Milton and Modernity: Politics, the Individual and Paradise Lost

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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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 0–333–74675–9 In North America ISBN 0–312–23600–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 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 821'.4—dc21 00–042053 10 10

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Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

To my family, and in memory of John Stachniewski


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


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


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


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


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-


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


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-


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


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


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, 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


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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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-


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


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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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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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


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

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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


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

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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


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

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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


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

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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,


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

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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


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

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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


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,

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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


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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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


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

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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


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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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


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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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

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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


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)


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:


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


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


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


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


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,


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


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


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


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


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


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)


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


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 79

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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)

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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


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


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,


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’


(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


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


‘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.


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


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


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


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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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


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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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


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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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)


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-


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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


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


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‘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


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


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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.


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


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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


dialectic to remain in play, even in relation to a unique object which isn’t really an object at all. Slavoj Zˇizˇek 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


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

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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


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


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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.


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


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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


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)


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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)


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


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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’


(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


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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


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)


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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


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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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


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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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


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


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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.


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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. . . 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


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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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


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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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


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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(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-


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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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


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


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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


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


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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


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


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

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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


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


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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),


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


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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


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


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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 Zˇizˇek 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 ˇizˇek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 179–226, 218. This is an Z 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. ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 105–6, 49. Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek’s perhaps rather provocative example (216) concerns the passive 108. Z 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 ˇ izˇek, at least) she will sacrifice anything but the sacrifice (according to Z itself. ˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 180–1, 122, 132–3. 50. Z 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. ˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 180. Z 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. ˇ izˇek, Sublime Object, 80–4. 87. Z

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. ˇ izˇek, ‘Introduction: the Spectre of Ideology’, in Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Slavoj Z ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 1; Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity, 1.

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210 Select Bibliography Duncan, Joseph E. Milton’s Earthly Paradise: a Historical Study of Eden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Dunn, John. The Political Thought of John Locke: an Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Dunn, Kevin. Pretexts of Authority: the Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Durham, Charles W. ‘ “To stand approv’d in sight of God”: Abdiel, Obedience, and Hierarchy in Paradise Lost.’ Milton Quarterly 26: 1 (1992): 15–20. Durham, Charles W. and Kristin Pruitt McColgan, eds., Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994. Durkheim, Emile. ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals.’ Translated by Stephen Lukes. Political Studies 17 (1969): 14–30. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. —— ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. ˇ izˇek, ed. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism’. See Z —— ‘The God that Failed.’ See Nyquist and Ferguson, eds. —— The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. —— Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: New Left Books, 1981. Earle, Peter. ‘The Middling Sort in London.’ See Barry and Brooks, eds. Easthope, Anthony. Literary into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1991. Eisenach, Eldon J. Two Worlds of Liberalism: Religion and Politics in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process, 1: The History of Manners. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. —— The Civilizing Process, 2: State Formation and Civilization. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. —— The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Empson, William. Milton’s God. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Edward Aveling. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950. Entzminger, Robert L. Divine Word: Milton and the Redemption of Language. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Everett, Barbara. Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Ezell, Margaret J. M. The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Fallon, Robert Thomas. Captain or Colonel: the Soldier in Milton’s Life and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. —— Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Fallon, Stephen M. ‘The Metaphysics of Milton’s Divorce Tracts.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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Farwell, Marilyn R. ‘Eve, the Separation Scene, and the Renaissance Idea of Androgyny.’ Milton Studies 16 (1982): 3–20. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986. Filmer, Robert. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer. Edited by Peter Laslett. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949. Fink, Zera S. The Classical Republicans: an Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945. Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: the Reader in ‘Paradise Lost.’ London: Macmillan, 1967. —— Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. —— ‘Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica.’ See Nyquist and Ferguson, eds. —— ‘Wanting a Supplement: the Question of Interpretation in Milton’s Early Prose.’ See Loewenstein and Turner, eds. Fixler, Michael. Milton and the Kingdoms of God. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Tavistock, 1967. —— ‘The Order of Discourse.’ See Young, ed. —— Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77. Edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1980. —— The History of Sexuality, 1: an Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. —— The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. —— The History of Sexuality, 2: the Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1988. —— The History of Sexuality, 3: the Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1988. —— The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1989. —— Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Alan Sheridan and others. London: Routledge, 1990. —— Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. —— ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an Interview Translated by J. D. Gauthier.’ See Bernauer and Rasmussen, eds. Fraser, Nancy. ‘What’s Critical About Critical Theory?: the Case of Habermas and Gender.’ See Benhabib and Cornell, eds. Freeman, James A. Milton and the Martial Muse: ‘Paradise Lost’ and European Traditions of War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Freud, Sigmund. Rickman, John, ed. A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. London, 1953. —— The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited and translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Guillory, John. ‘Dalila’s House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labour.’ See Ferguson, Quilligan and Vickers, eds. —— ‘Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem.’ See Kendrick, ed. Haber, Judith. Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. —— The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, 1989. Halkett, John. Milton and the Idea of Matrimony: a Study of the Divorce Tracts and ‘Paradise Lost.’ New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Haller, William. Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. Halpern, Richard. ‘Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask.’ See Ferguson, Quilligan and Vickers, eds. Hamilton, Roberta. The Liberation of Women: a Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hanford, James Holly. John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays by James Holly Hanford. Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1966. Harding, Sandra, and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983. Harrington, James. The Political Works of James Harrington. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Haydn, Hiram. The Counter-Renaissance. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1950. Healy, Thomas and Jonathan Sawday, eds. Literature and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Herz, Judith Scherer. ‘ “For whom this glorious sight?”: Dante, Milton, and the Galileo Question.’ See di Cesare, ed. Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640: an Essay. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955. —— Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. —— Reformation to Industrial Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. —— Milton and the English Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. —— The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1980. —— The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. —— Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

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Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: the Adventures of a Concept from Lukàcs to Habermas. Cambridge: Polity, 1984. Jefferson, Ann. ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes.’ See Hirschkop and Shepherd, eds. Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. 3 vols. London: Dent, 1925. —— The Works of Samuel Johnson. 12 vols. London, 1806. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘The Rise and Fall of French Marxism.’ See Appignanesi, ed. Judovitz, Dalia. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: the Origins of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kahn, Victoria. ‘The Metaphorical Contract in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. Kann, Mark E. ‘Locke’s Political Economy of Masculinity.’ International Journal of Social Economics 19 (1992): 95–110. Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. Keble, N. H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987. Kelly-Gadol, Joan. ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ See Bridenthal and Koenz, eds. Kendrick, Christopher. ‘Milton and Sexuality: a Symptomatic Reading of Comus.’ See Nyquist and Ferguson, eds. —— Milton: a Study in Ideology and Form. New York: Methuen, 1986. —— ed. Critical Essays on John Milton. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. London: Routledge, 1971. Kerrigan, William. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of ‘Paradise Lost.’ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. —— and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Keymer, Tom. Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: an Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. King, Preston. The Ideology of Order: a Comparative Analysis of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974. Kirby, W. J. Torrance. Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. Knight, G. Wilson. Chariot of Wrath: the Message of John Milton to Democracy at War. London: Faber and Faber, 1942. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Rewriting the Protestant Ethic: Discipline and Love in “Paradise Lost.” ’ English Literary History 58 (1991): 545–59. —— ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. Knott, John R., Jr. Milton’s Pastoral Vision: an Approach to ‘Paradise Lost.’ Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971. Kofman, Sara. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

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Levin, Harry. The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Levin, Richard. ‘Son of Bashing the Bourgeois Subject.’ Textual Practice 6: 2 (Summer 1992): 264–70. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. ‘Milton on Women – Yet Once More.’ Milton Studies 6 (1974): 3–20. —— Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. —— ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Lindenbaum, Peter. Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance. Athens: University of Georgia, 1986. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden, eds. History and Imagination: Essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper. London: Duckworth, 1981. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Edited by R. H. Quick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1880. —— Two Treatises of Government. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1924. —— An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Loewenstein, David. ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. —— ‘ “An Ambiguous Monster”: Representing Rebellion in Milton’s Polemics and Paradise Lost.’ Huntington Library Quarterly 55: 2 (1992): 295–315. —— ‘ “Fair Offspring Nurs’t in Princely Lore”: On the Question of Milton’s Early Radicalism.’ Milton Studies 28 (1992): 37–48. Loughrey, Bryan, ed. The Pastoral Mode. London: Macmillan, 1984. Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. —— The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Low, Lisa. ‘Marvell through Keats and Stevens: the Early Modern Meditation Poem.’ See Low and Harding, eds. Low, Lisa and Anthony John Harding, eds. Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lukàcs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: a Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Lukes, Stephen. Individualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Madsen, William. From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

218 Select Bibliography Marilla, E. L. Milton and Modern Man: Selected Essays. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1968. Marjara, Harinder Singh. ‘Angelic Motion and Moloch’s False Rhetoric.’ Milton Quarterly 19: 3 (1983): 82–7. —— Contemplation of Created Things: Science in ‘Paradise Lost.’ Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Marx, Karl. Capital: a Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with New Left Review, 1976. —— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978. McChrystal, Deirdre Keenan. ‘Redeeming Eve.’ English Literary Renaissance 23: 3 (1993): 490–508. McColley, Diane Kelsey. ‘Benificent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly’. See Durham and McColgan, eds. —— Milton’s Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. McKeon, Michael. ‘Politics of Discourses and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England.’ See Sharpe and Zwicker, eds. —— The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. London: Radius Books, 1988. Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Melzer, Sara E. Discourses of the Fall. A Study of Pascale’s Pensées. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. Merquior, J. G. Foucault. London: Fontana, 1985. Middleton, Peter. The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Mikics, David. The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994. Milner, Andrew. John Milton and the English Revolution: a Study in the Sociology of Literature. London: Macmillan, 1981. Milton, John. The Prose Works of John Milton. 2 vols. Edited by J. A. St. John. London: George Bell and Sons, 1904. —— Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 8 vols. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–83. —— Poetical Works. Edited by Douglas Bush. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. —— Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1968. —— John Milton: Political Writings. Edited by Martin Dzelzainis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Penguin, 1987. Moi, Toril. Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Moore, Barrington, Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. London: Penguin, 1967. Morgan, John. Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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Mouffe, Chantal. ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’ See Ross, ed. Mueller, Janel. ‘Embodying Glory: the Apocalyptic Strain in Milton’s Of Reformation.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. Mulryan, John. ‘Through a Glass Darkly’: Milton’s Reinvention of the Mythological Tradition. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Uniersity Press, 1996. —— ed. Milton and the Middle Ages. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982. Myers, William. Milton and Free Will: an Essay in Criticism and Philosophy. London: Croom Helm, 1987. —— ed. Restoration and Revolution: Political, Social and Religious Writings 1660–1700. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Noonan, John T. Contraception: a History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Polities, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. —— ‘Life and Death of Renaissance Man’. Raritan 8: 4 (1989): 89–110. —— ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere.’ See Burt, ed. —— Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge, 1984. Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Nyquist, Mary. ‘Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History.’ See Attridge, Bennington and Young, eds. —— ‘Gynesis, Genesis, Exegesis, and the Formation of Milton’s Eve.’ See Garber, ed. —— ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost.’ See Nyquist and Ferguson, eds. Nyquist, Mary and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds. Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions. New York: Methuen, 1987. Parker, Patricia and David Quint, eds. Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Patterson, Annabel. ‘No Meer Amatorious Novel?’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— ‘ “Forc’d fingers”: Milton’s Early Poems and Ideological Constraint.’ See Summers and Pebworth, eds. —— ‘Imagining New Worlds: Milton, Galileo, and the “Good Old Cause” ’. See Zeller and Schiffhorst, eds. Patterson, Lee. ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies.’ Speculum (1990): 87–108. Phillips, Edward. ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton’. See Darbishire, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. —— Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. —— ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment.’ See Zagorin, ed. Popkin, R. H., ed. Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988.

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Rossi, Paolo. Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Edited by Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Rudat, Wolfgang E. H. ‘Ovid’s “Art of Love” and Augustinian Theology in Paradise Lost.’ Milton Quarterly 21: 2 (1987): 62–5. Rumrich, John P. ‘Uninventing Milton’, Modern Philology 87: 3 (February 1990): 249–65. —— Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ryan, Alan. ‘Hobbes and Individualism.’ See Rogers and Ryan, eds. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1985. Samuel, Irene. Plato and Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965. Sarkar, Malabika. ‘ “The Visible Diurnal Sphere”: Astronomical Images of Space and Time in Paradise Lost.’ Milton Quarterly 18: 1 (1984): 1–5. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. London: Methuen, 1969. Saurat, Denis. Milton: Man and Thinker. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1944. Saxenhouse, Arlene W. Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli. New York: Praeger, 1985. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Schluchter, Wolfgang. The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History. Translated by Guenther Roth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Schochet, Gordon J. Patriarchalism in Political Thought: the Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. ‘Among Unequals What Society?: Strategic Courtesy and Christian Humility in Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 28 (1992): 69–90. —— ‘Gender and Conduct in Paradise Lost.’ See Turner, ed. Schwartz, Regina. ‘Citation, Authority, and De Doctrina Christiana.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— ‘From Shadowy Types to Shadowy Types: the Unendings of Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 24 (1988): 123–39. —— Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in ‘Paradise Lost.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. —— ‘Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost’. Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 85–103. Seitz, Brian. ‘Constituting the Political Subject, using Foucault.’ Man and World 26 (1993): 443–55. Seliger, Martin. The Liberal Politics of John Locke. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968. Sensabaugh, George F. Milton in Early America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Shapiro, Barbara J. 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.

222 Select Bibliography Sharpe, Kevin and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Shawcross, John T. John Milton: The Self and the World. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Shirley, F. J. Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas. London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1949. Shullenberger, William. ‘Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism.’ Milton Quarterly 20: 3 (1986): 69–85. Sinfield, Alan. Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660. London: Croom Helm, 1983. —— Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Skinner, Quentin. ‘The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation.’ See Vere Chappell, ed. —— The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. —— The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: the Age of Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Skinner, Quentin, Richard Tuck, William Thomas and Peter Singer. Great Political Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. London: Verso, 1988. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. —— ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. —— ‘Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater’s “Heroick Mechanicks”.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Somerville, Johann. ‘Ideology, Property and the Constitution.’ See Cust and Hughes, eds. Spellman, W. M. John Locke and the Problem of Depravity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Spingarn, J. E., ed. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. Spragens, Thomas A., Jr. The Politics of Motion: the World of Thomas Hobbes. London: Croom Helm, 1973. —— The Irony of Liberal Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Stachniewski, John. The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Staveley, Keith. The Politics of Milton’s Prose Style. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Steadman, John M. Milton and the Renaissance Hero. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

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Stocker, Margarita. ‘Paradise Lost.’ London: Macmillan, 1988. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. —— The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642. London: Routledge, 1972. —— The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. Abridged edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979. Strauss, Leo. ‘On the Spirit of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy.’ See K. C. Brown, ed. Stringer, Gary A. ‘Milton’s “Thorn in the Flesh”: Pauline Didacticism in “Sonnet xix”.’ Milton Studies 10 (1977): 141–54. Summers, Claude J. ‘Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of Anachronism.’ Southern Central Review 9: 1 (1992): 2–23. Summers, Claude J. and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds. ‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. Svendsen, Kester. Milton and Science. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Tambling, Jeremy. Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Tanner, John S. ‘ “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. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. —— Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Teskey, Gordon. ‘Milton and Modernity.’ Diacritics 18: 1 (1988): 42–53. Thomas, Keith. ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought.’ See K. C. Brown, ed. Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Tuck, Richard. ‘Hobbes.’ See Skinner, Tuck, Thomas and Singer. Turner, Bryan S. Max Weber: From History to Modernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Turner, James Grantham. The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. —— One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. —— Review of Feminist Milton, by Joseph Wittreich. Criticism 31: 2 (1989): 193– 200. —— ‘The Poetics of Engagement.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. —— ed. Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Turner, James Grantham and David Loewenstein, eds. Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Tuttle, Elizabeth. ‘Biblical Reference in the Political Pamphlets of the Levellers and Milton, 1638–1654.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. Ulreich, John C., Jr. ‘ “Incident to All Our Sex”: the Tragedy of Dalila.’ See Walker, ed. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture. Translated by Jon R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity, in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

224 Select Bibliography Vaughan, Aldon T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: a Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Virgil. The Georgics of Virgil. Translated by C. Day Lewis. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940. Von Maltzahn, Nicholas. ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: an Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 29 (1992): 181–98. —— ‘The Whig Milton, 1667–1700.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. Walker, Julia M., ed. Milton and the Idea of Woman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Walker, William, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Walzer, Michael. The Revolution of the Saints: a Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. Webber, Joan. The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. —— ‘The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 14 (1980): 3–24. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976. Weisberg, David. ‘Rule, Self, Subject: the Problem of Power in Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 30 (1993): 85–107. Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’. See Bernstein, ed. West, Robert H. Milton and the Angels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955. Weston, Peter. ‘The Noble Primitive as Bourgeois Subject.’ See Loughrey, ed. Wheeler, Wendy. ‘After Grief? What Kinds of Inhuman Selves?’. New Formations 25 (Summer 1995): 77–95. Wilding, Michael. Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Willey, Basil. The Seventeenth-Century Background. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Wittreich, Joseph. ‘ “All Angelic Nature Joined in One”: Epic Convention and Prophetic Interiority in the Council Scenes of Paradise Lost.’ Milton Studies 17 (1983): 43–74. —— Feminist Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. —— ‘ “Inspir’d with Contradiction”: Mapping Gender Discourses in Paradise Lost’. See Benet and Lieb, eds. Wolfe, Don M. Milton in the Puritan Revolution. New York: Humanities Press, 1963. Wolfenstein, E. Victor. ‘Inside the Leviathan.’ Free Associations 19 (1990): 124–34. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: an Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. ‘Locke Against Democracy: Consent, Representation and Suffrage in the Two Treatises.’ History of Political Thought 13: 4 (Winter 1992): 657–89. —— ‘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. Wood, Neal. ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Crisis of the English Aristocracy.’ History of Political Thought 1: 3 (Autumn/December 1980): 437–52.

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—— John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Woods, Susanne. ‘Elective Poetics and Milton’s Prose: A Treatise of Civil Power and Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hardship Out of the Church.’ See Turner and Loewenstein, eds. Woolhouse, R. S. Locke. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. Wootton, David. ‘John Locke and Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics.’ Political Studies 40 (1992): 79–98. Worden, Blair. ‘Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode.’ See Sharpe and Zwicker, eds. —— ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution.’ See Lloyd-Jones, Pearl, and Worden, eds. —— ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham.’ See Armitage, Himy and Skinner, eds. Wortham, Christopher. ‘ “A happy rural seat”: Milton’s Paradise Lost and the English Country House Poem.’ Paregon 9: 1 (1991): 137–50. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London: Methuen, 1987. Wrightson, Keith. ‘ “Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England.’ See Barry and Brooks, eds. Young, Iris Marian. ‘Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.’ See Benhabib and Cornell, eds. Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader. London: Routledge, 1981. Zagorin, Perez. A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 1954. —— ed. Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980. —— Rebels and Rulers 1550–1660, 2: Provincial Rebellion: Revolutionary Civil Wars, 1560–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. —— Milton, Aristocrat and Rebel: the Poet and his Politics. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Zeller, Katherine Z. and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, eds. The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993. ˇ izˇek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Z —— ed. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1994. Zwicker, Steven N. ‘England, Israel, and the Triumph of Roman Virtue.’ See Popkin, ed. —— ‘Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture in the Restoration.’ See Sharpe and Zwicker, eds. —— Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: the Arts of Disguise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

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 Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj 114, 159

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