EIGHT
Such an one was that Macchiavile, who perswaded men to governe in this world, partly by fraud, partly by force, and partly by fortune: and not by the divine providence, whereat hee jested immitating therein, not only Julian and those prophane heathens which said of the Israelites, Where is now theyr God (making mocke of theyr religion) but also (and that effectually) that cankered Serpent, which hearing that God had forbidden Adam and Heva the Tree of Knowledge of good and evill, scoffed at Gods word, and saide: Tush, it is nothing so: yee shall not die, but ye shall be as Gods.
—John Carpenter, A Preparative to Contention
BETTER than any other single figure, Satan in Paradise Lost exemplifies the intersection of rhetoric, theology, the Machiavel, and the republican that we have been exploring in this book.1 Perhaps the most famous nondramatic Machiavel of the Renaissance, Satan is a skillful orator and casuist, who uses rhetorical force and fraud to wheedle and coerce his fellow fallen angels. Not surprisingly, the topics of Machiavellism—the relation of virtù or virtue to success, means to ends, persuasion to coercion, force to consent—appear regularly in his speeches. What is surprising, or truly diabolical, however, is the way Satan attributes the stereotypically Machiavellian understanding of these topics to God. While in his use of force and fraud and his pretensions to absolute rule Satan resembles the Machiavellian Charles I, his republican rhetoric suggests that God is as coercive and manipulative as the Stuart monarch. In a kind of ironic comment on the mutual appropriation of each other’s arguments by royalists and parliamentarians, Satan speaks the language of republicanism in order to cast God as the Machiavel.2
Milton’s decision to have Satan the Machiavel occasionally speak as a republican has given rise to a number of interpretations. For some readers, Satan represents not only Charles I but also Milton’s disillusionment with Cromwell, the hypocritical puritan. Satan may also reflect Milton’s own doubts concerning the revolutionary cause or the adequacy of a secular language of politics.3 For other readers, Satan’s obvious misuse of republican language, along with his own tyrannical behavior, shows that the language of earthly politics is inapplicable to heaven and vice versa. Satan is wrong to expect heaven to be a republic; rather, heaven is the only legitimate absolute monarchy, and kings act hubristically when they style themselves as God.4 Still other critics argue, conversely, that the human language of absolutism is inapplicable to divine rule, which proves on examination to be a meritocracy based on virtue rather than force.5 Here it turns out that an analogy can be drawn between divine and human rule, precisely the one Satan refuses to recognize.
In the following pages I suggest a different approach to the issue of Satan’s republican rhetoric. Rather than seeing the conjoining of the Machiavel and the republican as evidence of Milton’s disillusionment with the revolutionary cause, I believe Satan is one of Milton’s best arguments for its validity. Just as Machiavelli argues for building a republic on the assumption of human corruption and for a rhetorical politics that integrates the resources of force and fraud into the arsenal of persuasion, so Milton begins Paradise Lost with Satan in order to show that rhetorical and political indeterminacy, which his contemporaries stigmatized as Machiavellian, is also the condition of free will. As Mary Ann Radzinowicz has argued, “Satan’s rebellion is political as well as spiritual, no mere subplot but part of a repeated pattern, a design in which failure itself enforces the doctrine of free choice.”6 Satan does not speak as a republican simply to illustrate that the language of republicanism—of virtue, debate, consensus, and dissent—can be appropriated for evil purposes, but also to show that it must be capable of being so appropriated for virtue to be meaningful. Furthermore, Christian virtue here is not the simple opposite of Machiavellian virtù, but rather structurally analogous to it in that both aim to articulate, without equating, intention and effect, virtu(e) and success. And, just as the force and misrepresentation of the stereotypical Machiavel are part of the rhetorical politics of the mature Machiavellian, so too Milton aims to make the resources of the Machiavel part of his own politics, as well as of his Machiavellian justification of the ways of God to men. What Satan stigmatizes, in the language of the Machiavel, as force and fraud, turns out to be the condition of virtue and knowledge in the making. In the following pages I analyze Milton’s exploration of the indifferent resources of the Machiavel, by looking briefly at Satan’s rhetoric in Books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost, and then in greater detail at his encounter with Sin and Death, and his rhetoric in prelapsarian Eden.
Satan’s Rhetoric in Books 1 and 2
Satan’s rhetoric consistently asks us to rethink the relationship between the stereotypical virtù—or force and fraud—of the Machiavel, republican virtù, and Christian virtue. Although Satan the Machiavel initially seems the opposite of the republican and the puritan saint, who share a concern with virtuous—in the sense of ethically responsible as well as effective—political action, it gradually emerges that force and fraud are not only an instrument but also a condition of republican and Christian virtue. Here we begin to see how the Machiavel and the republican are not simply mutually exclusive for Milton—not only because the republican will on occasion use the Machiavellian tools of force and fraud but also because the Machiavel and republican are two possibilities of the rhetorical politics that Milton and Machiavelli share to different degrees.
In Satan’s account, God is a Machiavel who fraudulently concealed his power in order to trick the angels into rebelling; once they did, he revealed himself as the de facto ruler by virtue of his greater power (1.91–124). Although Satan acknowledges God as the de facto “Conqueror (whom I now / Of force believe Almighty . . .)” (1.143–44) and hopes to use similar “force or guile” to wage war against God in return, he also rejects—when it serves his purposes—the argument for the legitimacy of de facto power: “That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me” (1.110–11). In rationalizing his defeat, Satan contrasts God’s rule by coercion and fraud to his own leadership and the “united force” of the devils, which are the result of “free choice,” “merit,” and “consent” (2.19–24, 388). Here Satan rehearses the republican interpretation of the Machiavellian topics of force and consent, virtue and success, opposing the de facto arguments for the Engagement as well as for absolute, monarchical power. In this account, the force and fraud of the stereotypical Machiavel are antithetical to republican virtue, and this antithesis is only confirmed when we recognize that it is not God but Satan who is the hypocritical Machiavel, using republican rhetoric merely to advance his own tyrannical ends.
Yet, if Satan appears to suggest the incompatibility of Machiavellian virtù and republican virtue, a more complicated picture soon begins to emerge from his overdetermined rhetoric. Like Machiavelli, Milton plays with classical and Christian meanings of virtu(e), not in order to separate them completely but rather to explore the various possible relations between them. For example, when Satan refers to the fallen angels’ “wearied virtue” (1.320), he implies that virtù is not equivalent to success; if it were, he would be God and the fallen angels his followers in heaven. Yet, he also suggests that the fallen angels are physically weary (wearied virtù) because they are ethically weak (wearied virtue). He thus implies in spite of himself that ethical virtue is the basis of God’s power, that, in God’s case at least, virtue does guarantee success.
In a later passage, the narrator plays with the meanings of “virtue” in order to explore the relation between creaturely virtue and virtù; he describes the fallen angels who bend toward Satan,
With awful reverence prone; and as a God
Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n:
Nor fail’d they to express how much they prais’d,
That for the general safety he despis’d
His own: for neither do the Spirits damn’d
Lose all thir virtue; lest bad men should boast
Thir specious deeds on earth, which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnisht o’er with zeal.
(2.478–85)
Here, too, the meaning of “virtue” is overdetermined, hovering between virtù and Christian virtue. At first glance, the meaning seems clear: the fallen angels praise Satan’s heroic valor or virtù, not his Christian virtue. Yet, the next lines can be construed in at least two ways. The first is that, precisely because even the fallen angels demonstrate virtù in deeds excited by glory or ambition, no creature on earth is able to boast of similar deeds: all such claims to agency are diabolical and thus merely “specious”; the specious deeds of virtù are no sign of Christian virtue.7 Here we already begin to see how virtù might not be simply the opposite of ethical virtue: for if human action is “specious” and Christian virtue takes the form of faith alone, then virtù comes to stand for the supposed achievement of deeds with ethical consequences.
This brings us to the second possible interpretation of the passage, according to which Milton wishes to preserve rather than deny the element of virtù in Christian virtue. For, as I have already suggested in the previous chapter, Milton rejects the Lutheran argument against freedom of the will and the possibility of working toward salvation. In this light, the devils’ actions are not specious; their responsibility for their deeds is precisely what allows them to be “damn’d.” (Perhaps here we might even understand the opposition between the fallen angels and “bad men” to suggest that whereas the devils preserve some “virtue,” “bad men” are those who pretend to deeds that are not their own.) Accordingly, when the devils complain later in book 2 that their “free virtue” is enthralled “to Force or Chance” (2.551), we understand that they have freely chosen to enthrall themselves. Similarly, when Satan declares the inefficacy of divine force—“That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me”—he takes responsibility for his own actions and thus justifies God’s behavior and his own damnation: God will not extort praise, not because he is incapable of exercising such power but because true praise—like virtue—cannot be coerced. “Spirits damn’d” are still possessed of “virtue,” in the sense of the free will to alter their own condition. Thus, if there is no necessary connection between Christian virtue and virtù, neither are they simply opposed.
Abdiel’s response to Satan in book 6 similarly complicates the relationship of virtue to virtù:
O Heav’n! that such resemblance of the Highest
Should yet remain, where faith and realty
Remain not; wherefore should not strength and might
There fail where Virtue fails, or weakest prove
Where boldest; though to sight unconquerable?
His puissance, trusting in th’ Almighty’s aid,
I mean to try, whose Reason I have tri’d
Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just,
That he who in debate of Truth hath won,
Should win in Arms, in both disputes alike
Victor; though brutish that contest and foul
When Reason hath to deal with force, yet so
Most reason is that Reason overcome.
(6.114–26)
Here Abdiel notes Satan’s fraudulent likeness to God, as well as Satan’s “puissance . . . to sight unconquerable,” at the same time that he expresses the faith that virtue and success, virtue and virtù, will correspond. He thus calls attention to the existence of force and fraud, and the necessity of angelic force to combat Satan’s troops, even as he asserts that God’s power is on the side of the angels. Abdiel tries to negotiate, as Milton does in Areopagitica, between the exercise of virtue in the realm of appearances and of things indifferent, and the conviction that “Truth is strong . . . [and] needs no policies” (Hughes, 747). And, as Milton does in Areopagitica, he suggests that the likeness of Truth and Error, of Satanic virtù and Christian virtù, as well as the lack of necessary correspondence between virtue and success, intention and effect, are an inevitable aspects of action in the realm of appearances. Yet, Abdiel also implies by his syntax that the indifference of virtù is divinely ordained: “His puissance, trusting in th’ Almighty’s aid / I mean to try” locates the origin of satanic as well as angelic power in God. He thus makes the realm of things indifferent a gift of God, in which virtue may be achieved only because it may also fail.
Milton similarly complicates the relationship between the stereotypically Machiavellian virtù of force and fraud and Christian virtue in Satan’s description of God in his final address to the fallen angels in book 1. Here Satan unwittingly shows that what is stereotypically Machiavellian from one perspective is Christian from another:
O Myriads of immortal Spirits, O Powers
Matchless, but with th’ Almighty, and that strife
Was not inglorious, though th’ event was dire,
As this place testifies, and this dire change
Hateful to utter: but what power of mind
Foreseeing or presaging, from the Depth
Of knowledge past or present, could have fear’d
How such united force of Gods, how such
As stood like these, could ever know repulse?
For who can yet believe, though after loss,
That all these puissant Legions, whose exíle
Hath emptied Heav’n, shall fail to re-ascend
Self-rais’d, and repossess thir native seat?
(1.622–34)
Here Satan rehearses his earlier description of God’s fraudulent concealment of his superior power, but with a difference. Once again he claims that the cause of defeat was insufficient knowledge; but he also reveals that even absolute knowledge would have been insufficient in the circumstances: “what power of mind / Foreseeing or presaging, from the Depth / Of knowledge past or present” could have anticipated Satan’s defeat? The following line—“For who can yet believe, though after loss”—reads, at first glance, as a gloss on those that precede it, as though to suggest that even the actual experience of the fall can’t make the fall believable to Satan. Yet, in shifting from knowledge to belief, Satan implicitly acknowledges that what is insufficient knowledge from one perspective is the occasion of faith from another; that what the Machiavel and his critics would call fraud—the intentional discrepancy between appearance and reality or, in the case of God, between free will and foreknowledge—is the condition of human action. As Satan admits, it is precisely because experience does not provide conclusive evidence, that he can believe in, and act on, his ability to “re-ascend.”
As this brief discussion of Satan’s rhetoric suggests, the virtù of the Machiavel is not simply opposed to republican or Christian virtue. Rather, virtù is a thing indifferent, whose force, fraud, and concern with effective human action are both instruments and conditions of Christian virtue. If we now turn to Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death in book 2 of Paradise Lost, we can analyze more closely how Milton exploits the indifference of rhetorical figures to anatomize human agency and justify the ways of God to men. Here, too, the Machiavel and the republican prove to be related.
The Allegory of Sin and Death
Like Comus, Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death allegorizes Milton’s own fears regarding the stereotypical Machiavellism of rhetorical virtuosity, his fears that poetic power might be allied to the forces of rebellion rather than true revolution. At the same time, in its rhetorical form and its biblical allusions, the episode aims to justify Milton’s poem by illustrating that the resources of the Machiavel may also be appropriated by the Machiavellian republican: “for neither do the Spirits damn’d / Lose all thir virtue” (2.482–83). The episode not only invites us to think about the Machiavellian topics of force and consent, means and ends, but also illustrates the inseparability of Milton’s rhetoric of indifference from his defense of Christian liberty. The stereotypically Machiavellian indeterminacy of rhetorical figures here becomes a justification of free will. In dramatizing that the force and fraud of allegory, and the indeterminacy of rhetoric, are conditions of republican virtù, Milton turns the culture’s fear of Machiavellian rhetoric on its head and makes the fallen Machiavel the best argument for a republic of saints. As with the other texts analyzed in this book, the rhetorical form of this episode needs to be taken seriously if we are to understand Milton’s Machiavellism.8 In the following pages I focus first on the allegory of Sin and Death and then on the critical reception of the episode as an example of Miltonic sublimity. As we will see, Milton’s allegory criticizes allegory from within, at the same time that his sublime defense of agency dramatizes the Machiavellian underside of sublimity.
In considering how the allegory of Sin and Death helps us meditate on the Machiavellian dilemmas of action in the realm of indifference, it may be useful to recall both Angus Fletcher’s remarks about the daemonic Machiavellism of allegorical agency and George Puttenham’s about the Machiavellism of allegory. Together, their comments begin to suggest why Satan the Machiavel tends toward allegory, and why allegory should be a particularly powerful rhetorical device for meditating on the paradoxes of agency, both Machiavellian and Christian.
Fletcher uses the term daemonic in a morally neutral sense, to describe a world in which “supernatural energies and consuming appetites are the sole means to existence.” And he draws an explicit parallel between the daemonic agent and the stereotypical Machiavel: “Like a Machiavellian prince, the allegorical hero can act free of the usual moral restraints, even when he is acting morally, since he is moral only in the interests of his power over other men.”9 Yet, while free from moral restraints, the allegorical agent seems not only possessed of an intellectual or physical virtus (41), but also possessed by external force, driven by an “appetite of dominion” (52). He thus combines the appearance of “unrestrained will” with “a maximum of restraint” (68–69). Allegorical fixity is simply the other side of daemonic agency. Satan the Machiavel is such a daemonic hero: in assuming a radically contingent universe, one governed by fortuna and susceptible to the machinations of his own unrestrained will, he makes himself into a “fixed mind” (PL, 1.97). He also gives rise to allegorical figures who reflect his own reified sense of agency. If, according to Fletcher, the allegorical hero often seems to operate in a world of daemonic powers, a world in which mental functions are compartmentalized and personified, it is not all that surprising that the daemonic hero appears, conversely, to generate allegorical figures from his own forehead.
In his Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham offers a slightly different account of the Machiavellism of allegory but one that is equally important for understanding Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death. For Puttenham, allegory or “false semblant” is a figure that depends on force and fraud, the wresting of signification and the resulting “dissimulation”:
And ye shall know that we may dissemble, I meane speake otherwise then we thinke, in earnest aswell as in sport, under covert and darke termes, and in learned and apparant speaches . . . and finally aswell when we lye as when we tell truth. To be short every speach wrested from his owne naturall signification to another not altogether so naturall is a kinde of dissimulation, because the wordes beare contrary countenaunce to th’ intent.10
Allegory thus raises the question of the relationship of force and signification. Puttenham implies that every trope that wrests signification disguises meaning under a false appearance, regardless of whether one is lying or telling the truth. He thus suggests that the forceful breach of allegory, which opens a space between words and intent, language and meaning, makes the attainment of truth contingent upon the possibility of falsehood. Without this split produced by dissimulation, neither truth nor falsehood would be possible. Allegory, for Puttenham, may be termed the “chief ringleader and captaine of all other figures, either in the Poeticall or oratorie science” (197), “as it is supposed no man can pleasantly utter or perswade without it” (196). Thus if Fletcher’s allegory is a figure of force and compulsion, Puttenham suggests that allegory’s forceful wresting of signification—or fraud—is a condition of meaning in general.11
Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death dramatizes both aspects of allegory: the episode does not simply allegorize Satan’s force and fraud and thereby equate force and fraud with allegory; it also stages a critique of such an equation by showing that the possibility of Machiavellian force and fraud is a condition of all signification and agency. Allegory comes to signify a false conflation of interpretation with perception, and—as in Areopagitica and Comus—the false delegation of ethical responsibility; at the same time, it also embodies a structure of linguistic difference that is the condition of meaningful human action. In its ambivalent rhetoric—at once parodic and sublime—the episode dramatizes the indeterminacy or indifference that is a condition of interpretation and free will.
We can begin to get at the indifference—the ambivalence and polysemousness—of this allegory by noting its high degree of self-reflexivity. This self-reflexivity is apparent first of all in the descriptions of Sin and Death. Traditionally, allegory was seen both as the representation of what is by nature obscure to human understanding and as itself an obscure form of representation. We can only know God or divine truths indirectly or allegorically but, in accommodating these truths to human understanding, allegory also presents them under a veil. Thus Demetrius in his On Style associates allegory with darkness and night, and Vossius writes that “by its obscurity [allegory] resembles the darkness of night, which easily terrifies the fearful.”12 The obscure representation of Sin and Death thus functions as a kind of allegorical parody of allegory. That is, in personifying the unknowable or unrecognizable, the descriptions should make Sin and Death clearer to us, but the descriptions themselves merely double the original obscurity of these terms. This is especially true of Death, “the other shape / If shape it might be called that shape had none” (2.666–67). Obscurity and darkness also attend Satan’s conception of Sin: “dim [his] eyes, and dizzy swum / In darkness” (2.753–54).
Sin’s narration of her birth is another self-reflexive, parodic moment of the allegory; her account alludes to one prominent allegory of the birth of Christ in the Renaissance, at the same time that it anatomizes the production of allegorical figures as a process of projection and, to use Fletcher’s vocabulary, compartmentalization of functions:
Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem
Now in thine eye so foul, once deem’d so fair
In Heav’n, when at th’ Assembly, and in sight
Of all the Seraphim with thee combin’d
In bold conspiracy against Heav’n’s King,
All on a sudden miserable pain
Surpris’d thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side op’ning wide,
Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright,
Then shining heav’nly fair, a Goddess arm’d
Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seiz’d
All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoiled afraid
At first, and call’d me Sin and for a Sign
Portentous held me; but familiar grown,
I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamor’d, and such joy thou took’st
With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d
A growing burden.
(2.747–67)
On one level, Sin’s description of her birth is a parody of God’s generation of the Son, since the latter was traditionally allegorized as the birth of Athena in the Renaissance.13 But Sin also describes the moment of her birth as the projection of Satan’s thoughts of rebellion and conspiracy, force and fraud: Sin springs out of Satan’s head as he and his fallen angels are joining together “In bold conspiracy against Heav’ns King” (ll. 750–51). As Kenneth Knoespel has informed us, the Hebrew word for sin, pesha, means rebellion. Thus the generation of Sin from Satan’s conspiracy serves not only to dramatize etymology14 but also conversely to gloss the independent or self-regarding activity of the imagination, with its concomitant claim to unmediated agency, as sinful rebellion.15
The passage just quoted provides a further allegorical comment on the relation of linguistic mediation to rebellion. As a number of critics have remarked, the birth not only dramatizes etymology but also gives rise to a “linguistic event” of its own: “amazement seiz’d / All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoil’d afraid / At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign / Portentous held me” (2.758–61).16 Sin seems unfamiliar and this unfamiliarity is tied to recognizing Sin as a sign of something else, a warning. It is familiarity or habit, here described as a narcissistic identification (“Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing / Becam’st enamor’d” [2.764–65]), which leads to a misrecognition of Sin’s otherness, that is, to the deepest sin: “familiar grown, / I pleased, and with attractive graces won / The most averse” (2.761–63).17 In these lines Milton allegorizes rebellion as the refusal to recognize the mediation of signs, as the narcissistic desire to conflate self and other. Thus what is an allegory of narcissism and identification on the one hand proves to be an allegory of the necessity of allegory—of linguistic mediation and difference—on the other.
This point can be clarified by turning to some of the analogues and subtexts of Sin’s narrative. To begin with, Satan’s response to Sin suggests the familiar Augustinian distinction between signs that are to be used and those that are to be enjoyed. For Augustine, “all things are to be used (uti), that is, treated as though they were signs, God only to be enjoyed (frui), as the ultimate signification. To enjoy that which should be used is reification, or idolatry.”18 Satan’s enjoyment of Sin involves an idolatry of the sign rather than a recognition of the signified—a form of self-reflection that precludes genuine engagement with the text or the external world. When we take into account Sin’s seduction of Satan, we could say that allegory panders to the reader, and thus obstructs the kind of rational exercise of the will which is the precondition of right reading and of virtue. In not leaving room for the reader’s own activity, this pandering might just as easily be described as a kind of violence or coercion, a violence that is later dramatized in Death’s rape of Sin. From this perspective, the passage can be read not only as a critique of the allegorical reification of meaning but also as a defense of reading allegorically; such a defense of allegory is also a defense against it, for to read allegorically is to take the figure of Sin as a sign, a warning.
Satan’s “enjoyment” or lust may parody the dangers of antinomianism as well. It is significant in this context that excessive allegorizing was associated with antinomian tendencies in the seventeenth century, and that antinomianism was often conflated with libertinism by its critics. As James Turner has written, “In mid-seventeenth-century polemic . . . radical ‘enthusiasm’ was associated with the abuse of Genesis and the attempt to recover an Adamite relation to the body. This was supposed to involve either naturalistic sexual freedom or ascetic hatred of the flesh, and sometimes both at once.” At times such “paradisal antinomianism” took the form of engaging in sex or sin in order to cast it out (a kind of parody of the Miltonic “trial by what is contrary”).19 The incestuous coupling of Satan and Sin would thus figure in particular the antinomian abuse of—or refusal to be constrained by—the “letter” or sign (PL, 2.760) with its attendant dangers of libertinism. Satan’s coupling with Sin would also figure the way in which the assumption of radical indeterminacy or immediacy turns into its opposite: the bondage of the will.
Here we can further clarify the dialectical implications of Milton’s selfconscious allegory of allegory by examining his biblical source. The genealogy of Sin and Death from lust derives from the Epistle of James, whose canonical status was controversial in the Renaissance not least of all because of its Pelagian or, in seventeenth-century discourse, Arminian argument for justification by works and thus for free will.20 The passage reads:
Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. (1.13–15)
In his preface to the epistle, Luther objected, “Flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture, [James] ascribes righteousness to works. . . . [and] does nothing more than drive to the law and its works; He calls the law a ‘law of liberty,’ though St. Paul calls it a law of slavery, of wrath, of death and of sin.”21 As John Tanner has argued, however, it is precisely the Pelagian emphasis on individual responsibility in the passage from James that serves to condemn Satan in our eyes:22 the autogeneration of Sin from Satan’s forehead figures the responsibility of the sinner for his fall (as Adam says of man in book 9 of Paradise Lost, “within himself / The danger lies, yet lies within his power: / Against his will he can receive no harm” [9.347–49]); Satan’s failure to recognize Sin is a failure to recognize his own responsibility. It is also a failure to recognize that what is the law of death and sin from one perspective is the law of liberty and of works from another, and that if sin takes the form of a sign, it is signs, conversely, that allow for the recognition of sin.
Satan’s error lies, paradoxically, in his refusal to read, to accept the necessity of interpretation and the possibility of error. He thus substitutes, both structurally and thematically, determinism for freedom, fate for faith and free will. Here, too, “fixed mind” and force or compulsion coincide.23 Signs that should ideally point to something else simply point back to themselves. Precisely because Satan’s narcissistic identification with the allegorical figure of Sin precludes genuine recognition of otherness, allegory in relation to Satan figures the danger of seduction by and idolatry of literature rather than, as it was traditionally presumed to do, providing armor against it. The episode could thus be said to perform its own immanent critique of the idea of an autonomous cultural realm of literature: the claim to unmediated imaginative activity is itself a form of violence, of reification and rebellion.
The preceding analysis has suggested the way the allegory of Sin and Death functions as a thing indifferent that may have positive as well as negative implications or uses in the poem. If the episode represents the stereotypical Machiavellism of allegory, it also criticizes such force and fraud as well. In so doing, it points to an alternative mode of reading the obscurity and failed referentiality we have noted in the representation of Sin and Death and in Sin’s account of her encounter with Satan. Borrowing from the more appreciative critics of the poem, we can redescribe this indifference in terms of the rhetorical category of the sublime. My aim in doing so is to situate the previous analysis in relation to the critical reception of the episode from the seventeenth century onward, and to show how even the encomiastic category of the sublime refigures the Machiavellian indifference of allegory.
In “On Paradise Lost,” prefaced to the 1674 edition of the poem, Marvell recorded how he feared Milton would “ruin . . . / The sacred Truths to fable and old Song,” and “perplex . . . the things he would explain”; yet, in the end he was “convinc’d,” and commended Milton’s “verse created like [his] Theme sublime” (Hughes, 209–10). Later readers followed suit, often singling out the perplexity of the Sin and Death episode as one of the chief examples of the Miltonic sublime. Commenting on the line, “Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens and shades of death” (PL, 2.621), Burke wrote:
This idea or affection caused by a word [“death”], which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great degree of the sublime; and it is raised yet higher by what follows, a “universe of death.” Here are again two ideas not presentable but by language; and an union of them great and amazing beyond conception. Whoever attentively considers this passage in Milton . . . will find that it does not in general produce its end by raising the images of things, but by exciting a passion similar to that which real objects excite by other instruments.24
And Coleridge, commenting on the description of Death in Paradise Lost, argued in a similar vein:
The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image.25
Burke’s and Coleridge’s comments nicely capture the ambivalence of the sublime. On the one hand, it seems as though the poet’s deliberate failure of representation allows greater freedom to the reader’s imagination; on the other hand, the reader’s failure to imagine anything precisely serves to refer the reader to what is described by Coleridge as “a sublime feeling of the unimaginable” but has been described by other theorists of the sublime as an identification with a higher power, one that transcends the faculties of perception and imagination. Luther’s description of the law in his Commentary on Galatians provides one example of the religious experience of the sublime: “Wherefore this is the proper and absolute use of the law, by lightning, by tempest and by the sound of the trumpet (as in Mt. Sinai) to terrify, and by thundering to beat down and rend in pieces that beast which is called the opinion of righteousness.”26 The abasement of the sinner proves to be an uplifting experience insofar as it makes him aware of his own sinfulness and thus receptive to divine grace. From this perspective the sublime descriptions of Satan, Sin, and Death serve as a counterplot to their infernal activities, by inviting the reader to contemplate his own divine nature. Similarly, according to Marvell, Milton’s sublime style effectively transforms his potentially satanic poetic activity into divinely inspired prophecy: “Just Heav’n thee like Tiresias to requite / Rewards with Prophecy thy loss of sight.”
Milton may have intended the sublime allegory of Sin and Death to convey an explicitly republican message as well. As Annabel Patterson and others have recently reminded us, Longinus’s discussion of the sublime—which was available to seventeenth-century readers in English translation, as well as in Latin and Greek—explicitly linked the sublime to political liberty and to democracy. Marvell, in particular, seems to have noted the republican dimension of the Miltonic sublime in his prefatory poem to Paradise Lost. As Patterson has observed, Marvell’s image of Milton as “a latter-day Samson braced to bring down the pillars of his society upon the heads of its leaders” “reverberates with Milton’s invocation in the First Defence of the ‘heroic Samson,’ who ‘still made war single-handed on his masters, and . . . slew at one stroke not one but a host of his country’s tyrants.’”27 In the preceding pages we have seen how the generation of Sin allegorizes the illegitimate rebellion of the individual sinner and of the self-regarding imagination; I would now like to suggest that Satan’s confrontation with Death be read as a related critique of monarchical authority. For, like Machiavelli, Milton’s aim here and elsewhere in Paradise Lost is not simply to stage the indifference of rhetorical figures but also to show how they may be appropriated by the religiously motivated republican.
Satan’s challenge to Death is represented as a repetition and parody of his rebellion against God’s throne. When Death first appears, it “seem’d his head / The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on” (2.672–73). And, when Satan refuses to recognize Death’s authority, Death surmises he is “that Traitor Angel . . . /Who first broke peace in Heav’n and Faith, till then / Unbrok’n, and in proud rebellious Arms / Drew after him the third part of Heav’n’s Sons / Conjur’d against the Highest” (2.689–93). Both in his revolt against heaven and in his encounter with Death, Satan’s assumption is that kingly power is merely de facto political power that may be challenged by equal and opposing power. This assumption is dramatized in the lines in which Satan and Death—like allegorical figures from The Faerie Queene—are indistinguishable in battle:
Each at the Head
Levell’d his deadly aim; thir fatal hands
No second stroke intend, and such a frown
Each cast at th’ other, as when two black Clouds
With Heav’n’s Artillery fraught, came rattling on.
(2.711–15)
Unlike Satan’s challenge to God, Satan’s contest with Death is merely a conflict of equal powers. As such, the passage looks forward to the War in Heaven and to Abdiel’s remarks, discussed above, on the indifference of reason, arms, and military virtù (6.114–26). And, as in Abdiel’s speech, so here the narrator implies that this indifference is itself divinely ordained: both fight with “Heav’n’s Artillery.”28
The fact that Death is an allegorical projection of Satan’s own desire for absolute rule may also suggest that Milton intends for us to see kingship as a deadly, allegorical projection and alienation of the subject’s true freedom. In The Reason of Church Government (1642), Milton had written that the authority of the civil magistrate seems originally “to have been placed, as all both civil and religious rites once were, only in each father of family” (Hughes, 678), but that in time magistracy was grounded in reason and persuasion. And, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Milton argued against Filmer that “the law was set above the magistrate,” and that eventually kings and magistrates
received allegiance from the people, that is to say, bond or covenant to obey them in execution of those laws which they, the people, had themselves made or assented to. And this ofttimes with express warning, that if the king or magistrate proved unfaithful to his trust, the people would be disengaged. (Hughes, 755)
In a later passage already mentioned, Milton rebutted Filmer’s and others’ coupling of 1 Peter 2:13 with Romans 13:
Therefore kingdom and magistracy, whether supreme or subordinate, is without difference called “a human ordinance” (1 Pet. ii, 13, &c.), which we are there taught is the will of God we should alike submit to, so far as for the punishment of evildoers and the encouragement of them that do well. “Submit,” saith he, “as free men.” But to any civil power unaccountable, unquestionable, and not to be resisted, no, not in wickedness and violent actions, how can we submit as free men? “There is no power but of God,” saith Paul (Rom. xiii), as much as to say God put it into man’s heart to find out that way at first for common peace and preservation, approving the exercise thereof; else it contradicts Peter, who calls the same authority an ordinance of man. It must also be understood of lawful and just power. (Hughes, 758–59)
In juxtaposing Satan’s illegitimate “conspiracy against Heav’n’s King” (2.751) with his initial refusal to recognize the kingly authority of his son, Milton calls attention to the indifference of dissent. What is illegitimate dissent from God becomes legitimate dissent from an allegorical figment of absolute authority. As in the passage just cited from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, where Milton asserts that the power to contract is the power also to disengage, so here the power to alienate agency is also the power to reassume it. The allegorical conflict of Satan and Death both dramatizes and ironizes the royal fiction of absolute, patriarchal authority. It thus indirectly provides a defense of republicanism.
Yet, in the end, Milton’s indifferent rhetoric touches the category of the sublime as well. Although from one perspective the sublime may be equated with true prophecy and republicanism, from another the sublimity of Sin and Death simply replays the problem posed by the Machiavellian indifference of the allegory in a higher key. For, according to some modern critics, in the experience of the sublime, reason “stages” a failure of that form of representation that assumes an analogy between cognition and vision, understanding and the phenomenal world, in order to make room for the nonphenomenological activities of reading and writing—of prophecy in the seventeenth-century sense of exegesis.29 The imagination fails to comprehend nature, but this failure allows reason to recognize its independence from nature. As Donald Pease has written, “Instead of locating the source of the sublime in its former locus, i.e., in external nature, the imagination redirects Reason to another locus, within Reason itself, where Reason can re-cognize astonishment as its own power to negate external nature.”30 In doing so, however, reason simply displaces to this ostensibly higher level, “within Reason itself,” the question of its own authority. Like allegory, the literary category of the sublime raises questions concerning the relation of authority and interpretation, free will and determinism, which are central to Milton’s theological and political concerns: if sublimity can be staged, how does one tell the difference between a satanic or Machiavellian self-aggrandizement and divinely inspired prophecy or poetry? How does one tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate dissent?31 In confronting the reader with the Machiavellian possibilities of its indifferent rhetoric, the episode looks forward to dilemmas faced by Adam and Eve in books 4, 8, and 9 of Paradise Lost.
Machiavellism in Eden
Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death has usually been perceived as something of an anomaly in Paradise Lost. From the eighteenth century on, the allegory was regularly praised as sublime while being criticized as inappropriate to the otherwise nonallegorical epic. Although admitting that “the descriptive part of this allegory is . . . very strong and full of sublime ideas,” Addison complained, “I cannot think that persons of such a chimerical existence [Sin and Death] are proper actors in an epic poem.” Samuel Johnson irritably echoed this complaint in his Life of Milton: “This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem.”32 And, although modern readers have preferred to see the “fault” of allegory as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, they have also isolated the episode by associating allegory exclusively with a fallen mode of language.33 Rather than being a form of sublimely inspired language or divine accommodation, allegory in this case is a satanic, parodic version of the Word.
The preceding pages have begun to suggest, in contrast, that the structures of linguistic difference and indifference that we observed in the Sin and Death episode—the emphasis on the mediation of signs and the varied uses of rhetorical figures—are constitutive of prelapsarian experience as well.34 The fact that the Sin and Death episode can be described both as an allegory and as a critique of allegory is thus part of the larger argument of the poem. Yet, if linguistic mediation exists in Eden, the poet still wants to distinguish between true and false versions of it. Thus the distinction that Christianity has traditionally marked with the fall Milton places within Eden itself, though this does not mean that Adam and Eve are somehow fallen before their acts of disobedience. In particular, Paradise Lost shows that the structure of the prohibition not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge is the same as that of the law of postlapsarian experience (the prohibition is already a law), and that the differential structure articulated by the law is a condition of freedom as well as slavery. Whether the law is perceived as enabling or not is a function of reading, which in either case depends on the law in order to negate it.
This point may be clarified by returning to Luther’s objections to the Epistle of James. The Lutheran view of the law as a law of slavery consequent upon the fall would seem to underlie any strict differentiation between pre- and postlapsarian experience. Although Pelagius might suffice for a description of the original fall, as fallen creatures we are incapable, according to Luther, of willing freely. Yet, in Paradise Lost, Milton takes issue with this Lutheran position. That Sin is first a sign means conversely that signs (linguistic mediation) allow for the recognition of the possibility of sin. In glossing the genealogy of Sin and Death in the Epistle of James, Milton’s allegory thus suggests that sin shares a linguistic structure not only with the postlapsarian law but with the prelapsarian prohibition, and that, in both cases, this linguistic structure is a condition of virtue. In the following pages I consider the command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge as an example of linguistic mediation and the linguistic constitution of virtue in prelapsarian Eden; I then analyze Satan’s Machiavellian rhetoric in book 9 in similar terms. Just as the divine prohibition exemplifies the linguistic mediation that is a condition of virtue, so Milton uses the disjunction between intention and language in Satan’s rhetoric—his Machiavellian fraud—to explore the way in which the wresting of signification is a condition of all agency and meaning.
It is significant that we first see the Tree of Knowledge from Satan’s vantage point, for the poet’s description emphasizes that “virtue” is tied to right use:
Thence up he [Satan] flew, and on the Tree of Life,
The middle tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a Cormorant; yet not true Life
Thereby regain’d, but sat devising Death
To them who liv’d; nor on the virtue thought
Of that life-giving Plant, but only us’d
For prospect, what well us’d had been the pledge
Of immortality.
(4.194–201)
The narrator uses “virtue” to mean the power of the Tree of Life—just as in book 9 Eve will refer to the virtue of the Tree of Knowledge and of other plants in the garden. But “virtue” also retains its ethical sense as the faculty that governs and is a consequence of right use. It is right use that converts the Tree of Life from a mere object to a “pledge” or sign of God’s promise of immortality. The ethical indifference of the Tree—that it can be used well or badly, that it can be construed as a pledge or a mere plant—is thus a condition of virtue in both senses of the word. As in the Sin and Death episode, Satan’s literal-minded perception is reflected in his “devising Death”: in scriptural terms, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.
Like the Sin and Death episode, this passage on the Tree of Life prepares us for Adam’s description of God’s command against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam describes the prohibition in a way that explicitly ties its linguistic structure to the possibility of virtue. Two aspects of his account are important to note: first, the prohibition signifies that the recognition of sin is a linguistic rather than a merely perceptual activity; second, as a sign, the prohibition is intended to establish the difference between coercion and persuasion. God “requires,” Adam tells Eve,
From us no other service than to keep
This one, this easy charge, of all the Trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to taste that only Tree
Of Knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life,
So near grows Death to Life, whate’er Death is,
Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou know’st
God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree,
The only sign of our obedience left
Among so many signs of power and rule
Conferr’d upon us, and Dominion giv’n
Over all other Creatures that possess
Earth, Air, and Sea. Then let us not think hard
One easy prohibition, who enjoy
Free leave so large to all things else, and choice
Unlimited of manifold delights:
But let us ever praise him, and extol
His bounty, following our delightful task
To prune these growing Plants, and tend these Flow’rs,
Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet.
(4.420–39)
Here it is clear that although Adam does not understand the word “death,” he does understand the prohibition as a test of obedience.35 The partial obscurity of the prohibition is thus analogous to the obscurity of Sin and Death; in both cases it functions as a boundary or limit. The sign is thus, in a curious way, performative rather than cognitive. It refers Adam and Eve to the limits of cognition but recuperates this failure of cognition (“whate’er Death is / Some dreadful thing no doubt”) in the recognition of the task of obedience to God’s word: “for well thou know’st / God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree.” As Milton intimates in the homophones of Raphael’s later warning, “Know to know no more” (4.775), knowledge is predicated on negation, on the knowledge of limits. Furthermore, this limit is of ethical as well as epistemological importance, for absolute knowledge would itself be coercive and thus preclude virtue. At the same time, the prohibition itself is clearly a sublime obstacle, a limit that tempts one to “think hard”—that is, beyond the boundary it establishes; and to think of that activity as hard which formerly—that is, without thought—was easy and so without virtue. Negation makes thought possible, at the same time that it makes the closure of absolute knowledge impossible, for us. But this impossibility is the condition of virtue. Just as the Mosaic law is given to fallen man to allow for the recognition of sin (12.287–308), so the prohibition is given to Adam and Eve as a sign which, as it articulates difference, allows for genuine choice, reason, and obedience. And this articulation of difference is itself predicated on the doctrine of things indifferent. As Milton writes in Christian Doctrine,
it was necessary that something should be forbidden or commanded as a test of fidelity, and that an act in its own nature indifferent, in order that man’s obedience might be thereby manifested. For since it was the disposition of man to do what was right, as a being naturally good and holy, it was not necessary that he should be bound by the obligation of a covenant to perform that to which he was of himself inclined; nor would he have given any proof of obedience by the performance of works to which he was led by a natural impulse, independently of the divine command. (Hughes, 993)
In Milton’s analysis, the Tree of Knowledge is itself a thing indifferent, and it is this indifference that makes possible the test of virtue constituted by the prohibition. Or, to put it another way, as in the passage on divine ordinance and human order in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton diminishes the difference between God’s command and human discretion in things indifferent by making the former a test of the latter.
If the prohibition establishes the fact of linguistic mediation in prelapsarian Eden, it is not surprising that Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian experience in book 9 of Paradise Lost rehearses many of the issues we saw dramatized in Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death. Satan’s narcissistic refusal to recognize the mediation of signs is refigured in book 9 as Eve’s narcissistic blindness to Satan’s fraud. Yet, if Milton allegorizes stereotypical Machiavellism in the Sin and Death episode as the unwarranted claim to self-origination and imaginative power, in book 9 of Paradise Lost Machiavellism appears as well in its more familiar form of rhetorical deception and hypocrisy. Even more than in books 1 and 2, Satan appears in book 9 as the archetypal hypocrite, using fraud and malice (9.55) to wage war against Adam and Eve. And, as in those earlier books, part of Satan’s Machiavellism involves ascribing the stereotypically Machiavellian use of force and fraud to God himself, while claiming in his own case and that of the fruit that appearances are truthful. As with Satan’s speeches to the fallen angels in books 1 and 2, here too Milton implies that what is rhetorical force and fraud from one perspective is the condition of virtue from another.
Satan is the original of Bradshaw’s Machiavel, who manipulates the realm of appearances so that “scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.”36 In addition, in a particularly diabolical twist, Satan makes even those things that appear as they are seem different. Debating about the proper means to serve his ends, Satan
Consider’d every Creature, which of all
Most opportune might serve his Wiles, and found
The Serpent subtlest Beast of all the Field.
Him after long debate, irresolute
Of thoughts revolv’d, his final sentence chose
Fit Vessel, fittest Imp of fraud, in whom
To enter, and his dark suggestions hide
From sharpest sight: for in the wily Snake,
Whatever sleights none would suspicious mark,
As from his wit and native subtlety
Proceeding, which in other Beasts observ’d
Doubt might beget of Diabolic pow’r.
(9.84–95)
Satan’s deliberations lead him to the conclusion that suspicious behavior in a creature one expects to be suspicious will not be suspicious. This reasoning simultaneously parodies and illustrates Machiavelli’s remark that “men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are” (P, 51). “Sharpest sight” will be its own undoing, because its suspicion takes the form of perceiving, that is, trusting the appearance of, “sleights” and “fraud.”
Once he has assumed the form of the serpent, Satan’s rhetoric consists of making distinctions between appearance and reality, intention and effect, means and ends, virtù and success, only in order then to argue for their correspondence on the basis of apparent evidence or sense certainty. In particular, according to Satan, physical sight guarantees intellectual insight. In fact, all of Satan’s arguments in book 9 can be organized around the sense of sight in a way that makes his rhetoric an elaborate pun. Thus the serpent appeals throughout book 9 both to Eve’s sight and to her desire to be seen. He calls attention to the shallowness or superficiality of mere sight as opposed to the depth of insight (9.544: “Beholders rude, and shallow to discern”). In this way, his rhetoric turns sight into desire and thus into a sense of absence (9.535–36: “gaze / Insatiate”). At the same time, he asks Eve not to think or be on guard: “Wonder not, sovran Mistress, if perhaps / Thou canst, who are sole Wonder, much less arm / Thy looks.” Then, having established the difference between two kinds of looks, fairness, and perception (9.538, 605–606), the serpent argues for their identity by referring to himself as evidence:
Queen of this Universe, do not believe
Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die:
How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you life
To Knowledge. By the Threat’ner? look on mee,
Mee who have touch’d and tasted, yet both live,
And life more perfet have attain’d than Fate
Meant mee, by vent’ring higher than my Lot.
Shall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast
Is open? or will God incense his ire
For such a petty Trespass, and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of Death denounc’t, whatever thing Death be,
Deterr’d not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of Good and Evil;
Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil
Be real, why not known, since easier shunn’d?
God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;
Not just, not God; not fear’d then, nor obey’d:
Your fear itself of Death removes the fear.
(9.683–702)
What is interesting about this passage is the way Satan argues inconsistently both for the truth of sense evidence and for God’s Machiavellian use of fraud. He appeals to the evidence of his own appearance—“Look on me”—to suggest both that God’s “rigid threats of Death” are fraudulent, and that the Machiavellian use of force would disable any claims to legitimacy: “God . . . cannot hurt ye, and be just.” The same is true of the divine prohibition construed as a threat: Eve’s “fear itself of Death removes the fear,” because such fear is construed as evidence of coercion. Yet, in describing God as a Machiavel, Satan admits the possibility of deception that undermines any strict claim for the correspondence between appearance and reality. In so doing, he betrays the Machiavellism of his pretension to unmediated experience.
Satan’s rhetoric also makes clear that the appeal to sense evidence is tied to a particular interpretation of “virtue” as natural strength or innate power. As in books 1 and 2, Milton plays with the word virtue in a way that invites us to reflect on the relationship between the natural virtue of herbs, plants, and fruit in the Garden, and the ethical virtue of obedience, which is dependent upon the linguistic intervention of God’s prohibition. Thus Satan describes the orbs of heaven, whose “known virtue appears / Productive in Herb, Plant, and nobler Birth / Of Creatures animate” (9.110–12); and, reflecting on why God created the Earth, he wonders if God’s “virtue spent of old now fail’d / More angels to create” (9.145–46). In both cases “virtue” may be construed as productive power. In a similar vein, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is repeatedly described as possessed of, in Eve’s words, a “virtue . . . / Wondrous indeed, if cause of such effects” (9.616, 649–50). Just before the fall, Eve praises the Tree’s “Virtues” (9.745); in describing the Tree as both “Fair to the eye” and “of virtue to make wise” (9.778, 779), she once again suggests that the appeal to sense evidence and the construction of “virtue” as a natural power and unfailing cause of specific effects are two sides of the same coin.
Yet, as Milton argues in the passage quoted above from his Christian Doctrine, and as Eve herself implies in the “separation colloquy” when she presents Milton’s argument in Areopagitica (“What is Faith, Love, Virtue unassay’d” [9.335]), such natural or innate “virtue” is itself a thing indifferent, one that needs to be tested or tried before it can be called Christian virtue. The prohibition provides for just such a denaturalization of virtue through the mediation of signs. Even Satan suggests as much when he urges Eve to show an epic virtù or “dauntless virtue” by trespassing God’s prohibition (9.694). He thus implies, in spite of himself, that the natural “virtue” of the Tree is nothing compared to the virtue Adam and Eve exercise by being obedient to—or disobeying—God’s command.
The linguistic play with “virtue” helps us to understand Milton’s Machiavellian defense against the force and fraud of the Machiavel. Such defense takes the form of arguing not that force and fraud are simply evil, or that appearances are merely deceptive, but rather that the possibility of deception means that appearances must be interpreted, and that the activity of interpretation is itself an occasion of free will. Or, to put it another way, “virtue” must be denaturalized so that it no longer appears as an object of perception but rather as an activity of interpretation. Accordingly, all of book 9 is governed by an opposition between knowledge construed as cognition of an object (knowledge as possession) and knowledge construed as an activity of choice. The first kind of knowledge is associated with perception and with reasoning by analogy. The second kind is identified with obedience to God and faith, for which there can be no merely perceptual evidence. The impossibility of such evidence might seem to guarantee the harmlessness—the inefficacy—of deceptive appearances or, to use Puttenham’s words for the trope of evidentia, “counterfait representation.” Yet, if appearances—and the realm of things indifferent—are reasoned away, learning and the right exercise of virtue are impossible.
Thus the problem that Eve faces when confronted with Satan disguised as “mere serpent in appearance” (9.413) is the same problem faced by the postlapsarian Redcrosse in book 1 of The Faerie Queene: the problem, that is, of Puttenham’s “false semblant.” In a garden that includes both the “fair appearing good” (9.350) that is the snake and the “fair appearing good” that is Adam, no single rule of interpretation (whether according to analogy or the inversion of simple irony) will suffice. Rather, it is precisely the absence of such an a priori rule that makes reading (construed not as the possession of knowledge but as the activity of choice) possible. Eve’s error does not arise from the entirely rational assumption of the snake’s good intentions (she has every right to expect the “subtle” snake to be as innocuous as the “mazy error” of the streams of paradise) but from her subjection of faith and of the divine prohibition to the serpent’s view of human reason—from a reading for knowledge that refuses to accept the knowledge of human limitations. Accordingly, with the serpent’s help, Eve reasons in contradictory fashion, both analogically and ironically. For, once she assumes with the serpent that she can accede to divine knowledge by reasoning analogically from appearances, she leaves herself open to (the misconstruction of) a mere Outside. Milton’s nonallegorical poetic is not at all designed to solve the ethical and epistemological problems dramatized by Spenserian allegory or by the allegory of Sin and Death; for what is allegory by one name is enargeia or evidentia by another.
Fittingly, Milton conveys his criticism of a phenomenological approach to reading not only thematically but also intertextually. If we return to the scene of seduction, we can see that although the pleasing appearance of the serpent dazzles Eve even before it speaks, Milton’s allusive style seems to place the reader in a different position. For the comparison of the serpent to a ship (9.513) recalls Virgil’s description of the Trojan horse. We are reminded of the sliding—or falling (lapsus)—wheels that allow the horse to slip into the city (inlabitur urbi), and the approach of the Greek ships, whose departure from Tenedos (Aeneid, 2.254–67) recalls a similar departure of the snakes (Aeneid, 2.203, 225) who devoured Laocoon. The reader is thus tempted to think that the cognoscenti of Virgil are in a position of superior knowledge in comparison with Eve, and that their knowledge of Virgil provides them with proof of why Eve should not have fallen: that is, the snake is a Trojan horse. But allusion here also functions as a trope of evidence and, in doing so, undermines the reader’s supposed superiority: if we do not remember that Virgil, like Homer, is an “erring” narrator (PL, 1.747), we should note that the Virgilian passages to which Milton alludes do not tell a story of simple deception (according to which appearances are in ironic contradiction to what they really signify) but rather of a double misreading—for the Trojans believe Sinon’s lies but they do not believe Laocoon’s truth. We are thus gradually forced in book 9 to confront the fact that knowledge per se, knowledge of allusion, knowledge of the deceptiveness of appearances (and one is tempted to add aesthetic knowledge in particular—as the model of disinterested, independent inquiry) is not a guarantor of virtue.
Yet, while Satan’s rhetoric plays with the unreliability of appearances and so undermines the possibility of a phenomenological account of reading, it also makes it clear that deceit and misrepresentation are not the invention of the devil: they are not created ex nihilo. If conventional signs are distinguished from natural signs insofar as the former involve the “will to signify” (as Augustine argues in On Christian doctrine), Satan does not introduce conventional signs into Eden.37 He simply makes explicit what was already a potentiality of human language: the possibility of misrepresentation is a constitutive part of representation just as the possibility of choosing wrongly is a constitutive part of free will. In other words, all human language is arbitrary, which is to say, in the root sense of the word, willful. The question is, whose will is being served? Satan’s sin, then, is not in using language arbitrarily but rather in turning that arbitrary language into an object: by making language seem to signify “naturally,” in short, by arguing that knowledge can be acquired as, or in the form of, a natural object (the Tree of Knowledge), and so reifying it. Like Augustine, Milton makes clear that the first wrong choice is the choice to think of language and of Christian knowledge as objects rather than as activities of choice.
That Milton aims to defeat Satan and his “rebellious rout” not by denying the conventionality of signs but by admitting it—and then by arguing that this conventionality is itself an assertion of free will (and thus a justification of God’s ways)—is apparent in the treatment of Adam’s fall. Since Adam falls neither by force nor by fraud, he undermines this stereotypical Machiavellian paradigm (itself associated with Satan’s rhetoric throughout books 1 and 2): the fall is not primarily a problem of external misrepresentation but of self-deception. Eve is righter than she knows when she says of her fall to Adam:
who knows
But might as ill have happ’n’d thou being by,
Or to thyself perhaps: hadst thou been there,
Or here th’ attempt, thou couldst not have discern’d
Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spake;
No ground of enmity between us known,
Why hee should mean me ill, or seek to harm.
(9.1146–52)
Although Eve claims to be reading (eating) for knowledge, her remarks here betray her necessary ignorance (the necessary limits of knowledge), an ignorance Adam accepts only in order to choose to reject it. When he warns Eve “not to taste that only Tree / Of Knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life, / So near grows Death to Life, whate’er Death is, / Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou know’st” (4.423–26), the syntax of the lines dramatizes the inseparability of knowledge and ignorance. Yet, in the end, “he scrupl’d not to eat / Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d” (9.997–98). Milton’s aim in both scenes of the fall is to shift the definition of reading from reading for the acquisition of cognitive knowledge to reading as the activity of choice, a choice that if correctly made presupposes a different kind of knowledge as its foundation. Thus, whereas Satan argues (9.756) that “good unknown / Sure is not had” (knowledge as possession), Milton replies with Eve that “In such abundance [of the yet unknown] lies our choice” (9.619–20).
I have argued that the Sin and Death episode is an exemplary instance of Milton’s ambivalent or, in theological terms, indifferent rhetoric. In Sin’s narration of her encounter with Satan, we are offered an allegorical parody of allegory; and in Satan’s encounter with Death, we are offered an allegory and critique of monarchical power. From one perspective (which we can identify with Sin’s description of Satan’s response), allegory implies a fallen mode of reading since it reifies signification and precludes any genuine encounter with otherness, any genuine exercise of deliberation and choice among possible meanings. From another perspective, the episode provides an allegorical critique of reading allegorically and so dramatizes the indifference of this rhetorical mode. From this second perspective, allegory exemplifies a structure of signification that characterizes pre- as well as postlapsarian experience. One burden of the episode is thus to show that signs, including prohibitions and laws, are not simply a consequence of the fall but the precondition of any genuine ethical choice: language itself is a thing indifferent that can be used well or badly.
Milton thus uses what contemporaries stigmatized as the Machiavellian indeterminacy of language, its potential for force and fraud, as an argument for free will. In so doing, as we have seen, he provides us with a rhetorical theology and rhetorical politics, both more concerned to stage than to resolve the paradoxes of Christian doctrine.38 Like the rhetoric of The Prince, Milton’s rhetoric dramatizes the dilemmas of agency in a world in which our actions are partially governed by fortuna—or entirely foreseen by God. Furthermore, like Machiavelli’s allegorical figure of Fortune as a woman, Milton’s allegorical critique of allegory aims to dramatize—and to free virtue from—the threat of reification in the face of pure contingency (fortune) or pure determinism (the Calvinist God). In both cases, the critical or enabling aspect of such allegory might be described as a mode of reading or reasoning, in which the failure of immediate perception gives way to an elevating activity of interpretation, one that restores to the subject the conviction of free will.
In this light, Milton’s remark in Areopagitica—“Reason is but choosing,” a remark that describes the activity of Adam, Eve, and the reader of Paradise Lost—is the exemplary Miltonic narrative in little: it posits the passage between epistemology and ethics. Faced with the limits of human cognition, the reader exercises judgment in the realm of things indifferent and in so doing performs his or her divinely ordained ethical task. The problem, of course—and it is the problem of Reformation hermeneutics—is how does one tell the difference between the satanic self-aggrandizement of “perfect, self-originating agency”39 and those decisions and actions that do not simply claim to be but are obedient to a higher power? Here we are reminded of the possibility that reason might act as a stage Machiavel, pretending a failure of knowledge in order narcissistically to “discover itself freshly in an attitude of awe.”40 Satan’s narcissism in his encounter with Sin enacts this theatrical possibility. As Milton was well aware, if ethical discretion in things indifferent can be staged or parodied, this also raises questions concerning Milton’s own rhetorical defense and education of the reader’s ethical judgment. We know not only from the Sin and Death episode but also from the poet-narrator’s self-descriptions, which frequently echo earlier descriptions of Satan, that Milton was himself sensitive to this dilemma. Milton stages the plot and counterplot of allegory in the Sin and Death episode not only to try to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate dissent, reformation and rebellion, but also to meditate on the satanic and Machiavellian dimension of justifying the ways of God to men. Just as fortuna was for Machiavelli both the occasion of virtù and the threat to its realization, so for Milton the satanic Machiavel signifies the realm of indifference that is both a threat to, and the occasion of, virtue. Not least disturbing in the conflation of truth and the realm of things indifferent is the suggestion that the exercise of Christian virtue may be inseparable from a self-aggrandizing stereotypically Machiavellian virtù. But, for Milton, this possibility is the risk one must take in order to reunite virtue and virtù in the proper exercise of Christian liberty.
In contrast to those many critics who have asserted that Milton was only interested in the Machiavelli of the Discourses, the preceding pages have shown that Milton was fully aware that the Machiavel and the republican theorist are two aspects of rhetorical politics, and that what contemporaries stigmatized as the indeterminacy or indifference of rhetoric in the figure of the Machiavel is also the condition of political virtue. Like the proponents of the oath of Engagement, Milton exacerbated this indeterminacy in the rhetoric of his prose and poetry, not in order to argue as they did for the necessity of allegiance to the arbitrary authority of de facto political power, but rather to insist on the exercise of deliberation and action in the contingent world of political affairs. Like Machiavelli, Milton was aware that the indeterminacy of rhetoric could serve as a dialectical critique of the status quo, a means of unmooring custom and ideology and making room for a republic of virtuous citizens or saints. Like the critics of Machiavelli, Milton knew that the cost of such indifference was the Machiavel.