the entirety of Milton's conscious, expressed intention in Paradise Lost  "to justify the ways of God to man" is at risk of utter failure if it should turn out that God was wrong in responding to Satan's disobedience the way He did. Return to Arno Gruen's essay once more, from where we left off:

The child's rage is directed against its own suffering and sense of aliveness, for these are apparently what caused the parents' oppressive behavior in the first place.? The first split in our being is the result: the rejection of what could have become the foundation for the development of our autonomy; namely, our sense of aliveness. And although we have been made accomplices in our own suppression, this doesn't mean that our self-hatred is diminished as a consequence; on the contrary, a continual process of splitting takes place, which is reinforced by societal norms.(41).

A propos of this description of authoritarian parenting, consider Satan's predicament. The "splitting" Gruen describes sounds like the birth of Sin from Satan's head. The phrase "accomplices in our own suppression" evokes those lines of God's triumphant exploitation of his defeated opponent:

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence [ 210 ] Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought [ 215 ] Evil to others, and enrag'd might see How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn On Man by him seduc't, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.

So: for Satan, neglect ("Let him at large to work his own dark designs) and then torture eternal ("Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance").  I don't think it ever becomes fully clear, even in Abdiel's speech, just what the grounds were upon which Satan was expected to render his submission. Whatever those grounds, among their entailments must be the proposition that God was not asking the angels to do something that would endanger their own moral existence when He asked them to bow down and worship His new "only begotten Son." For His own part, God does not so much assure the angels that they are safe from moral suicide (much less actually demonstrate this to them) as preside over an order in which doubts about this matter supposedly cannot arise. And yet they do arise.

The mission of Paradise Lost is to demonstrate (a)? that Satan and his rebels are mistaken in these doubts, and (b) that they are fully and solely responsible for their own mistake, regardless of (1) God's foreknowledge that they would indeed fall, would indeed make Satan's mistake about abundance and scarcity; given (2) the initial conditions, which lie with God's creation of them "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall"; and despite (3) God's announcement at V. 600-615, which, quite apart from its flaws and merits as a piece of statecraft, or parenting, or Godhood, would seem to be the first major event in Heavenly history, and the immediate occasion of the doubts to which Satan succumbs.

I take Milton to have been motivated to make this demonstration by his own cognitive and emotional needs and his almost equally deep religious and political experience, whose prodigious energies he devoted to persuading his fellows that the Christian God is just.? On behalf of his interpretive community,[7]Milton undertook to prove that the stories his culture told about God's justice are both true and coherent. Due to Milton's learning and to his genius, reading the poem brings some stellar rewards; Milton is preacher, orator, statesman, a man near the heart of the English Revolution, and a profound thinker in theology. More than this, his gift for blank verse is, at its best, comparable to Marlowe's. But all this bounty comes with a price; at the peril of our moral lives, the poem puts us questions about the way we respond to its demonstration.[8]

It's productive to bring to Paradise Lost an array of terms for what happens inside people when they do the things which various divine agents[9] do in this poem: they beget other agents, announce such begetting, delegate authority, exercise authority, rebel, remain loyal, make war, fall, et cetera. One rich source of terms for the inner entailments of such activities is psychology, in particular family systems therapy, object relations, hypnosis, and developmental psychology. These modern descriptions seem to have some purchase on Paradise Lost, so they may provide us with a description of the poem that emancipates us from a number of ethical pitfalls of its argument about Gods justice.

What I've tried to construct here is a three ring circus of religion, politics, and psychology.?Signs of dangerous anxiety and stress are strewn across the narratological landscape of Milton's grand design like the craters Galileo saw maculating the Moon. Some are like meteors, inflicted from without: the disaster of the Stuart Restoration, (or, in Dante's case, the exile from Florence). But others well up from deep below the surface, threatening to erupt with the molten magma of the repressed: doubts about Theodicy, personal agency, free will, Atheism. Like Dante's Commedia, Paradise Lost includes a deep katabasis into the basement of the Western mind, where dark issues work their perverse logic; where intolerable facts and unimaginable possibilities are isolated from the lifeworld of daily experience.? Milton allowed these deep aporetic anomalies to surface in various ways in his poem, just as Dante had, and for the same reason: Poetic creativity has been recognized, at least since Plato,[10]?as a state of privileged access to what Freud came to call the unconscious.?

But this same unconscious is the domain of the repressed, so that creative inspiration and forbidden knowledge enter the poem from the same source, through the same aperture in the repression system.[11] The forbidden knowledge is, in the case of Paradise Lost, all that the defense of Milton's God would benefit by concealing. It includes a sprawling tableau of emergent, radical ideas, many of which had ancient precursors (heliocentrism, Mortalism), while others did not (telescopic astronomy, Baconian experimentalism [12]). Older, pre-Miltonic materials are also ready to hand for this emancipatory labor we may owe to ourselves: Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus' grand meditation on justice, power, and divinity) and Shakespeare's King Lear are two important ones.

Christopher Marlowe's Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus compasses many of the same issues as Paradise Lost, but it responds to them in the opposite direction. Marlowe was a spy, who knew the dangerous inner workings of Elizabethan sovereignty and aristocratic nobility, and cynically participated in them. In religion, he was a strikingly daring and persuasive atheist, and therefore a (doubly) hunted man. By contrast, Milton was an idealist in politics who worked for the establishment of a Republic via regicide; while in religion, he was determined to prove Christianity's truth and God's goodness. Where the disillusioned Marlowe laces his Faustus with a red thread of defiant atheism, Milton submits to the most grotesque self-torture in his effort to "justify the ways of God to man." Marlowe's integrity is nothing in politics and everything in religion; in neither sphere will he tolerate wishful thinking. Milton's integrity is everything in politics, and nothing in religion; in neither sphere will he give up his wishful thinking.

So I argue that there is a domain of the repressed, which in the most general way we call the unconscious, such that among its most important contents for Paradise Lost is the fear that there is no God and no Devil. Next, I claim that this "forbidden knowledge" reading of Milton, even as it emancipates us from his punitive theism, burdens us anew with the responsibility for confronting our own repressed fears, lest we "subscribe slave" to a whitewash of our own (like Paradise Lost, or the Warren Report, or an inauthentic selfhood). Where Dante's Inferno warned against sin, Paradise Lost warns against the way every legitimation crisis oozes denial.? In this it resembles Shakespeare's political dramas, especially Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Richard II.? But if the interpretive habits of literary criticism are to issue in the good life, (as English Departments everywhere insist that they can), then we must not fail to mention, toward the end of the essay, that Paradise Lost also resembles innumerable denial systems closer to home, including for instance the Warren Report.?

Beyond Doctor Faustus and Paradise Lost lie more recent materials, the documents and governing narratives of our own political culture.? They scintillate with much the same patterns of repressions and denials that we find in the old poems. Ideology is a marvelous thing: it shows us what we can be permitted to think, and divides it into the acceptable and the dangerous. But ideology also mutely points beyond the horizon of these two categories, toward myriad third alternatives for the organization of society and psyche. In this study I make abundant use of Raymond Williams' famous pair of terms, the emergent and the residual. I hope my reader will permit me to requite this debt with a few more invented categories:

The acceptable is the dominant, primary story about the world (the Christianity that Milton clung to and Marlowe rejected, the authoritarian, imperialist nationalism that Marlowe accepted and Milton rejected, and which Americans like J. Edgar Hoover and Clay Shaw embraced).  The dangerous is that set of alternative, secondary stories which the primary story actively opposes but mentions at every opportunity (Satanism, Communism, Terrorism, etc). The excluded is that vast continuum of potential cultural alternatives?(and suppressed past facts) which lies beyond the acceptable and the dangerous, and even require a long journey away from them (Marlowe's defiant atheism; Milton's defiant, Republican opposition to the English monarchy; Jim Garrisson's defiant opposition to the deep political system of the U.S.).  Much of the business of ideology is done by construction a false, totalizing dichotomy between the acceptable and the dangerous, so as to preclude the possibility (and often even the mention) of the excluded.

In Paradise Lost, the acceptable is the claim to success in the avowed project of justifying the ways of God to man. The dangerous is the Satanic position, with all its attractive qualities as appreciated by so many authors from Blake and Shelley to William Empson. The excluded is the repressed atheism that rumbles through the poem like a many-tremored earthquake.

In the United   States, the acceptable is American exceptionalism, nationalism and imperialism. The dangerous is an ever changing category, occupied for fifty years by Communism and now comprising the best enemies money can buy. Although the deep political system is excluded from discourse, what is excluded from reality is the rule of law, along with democratic control over legislation.

Keith Stavely, in his Puritan Legacies: Paradise Lost and the New England Tradition, 1630-1890, demonstrates the centrality of Milton's poem to the early American psyche. Milton's emancipatory political practice disappears behind the sublime authoritarian wall of music that is his literary edifice. The tyranny of Milton's God, and the casuistry and swindle of his arguments, are part of the intellectual legacy that eventuates here in the imaginative landscape of Dallas and Los Angeles, Miami and Langley, where we love the flag and despise the "evil empire" with President Reagan and the "Axis of Evil" with the very Nixonian George W. Bush. This weird form of sovereignty, secrecy, and denial that constitutes American power, this tissue of murder and theatre, has roots in English literature and still deeper roots in the deep politics of antiquity.

[1] Note the similarity to the idea that there is a predestined, very small number of persons who will ultimately be saved ("The 700 Club").

[2]. See for instance Soren Kierkegaard, Attack On Christendom; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

[3].? See for instance Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, and Manufacturing Consent.

[4]. See Richard Rubinstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future.

5. See Doubt's Boundless Sea, Don Cameron Allen.

[6]. See "The Technique of Degradation," in Paradise Lost and Its Critics, A.J.A. Waldock (1947).? It's chiefly to this book that Stanley Fish seems to have been replying in his 1967 Surprised By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost.?

[7]. In its largest extension, Milton's audience is (like Dante's) all mankind, followed in more particularity by, say, readers of English, readers of epic poetry, Englishmen, Christians, Protestants, and at the smallest extreme "fit audience, though few." Beyond that minimal plurality named in the Hymn to Urania (the Muse of astronomy) at VII 1-40 (line 31: "Urania, and fit audience find, though few."), there lies an array of singularities, to each of whom the poem is addressed entire, but none of whom can be fully differentiated from the others (nor fully assimilated to them) so as to become the final addressee: Urania, God, John Milton. These figures (as the Hymn both suggests and denies) are alone, and not alone, with the poem: like the solitary Reader.

[8]. Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of God: "Aren't many of us disinterested to the fatal point of being uninterested in whether this or any other attorney manages to get an acquittal for God? Not when we're in the dock as well as the jurybox." (54)

[9]. These are God, the Son, and the various Angels of various degrees, fallen and loyal, named and unnamed, before and after the Fall.

[10]. See Ion. Before Plato, the Homeric poems attribute poetic inspiration to the Muse, who is later understood as an aspect of the Christian God (PL, VII. 1-40), and later still, as internal to the poet's psyche.

[11]. There is a well-attested link between imaginative access to unconscious sources of creativity, and cognitive access to dangerously dissident positions. Consider Plato's celebration of Socratic trance in Symposium; Giordano Bruno's emphasis on "Heroic? frenzy," as crucial to his own revolutionary insights in cosmology; Peter Dale Scott's dual status as the author of four volumes of poetry from New Directions Press, and the theoretician of "Deep Politics"; Noam Chomsky's disposition to look beneath the phenomenon of language competency to discover an underlying generative grammar, and his investigation of the unacknowledged violence undergirding the dominant political order of the United States.

[12].? Bacon's New Organon achieved its desired distance from its ancient model, Aristotle's Organon.

II Samuel 11:24 "And the shooters shot from the wall upon Thy serveants, and some of Thy serveants be dead; and Thy serveant Uriah the Hittite is dead also."