“…Commission from above

I have receav’d, to answer thy desire

Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain

To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope

Things not reveal’d, which th’ invisible King,

Onely omniscient, hath supprest in Night…”

Archangel Raphael to Adam, in John Milton’s 1674 Paradise Lost, Book VII. Lines 118-123

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial... Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off…We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.”

Nicholas Katzenbach, Deputy Attorney General, Memo of 25 November, 1963

“YOUR HEAD I HIM APPOINT”

At Book V, 600-615, God introduces his Son to the heavenly host and announces that He has already sworn that all of them will bend their knees to the Son and worship him. Whereas loyal angels like Abdiel experience this change as an addition to the abundant economy of love, Lucifer sees it as the advent of an economy of scarcity. In so doing, he invents the experience of feeling personally threatened, for which he earns the name Satan (the Adversary; the Opposer; the Threat).

Unless, of course, God has already had that experience, and is projecting it in Satan’s direction. On this view, Lucifer becomes Satan when God projects onto him a wounded portion of God’s own psyche. Later in the poem, Satan argues for this view in a mixed and confused performance, polluting his arguments with new mistakes and escalation. Still, with or without Satan’s arguments, the logic of God’s own arguments and His action in the poem can be taken to suggest that scarcity supervenes in Heaven at the moment of God’s announcement. Satan is responding to a real threat of scarcity. Though Satan’s behavior and his reasoning rapidly degenerate beyond the point where this argument can be applied to win him any sympathy, the initial phase of Satan’s rebellion — upon which all the sequel in some ways rather heavily depends — does seem to be an ethically defensible act of withdrawal and self defense, which gets treated as though it were aggressive rebellion, and quite savagely punished, beyond hope of reprieve. That this is unjust, Milton cannot admit. It is as though his regicidal defiance of Charles I had spent all of Milton’s defiance; the magical thinking he so bitterly eschewed in his critique of British monarchy was, as it were, dumped into Milton’s religious life, where it seems to have impeded his moral imagination. Somehow Marlowe is given over to passionate truth-speaking in his atheism, but servile in his political compromise. Milton is passionately defiant of the dominant ideology in his Republicanism, while excruciatingly bound to the premises of Christianity despite a deep perception of their incoherence.

Stanley Fish has argued that Milton is using our susceptibility to Satan's’ rhetoric as a way of demonstrating the depraved state of our own interpretive powers. We are fallen people whose minds can no longer claim to be impervious to rhetoric and suasion, all cases of which (for the reader, in Professor Fish’s view) ultimately reduce to this case, Satan’s seduction (of the rebel angels first, and of Eve second). Because Milton deploys it within Christian, culturally sovereign terms, this is a remarkably subtle and cogent way of outflanking resistance to one’s claims - simply add the claim that your audience will probably be very resistant, since their minds have been warped in advance by the very figure that your claims denounce. This way, God’s lack of forgiveness is not a failure of His omni-benevolence (for which it might be morally necessary for free beings to try and hold God accountable), but the inevitable shadow of Satan’s (“self-tempted, self-depraved” III, 130) failure to repent.

But this failure has roots not only in Satan’s-own-freewill-which-God-foreknew, but in Satan’s narcissistic wounding and lapse into jealousy. This is the sort of formulation we get if we consider the announcement at V 600-615 in human (i.e., psychological) terms, and I believe the poem has more to teach us if we do so. First let’s agree to commit the “pathetic fallacy,” and imagine (as we read) that the rhetoric provided us by the poet and ascribed by him to his characters represents the collected productions of a variety of angelic minds (internal to the poem), as well as the unitary handiwork of a single human craftsman (external to the poem) called John Milton. By doing so (in the Coleridgean tradition of “willing suspension of disbelief”) we can give the poem room to work upon us its aesthetic effects, its ideological magic and its hypnotic suggestions, so that we can experience their rich rewards, and see where they lead, while surveying the text itself as perspicuously as we can. Others may be equipped to see what we cannot; perhaps we will catch sight of something too.

Satan’s rebellion is his response to the following announcement, by God (V, 600-615):

Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light,

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers,
Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My onely Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heav'n, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great Vice-gerent Reign abide
United as one individual Soule
For ever happie: him who disobeyes
Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordaind without redemption, without end.

God is a Father of many children of one kind (the Angels), here announcing that he has conceived another child of another kind (the Son). By the fiat of the Father, articulated in this announcement, the new child is to be granted all the worship and the awe that the children have hitherto given only to their Father. To put this into perspective, imagine that the operative difference in kind (never fully clarified in Paradise Lost) is not that between Angels and the Second Person of the Trinity, but a much simpler and more familiar difference in kind; say, gender. Satan among the Angels is like a senior daughter among the many daughters of a Father, who then announces the conception of his new son that will inherit His position and preeminence, along with the whole property, house, wealth, obedience, service, et cetera.[1] Primogeniture would be the “right, ” by which a difference in kind (gender) becomes available as a source of moral grounds for its own economic consequences in such a story. Once unmasked as the transitory product of human institutions, primogeniture became vulnerable (to a critique of its alleged justice that already lay immanent in the experience of thousands of daughters and younger-than-eldest brothers), and began to lose ground, until it could no longer serve as a source of grounds for inheritance decisions. For example, when Shakespeare writes Edmund’s soliloquy in King Lear, “Stand up for bastards,” primogeniture is under attack but still well able to defend itself.

If the difference in kind between the Son and the angels is all that legitimates his assumption of God’s authority (line 606), it might prove just as difficult to defend. Similarly, on the earthly side, myriad persons throughout history have become the martyrs of their own beliefs, as Jesus of Nazareth did; of those myriads, a smaller but still enormous set had in common with him his central ideals of kindness and loving humility. Only this social activist dies a death which Paul, followed by millions of eventual adherents, claims as vicarious for all mankind, ransoming us from what Luther called “sin, death, and the devil.” Why this one? Because alone of all political and social martyrs, Jesus had entered into the flesh voluntarily, and not by nature. But only he had the opportunity to enter into the flesh voluntarily, and he had this opportunity because he was God’s son. So this ethical fact (his action of choosing the incarnation) points backward toward the difference in kind that it was supposed to transcend. The Son-ship of the Son is surely as much a difference in kind as any other accident of birth, like gender or class, or for that matter, ethnicity. If the difference between the Son and the Angels (also called “Sons,” for instance in PL XI. 84) depends entirely upon the various forms of the Greek word monogenê (“only begotten”), it will be hard for Milton to use it as the foundation of God’s justice, since differences in kind, I have claimed, cannot serve as grounds for ethical decision. From the first tyrannicides of ancient Athens and republican Rome, to Milton and his co-Revolutionists, democratic ideology has railed against kingship with the observation that kings are mere mortals like their subjects; no legitimate and legitimating difference in kind really exists. [2]

Just as primogeniture was moved from a position of hegemony to one of attenuated dominance, something else is in this same transitional position when Milton writes Paradise Lost; not theism tout court, but two of its most valuable byproducts: the belief that the soul lives on when the body dies, and the appeal to God as the ground of morality. The benefits which Theism confers tend to decay long before theism itself yields to its opposite. Religious awe of an omnipotent God (the mysterium tremendum described by Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy) makes people more willing to doubt God’s gifts than to doubt his justice, and more willing to doubt his justice than to doubt his existence. But these doubts have ways of remaining stubbornly linked to one another; if not logically, then by their common origin in the unconscious: if one gets out, and becomes acceptable to the judgment of the conscious mind, its newfound legitimacy may draw the others up from below. [3]

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[1]. This has been the fate of innumerable persons in history, and of a few in literature.

[2]. Thus Cassius to Brutus: “I had as lief not be, as live / In awe of such a thing as I myself.” Julius Caesar, I.ii. 102-103.

[3]. Looser analogies include the Storming of the Bastille; Satan leading the devils out of Hell toward earth in PL, and Christ leading the patriarchs out of Hell in Inferno IV.