(For 3 Quarks Daily)
I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.
Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their counterparts in present-day anti-democratic politics.
Still, Milton’s account of the Fall allows us to psychologize. We can indulge in the belief that if people had chosen better, we wouldn’t have been in such a mess right now. I think that should be fun for both of us, or cathartic for me at least. In any case, I am telling you in advance, so that if you continue reading, you don’t “pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned”.[2]
The new favorite
The plot of Paradise Lost is set in motion by God. We hear of this from the arch-angel Raphael, who is visiting Adam and Eve and tells the story of how the Father gathered all angels before his throne.
They arrive in their millions, and not as equals. Standards, banners, and shiny decorations indicate “hierarchies, […] orders, and degrees”, of a supposedly meritocratic nature.[3] At this assembly, however, God creates a new office, bypassing the entire hierarchy over which he presides. He puts his ‘Son’ in charge of everything and everyone, and threatens whoever disobeys him with eternal darkness. It is one of many scenes in which the God of Paradise Lost seems incapable of interacting with his inferiors other than through loyalty tests.
In human politics, our emotions tell us that such abuse of power requires resistance. We feel outrage on behalf of the angels, as we feel on behalf of lawmakers facing the confirmation of an insultingly unqualified cabinet member; even if we otherwise loathe their politics, we will them to resist the mad king in some way. Milton would go so far as to defend regicide. In divine politics, however, the role of would-be regicide is played by the devil. When God promulgates his decree, the arch-angel we know as Satan exchanges glances with his lieutenant Beelzebub. Afterwards, he shares in code his intention to rebel: “prepare / Fit entertainment to receive our king, / The great Messiah”.[4]
C.S. Lewis, whose Preface to the poem pours cold water on romantic and Satan-friendly readings of it, sees no contradiction between Milton’s “republicanism for the earth and royalism for heaven”, because Milton believed deeply in a metaphysical hierarchy.[5] Being put in your place by the Supreme Being is not a genuine case of political humiliation, because it changes nothing about your relation to him or other beings. Satan’s response would be appropriate if God were, as he suspects, simply a powerful aristocrat, who came to occupy the iron throne through historical accident; if he were a player in the great game of fate trying to grab more power for his party. But that is not the situation.
Divine birtherism
The seraph Abdiel throws this in Satan’s face: “Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute / With him the points of liberty, who made / Thee what thou art[…]?”[6] God’s loyalist angels are grateful for their existence. What in our fallen eyes seems to be a precarious position under a capricious monarch is to them a reminder that their happiness depends on something larger than them. Only a large minority of angels, Satan in particular, believe that the rule of the Son takes something away from them. If the system does not allow them to be at the top, then the system needs to be taken down.
Although this will prove impossible, we do get a glimpse of what the world would have looked like had Satangotten his way. Throughout the entire dispute, Satan has positioned himself on a “royal seat / High on a hill”,[7] in imitation of God. His democratic rhetoric is disingenuous from the start; he doesn’t seek to share power, but to topple and replace the existing elites. The rules and institutions that appear to a part of the populace as an adversary, standing in the way of their autonomy, are in fact standing between them and a darker world of unrestrained competition.
The rebellious angels are not just mistaken about the nature of the powers-that-be, or about their chance of success; they are also mistaken about what it would mean for their rebellion to succeed. This much is clear; what is less clear is how they were supposed to know better. To a crucial argument presented by Abdiel – the angels were created by God, and through the hands of the Son at that – he replies: “Strange point and new! / Doctrine which we would know whence learned”.[8]
A fair question, it would seem. In modern American fashion, Satan sees himself as self-made, and distrusts the mainstream media’s account of his own existence as well as that of the Son. William Empson, very much not an American,[9] yet believes that Satan is on such strong ground here that Milton must have meant for us to take his side.[10] A likelier interpretation is that Satan is engaging in motivated reasoning. He is a creation sceptic because that best suits his narcissism; he insists on seeing everyone’s long-form birth certificate because doubt about it serves his politics. When he asks “Remember’st thou / Thy making while the Maker gave thee being?”,[11] he is asking for impossible testimony. Of course, he doesn’t remember self-creating either.[12]
Satan has gravitated towards flawed metaphysics and theology the way successful entrepreneurs gravitate towards flawed economics and politics. They attribute to themselves the recognition the system has given them, and rather than grateful for their opportunities, it makes them resentful they have not risen higher. They start ranting against social security, progressive taxation, government subsidies, and whatever else they imagine is holding them back, without realizing those institutions were what made their success possible in the first place. Milton presents this as a genuine misunderstanding, but as blameworthy nonetheless.
A sense of injured merit
In the last statements Satan and Abdiel exchange before the battle in heaven, Satan refers to his army as
A third part of the gods, in synod met
Their deities to assert: who, while they feel
Vigour divine within them, can allow
Omnipotence to none.[13]
The rebellion is a literal test of God’s power. It is inspired by the rebels’ sense of self-reliance, which has not been a live political issue until the introduction of the Son polarized the angels. Satan: “At first I thought that liberty and heaven / To heavenly souls had been all one; but now / I see that most through sloth had rather serve”.[14] To him, the coming fight is a contest between the free and the unfree, which the free are bound to win.
Both sides agree that this dispute can now only be resolved by force. In fact, the first-ever act of physical violence in cosmic history belongs to the loyalists: Abdiel strikes the blow that starts a three-day war in heaven. In the first two days, God sits back and watches – equipping his own angels with better weapons and inventing pain only for the rebels, but otherwise allowing the two armies to be roughly evenly matched. After mining heaven for sulfur and concocting gunpowder, the rebels even seem to have the upper hand.
This initial back-and-forth serves to demonstrate the special status of the Son: it is not through the strength of the angels, but through divine superpowers that the rebels are soundly defeated. The irresistible force the Son wields on the third day makes it difficult to deny God’s omnipotence from now on. This apparently shatters the ideological foundation of the rebellion, but remember that God has cut off any hope of reconciliation in advance.[15] While the rebel angels are still falling, the Son is already busy creating the world so that their places in heaven can be filled with humans.[16]
In the opening scene of the poem, Satan wakes up in hell. Having acknowledged God’s superior strength with a subtle accusation – “till then who knew / The force of those dire arms?”[17] – he warns in the same breath that this does not change “that fixed mind, / And high disdain from sense of injured merit, / That with the mightiest raised me to contend”.[18] His resentment against the existing order is inventive; his plans for undermining it will adapt.
Suspending hell
Political debate in Milton’s hell looks comparatively sane. There is no question, for instance, of pretending that the battle was rigged or has actually been won if you count differently. (The one person that wants to storm the Capitol is shut down quickly.) Satan schemes and manipulates, but he tells no big lies in Parliament.
There are rhetorical liberties taken, both by Satan’s party and the other fallen angels. These make the speeches in hell much more attractive than anything we hear from heaven: the loyalist angels’ media appearances, later in the poem, are always pre-approved by their superior, and full of scripted references to his policy priorities – i.e., the importance of obedience and not eating from that tree. It is the opposition that, from outside of the heavenly bureaucracy, can articulate exciting alternatives.
The pan-demonic assembly has a genuine decision to make about the course to follow. Doveish speeches by Belial and especially Mammon paint a picture of how hell can be made tolerable, or even pleasant, through forbearance and hard work. Mammon’s vision almost carries the day. Satan, not a utilitarian, desires a different outcome, and he has arranged for his collaborator to sway public opinion with a well-timed intervention. Beelzebub argues that God will never allow his prisoners to be happy, and that satisfaction can now be won only through revenge.
According to Stanley Fish, the whole debate is absurd because it takes place under the assumption that creaturely agency is even possible. Beelzebub, however, is not naïve about the “absoluteness of God’s control”.[19] He does not deny it; he believes he has found a metaphysical loophole. Having resolved to respect the free will of his creatures, even an omnipotent and omniscient God could be made to watch his creation derail.
This is not hypothetical; it is what just happened in heaven. Moreover, except for the unknown quantity that is the Son, Beelzebub has made a correct assessment of his former friends up there. Once the plan is set in motion – Satan will travel to paradise and corrupt the humans – God predicts its success. He wonders aloud whether one of his courtiers is willing to take the fall for those unhappy humans: “Dwells in all heaven charity so dear?”[20] All angels look at their feet, unwilling to take up this suicide mission.
The plan is bold and clever. It is also cruel. It preys on the innocent and vulnerable. It captures and corrupts a right – free choice – that exists in the interest of rational beings, and uses it against them. It leads to suffering and loss. The rebels’ rhetoric seems heroic when framed as resistance against a mighty foe, but the nature of the cause matters. The cause has now become killing civilians. The cunning and courage this requires does not make it good.
When Satan leaves for his overseas adventure, his peers stay behind, playing sports, composing nostalgic songs whose beauty ‘suspends’ hell,[21] philosophizing, or exploring. Though their activities are remarkably like respectable pastimes on earth or even in heaven, the fallen angels are described as aimless – “in wandering mazes lost”.[22] To the extent that there is direction to their existence, and hope to lift their spirits, it is political: it is embodied by the dirty operation Satan is executing on their behalf. That Satan and Beelzebub exacted their consent through demagoguery; that absent their manipulation, the masses may have been ready to vote for Mammon’s godless but much less harmful vision, does not make a difference – what matters is how they did in fact vote. It is Satan who enters the snake, but they will all be cursed for it.[23]
‘Look on me’
Adam and Eve get ready to go about their day’s gardening work. Because there is so much to do and the two lovers have been known to distract each other, Eve suggests they could work more efficiently by dividing their labor. Adam praises her for putting on her thinking cap, before patiently explaining the issue with this lovely idea. Individually, they might be more vulnerable to the enemy whose cautionary tale Raphael has told, and who they know is now scheming against them. Eve, mildly offended by the implication she cannot be trusted, persists. Adam reluctantly lets her go.
When the snake finds her alone, it tells her a straightforward lie: that eating the fruit has enabled it to talk. Just imagine, then, the heights it can raise fair Eve to; she could be a goddess! Oh, but the tree is forbidden, on pain of death? Typical, scoffs the conspiracy channel. God wants to “keep ye low and ignorant”;[24] taking the red pill will open your eyes, which is why the government is censoring the truth about it. Its threats are empty; the snake is doing fine.
Can Eve be blamed for acting on this misinformation? Though in Milton’s sexist universe she constitutes the less rational half of Eden’s population, she has received her basic education; Raphael’s history and civics lessons were meant for her and Adam both. On the other hand, there is indeed a talking snake in front of her, and it cunningly entangles its lie with the evidence of her senses – “Look on me, / Me who have touched and tasted”.[25] Has she simply been outsmarted?
Not according to the poem. Throughout Paradise Lost, characters give moving speeches. The choices of the audience remain their own. Of the many millions of angels who happened to be in Satan’s and Beelzebub’s employ and were therefore called to rebel,[26] only Abdiel resisted Satan’s reasoning. This is enough to prove that God did not punish the rebels for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but for their choice; “freely they stood who stood and fell who fell.”[27] Likewise, having been presented with Raphael’s official propaganda and the snake’s alternative facts, it is now up to Eve whether she allows herself to be swayed – not to her intelligence, but to the steadfastness of her will. She is tested, and revealed to be too prone to believe flattery and false promises: “his words, replete with guile, / Into her heart too easy entrance won”.[28] The cleverness of Satan’s algorithm is no excuse. His message is ‘tuned’ to Eve’s particular (female) weaknesses and insecurities, but if she had been better, he would still have failed.
Adam, though horrified by the path his other half has taken, chooses to follow her on it rather than face losing her. He has kept the lessons of history closer to his mind, but tells himself maybe things will not be so bad this time.[29] His motives may be touching and his rationalizations appealing, but just like Eve’s, they don’t add up to a justification for breaking the one taboo. “For still they knew, and ought to have still remembered, / The high injunction not to taste that fruit”[30]
With wandering steps and slow
Satan is a would-be autocrat, incapable of rising to the top in the current system and no match for the existing elites; therefore, he goes through the people, using deceit and misinformation to prod them to resentment. That does not mean that Milton’s God represents liberal democracy. Although there is a hint that God intends to abolish his own monarchy in the far future, Orlando Reade notes this looks awfully like a dictator’s promise – sure, he will resign; “just not yet”.[31] In any case, during the action heaven and earth are paternalistic one-party states.
The poem’s metaphysical assumptions – its hierarchy between creator and creatures, its libertarian conception of free will – are outdated; even given those assumptions, the project of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’ fails to the point of backfiring, as there is no excuse for hell. Within the poem, to be sure, we are to see the system as benign, those who want to overthrow it as selfish and mistaken, and the people as misled but culpable; but this requires a lot of suspended disbelief and still proves nothing about any regime on earth. Milton would probably be the last person to want it to favor the status quo by default.
The analogies that came to me apply on some levels of abstraction but fall apart on many others. Still, I believe they are true to the spirit of the work in this way: that what is good for us and what we are attracted to are often different, and that this is a serious ethical and existential hazard, especially in politics. Some acts give a temporary sense of freedom and agency, a rush of fresh air; but the desire for self-assertion that makes them appealing also makes them dangerous. Discarding a rule-based order and disregarding the interests of others gives the illusion of taking back control, but makes you less free in the end.
I believe all of this is in Milton. His warning that relatable choices may mess things up irreversibly, though it was not written for electoral democracies, translates well to them. The alchemy that transmutes rich inner worlds and complex motivations into distinct and definite public choices and commitments exists in real life now, in every country that counts votes fairly. We are free there, but we can lose that freedom through exercising it poorly. When we do so, stories about how noble we thought our motivations were, what we hoped to achieve, how we saw the facts, how from our point of view the Jedi were evil, will not save us. A poet like Milton can be generous enough to tell those stories and respect our ambiguity – even “stretching our minds about Satan”[32] – but we live with the outcome all the same.
Paradise Lost is about self-inflicted loss. Its most moving passages show its protagonists realizing what they have done, and why they cannot undo it. In Satan, this leads to despair – “So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear, / Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost”.[33] Adam and Eve respond differently. They accept that through their actions the world – including their natural environment – has changed for the worse. Restoring what was good will be a long and painful journey, which they begin “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow”.[34] We should wish them well, as we should anyone in their predicament; and we should consider ourselves warned.
[1] William Empson, Milton’s God (Chatto&Windus 1961) 146.
[2] 5.244-245. Quotations from Paradise Lost follow the text in John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Gordon Campbell ed. (1992 / 2024).
[3] 5.590-594.
[4] 5.689-691
[5] C.S. Lewis, A preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford University Press 1942 / 1960) 73.
[6] 5.822-825
[7] 5.756-757
[8] 5.856-857
[9] “Like most Englishmen, I never know what Americans mean by a liberal; the story goes that the only way for an academic American to be quite safe from this smear, which would cost him his employment, is to give the secret police documentary proof that he has beaten one of his slaves to death with his own hands. ‘Why, that settles it; that’s American freedom; he can’t be a liberal’; but nothing less than that is enough.” (Empson, Milton’s God, 15.)
[10] Empson, Milton’s God,89.
[11] 5.857-858
[12] The point is made by Gordon Teskey in a footnote to this passage (Milton, Paradise Lost: 2nd Norton critical edition, 133).
[13] 6.156-159
[14] 6.164-166
[15] 5.615
[16] 7.189-190
[17] 1.93-94
[18] 1.97-99
[19] Stanley Fish, Surprised by sin: the reader in Paradise Lost (2nd edition: MacMillan Press 1997) 170.
[20] 3.216
[21] 2.554
[22] 2.561
[23] 10.519-520
[24] 9.704
[25] 9.687-688
[26] 5.683-684
[27] 3.102
[28] 9.733-734
[29] 9.928-929
[30] 10.12-13
[31] Orlando Reade, What in me is dark (2024), end of ch5(referring to 6.730-733).
[32] Michael Cavanagh, Paradise Lost: a primer. Scott Newstok ed. (2020) 28.
[33] 4.108-109
[34] 12.648