THE HUMAN SATAN IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE
To Zalmen, and to our children Liora, Sharon, and Avi.
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature From Milton to Rochester
NANCY ROSENFELD University of Haifa, Israel Max Stern College of Jezreel Valley, Israel
© Nancy Rosenfeld 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Nancy Rosenfeld has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England
Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA
Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rosenfeld, Nancy, 1944– The human Satan in seventeenth-century English literature: from Milton to Rochester 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise regained 3. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Grace abounding to the chief of sinners 4. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Holy war 5. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 1647–1680 – Criticism and interpretation 6. Etherege, George, Sir, 1635?–1691 – Criticism and interpretation 7. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism 8. Devil in literature 9. Body, Human, in literature 10. Evil in literature I. Title 820.9’351 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenfeld, Nancy. The human Satan in seventeenth-century English literature: from Milton to Rochester / by Nancy Rosenfeld. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6468-0 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Devil in literature. 3. Body, Human, in literature. 4. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 5. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise regained. 6. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Grace abounding to the chief of sinners. 7. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Holy war. 8. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 1647–1680—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Etherege, George, Sir, 1635?–1691—Criticism and interpretation. 10. Evil in literature. I. Title. PR431.R67 2008 820.9’351—dc22 2007046692 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6468-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.
Contents Acknowledgements
vi
Introduction
1
1 Satan’s Journey into Evil
5
2 The Tempter of Grace Abounding
31
3 Diabolus and His Unholy War
53
4 Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
79
5 “Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
101
6 Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
127
7 The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
147
8 The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
169
Epilogue: Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes?
187
Works Cited Index
195 209
Acknowledgements A few years ago on a cool, sunny, spring afternoon, I was strolling around Ein Hashofet, the kibbutz (collective village) of which my husband and I have been members for most of our adult lives, in the company of a dear friend who himself had once been a member of the community. Our discussion naturally focused on the difficulties faced by the individual kibbutz member, as well as on the problems facing the Israeli cooperative movement in general. Finally my friend stopped near a beautifully manicured lawn, where a group of noisy children were kicking around a football in the shade of a dignified old tree. He sighed and said, “It still looks like paradise to me!” Sensing that for him this was a major road-not-taken moment, I answered, “Well, when we were younger we dreamed of building a utopia, but as older adults in an imperfect world we know that every paradise is paradise lost.” I’m not sure that my friend was comforted by these words, but I myself was. I first read and studied Paradise Lost in an undergraduate seminar at the City College of New York. It is not surprising that I kept my notes, since I do remember sensing unfinished business with the poem (back in the sixties it was conventional to speak of books or poems, rather than texts). For the almost thirty subsequent years—during which I immigrated to Israel, married and raised a family, and worked as a high school teacher of English—Milton was on hold. He was, it seems, always there in the background, however, waiting to come to the forefront. This happened in 1993, when for reasons that now sound ludicrous, I decided that the time had come to go to grad school. On walking into Professor Noam Flinker’s Milton seminar at the University of Haifa I discovered that Milton, along with his Father, his Son, and his Satan, had been patiently waiting for me all those years. I should like to begin my thanks with Professor Flinker, the ever-patient, ever-helpful mentor of my belated studies. He reminded me why I had once been fascinated by the writings and life of John Milton, and encouraged my newfound interest in John Bunyan and John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester. I am also grateful to other faculty members of the Department of English Language and Literature of the University of Haifa for their support and friendship: in particular Dr. Wolf Ze’ev Hirst and Dr. Sarah Gilead. I am especially grateful to my friend, neighbor, and colleague, Dr. Itzik Peleg of Beit Berl College, and to my friend, role model, and colleague, Dr. Esther Carmel-Hakim, for their constant encouragement. I would like to thank the Research Authority of the University of Haifa for granting me the status of Researcher in the Department of English, thus enabling continued access to the university’s excellent library. Portions of this work have appeared in articles in scholarly journals. I am most grateful to the Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc., for permission to republish a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal (49 [2000]). I should like to express my gratitude to the editor of New Comparison: A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies (35–36 [Spring–Autumn 2003])
Acknowledgements
vii
for permission to use text that appeared in that journal. Chapter 6 contains a revised version of articles that appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies (9.3 [September 2003]). Chapter 7 contains a revised version of part of my article, “The Man of Mode: The Mode of Man,” which appeared in The McNeese Review (42 [2004]). An earlier version of chapter 8 appeared in Revista Atenea (ISSN0885-6079, 2.2 [2006]). Portions of this work have appeared in the following article: Nancy Rosenfeld and Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg, “‘Let Me Die with the Philistines’: Samson Agonistes and the Samson of Judges as Prophets,” Moed: Annual for Jewish Studies (14 [2004]). I am most grateful to Peter Lang Publishers for permission to republish a revised version of portions of my article, “‘So counterfeit holy would this Divel be’: Debate and Disinformation as Satanic Strategies in Milton and Bunyan” in John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing, edited by N.H. Keeble (2002). Most difficult of all is the expression of gratitude to my family, simply because words are weak: my husband Zalmen; our children Liora, Sharon, Avi, and their wonderful families; my mother, Beatrice Fields; my brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Cinthia Sadeh. They’ve been with me all along, and I’m constantly humbled by the strength of their conviction that if something is important to me, it really must be important.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction An examination of the Satan characters of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and of the Tempter and Diabolus in the spiritual autobiography and visionary prose of John Bunyan—Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Holy War, respectively—led me to posit the existence of an archetypal human Satan character, a creation of the two great nonconformist writers of the early Restoration period. To claim the status of archetype the character must be shown to serve as a pattern for other characters. I therefore decided to trace the Satan characters of Milton and Bunyan forward in time to the speaker of the poems of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, to the public persona of the earl himself, and to Dorimant, the young protagonist of George Etherege’s Man of Mode, for which the earl of Rochester served as model. Then, working backward chronologically, I addressed the question of the apparent absence of the Satan in Milton’s last great work, Samson Agonistes. The Satan of Paradise Lost, Grace Abounding, The Holy War, and Paradise Regained is first viewed as an archetype-in-the-making, whose development can be followed work by work. As part of the discussion of each separate work I examine the character as a representation of each writer’s engagement with loss—personal, political, religious—resulting from the restoration of the monarchy and of the established Church of England in the 1660s. Given the despair engendered by the Restoration in the religious structures to which they belonged, it is perhaps not surprising that during this period both Milton and Bunyan created Satan characters— characters noted for their articulation of those two quintessentially human emotions: confusion and anger. The creation of these characters, moreover, entailed pondering questions that would always be central to the believing Christian: to what extent is the search for redemption a group-based, as opposed to individual, endeavor? Is there a correlation between evil and individuation wherein one perceives oneself as a discrete entity rather than as a member of a group? The initial decision to begin this report of my investigations with a discussion of the Satan of Paradise Lost (first published in 1667, the year after Grace Abounding) was an intuitive response to received critical wisdom, wherein the Satan of Milton’s great epic is not only the most attractive of the satanic characters of seventeenthcentury English letters, but one of the canon’s most intriguingly complex. As noted by Neil Forsyth, Satan’s domination of the epic is nothing less than overwhelming: “Satan’s presence as the dominating character makes the text itself, at most of the key moments, inveigling, unreliable, seductive, fascinating. The Satanic epic continues even when he is not himself present [...] And even after he drops ignominiously out of the poem in Book 10 with that splendid and extended hiss, the seductive text keeps him active” (7). Further study of Milton’s and Bunyan’s oeuvres suggested an additional reason for opening with a discussion of the Satan of Pandaemonium and Eden: I noted that
2
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
the development of the Satan of Paradise Lost from the heroic military leader of the early books to the groveling, hissing serpent of Book 10 prefigures the broader development of the archetype whose existence I was in the process of positing, from the fallen archangel of Paradise Lost and Grace Abounding to the humanized character of Paradise Regained and The Holy War. The Satan archetype herein delineated is indeed characterized by his humanity: the character is no longer an archangel or larger than life, no longer the embodiment of evil in the abstract, but rather embodies those impulses of the human that, though not necessarily evil in themselves, can lead one to commit evil. The titular protagonist of this Satan Cycle, as it might be termed, is first seen by a human being when Eve dreams of meeting a creature bearing a heavenly shape (Milton, Paradise Lost 5.55). As originally envisioned by a human, the fallen fiend retains the form of archangel: eternally young, beautiful, and strong enough to carry Eve up to heaven (5.86–90). The Satan of Paradise Regained, on the other hand, first appears to Eve’s divine-human Son in the form of an earthbound elderly man (Milton, Poems 1.314). Paralleling his development from archangel to human, the character can thus be seen to develop from youth to old age, which is, of course, the fate of the individual. This, too, suggested the validity and utility of viewing the Satan as a human being; and while Satan himself is immortal, his hinted evocation in the character of Samson faces death, which is arguably the trademark of the human. The human—as opposed to the divine or the angelic—is the dynamic, as Milton and Bunyan knew. Just as political-religious victory was not permanent for the side favored by the nonconformists, victory over evil impulses cannot be permanent for the individual. Identity is therefore fluid, contingent. The believing Christian would thus be confronted with the question of whether redemption itself can be permanent. Milton and Bunyan may have created their Satan characters as one answer to this question; this, they appear to be saying, is what the human looks like if permanent salvation is not possible. John Wilmot, protégé of Charles II, rejoiced at the restoration of the monarchy; yet he interrogated the court hierarchy to which he belonged in his oeuve as a whole, and specifically in such works as Satyr against Reason and Mankind, Tunbridge Wells, and A Ramble in St. James’s Parke. In the Speaker of his poems, in his own life, and in the Restoration rake character as embodied on the stage in Dorimant, Rochester incorporated the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan. For Milton and Bunyan the validity of political and religious leadership was an issue of primary importance. Both knew that for most of their fellow Christians the venue of the struggle for redemption would be an ecclesiastical framework, yet both believed that salvation is ultimately granted or withheld on an individual basis. Rochester, too, may be said to have both accepted and challenged the validity of the hierarchy to which he belonged. In his poems he revealed his sense of the moral poverty of the aristocracy to whose economic and political rights he clung. Whereas the earl was reconciled with the Church of England only in the last months of his life, in his concern with the legitimacy of both ecclesiastical and secular authority he raises questions similar to those with which Milton and Bunyan were grappling. Although Rochester came of age after Charles II’s return to the throne, he can usefully be viewed as a liminal figure, both spanning and blurring the border between
Introduction
3
the Civil War and Restoration periods. I suggest that this notorious Restoration rake and the Speaker of his poems had as his spiritual father the Satan character who constituted the joint outcome of the writings of Milton and Bunyan, a character resulting from a process of creation taking place during the earl’s short life, and that had not yet been completed at the time of his death.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1
Satan’s Journey into Evil John Milton’s Paradise Lost does more than tell the story of humankind’s fall and Christ’s acceptance of the task of redeeming his human brothers and sisters. In his first great epic Milton details the downfall of Satan, the fall that preceded Adam and Eve’s fatal error; unlike the First Parents, however, the perpetrator had no possibility of achieving redemption through the Son’s sacrifice. The rebellion of one third of heaven’s angels under the leadership of Satan was, according to commonly accepted Christian chronology, the origin of sin in the universe; this fall was then replicated in Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Denied the option of achieving redemption, Milton’s Satan character subsequently took on a number of the defining characteristics of the human. By following the process of Satan’s downfall in Paradise Lost we can trace a Satan character who grows into humanity as he grows into evil. For Milton himself, chronology—careful placing of events along a time-line— was important, and Alastair Fowler argues that Milton “take[s] pains to arrange precise indications of the passage of time, dwelling fondly on chronologiae and giving long-drawn-out descriptions of sunset and sunrise” (25). For the believer, of course, the regular succession of day and night was indicative of the permanence of God and his grace. Imagery of day and night, light and darkness was, according to Fowler, “in keeping with a seventeenth-century fashion for philosophical optics and astronomical mysticism. But it would be a mistake to think of it as the result of easy or impersonal choices on Milton’s part. It is more like a confession of his faith in the justice of the God who had made darkness succeed light for him so unnaturally” (28). A sense of justice toward Satan makes it appropriate to trace the development of the character in Paradise Lost chronologically: after all, for Satan, as for the poet who told his story, God had made darkness succeed light. The Prelapsarian Satan Any discussion of Milton’s Satan must be based on the awareness that for Milton and his readers Satan existed as an actual being;1 yet the Hebrew Bible, Milton’s prime source for his epic of “man’s first disobedience,” provides scanty information about Satan. Genesis 3 does not mention Satan at all; it is the serpent, “more subtil 1 The war in heaven and subsequent exile of one third of the angels as punishment for disobeying God was a matter of historical truth for Milton and his contemporaries. Milton’s main authority for his general description of the war in heaven, as well as for several of its details, as William B. Hunter notes, was Revelation 12 (“War in Heaven” 125). Yet the “details of the War in Heaven were the despair of nearly every expositor in Milton’s age” (Milton 94), according to C.A. Patrides.
6
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,” who approaches the woman and asks “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (King James Bible, Gen. 3.1). The name Lucifer has traditionally been used as a synonym for Satan, although Milton only uses the former name three times in Paradise Lost.2 A figure called Lucifer is addressed by Isaiah in Chapter 14: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the start of God [...]. I will be like the most High” (Isa. 14.12–14). Maximilian Rudwin suggests that the substitution of Lucifer for Satan as a name for the rebel angel is a contribution by the Church Fathers, who wrongly assumed that Isaiah was referring to Satan.3 The Lucifer of whom the prophet spoke, according to Rudwin, was actually the king of Babylon, whose pride is taken to be the cause of his downfall (3). The “framework-story of the book of Job,” as N.H. Tur-Sinai has noted, is “the principal place in the Bible where the Satan appears as the bearer of a specific function” (39). Whereas the Hebrew word satan is commonly rendered in English as adversary, foe, prosecutor, Tur-Sinai argues that the key to understanding Satan’s role in Job lies in the source of the word satan as a derivative of the root mashot, meaning to go to and fro4: Satan was, in other words, one of a recognized group of functionaries in the service of a king, “secret roving officials, who go and come and report to [the king] on the doings of his subjects” (42). In this sense a satan is God’s servant, and in the Book of Job Satan plays the role of God’s partner in a bet: “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.” It is the Lord who calls Satan’s attention to Job’s goodness and prosperity and then enables Satan to afflict him: “Behold, all that he has is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1.6, 11). In 1 Chronicles 21.1 we read that “Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.” This is a rewriting of an earlier story—beginning in 2 Samuel 24.1—in which “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.” Since David’s decision to conduct the census had unfortunate consequences (a pestilence resulting in the death of 70,000 people, as told in 2 Sam. 24.15), the composer of Chronicles apparently found Satan a more appropriate instigator than God. In current terms, for the Chronicler Satan served as the Lord’s “heavy,” in much the same way as he did in Job. Since the Hebrew Bible did not provide Milton with extensive information about Satan before his fall, it is not surprising that the early books of Paradise Lost do little more than hint at Satan’s nature previous to the angels’ rebellion; or in Forsyth’s words: “The sudden decision to change the power structure in Heaven is quite 2 See 5.760, 7.131, 10.425. These and all further citations of Paradise Lost are to Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1991). 3 Rudwin notes that the names Lucifer and Satan were not used synonymously until the time of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1034–1093) (5). 4 On being asked by the Lord “Whence comest thou?” Satan answers “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” (Job 1.7).
Satan’s Journey into Evil
7
simply inexplicable” (176). This sense of confusion as to the rationale for Satan’s decision to rebel dates back at least as far as the eighteenth century. In his Political History of the Devil Daniel Defoe notes the importance of inquiring into the reason for Satan’s original fall: “How came seeds of crime to rise in the angelic nature? [...] [C]ould untainted purity breed corruption?” Defoe himself does not attempt an answer; he concludes that neither has “the great Milton, after all his fine images and lofty excursions upon the subject [...] left it one jot clearer than he found it” (59). Christopher Hill has noted that “Milton gave no real explanation of Satan’s fall; it is taken as given from the start of the poem” (Milton and the English Revolution 367). Forsyth therefore may be said to base his convincing case for viewing Satan as the hero of the poem on this lack of explanation: In spite of what the doctrine of the poem says, it is unquestionably God as much as Satan who is the “villain.” How we are to take this is an open matter. [...] Thus Satan has an extremely important role to play in the philosophical or theological structure of Paradise Lost. It is Satan’s presence that both causes and excuses the fall of mankind, and his role is to allow God to forgive Adam and Eve. Like his great opponent in the poem, the Son, he is, in an important sense, sacrificed for the good of mankind. Both Son and Satan are, in this version of the Christian myth, necessary for salvation. And while the one understands his role, and volunteers for it, knowing he will ultimately overcome death and ride in triumph high, the other steps unwittingly up to be damned. (170, 17)
Milton himself would not have adhered to a twenty-first-century view of the Fall as a myth; nor would he have entertained the possibility of presenting Satan as a dramatic hero, a kind of deus ex machina whose presence is needed to move the plot along. Nevertheless Milton scholars approaching the text from a dramatic and/ or psychological framework continue the search for Satan’s motivation and proffer various interpretations of the limited evidence at their disposal. On meeting Satan in book 4, Gabriel, who had known Satan prior to the latter’s fall, poses the question: “who more than thou / Once fawned, and cringed, and servilely adored / Heaven’s awful monarch?” (4.958–960). There are at least two possible interpretations of Gabriel’s question. Although it seems unlikely, Gabriel may be implying that the unfallen angels’ very acts of adoring God the Father were humiliating. John P. Rumrich claims that before the war in heaven “Satan had interpreted the Son’s exaltation as the beginning of the angels’ degradation (5.800–802). Subsequent events do not refute his prophecy” (64). That is, Gabriel may be using such words as fawned, cringed, and servilely because he believes that they reflect the way the fallen Satan would have felt when recalling the heavenly ceremonies of adoration in which he had taken part. Alastair Fowler argues that “it seems more likely that Gabriel is simply falling in with Satan’s choice of words (with cringed, cf. ‘cringe’ [5].945, and servilely cf. ‘serve’ [5].943), as people do in the heat of an argument” (Paradise Lost 250n). Then again, in his now-classical analysis of Milton’s Satan C.S. Lewis points out: “That the obedient angels might love to obey is an idea which cannot cross [Satan’s] mind” (98).5 5 Colin Burrow points to a contrast between Satan’s supposed servility and the unfallen angels’ genuine knee-worship of the Father: “Love for God as creator and future redeemer
8
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Milton’s specific source for the story of the Father’s exaltation of the Son—the catalyst of the angels’ rebellion—is the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews: God “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds [...]. [W]hen he bringeth in the firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him” (Heb. 1.2, 6). In his extensive discussion of the exaltation W.B. Hunter urges caution in connecting the begetting of the Son with the angels’ rebellion: such a “begetting” only for the purpose of fictional motivation would give some excuse for the rebellion in that it would picture a God who is merely petty in thus daring Satan to revolt [...]. Not only is there no support in Milton’s Christian Doctrine for this interpretation, but the exaltation of the Son has never been related to Satan in this way by any Christian tradition. (“The War in Heaven” 118)6
The narration of the events in Paradise Lost begins, let us recall, not with the exaltation of the Son, but rather in medias res, with a reference to the nine days during which the fallen angels lay defeated on hell’s floor. According to Alastair Fowler’s delineation of the epic’s 33-day chronology, this would have included days 13–22 (26). Nevertheless, the logical starting-point in a chronological examination of Satan’s journey or exile into evil is book 5, wherein Raphael describes Satan’s response to the exaltation of Christ. It is here that we first glean some hints as to the nature of the Satan character before the angels’ rebellion and fall.7 In attempting to imagine the prelapsarian Satan, that is, the character as he was before deciding to lead the angels in rebellion, we are on shaky ground, as was Milton himself. Any claim for Satan’s essential independence of God’s ultimate marks the chief distinction between the compelled gestures of servility shown by a courtier to a tyrant and the marks of respect shown gratefully to Him in the poem. These are the lines in book 8 with which Raphael urges Adam to cool his servile ardour for Eve to work into Milton’s not always consistent picture of what it is to obey God: 8.633–5” (n.p.). David Norbrook, on the other hand, critiques the lack of open debate in heaven: “There is no room in Heaven for deliberative rhetoric, for the arguments of the forum. The angels are engaged in a continual act of praise, expressed by kneeling—a posture Milton would have found idolatrous in earthly religion—as well as in speech. God reveals his purposes to the angels; there is no question of their being offered for discussion. This unanimity is shattered when Satan proposes a move to the deliberative mode” (480): “new counsels, to debate / What doubtful may ensue” (5.681–682). 6 In their discussion of Hebrew mythology Robert Graves and Raphael Patai note the identification of Satan with the Archangel Samael. Graves and Patai discuss the tradition according to which Samael rebelled against God on the sixth day of the creation, after God had ordered the heavenly host to worship Adam (82–84). 7 Mammon displayed signs of obsessive greed prior to the angels’ rebellion; but no information of this sort is provided about Satan: for even in heaven [Mammon’s] 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. (1.680–684)
Satan’s Journey into Evil
9 8
control might have led readers to charge the poet with Manichaeanism. Perhaps more important, however, is that Milton’s main concern, as stated in the epic’s opening line, was historical: in choosing to tell the story of man’s fall—rather than, for example, composing a tract or sermon on the origin of evil—he had taken upon himself a task that is essentially one of historiography. We all love a good tale, and want to know how it ends. Indeed, the final books of Paradise Lost contain Michael’s fulfillment of Adam’s wish to know “how it all ends.” David Norbrook suggests that through his lengthy revelation of future events Michael wants to guard Adam “against the disillusion that will follow from unrealistic expectations and a lack of historical perspective.” The overview of human history as narrated by Michael in books 11 and 12 will, in Norbrook’s words, enable Adam “to face the fallen world unflinchingly” (466). Intensive interest in the rationale for Satan’s first evil deed would have raised a question whose nature is more philosophical/theological than historical: What is the source of evil in the universe? An attempt at answering this question might have been beyond the scope of Milton’s self-imposed mandate. During the period prior to the exaltation of the Son (5.603ff.) there is no reason to assume that Satan, the putative First Archangel, was anything less than perfect. The idea that a sinless being could suddenly become evil would seem to call for explanation, however. Milton does not directly face up to this paradox, or even absurdity, vis-à-vis Satan’s fall; the issue does, however, merit extensive attention in the poet’s description of the process leading up to the fall of Eve and Adam. They, too, were created sinless, yet were quick to admit sin into their hearts. In Eve’s dream and the conversation immediately following (5.26–135) Milton indicates a way out of the dilemma: the First Parents are created sinless and remain so until the events described in book 9; but evil can, it seems, dwell in the human imagination without tainting the soul. Can this, however, be true of angels? As Ithuriel and Zephon observe Satan kneeling at Eve’s ear, insinuating a dream into her sleeping mind, it may at first appear that Satan merely intends to plant the idea of disobedience in Eve’s consciousness. Yet her reaction to the dream, both while it is taking place and upon awakening, shows that Satan has succeeded in leading Eve and Adam themselves to raise the possibility that the very dream—the image of sin—constitutes sin itself. At the beginning of book 5 Adam awakens while Eve is still asleep and watches as she dreams. After waking up Eve expresses relief that her vision was merely a dream. Adam, too, appears “sad” (5.94); he wrestles with an intuitive sense of sin in the speech beginning “But know that in the soul / Are many lesser faculties that serve / Reason as chief” (5.100–102ff.). Since the faculty psychology that Adam herein explicates was part of the conventional wisdom of the time,9 Adam’s lecture serves less to forward the reader’s intellectual enlightenment than to defeat a satanic plot aimed at convincing the struggling soul that by admitting the idea of sin into its mind, 8 Scholars have noted that the only possible heresy of Milton’s widely discussed by his contemporaries was connected with his plea for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility alone. See William R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (1: 244) and William B. Hunter, et al., A Milton Encyclopedia (3: 174). 9 See Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.2.vii: “In time of sleep this faculty [imagination] is free, and many times conceives strange, stupend, absurd shapes [...]. [I]t is subject and governed by reason, or at least should be.”
10
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
it has already sinned: “Evil into the mind of god or man [But what about angels?] / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind” (5.117–119). Although the latter claim should have convinced Eve that no sin has taken place, it appears that Adam succeeds in convincing neither himself nor his wife. Yet while Milton was aware of the need to address the question of the borderline between imagining sin and committing it vis-à-vis human beings, he did not finally choose to deal with the issue in his treatment of the prelapsarian Satan. The Miltonic narrator makes no direct reference to Satan in Raphael’s description of the exaltation of the Son in book 5. This moment, as Sanford Budick points out, constitutes “the first imaginable moment in the existence of the universe. In this moment of selfimaging God creates the germinal impulse not only of all creativity but of all further imagining as well.” Yet at this very moment “Satan looks outward and sees only himself, himself displaced, his place projected and unrecognized, his own existence diminished by the forced recognition of a perceptible existence that stands outside and above his sovereignty” (90). Raphael begins his narration of the exaltation with God’s announcement that “This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son, and on this holy hill / Him have anointed” (5.603–605). God establishes his Son as his regent, to whom all the residents of heaven are expected to bow, and declares that under the latter’s rule the inhabitants of heaven shall be “United as one individual soul / For ever happy” (5.610–611). The Father thus seems to expect that the bliss concomitant with accepting the Son’s rule will somehow erase the boundaries between individual personalities. It may, therefore, not be far-fetched to infer that previous to the creation of the Son, the angels were characterized by a variety of personalities, and that the Father was not completely satisfied with this state of affairs. William Kolbrener points out Milton’s suspicion of individuation unless it is “incorporated within—or mediated by—a larger context (whether it be the Christian republic of Areopagitica and The Readie and Easie Way or, what he calls in Of Civil Power, the ‘common ground’ of the scriptures)” (5). The Father’s dissatisfaction with the individuation of his angels is prophetic of the fear engendered in Adam, as well as in the reader, by Eve’s wish to separate herself from her husband while the two work in the garden (9.205–384); her wish was the first stage in her fall, a prelapsarian offense that made the fall possible. Adam begins his answer to Eve’s first speech on the question by addressing her as “Sole Eve, associate sole” (9.227). There is, of course, irony in his repetition of the word sole, over and above the pun on soul; Adam is calling Eve’s attention to the fact that she is one of a kind, a unique creation of God, and Adam’s only wife; but she will soon be “sole” in that she will be alone, and thus less protected against sin than if she had remained united with her husband. The danger that pertains to the state of being alone, separate, is herein emphasized. The Father gives explicit expression to his awareness of the dangers of individuation: him [the Son] who disobeys Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place Ordained without redemption, without end. (5.611–615)
Satan’s Journey into Evil
11
Although the angels had not yet fallen, it appears that God is warning of the dangers inherent in a trend that he notes in some of his angels: a potential unwillingness to accept the blurring of boundaries between individual personalities. It is reasonable, in other words, to conclude that prior to their decision to rebel, Satan and his mates were strongly individuated, and the possession of an individual nature—of the awareness that one has an existence even when not part of a group—can be both exhilarating and threatening.10 John Carey believes that the exaltation of the Son as told in Paradise Lost (5.600–615) “is deliberately doctored by Milton so that it sounds provocative compared with its source (Heb. 1.6). It seems to have been his own idea to make this exaltation the factor that pushes Satan across the heavenly Rubicon” (81). Yet this can only be the case if God had known that Satan was ripe for such a push; the Father, in other words, knew that Satan was capable of envy, pride, and disobedience. Carey, however, raises the intriguing possibility that Satan’s original crime was not so much pride as intellectual doubt (91). In his first speech Satan recalls that he had originally doubted the strength of the Father’s arms (1.92–94). At the outset of book 2, immediately prior to the fallen angels’ Great Consultation, the Miltonic narrator describes Satan as “insatiate to pursue / Vain war in heaven” (2.8–9). Vain may have a double meaning here: in the sense of proud or self-centered, it indicates Satan’s emotional state at the time; but in its other sense—useless, futile—it may show the continued presence of intellectual doubt. The fiend was not sure, in other words, of God’s omnipotence and thus was willing to risk continuing the struggle. According to this line of reasoning, if Satan had not originally doubted God’s strength, his pride would not have allowed him to lead his troops into certain defeat. Although Milton’s prelapsarian Satan may have doubted God’s omnipotence, there is clear evidence of the depth of his love for the Father. To draw inferences as to Satan’s feelings toward the Father previous to the begetting of Christ, we must go to book 4, in which, as Carey points out, there is a suggestion that “it is because Satan finds God so lovable that he has to hate him. Love would threaten his self-sufficiency. We get a hint of this when Satan feels he ‘could love’ the human pair because ‘so lively shines / In them divine resemblance’ (4.363–364)” (94). Nevertheless, this cri de coeur may not be ambiguous; it can be taken at face value, as an expression of Satan’s memory of a time when he had loved his Father unequivocally. Raphael’s narrative of the angels’ rebellion and fall (5.563–6.892) tells of Satan subsequent to his decision to rebel. Although Raphael describes a character who has already opted for disobedience, and thus can be said to have already fallen, the description of the battles offers some valuable information about Satan’s prelapsarian nature. On the first day of the battle Satan receives a painful blow from
10 N.H. Keeble suggests that the tension between individual aspirations and group allegiance was definitive of nonconformist literature in general: “Nonconformist literature bore an invaluably sympathetic witness to the apprehensions and aspirations of individuals in an age of increasingly complacent dismissal of any manifestation of individuality as a reprehensible aberration” (24).
12
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Michael’s sword;11 yet “the ethereal substance closed / Not long divisible, and from the gash / A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed / Sanguine” (6.330–333). Before the fall, in other words, Satan did not know physical pain; as a fallen, albeit immortal, creature, his body cannot be permanently damaged, although its form can be changed both by Satan himself and by the Almighty. Pain is thus seen as an aspect of fallenness; such suffering can be both bodily and emotional. Or as the Archangel Gibreel of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses explains, after quoting Milton’s Satan’s identification of pain and hell (4.888–893): “He couldn’t have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out…” (324–25). Satan’s physical pain clearly leads him to suffer the emotional pangs concomitant with defeat: spite and shame. Indeed, he can already be said to have fallen in very fact, since his previous self-confidence has been lowered by his physical fall to the ground. The integration of physical and emotional suffering, of course, pertains to the human, i.e., fallen, condition; it is thus possible to suggest that prior to his fall Satan had not suffered the painful spin-offs of injured pride. Yet the nagging question remains unanswered: did the prelapsarian Satan feel pride at all, and if so, what was its source? Perhaps one of humankind’s most basic sources of pain is the sense of having lost the beauty of a past that can never return, whether the beauty belongs to the lost youth of the individual or a lost Golden Age of human society. This pain results from humanity’s entrance into history: only one who knows his past can regret that which has gone forever. Moreover, only one who appreciates beauty will mourn its loss, and Raphael provides ample information as to Satan’s aesthetic sense, as seen in his love of the beauty of heaven. Prior to his defeat at the hands of the Son and consequent exile from heaven, Satan displays a warm appreciation of heaven’s natural beauties. In his speech explaining the generation of the materials used to make gunpowder he speaks lovingly and longingly of the “continent of spacious heaven, adorned / With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold” (6.474–475). One of the fallen Satan’s most poignantly attractive qualities is his awareness of a connection between goodness and beauty. It is not surprising, therefore, that our first view of Eden and its inhabitants is through Satan’s eyes. Despite his own feelings of regret and despair Satan senses the beauty of the garden and of the first humans, in whose “looks divine / The image of their glorious maker shown” (4.291–292). Lest the reader conclude that Satan was merely admiring Eve’s human, feminine charms, the narrator later tells us that the fiend was also capable of responding to the beauty of a male-gendered spiritual figure such as the angel Zephon: he “saw / Virtue in her shape how lovely” (4.847–848). The fallen Satan, it would seem, sensed the possibility of an intimate connection between beauty and goodness; such awareness would have been a carryover from his prelapsarian state. What conclusions, then, can be drawn as to Satan’s nature previous to his refusal to accept the authority of the newly exalted Son? He appears to have been, firstly, a highly individuated figure; the Father feared, after all, that some of his angels would not be willing to accept the erasing of individual personality that was one of the ramifications of the general bliss to be the portion of those adoring the Son. 11 Cf. Sin’s depiction of Satan’s pain while giving birth (2.752–761).
Satan’s Journey into Evil
13
This insistence on individuality may be the source, rather than the outcome, of that pride that has traditionally been considered as Satan’s primal sin; Norbrook notes that Milton’s experiences as a follower of Cromwell during the Civil War led him to be deeply concerned with “the general issue of the subordination of the common interest to a private will” (442). Then, too, Satan was apparently a doubter; this is shown by his inability to accept without proof the fact of God’s omnipotence. Such proof came in the shape of the total defeat of the angels’ rebellion and their expulsion from heaven, certainly a high price to pay for intellectual enlightenment. Yet the steepness of the price may be the point: Milton herein indicates the mortal danger inherent in the misunderstanding, which enabled Satan to believe that the Father might not, after all, be omnipotent. Prior to his rebellion Satan seems to have loved the Father; even after his fall he felt love for any creature, whether human or angelic, who bore a resemblance to the Deity. His appreciation of beauty, both natural and spiritual, must also have had its beginnings in his experiences as a denizen of heaven. Kenneth Gross has noted that Satan sometimes seems to readers of Paradise Lost “to be the only character with a voice, mind or attitude of his own” (337). Despite a dearth of direct information as to Satan’s prelapsarian nature, Milton enables us to conclude that Satan’s mind and attitude were his own even before his expulsion from heaven. Indeed, his possession of a mind that knew its own individuality, yet which entertained confusion as to the power of the Deity who headed the cosmic hierarchy, resulted in his fall. His “Darling Sin”—Satan after His Fall We are on shaky ground when attempting to draw inferences as to the nature of Satan’s character previous to the angels’ rebellion. The information provided by the poet is, after all, sketchy. The ground underfoot becomes firmer, however, as we make the fiend’s acquaintance: we first meet Satan after he has already led an unsuccessful rebellion against the Father, been exiled to hell, and is about to consult with his closest mates as to their options. Although our first view of Satan lying on hell’s floor is less than prepossessing, the character of the fiend of the first books of Paradise Lost has often aroused readers’ admiration; this admiration has resulted in ongoing speculation as to the poet’s reasons for creating a villain of such magnificent proportions in the person of the one who, for a believing Christian, is responsible for humankind’s fall. In his “Defense of Poetry” Percy Bysshe Shelley notes Satan’s “[i]mplacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy.” Yet Shelley takes up cudgels for the fiend: “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil” (498). The middle decades of the twentieth century saw lively debate on the part of scholars as to Satan’s heroic nature, with emphasis on the character as drawn in the early books of Paradise Lost. A.J.A. Waldock notes the difference between what Satan says and does, and what the Miltonic narrator claims that he says and does (89). C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, defends Milton against stubborn accusations
14
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
that the poet made the Satan of the early books more sympathetic than he had intended. Satan, according to Lewis, is “absurd: he has become more a Lie than a Liar, a personified self-contradiction” (97). John Peter adopts a middle course; he speaks of Satan as a living figure, “with all the complexity consequent on life” (35). Arnold Stein, too, notes that Satan’s “evil is not pure [...]. His remorse, pity, tears all pay homage to good, but are perverted” (Answerable Style 3). Milton scholars, in other words, found it impossible to discuss the Satan character without taking a stand on the poet’s intentions in investing Satan with those elements of complexity that make the character so attractive to so many readers. This scholarly focus on the poet’s intentions, of course, is in itself a commentary on the interests and approaches current in intellectual debate during the middle of the twentieth century. At the beginning of book 1, almost immediately following the Invocation of his muse, the narrator makes his first reference to Satan; the latter is referred to as a serpent (1.34), although at that particular moment he does not have the shape of a snake.12 Lines 36–44 are crammed with references to Satan and his motivations for rebellion: “his pride” (1.36); “aspiring / To set himself in glory above” (1.38–39); “ambitious aim” (1.41); “impious war (1.43); “battle proud” (1.43); “vain attempt” (1.44). Via the concentrated intensity of these noun phrases the narrator leaves no doubt as to Satan’s motivation, both for his past rebellion against the Father and his future attempt to seduce Adam and Eve to their “foul revolt” (1.33). Yet Satan’s words reveal a character obsessed neither with personal pride nor with ambition, although these qualities are undeniably present in his discourse, but rather one swinging back and forth between hope and despair. Paradise Lost was composed at a time of general despair in the political and religious configurations to which Milton belonged. N.H. Keeble points out that for those who had been associated with the Revolution: Daily life [during the 1660s] presented itself as a series of queries, quandaries and challenges: whether or not to conform, to attend a meeting, to take precautionary measures, to trust a stranger; how to respond to requests for information, to official interrogation, to legal proceedings; and, above all, how to endure material deprivation, destitution and impoverishment. (50)
Milton, as Christopher Hill notes, was one of those who had seen the Civil War as a prelude to the millennium (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 9). Yet the millennium did not come, and the middle decades of the seventeenth century were a time of despair for many, especially those for whom the Restoration of the monarchy represented the loss of almost everything for which they had fought. The political atmosphere of the time forced men like Milton to acknowledge a loss of cosmic proportions. The monarchy had been restored; incalculably worse, of course, the hoped-for millennium had not arrived, nor did it appear to be on the horizon.
12 Satan is first described as having the form of a cold-blooded creature when he is caught “Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve” (4.800). Even here, however, it can be argued that the narrator is likening Satan’s posture to that of a toad, rather than claiming that he has actually disguised himself as a toad.
Satan’s Journey into Evil
15
Nevertheless Hill finds evidence for Milton’s acceptance of the justice of the Revolution’s defeat: Long before 1660 Milton had to face the fact that God’s kingdom was not to be established in England yet. The disunity of the radicals, the ambitions of the generals, the selfinterested a-politicism of the mass of middle-class Englishmen, had defeated the hopes of Milton and his kind for creating a good society in England [...]. Paradise Lost accepts the fact of defeat. (Milton and the English Revolution 347)
Yet one who has taken an active part in a revolution and then survived its final defeat would quite naturally waver between utter despair and the desire to maintain hope. Milton expresses his personal despair in the Invocation opening book 7, in which he describes himself as having “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues” (7.25–26). Yet the Invocation contains a morsel of hope, since the poet’s voice is neither hoarse nor mute (7.24–25). Given Milton’s experience of defeat, it is not surprising that when depicting a character who has undergone a loss of similar proportions he emphasizes the swings between despair and hope which would be the portion of such a one. While noting that the fiend is “vanquished” (1.52) and “confounded” (1.53), the narrator calls Satan’s first words “bold” (1.82). In his first speech to Beelzebub Satan appears to be in touch with reality vis-à-vis the fallen angels’ current situation (1.87–91). A sense of past hope and glory is here, as well as an awareness of current misery and ruin; hope for the future is mentioned, although as belonging to the past rather than the future. While Satan’s electrifying speech to Beelzebub (1.105–124) is justly famous as a superb example of military rhetoric, it also serves to illuminate the speaker’s emotional state at this point: What thought the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? (1.105–109)
The themes here are determination, desire for revenge, hate; in his subsequent conversation with Beelzebub Satan develops these themes while adding an element of hope for the future when he suggests that they hold a consultation as to how to recuperate from their losses and fight again. Although the narrator has previously described Satan as being sunk in “deep despair” (1.126), it is only in his talk with his “nearest mate” that Satan actually uses the word despair, and even then does not rule out the possibility of looking forward hopefully. Indeed, rather than leading those on the losing side to give up, despair itself can be the source of resolution. The rhyme repair-despair, which suggests a connection between the two, may thus not be coincidental. The Miltonic narrator seems to ignore the potentially energizing function of despair when he calls attention to the despair that wracked the fiend during the latter speech. R.J.Z. Werblowsky has discussed “Milton’s habit of first ennobling his Satan and then calling him names [...]. [Milton] supplies his poem with a running commentary. Now whenever Satan makes one of his spirited and impressive appearances [...]
16
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Milton tries to take him down a peg by quickly adding a nasty remark” (9). While readers have noticed the contrast between what Satan says and what the narrator says about Satan, it may not be necessary to choose between hope and despair as the main emotional content of Satan’s discourse at this point. Both are present; while despair may dominate (and considering the extent of the defeat this would not be surprising), it is accompanied by a modicum of hope. Murray Roston analyzes the perceived grandeur of the Satan of the early books of Paradise Lost as an embodiment of the Baroque ideal of coming “as close as humanly possible to depicting that hypothetical moment when an Irresistible Force meets an Immovable Object,” thus enabling the viewer to “gaze in awe at the magnitude of the struggle” (61). Milton’s decision to create a Satan of heroic proportions thus parallels the attempt of the Baroque artist who, “fascinated by the new physical forces revealed in the universe, and attempting to convey them visually, instinctively resorted to scenes where the impact or resistance of contrary forces could suggest the enormous energy generated on either side” (60). Thus, according to Roston, “Satan’s stature in the poem as the formidable challenger needs no apology, nor psychological explanation on the grounds of Milton’s personal or political predilections” (69); neither is there cause to apologize for the sweeping breadth and depth of Satan’s feelings, whether of despair or of hope. Yet Milton himself (despite his original intention of telling the story of Adam and Eve’s fall in dramatic form) would arguably have resisted the claim that he created a figure of such grandeur solely to build up a sense of drama. A discussion of the Satan character of the early books must explain the newly fallen archangel’s retention of certain angelic characteristics, both physical and internal, for reasons other than dramatic: his form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured. (1.591–594)
Not content with noting Satan’s outer resemblance to an unfallen angel, the poet depicts the fiend’s inner life in angelic terms: Satan cries “tears such as angels weep” (1.620). The Miltonic narrator clarifies the issue even further in an aside in book 2: “for neither do the spirits damned / Lose all their virtue” (2.482–483). While readers have long sensed the role that these residual unfallen characteristics play in humanizing the fiend, they also prepare us for encountering the variety of emotion that Satan displays throughout the epic. Guilt and remorse are central human emotions, and such as the believing Christian of Milton’s time would have been familiar with as waystations on the road to salvation. In his discussion of the theology of John Bunyan, Gordon S. Wakefield notes that “God’s chosen are most likely to be afflicted by temptation, most tested and tried. They must not be daunted, many as are the discouragements. The burden of guilt rolls from their backs at the Cross, but the Cross does not disappear from their view” (117). The Christian, Wakefield argues, is never wholly free from sin, especially from “that particular sin to which we are constitutionally prone, our ‘darling sin’. We must especially be aware of the iniquities of our times, those sins which assail us because we live in a certain age” (121).
Satan’s Journey into Evil
17
Satan’s “darling sin” has traditionally been defined as pride in one form or another. Arnold Stein refers to “the basic mystery” of Satan’s pride, which is the “unchanging quality” of this fatal flaw. The fiend’s pride makes true repentance impossible, and he must persevere in his chosen course (Answerable Style 5, 6); he is, in other words, subject to a kind of paralysis that mitigates against his engaging an emotion such as humility, which might enable him to internalize “the good he encounters outside” himself, according to Stein (Answerable Style 3). It is possible, however, that Satan’s “darling sin” is not the stubbornness of his pride, but rather a weakness that renders him unable to maintain a single feeling for long. Pride can be a source of strength, encouraging its bearer to persist in moral behavior, if it enables him to hold firm to his beliefs. On the other hand, the inability to control the emotions may prevent the maintenance of a firm moral stance. In his discussion of John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Stachniewski points out the narrator’s “swings of feeling [...]. His assurance of salvation at one moment can be displaced instantaneously by despair at both early and later stages of the narrative” (136). The cause of these “violent mood swings,” of which Bunyan is a passive victim, is none other than Calvinism’s “binary scheme” of damnation/salvation (138). Milton’s Satan, too, can be viewed as a type of the reprobates, according to Stachniewski, who, “like Satan, were characterized by the underlying conviction that they had no control over their destiny, that they were prisoners of powers greater than their will” (357). Violent mood swings can thus be seen as an aspect of that lack of control so dangerous to one trying to sustain a moral position. If, as Wakefield notes, one’s “darling sin” is a function of the historical period in which one lives, it is worth keeping in mind, in the words of Laura Lunger Knoppers, that “the postlapsarian state is inevitably marked by woe, and attempts to restore joy on earth are perverse, misguided, and even satanic. In telling its story of woe, Paradise Lost challenges a central tenet of royalist ideology in Restoration England, the return of the golden age on earth, the restoration of joy” (Historicizing Milton 68). Satan contrasts the joy of humankind’s life in Eden with the woe that will be their portion in the not-too-distant future: “all these delights / Will vanish and deliver ye to woe” (4.367–368); Satan himself knows the danger of sudden, uncontrolled changes of emotion. Mood swings between joy and woe undermine that maintenance of sorrow that is the portion of the defeated; it may be more dangerous, in other words, to occasionally entertain the possibility of joy than to maintain a steady sense of woe. John Peter has noted that the “equivocality of Satan’s appearance, speech, and conduct is partly accounted for by the fact that his identity is in a state of transition” (37). Satan and his followers “shift and alter, hovering between the poles of horror and magnificence, grandeur and menace” (38). This, according to Peter, explains Milton’s repeated use of oxymoron in the early books of Paradise Lost: “‘darkness visible’, ‘Arch Angel ruind’, ‘precious bane’, ‘bad eminence’, ‘Black fire’, ‘Burns frore’. Such collocations take their life from the tension between syntax and meaning” (39). The oxymoron, that is, serves as an expression of the emotional swings to which the fiend is prone at this stage. During the course of the epic Satan undergoes a wide range of swings between emotions leading to action and those resulting in passivity. This, in fact, constitutes
18
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Satan’s uniqueness vis-à-vis the other leadership figures of Paradise Lost; neither God nor the Son display such a broad spectrum of sheer emotion. The Miltonic narrator concentrates a number of emotions in a few lines: care Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride Waiting revenge; cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion. (1.601–605)
Worry (“care”) rubs shoulders with courage, pride, desire for revenge, cruelty, remorse, and passion. Satan does, of course, evince a certain lack of self-knowledge when he claims that he brings to hell “A mind not to be changed by place or time” (1.253). This may be true on a general level: the overall nature of Satan’s mind may not have changed as a result of the angels’ defeat. Yet the emotions inhabiting that mind, as it were, appear to change from moment to moment. We find a similar variety at the epic’s most critical point: that at which Satan is about to begin the temptation of Eve. Inspired by her beauty and innocence, the fiend “for the time remained / Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, / Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge” (9.464–466). Satan quickly moves from admiration to a kind of open-mouthed goodness. At this moment he does not feel guile, hate, envy, revenge; but by mentioning these emotions the narrator reminds us that the fiend had been “disarmed” of these weapons, which he had wielded but a few minutes since. Satan did not lay down his arms of his own initiative: he was disarmed by an outer force. He does not seem to be able to take charge of the presence of his various emotions; the speed at which they change represents a characteristic lack of control. Milton later gives physical embodiment to this loss of control in book 10, when Satan is deprived of his angelic form and ability to stand upright and speak, and is literally turned into a serpent. Considering the depth of Satan’s fall, he seems to resign himself to his loss startlingly early in the narrative: “Farewell happy fields / Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail / Infernal world” (1.249–251). The fiend then describes the comfort of an inner life that makes such acceptance possible: “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” (1.254–256). There is irony, however, in Satan’s claim to be “the same”: the only characteristic that he seems to retain throughout his journey is the speed at which he changes. Satan’s resignation to eternal loss is mediated, moreover, by the fact that he is not alone; his responsibility for the downfall of his comrades and followers awakens feelings of sorrow. Arnold Stein sees such feelings of guilt as resulting from Satan’s sense of responsibility as a leader. The fiend admits this guilt when, focusing on the suffering undergone by his followers, he displays remorse and passion (1.605). Stein would have it that Satan’s remorse and guilt are directed mainly to his followers (Answerable Style 15), although later on, while taking his first look at Eden, Satan displays a mature ability of self-criticism. Yet the fiend’s greatest lack of selfawareness can arguably be seen when he claims to possess a mind not to be changed (1.253); as we have seen, Satan’s “darling sin” may likely be, not stubborn pride,
Satan’s Journey into Evil
19
but rather his inability to sustain that self-control, that consistent emotional stance necessary for the maintenance of a moral position, especially when held by a leader. Satan’s lack of consistency is also evident in his sexuality, in the presence in his psyche of unreconciled male and female elements. One of the most memorable moments in Adam’s lengthy conversation with Raphael (the latter section of book 5; books 6 and 7; the beginning of book 8) is Raphael’s answer to Adam’s inquiry about the nature of unfallen angelic sexuality. Archangelic smiles and blushes precede his explanation that: “Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring” (8.626–628). Just as human, prelapsarian sexuality differs from angelic sexuality, Satan’s fallen sexuality also differs from that which Raphael has so engagingly described. The postlapsarian Satan appears to waver between generation, that is, participation in what is traditionally viewed as a female function, and seduction, traditionally a male function. Or as Sandra M. Gilbert has noted in her seminal essay “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey,” Satan’s fall was, on the one hand, a “fall into generation, its first consequence being the appearance of the material world of Sin and Death” (372–73); at the same time Milton’s Satan is “in most ways the incarnation of worldly male sexuality: fierce, powerful, experienced, simultaneously brutal and seductive, devil enough to overwhelm the body and yet enough of a fallen angel to charm the soul” (378). In the Sin-and-Death allegory in book 2 Sin reminds Satan, her father/lover, of the details of her Athena-like birth, which took place in public, before an audience of Satan’s cohorts. This miraculous birth, in which Sin springs full-blown out of her father’s head, stands in stark contrast to Sin’s own experience of childbirth, characterized as it was by unbearable pain (2.780–785). In his discussion of the Sin-and-Death allegory vis-à-vis the obstetrical practices with which Milton was familiar, Louis Schwartz has called attention to the role of childbirth as “one of the central and most appalling ways in which fallenness itself was experienced and understood by Englishmen and women in the seventeenth century [...]. [T]he childbed was not only a site of joy and celebration, but a place in which men and women regularly confronted some of the most difficult aspects of the human condition—the vulnerability of the body to pain and disease, the suffering of the innocent and the death of loved ones” (67). Julia Kristeva has defined the mother’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth as “the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech” (211). Sin’s own memory of the fear and pain accompanying childbirth recalls Satan’s own childbed experience: Sin reminds her father of the pain that he had felt at the time of her birth. It is significant that Satan must be reminded of his childbed experience; Milton’s choice of Sin as the narrator at this point is not merely a dramatic device, but may also emphasize a wish on Satan’s part to block out memories of the childbed. Schwartz notes that Milton’s birth imagery functions forcefully “for the male reader, though for him it is his mother, lover, wife, or victim whom he sees transformed into one part of the allegory, while he plays the ultimately destructive role of Death or the originally responsible role of Satan” (80). Yet Satan’s original role in the birth of Sin is not really one of responsibility.
20
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
He does not appear to have had any control over the birth process; in Schwartz’s words, Milton’s decision to “put birth at the center of his narrative and emphasize its physical nature” brings to the fore “the fact that pregnancy is something that happens to a woman as a result of sex with or without her consent” (75–76). Or in the case of Satan, his decision, not yet fully implemented, to lead a rebellion against the Father resulted in a pregnancy for which the “mother’s” consent was not asked; in fact, Satan does not even recall the birth. In his discussion of Miltonic accounts of creation in Paradise Lost Sanford Budick has suggested that: For Adam, as for God the Father, the essence of creation from self must be the freely given separateness of the being with whom they associate as self-image. True perception of reality is thus privative perception. It results from achieved recognition of the independence of the image from obsessional subjective continuities. Without recognition of continual loss, perception, in Milton’s view, soon collapses into deathly rigor. (92)
The above could most usefully be applied to satanic creation/motherhood. Gilbert points out that “Milton himself seems deliberately to have sketched so many parallels between [Eve] and Satan that it is hard at times for the unwary reader to distinguish the sinfulness of one from that of the other” (372); yet I would suggest that Sin’s narrative of her own birth represents more than a parallel between Satan and the first woman: Satan himself has been feminized. His experience of giving birth is one of lack of control, both as to the “pregnancy” itself and vis-à-vis the “delivery.” Satan’s motherhood is not characterized by joy and triumph, but rather by pain so great that he seems to have forgotten the whole experience, in much the same way as women often claim to forget the pain of childbirth soon after delivery. Scholars, as Allison P. Coudert has noted, have recently called attention to the fact that mothers were often left out of seventeenth-century narratives (71); Sin’s narrative of Satan’s motherhood constitutes an ironic redress of this injustice. The nativities of Adam and Eve, according to Christine Froula, “bear out the archetypal association of maleness with invisibility and of femaleness with visibility that some theorists argue is given in male and female relations to childbirth and, through childbirth, to the world and the future” (333). Froula argues that Eve’s narrative of her own birth (4.449–491) “allegorizes Freud’s analysis of the ‘triumph’ of invisibility [...].13 [S]he turns away from the maternal waters in which she finds her reflected image to identify with a patriarchy whose power is specifically not visible, prevailing even though it is to all appearances ‘less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild, / Than that smooth wat’ry image’ of herself in the world” (334). This male “triumph of invisibility” stands in stark contrast to Satan’s experience of giving birth to Sin, taking place as it does before a large audience. The newly fallen Satan, however, does bear a traditional masculinity, not as yet possessed by the unfallen Adam; this masculinity can be defined as the desire to possess another. In the words of Edward Le Comte, “Milton has made it clear that sexual frustration is a part of hell: ‘fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines’ (4.509–511). He is telling indeed an old story—that of wanting to be in the husband’s place” (78). At the same time Satan plays the female, childlike role of the object of the male wish for control. As Leah S. Marcus points out, “the family, not the church, was the center of Puritan
Satan’s Journey into Evil
21
religious life, and parents were the chief agents of divine grace for their offspring” (54). Both parents played a part in this family-as-church configuration, although the father was expected to dominate. Those raised on Romantic concepts such as the innocence of childhood and the child’s vestigial connection with truths known prior to birth and then largely forgotten13 will find it salutary to recall that for most seventeenth-century Puritans, according to Marcus, “Children, before they came to a realization of their sinful condition, were not innocent, but wicked heirs of hell” (49); at the same time “Puritan autobiographies characteristically emphasize not only the wickedness of unregenerate children, but also their remarkable precocity in realizing their sinful condition” (51). This “remarkable precocity” can easily be applied to the fallen Satan and his followers; the latter, having completed a lengthy freefall through darkness, which recalls a passage through the birth canal, newly arrived in hell, at once “perceive the evil plight / In which they were” and feel its fierce pains (1.335–336). Satan’s awareness of his sinful condition is also emphasized at the beginning of book 4, when pangs of conscience reawaken despair (4.23–25). There is indeed something precocious in Satan’s awareness of his fallen state. Like the intellectually developed child whose unusual articulateness—often the result of having spent too much time with his elders and betters—impresses his adult listeners, Satan knows what to do and say in order to awaken the reader’s interest in his predicament. The description of Satan as he lies “vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf” (1.52), may be a parodic prefiguring of the fiend’s later adoption of reptilian form when setting out to tempt Eve. It is not only serpents who lie flat on the ground, however; babies, too, begin by lying in whatever way they are placed by a parent, then roll over, crawl, and eventually learn to stand, as does Satan. There may, in other words, be a hint of childlike precocity in Satan’s character at this point. Yet as women and children alike were subjected to male rule, whether by husband or father, Satan’s childlike stance may simultaneously represent an aspect of Satan’s female nature, as well as a Miltonian statement about unregenerate children. Protestants, according to Coudert, had “rejected one authority, that of the Church, and one father, the Pope. They were therefore constrained to establish a new order and authority and to construct a new identity that would justify their rebellion [...]. [This involved] the imposition of a new order based on rigid notions of patriarchal authority and obedience” (66). Lawrence Stone has noted that during the Civil War women “played a very prominent role in the host of radical sects which based themselves on the extreme interpretation of the doctrine of Grace” (337); the majority of these women activists, however, sought liberty of conscience and religion, rather than freedom from male control (338). If, as Melissa D. Aaron notes, Protestantism bore a subversive potential in its questioning of social institutions such as marriage and the family, such subversion may have produced a “backlash that necessitated the subjection of women.” This 13 Cf. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos’s suggestion that: “Paradoxically, Protestant theology, with its emphasis on the totality of human sins from which God alone could provide salvation, served to mute, to some extent, contemporary conception of the propensity to sin in the age of youth” (14).
22
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
backlash can be discerned in the writings of such nonconformists as John Bunyan: “The church in Bunyan’s formulation both replaces and buttresses the Puritan family unit, regulating marriages, raising children in the reformed faith, and controlling the damage caused by church members who leave” (171). Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the Protestant family, in which the father/husband was assumed to be the main source of religious and moral instruction, necessarily left both wife and child in the position of pupil.14 Satan, in other words, may be seen as the bearer of a female nature familiar to Milton and his contemporaries, that is, a nature composed of a lack of control then associated with pregnancy and childbirth and over one’s emotions, resulting in shifts of emotion combined with a precocious awareness of one’s state of sin often associated with childhood. In his discussion of Adam and Eve’s kiss in Paradise Lost (4.497–502) William Kerrigan shows how this kiss serves to conflate procreation and sexual love: This is Milton’s signature within the tradition of poetic love—intercourse itself is subordinate to impregnation, and both to marriage [...]. [F]ew critics seem to realize how aggressively, how libidinally, Milton sponsors old-style procreation. Sexual desire in Paradise Lost is root and branch the creation of the family, the proliferation of the human image, the image and likeness of God: Milton’s is a breeder’s lust, the ambition that makes fathers fathers and mothers mothers. We would expect no less in Eden, where sexuality and marriage have been enjoined by divine commandment as fruitfulness and multiplication. (“Milton’s Kisses” 127–28)
Satan, however, does not appear to have succeeded in integrating his female aspect with his masculinity; the two elements seem to exist side by side, lacking harmony. In their discussion of Paradise Lost and Renaissance love poetry William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden note that: Adam and Eve’s sexual connection is a cunningly and poetically imagined version of the dominant sexual fantasy [...] of Western culture from the Romans to this day, so pervasive and so enmeshed in cultural symbols that to many people it has looked like nature, with little or nothing of the fantastic about it [...]. The fantasy passed down through the centuries is venery, the love hunt. Men chase, women flee. Men aggressively manifest their interest. Women are coy, demur, hard-to-get, which is to say, undeclared, ambiguous. (200)
Despite the common tendency to view the First Parents’ relationship pictured in book 5 as a panegyric to companionate marriage, Kerrigan and Braden delineate Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian sexuality in terms of this “dominant sexual fantasy”; 14 The ideal of what has come to be known as “companionate marriage” was, in the words of Alan Macfarlane, “widely stressed and universally assumed. God made woman as a man’s second self, as a complementary part [...]. The necessity and presence of love [in marriage] were assumed in much of the popular pamphlet literature, both secular and ‘godly,’ of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (176, 180). Moreover, the concept of companionate marriage was not totally absent from Church literature of the Middle Ages, according to Shulamith Shahar. She notes that Peter Lombard, writing in the twelfth century, suggested that woman was created from man’s rib in order to indicate that she belongs at his side, rather than above or below (67).
Satan’s Journey into Evil
23
it is surely not far-fetched to see Satan’s attempts on Eve’s virtue as an expression of the chase-fantasy. Paradise Lost contains two major examples of Satan in the persona of the hunter: Eve’s dream-sequence (5.28–94) and the successful temptation of Eve in book 9. It is noteworthy that the dream is described by Eve herself. Although there is a technical reason for this—she, after all, was the dreamer—the choice of Eve as narrator also allows the reader to focus, for the first time, on how Satan appears in the eyes of a human, rather than divine or angelic character. In Eve’s narration the Satan character is shown in all his glory as Gilbert’s “incarnation of worldly male sexuality.” As Coudert has pointed out, “Because of their identification with the body, the senses (and, by association, women) became the almost exclusive locus of temptation in Protestant polemical writing” (81). Therefore, before engaging Eve in discussion Satan appeals to her by means of a proleptically Keatsian evocation of the five senses, beginning with sound: “Close at mine ear one called me forth to walk / With gentle voice” (5.36–37); sight is then called into play: Eve saw “One shaped and winged like one of those from heaven” (5.55); touch, smell, and taste are then speedily employed: “his dewy locks distilled / Ambrosia” (5.56–57). Having launched his attack, Satan then appeals to the intellect by way of argument. He does not, however, address Eve directly, but rather apostrophizes the tree: And O fair plant, said he, with fruit surcharged, Deigns none to ease thy load and taste thy sweet, Nor God, nor man; is knowledge so despised? (5.58–60)
Satan’s indirect address to Eve is reflected in two later scenes in which Eve is not present when an angelic narrator engages her husband in discussion. The first occasion is Adam’s conversation with Raphael, when Eve chooses to leave the two men together in order to tend her plants (8.48–52). In book 11 the fallen Eve is told by Adam to exit before the arrival of Michael. After discovering that she can overhear their conversation, Michael “drenches her eyes” (11.367) with, presumably, a sleeping-potion in order to prevent her from hearing their talk. When Satan chooses not to address Eve directly in her dream, but rather to allow her to overhear his apostrophe of the tree, he is treating her in much the same manner as she is later treated by her husband and by the archangel. Subsequent to his indirect appeal by means of cognitively based argument (5.60– 63), Satan delivers the coup de gras by approaching Eve with that masculine power that women are expected to find attractive. Turning from the tree to Eve herself, Satan first addresses her in terms reminiscent of the Annunciation: “Here, happy creature, fair angelic Eve, / Partake thou also; happy though thou art, / Happier thou mayst be” (5.74–76). Nevertheless, Satan’s final appeal to Eve is again made by way of the senses, with particular emphasis on taste and smell, both of which have overtly sexual associations. Once again Satan addresses Eve indirectly when he apostrophizes the fruit that he is about to taste: “O fruit divine, / Sweet of thyself, but much more sweet thus cropt” (5.67–68). For Satan the fruit itself seems alluring; in fact, it appears to be a sex-object, a substitute for Eve. As a male, expecting to play the traditionally aggressive male role in the courtship process preceding consummation, Satan claims to be aroused by the possibility of
24
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
picking the fruit, of using a phallic “venturous arm” to pluck it. In order to awaken in Eve the desire to taste the fruit Satan must enable her to fulfill a traditionally passive female sexual role. Satan therefore holds the fruit to Eve’s mouth, forcing her to smell its savoury odor, and causing her to conclude that she “[c]ould not but taste” (5.86). This hardly concealed aggression is another example of Satan’s maleness, and although the dream is recounted by Eve, the reader must keep in mind its source, which is none other than the fiend himself. Having tasted the fruit, Eve flies up into the clouds with Satan, whence she looks down on the earth, only to lose touch with her guide and fall asleep. Satan, as Jacqueline DiSalvo points out, is a “night-flier, a violator of boundaries” (122). He trespasses the boundaries of Eden in order to tempt Eve, and then takes her on a flight which crosses the boundaries of human capability. According to DiSalvo Milton “anxiously identifies the loss of boundaries with chaos. On the many levels here in which Eve’s flying dream signifies access to either sub- or supra-rational realms, the experience is prohibited” (129). The suddenness of the end of Satan’s and Eve’s flight is noteworthy. Eve tastes the fruit and “forthwith” is up in the clouds; “suddenly” her guide is gone and she is asleep. Le Comte calls Eve’s dream “a sexual dream, a dream of flying” (78): while in flight she has a vision of the world, which is totally different from any sight she has thus far seen. The “prospect wide and various,” the “high exultation” that Eve senses, may be a form of poetic vision, as well as an imagined sexual encounter; but this vision does not last long. Indeed, such vision, belonging as it does to the mysteries of the night-world, not controlled by the conscious mind, may be hard to sustain. In any case Satan does not grant Eve unmediated access to vision; he must be the source of any vision that she is allowed. In her discussion of Satan’s experiences of flight in book 2 DiSalvo suggests that “in Satan’s difficulty differentiating down from up, flying from falling, or flight from sailing in this ‘wasteful Deep’ (2.961), Milton offers a particularly apt expression of the intra-uterine and symbiotic states preceding the consolidation of ego boundaries distinguishing self and other” (125). In Eve’s dream consciousness is cut off at the point at which Satan himself is in a state of confusion, of disharmony vis-à-vis his sexual identity. Within the framework of the dream he is engaged in the chase, in a love-hunt. He is, however, simultaneously in that dangerous state in which ego boundaries are not clearly defined, and just as DiSalvo draws a parallel between such a situation and that of the infant, it would not be far-fetched to note that such symbiosis is also characteristic of that blurring of boundary between self and other traditionally associated with motherhood, in Kristeva’s formulation (211). In Satan’s lengthy soliloquy at the outset of book 4 the fiend’s inability to integrate contradictory aspects of his developing identity finds its expression; or in Fowler’s words: “The whole speech (4.32–113) is intensely dramatic. It presents an interior duologue between Satan’s better and worse selves” (192n). At that moment his mind is termed the “hell within him” by the Miltonic narrator (4.20). Yet Satan, who is positioned above Eden, contemplating the view, draws a contrast, not, as might be expected, between heaven and hell, but between Eden and the sun (4.27–29). The garden, that quintessentially female trope, “lay pleasant” in his sight. Indeed, Eden as Satan sees it (4.205–357) is fraught with poignantly female symbols: “pleasant soil”
Satan’s Journey into Evil
25
(4.214); “fertile ground” (4.216); “shaggy hill” (4.224); “veins / Of porous earth” (4.227–228); “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms” (4.248); “the flowery lap / Of some irriguous valley spread her store” (4.254–255). Satan does not begrudge the garden its beauty. His anger is awakened rather by the sun, that male figure to whom he compares himself: “how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell” (4.37–39). Satan recalls that he, too, was once a kind of sun. The temptation to call attention to the pun sun / son is overwhelming; Satan, like the newly created sun, presumably enjoyed the vision of “all the stars / Hid[ing] their diminished heads” (4.34–35) at his sight, as the angels in heaven were expected to do when adoring the recently created Son. Indeed, Forsyth suggests viewing the relationship between sun and Son “against the backdrop of Milton’s own combative politics and his distaste for monarchy” (342). By juxtaposing Satan’s need to forget his experience of giving birth, his love and appreciation of the female as seen in his view of the garden, and the anger that he expresses on viewing the sun—a male avatar of his unfallen self—we are led to conclude that Satan has not achieved a synthesis of the male and female aspects of his identity. They remain separated, with all the potential dangers pertaining to such a situation. If Satan’s “darling sin” is indeed his inability to sustain any given emotion for very long, this lack of integration of such central elements of identity will surely lead him, as Jane Austen was later to note of Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park), into more “vexation and regret—vexation that must rise sometimes to selfreproach, and regret to wretchedness” (717). “Punished in the shape he sinned”:15 Satan’s Dissolution When we first meet Satan he lies vanquished, throwing around his “baleful eyes,” viewing his “dismal situation waste and wild” (1.56, 60). Although previously termed “the infernal serpent” (1.34) by the narrator, Satan was presumably lying on his back, thus able to look around, and did not bear the outward shape of a snake. Our last glimpse of the fiend, however, reveals “A monstrous serpent on his belly prone [...] he would have spoke, / But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue / To forked tongue, for now were all transformed / Alike, to serpents” (10.514, 517–520). The final image of Satan—the silenced serpent—is as far a cry from the magnificent, Oriental king of the early books, that “proud steed reined” (4.858), as from the “bold,” “overjoyed” seducer of Eve’s dream (5.66, 67). How, as another Oriental monarch would later declare, are the mighty fallen!16 Satan’s despair-induced postlapsarian mood swings result in a weakness that mitigates against the maintenance of identity. He thus proves a poor candidate for that genuine repentance that might lead the Father to offer him forgiveness. Satan does, however, speak to the question in his first soliloquy (4.93–101) as he ponders, and then rejects as unrealistic, the possibility of true, permanent repentance. Even as Satan raises the possibility of reconciliation with God, he makes it clear that it would 15 Paradise Lost 10.516. 16 “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!” (2 Sam. 1.19).
26
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
not last. Satan does not, apparently, believe that he himself is capable of genuine repentance, even with the support of heavenly grace. Any such submission on his part would probably be feigned; or even if sincere, would be temporary. Unable to sustain such newly felt emotions as remorse and repentance, the ease of heavenly existence would attenuate his memories of his former suffering in hell and he might then risk a new rebellion, which would culminate in a second fall. John P. Rumrich has pointed out that: although Calvin may have considered man to have been created free, he also insisted that, given God’s omnipotence, the Fall had been immutably decreed—not simply foreseen— by God. According to Calvin, Adam and Eve could ‘not’ have chosen otherwise than to fall, despite their alleged freedom. (Institutes III.xxiii.7) Milton consistently argued against this position, from the time of Areopagitica, and in Paradise Lost insistently represents Adam and Eve as possessing the power to resist Satan’s temptation. (“Ordained Freedom a Paradox?” n.p.)
It seems, however, that Calvin’s dictum of an immutably decreed free fall, while not applicable to humans, might be appropriately applied to an archangel, and the question of possible motivation for Satan’s fall then becomes irrelevant, since for Calvin granting or withholding grace is a Divine prerogative. If Satan’s inability to repent is not assigned a credible psychological motivation by the Miltonic narrator, Revelation can enlighten us as to a possible explanation for Satan’s continued commitment to evil. In chapter 20 we learn that just as there is more than one Resurrection, there is more than one fall: “And [the angel] laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit [...] till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season” (Rev. 20.2–3). Those who had died for the word of God will then live and reign with Christ for a thousand years; this is known as the “first resurrection” (20.5). There will, however, be a “second death” (20.6). Satan will be released from prison in order to lead a great battle, resulting in his defeat: “and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (20.13–14). Salvation is thus an ongoing process: Christ died on the cross in order to redeem fallen humanity, but in spite of his sacrifice the end of time did not come, neither in AD 33 nor in the 1650s. In a discussion of John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners Anne Hawkins explicates the lysis model of conversion, wherein salvation is perceived “in the language and metaphor of education, as a gradual process of error and relearning, or fall and recovery, or wrong-doing and punishment whereby the soul matures into a regenerative state” (273).17 Hawkins points out that “although Calvin writes of conversion as a life-long process, he also treats it as a process consisting of the two stages of mortification and vivification—the death of the fleshly nature and rebirth in the spirit” (265). Nevertheless the Puritan 17 Milton reveals an awareness of the ongoing nature of the salvation process in On Education: “Then will be requir’d a speciall reinforcement of constant and sound endoctrinating to set [the youngsters] right and firm, instructing them more amply in the knowledge of vertue and the hatred of vice” (Complete Prose Works 2: 396).
Satan’s Journey into Evil
27
spiritual autobiographies that proliferated before the Civil War evince a “pattern of conversion, relapse, and reconversion” (268), rather than a single conversion episode. Milton, as Hill indicates, “shared the widely held millenarian hopes of the sixteen-forties [...]. Yet after the Restoration, in his disillusion with the politics of the Parliamentarian revolutionaries, he came to believe that a convergence of the human with the divine would be necessary before a good society could be built” (Milton and the English Revolution 336). In a parallel of his belief in the second coming of Christ, Milton seems to have embedded in Satan’s story a second fall. Although the poet knew that he was not alone (7.28) and would continue to fight the good fight, he did despair of a quick victory; he thus chose to give expression to his despair at the ongoing, unfinished nature of the struggle by depicting a second fall. Satan’s first fall is described by Raphael as occurring soon after the exaltation of the Son, appropriately enough during the fall of heaven’s twilight (5.645); the erstwhile first archangel feels himself impaired in the face of the Father’s preference of the Son. Satan’s second fall, too, is delineated by the Miltonic narrator at some length: it is none other than his successful temptation of Eve in book 9. In his expansion of the temptation narrative of Genesis 3 Milton was constrained by the biblical text, as well as by extant traditions, to clothe Satan in a snakeskin. Having contemplated the question at length, Satan finally settles on the serpent because the latter’s reputation for subtlety (9.93) may still Eve’s sense of surprise at his articulateness. “Like a black mist low creeping” (9.180), the already snakelike fiend locates a sleeping serpent; Milton’s description of the latter emphasizes the unfallen serpent’s self-centeredness: he slept “In labyrinth of many a round self rolled, / His head in the midst, well stored with subtle wiles” (9.183–184). Scholars have long noted the significance of Satan’s entrance into the serpent’s body by way of the beast’s mouth: Fowler points out that the soul was traditionally thought to enter and leave the body through the mouth (449n); the use of the same word both for breath (which enters and leaves the body by the mouth) and for spirit (soul) is unquestionably ancient. Yet Milton’s repeated references to the snake’s reputed subtlety, to his talent as a reasoner and speaker, should not be ignored. If one reason for Satan’s fall was intellectual doubt, it is not surprising that in book 2 the fallen angels are engagingly pictured as participants in a graduate seminar, charming away their pain with scholarly debate of good and evil. The narrator points out, however, that the students do not achieve closure in their discussion (2.561). The fallen angels’ doubt, in other words, is ultimately fruitless because it is open-ended and thus confused. Intellectual insecurity, the inability to draw a conclusion, rather than pride, may be Satan’s real sin of intellect. Excessive doubt, rather than excessive pride, in other words, would seem to be the problem. Such doubt is the intellectual partner of the mood swings, the inability to sustain a specific emotion, which has been posited as the postlapsarian Satan’s “darling sin.” Satan’s adoption of the serpent, that image of the subtle, wily, articulate, but ultimately fruitless reasoner as the vehicle of his attempt upon Eve, can be seen as a repetition of a central aspect of his first fall. Subsequent to his decision to use the snake for the temptation of Eve, but prior to his actual entrance into its body, the fiend’s inner torment is described. Satan explains his own need to do harm: he expects that thoughts of the destruction to be wreaked upon the First Parents will ease his inner turmoil (9.129–130). Although
28
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
his jealousy is directed at Adam and Eve because the earth was created especially for them, it would not be far-fetched to claim that Satan identifies humanity with the original object of his jealousy, the Son: “this new favourite / Of heaven, this man of clay, son of despite, / Whom us the more to spite his maker raised / From dust” (9.175–178). Whereas clay and dust are the supposed raw materials from which the Deity created man, the expressions “man of clay, son of despite” bear Christlike overtones, and, as such, recall that jealousy of the Son, which was a motivating factor of Satan’s first fall. In the words of William Kerrigan: Concerns prominent in [Paradise Lost]—the justification of the ways of the Father, the failed heroism of Satan’s rebellion, the tragedy of human disobedience, the reconciliation to death, the reworking of the Trinity into an uncreated Father and an indebted Son— impress the situation of an oedipal child on a religion that already derived our salvation from an identification with a divine and ideally obedient Son. (The Sacred Complex 6)
When Satan expresses his torment, his desire to see man destroyed (9.130–132), he is responding to the very same jealousy that was a factor in his first fall. The prelapsarian Satan was sensitive to beauty in all its forms and sensed a connection between goodness and beauty. When pausing to admire Eden, Satan is compared with a townsman, a refugee from a bustling, smelly city (9.445, 446), delighted by the beauties of paradise that lie before him. Satan’s overview of Eden at this point is, of course, a re-vision of his view of the garden and its human inhabitants in book 4 (4.205–357). The Miltonic narrator provides us with a last opportunity to realize the depth of Satan’s awareness of the connection between goodness and beauty when he shows the evil one temporarily “abstracted” from his own evil (9.463–466). Eve’s satanically inspired dream had culminated in an after-dinner flight (5.86–92). This flight, which may be likened both to a sexual experience and to a description of that vision that both precedes and accompanies creativity, ended abruptly and fruitlessly: “suddenly / My guide was gone, and I, me thought, sunk down” (5.90–91). Eve’s decision to taste the fruit in real fact results in a similar sterility. Her guide, the serpent, at once disappears, slinking back to the thicket (9.784–785); Eve herself is sunk down as she bows to the tree (9.835–836). Satan’s role as parodic generator is at least temporarily unsuccessful, since one of the immediate results of humankind’s fall is Eve’s suggestion that she and Adam remain childless (10.986–989). Satan, in other words, has risked being responsible for a lack of generation, which he himself may not have intended, again indicating a certain lack of clarity as to gender roles of female generation and male seduction. The fiend as male seducer is a pervasive image in art and folklore. As Le Comte notes, “One must remember the human countenance, in a few instances male, sometimes assigned to the snake around the tree and the rabbinical legend that makes him the father of Cain. Like any other adulterer he needs to catch the wife alone without her husband, and the challenge is one of reaping—or spoiling—‘pleasure not for him ordained’ [9.470]” (79). Yet Satan does not anticipate the triumphant enjoyment the successful seducer is traditionally expected to feel: he is anguished by the thought of the destruction that he intends to visit upon the object of his love-hunt.
Satan’s Journey into Evil
29
Despite the apparent success of his attempt on Eve, Satan’s second fall—his success in leading Eve to rebel against the Father—leaves him with much the same sense of despair as was his portion after his first fall. Satan’s first fall was initially spiritual—the decision to lead a rebellion against the Father—but it resulted in a physical fall lasting nine days. The fiend’s second fall, a replication of the first, concludes with a more complete physical fall, in which the character dissolves before our very eyes (10.513–518). The articulate, proud monarch is dismembered, rendered legless and speechless, forced to communicate with his followers by means of a hiss (10.508), the hissing sound recalling the “full bliss” that he had just promised the devils (10.503). Michael Lieb has called attention to the significance of dismemberment for Milton, who lived and wrote at a time when bodily mutilation was routinely used to punish political opponents: “Milton no doubt saw himself suffering in his imagination the fate of those regicides who, like [Thomas] Harrison, were mutilated, emasculated, eviscerated, beheaded, and dismembered” (79). Lieb points out that: In the universe of violence that expresses itself in both destructive and generative terms, that which assumes utmost prominence is mankind’s penchant for bodily mutilation and dismemberment. Such a penchant appears to be fundamental not only to the individual psyche but to the notion of violence as a religious category. In either case, bodily mutilation and dismemberment is [...] of seminal importance to the history of culture. (14)
The last view that the reader is afforded of Satan is not only of one who has been silenced and forced to grovel on his belly, but also of one who has suffered dismemberment (10.512–513). It may be claimed that the depiction of Satan’s dismemberment in such detail expresses a wish to relate Satan’s second fall to current events, to clear explicit threats to Milton himself. We cannot know whether Milton intended the reader to identify his own situation with that of the Satan of book 10. It can, however, be argued that the representation of Satan’s temptation of Eve as a second fall signals the poet’s awareness of the ongoing nature of the political and religious struggle in which he was engaged. The fall is not a one-time event, nor is salvation to be achieved by a one-time effort. Both must be repeated over and over again: Satan and his followers are permitted to resume their lost shape, yet are doomed to a cyclical repetition of their adoption of reptilian form (10.574–577). Salvation, too, is an unending process: as Keeble points out, “The ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ is attainable only by fallen man, and more specifically, by fallen man living in the time which Michael foresees when ‘heavy persecution shall arise / On all who in the worship persevere / Of spirit and truth’ [Paradise Lost 12.531–533]” (84). Paradise Lost, after all, ends at the beginning, when the hero and heroine of Milton’s great saga, weary from their adventures—no longer innocents, but rather fully fledged human beings—set out on a new adventure; as Budick notes, the heroic man of Paradise Lost “is also, in some sense, the image of epic Satan, man’s fall a reenactment of Satan’s fall, and the poet’s flight into Satan’s mind a subtle mimesis of Satan’s diabolical journey” (71). By the end of Paradise Lost Satan, too, is no longer an archangel, but rather a human(ized) exile from paradise, doomed to wander the world bearing much the same burden as did the First Parents.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 2
The Tempter of Grace Abounding Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners was first published in 1666; the first edition of Paradise Lost came out in 1667. Although it is doubtful that Milton read Grace Abounding while writing Paradise Lost, the ideas that shaped both works were pervasive. Christopher Hill notes that Milton “knew of the discussions and speculations which went on in London congregations and taverns” during the Interregnum, and would quite possibly have participated in them (Milton and the English Revolution 109). Both Milton and Bunyan, as Hill points out, had shared a sense of an impending millennium. The breakdown of censorship and ecclesiastical controls characterizing the Civil War period exposed them to the possibilities of open expression of ideas, both political and religious; this newfound freedom may in itself have seemed millennial to the young preacher,1 as well as to the older poetpublicist (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 9); and Maxine Hancock has suggested that “Bunyan was initiated by sermon-hearing2 and intense discussion into the Calvinistic community of nonconforming English Puritanism as his interpretive community” (74). By the same token, the strengthening of censorship and the widespread persecution of nonconformists accompanying the Restoration would have been one cause of the profound disappointment felt by both writers on being forced to come to terms with the fact that the millennium had not arrived. This deep sense of loss may indeed be one reason why each writer produced a work built around a forceful, dominating Satan character at this particular time. “If,” in the words of Forsyth, “Satan’s command of the interior world of modernity helps to render him deeply sympathetic at certain moments, it also makes 1 In Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 Nigel Smith illuminates contemporary perceptions of living during what would now be called an information revolution: “[B]efore the first shot of the Civil War was fired, the phenomenon of increased print circulation had spread far beyond the immediate circles of political and religious privilege, and the political nation had surprised itself with the complexity and effects of a printed flux of information, as individuals and institutions jostled for supremacy.” Accompanied by the collapse of censorship in the early 1640s, there was a “‘downwards dissemination’ of print—a democratising of its availability.” This resulted in “a sense—from all quarters—that the world had been destabilised by a printing surfeit” (24). This and more: “The effect of the expansion of the means of communication and the great variety of forms it took was a sense of living in a kind of public confusion” (25). 2 Sermon-reading was also a popular pastime among the literate, even prior to Bunyan’s time; according to Nigel Wheale sermons probably constituted the most prolific category of religious publishing in Britain during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign (religious works, including the Bible, constituted 40 percent of all book production between 1580 and 1603) (56).
32
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
him sinister. He it is who can induce thoughts and visions beyond the control of our conscious minds” (160). The existence of the devil as a being at once palpable and simultaneously able to enter into human minds was not generally questioned in seventeenth-century England; and for both Bunyan and Milton Satan bore a physical reality. In this they would not have differed significantly from many, if not most, of their contemporaries. News accounts of the period contain descriptions of satanic apparitions said to have been witnessed by respected citizens. On March 22, 1658, for example, according to “The Snare of the Devil Discovered,” the devil appeared to one Lydia Rogers in man’s shape, and made a contract with her in return for money which she needed. Mrs. Rogers, known to be a God-fearing woman, was examined by Mr. Johnson, the minister of Wapping. “The Just Devil of Woodstock, or a True Narrative of the Special Apparitions, the Frights and Punishments, inflicted upon the Rumpish Commissioners sent thither to Survey the Mannors and Houses belonging to His Magestie,” published on January 10, 1660, includes a list of respected citizens who witnessed the said apparitions. On 12 February 1661, moreover, an account was published detailing “A Wonder in Staffordshire ... Of a strange and horrible apparition of the Divell,” which had appeared to James Fisher, a “phrenatic,” in the shape of one of his church brethren (1). The latter text is followed by a humorous poem about a phrenatic who, in a conversation with the devil, notices that the latter has cloven feet and asks him who his shoemaker is; the devil then replies that his feet are misshapen as a result of the gout (5). This humor, however, should not lead us to doubt the seriousness with which reports of conversations between devils and humans were generally taken. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the reality of claims of direct contact between humans and Satan was openly questioned. “A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Pracits’d by Jane Wenham of Walkerne in Hertfordshire, upon the bodies of Anne Thorn, Anne Street, &c.,” written by one A.N., is notable for a comment found in the Preface. The events described, including Wenham’s trial, which took place in March 1711–12, drew a great deal of attention. Therefore: [I]t was thought proper to draw up [an account of the trial], both for the Information of the World, and the Vindication of the Persons more immediately concerned in this Prosecution; especially since some People have thought fit, in a Public Manner, to express their Wonder, that two Divines should concern themselves in a Thing of this Nature, as if detecting the most Abstruse, and Hidden Works of the Devil, and his Spiteful and Malicious Vassal, were a Business wholly foreign to, and inconsistent with, the Duty of a Minister of Christ. (i)
Yet despite the severe philippics against those who ridiculed such reports of open contact between Satan and a woman, the above expresses a sense of the mysterious ways in which the devil was thought to work; this sense would have been familiar to both Milton and Bunyan. The legitimacy of a scholarly comparison of Bunyan’s Tempter and Milton’s Satan character should not blind us to the vast differences between the two genres: the spiritual autobiography that Bunyan set out to write and the epic theodicy that Milton was in the process of composing. The spiritual autobiography, as Henri A. Talon notes, was a common Dissenter tradition (14):
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
33
In the spiritual life of every Christian, and of the Puritan more especially, two movements can be discerned: the first, born of penitence and humiliation before the face of God, turns inwards to examine the self; the second is the contrary movement, drawing away from introspection towards the contemplation of the goals to be attained [...]. Grace Abounding, it would seem, was created out of these two movements; in it are to be found their ebb and flow, their currents now rushing ahead, now being checked and losing themselves in eddies and backwaters. (15)
Beyond the obvious generic differences, however, Paradise Lost and Grace Abounding have a similar purpose, stated in the case of the poem and implicit in the autobiography. This purpose is none other than justification. The composer of a theodicy, of course, is taking a liberty: by what right does a man justify his God? Although Milton defines the subject of his work as “man’s disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was placed” (Paradise Lost, Argument, book 1), generations of readers have understood Milton’s plea to his muse for aid in his attempt at justifying the ways of God to men (1.1–26) to contain a statement of purpose. Whereas justification was for the Puritan one of the clearly defined stages of regeneration—the achievement of a saving faith through God’s grace—the spiritual autobiography as a genre can be viewed as the believer’s own attempt at justifying an inner conviction that one was numbered among the saved. Monica Furlong points out how important it became for believers to be certain of their regeneration: “a whole body of teaching, almost an industry, grew up which told people how they could know whether they were saved or not” (32). The need to watch oneself constantly for signs of salvation or its opposite led Puritans to fall into “the habit of, as it were, totting up their spiritual balance at the end of each day. They kept painful diaries of their [spiritual] struggles and mishaps” (34).3 Grace Abounding served the dual purpose of such texts. As a personal autobiography it aided the author in his quest for security as to one’s regeneration so important to the believer. As a published book it could also be circulated among Bunyan’s followers, thus enabling the imprisoned preacher to continue his ministry. Scholars of this genre have often found it necessary to take a stand on the degree to which each diary is a personal, perhaps even idiosyncratic composition, rather than a public document, conforming to familiar conventions.4 In the words of Paul Delany: The danger here was that men of diverse experience would, yielding to the influence of such preachers as Bunyan, attempt to force their life-histories into a Procrustean pattern. The doctrine of childhood depravity already imposed a stringent check on originality and spontaneity; it led Calvinist autobiographers to compete with each other in confessions of precocious wickedness, with the result that their histories blur together in the reader’s mind. (88–89) 3 Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos suggests that many spiritual autobiographies, including Bunyan’s, were modeled on the tale of the Prodigal Son: Luke 15.11–32 (17). 4 Delany notes that Grace Abounding “was probably based on an account of his spiritual experiences which Bunyan would have been required to submit before being admitted to communion with the Bedford Baptists” (88), as was common practice at the time. Such accounts were often read aloud before members of the congregation.
34
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Anne Hawkins finds in Grace Abounding a synthesis of the private and public: she notes that Grace Abounding “derives its thematic properties and structural unity from Bunyan’s personal experience of conversion—an experience which is itself derivative of existing models in the theology and cultural milieu of seventeenth-century England” (259). Melvin R. Watson, on the other hand, finds a tension between the personal nature of the text—“I start from the premise that everything in Grace Abounding is the truth or what Bunyan believed to be the truth”—and the book’s overtly didactic purpose (471). Bunyan himself believed that the private, individual benefits of selfexamination, of constant monitoring of one’s spiritual progress or regression, which the writing of a spiritual autobiography gives its author, are integrated with the benefits accruing to his congregants from reading Grace Abounding; or, as he notes in the Preface, “if God will, others may be put in remembrance of what he hath done for their Souls, by reading his work upon me” (2). He who would later compose The Pilgrim’s Progress was, however, sensitive to the dangers of possible deviations from Puritan norms in his preaching and writing, as U. Milo Kaufmann points out in his explication of the Apology preceding Bunyan’s most popular work (3ff.): “There is a conspicuous tension in Bunyan’s practice between the didactic and literalist methods widespread in Puritanism and the imaginative methods native to the grand tradition in literature” (5). According to Kaufmann, when Bunyan says that “My dark and cloudy words they do but hold / The Truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold” (4; 25–26): This conception of the relationship between truth and words is conventionally Puritan: truth was “contained” in words, ready to be emptied into the mind in the simple process of reading, and little allowance was made for the possibility that it might be incommensurate with its containers, that the event might perhaps be a slightly more commodious vessel than the word. This statement suggests that Bunyan’s conscious allegiance was given to a literalistic understanding of language, and yet we would be surprised if the Apology prepared us in no way for the quite different way in which he regards event and metaphor in the body of The Pilgrim’s Progress. There is indeed ample evidence in the Apology for an ambivalence in Bunyan’s attitudes toward logos and myth. (11)
The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1 was first published in 1678, twelve years after Grace Abounding; nevertheless Kaufmann’s response to Bunyan’s question in the Apology—“Would’st read thy self, and read thou know’st not what”? (7, 22)—is no less apt when applied to Grace Abounding: “Bunyan implies a conception of his narrative as one which speaks on the intuitive levels of communication, the fictive life evoking those subtle responses in the reader which enable him to discern that the narrative is faithful to the mysteries of the heart” (14). In his Preface to Grace Abounding the imprisoned Bunyan engagingly points out that he is “so tied up that [he] cannot perform that duty that from God doth lie upon me to you-ward, for your farther edifying and building up in Faith and Holiness” (1). He notes that the manuscript of Grace Abounding is “dedicated to those whom God hath counted him worthy to beget5 to Faith, by his Ministry in the Word” (1). 5 The notion that the evangelizer is a father who begets his followers can be traced back to Paul’s Epistles, as Keeble suggests (90–91). In The Epistle of Paul to Philemon the preacher/father is actually imprisoned, as was Bunyan: “I beseech thee for Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds” (1.10).
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
35
Bunyan’s relation of his suffering, whether from political and religious persecution or at the hands of the Tempter, can serve to encourage others: “Temptations when we meet them at first, are as the Lyon that roared upon Sampson; but if we overcome them, the next time we see them we shall finde a Nest of Honey within them” (1). In his discussion of the metamorphosis of the spiritual autobiography from Augustine’s Confessions up to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and JeanJacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Robert Bell points out that “[t]here is an heroic, but nevertheless tentative quality about Bunyan’s salvation [...]. For Bunyan has experienced a symbolic rebirth, which he ceaslessly tests in the flux of life [...]. [T]his constant verification anticipates the modern disposition to forge identity in the hot fires of experience” (118). It is worth noting, moreover, that for Bunyan, as for twentieth-century man, the “flux of life” and the “hot fires of experience” subsume the individual mind and include dreams. Bunyan’s best known work, The Pilgrim’s Progress itself, is couched in the framework of a dream: “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream” (8). An allegory such as The Pilgrim’s Progress need not be part of a dream, but can be narrated directly, as Bunyan was to do in The Holy War, which is told by a first-person narrator. By adding an extra layer of narration, a frame-story that makes it clear that the events to be told take place within the mind, the author sends the message that the mind itself “is its own place,” that its content may be no less real than events that are viewed, heard, or otherwise accessed by the senses. For Bunyan the overwhelming significance of the mind as the primary locus of the search for salvation meant that great importance was ascribed to the sources of the dreams, thoughts, ideas, feelings, which the mind entertained. A thought might be implanted in the mind by God or by Satan. The devil knew this, and Bunyan’s Tempter is characterized by his ability to penetrate the mind of the sinner and cause great harm. The cause of much of this mischief is the necessity of interpretation; signs, as was known by the composers of the Hebrew Bible, are understood by their receivers through a process of interpretation. If Satan interferes in this process he may even lead the believer to misinterpret Holy Scripture. Bunyan would certainly have appreciated Ellen Spolsky’s analysis of the risks to which the believing reader/interpreter of Scripture is exposed by the very act of reading. The interpretation of the midrashist—the covenantal hermeneuticist—both “displays a talent and a taste for interpretation that is sufficiently open to allow not only multiple, but even contradictory interpretations to stand together as equally valid,” while simultaneously requiring “the greatest respect for the authority of the text under interpretation” (Summoning x–xi); this authority was “considered to have been revealed at a specific and never to be repeated time in history” (Summoning ix). The dangers are contingent on the responsibility the interpreter takes upon himself: “Convenantal hermeneutics challenges us to admit that if holding an ideology is to mean anything more than the happenstance of having been born into one cultural milieu rather than another, it means having to make choices, and having to own up to them” (Summoning xv). To validate one’s interpretive choices it is necessary to avoid being misled by the Tempter. One must, that is, know the sign’s source; it is thus essential to recognize
36
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
God, to differentiate between the Lord and the devil. Steeped as he was in the Bible, Bunyan would have been familiar with God’s formulaic proclamation—that “they may know that I am the Lord”—which runs throughout the Hebrew Bible; this recognition of the Deity takes place within the human mind. Indeed, Piero Boitani views such biblical passages as “formulas of recognition”: The Bible dwells almost obsessively on two aspects of this theme: in the first place, that the recognition process is begun by God himself—he who, by definition, is that he is, but needs human awareness to exist in history; in the second, that in order to know God, man must be ready within himself, and must know himself as a human being (and human becoming), and be able to look within and be open towards the ‘other’, whether it be from earth or heaven. (12)
His examination of the tales of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis, with their plethora of dream-embedded signs, leads Boitani to conclude that “true” signs “turn out to be watertight proof leading from ignorance to knowledge, from error to a recognition of guilt, and from carnal knowledge to quiescence. They speak eloquently because they speak to the conscience” (19). A sign, according to Boitani, is in itself neutral (20); it is granted meaning by its reader, who may interpret or misinterpret. The interpreter, moreover, will reach “true” meaning only if his conscience, his readiness to accept personal guilt, is involved in the process. Or in Boitani’s words: Sophocles’ Oedipus recognizes that he is guilty of parricide and incest not because the clues he gathers make him feel guilty, but because they reveal the truth of the facts committed unwittingly. J[the Yahwist posited by biblical scholars]’s Judah, on the other hand, acknowledges his blame as regards Tamar. Oedipus’s responsibility belongs to general human fallibility, while Judah’s is purely personal. The former, necessarily, has tragic consequences; the latter can announce a renewal of life. (20)
The individual human mind, then, is the locus of the attribution of “true” meaning to signs, thus clarifying Bunyan’s reason for composing The Pilgrim’s Progress as an allegory within a dream. Or as Neil H. Keeble suggests: Christian’s progress in fact takes place not during the incidents of his pilgrimage but during those analytical discussions of these events, their interpretation in the light of Scripture, which, to readers who approach The Pilgrim’s Progress merely as a novel, appear irritating interruptions to the action. They are the action: at least, the only action that matters. (224)
When attempting to delineate the Tempter of Grace Abounding, therefore, we must appreciate Satan’s ability to understand and manipulate the narrator’s mind; such ability may stem from Satan’s self-consciousness, his awareness of his own mind, as well as his understanding of his role as representing an aspect of his victim’s mind. In his discussion of Milton’s Satan, Kenneth Gross makes the bold claim that: Satan is the poet’s most palpable image of what human thought is like as it is moved, wounded, or disowned by its memories, desires, intentions, sensations, as it confronts body and environment, inertia and pain, as it engages the words and stories which shape
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
37
and misshape it. Satan is an image of the mind in its dividedness from both itself and others, in its illusions of inwardness and power. (337)
If “the narrator’s mind” is substituted for “Satan” in the above, and “Bunyan” for “the poet,” we have a description of what is arguably Bunyan’s greatest achievement in Grace Abounding: the creation of a mind struggling with an antagonist who has his own external existence, but is at the same time an internal aspect of the protagonist’s mind. It may not be far-fetched to claim that Bunyan’s use of the Tempter as a synonym for Satan is part of an attempt to distance the character from the familiar creature of drama, folklore, and religion,6 and to hint that the devil could also be a facet of the human mind. In this sense Bunyan’s Tempter may possibly represent a vision of the devil character that is more familiar to modern readers than is the Satan of Paradise Lost; within the framework of the epic Milton does not generally use his Satan as a metaphor for evil aspects of the fallen mind, but rather as a dramatic character with physical presence. Both writers’ conceptions of Satan, moreover, may have been influenced by that axiom of Calvinist theology that was so pervasive yet so problematical at the time: the belief that one has no control over his or her inclusion in the ranks of the elect. In his discussion of the Satan character of Paradise Lost John Stachniewski claims that “there were actual people around whose social alienation was so preyed on by Calvinist preaching that they were convinced of their own reprobation and sometimes, like Faustus,7 even took the small next step of thinking themselves demonic.” Stachniewski finds evidence of what he terms “demonization of actual people” (345) in Milton’s depiction of Satan’s inner life: “The state of mind displayed in Satan’s soliloquies derives less from any picture of the devil which either theological or literary traditions had made available than from Milton’s own contemporaries who themselves professed affinity with the devils” (346–47). The sneaking suspicion that one may have an uncontrollable “affinity with devils” seems indicated by Bunyan’s occasional confusion as to the source of those temptations against which he struggles. Do they come from one’s own mind, from Satan, or perhaps from God himself?8 In the Preface to Grace Abounding Bunyan, 6 According to Monica Furlong, Bunyan and most of his contemporaries envisioned a fairly uniform end for those who were not among the elect: “Devils came to you on your deathbed (and seventeenth-century writers are strikingly united about the details of damnation) and carried you away” (33). 7 Cf. Helen Gardner’s view of Milton’s Satan as belonging to the company of the Faustus characters of the Elizabethan stage (208). 8 In his discussion of Abraham’s meeting with three visitors in Genesis 18, Boitani details the importance of Abraham’s apparent confusion as to the identity of the three. Does he believe that one of them is God and the other two angels? Does he view them as one entity, i.e., a typology of the later Christian Trinity? No less important are the conclusions to be drawn by the reader: “What Genesis 18 unfolds is a silent, mysterious, dual process of recognition: that whereby Abraham sees three men and understands that one of them is the Lord; and that whereby the readers, who are told from the start that ‘Yahweh’ appears to Abraham, will recognize the truth of this through Abraham himself and J’s narration” (3).
38
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
as might be expected, speaks clearly of God’s grace and Satan’s temptations. But in his brief apology for his supposedly “low,” unadorned style he notes that “God did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting of me” (3). Although Satan doubtlessly served as the vector for the temptation schemes to which the Chief of Sinners was subjected, the very propinquity of the two “did not play” clauses suggests that for Bunyan, God himself may sometimes have been the instigator of the attempts. In this case the Tempter can be said to behave much as did the Satan of Job, who is less God’s adversary than his partner in a bet (Job 1.7–12).9 God’s role as instigator, however, may be a trope for the presence of evil impulses within the mind of the believer, rather than an accusation levelled against the Deity. Maximilian Rudwin sketches the ups and downs undergone by the figure of Satan/ Lucifer/the Devil throughout the centuries: “Satan in the Old Testament is no devil in the accepted meaning of the word. He was originally not an adversary but an adjutant of the Almighty [...]. A certain group of historians of religion maintain that the Devil is the creation of Christianity [...]. During the triumphal march of Christianity through the European countries, he assimilated many of the characteristics of the discarded gods of the old religions (1, 2–3)10. Rudwin concludes, however, that in the course of time “the demons behind evil acts were subordinated to an evil spirit. In this manner, the Devil entered into human thought and has remained to this day. The Fiend is thus the incarnation of human frenzy. The human mind fell a prey to its own fear” (2). In various cultures, that is, Satan is viewed as an independent creature with physical existence and simultaneously figures a certain aspect of the human mind. If Bunyan can be said to have envisioned his Tempter as both a facet of the mind and a palpable creature, it becomes necessary to ask whether his evil is not of necessity mixed with those good impulses that dwell in the mind; and Bunyan may have sensed that the boundaries between good and evil impulses within the mind are sometimes blurred. Arnold Stein opens his analysis of Milton’s Satan character with the claim that “[t]he good in Satan responds to, and struggles toward, the good he encounters outside him. His evil is not pure; it can win the struggle against good only by allying itself with good” (Answerable Style 3). Nor, it would seem, was Bunyan’s Tempter’s evil pure. Perhaps one of the most memorable, as well as long-lasting of the temptation episodes in Grace Abounding is that in which Bunyan is told to sell Christ (42; par. 135). In much the same way as the Miltonic narrator describes the pain and regret that accompany Satan’s awareness of his wrongdoing, Bunyan himself senses the shame the Tempter feels as he contemplates his victim’s sufferings. Bunyan is released from sorrow and guilt by the sentence that suddenly “bolted in upon me, The Blood of Christ remits all guilt (44; par. 143). The narrator then adds that: “Now I began to conceive peace in 9 Cf. Exod. 8.32, 9.35, 11.10, in which God himself hardens Pharaoh’s heart, rather than sending an agent to do so. 10 Anthropologist Margaret A. Murray’s The God of the Witches is based on the claim that what Christians called witches were actually human followers of the indigenous, preChristian religion of northern Europe, and that devil was a Christian term for the horned god of paganism, who was not evil (11–14). Murray’s thesis is, however, highly controversial (cf. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages 63n).
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
39
my Soul, and methought I saw as if the Tempter did lear and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done” (44; par. 144). The Satan character of Grace Abounding is not only capable of feeling shame; he can, on occasion, display an ability to tell the truth surprising in one who has traditionally been called the Prince of Lies. Bunyan’s Tempter tells what later turns out to be the truth when he makes a prediction as to the progress of Bunyan’s conversion. The Tempter came upon Bunyan: “I will ply it close, but I will have my end accomplished: though you be burning hot at present, yet, if I can pull you from this fire, I shall have you cold before it be long” (35; par. 110).11 In her explication of the lysis model of conversion Hawkins suggests that: The spiritual illness afflicting such seventeenth-century sinners as John Bunyan seems to have taken the form of a powerful intestine evil and a concomitant moral paralysis to withstand evil. The cure for this malady is conversion—but a form of conversion for which the model is not so much the dramatic, single event (as in crisis conversion) as it is the gradual process (as in lysis conversion). (260)
Yet Grace Abounding purports to describe a conversion process that was finite in time; Bunyan tells what went on in his soul up to the time at which he gained a sense of spiritual contentment (101; par. 339). In the words of Bell, on the other hand, “Just as the hero of Grace Abounding remains [...] rooted [...] to the contingencies of the flesh and the world, Bunyan the narrator is not as utterly differentiated from the sinner, because his quest and travail are never truly consummated” (117). Bunyan knew that the Christian soul would continue to be a prime target for those forces of evil embodied in and by Satan. Or in current terms, Felicity A. Nussbaum notes that Grace Abounding is the account more “of a soul constantly endangered in this world than of a soul saved; it is the account of a self in process rather than a static identity, a self which insists on its power and pride but which acknowledges nagging temptation” (31). Thus when he warns Bunyan that he will have his end accomplished, the Tempter is, in fact, giving his victim important, reliable information: the powers he represents have time at their command, and will not give up their attempts on the soul. Bunyan, in other words, is not being misled at this point. Reliable information becomes especially vital during periods of political, social, and religious upheaval. Supporters of the Restoration quite naturally looked back on the Interregnum as a period of unbearable chaos; as Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos suggests: “Early modern Englishmen believed in a divinely ordained social order, and authority and obedience were central to its very survival” (18). Yet in his discussion of Milton’s approach to chaos as multifaceted, rather than exclusively evil, John P. Rumrich notes that if anyone in Paradise Lost desires “the lasting suppression of chaos it is Satan [...]. Milton’s fallen angels could never champion indeterminacy but incline instead to rigidity and parodic orderliness” (Milton Unbound 126). For those who rued the Restoration, Satan could thus serve as a useful figure for the
11 This passage is reminiscent of a satanic threat reported in “A Wonder in Staffordshire ... Of a strange and horrible apparition of the Divell”: “I will make thee hot by and by we will sweat by turnes, and tho I am cold if thou cleavest to me thou shalt like fire burne.”
40
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
victorious political and religious leaders of the 1660s who rejoiced at the restoration of a familiar order. As might a clever politician, Bunyan’s Tempter makes ingenious use of disinformation to bring his victim to a state of despair, which leads to humble acceptance of the leader’s fiats. If disinformation is defined as incorrect and deliberately misleading information leaked, usually by an agency of government, as a means of negating correct information, both Milton and Bunyan would most certainly have been aware of its importance as an effective tool in the hands of the politician/leader. According to Sharon Achinstein, “in Paradise Lost, Milton summons readers to become more keenly aware of their susceptibility to political deception. Milton aimed to promote readerly skills as a means for English citizens to regain the individual freedoms that had slipped through the revolutionary leaders’ fingers” (202). Bunyan, too, was aware of the importance of “readerly skills” for the believer. He speaks to the issue directly in his account of the interrogations attending his arrest and imprisonment. On being told by William Foster of Bedford that he [Bunyan] “understood the Scriptures literally,” Bunyan answered that “those that was to be understood literally we understood them so; but for those that was to be understood otherwise, we endeavoured so to understand them” (110). In his examination before a team of justices Bunyan shows up Justice Keelin’s ignorance when the judge claims that “the Common Prayer-book hath been ever since the apostle’s time.” Bunyan answers: “[S]hew me the place in the epistles, where the Common Prayer-book is written, or one text of Scripture, that commands me to read it, and I will use it” (117). By putting the learned justice in his place, he emphasizes the role to be played by “readerly skills” in the fight for religious freedom. The Interregnum had generally been characterized by a blurring of the borderline between religious and political debate; as Monica Furlong notes, during the period leading up to the execution of Charles I Puritanism was inevitably a political doctrine (29). For the individual believer this blurring of boundaries between religious and political discourse resulted, as Furlong points out, at least in part from the fact that for Bunyan, as for many of his contemporaries, the Bible was “the world of books, plays, poetry, learning, which his poverty and lack of education denied him” (31). As the sum total of learning for many believers, the Bible was the object of constant attempts at interpretation; there might thus be a muddling of boundaries between acceptance of the Word as literal, revealed truth and the new, possibly controversial insights to be gained by the reader through interpretation.12 In the words of Kathleen M. Swaim, “Reformation Protestantism by definition cast the believer in the role of literary critic, and Puritan experiences of the Word reach 12 Gordon Campbell notes that since Bunyan could read no language other than English, he had of necessity to read an English Bible: when composing his early works he would probably have relied on a sixteenth-century translation—the Geneva version—and later, on the King James Version (515–16). Campbell argues that a drawback was turned into a virtue by seventeenth-century sectarians, who “are unusual in their elevation of an English translation to the status of a holy book.” This explains why Bunyan never felt the need to learn the “biblical languages,” i.e., Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (516).
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
41
beyond literacy and literalness into the arena of the distinctively ‘literary’ just at that point where the Word gives way to interpretation” (77). Tamsin Spargo, moreover, has noted that: “Bunyan’s own writing, in the form of Grace Abounding may be read as ultimately competing with Scriptural authority, as Scriptural texts form a subtext within Bunyan’s text” (The Writing of John Bunyan 57). Nonconformist interpretation often tended to be unmediated and intensely personal.13 As Keeble reminds us, “the Bible was no lucid handbook of ethics but an inexhaustible storehouse of wonders and revelations” (250); and in his discussion of Grace Abounding Brainerd P. Stranahan notes the significance of the “dramatic appearance of biblical passages in [Bunyan’s] mind: the sudden arrivals of these texts are among the most important happenings in the narrative” (329). Bunyan may have been sensitized to potential dangers inherent in the act of interpreting holy texts through his contacts with Ranters.14 He tells of meeting up with some Ranters: I happened to light into several peoples company; who though strict in Religion formerly, yet were also swept away by these Ranters. These would also talk with me of their ways, and condemn me as legal and dark, pretending that they only had attained to perfection that could do what they would and not sin. O these temptations were suitable to my flesh, I being but a young man and my nature in its prime. (17; par. 45)
Noam Flinker suggests that “[a]n important ploy used by various Ranter leaders involved subversion of traditional approaches to biblical texts so as to make their radically different new readings appear to be reasonable understandings of Scripture. Although this stratagem served to justify their ideological positions, it also legitimized a biblical hermeneutic that was tied to the original Hebrew or Greek texts in only an associative or impressionistic fashion” (The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature 124). The very legitimacy of the act of interpretation, of course, could provide such an agent of evil as Satan with unlimited opportunities for mischief. Since the believer does not question the essential truth of a given biblical text, Bunyan’s Tempter may be guilty of disinformation when he attempts to convince the Chief of Sinners of the validity of a particular interpretation. A major crisis of Bunyan’s spiritual struggle is initiated by his acceptance of a piece of wrong information, an incorrect interpretation: the notion, ingeniously posited by Satan, that Bunyan had committed 13 Keeble notes, however, that for Bunyan “a process of spiritual reappraisal and growth through meditation upon the occasion and circumstances of his imprisonment” would culminate in “a renewed commitment and a public declaration of constancy” (203); such private meditation, in other words, gained significance by serving as part of the believer’s public evangelical efforts. 14 In his discussion of the Ranters as part of radical religious milieux (Familists, Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians) with which Bunyan, as a Baptist, was, albeit unwillingly, often associated, T.L. Underwood argues that: “The term Ranter was a sobriquet used loosely and pejoratively to refer to a variety of persons. [...] Ranter beliefs usually reflected antinomianism and a mystical pantheism, appealed to an inward spiritual authority, and sometimes embraced a denial that the spiritual person actually sinned in the commission of carnal acts” (“For then I should be a Ranter” 130).
42
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
a sin for which there was no possible forgiveness. Bunyan’s soul is rent asunder by Acts 4.12: “Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other Name under heaven, given amongst men, whereby we must be saved” (56; par. 182). At this point “the most free, and full, and gracious words of the Gospel, were the greatest torment to me” (56; par. 183). Believing that he had cast off Jesus Christ, the sinner was now liable to accept the Tempter’s claim that “Christ, indeed, did pity my case, and was sorry for my loss; but, forasmuch as I had sinned and transgressed as I had done, he could by no means help me, nor save me from what I feared; for my sin was not of the nature of theirs, for whom he bled and died.” Lest we miss Satan’s role in convincing Bunyan of the uniquely unforgiveable nature of his sin, we are then told that his fears were grounded in misinformation as to the nature of his sin (57; par. 184). Even while delivering a sermon Bunyan was often tempted by an inappropriate sense of pride (90; par. 296); moreover he details Satan’s attempts at leading him to spread disinformation in his public appearances as a preacher: while in the midst of preaching a sermon he would be “violently assaulted” by blasphemous thoughts and tempted to speak them aloud (90; par. 293). Satan is herein caught in the act of misleading a preacher of the Gospel, in order that the latter might mislead his congregation. Bunyan is on occasion uncertain of the source of the temptations that attack him. When questioning whether or not he is numbered among the elect, the sinner at first identifies the Tempter as the source of his doubts: “Why, then, said Satan, you had as good leave off, and strive no further; for if indeed you should not be Elected and chosen of God, there is no talke of your being saved” (21; par. 60). Yet Bunyan soon loses his sense of satanic temptation: By these things I was driven to my wits end, not knowing what to say, or how to answer these temptations, (indeed, I little thought that Satan had thus assaulted me, but that rather it was my own prudence thus to start the question). (21; par. 61)
Bunyan, in other words, may be guilty of a double error: he is yielding to doubts of his own election, which will inevitably lead him to despair, and at the same time crediting himself as the source of these dangerous ideas, and is thus not aware of the danger of such satanically induced thoughts. At the center of Grace Abounding is a view of sin as a product of a process of temptation in which the victim is led by Satan to confuse the idea of sin with sin itself. The end-product of this process is despair; once convinced that by imagining the sinful act, one has committed it, the soul is overwhelmed by a sense of despair. In his examination of religious despair as a central element in English Puritanism in general and the literature it generated in particular, John Stachniewski claims that: [What Grace Abounding] actually preponderantly contains is agonized isolation. The more firmly Bunyan concludes himself a reprobate the more strongly his isolation is stressed [...]. Yet the sense of isolation is reinforced when his experiences are located in public contexts—in the game of tipcat, for example [par. 22–24; 10–11] [...]. The contrast between a social situation and an unbetrayed experience clarifies the separateness and the incommunicability of the spiritual self. This early incident dramatizes how the theology that threatened him drove a wedge between his exterior and interior self. (134)
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
43
Although many of the events described in Grace Abounding are purported to have taken place in the narrator’s distant past, previous to the Restoration and its accompanying persecution of nonconformists, the autobiography was composed at a time of general despair in the political and religious configurations to which its author belonged. Religious despair, a by-product of the believer’s inability to be secure in his sense of salvation, thus conflates with the despair caused by political defeat and the resulting persecution. Whereas Hill argues that when writing Grace Abounding “Bunyan seems to feel that his doubts and temptations are all behind him” (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 74), Keeble would have us remember that: [R]esourcefulness in countering persecution carries over into the spirit of adventure, the sense of omnipresent danger and the stress on alert watchfulness in nonconformist writing. Common experience taught the need for wariness, discernment, skill in detection and a ready responsiveness to unexpected eventualities. (49–50)
Early in the description of his conversion, Bunyan notes the sudden sense of sin that overtook him during a game of tipcat—a seemingly harmless children’s game similar to today’s stick-ball; a sudden sense of despair convinced him that redemption was beyond his reach (11; par. 24). The narrator then continues to explicate the Tempter’s diabolic strategies. The conscience is first benumbed; afterward: which frame, he stilly and slyly supplyeth with such despair, that though not much guilt attendeth the Soul, yet they continually have a secret conclusion within them, that there is no hopes for them. (11; par. 25)
The Tempter, in other words, leads the Christian to believe that he has committed an unforgiveable sin, even when, in fact, “not much guilt attendeth” the sin. In paragraphs 22–25 Bunyan describes committing an offense—he did, after all, take part in the game of tipcat—which the Tempter led him to interpret as an unforgiveable sin. This attempt is a way station on the road to an even more serious assault on the soul which is depicted in paragraphs 132–140: during the course of a year Satan encourages the narrator to sell Christ (41; par. 133). Bunyan resists these temptations, but “sometimes also the Tempter would make me believe I had consented to it; then should I be as tortured on a Rack for whole dayes together” (42; par. 136). Satan, in other words, has led Bunyan to confuse the idea of sin with sin itself; the boundaries between imagining sin and committing it have been erased. Having been granted a short reprieve from his sufferings, the Chief of Sinners is once more overwhelmed with guilt (44; par. 144): Bunyan is now tortured by the scriptural tale of Esau’s selling of his birthright (44; par. 145). In his discussion of Satan’s view of Jacob’s ladder to heaven in Paradise Lost (3.501–525) Stachniewski avers that: Milton is drawing on the double typology characteristic of Calvinists: biblical events had positive or negative application to individuals depending on their elect or reprobate identity [...]. Satan’s position is to be contrasted with that of Jacob. Jacob was awed by the vision, after he had cheated Esau out of his father’s blessing, into (what was seen as) repentance. As we will see, Satan is shortly to be implicitly assimilated to Esau. (351–52)
44
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
When tortured by a feeling of identity with Esau who, once having sold his birthright had no possibility of regaining it, Bunyan seems to be confused: is he the gullible victim of a satanic cheater, or is he an avatar of the cheater himself? Hill argues that “Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is about getting to heaven, where we seek our reward; [while] all Milton’s great poems are about living on earth” (Milton and the English Revolution 458). It can be claimed, however, that Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is also about living on earth: he or she who lives on earth is exposed to the assaults of Satan, to a Tempter who has the ability to enter into the believer’s mind and by an ingenious mixture of truth and lies, reminiscent of those disinformation techniques often used by political leaders, convince him that he has sinned, thus leading him into despair. Milton’s Satan, as we know, does not despair: “What though the field be lost? / All is not lost” (1.105–106). Or in the words of Bunyan’s somewhat more laconic Tempter, “I will have my end accomplished.” I have suggested that Bunyan’s Tempter can usefully be compared to a political leader who spreads disinformation to instill in his followers a sense of despair; the purpose of this despair is the engendering of a conviction that the leader’s decisions are inevitable. In his role of leader the Tempter recalls, of course, the Satan of Paradise Lost, whose leadership function is a central aspect of his identity. Yet the political leader is not the only one who can be said to achieve his ends by inserting certain thoughts into the mind of his follower. The artist, too, is a creator of visions, first giving them reality on canvas, on the page or on the stage, and then in the mind of the observer, listener, or reader. The Tempter, then, is reminiscent of Milton’s Satan as a creator of visions, an artist. In one of the most memorable visions described in Grace Abounding, Bunyan tells us that after a particularly horrible blasphemous thought had bolted out of his heart: [I often] did compare my self in the case of such a Child, whom some Gypsie hath by force took up under her apron, and is carrying from Friend and Country; kick sometimes I did, and also scream and cry; but yet I was as bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away. (32; par. 102)
The gypsy woman, whose sex and ethnicity label her a quintessential outsider, leads the sinner away from the familiar world; might she not be introducing him into the realm of art? Readers have long noted that the Satan of Paradise Lost can be viewed as a parodic creator. No sooner have the fallen angels arrived in hell than they set to work building Pandaemonium. The latter’s roof is made of “fretted gold” (1.717), which was founded by the “wondrous art” (1.703) of the fallen angels; in this it is similar to “heaven’s pavement, trodden gold” (1.682). The Miltonic narrator takes the opportunity to tease earthly architects and those who admire their magnificent creations. In Fowler’s words, we are probably meant to see the erection of Pandaemonium “as a grotesque travesty of the rising of earth out of chaos at the Creation,” although he does call attention to scholarly suggestions that Milton may have been hinting at a connection between the splendid edifices erected by the Church of Rome, such as St. Peter’s, and the devil’s palace (84–85n). Sandra M. Gilbert notes that:
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
45
[T]hough Milton goes to great lengths to associate visionary prophetic powers with Adam, God, Christ, and the angels, that visionary night world of poetry and imagination, insofar as it is a demonic world, is more often subtly associated in Paradise Lost with Eve, Satan, and femaleness than with any of the “good” characters except the epic speaker himself. (376)
Bunyan’s Tempter, on the other hand, has not generally been depicted as an artist. A look, however, at his use of heat and cold imagery enables us to conclude that he is quite a capable poet; the following lines recall biblical poetry in their rhythm and density: “You are very hot for mercy, but I will cool you [...] I will cool you insensibly, by degrees [...] though you be burning hot at present, yet, if I can pull you from this fire, I shall have you cold before it be long” (35; par. 110). Bunyan, of course, was immersed in the prose and poetry of the Hebrew Bible and would have noted the repeated, almost formulaic, use of heat and cold to describe God’s wrath. The Psalmist writes that “[m]y heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue” (Ps. 39.3); The Lord’s word “runneth very swiftly. He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold? He sendeth out his word, and melteth them” (Ps. 147.15–18). And the heat and cold imagery of Revelations 3:15–16 would not have been lost upon Bunyan: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” At the outset of Grace Abounding the narrator avers that the creator of the dreams and visions that had first frightened him was not Satan, but rather God; as a child his taking the Lord’s name in vain resulted in repeated nightmares and visions (5, 6; par. 4). In these God-sent dreams devils would tempt the child to follow them away (6; par. 5). Yet while the young Bunyan’s earliest visions were presumably introduced into his mind at the Lord’s initiative, God also allowed the Tempter to implant visions in Bunyan’s mind, and much of Satan’s activity, as described by Bunyan in the course of the autobiography, involves creating visions and instilling them in the Chief of Sinners’ mind. Bunyan’s Tempter can therefore be seen as an artist, albeit a parodic creator, since these visions are ultimately sterile, fruitless, leading to spiritual paralysis: “I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up. I thought I was as with a Tempest driven away from God” (49; par. 162–163). On noticing a readiness on the part of the Sinner for prayer, the Tempter endeavors to convince him that such prayer will merely anger God: “yea, now to pray, seeing God hath cast you off, is the next way to anger and offend him more then ever you did before” (54; par. 176). The outcome of these visions for Bunyan is an inability to act: he is stymied in his attempts at communication with the Deity. Milton’s Satan, as we know, makes his first attempt on Eve’s virtue by means of visions which he implants in her sleeping mind (5.28–94): he causes her to dream that an angel convinces her to taste the forbidden fruit. The framework of this dreamsequence replicates the Tempter’s assaults on Bunyan. In much the same way as, in the words of Stranahan, “we cannot tell when a new text will ambush the hero and produce either intense joy or despair in the personal narrative of Grace Abounding” (331), Eve is unexpectedly attacked by a discomfiting dream (5.34–35). In her discussion of boundary violation and ego dissolution in Paradise Lost Jacqueline DiSalvo points out the dangers the poet perceives to be immanent in the
46
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
blurring of boundaries: “ego boundaries are in some ways also those of civilization.” Milton can be seen to anxiously identify the loss of boundaries with evil: “On the many levels here in which Eve’s flying dream signifies access to either sub- or suprarational realms, the experience is prohibited” (129). Yet the artist’s task may be said to involve that very blurring of ego boundaries that Milton believed to be dangerous. On the one hand, artists throughout the ages have posited a view of themselves as a conduit for inspiration whose source is outside, or even above the self; this source can be heavenly (a Muse) or earthly (e.g., a beloved woman). On the other hand, the receiver of the vision, whether reader, playgoer, or viewer of the work, often becomes so involved with the work of art that self is temporarily effaced. It can therefore be claimed that Satan’s entrance into the mind of another prefigures perils endemic to both the poet’s and reader’s trade. In a discussion of enthrallment in the poetry of John Keats, Clifford Adelman defines the one enthralled as “he who remains trapped in one of the Chambers of the mind whose attitude toward conventions, beliefs, and the language which expresses them remains static” (100–101). Some dreams/visions are dangerous: they can cause the dreamer a kind of paralysis, thus locking him into fruitless ways of thinking and feeling. The Chief of Sinners is aware of a similar sense of enthrallment, although he does not use the word. At a number of points in the narrative he expresses a feeling of entrapment which Adelman (and perhaps Keats) would have recognized: “as yet I knew not where I was. Neither as yet could I attain to any comfortable perswasion that I had Faith in Christ, but instead of having satisfaction, here I began to find my Soul to be assaulted with fresh doubts about my future happiness” (20; par. 56–57). The catalyst for this sense of entrapment may be one of those biblical verses with which Bunyan is constantly bombarded: It is neither in him that willeth, nor in him that runneth, but in God that sheweth mercy, Rom. 9.16. With this Scripture I could not tell what to do; for I evidently saw that unless the great God of his infinite grace and bounty, had voluntarily chosen me to be a vessel of mercy, though I should desire, and long, and labour untill my heart did break, no good could come of it. (21; par. 58–59)
Having fallen under the influence of an unidentified man of religion, the young Bunyan made certain changes in his behavior: he ceased swearing and began to find great pleasure in reading the Bible. As a result, “our Neighbors did take me to be a very godly man, a new and religious man, and did marvel much to see such a great and famous alteration in my life and manners; and indeed so it was, though yet I knew not Christ, nor Grace, nor Faith, nor Hope” (12–13; par. 31;). On looking back at this period, in other words, Bunyan concludes that during the course of a whole year he had been locked into a hypocritical stance so profound that “had I then died, my state had been most fearful” (13; par. 31); but unlike the “poor painted Hypocrite” to whom he compares himself (13; par. 32), Bunyan had not even been aware of his own hypocrisy. At this point Bunyan lacked that saving faith that, according to Keeble, “consists in an emotional cleaving to God which is, wherever we turn in nonconformist writing, the gift not of understanding but of grace, the fruit not of study alone but of experience” (177–78). To the extent that the parodic artist succeeds in implanting in
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
47
the sinner’s mind visions whose source is unclear—and the sinner does not appear to have any choice as to admitting the vision into his mind—he is endangering his victim, locking him into a mind-set that does not allow him to progress on the road to salvation. During this same period the young Bunyan continues to get much delight from one of his favorite pastimes: bell ringing;15 yet one day he is prevented from engaging in this activity by the harrowing vision of what would happen were one of the heavy bells to fall upon him. Subsequently he suffers from visions of the fall of the beam that holds the bell, and finally from the possibility that the steeple itself might fall on his head; these frightening images result in his staying away from the bell-steeple altogether (13–14; par. 33–34). Throughout the description of his feelings during this period of what hindsight leads him to call hypocrisy (12–14; par. 28–36), Bunyan does not specify the source of the thoughts and visions that tortured him so intensely. This is in contrast to other sections of the narrative, in which Bunyan usually cites the Tempter, or occasionally God, as the source of his visions. Since Bunyan attaches significance to the source of an idea, his decision not to mention the source is itself important. I would therefore claim that Bunyan may very well have sensed the danger of being the receptacle of visions whose source was not clear. Such visions, as we observe in the case of the bell and steeple, are paralyzing for Bunyan. The vision of being knocked on the head by a church-steeple leads him to change his outward behavior—he does not engage in his hobby of bell ringing anymore—but does not draw him any closer to his Savior (14; par. 36). Bunyan reverts to the theme of bell ringing years later in A Book for Boys and Girls (first published in 1686), his collection of didactic poems, which editor Graham Midgley notes was very popular both during Bunyan’s lifetime and after his death (Bunyan, The Poems 185). In the allegorical poem “Upon a Ring of Bells,” he does not present bell ringing as an illegitimate endeavor in itself: “When ringers handle them with Art and Skill, / They then the ears of their Observers fill, / With such brave Notes” (231; 961–963). Yet the most important factor deciding the beneficence or malevolence of the music is the nature of the ringer: Or if these Ringers do the Changes ring, Upon my Bells, they do such Musick make, My Soul then (Lord) cannot but bounce and sing, So greatly her they with their Musick take. But Boys (my Lusts) into my Belfry go, And pull these Ropes, but do no Musick make; They rather turn my Bells by what they do, Or by disorder make my steeple shake. (232; 982–989)
Lack of clarity as to the origin of vision, in other words, can result in one’s being enthralled by thoughts that are unfruitful; such thoughts may encourage outward 15 Although, as Christopher Hill notes, bell ringing was far from being opposed by all Puritans (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 265), it bore “papist” connotations for many Protestants.
48
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
adjustments in behavior, which leave the sinner with a sense of achievement but do not ultimately further salvation. If the Sinner does not know the source of his visions, the danger may be even greater: at one point Bunyan appears to fear a blurring of the limits between his very identity and that of the Tempter. In an image prophetic of that used by Milton to detail Satan’s appearance during his dream-assault upon Eve (“Squat like a toad” [4.800]), Bunyan notes that “I was more loathsom in mine own eyes then was a toad” (27; par. 84). The feeling that one is wallowing in sin and corruption is a result of Bunyan’s confusion as to the boundary between his own self and that of the Tempter: “I thought now that every one had a better heart then I had; [...] I thought none but the Devil himself could equalize me for inward wickednes and pollution of minde. [...] [S]ure, thought I, I am forsaken of God, sure I am given up, to the Devil, and to a reprobate mind” (27; par. 84); note the passive structure of the verbs in the latter sentence, which may indicate a sense of confusion as to the agent of the act. John Keats’s famous description of the poetical character highlights an inherent joyousness: “It has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character— it enjoys light and shade [...]. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er delights the camelion Poet.”16 T.S. Eliot, however, appears to emphasize the poet’s pain; as Eliot would have it, the poet continually surrenders “himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (52–53). Bunyan depicts what can happen to the mind of the unconverted when exposed to that “extinction of personality” which is the portion of the artist. Although I have so far pictured Milton’s and Bunyan’s Satan characters as poets, a case can be made that their artistic calling is that of the actor. Although the actor speaks words presumably composed by someone else—the Tempter speaks to his victim by means of words taken from the Scriptures—his talent and skill often enable him to instill in his listener a sense of helplessness in the face of the onslaught of words. Members of the audience at a play find it difficult, and unnecessary, to distance themselves from what is happening on the stage; they may actually wish to temporarily suspend the emotional distance between themselves and the characters on stage. Both the narrator of Grace Abounding and Milton’s Eve describe a frightening lack of control when they recall watching a satanic actor encouraging tree-worship. In his dream-assault upon Eve Satan is found standing beside the tree of knowledge in costume: “shaped and winged like one of those from heaven / By us oft seen; his dewy locks distilled / Ambrosia” (5.55–57). Eve envisions Satan apostrophizing the tree, addressing it as if it had sacred properties: “on that tree he also gazed; / And O fair plant, said he, with fruit surcharged, / Deigns none to ease thy load and taste thy sweet” (5.57–59). Bunyan tells of the devil’s attempts to “turn away my mind, by presenting to my heart and fancy the form of a Bush, a Bull, a Besom, or the like, as if I should pray to those; to these he would also [...] so hold my mind, that I was as 16 From Keats’s letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
49
if I could think of nothing else, or pray to nothing else but to these, or such as they” (34; par. 108). The Tempter has, it would seem, turned away Bunyan’s rational mind, and appealed, as does the actor, to his heart and fancy, thus causing him to believe that he is being led by a force over which he has no control. Or in Eve’s words, “the pleasant savoury smell [of the tree in her dream] / So quickened appetite, that I, methought, / Could not but taste” (5.84–86). According to Keeble: Although “credulous” and deceived by the snake, Eve remains “sinless” until persuaded by her intellectual error to trust the snake rather than God. Though prompted by logic and argument, the sin resides not in the mind but in the heart, which is why Adam, who is not deceived, can yet commit it [...]. As presented in Grace Abounding what Bunyan felt was [...] hardly under his own control. The clear implication of his narrative is that no man can think himself into fiducia [trust in God], reason himself into love. (178)
Satan’s and the Tempter’s abilities as actors can be measured by their success in leading their audience to place faith in the reality of their words, thus causing a suspension of intellectual disbelief in the satanic script. In his analysis of the role played by Grace Abounding in the development of autobiography as a genre William C. Spengemann calls attention to the idiosyncratic importance of the act of writing to the author himself; at the same time Spengemann finds in Grace Abounding evidence of “the Dissenter’s belief that the truth resides primarily in the religious life, rather than in some formulated theology, and is therefore a matter of individual experience and personal conviction” (48). Bunyan, however, may be said to have taken his writing a step further than what nonconformist thinking would generally have approved; or in Spengemann’s words, “Bunyan’s identification of the truth with his own peculiar experiences comes very close to erasing altogether that dividing-line between the autobiography and the life it recounts” (49). Stranahan has called attention to the central role played by biblical texts in erasing the dividing line between Grace Abounding and Bunyan’s life. Having defined “the dramatic appearance of biblical passages in [Bunyan’s] mind” as “among the most important events in the narrative” (329), Stranahan concludes that “an ‘event’ occurred for Bunyan when, so to speak, his life had ‘caught up’ with a particular experience described in the Bible. At that point he would suddenly become conscious of the verse that fitted his needs” (343). The verse of which Bunyan suddenly became aware, however, appears on occasion to have been suggested to him by none other than the Tempter. Bunyan suffers through a long period during which he is tortured by two questions: Is he numbered among the elect?17 What if the day of grace is already past? It soon becomes clear that the Tempter is the source of this text; moreover he convinces Bunyan that the thrust of Romans 9 is that he had better give up striving for salvation; his cause is lost (21; par. 60). There is special danger in the Chief of Sinners’ confusion as to the source of this text: “By these things I was driven to my 17 In her discussion of Grace Abounding Tamsin Spargo suggests that: “Presented as a ‘transcript’ of experience, the text is seen both to accomplish and attest to release from the despair which accompanies fear of reprobation, and to integrate its subject-author into the community of the elect” (John Bunyan 55).
50
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
wits end, not knowing what to say, or how to answer these temptations, (indeed, I little thought that Satan had thus assaulted me, but that rather it was my own prudence thus to start the question)” (21; par. 61). The biblical text is presumably the same holy text, no matter who is responsible for its presence in the believer’s mind. But whether its availability to the believer contributes to the latter’s sense of reprobation or conviction of salvation may be a function of the person who implants it in the mind, of the actor who, as it were, performs the text. In “Drama, Performativity and Performance” W.B. Worthen discusses the complicated, dynamic relationship between text and performance: What are dramatic performances performances of? [...] [A] performance is not usually of one text in any direct sense, since a number of different versions of a classic play might be consulted as part of the production process [...]. The text is absorbed into the multifarious verbal and nonverbal discourses of theatrical production, transformed into an entirely incommensurable thing, an event. Texts in the theater are always more like the phone book than like Hamlet: they are transformed by the performative environment of the theater into something else, a performance. (1100)
Biblical texts are enacted in Bunyan’s mind, with the mind itself as the theater and Bunyan’s soul as the audience. The identity of the actor, therefore, becomes signally important, since according to his identity we can know what kind of theater he is performing in: is it a burlesque stage, a light opera house, or does it present the “high” art of the drama? When the actor is the Tempter, as is the case in Paragraphs 58–61, the theatrical “event” is frightening for the audience and productive of despair. Current performance studies, according to Worthen, grapple with questions of authority vis-à-vis the supposed original text: “Understanding dramatic performance as authorized in a relatively straightforward way by a scripted text does indeed consign theater [...] to some faded conceptual Levittown: dramatic performance is a series of authorized reproductions, each plotted on the blueprint of the authorial text” (1094). For Bunyan, as for Protestant thinkers in general, the authorial text itself— the Bible—was in no way contingent; its authority was not open to challenge. In his readings and explications of the Bible, Bunyan may be said to have aimed precisely at such an “authorized reproduction” as that which Worthen suggests is appropriate to the theaters (and living rooms?) of Levittown. Yet the achievement of one of Bunyan’s purposes in composing Grace Abounding, the wish to prove to himself that he is numbered among the elect, was mitigated against by his methodology. As Spargo notes: “Bunyan’s attempts to decide whether individual scriptural texts place him as elect or reprobate are accompanied by a series of engagements with language and authority, both spiritually or theologically and materially or culturally” (The Writing of John Bunyan 55–56). The act of writing an autobiography itself is, of course, a supreme “engagement with language and authority,” especially if we recall that Grace Abounding served as a “scripted text” in Worthen’s sense: one meant to serve as a blueprint for spiritual autobiographies written by postulants at the gates of nonconformist congregations; many of these applicants would, as already noted, actually read/perform their texts in front of members of the congregation. The claim for interpretive authority, as Spargo suggests, leads Bunyan to produce a text that “must itself participate in a contest to establish its own legitimacy of meaning.” This and more:
The Tempter of Grace Abounding
51
He must, in effect, try to control the deferring, differentiating effects of language, to imitate in the words of man the assumed singularity and transcendence of meaning of the Word of God. The possibility of incorrect interpretation, of misreading, which informs the narrative section of Grace Abounding is the cause of a profound anxiety about the narrator’s spiritual condition. (The Writing of John Bunyan 66)
Doubt and despair, whose presence in the mind would be most conveniently attributed to the Tempter, could never be completely banished. As an opponent of the Reformation in England, Sir Thomas More was aware of the dangers inherent for the Christian in a sense of despair; and in his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation Vincent argues with his uncle that God’s “own gracious presence” is not enough to comfort the Christian as he faces life’s troubles: while you tell me this [that God’s comfort is never far from the believer] I cannot but grant it for true, yet if I had not now heard it from you, I would not have remembered it, nor would it have fallen to my mind. And moreover, as our tribulations shall increase in weight and number, so shall we need not only one such good word or twain, but a great heap of them, to stable and strengthen the walls of our hearts against the great surges of this tempestuous sea. (3)
It then falls to Anthony to reply that God will provide “outward teachers” and will himself teach the faithful “inwardly.” Both uncle and nephew agree that escape from despair cannot be taken for granted; to avoid the “peril of spiritual drowning” (3) one must be constantly exposed to a “great heap” of good words. In his discussion of religious despair Stachniewski argues that:18 making sense of social and economic circumstances can be negative, against one’s interest, as well as self-serving. The negative aspects of Calvinism tended to bond with negative aspects of the social and economic milieu, in particular the severity of parental discipline and the menacing volatility of the economy for the lower to middle orders of society from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Religious ideas have powerful effects when they seem to answer to specific social circumstances, and these circumstances can make painful explanations seem most credible to the imagination. (6)
If, as Stachniewski claims, there is a great deal of evidence for the contention that “Calvinism and puritanism were conducive to despair and that this was both a widely recognized and widespread phenomenon in England at least from the late sixteenth century,” it was vital to “distinguish the despair of the reprobate from its potentially 18 Furlong avers that: “The Puritans tend to be thought of as a gloomy people, but it seems unlikely that this was usually the case. Their writings suggest an extraordinary intellectual vitality (in Bunyan’s work this is matched by an imaginative vitality), a thrilling sense of purpose, and a genuine delight in the fellowship of fellow-believers” (44). Yet, Furlong argues, this did not prevent them from suffering from depression: “The continual stretching of their minds to sermons and long extempore prayers, and of their emotions to feelings of love and warmth towards God, combined with hard work and lack of play, inevitably drove them to moods of dullness and boredom, and to far worse states of gloom, anxiety and despair. Bunyan experienced all these states to the full, together with appalling fears of rejection by God ending in perpetual damnation” (40).
52
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
misleading simulacrum in the pre-conversion experience of the elect.” Stachniewski adds that as far back as 1628 Charles I forbade anyone lower in Church hierarchy than bishops and deans to preach on the “deep points” of predestination, election, reprobation, since these were perceived as issues that encouraged despair (27). The Tempter of Grace Abounding used his considerable abilities as an actor to commit the very mischief that the king had warned against, thus causing his audience— Bunyan’s soul—great suffering. The Tempter can be seen as a poet and an actor: perhaps as a Shakespearean actor, situated at that point where poetry meets performance. “An act of memory and an act of creation,” according to Worthen, “performance recalls and transforms the past in the form of the present” (1101). The Chief of Sinners warns himself, and his readers as well, against possible dangers to the audience of such a performance, in which satanic acts of creation, based upon biblical scripts, are performed within the theater of the believer’s mind. While disguised as a toad, an angel, or a serpent, the Satan of Paradise Lost implanted dreams and ideas in the mind of Eve. The Satan of Grace Abounding instills fear and despair in the mind and heart of the Chief of Sinners. He does this, however, through taking on the role, although not the outward form, of a human; he manipulates the thoughts, feelings, and dreams of another man, much in the same way as would a political leader or an artist. The Satan character has taken another step on his road from archangel to human.
Chapter 3
Diabolus and His Unholy War Because of the great success of The Pilgrim’s Progress, both during Bunyan’s lifetime and in the course of the centuries to follow, and the subsequent limited success of The Holy War, Bunyan scholars have often found it necessary to include an apologia, or perhaps even disclaimer, in their discussions of what E.M.W. Tillyard has called “England’s Puritan epic” (English Epic 406). Christopher Hill argues that while the allegories of The Pilgrim’s Progress focus on the person of Christian, in The Holy War “the battles are fought between allegorical puppets, not real human beings” (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 249). Stuart Sim notes that “the text has traditionally been regarded as the least successful of Bunyan’s fictions, and has tended to inspire even less enthusiasm among critics than Badman.” Yet Sim has suggested that a case can be made for viewing The Holy War as Bunyan’s “most dramatic, and certainly his most ambitious text” (90). The Holy War was first published in 1682, some sixteen years after Bunyan’s great spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, with its sweeping range of raw, disturbing, often poignant emotion. According to Tillyard, “the Puritan phase of thought, which gave him his material, was past its zenith when he began to write [The Holy War] and could provide him with only a part of the inspiration it had commanded earlier” (English Epic 386). Although The Holy War, in Tillyard’s words, “embodies Bunyan’s authentic experience as surely as Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress” (404), by the time Bunyan set out to compose his epic, the millennarian hopes which were so pervasive an influence on the preacher-author were “forlorn, anachronistic, unable to mould the great shape of his mind and experience” (391). Or perhaps The Holy War should be approached by means of Joan Webber’s comments on Grace Abounding: “The self-conscious Puritan hopes to be able to move in time, in some sort of meaningful progression of events, from bad to good, from heathen to Christian (or from unsaved to saved) [...]. Thus we see in Bunyan a chronological account of years that are finished, of a struggle that exists in the past and in the memory” (28). The Holy War, in other words, may be less appealing to readers than Bunyan’s great crowd-pleasers precisely because of its distance in time from the seminal experiences of its author’s youth: his participation in the Civil War and his conversion, culminating in his decision to preach God’s Word, whether in the pulpit or by means of the printing press. This scholarly view of The Holy War is conveniently summed up in the title of Clement H. Wyke’s explication of the epic, “Distanced Experience and Faded Vision in The Holy War.” Due to the distance in time between the writing of The Holy War and Grace Abounding, Bunyan’s conversion has been depersonalized, and the visionary framework within which it, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, for that matter, is presented has disintegrated (21). There is, moreover, an additional distance in time which may
54
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
be no less important than that between Bunyan’s conversion and his composition of the The Holy War; conversion, as already noted, was viewed by Bunyan, as well as by many of his nonconformist contemporaries, as an ongoing process. Given that Bunyan was demobilized in 1647, there was a significant distance in time between his experiences as a soldier in the Parliamentary army and his writing of a war epic. The Holy War, according to Wyke, suffers from “the loss of that sense of immediacy between writer and reader felt in [Bunyan’s] use of the authorial ‘I’ which strikes us with a freshness at the beginning of the verse epistle to the reader, but which later gets lost among a quickly moving throng of characters on an over-populated stage” (23). Most problematic of all for Wyke is that at various points in the narrative “Bunyan achieves such a complete sense of distance and objectivity that for him [the conflict being described] becomes no longer a shared experience, but an observed performance that entertains the viewer” (26). It has thus long been a critical commonplace that The Holy War comes out a poor third when compared with Bunyan’s two earlier tours de force (Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress); as an epic it is also weighed on the same scale as its great predecessor, Paradise Lost, and usually found wanting. In his “Prefatory Remarks” on The Holy War nineteenth-century Bunyan editor Henry Stebbing notes that “it is almost impossible to read the beginning of The Holy War without feeling assured that Bunyan was well acquainted with Milton, and derived the general idea of this work from the poems of his great contemporary” (1). Unlike Hill, however, who calls Milton and Bunyan “respectively the greatest poet and the greatest prose writer of late seventeenth-century England, the greatest century of our literature” (“Literature of Defeat” 1), Stebbing adds a significant caveat: “in all considerations of literature, and even in some religious points,” Milton is “immeasurably the superior” of the two (1). Scholars have teased out a number of possible sources for The Holy War in addition to Paradise Lost: Hill notes that Bunyan was familiar with Benjamin Keach’s War with the Devil (1673) (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 142), as well as with John Canne’s Emanuel or God with us, which celebrated Cromwell’s victory over the Scots on September 3, 1650 (250), and Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven, which was first published in 1601; by 1704, it was in its fortieth edition and had sold 100,000 copies (161). These once-popular texts all contain elements appearing in The Holy War (250–51). Tillyard points out, however, that the “substance of The Holy War is the same as that of Grace Abounding. It is the struggle of the soul at war with itself and pulled this way and that by God and the Devil [...]. The theme itself goes right back to the fourth century A.D. and to the Psychomachia of Prudentius” (English Epic 397). Yet whether one agrees with Wyke, that: “Even when Emanuel gets the stage and embattles Diabolus and his army, we get nothing like Milton’s war in heaven, although some of the speeches are proportionately as long as Milton’s” (23); or whether one feels, as does Sim, that the “drama of salvation” with its “stirring battle” and “huge cast, cannot fail to put one in mind of Paradise Lost” (92), the presence of Miltonic influences in The Holy War is palpable. Both Paradise Lost and The Holy War tell of humankind’s fall and ultimate redemption through the intercession of Jesus Christ. The major difference between the two epics thus is not thematic, but rather generic. Milton wrote a dramatic epic,
Diabolus and His Unholy War
55
peopled with characters who play themselves—with the exception of the Sin and Death allegory of book 2—while Bunyan couched his prose narrative in allegory. Victoria Kahn has delineated those traditional objections to allegory which may have led Milton to give the genre a wide berth: “Traditional allegory was seen both as the representation of what is by nature obscure to human understanding and as itself an obscure form of representation [...]. The obscure representation of Sin and Death thus functions as a kind of allegorical parody of allegory” (“Allegory” 189). This and more: Allegory could thus be said to pander to the reader, to commodify truth and thus to obstruct 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. The allegory [of Sin and Death] is thus one of force, of forced signification. (191)
In her discussion of Machiavellian rhetoric vis-à-vis the Sin and Death allegory Kahn avers that the account of Sin’s seduction of Satan is an example of allegory pandering to the reader (Machiavellian Rhetoric 219). Yet for Bunyan, writing not for a “fit audience though few” but for a wide readership, the perceived spoonfeeding of which the genre stood accused would not have been a drawback. In the words of Sharon Achinstein, “Bunyan aimed to educate his everyman Christian in proper habits of reading, and his own readers, of course, would practice these by reading Bunyan’s own allegory [...]. Bunyan supplies marginal notes, repetition, and a plain style” (179). Or as Bunyan himself suggests, somewhat disingenuously, in his preface to Grace Abounding, I could also have stepped into a stile much higher then this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more then here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: God did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. (3–4)
Louis Martz has claimed that “the essential and unique appeal of [The Pilgrim’s Progress] does not lie in Bunyan’s ability to present common things realistically. It lies in his startling ability to convey abstract ideas through the medium of vivid, concrete details and direct, plain language” (vi); for Martz this blending of abstract and concrete is what constitutes allegory (vii). Yet while the basic allegorical structure of The Holy War is clear, the three central nonhuman characters—Shaddai, Emanuel, and Diabolus (God the Father, the Son, and Satan)—are not allegorical; for Bunyan they do not represent forces within the human psyche or kinds of behavior, but are themselves. When comparing The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1 with Part 2 (published in 1684–85, some six years after the first publication of Part 1) Horace J. Sams traces a development away from allegory and toward realism. He reminds us that Old Honest introduces himself, not as honesty in the abstract, but Honest by name; and Mercy does not merely represent the quality of mercy, but is a pleasant young woman named Mercy, which was a fairly common girl’s name at the time. Bunyan,
56
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
in Sams’s words, “provides many such evidences that as a mature author he moves cautiously from medieval allegory towards pure fiction” (222). In her discussion of the writings of the Apostle Paul as an overall referent for treatment of female characters in nonconformist fictional texts Margaret Olofson Thickstun has devoted attention to the form of allegory used by Puritan writers to embody their human characters, both male and female: In order to offer believers a viable model for their own conduct in this world, Puritan authors present their positive characters not as abstract embodiments of ideas but as individuals capable of growing toward those virtues. In Puritan allegory, characters do not represent a Virtue or a Vice, they act virtuously or viciously [...]. When Bunyan presents his allegory of spiritual quest, he chooses his characters and episodes from working-class English life; when Milton offers an allegory of the willful self-destruction of sinfulness, he has Sin discuss her conflicting responsibilities to God and to Satan as if she were an ordinary Puritan housewife. (23)
The Holy War, in other words, is characterized by a blurring of boundaries between allegory and realistic, individual nature, vis-à-vis the individual characters and the town as a whole. To paraphrase Thickstun, old Mr. Incredulity is first of all himself, an individuated literary character, and only secondarily a personification of disbelief; the town of Mansoul is a figure for the human soul at the same time as it is the Bedford or Elstow of mid- to late-seventeenth-century England (23). But while, as Wyke suggests, “the emotional distance between the metaphor of the town and our own souls is so great that we fail to experience intimately” a sense of tragedy and danger (28), at a number of pivotal points in the course of The Holy War the nonallegorical status of Diabolus encourages the reader to view and judge Bunyan’s Satan character according to those parameters that can be usefully applied to Milton’s Satan. I have suggested that the suffering occasioned to Milton and Bunyan by the fact of the Restoration itself, as well as by the accompanying persecution of nonconformists, may be one reason why each writer produced a work built around a dominant Satan character in the mid-1660s (Paradise Lost and Grace Abounding). During the early 1660s, when restoration of the monarchy and changing in direction of the political winds forced nonconformists to doubt the imminence of the Millennium, Revelationtype visions were entertained, written up, and published. Under the headline “Strange News from the West,” we read of a letter from Dantzik in Moravia printed March 21, 1661, reporting the “appearance of a clear, shinning Sun in the East, with several Rayes or beams, about twelve of the Clock at night; and upon each of these Rayes hanged a Skeliton of a dead man, linked fast together with fiery Serpents.” Such gory satanic apparitions might be elicited by the perception that one was living at the end of a heroic, revolutionary era; they would, however, be less appropriate as an image of Satan in a period that called forth the virtues and vices of a quieter life. The Holy War was composed years later, after Bunyan had been released from his long imprisonment, returned to preaching, and published his greatest popular success, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Part I).1 Tillyard suggests that: 1 Keeble notes that 22 editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress were published during the seventeenth century, probably running to over 30,000 copies (128).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
57
It was Bunyan’s misfortune that he began writing too late to be able to use for his art those positive hopes of a holy community in England that had earlier held men’s minds. These hopes, had Bunyan been able to embrace them, would have forced him to be political and to share in the responsibility that a man incurs through advocating definite lines of political action. In these matters Bunyan comes out poorly compared with Milton. (English Epic 391)
Tillyard appears to be criticizing Bunyan for a lack of political awareness in his fictional works, although the preacher’s poverty, lengthy imprisonment, distance from London and lack of formal education would have mitigated against his taking the kind of active political role that Milton took. In Keeble’s words: The shared experience of disillusion and chastened optimism [which accompanied the Restoration], though it took men off from social and political revolution, bred a new understanding of, and sympathy for, the complexities of human psychology, and a clearsighted address to the actual conditions of fallen man. (24)
The necessity of subjecting oneself to persecution, which was the portion of so many nonconformists, was not perceived as the act of a coward, but rather as a sign of strength. According to Keeble, “Christian patience was not presented [by nonconformist preachers and writers] as an abject capitulation to circumstances [...]. On the contrary, it was carefully distinguished from the stagnant quiescence of hopelessness, the indifference of helplessness and the resigned stoicism of pessimism” (198). Such pessimism, or even despair, was an occupational disease of nonconformists during the Restoration. Donald A. Bloom has defined Christian despair as “the continuance of belief in eternal life and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, with a concomitant belief that it does not apply to oneself. [...] But because in Protestantism the individual finds his own salvation, and only through the inner working of the Spirit, the collapse of hope is essentially damnation itself, a sure sign that you are not finally of the elect” (66). It is possible that with the passage of time Bunyan achieved an acceptance of the dashing of millennial hopes, accompanied by a conviction, albeit hesitant, that he himself might be numbered among the elect. This conviction enabled him to compose an epic of salvation in which Satan bears more human, perhaps even endearing, frailties than did the heroic, larger-than-life villain of Paradise Lost. Mr. Badman, the protagonist, if such he may be termed, of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), is a way station on the road between the Tempter of Grace Abounding and Diabolus of The Holy War. In their introduction to Mr. Badman James P. Forrest and Roger Sharrock have noted that our “modern literary sophistication” leads us to perceive greater differences between the latter text and The Pilgrim’s Progress than would have appeared to Bunyan’s contemporary readers. The modern reader focuses on generic differences between the two works, while for Bunyan’s readers the basic similarity was clear: after telling a tale of the good Christian who goes to heaven, the author would surely wish to describe the bad Christian who is damned to hell (xv). In Mr. Badman Bunyan integrated a number of extant literary traditions into a convincing narrrative, as detailed by Forrest and Sharrock: religious instruction
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
58
by means of dialogue (xv–xix); judgment stories (xix–xxvi); the picaresque, the exemplum and the posthumous (xxvi–xxx). Yet Bunyan’s greatest challenge was the need to reconcile his wish to propagate a message for/about all men, for which allegory would be a suitable medium, with an awareness that describing a specific, individuated man might be the most effective means of catching and holding his readers’ attention. Or in the words of Forrest and Sharrock, “Badman’s career is drawn against a firmly delineated social background; and yet the need to condemn classes of sins, rather than simply an individual, tends sometimes to make this background lacking in detail” (xxx). If a major difficulty in composing Mr. Badman was the need to strike a balance between Everyman and Badman, in writing The Holy War, a much more complicated work, Bunyan faced the daunting task of creating a microcosm of human society which was simultaneously Bedford—an English market town—and a macrocosm of the individual human soul. As a human being, Mr. Badman bears two of the most significant characteristics of his angelic predecessors, the Satan of Paradise Lost and the Tempter of Grace Abounding: the ability to feel guilt, accompanied by the inability to sustain this feeling. As I have already argued, both Satan characters are capable of suffering guilt for deeds they perceive to be wrong.2 In his explication of the spiritual ramifications of Mr. Badman’s first serious illness, from which he recovered after undergoing a sickbed repentance, Mr. Wiseman warns of the suspicion attached to such repentance: And hence usually is sick-bed Repentance, and the matter of it: To wit, to be saved from Hell, and from Death, and that God will restore again to health till they mend [...]. I have known many, that, when they have been sick, have had large measures of this kind of Repentance, and while it has lasted, the noyse and sound thereof, has made the Town to ring again: but alas! how long has it lasted? oft-times scarce so long as untill the party now sick has been well (139–140).
Since the patient is motivated by the wish to be rid of physical pain and the fear of death and hell, his repentance is not to be relied upon. What is more, Mr. Wiseman points out examples of patently evil people who are known to have had a sense of guilt: “there wanted in [Mr. Badman], when he was most sensible, a sence of the pollution of his Nature; he only had guilt for his sinful actions, the which Cain, and Pharaoh, and Saul, and Judas, those reprobates, have had before him” (138–139). True repentance, it seems, can only result from internalizing an awareness of original sin, from sustaining the conviction that as an offspring of Adam and Eve one is necessarily fallen. Mr. Wiseman emphasizes this once again by means of the same four figures: Repentance, as was said before, is a being sorry for, and a turning from transgression to God by Jesus Christ. [...] That every sight and sence of sin will not produce repentance, to wit, the godly repentance that we are speaking of, is manifest in Cain, Pharaoh, Saul and Judas, who all of them had sence, great sence of sin, but none of them repentance unto life. (151)
2
Cf. Satan’s soliloquy: Paradise Lost (4.32–113) and Grace Abounding (44; par. 144).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
59
A sense of sin is thus a result of self-awareness, of consciousness of responsibility for one’s own beliefs and behavior; here, William J. Grace calls attention to the role of Paradise Lost in foregrounding self-awareness as a defining human quality: While one would hesitate to use the word “evolution” in regard to the epic, since this term was to emerge meaningfully at a later stage in intellectual history, there remains a kind of constructive evolution, within the framework of real losses, in the allegory of the Fall as Milton presents it. The possibility is indicated of development toward a full selfconsciousness that could be simultaneously harmonized with a full “relating” to the other person. (77)
Growth toward self-awareness, according to nonconformist methodology, could be sustained through meditation. As a means of enabling the believer to focus on his relationship with the Deity, religious meditation was especially useful during periods of regular work and quiet daily routine. In his discussion of Puritan practices of meditation and their significance for the student of The Pilgrim’s Progress U. Milo Kaufmann notes that: as the whole movement lost its raging millennial fervor, the speaking Scripture with its uncompromising personal address as well as those devotional practices for the full application of word to heart were to give place to less coercive authority. Common sense and the golden mean were guides with which one dared to relax [...]. It is clear that not every era is one demanding arduous pilgrimage. (250–51)
Although incapable of permanent repentance, Diabolus is characterized by a sense of fear and a sense of humor; these are vital to his humanity, and allow for a claim that the passage of time, rather than increasing Bunyan’s despair at the delay of the Millennium, led to a mellowing of his feelings of loss. If, as Kaufmann suggests, the Puritan tradition of heavenly meditation, in which Bunyan was immersed, was founded on the “assumption that for the individual to improve his conceptions of things above, he must compare them with things below” (171), it is not surprising that Bunyan’s conceptualization of Satan, whether in Grace Abounding or in The Holy War, was based on qualities associated with fallen humanity. This would be especially true of a character functioning within an allegory, in which the human personality, in modern terms, or the human soul, in Bunyan’s terms, is broken down into literally dozens of characteristics, some deserving of strengthening and others fated to be weakened or even eliminated. According to Wyke: The desire to focus on the present rather than on the future at the final stage of pilgrimage and warfare reflects Bunyan’s later apprehension about the insidious evils which he thought were creeping into [his] church during contemporary times under the deceptive appearance of good [...]. Bunyan, in his closing years, was seeing a spiritual decline in church militancy and a developing complacency which was the result of the church conforming itself to the world as Protestant nonconformists became less the target of persecution. (29)
Although Keeble would have us remember that it was only in 1686, four years after The Holy War’s first publication, that James II began to foster nonconformist support
60
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
for repeal of the Test Acts, thus leading the public to believe that nonconformists were gaining a modicum of royal favor (62), the distance in time from the persecutions of the 1660s and 1670s would have led even the most despairing nonconformist to conclude that survival, and even a minimal prosperity, were possible. It can be claimed, moreover, that the war that constitutes the central allegorical action of The Holy War is much less violent than might be expected in an epic of war written by a former soldier, although Hill has suggested that Bunyan saw little military action during some two and a half years in the Parliamentary army. Yet the young Bunyan must have witnessed much violence during his service, if only as a result of belonging to a unit that went unpaid for long periods of time, leading many soldiers to desert and then terrorize the countryside (A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People 46–47). Stuart Sim makes a case for viewing The Holy War as a narrative in which “rival authorities—one might say rival determinisms—are to be observed competing for control of the individual [...]. We have here what amounts to an early version of that most Calvinist of political doctrines: the individual must be ‘forced to be free.’” To deal with the problem posed by the latter doctrine’s limitation of individual development, Bunyan “chooses to emphasize the exciting and thrilling aspects of election” in what Sim terms “one of the author’s periodic ‘doctrine softening’ exercises” (98). The Holy War, however, often appears to be characterized by a calm, an acceptance, quieter than the excitement and thrills that Sim discovers. Indicative of the comparative nonviolence often prevailing in Bunyan’s macrocosm of the soul is the rather startling fact, revealed by Lord Understanding, Mr. Conscience, and Lord Will-be-will in their trial, that they did not suffer while living under the devil’s rule. Acting as prosecutor, Emanuel asks the three whether they could have been content to spend their whole lives under Diabolus’s rule; they reply “Yes, Lord, yes; for his ways were pleasing to our flesh, and we were grown aliens to a better state” (105). The unregenerate soul would not suffer from that guilt which was the portion of the redeemed; but the soul’s willing choice of the corruption and defilement of carnality, as the three note in their testimony (104–105), seems to have resulted in a simple, genuine enjoyment of the delights of the flesh. Diabolus was, of course, aware of the role played by the pleasures of daily life in misleading the soul. Toward the end of the narrative he suggests to a conclave of his supporters that Mansoul “be taken up in much business, and let them grow full and rich;” when they “begin to grow full, they will forget their misery” (216). The devil’s followers see this advice as “the very masterpiece of Hell, to wit, to choak Mansoul with a fulness of this world, and to surfeit her heart with the good things thereof” (217). The idea that the good things of the earth are a snare for the soul was a Puritan commonplace; the very enjoyableness of the fullness of the earth could not be denied. Bunyan’s emphasis on the pleasure of “earthly delights” would thus be traditional; at the same time the very act of recalling the fullness of the earth adds a sense of comfort, even of comfortableness, to the text as a whole. The peace of the sinner herein detailed is reminiscent of the peace that was the portion of Mr. Badman prior to his death. Mr. Wiseman and Attentive debate somewhat at length the apparently surprising fact that Badman, having cheated his
Diabolus and His Unholy War
61
customers, abused his wife and their God-fearing son, and generally committed every sin possible for one of his somewhat limited station in life, dies what seems to be a peaceful death: [Wiseman:] The strong man armed is the Devil, and quietness is his security. The Devil never fears losing of the sinner, if he can but keep him quiet: can he but keep him quiet in a sinfull life, and quiet in his death, he is his own. [...] Attentive: This is a good one too; for doubtless, peace and quiet with sin, is one of the greatest signs of a damnable state. (163)
Peace of mind as a sign of possible reprobation was later to be developed in Bunyan’s picture of the Mansoulians and their enjoyment of the simple pleasures of everyday life. Given what is known of the largely non-combatant nature of Bunyan’s own military service, it is not surprising that the narrator describes the obvious enthusiasm with which the inhabitants of Mansoul watch their army performing those military exercises that enable soldiers to put on a good display for an admiring civilian population: “They marched, they counter-marched, they opened to the right and left, they divided and subdivided, they closed, they wheeled, made good their front and reer with their right and left wings [...] they took, yea, ravished the hearts that were in Mansoul, to behold it” (110, 111). Emanuel’s army, in other words, spends comparatively little time fighting; to keep the men occupied and maintain high morale, the troops show off for the townspeople, thus affording enjoyment to soldiers and public alike. This is not to say that The Holy War lacks scenes of slaughter: the epic has its share of descriptions of violence, the most memorable of which is the Doubters’ massacre of women and children (the civilian menfolk are apparently beaten, though not killed): They made great havock of whatever they laid their hands on; yea, they fired the Town in several places; many young children also were by them dashed in pieces; yea, those that were yet unborn they destroyed in their mothers wombs [...] women, both young and old, they forced, ravished, and beastlike abused, so that they swooned, miscarried, and many of them died [...] these Diabolonian Doubters turned the men of Mansoul out of their Beds, and now I will add, they wounded them, they mauled them, yea, and almost brained many of them. (204, 205)
Actual descriptions of battles in The Holy War, however, are not usually massive in scale; the narrator rather tends to concentrate on vignettes of individual characters, representing individual human qualities, which forward the purpose of allegory. Captain Execution, for example, one of Emanuel’s loyal generals, was busy in securing the backstreets and the walls of the town. Only after learning the details of Captain Execution’s killing of Mr. Prejudice, Mr. Backward-to-all-but-naught, and Captain Treacherous, are we told almost as an afterthought that Captain Execution “also made a very great slaughter among my Lord Wilbewils souldiers” (89). The narrator then treats us to a laconic, shoulder-shrugging summary of the victory of Emanuel’s forces in what must have been a bloody conflict: “What shall I say, the Diabolonians in these days lay dead in every corner, though too many yet were alive in Mansoul” (90).
62
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
The allegorical structure of The Holy War makes large-scale battle scenes largely unnecessary, thus putting the author of the epic in a paradoxical situation. War epics such as the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Paradise Lost traditionally contain long, heroic, presumably stirring descriptions of battles. Yet undesirable human qualities are probably defeated, or rooted out of the soul, more efficiently one by one; it is in vain that we search Bunyan’s epic for descriptions of battles of the type found in book 6 of Paradise Lost. Although it does not result in casualties (the angels, after all, cannot be killed), Milton’s version of the three-day war in Heaven includes epicscale depictions of the sights and sounds of battle. War was frequently viewed in the seventeenth century as the “offspring of Satan and Hell,” as Stella P. Revard has pointed out; the war waged in heaven (Paradise Lost book 6) is, according to Revard, “Satanic in essence. Rebel and loyal angel alike—even though the loyal are upheld by truth and justice—subscribe to the classical ethic of war making wherein skill and strength determine victory” (196–97). Indeed, the events of the first day of the three-day battle emphasize the violence soldiers perpetrate against one another individually (181). The loyal angels, however, are unable to expel the rebels from heaven by sheer force of arms; eventually, Revard notes, “[n]either might nor heroic enterprise gains the day, but innocence and obedience” (186), and finally the loyal angels are spectators at the Son’s defeat of Satan and his army (191). A summary of Revard’s argument at this point would be that Milton reconciles himself to the need for extensive descriptions of battle dictated by the epic genre by using them as a critique of the genre itself, as well as of war in general (191–92). Bunyan, on the other hand, may not have wished to engage such strong precursors as Homer and Virgil. Then, too, the preacher did not allow himself to forget Mansoul’s function as man’s soul. This might also lead the writer to play down the military details, and Bunyan’s version of the war in heaven is thus that much less heroic in scale. As George L. Scheper points out in his discussion of Reformation attitudes toward allegory,3 there “is complete agreement among the Protestant commentators with the traditional [i.e., pre-Reformation] view that spiritual truths can, in the last analysis, be expressed only metaphorically” (558). Yet contemporary readers were sensitive to a constant tension between metaphor and referent, perhaps exacerbated by difficulties in interpreting the Song of Solomon, which, as Scheper points out, had a “prodigious exegetic history”; the number of commentaries is “astounding” (556).4 This perceived need to attenuate, or even explain away the explicit sexuality of the Song, may have contributed to a blurring of the boundaries between the physical and
3 In an aptly titled essay—“Bunyan, non-conformism, and the limits of allegory”— Sayre N. Greenfield attempts to reconcile Bunyan’s decision to couch his great fictional works in the form of allegory, a genre whose “metaphorical distancing” tends to “strive too much for system” (439), with the palpable vigor of his allegorical characters. 4 Scheper notes that early catalogues and bibliographies list more commentaries on the Song than on any other book of the Bible except for the Psalms, all of Paul’s epistles taken together, and the Gospels. Scheper’s checklist of commentaries through the seventeenth century totals 500 and is, he avers, incomplete (556).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
63
the spiritual. In his explication of Milton’s revisions of the Song in Paradise Lost Noam Flinker states that: Milton’s narrator adds to the love discourse in the epic as he thematizes the relations between Adam and Eve in the praise of “Wedded Love” [...] as well as in terms of his own courtship of the Heavenly Muse. This places the discourse about Eve’s dreams in a context of a broad series of love relations that explore a set of connections between love and desire that include interaction between Adam and Eve, the narrator’s desire for and fear of his Muse as well as the ways in which the narrator’s choice of language to describe love is simultaneously an account of the actions of his characters and an expression of his own inspired love for holy song. On this level, the narrator’s choice of Canticles to express Adam’s love for Eve becomes a medium for expressing tensions between lover and beloved as well as between singer and muse. (The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature 158)
In obscuring the limits between holy and profane, between allegory and what would later be called realism, Bunyan was thus following a central trend in biblical hermeneutics. Conventional wisdom might seem to argue that Bunyan’s choice of allegory as his preferred fictional genre should somehow have rendered impossible the incontrovertible vitality and individuality of many of his characters. In his classic discussion of Paradise Lost Samuel Johnson argues that: To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity. (1: 133)
In his engagement with his own imprisonment Bunyan may have found comfort by allegorizing his stay in jail as a pilgrimage. Bunyan was, of course, familiar with pilgrimage as mandated in the Hebrew Bible: three times a year—during Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles—Jewish males went up to Jerusalem to the Holy Temple: “Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles: and they shall not appear before the Lord empty” (Deut. 16.16). The Hebrew term aliya leregel (the three holidays are called regalim) comes from the word for foot, indicating, of course, that the faithful actually made the trip on foot. This was, however, not an individual act of worship, but rather part of the normative religious observance of the ethnic group, as was pre-Reformation pilgrimage. Bunyan would have rejected those aspects of pilgrimage redolent of the hated “idol-worship,” yet the act of pilgrimage could serve him as a convenient metaphor for the soul’s unending attempts at achieving unity with the Deity. Indeed, nineteenth-century critic J.W. Hales contended that “it is difficult to conceive how Bunyan could have been brought into contact with the literary culture of his time without being ruined. For it was altogether unfavourable to such intensity
64
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
and fervour as characterized his nature” (Sharrock 78). Gordon Teskey also speaks of “the uncannily familiar [allegorical] characters of Bunyan, who seem to be being turned into writing by a force that bends all their actions to suit what they are called” (25). Bunyan’s ability to create allegorical characters who are at the same time individuated characters can be explained, however, by means of Bunyan’s own attitude toward Scriptural language. Northrop Frye has discussed the image of Christian’s burden (The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1) as an illustration of the relation of ideology, allegory, and realistic story. Bunyan’s hero begins his pilgrimage weighed down by a heavy knapsack— his sins—which falls off at a certain point in his journey; in Frye’s words, this is “a rhetorical analogue to the Christian ideology of the forgiveness of sins through the atonement of Christ.” Frye notes that as long as its “ideology remained central in British Protestant middle-class homes, The Pilgrim’s Progress was cherished in every such home as a kind of appendix to the Bible. After the ideology waned, The Pilgrim’s Progress fell out of fashion [...]. But the story can still be read as a story” (Words with Power 59–60). Nevertheless, for Bunyan himself the possibility of a separation between ideology and story, between allegorical character and individuated character, did not really exist. From Genesis on, the word/Word itself is powerful. Adam is empowered to name the living creatures (Gen. 2.19); such power is usually an attribute of the Deity, according to the Psalmist: “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Ps. 147.4). The clearest statement of the blurring of boundaries between language and referent is found at the beginning of The Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1.1). And if the word is so holy that once spoken it cannot be recalled (as was the case in Jacob’s theft of his brother’s blessing; the best Jacob could do to compensate Esau for having given the elder brother’s blessing to the younger was to give him a supplementary blessing—Gen. 27.36–40), how much more sacred did the written word become. As Ruth Ap Roberts points out, ancient Jewish culture had a profound sense of the holiness of language (2). Roberts notes the special “relish” the English had for the Hebrew Bible (5): perhaps “there never was a time when the Bible was more in men’s speech than with the Puritans, even in their names” (9). As well, in the words of Morton Bloomfield, the “Biblical [overtly didactic] wisdom tradition found its greatest welcome in northern countries, especially in England. English literature has always had, until very recently, a strong wisdom aspect and some of it can be traced to Biblical sources” (27). It would not be far-fetched to claim that Bunyan’s ability to blur the border between allegorical characterization and individual characters was a function of his own relationship to Holy Scripture. In her analysis of Grace Abounding Maxine Hancock notes that “Bunyan had an intensely personal and ego-involved relationship to text,” which is “an expression of the Protestant demand that a reader experience subjectively what he reads about in the Scripture” (74–75). One of the most painful temptations visited upon the Chief of Sinners occurs when Satan pours “floods of blasphemies” upon his spirit, by suggesting that Holy Scripture may be no more than a collection of fables; moreover, the Tempter would challenge Bunyan to prove that Mohammed is less of a savior than Jesus (31; par. 96, 97). Satan, in other words,
Diabolus and His Unholy War
65
leads the Sinner to think about the metatext itself—Christian Scripture as a whole— in blasphemous terms. Yet Satan’s hermeneutics may be faulty because they are intellect-based rather than subjective, and in their ultimate sterility recall the “vain wisdom” and “false philosophy” of the fallen angels of Paradise Lost who beguile the time so pleasantly in Pandaemonium. Critics generally agree that Bunyan’s response to Scripture, as detailed in Grace Abounding, was physical as well as spiritual. Hancock notes that Bunyan describes his interaction with individual words and whole texts in physical terms: a sentence “fell with weight” upon his spirit (21; par. 62); texts can “seize” (22; par. 64) or hold down (44; par. 145) the author (77). Stranahan points out that “instead of first giving the text and then telling an anecdote to explain its meaning, Bunyan introduces biblical verses and implies that his own life testifies to the truth in them” (332). Yet if Bunyan’s unmediated response to biblical texts would seem to involve a total and immediate acceptance of their authority, Felicity A. Nussbaum argues that “Bunyan’s relationship to authority was certainly as troubled as any Puritan’s might have been” (22); if we forget that Grace Abounding was written in prison, in defiance of the authorities who wanted to silence the preacher, we do so at our peril. Bunyan himself must have been aware of the danger inherent in the “subjectivism” entailed by the Reformation, according to Peter J. Carlton: “By constituting certain thoughts and feelings as happenings, such statements transformed mental events into direct communications from God, making them implicitly authoritative” (20). By granting validity to immediate, unmediated (what would now be called emotional) responses to Scripture, whether to individual words, phrases, or whole narratives, as he does in Grace Abounding, Bunyan was proleptically validating his own future fictional creations. The Holy War contains many vignettes, shorthand portraits of characters who are individuated at the same time as they are allegorical: for example, Forget-good, “a very sory fellow he was. He could remember nothing but mischief, and to do it with delight” (25), or Mr. Loth-to-stoop, “an old man a Diabolonian [...] a stiff man in his way, and a great doer for Diabolus; him therefore they sent, and put into his mouth what he should say” (77–78). The shorthand nature of these portraits is often reflected in the sentence structure. As Bloomfield notes, because of its didactic agenda the wisdom tradition of Scripture tends toward disjunction, or short, separate units composed in brief, dense sentences (24–25), such as could easily be remembered. Bunyan’s depictions of the battles taking place in and around Mansoul may also be taken as discrete incidents, rather than as wars whose narration stretches over whole books. This, too, tends to weaken the expectation of descriptions of violence which would usually accompany a war narrative. These battle scenes are somewhat reminiscent of Michael’s brief, offhand mention of the conquering of Canaan in his history lesson in book 12: “the rest / Were long to tell, how many battles fought, / How many kings destroyed, and kingdoms won” (12.260–262). Moreover, Bunyan’s descriptions of battle often recall, in their terse matter-of-factness, biblical narrations of the Israelite conquest of Canaan and subsequent struggles with the remnants of the indigenous population. While there are long lists of Diabolus’s senior officers (186–87), Bunyan’s narrator does not supply individual listings of the maimed, wounded, or slain common soldiers: “I shall not give you a particular account of the
66
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
names of the souldiers that were slain in the Town” (83). The war narratives found in Joshua and Judges are characterized by long lists of cities taken and redistributed, kings killed, and body counts, though individual soldiers are not usually named: “So all the cities for the children of Merari by their families, which were remaining of the families of the Levites, were by their lot twelve cities” (Josh. 21.40); “And after [Ehud] was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel” (Judg. 3.31). Yet the clearest, and at the same time the most surprising, example of the nonviolence characterizing The Holy War, I would argue, is not the lack of extensive depiction of bloody war, but rather the fact that the narrative contains no explicit description of Christ’s Passion, his sacrifice, that suffering that for the Christian constitutes the pivotal event of human history. The first reference to Jesus’s death on the cross is made by Emanuel himself, and is couched in economic terms: Mansoul is mine by right of purchase. I have bought it (O Diabolus) I have bought it to my self. Now, since it was my Fathers and mine, as I was his heir, and since also I have made it mine by vertue of a great purchase, it followeth, that by all lawful right the Town of Mansoul is mine. (75)
Salvation theory, of course, routinely makes use of financial imagery. Christ’s death is a ransom paid by God to Satan; Jeffrey B. Russell has pointed out that as far back as the second century AD the theologian Irenaeus (ca. 140–202) propounded “ransom theory,” according to which: Satan legally and justly held [humankind] in his grip. In order to liberate us, God needed to pay him a ransom. Only God could pay the price, because only God could freely choose to pay it. Under the Devil’s power, humans had neither the freedom to choose nor the means to pay. Thus God handed Jesus over to the Evil One in order to obtain the release of imprisoned humanity. (67)
The very use of paying a price as a metaphor for making a sacrifice is so deeply embedded in the language as to be no longer perceived as a figure of speech. Yet when Bunyan chooses to allow the Son himself to employ such a figure for his own passion, the result is a weakened perception of the depth of Emanuel’s suffering on the cross. It is possible, moreover, to see Bunyan’s decision to de-emphasize Christ’s suffering as continuing a dramatic tradition ingrained in Paradise Lost. John M. Steadman has pointed out Paradise Lost’s affinities with domestic and political dramas (23): Satan’s successive alliances with the infernal jailers and with Chaos, the hoary anarch of the abyss, will be progressively fulfilled in the microcosm of the human soul, in the universal macrocosm, and in human society. Each will be subject to confusion—to anarchy or tyrannical order—until confusion is once again confounded, and the peace of divine order restored. (24)
The ramifications of the above vis-à-vis Mansoul are clear; the latter, after all, is at one and the same time a macrocosm of the human soul and a microcosm of human society, in constant motion from confusion to peace and order.
Diabolus and His Unholy War
67
The constant motion, often bordering on confusion, of life in Mansoul, a type of an English market town with all its variety of occupation and activity, is not grounded in a specific historical period; Bunyan could have meant to depict Bedford of the sixteenth as well as the seventeenth century. Although the composer of an allegory would not wish to limit his message to a particular time in history, this lack of historical specificity may also be explained by gaps in Bunyan’s own historical sense. John R. Knott, Jr. reminds us of the importance of Bunyan’s comparative lack of education in any attempt to analyze his work. Bunyan, in Knott’s words, “approached the Bible as only a relatively uneducated person of the seventeenth century could, with an acute sense of the power of the Word to terrify or comfort one who wrestled with it [...]. His torment is that of an unlearned man who must search the Scripture with the conviction that any one verse can save or damn him” (Sword 130, 132). At the same time this lack of formal schooling5 might be an advantage, since it allowed Bunyan to “find analogues for his experience and that of any ordinary Christian in scattered biblical texts with little regard for historical context” (Sword 137). Tamsin Spargo shows how Bunyan turns his daily experiences, those of a relatively uneducated preacher who had to work with his hands to feed his family, to advantage when creating a “map of salvation and damnation”: Mundane, marginal locations such as the hedge, the barn and the stable, which stand literally and metaphorically outside the limits of conventional ecclesiastical territory, are to be restored to a central position within a different map of the realm of the spirit. The prison cell in which Bunyan writes is similarly reinterpreted, relocated within this map, as a space saturated not by state power but by divine power, or grace. (The Writing of John Bunyan 60)
Dayton Haskin has noted the presence of a “proper narrative pattern of experience” which does not move through linear time, but rather reflects “the ordo salutis that moves from repentance to faith to assurance. Within this pattern the stage of suffering and affliction is utterly necessary, and it acquires thereby a kind of virtue. One must be content to bear an intolerable burden before he can be assured of having saving faith; and the presence of the burden is itself a sign of election” (“The Burden of Interpretation” 269). Although Haskin is referring to the mortal sinner’s affliction, Christ’s death as a man is the pattern for such human suffering. Bunyan’s second reference to Christ’s sacrifice is once again financial, although it does contain a reference to death on the cross: in his final address to the citizens of Mansoul Emanuel points out that “I have [...] laid down for thee for thy soul, a plenary satisfaction, and have bought thee to my self; A price, not of corruptible things as of silver and gold, but a price of blood, mine own blood, which I have freely spilt upon the ground to make thee mine” (245). If, as James F. Forrest has noted, “often in Bunyan the merest item is quite significantly revealing” (133), the lack of an expected “item” is no less significant. In The Holy War it is not Christ, but rather 5 Although Bunyan tended, according to Christopher Hill, to emphasize his lowly origins (A Turbulent, Seditious, and FactiousPeople 42), his parents had sent him to school to learn reading and writing, and the breadth and depth of his familiarity with Holy Scripture could only have come from constant reading.
68
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
defeated Diabolonians who are crucified: Election-doubter, Vocation-doubter, and Grace-doubter, for example, are sentenced to “the death of the Cross” (242); and the men of Mansoul had previously been cautioned by Emanuel “to seek out, to take, and to cause to be put to death by the Cross, all, and all manner, of Diabolonians, when and where ever you shall find them to lurk within, or to range without the walls of the Town of Mansoul” (145). The strength of the picture of Christ’s lingering death on the cross has been weakened when unrepentant local criminals are subjected to the same punishment,6 and when the cruelty of the punishment is not detailed. The gentleness with which the Savior’s excruciatingly painful death is referred to in The Holy War is matched by the Son’s prophecy of his own death on the cross in book 3 of Paradise Lost: Though now to Death I yield, and am his due All of me that can die, yet that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave His prey, not suffer my unspotted soul For ever with corruption there to dwell. (3.245–249)
Although the Son makes reference to the “loathsome grave,” the emphasis here is on the temporary nature of his own “death”; in fact, any concomitant suffering, whether physical or emotional, is not mentioned. The writer’s decision to refrain from allowing the savior to describe his suffering as a human, serves to attenuate the pain of the act of sacrifice, thus emphasizing a sense of quiet, ensured victory. Milton’s playing down of Christ’s suffering on the cross can be viewed as an expression of the Protestant belief that the Christian martyr does not bear any special, supernatural powers. John N. King has located this development on the continuum of changes that constituted the movement from Catholicism to Protestantism in England: “Unlike the Catholic saints, Protestant martyrs are no different from ordinary laymen and possess no miraculous, intercessory power as a special endowment from God. As exemplary types, they illustrate how true faith enables anyone to be a witness to Christ as an elect saint” (438). Milton and Bunyan, as King notes, “return again and again to the Protestant dilemma; justification by faith and imputed grace are incessant concerns.” At the same time, Calvinist theology, with its division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate, engendered skepticism as to the ability of the individual to know whether or not he was numbered among the elect, and challenged the value of good works as either a means of gaining “chosen” status or as a sign of having been chosen. As King would have it, “the paradoxical balance between freedom of the will and divine providence ensured the ‘comedic’ pattern of the universal drama” (445), which would, again, lead to a de-emphasis of acute suffering as either an expression or guarantee of salvation. If the allegorical war within the soul seems less violent, calmer even, than might have been expected, part of the cause lies in the human nature of Diabolus, the tempter, the source of evil impulses in the human soul. Even Diabolus’s physical 6 It is true that Jesus’s cross was placed between those of two “malefactors”; but one of them repented and was promised by the Savior that “Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23.43).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
69
presence is far less impressive than that of his Miltonic predecessor. The latter is indeed a giant, both in his physical and perhaps even in his mental presence. Although Bunyan’s narrator takes care at the epic’s outset to describe his devil as “a mighty Gyant” and a “great and mighty Prince,” he quickly adds that the devil is also “both poor and beggerly” (9), and nowhere else is Diabolus’s larger-than-life physical stature stressed. As Murray Roston noted in his discussion of Satan’s assumption of leadership of the fallen angels in book 2 of Paradise Lost: A condemnation of the Arch Antagonist for his diabolical plan to corrupt mankind can exist side-by-side with an admiration for his sense of the responsibilities inherent in his assumption of leadership and his courage in fulfilling them [...]. Satan’s charisma is, of course, only one aspect of his portrayal, and in drawing attention to his more admirable traits there is no intention here of minimising the real evils present in his complex character from the very beginning of the poem. (70, 71)
Throughout Bunyan’s epic Mansoul’s nemesis is given the epithet of tyrant; but while as hell’s first-among-equals he makes final decisions as to strategy and tactics, his so-called tyranny over his followers does not generally appear to be unbearable. In this he recalls the Satan of Paradise Lost who, according to the Miltonic narrator, uses the claim of “necessity, the tyrant’s plea” (4.393) to justify his evil actions, but at the same time is not depicted as a vicious tyrant in his role as leader of the fallen angels. A tyrant is usually assumed to be indifferent to any suffering caused to his followers by his policies; yet nowhere does the Miltonic narrator suggest anything hypocritical about Satan’s grief on beholding the suffering of the fallen angels. Indeed, the “tears such as angels weep” (1.620) are genuine. John P. Rumrich suggests that Satan’s pain might usefully be regarded as masochistic: Pain usually signifies physical damage. Masochists, however, seek intense pain without real injury [...]. Such pain may be regarded as symbolic or fictional—pain removed from its ordinary physiological implications and accepted, even desired, as the expression of one’s place in a relationship. That is precisely how Satan repeatedly represents his fortitude. (Milton Unbound 66)
Satan can, however, simply be seen as a genuinely caring leader; in the above his tears not only express his own pain but that of the angels whom he has led to defeat. As political leaders generally do, Milton’s Satan makes use of his considerable powers as an orator to influence the fallen angels. The speech to the Council in Pandaemonium, in which he volunteers to make the potentially hazardous exploratory journey to the earth and then immediately accepts himself as a volunteer, is cited by the Miltonic narrator as an example of Satan’s diabolic ability to manipulate his followers (2.466–473). If, however, a tyrant is one who rules by means of cruelty and terror, there is no indication of any act on Satan’s part vis-à-vis his supporters in hell that could fairly be termed tyrannical; even the most democratic leader—in twenty-first-century terms—will on occasion use rhetoric to convince his followers of the correctness of his path.
70
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Recent scholarly interest in the connections between literature and power, both economic and political, has led to reexaminations of power relations in such highly canonical works as Paradise Lost. In “The Politics of Paradise Lost” Mary Ann Radzinowicz contends that: “Like Satan, Milton repeatedly made the point that ‘degrees / Jar not with liberty’ [5.792–793]” (136); yet “[W]hat of Satan’s own political example? Whatever Satan has to say of God’s tyranny and however beautifully Milton conducts that argument to secure political paideia, Satan’s actual example is of a frozen meritocracy or tyranny” (128). It is possible, however, that “Satan’s actual example” is faulty, not because of an autocratic leadership style, but simply because he functions as part of a group, and, as I have suggested, if there is one lesson learned by both Milton and Bunyan, as well as by other nonconformist veterans of the Civil War, it was that salvation is more an individual affair than a collective endeavor. The fall of Satan, according to Radzinowicz, “is used to imply a collective ideal of organic change” (138) which failed. Sharon Achinstein7 argues as well that the Great Consult of book 2 was not really a free exchange of ideas, since Satan dominates the debate (203); this domination is achieved by what is now known as personal charisma. Therefore Satan’s rebellion was doomed to failure, not only because the leader himself may have made use of manipulative leadership techniques, but because of the necessity to seek salvation as an individual. Bunyan, too, enables the reader to watch his Satan character at work as head of a committee. Diabolus holds a consultation similar to the Great Consult of Paradise Lost with his closest mates; yet unlike Satan, he allows himself a display of pique after listening to lengthy speeches by Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mr. Profane, and Apollyon: So soon as Apollyon had made an end of speaking, Diabolus began to blow out his own malice, and to plead his own cause, and he said, My Lords and Powers of the Cave, my true and trusty friends, I have with much impatience, as becomes me, given ear to your long and tedious Orations. But my furious gorge, and empty panch so lusteth after a repossession of my famous Town of Mansoul, that whatever comes out I can wait no longer to see the results of lingering projects. [...] Therefore lend me your heads, your hearts, and your help, now I am going to recover my Town of Mansoul.” (175)
This speech, too, can be viewed as an attempt to manipulate his listeners, but while it gives honest expression to anger and impatience, it is not quite the oration of a tyrant. Diabolus’s call “lend me your heads, your hearts, and your help” seems rather to parody the oratory of a second-rate politician or general; as such it is amusing, but certainly not awe-inspiring. Neither Milton’s Satan nor Bunyan’s Diabolus can ultimately be accepted as tyrants because they do not appear to behave tyrannically toward their followers; that is, their exercise of power is not exclusively arbitrary. Indeed, both characters’ behavior seems to result from a multiplicity of emotions; the perception that a character’s acts are motivated by more than one emotion tends to humanize the character. A wide range of human qualities and emotions are attributed to the Satan of the early books of Paradise Lost: in the soliloquy at the beginning of book 4 (4.32–130), for example, the fiend expresses regret, self-criticism, disdain, dread 7 In Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) Achinstein discusses the “parliament of hell” as a genre (182–93).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
71
of shame; as Satan speaks the Miltonic narrator discerns in his facial expression evidence of ire, envy, and despair (4.115). Notably absent from this catalogue of human emotions, however, is fear, whether of death or of life. Although the devil is not mortal, it has been argued that Milton’s Satan is an exemplar of a suicide, that is, one who fears life so much that he chooses to flee from it. R.A. Shoaf argues that: “In his monomaniacal singularity, Satan has severed himself from God and thus killed the brightest of the archangels, himself” (20). Indeed, it may be useful to view the decision to rebel as a kind of suicide, of fleeing from the responsibility pertaining to his status as brightest of the archangels. Satan himself does not often express fear—indeed, as John Peter has pointed out, his lack of fear seems almost insensitive, given his predicament at the beginning of Milton’s epic: “Satan’s composure makes the flames of Hell seem tepid, while the flames make his composure seem absurd” (33). His mates, however, are afraid, and Steadman has explicated Miltonic allusions to fear in his description of the war in heaven. The rebel angels, as Steadman points out, do experience terror. Milton, in Steadman’s words, “frequently attempts to intensify the affective value of [fear and horror] either by describing their emotional impact on his characters or by employing terms (‘terrible,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘dreadful’) which suggest their ability to arouse the emotion of fear” (38). Yet since he is immortal and therefore impervious to fatal wounds, Satan himself has no cause for that most basic of human fears: the fear of death; while he undergoes painful regret for lost happiness, Satan does not appear to be afraid of the Father or the Son. Diabolus, however, who is also immortal, does feel fear. On learning that Emanuel is to lead the campaign to recover Mansoul from Diabolic control, “Diabolus himself did totter and shake” (67). On perceiving the strength of Emanuel’s army Diabolus is again put into “another fright” (69), and while waiting for the townsmen to decide what answer to make to Emanuel’s offer of grace and mercy, the fiend was afraid in his heart (72). At this point Diabolus’s behavior can be contrasted with that of Milton’s Satan when the latter, having made his first journey to the earth, engages in an argument with Gabriel, in which the archangel accuses the fallen angel of having fawned upon the Father prior to leading the angels in rebellion (4.959–960). Despite Northrop Frye’s claim that Satan “can only understand ruling and serving,” which explains his preference of ruling in hell to serving in heaven (Return of Eden 64), the fallen Satan from the outset calls upon his followers to “Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen” (1.330); while the irony of the latter cry is palpable, since the angels are in very fact “forever fallen,” Satan does wish his followers to awake and arise, and at no point suggests that they, in the language of The Holy War, should shrink and cringe either at his own feet or at those of the Father (92).8 Diabolus, however, on sensing that Emanuel’s forces are about to conquer the human soul, bargains with the Savior in an attempt to retain some of his power:
8 See R.J.Z. Werblowsky’s claim: “I rather suspect that Milton, slightly off his track, gives away his real opinion (and, incidentally, that of many of his readers) as to what we should think about the revivalling crowd in heaven, who ‘lowly reverent [...] bow and to the ground with solemn adoration [...] cast Thir Crowns’ [Paradise Lost 3.349–352], as compared to the dashing self-reliance of Satan and his crew” (10).
72
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
“the Town of Mansoul (poor hearts) understood [Diabolus] not, nor did they see how he crouched, and cringed, while he stood before Emanuel their prince” (72). The Prince, of course, is not taken in by the devil’s ploys; realizing that he has been discovered, Diabolus is filled with despair and decides to make as much trouble as he can (85, 86). The Satan of Paradise Lost is also “confounded” (1.53) and “racked with deep despair” (1.126); yet when discovered by Gabriel in an attempt to plan his subversion of the human soul he neither crouches nor cringes, but rather answers his angelic accuser sensibly, though contemptuously: “Lives there who loves his pain? / Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell, / Though thither doomed?” (4.888–890). When Emanuel and his army succeed in their conquest of the soul, Diabolus is ordered to surrender himself into the Prince’s hands: “Oh how loth was the beast to appear! how he stuck at it! how he shrunk! Ay, how he cringed!” After stripping the fiend of his armor and binding him to his chariot wheels, the Prince “did ride in triumph over him quite through the Town of Mansoul” (92); then he “turned him up in the midst of his contempt and shame, having given him a charge no more to be a possessor of Mansoul” (93). Diabolus’s sniveling exile from Mansoul can be compared with Satan’s departure from the earth at the end of book 4: “The fiend looked up and knew / His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled / Murmuring, and with him fled the scales of night” (4.1013–1015). The Satan of Paradise Lost, in other words, silently retains more than a semblance of dignity even when forced out of Eden, while Diabolus, having undergone a similar temporary setback, is “the object of all derision” (93). Wyke has contended that in The Holy War there is none of that “sustained element of vision which, as we learn from Grace Abounding, was such a fundamental part of Bunyan’s temperament” (24). Although Bunyan’s emphasis on visionary experience is drawn from Revelation, unlike his biblical predecessor Bunyan displays a “lessening of apocalyptic vision” and “movement away from the stance of personal eyewitness” in his epic (25). With the passage of time, as I have suggested, the power of the formative events of Bunyan’s youth over his mind was attenuated. This would naturally be the case with wars and political upheavals; but it might also be true of the central ongoing process of Bunyan’s life: his conversion. Bunyan, as Sams notes, had succeeded in “closely relating autobiography and allegory to give [Grace Abounding] depth and an artistic effect” (183). Moreover, Bunyan’s distance from the formative experiences of his conversion as detailed in Grace Abounding informed and humanized the vision of Satan as inscribed in The Holy War. Our awareness of Bunyan’s sense of the losses suffered by nonconformity should not lead us to overemphasize his feelings of despair as to the ultimate arrival of the Millennium. As W.R. Owens has noted, “Bunyan’s early writings reveal that he shared many of the eschatological beliefs and millennarian hopes current at the time. [...] [H]e believed that the millennium was still to come, but that it was close at hand” (79). Bunyan’s unshaken belief in the eventual defeat of the Antichrist would have given him an ultimate sense of security, thus allowing him to depict a Satan who bore characteristics that might otherwise appear as strange adjuncts to the incarnation of evil. One such quality is a sense of humor. The Holy War does, as I have noted, contain some of those elements of violence and cruelty that pertain to an epic of war; yet these often take the form of what
Diabolus and His Unholy War
73
is now called psychological warfare, that is, weakening the enemy’s resistance by non-physical means. Diabolus “began to play his game with Mansoul, and to serve it as doth the Lion his prey, even to make it fall before his terrour” (188). On a hill facing the town “the Tyrant set up his Standard, and a fearful thing it was to behold, for he had wrought in it by Devillish art, after the manner of a Scutcheon, a flaming flame fearful to behold, and the picture of Mansoul burning in it” (189). An effective weapon in psychological warfare is humor: the use of laughter to weaken the respect in which the enemy forces hold their leaders, and to raise the morale of one’s own forces. Diabolus is thus characterized not only by human feelings of fear, but also by a sense of humor, by the ability to evoke laughter by poking fun at familiar, often pompous types: preachers, ministers, generals. It is almost impossible to imagine Milton’s Satan casually joking with “the companions of his fall”; even when Satan and Belial trade jokes about what seems to be their success in battle on the second day of the war in heaven, their humor is rather heavy-handed and based mainly on derision: “Leader, [says Belial] the terms [i.e., cannonballs] we sent were terms of weight” (6.621). William Kolbrener suggests that the above is “more than simply an occasion for some bad punning”; it “quite literally literalizes the war in heaven, emphasizing the satanic failure in not only military but linguistic terms as well. Satanic language and satanic warfare, linked in their materiality and ostensible self-sufficiency, continually fail in relation to God’s all-powerful ‘Sentence’” (152). It is important to differentiate between an appreciation of heavenly mockery of Satan and his cohorts in the war in heaven, and the far-reaching argument made by Arnold Stein9 that the whole narrative of the war in heaven should be taken as comedy. Murray Roston responds to Stein’s suggestion by arguing that “there are numerous indications both in the overall setting and in the details that, so far from being humorous, it is intended as a deeply serious scene and, in fact, climactic for the first half of the epic.” Stein’s position, according to Roston, has as its starting point God’s laughter (5.735–737), which is seen as “setting the comic tone for the subsequent scene. Laughter there certainly is, but not the kind associated with humour and comedy; only laughter in the biblical sense of cold mockery, the scorn poured upon one’s enemy” (118). The reader, in other words, ought not respond to heavenly scorn of the fallen angels, expressed in derisive laughter, by assuming that the description of the war is meant to amuse; nor, on the other hand, need the reader be prevented from taking pleasure in the discovery of a satanic sense of humor. The first hint of Diabolus’s sense of humor is in a short letter he sends to one of his supporters, Captain Anything, requesting that the latter receive into his company three new recruits; the letter begins: “Anything, my Darling” (52). This friendly, casual form of address indicates a high level of informality among the Diabolonian armed forces, and again contradicts the ubiquitous epithet tyrant so often attached to Diabolus’s name. Wyke has called attention to the “subtle intonations of parody” which are found in the exchanges between the inhabitants of hell and their supporters in the town of Mansoul (28). Unlike his Miltonian predecessor, Diabolus attempts to engage the Son in bargaining, the goal of which is to convince the Prince to allow 9
See Stein’s Answerable Style pp. 23ff.
74
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
the forces of evil to remain within the soul. Diabolus’s attempt at bargaining with the Son can be seen as a parody of the bargaining between the Son and the Father in book 3 of Paradise Lost. Gordon Campbell notes that the God of Paradise Lost is “distinctly anthropomorphic,” as was the God of the early books of the Hebrew Bible. When Milton’s Father interviews Adam in book 8, he: adopts a tone of voice which is distinctly jocular; he lacks utterly the gravitas which was traditionally associated with God. One of the most striking features of the god of Paradise Lost is that although he is omniscient, he is not very quickwitted. [...] There are moments in the Old Testament when the patriarchs must deal with an irascible god, and they are able to cope only because they can outwit their creator. (511)
Campbell’s prime example of a patriarch outwitting the Lord is Genesis 18, in which Abraham bargains with God to prevent the destruction of Sodom; the latter served Milton as a model for the Son’s debate with the Father (3.144–343), in the course of which God is convinced not to destroy the human race. Diabolus, however, is not part of the Trinity, and ultimately fails to convince the Prince. The failure of the fiend’s comic attempt to outwit Emanuel through driving a shrewd bargain recalls biblical rather than Miltonic renditions of bargaining with the Deity: despite Abraham’s success in lowering the price of Sodom’s continued existence, the city was destroyed (Gen. 18, 19). Emanuel could not be fooled by devilish rhetoric; he knew “what a reformation is like to be set up in Mansoul, when the Devil is become the corrector of vice” (85). Bunyan may herein be displaying a conviction that it would be desirable, at least theoretically, to rid the soul completely of evil. In this he differed from Milton, who was aware of the positive function of evil impulses within the psyche. Indeed, the very aim of a theodicy, “to justify the ways of God to men,” involves showing the utility of evil within the soul: to serve as a sparring partner, enabling the Christian to be purified by defeating it. Or in the words of William Kerrigan, “Since there could be for Milton no meaningful virtue in pure knowledge of the law, in forced or untried obedience, the secret ordeal of temptation is our sole initiation into the moral life. So the tempter appears” (The Sacred Complex 15). This and more: for the Christian, life on earth is a “slow and fragmentary effort to choose [oneself] amidst the disruptions of psychic conflict” (17). It is therefore not surprising, as Sams points out, that while Milton intended the temptation of Eve to take place offstage in his projected drama Adam Unparadiz’d, in Paradise Lost book 9 the temptation is foregrounded (97, 99), and from a dramatic viewpoint constitutes the epic’s climax. Milton’s recognition of the importance of temptation, indeed of its value, would not have allowed him to do otherwise.10 Diabolus’s speech to Emanuel, in which the fiend pleads for a chance to remain in Mansoul, displays his considerable abilities as a parodist. Presenting a brief of 10 Milton had, of course, defended the efficacy of exposure to temptation in Areopagitica: “all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service & assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest [...]. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?” (2: 513, 514).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
75
which any lawyer would be proud, Diabolus offers to cooperate with Emanuel by turning reformer and serving as the latter’s deputy. To assure the success of these honest efforts Diabolus makes what seems to be a generous offer; he will establish and maintain both a ministry and what may be an academic chair, in Mansoul (84). Given Diabolus’s awareness of Emanuel’s understanding and ability to recognize deceit,11 even, or especially, when couched in lawyerly terminology, we can assume that the devil is again appealing to the readers’ sense of humor in making the Prince “an offer he can’t refuse.” The offer itself, hinting broadly as it does at those ministries Bunyan apparently viewed as hypocritical, is comic in its very seriousness; as such, it differs radically from the treatment accorded by the Miltonic narrator of Paradise Lost to the clerical denizens of the Paradise of Fools: Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars White, black and gray, with all their trumpery [...]12 then might ye see Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds. (3.474–475, 489–493)
There is humor here, but the laugh is elicited by the ridiculous picture of the monks, their apparel and equipment, all tossing in the wind; such laughter is not without scorn. Much of Diabolus’s communication with his supporters in Mansoul is carried on by means of letters. In answer to an appeal from the Diabolonians he sends them a lengthy, parodic epistle beginning “Beloved children and disciples, my Lord Fornication, Adultery, and the rest, we have here in our desolate den received to our highest joy and content, your welcome Letter by the hand of our trusty Mr. Profane” (165). There is something almost Pauline in the latter address, reminiscent as it is of the addresses with which the various Epistles of Paul the Apostle begin.13 Diabolus continues, moreover, addressing his followers as “right horribly beloved” (165) and signs off with “all the blessings of the Pit be upon you, and so we close up our Letter” (166). Diabolus’s epistolary style appears once again in a communiqué sent to his Diabolonian supporters after a consultation of the devils held in hell. Diabolus opens with a hinted sense of horror, but quickly falls into a childlike, not to say childish, humor:
11 The Miltonic narrator of Paradise Lost notes that “neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone” (3.682–684); as an aspect of the Godhead the Son would, of course, not be deceived by hypocrisy. 12 Fowler points out that in juxtaposing “embryos and idiots” with “eremites and friars” Milton is satirizing a Catholic tradition which consigned intellectually retarded people and unbaptized infants to a special Limbo (Milton, Paradise Lost 171n). 13 Paul’s Epistles tend to have formulaic openings, i.e., addresses to his followers from a specific locale followed by a blessing; see Corinthians 1, 2, Galatians, Ephesians, Phillipians, Colossians.
76
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature From the dark and horrible Dungeon of Hell, Diabolus with all the Society of the Princes of Darkness, sends to our trusty ones, in and about the walls of the Town of Mansoul, now impatiently waiting for our most Devillish answer to their venomous and most poysonous design against the Town of Mansoul. [In the same tone the writer notes that:] “We received your welcome, because highly esteemed Letter, at the hand of our trusty and greatly beloved the old Gentleman, Mr. Profane.” (176)
The humor evinced by Diabolus as he composes his letters to his followers can legitimately be called childlike both because of its repetitiveness and because of the obviousness of the parody; children love to tell jokes, but their humor tends to involve much repetition and to lack subtlety. There is little subtlety in the right horribly beloved or in the repeated references to deviltry such as devilish, venomous, poisonous. Yet one senses the enjoyment with which Bunyan must have penned these lines. Monica Furlong argues that Puritans looked to the world to come for delight because they felt themselves to be oppressed by persecution from without and demands from within for hard work and constant self-monitoring: “Joy is never now, but always in some future state” (41). Childhood, as Furlong notes, “with its spontaneity, its lack of repressions, and its strong instinctual life was, in one sense, exactly what Puritanism was fighting against, the nearest thing to ‘natural’ man that ever came within their orbit” (40). The spontaneousness, the directness of childhood constitute its very attraction, however, to which Bunyan gives expression in Diabolus’s obvious, repetitive, somewhat heavy-handed, sense of humor. In his very humor Diabolus may also be a parody of the heroic, albeit somewhat dour Satan of Paradise Lost. Barbara K. Lewalski notes that Satan’s serenade to Eve in her dream (5.38–47) is a parody of Adam’s aubade (5.17–25); both echo the Song of Solomon 2:10–13 (Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms 200–201). Satan himself, of course, could not have known that he was parodying a text that had not yet been spoken. Yet the very fact that the fiend is shown by the Miltonic narrator to parody Holy Scripture would mitigate against claiming comic status for the character; the line between humor and blasphemy would be too close for comfort. It is surely as impossible to imagine Milton’s Satan addressing his followers as “right horribly beloved” as it would be to hear him call Beelzebub “Beelzebub, my darling.” The Miltonic narrator occasionally holds Satan up to ridicule; the reader is invited to laugh at Satan, but not with him. It is hard, for example, not to laugh at the picture of Satan as an uprooted mountain, “Half sunk with all his pines” (6.198), despite the grandeur with which he is endowed. The Satan of Paradise Lost, in other words, may on occasion be the butt of what would now be called a slapstick joke. Helen Gardner has suggested that a main difference between Adam and Eve’s disobedience and Satan’s is that when the former eat the fruit they are “representative figures,” performing a symbolic act: there is, after all, nothing inherently evil in picking a ripe apple and eating it; the evil lies in the fact that they were told not to do so (209).14 On the other hand, “Satan’s 14 In The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 2 Matthew asks Gaius whether the pilgrims are allowed to eat apples, which were the means by which “the Serpent beguiled our first Mother”; Gaius replies in the affirmative, arguing that “Apples were they with which we were beguil’d, / Yet Sin, not apples, hath our Souls defil’d” (262; 33–34).
Diabolus and His Unholy War
77
defiance of God is not expressed by a symbolic gesture; in his rebellion the act and its meaning are one” (210). This explains why Milton’s Satan may appropriately be the butt of a slapstick joke, which elicits laughter through nonsymbolic means, and whose very physicality guarantees that act and meaning are one: when the audience laughs at the sight of a comedian getting hit in the face with a cream pie little or no interpretation is involved. Bunyan’s decision to endow Diabolus with the desire and ability to poke fun at the lawyer, the minister, the politician, as well as at his great precursor from Paradise Lost, may be taken as an engagement with dangers inherent in spontaneous enjoyment, similar to the use made by Bunyan in Grace Abounding of the game of tipcat or of bell ringing, both of which, harmless amusements in themselves, represent the danger to the believer of the enjoyments of this world. At the same time the very presence of a Satan-character with a sense of humor indicates the possibility that the epicist himself had mellowed, and wished to temper the fire and brimstone, as it were, with a draft of refreshingly cool water. This is not to say that Diabolus can be legitimately seen as a genial, bumbling stand-up comedian; as Richard L. Greaves has noted, the “militant imagery” of The Holy War provides “an unmistakable indictment of Charles II’s government during the bitter conclusion to the exclusion crisis.”15 It is not necessary to accept Greaves’s broad claim that Diabolus “tyrannised Mansoul as its king,” to agree that the devil did indeed remodel the corporation and spoil the law books (24). Yet Bunyan’s Satan is characterized by such human qualities as fear of a greater power and the ability to poke fun at the pompousness often associated with the powers that be. By endowing Diabolus with those human qualities Bunyan gives expression to an acceptance of the existence of human weakness, both on the wider social level and on the individual level. He could not approve of the various frailties that, as a hopeful regenerate, he would feel obligated to struggle against, but in ascribing to Satan certain quintessentially human qualities he appears to be hinting that the passage of time has somewhat weakened his personal sense of sin and taught him to appreciate the value of the very weaknesses that define, in Bunyan’s terms, the human heart, or in our terms, a human being—as Diabolus himself points out, “without the heart things are little worth” (174).
15 Greaves points out that nonconformists “saw the events of the years 1678–82 as an attempt to destroy their rights through the establishment of tyrannical government and a Catholic succession” (66).
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 4
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son In Paradise Regained, according to Sanford Budick: Milton acknowledges the eschatological inevitabilities that adhere to Christ’s appearance in human form. But it is the business of his poem to embody the essence of Christ’s activity in a form that is improgressive and quietistic. In Paradise Regained the logosdivided form emerges as the sum of Christian knowledge. Christ’s life and sacrifice are for Milton not only the arch image of that form but the medium of its continuous efficacy in the universe. (147–48)
Yet even when allowing the impossibility of enfiguring a successful temptation of Christ, it can still be claimed that the theme of Paradise Regained is, in the words of Northrop Frye, none other than “the temptation of experience” (“Typology” 230). Unlike Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, who are placed by the Creator in their prelapsarian bower and surrounded by angels assigned to protect them from temptation, the hero of Milton’s “brief epic”: One day forth walked alone, the spirit leading And his deep thoughts [...] Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entered now the bordering desert wild, And with dark shades and rocks environed round, His holy meditations thus pursued. (1.189–190, 192–195)
The nature of the Son’s humanity “deeply worried” the poet, as Forsyth contends: “In both epic poems, Milton makes the identity of the Son problematic at the critical moments. Indeed both epics turn on the question of the Son’s identity” (178). Milton had attempted to clarify his own vision of the Son’s humanity in On Christian Doctrine: “although Christ’s human nature is in supreme glory, it nevertheless exists in one definite place and not, as some people would like to think, everywhere” (6: 442).1 The Son, that is, who was born of a woman, lives as a lone man in the fallen world. This is not lost on the devil, the thrust of whose argument with the Son is, as Frye points out, that “good and evil are inseparable in the fallen world, and, in a world where all instruments are corrupted, one must either use corrupt instruments or not act at all” (“Typology” 230). What the Satan of Paradise Regained does not understand, however, as Budick suggests, is that his “wiles are now and forever being foiled, defeated, and repulsed; the waste wilderness, which is as much our wasted world as it is the Judean desert, is being transformed into Eden, even now” (123). 1 See Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works for a short survey of the debate as to the provenance of Christian Doctrine (15–19).
80
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Confronted with an opponent who, while human, exists outside of dimensions comprehensible to the human mind, Satan turns out, according to Budick, to be unable to “imagine any process or experience that is not tied to cause and effect” (129). This inability to conceptualize the Son in any terms but those pertinent to human thought results in the failure of Satan’s temptation schemes. Based on textual evidence—use of run-on lines, spelling—John T. Shawcross has argued for an early dating of the initial composition of Paradise Regained; he suggests that the first draft was written in 1642–44, revised in 1646–49, and rewritten in its final form previous to publication in 1671 (24). Shawcross believes that Milton turned Paradise Regained into an epic at about the same time he made his decision to couch Paradise Lost in epic form: “Any epical change is difficult to assign; but it probably did not take place until after the epic shift for Paradise Lost, which I would suggest was occurring in 1655–58 and which had occurred by 1660 [...] I would thus date the epic shift for what became Paradise Regained [...] after 1665” (25). If Shawcross’s dating is accepted, the composition of Paradise Regained may have spanned the stormy period which began for Milton with his enthusiasm for the republic, and ended with his ultimate acceptance of its downfall. Paradise Regained, as Christopher Hill has noted, “is about how men should live in the real world, not ignoring or flying from the unpleasantness of post-Restoration England. By contrast with the cosmic grandeur of Paradise Lost, the brief epic is bleakly simple” (Milton and the English Revolution 413–14). Hill then calls attention to an apparently surprising omission in Milton’s narrative of the restoration of paradise to mankind: it contains no mention of the crucifixion (Milton and the English Revolution 418–19).2 To the extent that it ignores Jesus’s death and resurrection, or return to his original god-persona, Paradise Regained may be viewed as Milton’s attempt at coming to grips with the fact of the Son’s manhood and the ramifications of his humanity, given that, as Satan himself reminds us, “All men are Sons of God” (4.520). As part of this attempt, the poet develops a Satan character who is human: the Son’s interlocutor, the Satan of the “brief epic,” has a human’s desire to achieve a clear identity, yet, as is the case with humanity, the self-knowledge needed for this task can never be complete, since as one of the fallen, Satan’s perceptions, whether sensual or intellectual, are limited. It has become a critical commonplace that Milton coped with the defeat of the Commonwealth and restoration of the monarchy by positing Christian salvation as an individual, rather than communal, process: one less dependent upon the believer’s connections to religious or political configurations, and more dependent on processes taking place within the individual soul. N. H. Keeble suggests that Paradise Regained “is not a narrative of the regaining of paradise, as Paradise Lost had narrated the history of the Fall; it is an argument about how paradise should be regained, and, more particularly, an argument about how a person lacking every advantage of status, accomplishment and power might regain it” (194). In Keeble’s words: The Christ, who, Milton insists, is, though “exalted”, a man, with the limitations that implies, is initially unsure of his vocation and course of action [...] [There is], for 2 John R. Knott, Jr. has noted scholarly awareness of Milton’s avoidance of representing the Crucifixion in his poetry (Discourses of Martyrdom 163).
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
81
protagonist, antagonist and reader alike, a moment of epiphany compressed into a line of stunning finality: “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood”. That final monosyllable comprises the thrust not merely of this poem but of every nonconformist meditation upon the course of individual lives, the challenge of trial and the meaning of vocation held by the defenseless. (85)
When he created the Satan character of Paradise Regained, therefore, Milton seems to have been directed by two main ideas. The first is that the Son who is a human should be tempted by an opponent who also bears the character of a man. The second is that the Son’s stance as an individual man, one who has not yet accepted a leadership role similar to that which he had so easily undertaken in the battle against the fallen angels (Paradise Lost 6.723–733), a young man struggling alone with issues of individual identity, should be counterpoised by an antagonist who is the leader of a group. In his retelling of the Son’s temptation in the desert as found in the Gospels (Matt. 4.1; Luke 4.1) Milton fleshed out the character of the tempter on the basis of the Satan who is sent by God to test Job.3 This choice of a model is not surprising, generically as well as thematically: the Book of Job, after all, is a dialogue, and Milton seems to have been comfortable writing dialogue.4 Milton had, after all, originally intended to write the history of mankind’s temptation and fall as a drama, to have been called Adam Unparadiz’d.5 Moreover, William R. Parker has called attention to Milton’s long-term positive attitude toward and support for the theater, dating back to the early 1640s, when theaters were under attack and eventually closed down by the Puritans; in this, Parker notes, Milton’s ideas were squarely opposed to those of his age (218).6 Moreover, the poet’s most daring temptation-narrative prior to the
3 As far back as 1807 Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted that “the poetic dialogue of the Book of Job was [Milton’s] model for the general scheme of his ‘Paradise Regained’” (“Notes on Milton” n.p.). 4 Despite his acknowledgment of its elegance and instructiveness, Samuel Johnson judged Milton harshly for his decision to cast Paradise Regained in the form of a dialogue: “The basis of Paradise Regained is narrow; a dialogue without action can never please like an union of the narrative and dramatick powers” (135). 5 In his examination of the changes Milton made in his plans for his great epic during the thirty years prior to its completion, Murray Roston suggests that “each decision on his part marked a further stage in his progression away from [the] High Renaissance tradition and towards the newer art form [the baroque mode].” The detailed depiction of the war in heaven entailed a portrayal of the great strength of God’s opponent; only God’s strength could have defeated an enemy of such stature. In contrast, Adam Unparadiz’d was to have been “set entirely within the confines of Eden, where Gabriel and Lucifer visit Adam in order respectively to protect and corrupt him, and the expulsion of Lucifer from heaven is merely recounted as a past event” (75). 6 In The Reason of Church Government (1642) Milton indicates the possible didactic role of dramatists such as Sophocles and Euripides, whose “raigne shall be found [...] doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation.” Milton then suggests a connection between the Bible and drama: “the Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral Drama in the Song of Salomon, consisting of two persons and a double Chorus” (Complete Prose Works 1: 814–815).
82
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
great epics was, of course, performed: A Masque … Presented at Ludlow Castle (popularly known as Comus). Both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are scripts; most of the text is composed of conversation between two, or at most three, interlocutors, against a fairly static backdrop—Hell, a bower, or a corner of the desert—with a few easily produced sound and lighting effects (night coming on; or thunder, for example). In this the two epics resemble the Book of Job, which is also structured as dialogue:7 the frame-story consists of conversations between God and Satan, while the debates between Job and his infamous comforters—friends who originally came to be with the hero during the seven days traditionally allotted to mourning, during which they do not speak at all, and then stay on to engage him in talk—make up the body of the text. Robert Alter has suggested approaching the frame-story of Job, that is, the conversations between God and Satan, as an exchange of words between judge and lawyer, characterized by correlation of length and brevity with rhetorical calculation and directness: God’s first words in Job, addressed to the Adversary, are almost brusque—“Where are you coming from?” (Job 1.7) [...] The Adversary, on the other hand, in his relatively longer speeches, shows a fondness for verse-insets, clever citation of folk-sayings, argumentative positioning of syntactical members for the most persuasive effect. In short, as befits a prosecuting attorney, he is a master of conscious rhetoric, alongside of whom God seems plainspoken. (74)
God and his interlocutor, in other words, can be seen as stage characters taking part in a courtroom scene, each speaking in appropriate style and register: His Honor the Judge expressing himself tersely, not finding it necessary to explain himself, and the attorney, enjoying his own fluent, though self-conscious, rhetorical talents. Arnold Stein, on the other hand, has characterized the Satan of Paradise Regained not as a prosecuting attorney but rather as a stage director. Stein views Satan’s management of the banquet temptation of book 2 (2.337ff.) as the act of a director (Heroic Knowledge 56–57); he also emphasizes the comic aspects of this temptation: “The scene is comic in a way that the first temptation [which includes Satan’s challenge to the Son that he make stones into bread, 1.342–345] was not, though the high irony and the exchanges of wit have much in common [...]. This is more leisurely, and far less likely to succeed, because of the heightened incongruity of the excess” (Heroic Knowledge 57). It can, in fact, be claimed that this is not the first occasion on which Satan’s modus operandi as a tempter is directorial: his first attempt on Eve in Paradise Lost was by means of a stage-managed dream which he inserted into her sleeping mind (5.28–94);8 and in Paradise Regained he merely continues to employ what had proved to be a successful method of temptation.9 7 Robert Alter has explicated the subordinate role of narration in comparison with direct speech in biblical narrative in general (63–87). 8 Stuart Curran suggests that if we convert Satan and Christ “into primary antagonists of a psychomachia, it is clear that Satan’s temptation comes from deep within Jesus’ mind” (212). 9 While Stein draws a parallel between Satan and Iago as diabolic creators (Heroic Knowledge 56), Prospero may be a more pertinent referent here.
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
83
Milton’s contemporaries, it would seem, were troubled by the reality of the wager between God and Satan which resulted in Job’s sufferings. In his popular seventeenth-century commentary on the Scriptures Matthew Poole avers that “[s]ome things are to be premised in the General concerning this Book [Job] before I come to the Particulars. 1. That this was no Fiction or Parable, as some have dreamed, but a real History, which is sufficiently evident, both from the whole Contexture of the Book [...] and especially the succeeding Pen-men of Holy Scripture, who mention him as a real and eminent example of Piety and Patience” (1:Gggg4r). Yet in his “particular” comment on Job 1:6, wherein we are told that “there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them,” Poole feels constrained to note that: you must not think that these things were really done, and that Satan was mixed with the holy Angels, or admitted into the presence of God in Heaven, to maintain such discourses as this with the blessed God, or that he had formal Commission and leave to do what follows, but it is only a parabolic Representation of that great Truth, that God by his wise and holy Providence doth govern all the Actions of Men and Devils to his own ends. (1:Gggg5r)
And when God mentions to Satan that the latter “movest me against” Job (2.3), Poole once again rushes into the fray: But this, as the rest of this Representation, is not to be understood properly, as if God could be moved by any of his Creatures to alter his purposes, which are all Eternal and Unchangeable, and especially by Satan, as if God would gratifie him, by granting his desires; but the design of these words is to signifie both the Devils restless Malice in promoting Man’s misery, and God’s permission of it for his own wise and holy Ends. (1:Gggg6r)
Milton, however, does not appear to be overly concerned about the reality of Satan’s bet with God as to the feasibility of causing Job to “curse God to his face” (Job 1.11). As Achsah Guibbory notes, in Paradise Regained Milton “boldly announces that his poem will add to the biblical account of Christ’s temptation, recording deeds ‘unrecorded left through many an age’ (1.16). Milton implies he has received a new revelation” (184). Openly ignoring the clarity of the biblical text, according to which “the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1.12), the poet solves the question of God’s role by suggesting that the idea of testing Job was not initiated by God, but rather by Satan. According to Milton it is Satan who makes the claim that God “Gave up into my hands Uzzean Job / To prove him, and illustrate his high worth” (1.369–370), while Christ rejects this version of events: “What but thy malice moved thee to misdeem / Of righteous Job, then cruelly to afflict him / With all inflictions, but his patience won?” (1.424–426). It was Satan, after all, who in very fact afflicted Job; as a man, with a man’s limited vision, it is only natural that Christ would accuse the perceived perpetrator of the deed (Satan), rather than God, despite the latter’s announcement to Satan that “[b]ehold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1.12). It is also not surprising that with a man’s limited vision, Satan would think that—if we may be allowed to continue Christ’s
84
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
line of argument—by thrusting all responsibility for his malicious attempt on Job onto an all-powerful God, he could avoid blame for his cruelty. Yet Satan’s temptation of Job could serve Milton only in part as a model for the fiend’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Neither Satan nor the first-time reader of Job could have been certain whether or not the afflicted Job would eventually curse God; but the Father in Paradise Regained knew that his Son would not fall. As he explains to Gabriel: this man born and now upgrown, To show him worthy of his birth divine And high prediction, henceforth I expose To Satan; let him tempt and now assay His utmost subtlety [...] and men hereafter may discern, From what consummate virtue I have chose This perfect man, by merit called my Son, To earn salvation for the sons of men. (1.140–144, 164–167)
The repeated emphasis on the word man is significant; the Son is a man, born of woman, and man is arguably the key word of Paradise Regained. It is no accident that the epic opens with: I who erewhile the happy garden sung, By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing Recovered Paradise to all mankind, By one man’s firm obedience fully tried. (1.1–4)
Walter MacKellar has noted that Milton “is concerned to emphasize Christ’s humanity, and to the last to show him tried on a strictly human level, as any man may be tried, and resisting temptation as any man may resist it” (50). In her discussion of the narrative method employed by Milton in Paradise Regained Barbara K. Lewalski points out that the focus of the epic is on Christ as human hero (Milton’s Brief Epic 325). Lewalski suggests that such focus is necessitated by the poet’s knowledge of his hero’s success in resisting satanic temptation, as well as by the ramifications of this success for the individual human. In Lewalski’s words, the “constant use of the epithet ‘our Savior’ reveals that the narrator does not now think of himself primarily as man fallen but as man restored and redeemed through Christ’s heroic action” (327).10 If Paradise Regained narrates the trial of a human Son, the virtues tested must be germane to fallen humanity: not miraculous strength, supernatural powers, or omniscence, but the ability to suffer and overcome, even when one does not know whether there is a happy ending in store. Humans, after all, are not omniscient, and suffering is increased when we suspect that it may be in vain. Readers of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark are most aware of Christ’s humanity when at the ninth hour the dying Jesus cries with a loud voice “My God, my God, why hast thou 10 Christopher Hill notes that there was “plenty” of anti-Trinitarianism around in the England of the 1640s, “and indeed in the two preceding generations. Christopher Marlowe taught that Christ was only a human being” (Milton and the English Revolution 287).
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
85
forsaken me?” (Matt. 27.46; Mark 15.34). At this point in his Passion Jesus suffers as a man: the intensity of his pain shuts out his previous divine foreknowledge that this suffering and humiliation are but a way station on the road to paradise. For readers familiar with the Hebrew Bible the Son’s despairing cry is, of course, pregnant with reminders of Jesus’s human ancestor. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” David cries (Ps. 22.1), and Christ’s repetition of this cry reminds the believer that the Savior, who is a descendant of David, suffered and died as a human. As one whose vision is limited, Satan, too, may be said to share in Christ’s humanity; he does not, however, attempt to imitate the Son’s obedience and endurance. According to Frye: “For Milton all real acts are good, and there are no real evil acts. [...] The genuinely heroic act is found only in the imitation of Christ, in endurance and obedience. [...] For Satan, of course, heroic action means his own type of aggressive and destructive parody-heroism” (“Typology” 231). Christ’s human nature is of vital importance: the Father himself notes that the Son is the mortal offspring of Adam and Eve when he boasts that Satan “now shall know I can produce a man / Of female seed, far abler to resist / All his solicitations” (1.150–152). The issue of Christ’s humanity is, moreover, even further complicated by the possibility that Cain, Eve’s son and thus Christ’s ancestor, was fathered by Satan. Jesus himself accuses his Jewish interlocutors: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth” (John 8.44). Herbert Marks has called attention to a well-known rabbinic tradition, most probably familiar to Milton, according to which Cain was the son of Sammael or Satan; Marks argues that references to first, fruit, and forbidden in the opening lines of Paradise Lost recall the predicament of Cain, whose offering of first fruits was not accepted by God (227). The hint that Satan, by way of Cain, is an older relative of Christ is significant in any attempt at delineating the fiend’s character. Cain’s anger at God’s rejection of his sacrifice and jealousy of the Father’s acceptance of his brother’s offering led him to commit what is generally considered to be the first murder (Gen. 4). It is, however, worth recalling that according to Miltonic chronology this murder was made possible by Satan, who was the first to introduce death into the world. Prior to the fall, after all, there was no death in the universe. Satan’s role in freeing Sin and Death, in releasing them into the world, as detailed in Paradise Lost, is twofold; the road that would both literally and allegorically allow Satan’s offspring easy access to the human world was built “following [Satan’s] track” (2.1021–1026). Or, as the poet notes in the Argument preceding book 10, “to make the way easier from hell to this world to and fro, [Sin and Death] pave a broad highway or bridge over chaos, according to the track that Satan first made.” Satan, moreover, releases Sin and Death into the human world in order that they may act out their names. Roland M. Frye claims that alone among the characters of Paradise Lost, Sin and Death “are freed by Satan to act in full accord with their natures,” although, as Frye reminds us, “this liberation represents only the freedom to destroy other selves, the freedom to digest all other life, to incorporate, to extend the demonic possession of life” (36). Satan, however, has enabled Sin and Death to destroy human beings, while limiting his own responsibility; if Frye is correct, after all, Satan has merely freed his offspring to “act in accord with their own natures,” rather than in accordance with his.
86
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
For Milton the question of Christ’s humanity was not a simple one. How can the Savior be at once part of the Godhead and at the same time a man? Would not an unfallen, yet postlapsarian man be an oxymoronic impossibility? While depicting the Son’s humanity, Milton, of course, recognized the Son as an aspect of the Trinity; his struggle to define the latter within the context of his own Protestantism is perhaps most clearly put forth in Of Christian Doctrine: [God] was in a real sense Father of the Son, whom he made of his own substance. It does not follow, however, that the Son is of the same essence as the Father. Indeed, if he were, it would be quite incorrect to call him Son. For a real son is not of the same age as his father, still less of the same numerical essence: otherwise father and son would be one person. (6: 209)
The Son of Paradise Regained, however, while constituted of the same “essence” as the Father, is simultaneously a man, the son of a woman, and as such he cannot but partake of fallenness. Milton continues to grapple with the question of Christ’s humanity in Of Christian Doctrine, wherein he notes that: God imparted to the Son as much as he wished of the divine nature, and indeed of the divine substance also[.] But do not take substance to mean total essence. If it did, it would mean that the Father gave his essence to his son and at the same time retained it, numerically unaltered, himself. That is not a means of generation but a contradiction of terms. (6: 212)
The Son, that is, partook of the divine nature and substance, but his portion of divinity was not total. It is therefore reasonable to interpret the above as a claim that Christ in his human persona would bear the attributes of a human being. Yet the poet may have preferred to show the limitations of human understanding as an attribute, not of Christ, but of Satan. It may be worth noting Forsyth’s gentle warning before recalling Satan’s first appearance to a human being: “Satan’s voice and his ability to induce a dream in Eve’s consciousness align him, and not necessarily ironically, with the voice of God she had heard previously, and with Milton himself as a poet: this triple alignment of God-poet-Satan as writers, so to speak, recurs in many forms in the poem, and threatens constantly to subvert any easy hierarchy we may wish to impose” (165). In book 5 of Paradise Lost the fiend indeed insinuates into Eve’s sleeping mind a dream in which he convinces her to taste of the fruit (5.28–94). The Satan of Eve’s dream, as described by Eve herself, was “One shaped and winged like one of those from heaven” (5.55); the fiend, in other words, presents himself to the unfallen mother as an angel,11 although he chooses the form of a serpent for the actual temptation as detailed in book 9. The Satan of Paradise Regained, on the other hand, makes his first appearance to the human Son in the form of a fatherly old shepherd, and a kindly, familiar type at that: But now an aged man in rural weeds, Following, as seemed, the quest of some stray ewe, 11 Cf. 2 Corinthians 11.14: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
87
Or withered sticks to gather; which might serve Against a winter’s day when winds blow keen, To warm him wet returned from field at eve, [Christ] saw approach. (1.314–319)
As Walter MacKellar points out, extant traditions have Satan appear to humans in the disguise of a poor but benevolent old man.12 The mention of the old man’s search for a straying ewe, however, hints at parody: Christ is traditionally figured as a sacrificial lamb, while the trope of God as shepherd is commonplace. At the outset of Paradise Regained the Son is a youth on the threshold of adulthood. Perhaps Satan’s temptations are aimed at causing Christ to form an identity for himself which is in some way flawed, unworthy of one who is destined to be that quintessential oxymoron: a postlapsarian unfallen man. Shawcross has defined Satan’s strength as a force whose “influence lies through the self, through inordinate desire, and through vanity, the subjects of the three temptations” (127). The Satan of book 1 of Paradise Regained is not larger than life, but merely human; or in Shawcross’s words, a trickster, “the shaman of initiation ritual whose world involved magic. The Son must reject the magical and accept the factual” (62), that is, construct for himself an identity based on the realities of human life. Sams, however, argues that from the beginning the Son never had what is currently known as an identity problem: Jesus himself recalls how he had “revolved / The Law and prophets, searching what was writ / Concerning the Messiah, to our scribes / Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake / I am” (1.259–263). According to Sams it is Satan who has an identity problem (132): the fiend seeks to discover the identity of the mysterious man (Christ), since the latter poses such a palpable threat to his own identity as the bearer of almost unchallenged hegemony over the human race. Although Sams contends that Satan’s problem is not with his own identity, but rather with that of the Son, it would not be far-fetched to claim that Satan’s need to investigate the Son’s nature is part of a search for deeper understanding of his own self. What is more natural than that, having discovered the existence of a step- or half-brother, he would want to get to know the sibling? One’s family members are, after all, a central component of one’s identity. It is thus not surprising that Satan’s first response to his view of the Son’s (re)birth, that is, his baptism, is a combination of wonder, envy, and rage (1.38), feelings indicative of fears for one’s very selfhood. After his first conversation with Jesus, moreover, Satan simply abandons his disguise of elderly rustic; after all, searches for identity are usually more closely associated with youth than with age. While wandering in the desert, pursuing his meditations, the Son remembers his own rebirth (1.273–274). Jesus had with difficulty persuaded John to perform the ceremony, as is narrated in Matthew 3.13–15: Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?
12 Spenser’s Archimago, too, belongs to this tradition; in books 1and 2 of The Faerie Queene he appears to Guyon as an old man (I.i.29; II.iii.11ff).
88
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.
The Son’s description of his baptism continues with his vision of the Holy Spirit, descending in the form of a dove: And last the sum of all, my Father’s voice, Audibly heard from heaven, pronounced me his, Me his beloved Son, in whom alone He was well pleased; by which I knew the time Now full, that I no more should live obscure. (1.283–287)
The above is a reworking of Luke 3.22: “And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.” Both Luke and Milton emphasize the physicality of Christ’s initiation/conversion experience. Luke spells this out in his comment that the Spirit appeared to the Son “in a bodily shape” and spoke in a real voice; in Milton’s version the Son remembers hearing an “audible” voice: this vision, too, has sensory reality. It is, however, possible that the Son was the only human being present at the baptism ceremony to whose senses the sight of the dove and sound of the voice were vouchsafed (although Satan had noted the apparitions); indeed, neither Luke nor Milton state directly that others present heard or witnessed the heavenly signs. Milton may therefore be delineating the Son as both human and divine at the point of his initiation. He was capable of hearing the voice and seeing the dove, while the people present at the scene did not sense them, thus implying that the Son possessed supernatural capabilities. Yet his apparent need of these senseimpressions strengthens our awareness of his humanity, that he was the only man present to hear and see these visions calls attention to his aloneness. Northrop Frye has noted that the meaning of the baptism ceremony for Christ was not clear to Satan: “the action of Paradise Regained begins with the baptism, an epiphany which Satan sees but does not understand” (“Typology” 238). Barbara K. Lewalski has pointed out too that there is a technical reason for this lack of understanding. Christ himself first displays his ultimate self-knowledge, that is, his awareness of his own divinity, at the end of the epic, when he warns Satan: “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (4.561). In Lewalski’s words: “It is hardly to be supposed that Satan would comprehend Christ’s nature before Christ himself does. Satan in one moment comprehends and falls defeated as Christ in one moment comprehends and stands victorious” (Brief Epic 318). While the fiend recognizes the baptism and subsequent descent of the dove upon the Son as portents of danger for himself and his followers, he seems to see the baptism as merely the coronation of an earthly king. As such it can be used as part of a ploy to delude the Son as to his adversary’s strength; or as Shawcross notes, “Satan offers to deliver up to the Son what he is reputedly destined for, kingdom” (120). The first narrator of the Son’s baptism is none other than the fiend himself: Before [Christ] a great prophet, to proclaim His coming, is sent harbinger, who all
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
89
Invites, and in the consecrated stream Pretends to wash off sin, and fit them so Purified to receive him pure, or rather To do him honor as their king. (1.70–75)
Hill has drawn a parallel between Christopher Marlowe’s decision to have Mephistophilis express the possibly heretical view that hell is an internal state rather than a physical location,13 and Milton’s “tactic” of putting his own ideas on baptism into Satan’s mouth (Milton and the English Revolution 310). Although Satan treads a fine line between deprecation and straightforward narrative (while pretend can indicate falsehood, it also means claiming or professing), his point that the newly baptized have prepared themselves to receive the Son as their king is well-taken. In his human persona Satan would naturally be most concerned with the Son’s role as a human14 candidate for political power in the human world. Satan, whose word, however, is not always to be taken at face value, suggests that baptism is significant for the Son because it is a kind of anointing into kingship, both for the Son himself and for his followers, who by partaking of the king’s initiation ceremony have also been “anointed” as his lieges. Satan, an experienced political leader, thus sees the baptism as bearing meaning not only for the Son but for his followers. Satan would almost certainly have been confused by Psalm 91, long considered as a type of Christ’s temptation, if he had tried to interpret it on any level other than the literal. In the words of the Psalmist: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked” (Ps. 91.7–8). The fiend, it would seem, imagines the Son as a military leader guaranteed success in battle by a divine protector, whose name he would later take. The Son himself, however, points out the superficiality of such an approach: They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries [...] [These conquerors] swell with pride, and must be titled gods, Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers, Worshipped with temple, priest, and sacrifice. (3.71–73, 81–83)
Satan’s awareness of the importance of a leader’s relationship with his followers is central to his worldview, both in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and in The Statesman’s Manual Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls attention to Satan’s function as prototype of the despotic yet charismatic political leader:
13 It is a scholarly commonplace, as John Gorecki points out, that Milton’s description of Satan as bearing hell within himself (Paradise Lost 4.20–22) owes a debt to Mephistophilis’s comment: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In one self place, but where we are is hell” (Dr. Faustus II.i.1.19–20) (46). 14 In addressing Christ Satan refers to the former as a man, while also recalling Christ’s divine nature: “to me thou seem’st the man, whom late / Our new baptizing prophet at the ford / Of Jordan honoured so, and called thee Son / Of God (1.327–330).
90
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature in its utmost abstraction and consequent state of reprobation, the will becomes Satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others; the more hopeless as the more obdurate by its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and pain and pleasure; in short, by the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed. This is the character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. Alas! Too often has it been embodied in real life. (“From The Statesman’s Manual” 390–91)
We first met Satan in the earlier epic, “[c]onfounded though immortal” (1.53); the subsequent consultation between the fiend and his mates serves not only to introduce the various protagonists, but also to establish the nature of Satan’s vigorous, yet often empathetic leadership, which even Coleridge’s stirring words have not convinced all readers to view as “remorseless despotism.” The Great Consult of book 2 of Paradise Lost concludes with a less than generous comment on the part of the Miltonic narrator as to Satan’s leadership: having announced that he will take upon himself whatever danger inheres to an exploratory journey to the newly created earth, Satan brings the debate to a hasty close (2.466–473). Yet in the grand epic simile which concludes the description of the Great Consult of Paradise Lost (2.488–499) the Miltonic narrator convinces us to accept Satan’s followers’ appreciation of his bravery as honest: “Devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds” (2.496–497). The Satan of Paradise Regained speedily focuses on the possible dangers to himself and his followers posed by the Son’s baptism. He convenes a council, not even waiting for an opportunity to meet in the devils’ underworld homeland, but rather floating tenuously amidst threatening clouds: then with envy fraught and rage Flies to his place, nor rests, but in mid air To council summons all his mighty peers, Within thick clouds and dark tenfold involved, A gloomy consistory; and them amidst With looks aghast and sad he thus bespake. (1.38–43)
The Great Consult of Paradise Regained ends quickly; it does not involve the lengthy debates with which we are so familiar from Paradise Lost, since the “infernal crew” feel themselves pressed for time and have faith in their leader’s abilities (1.111–113). His deep involvement in the political struggles of his time had sensitized Milton to a variety of leadership methods. Seven years previous to the first publication of Paradise Lost, with the restoration of the monarchy imminent, Milton published an attack on the dictatorial method of leadership, or what might today be called the authoritarian management style. In The Readie and Easie Way he insists that: people must needs be madd or strangely infatuated that build the chief hope of their common happiness or safetie on a single person; who if he happen to be good, can do no more then another man, if to be bad, hath in his hands to do more evil without check,
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
91
then millions of other men. The happiness of a nation must needs be firmest and certainest in a full and free Councel of their own electing, where no single person, but reason only swayes. (Complete Prose Works 7: 361–362)
The fallen angels of Paradise Regained, however, do not appear to be motivated by fear of their leader. They commit the care of their “main enterprise” (i.e., development of the “well-couched fraud, well-woven snares” [1.97] which may prevent the Son from taking his place as “supreme on earth” [1.99]) to Satan with a simple sigh of relief. He had, after all, succeeded in overthrowing Adam, and might therefore be able to overthrow Adam’s son. The relationship between Satan and his followers thus seems to be straightforward, based on mutual respect. Whether one is a leader or a member of the rank and file, tension between allegiance to the group and responsibility to the self is central to the human experience. Early Protestant martyrology, however, did not always discern a difference between the temptation and suffering of the individual believer and the suffering of the community of believers, that is, the church. At the beginning of The Acts and Monuments (popularly known as The Book of Martyrs; first published in 1563 but reissued many times), which details the persecution of individual Christians, John Foxe notes Christ’s determination to establish a church “in this world [...]. [T]he same Church should mightily be impugned, not only by the world, but also by the uttermost strength and powers of all hell [...] that the same Church, notwithstanding the uttermost of the devil and all his malice, should continue” (1). The above might just as easily apply to the individual as to the community of believers. For Milton, however, salvation was not essentially a collective, but rather an individual process; while he devoted much of his energy and zeal to the struggle for political and church reformation, he believed that even the most liberal system of government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, is worth fighting for to the extent that it enables the individual to seek God’s grace. In The Readie and Easie Way Milton argues that: “As for spiritual [liberty], who can be at rest, who can enjoy any thing in this world with contentment, who hath not libertie to serve God and save his own soul, according to the best light which God hath planted in him to that purpose, by the reading of his reveal’d will and the guidance of his holy spirit?” (Complete Prose Works 7: 379). Or as Shawcross suggests, Paradise Regained “sets forth the need for and means to independence of the individual” (119). If the Son is tested as an individual, the Satan of Paradise Regained is essentially a politician, a leader, concerned less with individual redemption than with the salvation and prosperity of the group. Yet sensing, perhaps, that he could not impress his interlocutor by appearing to him clad in the robes of a monarch, a leader of men, Satan adopts the guise of a poor shepherd. The “aged man in rural weeds, / Following, as seemed, the quest of some stray ewe, / Or withered sticks to gather” (1.314–316) can be seen as a parodic version of the Old Man of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, he who comes to plead with the hero: Ah, Doctor Faustus, that I might prevail To guide thy steps unto the way of life, By which sweet path thou mayst attain the goal That shall conduct thee to celestial rest! (A-text; 5.1.35–38)
92
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Milton may also have found inspiration for a possible parody of the earlier drama when the Old Man begs of Faustus: “Though thou hast now offended like a man, / Do not persever in it like a devil” (B-text; 5.1.37–38). In their introduction to Dr. Faustus David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen note that the B-text provides a somewhat different theological emphasis from that of the A-text, in that Faustus is given “more volition in his choice of evil and Mephistophilis a more active and sinister role in his temptation of his victim” (xvi–xvii). This greater “volition in his choice of evil” would have appealed to Milton,15 and both versions of the play were presumably accessible, the A-text having first been published in 1604 and the B-text in 1616. The Old Man of Paradise Regained, of course, has offended like a devil and attempts to persevere in his offense like a man. His intended victim, the Son, is about to take his first “steps unto the way of life” that will ultimately culminate in “celestial rest”; although not before suffering the broken heart and mingling of blood and tears of which Marlowe’s Old Man speaks (A-text; 5.1.39–40). Although the two are presumably alone in the desert, Satan addresses the Son in the tones of a veteran candidate for political office who senses the presence of a larger audience, whether composed of his demonic followers or of the future generations who will read of this epic encounter in Holy Scripture as well as in Milton’s epic, in “states unborn and accents yet unknown.” After opening with a frank, candid concession of defeat (“’Tis true, I am that spirit unfortunate, / Who leagued with millions more in rash revolt / Kept not my happy station” [1.358–360]), Satan uses the common ploy of false modesty: “Though I have lost / Much lustre of my native brightness, lost / To be beloved of God, I have not lost / To love” (1.377–380). The fiend then proceeds to praise himself in a way he assumes will endear himself to the human persona of his immediate listener, as well as to the rest of his audience: “by them [humankind] / I lost not what I lost, rather by them / I gained what I have gained, and with them dwell / Copartner in these regions of the world” (1.389–392). This is surely the rhetoric of the seasoned pol who would have his listeners see him as “first among equals,” as one who is simultaneously aware of both his debt to his followers and his undeniable position as leader. Satan is again shown as leader, as one whose identity is defined by interaction with followers, in book 2. Arnold Stein notes that the second council (2.121ff.) of “Satan’s ‘peers’ is a lively one, introducing what may appear to be a fresh comic spirit into a poem remarkable for its concentrated austerity” (Heroic Knowledge 49). According to Stein’s definition of this comic spirit, Milton’s “fascinating comedy” lies in his depiction of Satan as “puritanical” (50–51) when he rejects out of hand Belial’s suggestion that the Son might be susceptible to female beauty. Satan’s lecture begins with a scornful attack on Belial himself: because of old Thou thyself dot’st on womankind, admiring 15 Gordon Campbell argues convincingly that despite the atheistic “table-talk” in various London taverns for which he was notorious, Marlowe was not an atheist: Dr. Faustus “may deplore the truth of Christianity, but it acknowledges that truth even as it despises it. In short, Marlowe was not an atheist, and his blasphemy may be accounted for as a protest against the Christian faith the truth of which he acknowledged through gritted teeth” (520).
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
93
Their shape, their colour, and attractive grace, None are, thou think’st, but taken with such toys. (2.174–177)
Although the notion of Satan employing the rhetoric of a nonconformist preacher chastening a straying parishioner is certainly pregnant with humor, this speech is not of itself amusing. Satan accuses Belial of responding to women’s outward appearance, which, as is often the case with any appearance, can be deceptive, especially to the weak-minded (2.220–222). Belial, in other words, stands accused of bearing one of the most common of human weaknesses: difficulty in distinguishing essence from appearance. Milton’s readers first made the acquaintance of Belial in Paradise Lost. The narrator of the earlier epic tells us that Belial was lewd, gross, vicious (1.490–492), and proceeds to remind us that he is the spiritual father of the sons of Belial, a generic biblical term for groups of undisciplined mischief makers (1.500–502). In book 2 of Paradise Lost the narrator presents Belial as fair and dignified in appearance, but false within (2.109–112). Here, too, the poet calls attention to Belial’s role as one who blurs the borderline between essence and appearance: Belial himself seems fair (physically attractive), but is empty inside, and Milton was surely aware that in Hebrew the first syllable of the fallen angel’s name means without. The Council of Pandaemonium is then exposed to Belial’s considerable oratorical abilities as he makes a persuasive case for sitting tight and waiting, rather than immediately engaging heaven in another battle, or in the words of the Miltonic narrator, counseling “ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth, Not peace” (2.227–228). Belial’s words, let us note, are only reasonable in appearance; they are “clothed in reason’s garb,” that is, their surface appearance—reason—is not identical with their essence, which is sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Milton had earlier drawn a parallel between Belial, that supreme hypocrite, and Ely’s sons Hophni and Phinehas (1 Sam. 2.12–25), those types of the dissolute priest (1.493–496). An examination of the biblical text reveals that Ely’s sons, “sons of Belial” who “knew not the Lord” (1 Sam. 2.12), committed a number of sins, of which fornication was only one. They demanded meat of those who brought offerings to the temple in a manner that led innocent worshippers to abhor the offering of the Lord (2.17). They “lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation” (2.22), by their priestly example encouraging the people to transgress (2.24). Hophni and Phinehas did not honor their father; they “hearkened not unto the voice of their father” (2.25) when he pleaded with them to desist from their evil behavior. They were ultimately slain because they “made themselves vile” (3.13). Satan’s lengthy rebuke of Belial for suggesting that Jesus may be successfully tempted by female pulchritude (Paradise Regained 2.172–234) is thus more than a captain’s reprimand of his womanizing lieutenant. The fiend is, of course, astute enough to realize that the Son is one of those who would with a smile make “small account / Of beauty and her lures, easily scorned / All her assults, on worthier things intent!” (2.193–195). Yet the threads connecting Belial with his priestly offspring indicate a deeper sin: lust for beautiful women is a fault, but the hypocrisy of the fallen priest is even more evil. Ely’s sons, after all, are blamed not only for their
94
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
own misconduct but for misleading others into iniquity by blurring the boundaries between appearance—the upright priests clad in linen ephod, serving God in his temple—and essence: the abusers of poor worshipers, whether men or women, who come to the temple with honest intentions. When he accuses Belial of not understanding that the Son cannot be worked upon by a “graceful and discreet” woman, even one expert in the “amorous arts,” Satan is judging his fellow as if they were both human. This is because, as Stein has noted, Satan cannot avoid—“these are the inescapable terms of the drama— judging even Christ by himself, Satan. Finally, that is all he has. And that self is human” (Heroic Knowledge 52). Yet the fiend’s human self does not seem to have that independent existence that characterizes the Son. While the Satan of Paradise Regained is individuated, he is never really shown as alone in the sense that the Son is. Missing are the heroic satanic soliloquies of Paradise Lost.16 As an experienced politician and leader, the Satan of Paradise Regained is a capable rhetorician. Barbara Lewalski discusses the fiend’s verbal ploys as a function of Milton’s decision to write Paradise Regained as an epic: “the language of Paradise Regained incorporates most of the epic stylistic features and most of the kinds of poetic figures found in Paradise Lost, albeit in lesser profusion and in a somewhat muted tone” (Brief Epic 332–33). The “decorum,” according to Lewalski, which is imposed on the epic as a whole by Milton’s choice of the Son of God as his main character, “dictates that Satan avoid the splendid and swelling oratory which he employs to such remarkable effect in the councils and temptation scenes of Paradise Lost.” At the same time, such soul-stirring rhetoric is not really necessary: Satan has already established and consolidated his position as chief enemy of mankind and leader of the fallen angels. The latter are now, in Lewalski’s words, “comfortably established and reasonably content in their usurped kingdoms of earth and middle air” (Brief Epic 333). The fiend is also astute enough to realize that he must suit his discourse to that of his interlocutor. He will employ those “subtle nuances of suggestion, intimation, and irony sounded above a ground base of seemingly calm and ordered rationality” (334) to “sound like Christ’s alter ego, to imitate the voice of reason itself” (350). Although Paradise Regained does not contain lengthy Satanic soliloquies of the type for which Paradise Lost is so justly noted, the Miltonic narrator shows Satan’s mind at work as he evaluates the effectiveness of past speech acts and plans future ones: So spake the Son of God, and Satan stood A while as mute confounded what to say, What to reply, confuted and convinced Of his weak arguing, and fallacious drift; At length collecting all his serpent wiles, With soothing words renewed, him thus accosts. (3.1–6)
It is worth noting the enjambment of lines 1 and 2: if we pause at the end of line 1 we might be tempted to think that it is Satan who stood, even though we know that 16 Paradise Lost 4.32–113; 4.358–392; 4.505–535; 9.99–178; 9.473–493.
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
95
it is the Son who will eventually stand, while the fiend is always/already fallen, both from his status as archangel and from an upright position to that of the serpent who slithers on the ground. The figure here—the comparison of Satan’s verbal tricks to those of the serpent—is commonplace; yet reading the poem without pausing between books 2 and 3 reveals that these lines immediately follow the Son’s sermon on the vanity of wealth and power, ending with: “Riches are needless then, both for themselves, / And for thy reason why they should be sought, / To gain a scepter, oftest better missed” (2.484–486). The images of serpent and scepter, let us recall, conflate in Exodus 4.2–5: And the Lord said unto [Moses], What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand: That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee.
In the above God teaches Moses to use a fairly common magic trick to prove to his potential followers that he bears divine approval. Milton may have intended to recall this image of the serpent that turns into a stick as a figure for the indefinite quality of human reality: what appears to be a soft, sinuous, slimy serpent can suddenly become a firm, straight stick. The poor, enslaved Hebrews who would expect Moses to show visual proof of his contact with God before they agree to follow him could easily view this challenge to their limited perception of physical reality as a sign of God-given abilities. Sharon Achinstein has called attention to a trend in Interregnum political writing in which the traditional image of Satan as liar was used to “meet the current conditions of polemical writing”: publicity in the press, in other words, was seen as “the Devil’s work”: The press is a kind of weapon, capable of hellish murder. [...] Parliament was likened to the Devil specifically in spreading “lies” in the press. What is surprising is the consistency of intention and the flexibility of technique in this royalist effort, the attempt to put the traditional image of the Devil to contemporary use, “upgrading” the Devil’s falsifying media to include the modern technology of the printing press. (191)
Milton, of course, would have rejected out of hand such royalist attempts at besmirching the modern technology of the press and its ability to spread ideas broadly and quickly; yet by recalling Moses’s magic tricks the poet may be hinting that his readers should beware of blind acceptance of any word, whether spoken or written. Milton’s mention of the scepter at the end of book 2 and the almost immediate reference to the serpent a few lines later thus suggests Satan’s inability to go beyond his own limited understanding of the multifaceted nature of reality; in this the fiend is, of course, no more than human. “Confounded what to say” (3.2), Satan accosts the Son: “thy heart / Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape” (3.10–11). Yet these
96
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
words will ultimately be useless, since, as MacKellar notes, they are merely intended to flatter Christ (142), who will surely not find anything particularly flattering in the notion that his heart contains the “perfect shape,” that is, the outward form, of any quality. The way in which Satan uses his “serpent wiles,” in other words, reveals an understanding as flawed as that of the ancient Hebrew slaves who needed a cheap magician’s trick to validate the heavenly source of their leader’s authority. Later on in the Hebrews’ journey to Canaan God used the serpent to both punish and instruct his people. Wearied with their complaints about the “light bread” on which they subsisted for so many years, The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that everyone that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. (Num. 21.6–9)
Book 9 of Paradise Lost details the fiend’s hesitation as to which creature’s body he should choose to inhabit during his temptation of Eve (9.87–90). Satan is confused, as he will be again at the outset of book 3 of Paradise Regained, when “mute” and “confounded,” he “collects his serpent wiles,” that is, decides once again to allow himself to be informed by the serpent’s nature. It is possible to detect herein a development in the serpent symbolism similar to that found in Numbers 21.6–9. The Lord sends real serpents to sting the ungrateful Hebrews, certainly a convenient form of punishment, considering the desert venue of the action. When they realize their sin and ask Moses to intercede for them, God orders the creation of a symbolic serpent. The latter will replace the actual creature, and will serve as a figurative sting, a necessary reminder of the people’s sin and repentence. The fiend, too, moves from the physical to the symbolic mode, as God did in Numbers: the Satan of Paradise Regained adopts the serpent’s wiles—his signs—rather than inhabiting the serpent’s physical form, as he had done in the earlier epic. The Old Testament images of serpent and scepter eventually conflate with Godhead in John 3.14: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” And in fact it is Satan himself who takes the Son of man from out of the wilderness and lifts him up: he caught him up, and without wing Of hippogriff bore through the air sublime Over the wilderness and o’er the plain [...] There [in Jerusalem] on the highest pinnacle he set The Son of God. (4.541–543; 549–550)
In The Book of Martyrs John Foxe describes the temptation of Jesus’ brother James by the scribes and pharisees of Jerusalem:
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
97
[The latter] did set James upon the battlements of the temple, and they cried to him, and said, “Thou just man, whom we all ought to obey, this people is going astray after Jesus which is crucified.” And he answered with a loud voice, “Why do you ask me of Jesus the Son of Man? He sitteth on the right hand of the Most High” [...]. Then the Scribes and Pharisees said among themselves [...] “let us go up, and throw him down, that others, being moved with fear, may deny that faith” [...]. Therefore they went up to throw down the just man. Yet he was not killed by the fall, but, turning, fell on his knees, saying, “O Lord God, Father, I beseech thee to forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (10–11)
In Foxe’s version of the temptation of a Christ substitute who is placed on the pinnacle of the Temple, the devil’s role is played by representatives of a hypocritical, power-hungry religious authority. The Scribes and Pharisees, being human, and thus of limited vision, assume that it is possible for them to succeed in murdering their victim. The miracle of James’s survival is, however, something of an anticlimax, and James’s subsequent repetition of Christ’s plea to God that his tormentors be forgiven borders on the condescending. This is not the way Milton would have the Son of God exalted by Satan. As John R. Knott notes, in Paradise Regained Milton gives expression to a mature, yet militant ideal of Christian martyrdom: the overcoming of satanic rage through the speaking of truth, constancy, and acceptance of suffering (Discourses of Martyrdom 169). The Satan of Paradise Regained is more sensitive to the nature of his intended victim than Foxe’s Pharisees are to theirs. The poet depicts, moreover, Satan’s development from his jealous, angry stance vis-à-vis Christ in Paradise Lost to a more balanced, albeit grudging acceptance in the later epic. As detailed by Raphael to Adam, Satan is not above lying to his followers about the Son’s part in his own exaltation when he suggests that the Son was self-anointed (5.774–777). This is in direct contradiction, of course, to the Father’s declaration that he himself had anointed Christ (5.603–605). At the outset of Paradise Regained, on the other hand, Satan admits to his followers that: His first-begot we know, and sore have felt, When his fierce thunder drove us to the deep; Who this is we must learn, for man he seems In all his lineaments, though in his face The glimpses of his father’s glory shine. (1.89–93)
The fiend, as the prince of lies, is both articulate and sensitive to the fine points of rhetoric. Having “collected his serpent wiles” at the beginning of book 3, Satan proceeds from analyzing his own “weak arguing” to an analysis of Christ’s rhetoric; but he is less than candid when he flatters the Son for the latter’s ability as an orator in phrases reminiscent of Hamlet’s dramatic criticism (“let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature” III.ii.19–23): I see thou know’st what is of use to know, What best to say canst say, to do canst do; Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
98
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape. (3.7–11)
Satan himself, that is, may be accused of “o’erstepping the modesty of nature” in his praise of Christ; though the Son’s perfection would seem to make overpraising impossible. Yet Christ is human at this point, and Satan might delude himself that he could be moved by flattery. In Satan’s attempted flattery of the Son, Milton may be hinting at the original pollution of language which was one of the spin-offs of mankind’s fall; again, the Mosaic overtones are suggestive. As Marks has noted, “The shattering fall of the first tablets suggests that the sacred truths were ‘ruined’ before we ever heard of them. Like the fall into sin, the linguistic fall and the shattering of the tablets are ‘fortunate,’ but only in so far as they eventuate in a text. This makes the poem potentially an idol, evoking the scandal of all prophetic poetry” (227). In “Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word” Dayton Haskin suggests that just as “Mary did not fully understand all at once the meaning and implications of the text of her calling, so Jesus, having heard that he was the Father’s ‘beloved Son,’ gradually works through the implications of his calling during the trials in the wilderness [...]. Milton’s Mary emerges as a portrait of the responsible reader” (177–178, 179), who in turn educates her son to be such a reader. Moreover, Milton scholars have noted that the Satan of Paradise Regained can be viewed as a faulty reader. Or as Annabel M. Patterson has suggested, Milton also constantly invokes in Paradise Regained the dichotomy between truth and fiction [which is] a concern in his poetics. It might seem that he had finally found a solution by simply dividing these rival modes between his two protagonists and elaborating the contrast between the divine Word and the Father of Lies. This program is articulated in its baldest form at the end of Book III: “So fares it when with truth falsehood contends.” (202)
If Satan had been a more capable reader he might not have tried to convince Jesus that satanic intercession could reinstall him in “David’s royal seat, his true successor,” and enable him to deliver the ten lost tribes (3.373–374); he would have known that the Son had, as a boy, searched “what was writ / Concerning the Messiah,” (1.260–261) and had discovered that his way “must lie / Through many a hard assay even to the death,” (1.263–264) before being able to achieve fallen humanity’s redemption. The fiend’s literal level of literacy would not have been an issue in Paradise Lost, telling as it does the story of a preliterate society, in which all communication, whether between God and angels, between angels and humans, or between humans, was oral. In the later epic, however, the poet posits protagonists who read, or in other words interpret, and the question of Satan’s literacy thus becomes salient. Emory Elliot has noted that “much of the poem’s dramatic power depends upon the reader’s awareness of those aspects of Christ’s life and character of which Satan is ignorant [...]. Satan knows only that there is a meaning in Christ’s words which he cannot grasp” (228– 229). Patterson points out that Satan is “tormented by ambiguity—not the language of which he is author, ‘the persuasive Rhetoric / That sleek’t his tongue’ (4.4–5), but in the divine Word itself” (202). And in “Time and History in Paradise Regained”
Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son
99
Lewalski judges the fiend’s ability as a reader most severely. Satan’s language in part derives “from the intellectual blindness which, according to Milton’s theological and poetic vision, affects all those who commit themselves to evil” (56–57). “[T]hough Satan’s scornful allusions to the ambiguities surrounding the beginning of Christ’s kingdom [4.382–393] serve his rhetorical purposes, they also display his literalmindedness, his myopic inability to penetrate the true meaning of the signs he affects to be reading” (“Time” 65). Satan’s language, in other words, displays his inability to accept ambiguity; such inability makes interpretation of texts exceedingly difficult. It is not surprising that Satan, while still in the weeds of a man, appeals to the Son to engage in a discussion of interpretation: Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song. (1.478–480)
While not forgetting that Satan is more than capable of acting the part of an honest old man, the above seems to be a sincere expression of confusion; there is indeed a difference between the hard, rough ways of truth for the one who walks, and the smooth, pleasing way of the one who talks. As a man, speaking with another man, the fiend reveals his despair at attaining, not only virtue, but even a credible reading of virtue. Satan finds the act of speaking easy enough; no matter of what he is accused, he can always return “answer smooth” (1.467). Yet as a reader, an interpreter, he is found wanting. Marks has suggested that Milton was sensitive to traditional concepts of prophecy and interpretation as marking the endpoints of a continuum representing the reading process: It is one of the ironies of language—one Milton must have brooded over—that the archaic verb “aread,” meaning “advise,” but also “prophesy,” came early to have a cognate form with the meaning “interpret, especially written symbols.” The deeper relationship between prophesy and interpretation, or re-creation as inevitable gloss, resists definition. According to a famous saying found in the Talmud, “a sage is greater than a prophet” [...].Yet the deference here accorded to biblical interpretation was never extended to poetry, which was rather feared or dismissed. (229)
In his persona of elderly shepherd Satan’s last request to Jesus is to be allowed to hear the “dictates” of truth from the latter’s mouth (1.483–484). It is, of course, not coincidental that Satan begs to be allowed to hear, rather than merely to listen, since hearing implies understanding and ultimate internalization of the message. The fiend justifies his request by recalling the Father’s apparent willingness to allow “the hypocrite or atheous priest” to touch “holy things” and “pray or vow.” God had even spoken to the reprobate Balaam (1.490–492), and with a surprisingly modern turn of phrase Satan pleads, “disdain not such access to me” (1.492). Satan herein appears to be aligning himself with evil biblical personages who nonetheless served as God’s tools, that is, vectors of God’s Word, by means of speaking. Yet, as Alter notes, the central word-motif of the Balaam story (Num. 22–24) is the verb to see and its synonyms (95): the ass alone sees the angel of the Lord, until at last God opens Balaam’s eyes and enables him to see. It is not enough,
100
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
in other words, to listen or even hear God’s word, since hearing, the prophet’s most developed sense, is arguably a less mediated process than is seeing. Seeing, the basic sense involved in reading, necessarily involves interpretation; it is here that Satan is found wanting. The Son himself parts from his interlocutor with the ironic comment “I know thy scope” (1.494), and while, as MacKellar notes, scope commonly bore the meaning of purpose or aim in the seventeenth century (102), it would not be farfetched to detect a critique of the limitations of Satan’s sight, or breadth of vision. Having begun his first temptation of the Son clothed as a desert wanderer, Satan begins his final temptation with another reference to his own humanity, combined with a statement of the ambiguity inherent in that status, both for him and for the Son: thou art called The Son of God, which bears no single sense; The Son of God I also am, or was, And if I was, I am; relation stands; All men are Sons of God. (4.516–520)
The Satan of Paradise Regained then concludes his final temptation and falls (4.576–578). The irony of Satan’s second fall, straight into the arms of his crew “that sat consulting,” is palpable. Having failed to wean the Son away from his entry into Godhead the fiend puts aside his human persona and returns to his role as leader of the forces of Hell, at the same time as his human interlocutor, still alone, returns to his mother’s house (4.638–639). Paradise Regained concludes with the Son’s return home, and in this sense is prophetic of the tale of the Prodigal Son, one of the parables the Son will soon tell in his ministry. Unlike the Prodigal Son, however, Jesus returns, not to his father, but to his mother’s house. The epic’s last line, that is, reminds us again of the Son’s humanity: he is the son of a woman, and his home is with his mother. Yet this finale also forces the reader to recall the Son’s stepbrother: unlike Satan, the observed of all observers who nevertheless will one day beg to be hidden in a herd of swine (4.630), as was the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), our last view of Christ is not as a leader, but rather as a “private” person, “unobserved.”
Chapter 5
“Thine now is all this world”:1 A Human Satanic Archetype Having examined the Satan characters in the epic poetry of Milton and the spiritual autobiography and imaginative prose of Bunyan, it is now both possible and necessary to suggest the existence of one archetypal Satan character: the joint production, as it were, of the two great nonconformist writers of the early Restoration period. This character is both allegorical and individuated; he is greater than the sum of his parts, and serves as a pattern for later characters who, while functioning in a secular milieu, are essentially satanic in a sense that Milton and Bunyan would have recognized, had they been familiar with later literary terms and methodology. It is, I have claimed, possible to view the Satan of Paradise Lost, Grace Abounding, Paradise Regained, and The Holy War as an archetype whose development can be followed through the above-mentioned works. The character is a representation of each writer’s engagement with questions of primary importance: To what extent is the search for salvation a group-based, as opposed to individual, process? Is there a correlation between evil and individuation, that is, perceiving oneself as a discrete entity, rather than as part of a group? Given the defeat of the Good Old Cause, to say nothing of the personal sufferings of the believer, is hope possible? Bunyan and Milton grapple with these questions in their creation of Satan; the archetype that I have posited is the sum total of their answers. High school biology students were long taught that the development of the individual embryo is a pattern for the development of the phylum as a whole. This concept was couched in the easily memorized formula “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The human embryo in its mother’s womb goes through a phase in which it is fish-like, then amphibian, then reptilian, and finally mammalian, which is how modern evolution theory has delineated the development of the species Homo sapiens within the phylum to which it belongs. Although “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” has been criticized by scientists for not being an exact formulation,2 it
1 Paradise Lost 10: 372. 2 In their textbook Biological Principles and Processes (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1971), to cite one example out of many, Claude A. Villee and Vincent G. Dethier explain that in 1866 Ernst Haeckel developed and expounded the theory that embryos “repeat the evolutionary history of their ancestors in some abbreviated form” in the course of their development. “This idea, succinctly stated as ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ stimulated research in embryology and focused attention on the general resemblance between embryonic development and the evolutionary process. It is now clear that the embryos of the higher animals resemble the embryos of lower forms, not the adults, as Haeckel had believed” (291–92).
102
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
can serve as a convenient figure for the relation between Satan of Paradise Lost and the Satan archetype that can be inferred from the writings of Milton and Bunyan. That is, the development of the Satan of Paradise Lost from the larger-than-life hero of the early books to the hissing serpent of book 10 predicts the broader development of the character, from the heroic giant of Paradise Lost and Grace Abounding to the humanized, down-to-earth (literally as well as figuratively) character of Paradise Regained and The Holy War. Lacking one universally accepted definition of the human, the scholar returns to, or perhaps resorts to, examining artifacts in his search for enlightenment. We may not know what the human self is, but we can read/see/envision the story told by the individual. As Marshall Grossman argues, “individuals often act in consonance with stories, which therefore—through these actions—become historical, regardless of the complex, shifting, and incoherent ways in which they do or do not correspond to some putative, extrasubjective, material or collective ‘reality’” (44). Harold Bloom makes a persuasive claim that Shakespeare, “by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing character and personality in language,” has in fact “invented the human as we know it” (714). Bloom defines human nature as “human action, and the way such action frequently [is] antithetical to human words” (722). Bloom’s definition is useful here, although it is couched in terms more appropriate to the drama, in which human actions and words are made visible and audible to an audience. The human being is capable of examining his own actions and words and comparing them, whether the words are spoken aloud with the voice or internally in the mind, and of judging the degree to which they correspond. Since humans are not gods, they will probably possess this ability of self-examination to a limited extent. The old saw “To err is human” not only describes, that is, gives a characteristic of the human, but also defines. We can know the human because it is flawed: I err, therefore I am. Yet error itself exists within a narrative framework, which consists of description of character and the character’s action; Grossman notes that “when discrepancies between description and narration occur, readers generally discredit description and accept the character’s actions as the index of his or her ethos” (38). The Satan characters of Milton and Bunyan are human, first and foremost, in that they are capable of introspection, of comparing their own thoughts and actions and constructing their own narrative on the basis of this comparison. Yet even when they fail to do so, their very failure forces us to recognize that they remain within the realm of the human. Not only is the construction of narrative an essential activity of the human mind, according to Grossman (34); human experience itself is mediated by narrative: “the subject may appropriate his or her experience by finding a place for it in an ongoing story” (42). This appropriation of experience may be seen as a fashioning of self by means of constructing a story; in other words, the subject “emerges as an agent through a reflection on the actions it has taken, is taking, will take, or can be conceived of taking within the narrative” (37). For an individual, according to Grossman, “the one serious answer to the question ‘Who are you?’ is the story of his or her life” (40). In his groundbreaking Renaissance Self-Fashioning Stephen Greenblatt has provided a definition of self which can be appropriated as a useful definition for the
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
103
human: “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires—and always some elements of deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity” (1). Thus we recognize Satan as human because he is an individual, an entity who is aware of his separation from others, whose nature can be not only defined, but also re-defined, that is, changed. Greenblatt avers that during the early modern period “there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process. [...] [I]t is in the sixteenth century that fashion seems to come into wide currency as a way of designating the forming of a self” (2). It is to Greenblatt’s “set of governing conditions common to most instances of self-fashioning” (8–9) that we may look in order to grasp the importance of the process vis-à-vis the development of the Satan character we have been tracing: Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adultress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed. [...] [W]e may say that selffashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss. (9)
The human is thus the dynamic. This is what makes the permanent maintenance of goodness impossible for Satan. Satan cannot be good because as a human he is always/already discovering or even inventing the alien against whom he measures himself and finds himself wanting. The believing Christian must then question whether repentance and redemption can be permanent. Milton and Bunyan may have created their Satan characters as one, though not the only, answer. This, they appear to be saying, is what the human looks like if permanent salvation is not possible. As if intending to predict his final depiction of Satan in the epic as a voiceless, helpless serpent (10.513–517), the Miltonic narrator’s first reference to the character at the outset of Paradise Lost is as the “infernal serpent” (1.34). Yet this is immediately followed by a veritable lexicon of pride, which the reader cannot help but find stirring:3 aspiring, glory, equalled the most high, ambitious, among others (1.36–44). 3 C.S. Lewis claims that the reader should not be stirred by Satan’s rhetoric: when all is said and done “it was the poet’s intention to be fair to evil, to give it a run for its money—to show it first at the height, with all its rants and melodrama and ‘Godlike imitated state’ about it, and then to trace what actually becomes of such self-intoxication when it encounters reality [...]. It was from this conception that Milton started and when he put the most specious aspects of Satan at the very beginning of his poem he was relying on two predispositions in the minds of his readers, which in that age, would have guarded them from our later misunderstanding. Men still believed that there was such a person as Satan, and that he was a liar. The poet did not foresee that his work would one day meet the disarming simplicity of critics who take for gospel things said by the father of falsehood in public speeches to his troops” (100). In his classic Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, Stanley Fish posits Satan’s rhetoric as Milton’s intentional challenge to the reader: “our reception [...] a blend of what, for various reasons, we would like to read into the passage, and what we know, from unimpeachable sources, is really there. So that in any one scene, including the crucial scenes of book 9, there
104
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
While not ignoring the risk inherent in separating individual words from their context, the density of expressions of pride and glory in the above in this, the narrator’s first rendering of Satan, cannot be coincidental. It is also not surprising that in the early books of Paradise Lost the fiend is usually shown in his role as leader, surrounded by admiring followers. His struggle against God the Father is not, we are constantly reminded, a solo venture. The picture is different, however, when the fiend is alone. An examination of Satan’s great soliloquies in books 4 and 9 yields few references to the rebel hosts. When alone with his thoughts, Satan, as might be expected, expresses and analyzes his own thoughts and feelings. A rare reference to his followers in Satan’s first soliloquy in book 9 is revealing: To me shall be the glory sole among The infernal powers [. . .]. I in one night freed From servitude inglorious well-nigh half The angelic name. (9.135–136, 140–142)
If the above had been part of a public oration it would have served as yet another example of Satan’s skills in political rhetoric: both the self-serving boast of “glory sole” and the strategic use of exaggerated statistics. (It was, after all, generally accepted that the fiend took with him a third of heaven’s population, according to Raphael (5.710), and this estimate is supported by Revelation 12.4: “And his [the dragon’s] tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”) Nevertheless this discussion of his own leadership role is well-nigh the only point in the soliloquies at which Satan appears to be engaged in a gratuitous act of lying to himself. Throughout the rest of his inner monologues he is brutally honest as to his own ingratitude to God (4.42–45); he also places the blame for his fall squarely upon himself: Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand? Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse, But heaven’s free love dealt equally to all? (4.66–68)
The above is in stark contrast to statements the fallen angel makes when addressing his followers. In his debate with Abdiel at the outset of the rebellion in heaven Satan claims the God-like attribute of not having been created: “We know no time when we were not as now; / Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power” (5.859–861). Only when he is alone, not functioning as are available two interpretations; one, urged on us by the epic voice or by our own awareness of the possibilities and their implications, supports and gives body to the picture of Edenic reality outlined by God in book 3, while the other points, however indirectly, to his villainy and our parents’ (technical) innocence. As before, the subversive response (interpretation) is first encouraged and then discredited, leaving the reader to come to terms with the appeal it has for him” (214). Ultimately, “the reader is forced to acknowledge a tendency of mind of which he may have been (consciously) unaware, and which, undetected and unjudged, could have done him irreparable harm” (239).
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
105
part/leader of a group or even pondering this role, is Satan able to judge himself. Might not this be a statement on Milton’s part of the greater credibility of internal, individual, as opposed to group-based, struggle? We are vouchsafed a final view of Satan in book 10 when he returns to hell in the guise of a conquering hero, only to be temporarily turned into a serpent groveling on his belly (10.514). The Miltonic narrator ends his depiction of the devils with the reminder that their punishment—serpentization—is temporary, since they will soon be permitted to resume their lost shape (10.574). Satan finally regains a form which in the commonly accepted hierarchy is somewhat lower than angelic, or in other words, retains a form that is human: lesser than the angels but higher than the animals. C.S. Lewis suggests that Satan’s final (though temporary!) transformation into a serpent is the high point of the process of his self-induced downfall: By his own will he becomes a serpent in book 9; in book 10 he is a serpent whether he will or no. This progressive degradation, of which he himself is vividly aware, is carefully marked in the poem. He begins by fighting for ‘liberty’, however misconceived; but almost at once sinks to fighting for ‘Honour, Dominion, glorie, and renoune’ (6.422). Defeated in this, he sinks to that great design which makes the main subject of the poem—the design of ruining two creatures who had never done him any harm, no longer in the serious hope of victory, but only to annoy the Enemy whom he cannot directly attack.” (99)
Yet the latter ignores Satan’s previous expressions of pity for Adam and Eve; the reason for the kindliness of these feelings is none other than their resemblance to God. For Satan the First Parents are a “gentler pair, whom my thoughts pursue / With wonder, and could love” (4.362–363). These lines surely reveal a poignant, yearning generosity toward the humans whom Satan believes to have replaced himself and his mates in the Father’s affection, as well as love for the Father who has so impaired him. In his discussion of the problematics of providing a credible motivation for Satan’s rebellion, Arnold Williams notes that: In the Renaissance at least one theologian and several dramatists and poets used an account of the rebellion of Satan which assumed that the incarnation was revealed to the angels and that Satan rebelled because he would not accept the incarnation. By choosing man as the form which the Son was to take, God degraded the angels below the dignity of man. (263–64)
Furthermore, as Williams points out, the “worship of man was more spiritually construed as the worship of God as man, that is, of Christ. Hence Satan’s sin was the refusal to accept the incarnation of God as man, an act by which man outranked the angels in the order of beings. Such a motivation would, if Milton knew it, be suited to the purpose of Paradise Lost” (255). If, however, the incarnation of Christ as a human places mankind above the angels in the divine scheme, it may be possible that Satan’s development from angelic to human can be seen not as degradation, but as a paradoxical rising in the hierarchy. In my discussion of the exaltation of the Son (5.600–615)4 I suggested that the Father feared the consequences of individuation among his angelic followers; he 4
Chapter 1, pp. 8–9.
106
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
therefore established the Son as his regent, under whose rule all the denizens of heaven were meant to be “United as one individual soul / For ever happy” (5.610–611). In his account of Christian angelology and its embodiment in Milton’s writings, Robert H. West explicates Milton’s intense interest in the angels’ physical nature: he avers that the poet cared about angelic eating and lovemaking because “they grew out of his idea of the continuity of nature. Milton included them in Paradise Lost because he believed solidly in this larger idea which they helped to make graphic” (114). Yet the good angels of Paradise Lost display individual character traits. In our first view of Raphael he appears in an expected, empyreal glory (5.250), and is accompanied on his mission to the earth by angelic choirs. As we eavesdrop on his luncheon conversation with Adam and Eve, however, we get to know him better: he is pleasantly talkative— as Adam notes, Raphael is sociable (11.234)—very knowledgeable, and articulate. Whether expounding angelic digestion (5.404–443), sexuality (8.618–629),5 or fending off Adam’s query about celestial motions (8.66–178) by propounding both Copernican and Ptolemaic answers, he is quite simply an excellent teacher. In this lies Raphael’s individuality, which is distinct from Michael’s. Michael, too, is a teacher, but for the First Parents—his pupils within the framework of the narrative—his instruction is not a series of explanations, but rather visions of future human history. To compensate for the apocalyptic nature of his teaching, perhaps to make it more credible to his human listener, Michael appears to Adam not in angelic shape, but as a man (11.239–240). It is also reasonable that, in Fowler’s words: “He comes without wings, because he is to talk about terrestrial matters, about fallen mundane history” (575n). Then, too, we must recall the overall sadness of his mission: Michael is in a very real sense paying a condolence call on Adam and Eve. As would an elder friend or religious adviser, he hopes to comfort them on their first exposure to loss by encouraging them to look to the future, rather than backward. In such a situation the sensitive individual usually tries not to call attention to his own idiosyncratic personality, but rather plays it down if at all possible. Milton’s decision to deny Michael specificity of personality at this point may thus have a dramatic, as well as theological explanation. On noticing Michael’s approach, Adam at once senses the seriousness of his mission (11.228–233). Adam realizes that a celestial creature of high rank is on his way although, like the Miltonic narrator, he is not clear as to the angel’s exact rank. According to West, Milton uses terminology of angelic ranks very generally, and even names individual angels under more than one rank (135). What is perhaps most important to Milton is the actuality of angels’ existence (the latter are “bodily creatures who could be truly present in time and space to man’s senses” [137]) and their free will: two qualities that, as Raphael notes, man shares with them (5.535–540). The poet’s purpose, West suggests, “is to emphasize his picture of man’s nature by its parallel in angel’s nature. [...] Like many a more professional angelologist, Milton
5 Fowler suggests that Raphael’s famous blush—“the angel with a smile that glowed / Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue” (8.618–619)—was not an embarrassed response to Adam’s question about angelic sexuality; it is, after all, the smile that glows red, and red is the color of angelic ardor (430n).
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
107
seems to have shaped his doctrine of angels less by its own intrinsic requirements than by the related and more important requirements of his anthropology” (163). The degree and nature of each angel’s individuation is also dictated by his interlocutor/s. While Raphael and Michael converse with human beings, Gabriel and Abdiel engage in highly memorable arguments with Satan, their erstwhile comrade. Gabriel, whose name means strength of God, is characterized by Milton as a soldier, chief of the angelic guards, demanding vigilance (4.577–588), and quite capable of matching Satan in debate (although his threat—to throw Satan out by force if he doesn’t leave of his own accord within the hour [4.963–965]—sounds suspiciously like the empty words of a bully). In his portrayal of Gabriel, Milton may have chosen, according to Fowler, to adhere to a cabbalistic tradition which identified the winged warrior with Mars (227n). Abdiel, however, “than whom none with more zeal adored / The Deity” (5.805–806), was a Miltonic invention, as West notes (124). Milton’s choice of servant of God as a name for the only angel to engage Satan in debate prior to the failure of the latter’s rebellion against heaven was surely intentional. Abdiel’s main point in his angry speech to Satan is that no creature should deny his status as servant to God, since the latter is “bent rather to exalt / Our happy state under one head more near / United (5.829–831). The servant should not feel any lack of dignity in his status when the Deity himself is willing to bend in order to exalt his followers. Yet there is a modicum of irony in Abdiel’s use of the words exalt, happy, and united, and in his reference to bending of knees, reminiscent as these are of Raphael’s description of the Father’s exaltation of the Son earlier in book 5, in which all the denizens of heaven are called upon to kneel to the Son and acknowledge him as their lord (5.607–608). As we know, and as Abdiel would understand, this divine prophecy did not come true: many knees in heaven refused to bow, and happy unity “as one individual soul” was never realized. When Abdiel returns to heaven he is praised by God as one who bore witness to the truth alone (6.30–32). Abdiel represents the lone believer who sustains his goodness by stubbornly maintaining an individual stance in the face of pressure from the fallen, who are “united as one individual soul” in their rebellion against heaven. He thus embodies the ironic situation of the righteous man who envisions himself as part of a like-minded group, but in fact remains alone. The leading characters among Satan’s closest mates are even more clearly human and individuated than the unfallen; C. S. Lewis has shown that the fallen angels who take part in the Great Consult of Paradise Lost book 2—Moloc, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub—represent the moral significance of parallel situations in human life: each of [the fiends] is like a man who has just sold his country or his friend and now knows himself to be a pariah, or like a man who has by some intolerable action of his own just quarrelled irrevocably with the woman he loves. For human beings there is often an escape from this Hell, but there is never more than one—the way of humiliation, repentance, and (where possible) restitution. For Milton’s devils this way is closed. (105)
Although each of the four fallen angels approaches their mutual predicament from a different angle, all their speeches are, as Lewis claims, “alike futile.” “But such is Milton’s invention,” according to Lewis, “that each new speaker uncovers further
108
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
recesses of misery and evil” (107). I would, however, claim that the stand taken by each of the four on what plan to adopt is an expression of individual personality. Moloc is full of rage; his fury leads him to opt for a rematch with the Father, whether or not such a war can be won (2.51–52). Belial, on the other hand, who has a more realistic sense of heaven’s strength, favors making the most of a bad situation. After all, things might be worse (2.163–164). If we can lay low for now, he seems to be arguing, the enemy’s anger may attenuate (2.210–211), thus making another war unnecessary. Yet lest the reader be taken in by the cogency of Belial’s argument, the sheer common sense, the Miltonic narrator hastens to characterize his counsel as pure laziness (2.227). Belial is supported in the infernal debate by Mammon: this first proponent of the wonders of a global economy offers sound economic reasons for avoiding another war. Why not use their well-educated, skilled workforce to exploit the vast riches now under their control? Why not mine for gold and build a magnificent city? (2.270–273). There is productive work to do, Mammon points out, and eventually they may even get used to the climate. Beelzebub, the final speaker of the four, displays a genius for realpolitik by calling attention to the recent establishment of a new world and the new race destined to inhabit it (2.347–348). By injuring these new creatures the fiends can cause suffering to heaven without engaging in an open war, which is generally agreed to be doomed to failure. The fallen angels, it appears, do have individual characters. The epic is not an allegory; while the angels may possibly partake of that “flatness” which E. M. Forster has so usefully defined,6 and which may pertain to the allegorical character, they still have, as Forster writes of Charles Dickens’s people, “this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of [the author] causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own” (79). Perhaps Milton would have liked to hint that a species whose members are capable of individuation is on a higher level than one whose members function best as parts of groups. The problem here is that a claim for the higher status of the individuated may not admit of a theological justification. In Christian Doctrine Milton devotes a great deal of thought (to say nothing of some pretty bitter polemics7) to the question of the connection between God and Jesus. To what degree are they one? To what extent is the Son a separate entity? [I]t is evident that Christ distinguishes the Father from the whole of his own being. However, he does say that the Father dwells in him, though this does not mean that their essence is one, only that their communion is extremely close. Secondly, he declares that he and the Father are one in the same way as we are one with him: that is, not in essence but in love, in communion, in agreement, in charity, in spirit, and finally in glory. (Complete Prose Works 6: 220)
6 E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel: “We may divide characters into flat and round. Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality. [...] Such characters are not changed by circumstances” (75, 77). 7 See, e.g., 6: 213, 218.
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
109
Individuation, it would seem, is so complicated, so loaded a question that the character of Satan is used to embody the issue. For the individual believing Christian, whether Church of England communicant or nonconformist, it was necessary to locate a place on the continuum between hope and despair that would strengthen an awareness of one’s sinful nature while encouraging one in an individual, often lonely, struggle against sin and toward salvation.8 Keeble suggests that the helplessness of the persecuted nonconformist in the face of the political and episcopal authorities necessitated a transfer of the field of battle to the “heart of man.” And within the heart it is “Satan who alone, by persuading to doubt, compromise and apostacy, can bring the individual to yield” (206).9 Within the confines of Paradise Lost Satan can be said to represent an engagement with the need to achieve a balance between hope and despair, two definitive human emotions. Margo Swiss has made a case for viewing the Satan character as representing the quality of obduracy, or inability to experience pity, grief, despair. Swiss posits Satan as a response to the extant tradition of tracts of contrition,10 popular handbooks claiming that sobbing, even floods of tears, is an outward sign of the presence of a sense of sin; one who is incapable of this kind of weeping is all too probably a reprobate (56). Satan is known, of course, to cry “Tears such as angels weep” (1.620); but Swiss claims that Satan’s grieving is “provided as a demonic parody of godly sorrow” such as that displayed by Adam and Eve in book 10 (Swiss 58) when they confess their sins and beg pardon (10.1089–1093). Generations of readers have nonetheless sensed the reality of the sorrow and despair articulated by the fiend in his soliloquies. If the soliloquy at the beginning of book 4 (4.32–113) reveals a deep-set despair, Satan’s thoughts as he views the First Parents in the Garden prior to his attempt on Eve’s virtue indicate pain so infinite 8 John N. King discusses ways in which Restoration writing was influenced by earlier Reformation literature: literary traditions popularized during the Reformation “lived on into the Restoration. Distinctively Protestant themes, genres, and conventions shaped the main tradition of English literature from the time of Sidney until Milton. The epistomological problem of the Reformation is, e.g., a central concern of Marlowe, Donne, Milton, Bunyan, and many others. Later works return again and again to the Protestant dilemma; justification by faith and imputed grace are incessant concerns in this literature. Predestinarian theology contributed to skepticism concerning a humanity mysteriously divided into the elect and reprobate. Despite the perplexities of many individual tragedies of despair and damnation, the paradoxical balance between freedom of the will and divine providence ensured the ‘comedic’ pattern of the universal drama” (445). 9 Keeble points out that the war in heaven is “subordinated to man’s story. It is recounted by Raphael solely for the benefit of Adam and Eve, having significance only in so far as it bears on, and prompts a reaction in, them. From (potentially) an epic tale in its own right it is reduced to a parenthetical episode in the history of humankind. What goes on in the hearts of Adam and Eve is what counts. Similarly, in The Holy War, the paraphernalia of social and political dealings and all the ‘luggage’ of war are transmuted into a metaphor for the individual’s attainment of resolute patience: its military campaigns are an individual’s struggle with doubt” (206). 10 Swiss cites Charitable Tears (1623) by William Whately, Ancilla Pietatis (1639) by Daniel Featley, and Teares in Time of Pestilence (1665) by John Featley, among other such handbooks (57).
110
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
that it cannot be eased, even when he is on leave from hell’s physical precincts: “the hot hell that always in him burns, / Though in mid heaven, soon ended his delight [in gazing at Eve]” (9.467–468). There is, nevertheless, a sense of hope in Satan’s very ability to feel love for a human being, even if it does not finally prevent his attack on her (9.457–462). Satan can indeed be overwhelmed by grace and innocence; it is he who is the “victim” of a “sweet rapine” which leads him to be disarmed of hate and to be, for a moment at least, “stupidly good” (9.465). Satan’s last appearance in Paradise Lost is his curtailed victory speech to his followers. It is highly ironic, of course, that his last spoken words are: “what remains, ye gods, / But up and enter now into full bliss” (10.502–503). The rebel angels are not gods; they are not about to be transported up to heaven; nor are they about to enter into a state of bliss. Satan himself, moreover, is soon to be deprived of his voice altogether, albeit temporarily: “punished in the shape he sinned, / According to his doom: he would have spoke, / But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue” (10.516–518). Nevertheless, as memorable as is the picture of Satan and the other fallen angels transformed into a mass of hapless serpents, deprived of voice, hands, and ability to walk upright, those three quintessential attributes of the human being, its reality is ultimately temporary. Shortly afterward they will be permitted to resume their previous shape (10.574), that is, their humanity, since they will regain voice, hands, and capability of upright motion. There is, in other words, a measure of hope allowed to Satan at the final point of the character’s development in Paradise Lost. Although he cannot, in Williams’s words, “believe that human nature was to be exalted above angelic” (264), he will partake of certain attributes of the human which move him somewhat closer to hope than he was at the beginning of the narrative. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is the story of a titanic struggle between two protagonists—the sinner/autobiographer and Satan—in which the weapons are passages from Scripture. As John R. Knott, Jr. has pointed out, John Bunyan’s approach to the Bible was that of a relatively uneducated person who had an “acute sense of the power of the Word to terrify or comfort one who wrestled with it. The story of his artistic development is one of learning to understand and control this power” (Sword 131). In Grace Abounding Bunyan describes his struggle with individual chapters and verses. At times he appears to forget that the presence of each individual verse in his mind is either the result of his own reading or was caused by Satan; it is as if a soldier in the trenches were to get angry at the bullets whizzing overhead, without considering who shot them. Bunyan is tormented by the thought that any one verse can save or damn him. Throughout the central portion of the narrative the writer details his situation as one of utter helplessness, in Knott’s words, in the face of forces “released by his belief in the reality of Scripture. Stability comes when he is sufficiently assured of the relationship of law and grace11 and of
11 In The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames, Maureen Quilligan points out that: “Rather than the regulation of food intake established in Judaism by categorizing food as clean or unclean, in Christianity it is the acts of speech that are categorized and stigmatized and ritualized in auricular confession—that alone has power to render clean the improper and polluted body” (236–37).
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
111
the redeeming righteousness of Christ to see himself ‘in Heaven and Earth at once’ (73; par. 233)” (Sword 132, 135). It can also be claimed that in his creation of what are now termed realistic characters, human beings who gain reality through their author’s integration of allegory and symbol in their persons, Bunyan achieved an artistic stability. In The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre, Maureen Quilligan has suggested that there is something inexplicable in Bunyan’s decision to write narrative allegory (183); Milton, after all, generally chose to steer clear of allegory in his writing, and Quilligan argues that this avoidance can be taken as “the most obvious testimony to the increasing unviability of allegory as a genre in the seventeenth century” (179): “Milton’s point must have been that the verbal ambiguity necessary for allegory was part of man’s damned nature. Allegory is a genre for the fallen world” (182), and we can thus understand why Milton chose to make an exception to his rule of avoiding allegory in his portrayal of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost. Bunyan quite understandably felt called upon to apologize for employing “Dark Figures, Allegories,” in his “Author’s Apology for His Book”: “was not Gods Laws, / His Gospel-laws in olden time held forth / By Types, Shadows and Metaphors?” (The Pilgrim’s Progress 4). Bunyan’s view of the centrality of Scripture as the pretext and pretext for any narrative of human life informed his use of allegory; or according to Quilligan: [T]he Puritan imagination, with all its explicit condemnation of rhetorical embellishment and its rigorous demands for a neutral plain style, paradoxically reintroduced a context for allegory by reconstituting the union between human history and scripture. This they did by positing an actively interventionist God who controlled the most minute affairs of daily life which then constituted an elaborate language of signs. (Language of Allegory 185)
His discomfort with the allegorical mode led Bunyan to create a narrative that was one of the precursors of the novel;12 and Quilligan points out that The Pilgrim’s Progress reads much like a novel (127). Indeed, Bunyan’s characters “are more or less real people who discover in their journeys the difficulties of behaving according to Scripture. In great part they discover that the allegorical landscape does not really define for them the psychic problems they confront internally” (129). Following this line of thinking, we may say that Bunyan’s attempt to “reconstitute the union between human history and scripture” resulted in the creation of human characters: individuals who struggle with “psychic problems” for which even the holy texts provide only partial solutions. Yet Bunyan may have had a certain difficulty in justifying his use of allegory precisely because of his acceptance of the infallibility of Scripture. As Jon Whitman notes in his aptly titled chapter “The Allegorical Problem”: “The basis for the [allegorical] technique is obliquity—the separation between what a text says, the ‘fiction,’ and what it means, the ‘truth.’ This very obliquity, however, relies upon an 12 Forsyth suggests that Paradise Lost “is in some ways like an early novel: Milton’s main human characters are not the bristling heroes of epic or even the romantic swashbucklers of the Arthurian epic he once planned to write, but the key subject of the bourgeois novel, a married couple” (18).
112
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
assumed corespondence between the fiction and the truth” (2). And in a discussion of personification—surely a central tool in the allegorical endeavor13—Whitman concludes that: While the rapport between personifications and persons is impressive, it remains imperfect. In its literary form, this disparity produces pressures to reconcile the fictional personification with the human personality. As in allegory as a whole, the self-consciousness of a distinction between fiction and fact increasingly preoccupies the technique. (272)
In Bunyan’s visionary writing such self-consciousness was expressed by the very tension between the humanity—now we would say reality—of his creations and the biblical pretexts that guide their quests for redemption. For Bunyan the characters are the fiction, the inventions of his brain, and the fact is Scripture; yet the characters partake of reality, while the fact, Scripture, is a written text. Murray Krieger has explicated the development of the symbol as an alternative to allegory, as a means of resolving perceived intellectual conflicts in ancient times between poet and philosopher, and in more recent times, between poet and historian. From the Romantic period on, symbol has been privileged over allegory: The union of the symbol between subject and object, man and nature, of which Goethe spoke, is extended by Coleridge [...]. It is, of course, the participatory power of the symbol, partaking fully rather than pointing emptily, that allows it to overcome otherness, thereby distinguishing it from allegory. (5)
Dayton Haskin, in his article “The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue with the Radicals,” would have us recall, however, what he terms the “extensive [...] confusion among seventeenth-century interpreters between typology (which is said to respect the literal historical sense) and allegory (which makes of recorded events a mere shell to be cracked in order to extract a timeless spiritual truth [...]. Although recent theorists have sought to distinguish sharply between typology and allegory, the fact is that, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the boundaries between the two are frequently—and sometimes quite happily—dissolved” (“Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue” 83). In “The Author’s Apology for his Book” Bunyan details the process by which he was led to undertake the composition of his most enduringly popular creation: And thus it was: I writing of the Way And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day, Fell suddenly into an Allegory About their Journey, and the way to Glory, In more than twenty things, which I set down. (The Pilgrim’s Progress 1; 7–11) 13 In his discussion of the Sin and Death episode Thomas P. Roche, Jr. plays what it is overwhelmingly tempting to call the Devil’s Advocate when he suggests that allegory has little to do with personification before the eighteenth century (18): “In the case of Spenser and Milton, Mutabilitie and Sin and Death are ultimate philosophical issues. To treat any of the three as purely literary artifacts, or personifications, is to deny a reality that faced Spenser and Milton, and also faces us (with the possible exception of Sin, which seems to have disappeared in the twentieth century)”(31).
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
113
The sense of being controlled by an outer, stronger force is, of course, familiar to readers of Grace Abounding. Yet despite the author’s definition of the work as allegory, the tale is embedded in a vision, and the visionary framework enables what Krieger calls “the unifying power of mind, a form-making power that could break through the temporal separateness among entities, concepts, and words to convert the parade of absences into miracles of copresence” (4). Grace Abounding was published twelve years prior to The Pilgrim’s Progress. The published work of a recognized preacher, it was meant, as I have noted, not only to enlighten and encourage potential converts, but also to serve as an exemplar of its genre, as a sample to be imitated by candidates for membership in such independent congregations as Bunyan’s. As the Chief of Sinners notes in his “Preface: Or brief Account of the publishing of this Work”: I have sent you here enclosed a drop of that honey, that I have taken out of the Carcase of a Lyon (Judg.14.5,6,7,8). I have eaten thereof my self also, and am much refreshed thereby. [...] It is a Relation of the work of God upon my own Soul, even from the very first, till now; wherein you may perceive my castings down, and raisings up; for he woundeth, and his hands make whole. (1–2)
Bunyan’s depictions of his own responses to attacks by biblical verses can certainly be taken as representing ways of coping with the problem of interpreting individual segments of God’s word. Graham Ward describes the hermeneutic process revealed in Grace Abounding: Words or phrases of Scripture can be dislodged from their contextual matrix. This is exactly the nature of Bunyan’s struggle with Scripture in Grace Abounding. It is the first step towards his experience of paranoia. As a reader, he is subservient to the hegemony of the words, a victim of the decontextualized text-as-truth, persecuted by random verses. (32)
When Bunyan gains experience as a reader, or, in Ward’s words, becomes “self liberated to be a reader” and is thus able to “read” himself (45), he can be said to establish “two texts—Scripture and biography—creating a dialogue between two forms of discourse; the Word and words” (40). The Bible itself was the source of those verses that initially persecuted the Sinner, but whose function was eventually healing. The Tempter, however, inserted into Bunyan’s mind individual verses which tortured him with their hopelessness, with the reminder that most will not be saved. The Tempter often tormented the young Bunyan with thoughts, visions, and dreams of devils and hell: Also I should at these years [about nine or ten years old] be greatly afflicted and troubled with the thoughts of the day of Judgment, and that both night and day, and should tremble at the thoughts of the fearful torments of Hell-fire; still fearing that it would be my lot to be found at last amongst those Devils and Hellish Fiends, who are there bound down with the chains and bonds of eternal darkness. (6; par. 6)
Throughout Grace Abounding Bunyan describes the Tempter’s modus operandi: biblical texts and their fiendishly inspired interpretations, along with visions of hell
114
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
and its residents, are inserted into the sinner’s mind. Almost all the significant events of Grace Abounding, that is, occur within the individual mind, and Satan himself is at his most effective when working within the mind of the believer. Indeed, it can be claimed that in Grace Abounding evil itself exists within the Chief of Sinners’ mind. The arena in which the struggle for salvation takes place, in other words, is again shown to be the individual mind. Bunyan’s rationale for composing and publishing the work is that it may help other believers, and it would be incorrect to downplay the importance for Bunyan of his ministry. He chose, after all, to spend precious years in jail rather than promise not to preach. Yet Grace Abounding is an intensely individual narrative whose technique is often reminiscent of stream-of-consciousness, detailing what went on in one man’s mind, in current parlance (Bunyan himself would probably have preferred soul), and attaching existential importance to what occurred in that mind. In composing his autobiography Bunyan the minister may have aimed to “perform that duty that from God doth lie upon me, to you-ward, for your further edifying and building up in Faith and Holiness, &c.” (1). But the narrator is almost totally self-involved,14 and in the very strength of the descriptions of his satanically induced visions the Chief of Sinners makes a convincing claim for the individuality of the quest for salvation. For the composer of Grace Abounding, the Tempter was the source of despair. When the sinner tries to pray he thinks that he feels the devil behind him, pulling at his clothes; the Tempter then sometimes “would cast in such wicked thoughts as these, that I must pray to him, or for him” (§107, 34). In The Pilgrim’s Progress, on the other hand, despair is figured by a place: the Slough of Dispond. It is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Dispond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place: And this is the reason of the badness of this ground. (15)
As Whitman points out, allegorical composition does not always use abstract characters; the writer may choose to express a wise course of action by describing the wise (sensible, careful) navigation of a ship, for example (6–7). Yet in a work filled with human characters representing qualities and feelings it is significant that despair is not given a human face, but rather a location. Considering the seemingly endless years spent by the author in a dungeon, it is not surprising that despair is figured by a locale noted for its “scum and filth.”15 14 Or as Stanley Fish would have it, “Autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves, whether they know it or not. Autobiographers are authentic necessarily and without effort” (“Just Published” n.p.). 15 Sid Sondergard has surveyed scholarship devoted to the question of just how onerous Bunyan’s imprisonment really was. He claims that early Bunyan scholarship “developed the convention of reading Bunyan’s years of imprisonment as a relative inconvenience rather than as the protracted torment his works suggest it to have been [...]. More recent critics have been inclined to authenticate the trauma of Bunyan’s imprisonment” (219). It is difficult to justify downplaying Bunyan’s sufferings in the light of his own words: “the parting with my
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
115
Sid Sondergard has suggested that the prison metaphors that occur throughout Bunyan’s work are intentional and didactic; they serve to establish and authenticate his spiritual authority (220), in much the same way as a modern statesman like Nelson Mandela would gain authority by having undergone lengthy imprisonment. Such authentication was necessitated by Bunyan’s physical separation from his congregation, and according to Sondergard the author’s lack of “formal rhetorical training may explain why his use of images of violence and imprisonment seems designed to address its audiences at the level of human empathy and experience”; at the same time, such images are “employed didactically, modelling unpleasant physical experience fictively to deter his audience from sinful activity” (218–19). In Sondergard’s words, the idea that “the experience of imprisonment precludes the possibility of ever being truly free again” is specifically asserted in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (223). In Bunyan’s view, sin was a prison from which one could never be completely free; in his description of Badman’s death Mr. Wiseman states that “[t]he Prisoner that is to dye at the Gallows for his wickedness, must first have his Irons knock’t off his legs; so he seems to goe most at liberty, when indeed he is to be executed for his transgressions” (165). Mr. Badman editors Forrest and Sharrock note that the work, published a mere two years after The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1, was aimed at an audience different from that of the novel. It was directed at “serious” members of nonconformist congregations rather than at the general public, which explains why its method is “narrowly subordinate to a remorseless moral lesson, with its concomitant repetitions and rhetorical emphases” (xii–xiii). The biography of Bunyan’s reprobate is not couched in the form of a vision, but rather of a dialogue; most of its action takes place, not in the mind of the protagonist, but in the shop, the home, and the town. In his preface the author clarifies his intention: “My endeavour is to stop an hellish Course of Life, and to save a soul from death, (Jam.5.) [...]. I must remember the man in the dream [The Pilgrim’s Progress 33], that cut his way through his armed enemies, and so got into the beauteous Palace; I must, I say, remember him, and do myself likewise” (5). It would not be far-fetched to claim that the reason for the Tempter’s absence from Mr. Badman is that the narrative deals mainly with the protagonist’s deeds, rather than with occurrences within his soul; in Bunyan’s fictional and autobiographical works, Satan functions almost exclusively within the human mind, and in this the character differs from the Satan of Paradise Lost, who works both within and without the minds of the protagonists. Mr. Badman, however, can be seen as a prototype for the humanized Satan of The Holy War; since we are rarely vouchsafed entry into his mind, we are inevitably led to focus attention on the villain’s relationships with his fellow men and women. Mr. Badman saw himself as a central figure in his peer group: Wife and poor Children hath oft been to me in this place [jail] as the pulling the flesh from my bones. [...] [Addressing his beloved blind daughter:] Poor Child! Thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world? Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee” (Grace Abounding 98; par. 327, 328).
116
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature [W]hen he did light among those that were bad, then he would be as they, but yet more close and cautiously, except he were sure of his company: Then he would carry it openly, be as they; say, Damn ’em and Sink ’em, as they. [...] This was now the path he trod in, and could do all artificially, as any man alive. And now he thought himself a perfect man. (84)
He is not, however, an epic, heroic leader of the sort with which Paradise Lost has familiarized us—Mr. Wiseman calls attention to the pettiness of Badman’s relationships with others: You have heard of the sins of his Youth, of his Apprentiship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he led his wife;16 and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack of Knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve and Apprentiship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have been more artificial at it. (83)
Even if artificial is taken to mean skillful,17 the above is brimming with descriptives of trickery; yet it is the trickery of the cheap tradesman, who is as dishonest as he can get away with being. In portraying a human character whose existence is almost totally externalized, who, indeed, has no existence that can be separated from that of the companions, customers, and family whom he aims to exploit at every opportunity, Bunyan has established a way station between the Tempter of Grace Abounding and Diabolus. This character embodies the impossibility of attempting to achieve salvation if one cannot sustain an individual inner life. Mr. Badman’s lack of a rich inner life differentiates him from his heroic precursor, the Satan of Paradise Lost. The latter is able to consider the option of repentance, although very quickly rejecting it as not realistic (“But say I could repent and could obtain / By act of grace my former state [...]. So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse” [4.93–94, 108—109]). Stella Revard has explicated preReformation discussions of Satan’s motivation for rebelling against the Father. As a religious/philosophical issue it was of overriding importance: Revard points out that Origen and Tertullian, the great second-century fathers of Christianity, gave Satan personality, thus supplying Christianity “with a clear identification for its ‘evil factor’ [...]. For Christianity, then, Satan became the angel, created in good by God, indeed created in the height of perfection, who fell by his own choosing when in presumptive aspiration or egotistical pride he sought to exalt himself above God.” Yet, as Revard concludes, neither Origen nor Tertullian explored the essence of evil and how it could have been created spontaneously (35). Lacking an answer to the question of the origin of evil, it is difficult to answer accusations of vindictiveness on God’s part in his refusal to forgive the leader of the fallen angels for his rebellion. Milton may be suggesting a justification for God’s not allowing Satan the proverbial “second chance” in the apparent inability of his Satan to seriously question the 16 Mr. Badman married his wife for her money; see p. 65. 17 The earliest entry for artificial found in the OED is dated c. 1382: “brought about by constructive skill, and not spontaneously.” The pejorative sense: “merely made up; factitious; hence, feigned, fictitious” goes back as far as Shakespeare (1593) and Cowley (1650) (Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed., 1: 666).
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
117
validity of his own thoughts and feelings, and this despite his undoubted talents for expressing those feelings. Satan himself senses the irony in his followers’ adulation: while they “adore [him] on the throne of hell” they are totally unaware “Under what torments inwardly” he groans (4.89, 88). Even when alone with his thoughts, however, the fiend does not finally go beyond the expression of passion and pain. Nor does Milton provide an answer to the question of the origin, the motivation, of Satan’s choice of the pain-inducing evil; in Forsyth’s words, “the key moment of his story, the primal scene of the birth of evil, is thus eluded, as in all such myths” (187). Satan’s soliloquized expressions of pain, as poignant as they may be, are thus shown to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Badman’s abortive sickbed conversion (Mr. Badman 137–140). Neither Satan nor Badman is capable of sustaining an individual struggle against evil impulses. As a result of pain—emotional for Satan and physical in the case of Badman—both are besieged by a variety of emotions over whose presence in their minds they have little control. As soon as the pain disappears, each reverts to type; Satan continues to fulfill his leadership position “with diadem and scepter high advanced” (4.90), while Badman had “no good actions when he was well” (140). The tormented human soul, it turns out, is the only viable, permanent arena for struggle; Mr. Attentive points this out during the discussion of Badman’s childhood: Children come polluted with sin into the World, and [...] oft-times the sins of their youth, especially while they are very young, are rather by vertue of Indwelling sin, than by examples that are set before them by others. Not but that they learn to sin by example too, but Example is not the root, but rather the Temptation unto wickedness. The root is sin within; for from within, out of the heart of man proceedeth sin. (17)
The main battleground, in other words, is internal. Mr. Badman is incapable of maintaining an inner struggle, or perhaps it would be more exact to say that he is unaware of the possibility and necessity of such a struggle. He therefore exemplifies the satanic nature of what has come to be known as the unexamined life. Mr. Badman is, finally, more of a type than an individual, and thus cannot save himself. In a discussion of typology Dayton Haskin has suggested that sectarians such as the Quakers “extended the hermeneutical tradition of the Reformers in a manner that threatened to undermine the importance of the biblical text.” Luther, according to Haskin, “came to conceive all Scripture, including the New Testament, as ‘Testimonies’ of Christ that look forward toward a future eschatological fulfillment” (“Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue” 81). Just as Old Testament characters served as types for New Testament protagonists, New Testament characters and events were assumed to be predictive of post-biblical characters and events: biblical typology “was used to discover and to contemplate the resemblances between two historical events. This contemplation afforded a privileged position to the later event without denying the significance of the earlier” (82). It is possible, I would claim, to sense in Bunyan’s prefaces to his fictional works a disquiet with depiction of type, as opposed to fully individuated character. The “Author’s Apology for His Book” with which The Pilgrim’s Progress opens contains lengthy justifications of the author’s use of allegory; after all, “was not God’s
118
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Laws, / His Gospel-laws in olden time held forth / By Types, Shadows and Metaphors?” (4; 8–10). Yet having explained his use of allegory, Bunyan asks the reader to accept the individuality of his hero; he aims to show how and why an individual Christian seeks and eventually finds salvation: This Book it chauketh out before thine eyes, The man that seeks the everlasting Prize: It shews you whence he comes, whither he goes, What he leaves undone; also what he does: It also shews you how he runs, and runs, Till he unto the Gate of Glory comes. (6; 23–28)
In the preface to Mr. Badman the author addresses a sort of apology to the “Courteous Reader”: at first he claims to be writing about “the Life and Death of the Ungodly, and of their travel from this world to Hell”; at this point it would be possible to assume that the text is a sermon, rather than an imaginary portrayal of an individual. Bunyan, however, immediately clarifies the issue by adding that “[t]he which in this I have done, and have put it, as thou seest, under the Name and Title of Mr. Badman, a Name very proper for such a Subject.” Lest the reader still suspect that he is about to read a tract, Bunyan explains his intention fully; he plans to describe people with whom he is acquainted and events that he has witnessed: And although, as I said, I have put it forth in this method, yet have I as little as may be, gone out of the road of mine own observation of things. Yea, I think I may truly say, that to the best of my remembrance, all the things that here I discourse of, I mean as to matter of fact, have been acted upon the stage of this World, even many times before mine eyes. (1)
The author’s preface to The Holy War is not, strictly speaking, an apology, although Bunyan feels called upon to explain that he is not proferring his readers an old fable, “or such worthless things,” but simply a report (1). The narrative itself is to be a firstperson account, and the text is thus enriched with an extra level of narration. The decision to use the first-person technique reminiscent of travelogs (“In my Travels, as I walked through many Regions and Countries” [7]) may, of course, have been an attempt to popularize his work. Seventeenth-century readers were familiar with travel documents of various kinds, whether the latter were published as books or in newspapers. Nigel Smith reminds us that newspapers, or newsbooks as they were originally called, first appeared regularly (weekly, as a rule) in the 1640s. Newsbooks took hold with “a momentous significance.” Their circulation “was broad and socially diverse. The capacity of the newsbook, ‘mercury’ or diurnal publication, to cross barriers of social difference was matched by the divergent backgrounds from which the newsbook writers came” (54). By the mid-1640s a typical newsbook would contain reports from particular places, perhaps including whole letters carrying reports from individually identified observers (55). Such first-person narratives were credible to readers precisely because they were taken to be the work of an individual observer. The first-person narrative, in other words, serves a purpose more germane to Bunyan’s aims than merely improving sales. It encourages the reader to view the subsequent content from a realistic perspective: the narrator is telling us about individual characters with whom he is familiar from his own experience.
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
119
In their introduction to The Holy War Sharrock and Forrest aver that Bunyan’s “complex epic” operates on at least four levels: Christian/world history, the life of the individual soul, recent and contemporary English history,18 and “a fourth level of millenarian history relating to the events described in Revelation. But [...] not all these levels of reference are kept in play at the same time, and there are large parts of the narrative where one level, especially the second, is predominant at the expense of the others” (xxvi). Bunyan’s version of the fall from heaven of the rebel angels (7–13) is clearly modeled on elements familiar to readers of Paradise Lost. The Satan character is, if not heroic in scale at the beginning of The Holy War, at least mock-heroic: This Diabolus is indeed, a great and mighty Prince, and yet both poor and beggarly. As to his Original, he was at first, one of the Servants of King Shaddai, made, and taken and put by him into most high and mighty place, yea was put into such Principalities as belonged to the best of his Territories and Dominions. This Diabolus was made Son of the morning, and a brave place he had of it: It brought him much glory, and gave him much brightness, an income that might have contented his Luciferian heart, had it not been insatiable, and inlarged as Hell it self. (9)
Although Bunyan’s tongue-in-cheek social criticism of political figures who use their position to enrich themselves is palpable, the fiend still had his origin as a “great and mighty prince” and “Son of the morning”; to ignore or deny these extant traditions would have been nothing short of blasphemous, since it would imply a denial of the sheer strength of evil. In the course of the wars, however, Diabolus is shown to be less a fallen archangel than an individual human, capable of feeling fear, despair, pain, and hope. Yet the fiend is not vouchsafed an inner life characterized by the ability to examine and criticize one’s own emotions and motives. As such he tends to function on the level of a Mr. Badman: we see him in his role as a military/political leader, whether victorious or losing, but as an individual he lacks a rich inner life. Thomas S. Freeman suggests that not enough scholarly attention has been paid to Bunyan’s “borrowings” from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (more commonly known as the Book of Martyrs), and this despite contemporary evidence that when confined in the Bedford jail Bunyan’s whole library consisted of two books: the Bible and the Book of Martyrs (47). The latter’s influence is, according to Freeman, especially noticeable in The Holy War: In The Holy War, a complex allegory representing, among other things, the history of humanity, Bunyan described the Diabolonians as sending two armies against the town of Mansoul, those of the Doubters and the Bloodmen, after its second liberation by Emanuel. Although the Doubters and the Bloodmen are symbols that function on several different
18 The extent to which changes in the government of Mansoul (brought about by Diabolus’s usurpation of political power) reflect a revolution in local government occurring during the years when Bunyan was composing his great fictional works is not always clear to present-day readers, according to Sharrock and Forrest (xxi). The editors detail the parallels between events in Mansoul and in Bedford in the section of their introduction entitled “The Contemporary Background and Bedford Corporation” (xx—xxv).
120
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature levels, their assaults correspond very closely to Foxe’s depiction of Satan’s two-pronged attack on the Church, throughout its existence, by means of heresies [...] and by means of persecution. (54)
It is worth recalling that Foxe’s book narrates the lives and deaths of individual Christian martyrs. Each hero, no matter how obscure to current readers, has his/ her own name and story. As Ken Simpson suggests: “Visible church membership is necessary for Bunyan because no one can complete the journey to the mystical church without the instruction and nourishment that God provides in the ordinances, discipline, and fellowship of a particular visible church” (116). Yet “individual, inward conviction” was the main criterion for membership in congregations such as Bunyan’s, and in Simpson’s words, “Independent congregations of visible saints were gathered and separated from the world for comfort and edification” (115). Such separation may be the mirror image of Bunyan’s enforced separation from the world during his imprisonment. Sondergard posits The Holy War as an outlet for the “frustrated anger” caused Bunyan by his own and his family’s sufferings during his lengthy imprisonment: “Bunyan’s most overtly violent allegory dialectically asserts that there are no permanent solutions in the battle of the Church Militant, that the efforts of the individual in this conflict [...] [are] unlikely to find permanent resolution within, or without, the text” (235). Yet in Bunyan’s text the Church Militant’s battle is fought by a motley crew of local citizens against Diabolus, who is surprisingly similar to the townsfolk of Mansoul in his humanity: capable of sensing and expressing fear and anguish, but unlike some of the townspeople, ultimately unable to sustain hope. Given Milton’s conviction that the individual self was the major venue of the struggle for redemption, it is not surprising that a major argument for the individual nature of the quest for salvation is made by Eve in her successful attempt to convince her husband to allow her to be “tried” alone (Paradise Lost 9.205–383). The First Mother argues that her victory over temptation will be all the greater if it results from an individual struggle (9.335–336); Adam, though hesitant, finally accepts Eve’s line of reasoning (9.370–375). In his explication of the above, Fowler emphasizes the symbolic aspects of the upcoming separation between the spouses. Adam can be seen as representing mind and Eve as reason, in which case their separation may be a “loss of integration. Man fails to inform and support his moral choices with intellect and wisdom” (459n). Adam and Eve fell both because she clung to her wish to be alone, and also because Adam accepted her wish: his three imperatives—Go, Go, do (9.372–5)—grant legitimacy to her plan of dividing their labors, and establish his partnership in their eventual downfall. Eve’s fall can thus be attributed to her desire to engage in an individual struggle, and to Adam’s concurrence. Christ, her son, will later appear to be following his ancestress’s example when he goes into the wilderness to meet temptation alone. The desert—into which Satan then follows Christ—is, of course, a parodic Eden (Paradise Regained 1.303–307, 310–311). Sheltered in shady coverts provided by oak or cedar, surrounded by wild animals who grow mild in his presence, the Son is open to temptation. But unlike Eve, he is aware of the seriousness of the threat to his integrity posed by the Tempter. In the words of T.S. Eliot: “Someone said: ‘The
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
121
dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know” (52–53). The young Jesus knew so much more than Eve; her story was that which he knew. As a child, after all, “all [Christ’s] mind was set / Serious to learn and know” (1.202–203). Although he had not had the opportunity to read book 9 of Paradise Lost, in the course of his readings, which surely included Genesis 3.1–5, he had found a warning worth paying attention to. According to Grossman, the difference between Eve and the (her?) Son “is precisely the allegorical difference, the difference between Speech, the living Word whose presence guarantees the Father’s being, and Writing, the (more or less) autonomous reproduction of a historical utterance” (238). Christ is simultaneously the Word and the reader of the word. This duality seems, paradoxically, to thrust him into a state of fallenness: as a perfect man, Christ is always/already fallen. Unlike Eve, whose blissful existence in the garden may be seen as an idealized childhood, in which long, sunny days are filled with pleasurable activity, and pain, death, and sin are meaningless concepts, Christ cannot remember a period of Edenic innocence: “When I was yet a child, no childish play / To me was pleasing, all my mind was set / Serious to learn and know, and thence to do / What might be public good” (Paradise Regained 1.201–204). The Son loses no time in preparing himself for future challenges. When his parents are worried because, at age twelve, he disappears for three days to debate with “doctors” at the temple in Jerusalem, he expects his mother, the second Eve, to understand the urgency of his mission: “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2.42–52). On learning of the Son’s baptism, Satan calls a consultation which is, as I have already noted, a parody of the Great Consult of Paradise Lost (2.1–505). In his discussion of this council Walter MacKellar affirms that: Satan addresses [his “peers”] in a gloomy speech strikingly different from his proud, arrogant utterances in Paradise Lost [...]. The predominant note in his speech is the foreboding of danger, danger so great, he says, that it admits no long debate; and his followers in dismay, like dumb, driven cattle, without question accept the announcement of their “great Dictator” that as he undertook to ruin Adam, and succeeded, so will he undertake to avert the “fatal wound” which now threatens from the seed of Eve. (58–59)
What is arguably most notable in Satan’s speech is not that the poet chose to parody his own rendering of the devils’ council in the earlier epic, but rather Satan’s expression of his genuine confusion about the Son’s human nature. The fiend and his mates have, of course, not yet forgotten their humiliating defeat at the hands of God’s first-begotten; but the Son whom the rebel angels remember from their original defeat was not a human: “Who this is we must learn, for man he seems / In all his lineaments, though in his face / The glimpses of his father’s glory shine” (1.91–93). Satan’s lack of understanding at this point parallels the Son’s own lack of understanding; the latter is “by some strong motion” led “Into this wilderness, to what intent / I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know” (1.290, 291–292). Satan and the young Jesus undertake the identical quest: they both seek to define the Son’s identity as a man. In his speech at the consultation, however, Satan displays a superficiality of outlook which reveals much about the workings of his mind. Unlike Christ, who
122
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
allows himself to be led into the wilderness without knowing the aim of the journey, Satan, having first suggested that he must learn “who this is,” immediately declares that he will employ “well-couched fraud, well-woven snares” (1.97) to oppose his enemy. He does not, that is, engage in a lengthy, thoughtful attempt at understanding who Jesus is, but employs faulty logic to hastily decide that since the latter is human, he can easily be fooled. The Satan of Paradise Regained reasons and chooses a course of action as might a human, and human thought processes are, as we know, often flawed. Rather than observing his quarry and then thinking things out carefully, he senses, as MacKellar points out, that it is impossible to defeat the Son by means of force, and decides that he will use guile, simply because it had already proved to be effective in leading another human astray (64). It is not coincidental that the narrator refers to the human Christ as “our morning star, then in his rise” (1.294) immediately before the latter meets Satan in the wilderness; after all, that is Jesus’ name for himself (Rev. 22.16: “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”). Yet the association with Lucifer, son of the morning, is unavoidable. The poet chooses to emphasize a similarity between Satan and Christ just as he is about to portray them both as humans. Two men meet in the desert: one is older and more experienced in the ways of the world, and thus assumes that he can defeat the other by means of trickery; yet Satan in the guise of Mr. Worldly-wiseman proves clueless as to his own lack of understanding, and it is a foregone conclusion that he cannot fool the Son. Perhaps the major problem in the poet’s attempt to draw a parallel between Satan’s temptation of Eve and his temptation of Christ is that the reader knows that Eve will yield, while Jesus’ proof against temptation is never in doubt. Satan’s trial of the Son is hopeless; if the fiend constitutes Milton’s grappling with the nature of human, that is, fallen hope, it is worth examining the degree to which the character is left with hope at the end of the epic. At first it would seem that Satan is sent back to his lair howling pathetically: So struck with dread and anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his hoped success, Ruin, and desperation, and dismay, Who durst so proudly tempt the Son of God. (4.576–580)
The picture is clearly one of total hopelessness. The next few lines, nevertheless, sow a temporary confusion which must be intentional: So Satan fell and straight a fiery globe Of angels on full sail of wing drew nigh, Who on their plumy vans received him soft From his uneasy station, and upbore As on a floating couch through the blithe air. (4.581–585)
A first-time reader of the above could surely be excused for assuming that “him soft” refers to Satan. Only as one continues to read does it become clear that the object of the angels’ loving care is not the fiend, but rather the Son.
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
123
This intentionally wrought mistaken identity may hint at a similarity between the futures of the two protagonists: Jesus will be fed on “celestial food, divine, / Ambrosial” (4.588–589), but will then, as “Savior meek” (something of an oxymoron), repair unobserved to his mother’s humble house. Although a choir of angels sings Christ home (“Hail Son of the Most High, heir of both worlds” 4.633), there is a sense of humility in the words used to describe the returning (prodigal?) Son: meek, unobserved, private. These descriptives serve to stress the individual nature of his quest for identity at the same time as they suggest a lack of closure. What, exactly, is the Son: most high, heir of both worlds? Or meek, private? In the same angels’ anthem Satan’s future is described as a series of ups and downs. We know the fiend to have fallen, “smitten with amazement”; he shall, however, continue to “Rule in the clouds; like an autumnal star / Or lightning thou shalt fall from heaven trod down / Under his feet” (4.619–620). The final picture of Satan in the anthem shows him and his legions being chased by the unarmed Son (4.626–632); there is, in other words, no resolution of Satan’s fate. Both Satan and the Son are left symbolically suspended between hope and despair: Satan closer to the latter and Jesus nearer to the former. Only apocalyptic imagery, as N.H. Keeble points out, “was adequate to express the detestation for the established church by those who [...] regarded all traditional churches as ‘cages of unclean Sprirts’, ‘Synagogues of Satan’” (38). Such imagery centered on a Satan character familiar to readers of Revelation. Keeble cites the example of one Mrs. Hazzard who as far back as 1639 had established a separate religious group19 with its own methods of worship based on Revelation 14:9–11: “If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God” (38). Nonconformist writers such as Bunyan and William Penn took issue, as Keeble notes, with the perceived fashionable urbanity of the Restoration court, often drawing parallels between the latter and the Sodom and Egypt of Revelation 11.8 (152). And persecuted nonconformists often found comfort in Revelation’s promises of a crown in the kingdom of heaven (192):
19 It is commonly accepted that women formed the majority in many Restoration nonconformist congregations, as Tamsin Spargo affirms (“Contra-dictions” 174). And T.L. Underwood avers that during the early years of Bunyan’s membership in the Bedford congregation, women members outnumbered men by about two to one (“Introduction” xlii). It seems that there was even a movement afoot for women to be allowed to hold their own separate religious services. In his tract A Case of Conscience Resolved, published in 1683, Bunyan addresses the issue of separate women’s religious meetings or services. He apparently perceives the latter as a threat, and labors to convince not only Mr. K., his putative interlocutor in debates on the issue, but his female readers as well, that not only are separate women’s meetings against church law, but even in mixed assemblies the female voice should not compete with the male. The one legitimate space offered to women, a space that, as Spargo notes (“Contra-dictions” 176), recalls the “safe domestic space” described in Christian Behavior, is “the closet,” i.e., one’s private room at home: “Be as often in your Closets as you will; the oftener there, the better. This is your Duty, this is your Privilege: This place is Sanctified to you for service by the Holy Word of God” (4: 329).
124
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life [...]. Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown (Rev. 2.10, 3.11).
The allegorical satanic imagery of Revelation was, in other words, of great interest to all literate Christians, and had long been available to them either directly or by way of popular interpretative works;20 it was especially salient for Milton and Bunyan, for reasons political, religious, and artistic. The difficulties placed in the path of the day-to-day functioning of organized nonconformist congregations after the restoration of the monarchy forced the believer to bear individual responsibility for his own continuation in the faith. Scholars of the seventeenth century have tended, according to Keeble, to view Milton and Bunyan as idiosyncratic creators whose originality cannot be completely explained by the religious/cultural traditions from which they sprang, but rather by their own genius (22). Yet the disappointments inherent in the defeat of the Good Old Cause and the constraints under which each suffered certainly cannot be ignored as explanations both of the individual genius of each and of the growing emphasis placed by both on the search for salvation as an individual process. The satanic archetype engendered by and in the works of Milton and Bunyan should be viewed in the light of this process of the individualization of faith. Walter Bate Jackson, among many others, has called attention to the fact that only within the past two centuries has individuality become an aesthetic value in and of itself: The whole procedure of what to do with your life, your vocation, your craft [...] has at times seemed about to be crazily split down the middle by two opposing demands. On the one hand, we have the natural human response to great examples that, from childhood up, are viewed as prototypes [...] and then [we] have suddenly blocking it a second injunction: the injunction that you are forbidden to be very closely like these examples. (133)
For seventeenth-century artists, originality was not a primary goal. Dayton Haskin has suggested, however, that Bunyan was concerned that he had converted too late, “missed the boat” of salvation, as it were; he hints that this concern was literary as well as religious: “Not only was he worried that he had converted too late, but he felt rather anxious about the derivative nature of his own experience21—and of the 20 See, e.g., The Key of the Revelations, in which “the battaile of the seven headed Dragon with Michael concerning the child-birth” is detailed: “For the woman, as soone as she had brought forth flieth into the wildernes, there to be nourished 1260 dayes, chap. 12. verse 6. Likewise the Dragon being throwen downe, the woman flyeth into the wildernes, there to be nourished from the preference of the Serpent, or Dragon for a time, times, and halfe a time, ver. 13, 14” (Pt. 1; p.10). 21 As Haskin notes: “Bunyan’s conversion took place within the fluid religious atmosphere in which a host of new sects was springing up. It was just at this time, and in this context, that a new valuation was coming to be placed, especially among the radicals, upon the idea of novelty. No longer were the words ‘new,’ ‘novel,’ and ‘novelty’ used merely as terms of opprobrium to disparage the views of one’s rivals. The idea that God was about to offer
“Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype
125
accounts of that experience that he gave in his writings” (“Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue” 76). There is, nevertheless, a contradiction between the presentation of Satan’s (and Eve’s) fall in Paradise Lost as the result of desire for individuality, and the intensely individual nature of Bunyan’s struggle against an individual satanic antagonist in Grace Abounding. Salvation in Paradise Regained is, however, detailed as an individual conflict; the Satan characters of the brief epic and of The Holy War are both criticized in their roles as leaders of groups. Revard has noted that the resemblances between Milton’s angels in book 6 of Paradise Lost and the warring saints of the prose tracts of the Civil War period were “more than incidental”: For embattled Christians and loyal angels alike the war is paradoxical. Theirs is a struggle they cannot win: none but the Son of God possesses the power to crush Satan [...]. Satan must be resisted by the faithful on earth and in Heaven. While Christ neither needs nor will use their strength to effect the victory itself, it is their support that will make the victory glorious. Christ will not act in isolation. In the truest sense, though he effects his victory singly, he has done so as the leader of a great army that rallies to him.” (116–17)
There is glory in participating in a holy war; Christians of the seventeenth century, no matter what their religious affiliation, generally troped life on earth as a battle; moreover, as a battle engaged in by a group. In this sense Eve’s prelapsarian demand to separate herself from Adam and face possible challenges alone may be predictive of sin. It is also fraught with irony: If this be our condition, thus to dwell In narrow circuit straitened by a foe, Subtle or violent, we not endued Single with like defense, wherever met, How are we happy, still in fear of harm? (9.322–326)
The irony, of course, is provided by the conditional if; in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve are not expected to feel that they are restricted, even though they do reside in a narrow circuit (their bower) located within another narrow circuit (the garden itself). Yet while Eve does not know it, the human condition, into which she is about to enter, will thrust her and her husband out of the narrow circuit of the garden, into a much wider world. This physical release, however, entails dwelling in a narrow circuit, that of the individual human self, straitened by foes from within the self (“subtle”) and without (“violent”). In the depiction of her solo walk in the Garden, Eve is compared with various non-Christian goddesses and sprites (9.386–396), who often come to grief when walking alone, as, indeed, Eve is about to: “O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve, / Of thy presumed return! Event perverse!” (9.404–405).
more light, new divine revelations beyond those contained in the Old and New Testaments, pervaded the millenarian movement; and there was a widespread expectancy that a new age of the Spirit was about to dawn. Newness thus became something desirable” (“Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue” 74).
126
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Eve can presumably find sweet repast and sound repose, not as an individual, but in fulfilling her duty to the family unit. Moreover it may be possible to conclude that, just as the Son of Paradise Regained embodies the necessity for individual struggle, the Satan of Paradise Regained illustrates the dangers of a lone struggle, much as does the Eve of Paradise Lost. In her discussion of Paradise Regained Stevie Davies emphasizes the degree to which Satan is “a bruised, jaded and saddened remnant of the towering, machinating self of Paradise Lost. He bears about with him a pain at once archaic and chronic”: the pain of loss. Satan’s use of lost (“though I have lost / Much lustre of my native brightness lost / To be beloved of God, I have not lost / To love” [Paradise Regained 1.377—380]) in Davies’ words “dramatizes a psychology, one might say, a mass-psychology—prevalent in the 1660s—a desultory and clueless aftermath to the Revolution. This blankfaced and uneasy state of incomprehension afflicts Satan to a pathological degree” (163). Satan’s brother in Paradise Regained, the Son of God, is also a lone figure. Davies, perhaps hinting that Milton is careening perilously near Manichaean heresy, calls Satan and Jesus “twin figures, the light and dark Sons, the outcast and the invoked” (164). The outcast, struggling alone, is indeed reminiscent of the nonconformist who was on the losing side during the Restoration. Yet there was a development, a basic change, in the Satan character; in the stories of Milton’s and Bunyan’s later Satans (the Satan of Paradise Regained and Diabolus) we discover the writers’ acceptance of the necessity for individual struggle, which constitutes validation of individuation. This is another way of saying that these characters who represent the evil principle in the universe are human beings. It is this incorporation of the individual human into the representative of evil that enables the character to serve as a paradigm for later writers. Or if I may be allowed to paraphrase one of Milton’s future admirers, Bunyan and Milton both came to recognize that “Evil has a human heart, Sin a human face.”22
22 “For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face” (William Blake, “Divine Image,” Songs of Innocence. 3 December 2007
).
Chapter 6
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox N.H. Keeble has noted a perceived sense of the miraculous in contemporary views of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Such a view was, as might be expected, especially widespread among supporters of the king: “The Restoration1 so effectively, so painlessly and so quickly frustrated the whole range of Puritan aspiration that its beneficiaries could not but see it as a divine mercy” (17). Among those who rejoiced at Charles II’s ascendance to the throne was a young Oxford student: John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the orphaned son of Henry, Viscount Wilmot, a well-known Cavalier general and supporter of Charles II.2 As Rochester biographer Vivian De Sola Pinto notes, “Rochester’s university career was passed in an atmosphere of turbulence and excitement. The University was reverting with almost ludicrous suddenness to its old loyalist principles, and the sudden change went to the heads of many of its members and led to riotous behavior [...].3 May-games, morris-dances and revels were now encouraged instead of forbidden”; swearing,4 visits to alehouses and the theater once again became acceptable undergraduate pastimes (Enthusiast in Wit 7).
1 It is ironic that the first public political use of the term Restoration, according to David Norbrook, was in the Great Seal of the republic in 1649: its designer, Henry Marten, chose as an inscription “In the First Yeare of Freedome by God’s Blessing Restored.” Norbrook points out that while the “notion that abolishing the monarchy could be a restoration of tradition may seem bizarre,” to Marten “the monarchy as it had developed under the Stuarts had become so massively disproportionate to its traditional role that it had gained a private interest of its own that was structurally irreconcilable with the public interest. Only its abolition would restore ancient liberties” (96–97). 2 Vivian De Sola Pinto details Henry Wilmot’s loyalty to Charles II: the elder Wilmot “accompanied his master on the unfortunate expedition to Scotland in 1650, and remained with him until the final defeat at Worchester, when his courage, coolness and ingenuity were among the chief factors in effecting the escape of the King. After those thrilling days when the fugitives made their way through a hostile and suspicious England to the Dorset coast, Wilmot passed with Charles into France and became one of the most prominent and energetic members of the exiled Court” (Enthusiast in Wit 3). 3 Rochester editor Keith Walker notes in his Introduction to the collected poems that “post-Restoration Oxford was not a place where young gentlemen were expected to study” (ix). 4 David Trotter calls attention to the fact that the habit of casual swearing, which during the Interregnum had been associated with both Cavaliers and Ranters, was by the 1660s associated with the so-called gallants, or the rakes (or, in Bunyan’s expression, the “Damnme-blades”), who were generally presumed to do the most swearing (115–16).
128
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Rochester had been brought up by his mother, Anne St. John,5 the pious daughter of a prominent Wiltshire Puritan family (Enthusiast in Wit 2).6 Nevertheless the thirteen-year-old Oxford student “undoubtedly,” in the words of David M. Vieth, “shared in the jubilation which greeted the Restoration of Charles II” (Wilmot, Complete Poems xix). And, according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester intimate and author of Some Passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester: When [Rochester] went to the University the general joy which over-ran the whole Nation upon His Majesty’s Restauration, but was not regulated with that Sobriety and Temperance, that became a serious gratitude to God for so great a blessing, produced some of its ill effects on him: He began to love these disorders too much [...]. [T]he humour of that time wrought so much on him, that he broke off the Course of his Studies. (48–49)
If Keeble seems to be speaking with the proverbial tongue in cheek when he suggests that the general rejoicing occasioned by the king’s return was “so excessive” that it “quite turned the head of John Wilmot” (18), it is nonetheless reasonable to see the Restoration as a watershed event in the life of a youngster like Rochester. Indeed, the earliest poem ascribed with any degree of certainty to Rochester is “Virtue’s triumphant shrine!”; the latter first appeared in a volume of poetry published at Oxford on 29 May 1660 in honor of Charles II’s return to the throne. The final lines of this offering remind Charles that the writer is the son of one who had died while in the king’s service: Great Sir, approve My manly wishes, and more vigorous love; In whom a cold respect were treason to A Father’s ashes, greater than to you; Whose one ambition ’tis for to be known By daring Loyalty Your WILMOT’s Son. (3; 13–18) 5 In his discussion of the background of Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind Dustin H. Griffin suggests that as a child Rochester had been “force-fed” on the writings of Puritan divine Richard Sibbes by his “pious Puritan mother, and carried with him a distasteful memory” of such writings (195). Yet according to Pinto, Rochester’s first tutor, Francis Giffard, “an enthusiastic loyalist,” had been hired by the boy’s mother after being ejected by the Puritans from a Wiltshire living (Enthusiast in Wit 4). Lacking specific biographical information, it might be well to avoid ovemphasizing Puritan leanings on the part of Anne St. John. 6 It is not known for sure whether Rochester ever met his father, as the latter was employed in various diplomatic missions on the Continent during his son’s boyhood. Scholars have discussed the possible effects of this lack of paternal contact from the stance of modern theories of child psychology. Pinto suggests possible effects of Henry Wilmot’s putative visit to his family at Ditchley, Oxfordshire, when John was eight years old: “It needs no strong effort of imagination to conceive the emotional disturbance that such an encounter would have produced in a sensitive, delicate child of eight. An historical novelist might give a moving picture of the only meeting of the fat, jovial cavalier in disguise with the bright-eyed, intelligent little boy who was to inherit the title” (Enthusiast in Wit 3) a mere three years later. Vieth claims that “John Wilmot’s relationship with a father he saw rarely, if ever, may partly explain his later distrust of father-figures like Charles II, whose true greatness as king he seems not to have understood” (Wilmot, Complete Poems xix).
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
129
Although Rochester could not have remembered the execution of Charles I, and came of age after Charles II’s return to the throne, he can usefully be viewed as a liminal figure, spanning the border between the Civil War and Restoration periods. A simple comparison of dates is helpful: when Paradise Lost was first published, seven years after Charles II’s return to power, Rochester was twenty years old. John Bunyan outlived Rochester by eight years; his description of the Tempter who entered into his mind with the intention of leading him into blasphemy (Grace Abounding) was published in 1666, whereas his epic portrayal of Diabolus in The Holy War was published in 1682, two years after Rochester’s death. It would not be farfetched, therefore, to claim that this quintessential Restoration rake, sired by a cavalier and mothered by the daughter of a Puritan family, had as his spiritual father none other than the Satan character that I have posited as the joint outcome of the writings of Milton and Bunyan, a character resulting from a process of creation that took place during the earl’s short life, and which had not yet been completed at the time of his death. The Satan archetype that I have described is characterized by his humanity: no longer archangelic or larger than life; no longer the embodiment of evil in the abstract, but rather embodying the evil impulses of the human. This Satan figure suffers pain, both physical and mental; he finds it difficult to maintain one specific emotion over a given length of time; he is noted for the ability to entertain opposing emotions simultaneously, both loving and hating the same object at the same time; his viewpoint is necessarily limited, as he lacks the omniscence of a god. His understandable confusion as to his—humanity’s—place in the cosmic hierarchy is productive of sin. Satan is, finally, comic, according to the definition posited by David Farley-Hills: “comedy is created when the mind has to interpret the same facts or ideas simultaneously in contradictory ways [...]. Comic literature is a response of the human mind to incongruity, and the kind of comedy evoked records the attitude of the individual writer and of his audience when confronted with incongruity” (Benevolence vii, 20). In his discussion of the rake figure in Restoration dramatic comedy John Traugott claims that Dorimant in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (a character whom scholars generally identify with Etherege’s friend Rochester, as John Conaghan notes in his introduction to the play [3]) represents a reduction of “the satanic rake to a figure of humanity” (403). Perhaps, however, the satanic rake was already in the process of being “reduced to a figure of humanity” by Rochester’s and Etherege’s elder contemporaries, Milton and Bunyan, and the rake whom Rochester embodied in his life and in much of his poetry represented a completion of the process. Despite the ease with which Oxford undergraduates adopted the old/new cultural patterns of the Restoration period, the Interregnum and the Puritan culture, which to a significant extent characterized it, must have left their mark on such liminal personalities/artists as Rochester. As Marianne Thormahlen suggests, it is likely that Rochester had some degree of familiarity with Paradise Lost (81);7 Dustin H. Griffin 7 Thormahlen also notes that Rochester was apparently familiar with Dryden’s The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man, a rhymed operatic play based on Paradise Lost. The latter was not staged, but hundreds of printed copies were circulated during 1675–76 (318).
130
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
also believes that Rochester had read Paradise Lost (215). Scholars have, according to Keeble, tended to view Milton and Bunyan in terms of their Puritan predecessors, rather than as Restoration figures (21), even though the publication of Milton’s three greatest poems and much of Bunyan’s imaginative oeuvre postdates 1660. It is thus possible to see all three—Milton, Bunyan, and Rochester—both in their lives and in their work, as blurring the boundaries that scholars have traditionally, and sometimes artificially, employed to separate the Civil War and Restoration periods. For Milton and Bunyan issues of political and religious leadership were, as I have already noted, of primary importance: Milton was involved in a revolution that aimed at changing the nature of his country’s leadership, and as a commentator on the religious struggles of his time had views as to the desired structure of the leadership, or hierarchy, of religious configurations. Bunyan, too, as a nonconformist preacher, thought deeply and constantly about the role of the religious leader. They were, in current terms, on the losing side, although the young Rochester was, of course, numbered among the “winners.” Yet I believe a case can be made that Rochester, too, both accepted and challenged the validity of the hierarchy to which he and his family belonged. The challenge seems to have been predicated on his sense that the aristocracy of which he was part, and whose economic/political rights he clung to, did not have the moral authority to lead. Although the earl was only reconciled with the church into which he was born in the last months of his short life, in his concern with the source and legitimacy of authority he confronts the same questions with which Milton and Bunyan were grappling. The secular framework in which Rochester felt most comfortable may have led him to approach the issue of the legitimacy of hierarchy through the trope of the shepherd; this figure of the leader was meaningful for believer and nonbeliever alike, and would have been attractive to Rochester because of his familiarity with theriophilic currents of thought, which tended to blur the boundaries between man and animal, shepherd and flock. George Bull begins the introduction to his translation of The Prince by noting that traditionally “The Prince is a book inspired by the Devil. The legend of Machiavelli’s depravity was already established by the time the first English translation appeared in 1640 [...]. Old Nick was identified with Niccolo Machiavelli (though that name for Satan existed before Machiavelli’s evil reputation reached [England]), and it became as acceptable to call the Devil Machiavellian as it was to call Machiavelli diabolical [...] the legend soon obscured the man and his works” (ix). With minor changes the above could be said of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester the poet and Rochester the rake may be said to have engendered a character that simultaneously conflated with extant satanic characters. Sixteenthand seventeenth-century Englishmen in general may have known little about the historical personage Machiavelli; yet this did not prevent the development of a legendary character in the public consciousness: “the Machiavel,” based on readers’ angry responses to the content of The Prince. This representation of evil is not the type of the ruler as described by Machiavelli, but rather the author himself, who may have led a very virtuous life, but whose great sin was composing a work that readers found discomfiting, offensive, even obscene. The character of “the Machiavel” may therefore be the result of a blurring of boundaries, on the one hand, between an
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
131
author and his creation, and, on the other hand, between this legendary character as configured by readers and the Satan of normative Christianity. In much the same way, the character of Rochester the Restoration rake is the result of anger and confusion occasioned by much of his poetry, mixed with stories and legends about the violence in general and wild sexual behavior in particular for which the historical Rochester was (in)famous. It is therefore not surprising that Pinto takes the following for the epigraph of his biography of Wilmot: “his form had yet not lost / All her original brightness, nor appeared / Less than archangel ruined, and the excess / Of glory obscured” (Paradise Lost 1.591–594). As Victoria Kahn has pointed out, the Satan of Paradise Lost: exemplifies the intersection of rhetoric, theology, the Machiavel, and the republican [...]. 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 virtu or virtue to success, means to ends, persuasion to coercion, force to consent—appear regularly in his speeches. (Machiavellian Rhetoric 209)
The unabashed secularism and proud obscenity of Rochester’s best-known poems would have led many of his contemporaries to draw a parallel between the young aristocrat and the Machiavel, since Rochester was without doubt an articulate, skillful writer, whose poems are informed with great ability to convince; indeed, the strength of his obscenity is not merely a form of persuasion, but rather of force, even coercion. As a reader of Paradise Lost who was possibly familiar with others of Milton’s and Bunyan’s renditions of Satan, the author of A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind may be acting out his sense of what this character was really about. In other words, in the Satyr Against Reason the poet, by means of his Speaker, interrogates both himself and the Satan of his great predecessors/contemporaries as to the nature of that hierarchy of which, as a supporter of Charles II, he was a part. In 1664, at the age of eighteen, Rochester was launched into the court milieu of Restoration London—a world, in Pinto’s words, “of beauty and squalor, of color and music and splendor and vice”—and immediately became an important figure in the group of young courtiers with whom the king spent much of his time (Enthusiast in Wit 33–34). By 1671, however, Rochester was writing to his intimate friend Henry Savile that “I have seriously considerd one thinge, that of the three Buisnesses of this Age, Woemen, Polliticks & drinking, the last is the only exercise att wch you & I have nott prouv’d our selves Errant fumblers” (June 22, [1671?]; 67).8 While allowing for the humor, the above may express a sober sense of doubt as to his and his colleagues’ role in the leadership of their country. Because he was born into the aristocracy, his place in the hierarchy was guaranteed. Yet young men like himself, Rochester suggests, undermine the hierarchy of which they are supposed to be such gracious adornments by positing three aims for that authority, only one of which— politics, or the wielding of power—is legitimate. As a young rebel familiar with the lexicon of Protestantism, whether that of nonconformity or of the Church of England, 8 Citations of letters to and from Rochester are to Wilmot, The Letters of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Citations are of date, whether tentative or definite, and page number.
132
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Rochester would have found interesting, if not unsettling, parallels between himself and his comrades, on the one hand, and Milton’s fallen angels, on the other. As I have already noted, conventional Christian thinking of whatever school never seriously doubted that one of the reasons for Satan’s decision to rebel against God was his unwillingness to accept a lower rung in what had presumably been a fixed hierarchy in which the angels, headed by Satan himself, occupied an honorable position, second only to that of the Father. When God decided to beget a divine son who would occupy a rung above the angels, he changed, complicated, and irrevocably confused the hierarchy. There is more confusion to come, however: when the rebel angels are defeated and sent howling into outer darkness the Father decides on the constitution of a new set of creatures, human and nonhuman, who are to inhabit the new universe being prepared to receive them. Thus, even before the actual creation, there is confusion as to the status of humanity. They are to rank lower than angels in the cosmic hierarchy; yet they are the children of God’s only begotten Son, who himself is to be the son of a human, and therefore they are simultaneously the Son’s brothers. Concern about man’s place in the hierarchy pertained not only to Satan, of course. As E.M.W. Tillyard claims in his much-maligned but still thought-provoking Elizabethan World Picture: “During the whole period when the notion of the chain of being was prevalent, from the Pythagorean philosophy to Pope, it was man’s key position in creation—a kind of Clapham Junction where all the tracks converge and cross—that so greatly exercised the human imagination” (84). Tillyard then details the problematics of the “great commonplace,” that is, the idea that humankind occupies the middle ground between god and beast, and simultaneously notes the “vitality” engendered by the perceived need to face up to the paradox of man’s place in the hierarchy (85–86). Man’s locus between angel and animal, involving as it does the dilemma of being expected to adopt the morality of the divine while bearing the senses and impulses of the animal, is seen as a built-in paradox, a challenge to the human mind’s ability to accept contradictory facts or ideas. This challenge, so to speak, comes with the Edenic territory. As Roy Flannagan writes in his introduction to Paradise Lost, hierarchy is implied in all of Milton’s works (49). Indeed, in The Second Defense of the English People we learn that “nothing is more natural, nothing more just, nothing more useful or advantageous to the human race than that the lesser obey the greater, not the lesser number the greater number, but the lesser virtue the greater virtue, the lesser wisdom the greater wisdom” (Complete Prose Works 4: 636). Such obedience pertains not only to humans of “lesser virtue” vis-à-vis their better-endowed brothers, but is also expected of those lower than humankind in the cosmic hierarchy: the animals. From the very beginning of the Creation animals rank below humans. In Flannagan’s words, their appetites serve to teach human beings “what to reject in ourselves as base motives [...]. The entrance of sin into the world spreads the distance between the hierarchies. It also increases the distance from humans to God, making communication with God more difficult. Sin creates enmity between humans and animals, and it makes the naturally subordinate into inferiors” (50). Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, the most admired and most discussed of the earl’s long poems, opens with a questioning of man’s place in
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
133
the universal hierarchy. The Satyr is couched in the form of a debate between the Speaker and an Adversarius. Whereas an adversary traditionally plays a satanic role, in this case it is the Speaker who fulfills the fiendish role of rejecter of conventional religious truth. In his analysis of the various discourses on which Rochester drew for inspiration, Dustin H. Griffin makes a convincing case for viewing the Satyr as belonging to the same genre of formal verse satire as Nicholas Boileau’s famous Eighth Satire (1663),9 that is, “less a narrative of past events than a musing on or casual contemplation” of a given topic, in which the thinker imagines what arguments he himself would make, and then imagines what an opponent would say in reply (198). Such a structure also recalls Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, wherein the narrator imagines what Satan would say to tempt him to sin, and then imagines his own responses. The central question that the Speaker ponders is man’s place in the universal hierarchy; he stakes out a claim for the notion that man, despite his much-vaunted reason, is morally lower in the cosmic hierarchy than the animals with whom he shares the earth. This idea, known as theriophily, came into being, according to James E. Gill, “when Cynic and Stoic ideas of animal oneness with nature were contrasted to the idea that humankind had become divorced from nature, that human reason had somehow become ‘unnatural.’ Hence there are two ‘reasons,’ the reason of nature and the reasons of men” (“Fragmented Self” 32n).10 And in “Mind Against Itself” Gill suggests that historical and formal analysis of the principal sources of theriophilic thinking reveal: that the argument is based on the primitivistic dissociation of human nature and human reason from nature and the reason implicit in it—from the Logos, which is immanent in the orderly behavior of animals. Thus, while theriophiles argue that beasts are more natural, and therefore that they are better than man, they can also contend that beasts are more reasonable than men, even, paradoxically, if beasts do not reason as well as men or if they do not reason at all. Human reason in such cases is often seen as indirect, complex, abstract, and remote from the simple natural life. (558)
The classic study of theriophily, as Gill notes (“Mind Against Itself” 547n), is George Boas’s The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century. In this wideranging discussion of the influence of the doctrine of theriophily on the thought and writings of philosophers, zoologists, and poets of seventeenth-century France, Boas analyzes Boileau’s Eighth Satire: The satire opens with the announcement that of all the animals on earth, the most stupid (le plus sot) is man. This in spite of the fact that he has been made lord of creation and endowed with reason. For true reason (sagesse) is an equanimity untroubled by desire, 9 See Paul C. Davies’ discussion of Boileau’s Eighth Satire as inspiration for Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind. 10 George Boas notes that interest in the doctrine which he calls theriophily was renewed in the seventeenth century by exploration of the New World, as well as of Africa and Australia, and subsequent contact with Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples. Boas claims to have coined the term theriophily (1); however, the word is not found in the OED. In Boas’s usage it applies not only to wild beasts, but to domesticated animals and to insects as well.
134
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and what man has ever shown it? [...] But man’s reason? Is it not his lantern in the dark? It leads him into folly. The ass without reason, with only the light of nature, does better. The bear and panther are not troubled by their fancies, know not superstition. Man falls to his knees before idols of metal, before the animals themselves. (145–46)
The preference of beasts to men, resulting in a sense of mock distress at one’s inability to choose to be another beast, can be seen as the Satyr’s “primary satiric device,” according to Charles A. Knight: This preference dominates most of the poem and is its formal organizing device. In addition to introducing the play of stock attitudes concerning the role of reason in identifying man’s position in the cosmic hierarchy, it presents important aspects of the Speaker’s cast of thought, for he sees himself as inextricably caught by his view of the human situation [...]. [T]he Speaker presents alternative choices that he knows are impossible. Thus he is comically aware that he is trapped by his situation. (255)
Rochester, according to Christopher Hill, “was unique among poets in challenging the Christian assumptions of his society. Man is alone in an irrational world. Our fallible reason is all we have to impose a limited coherence on an incoherent universe, to come to terms with the insoluble absurdity” (“John Wilmot” 300). Farley-Hills has suggested that Rochester may usefully be viewed as one of the first poets of the absurd; indeed, in Rochester’s positioning of the poet in the role of clown, as well as in the Satyr’s “extraordinary exploration of a world without God, in which man is forced to impose his own limited coherence on an incoherent world” (Benevolence 164, 189), there is something familiarly, uncomfortably, modern. In the debate between the Speaker and the Adversarius repeated reference is made to animals. As would be expected, the Speaker uses the familiar device of endowing animals with human emotions: “For hunger, or for Love, they [beasts] fight, or tear” (95; 139). In what may be a gesture of respect to animals, the Speaker generally refrains from troping humans as animals; human behavior is simply depicted in what has come to be termed, perhaps unfairly, all its bestiality: “Man, with smiles, embraces, Friendships, praise, / Unhumanely his Fellows life betrays; / With voluntary pains, works his distress, / Not through necessity, but wantonness” (95; 135–138). It can be claimed that Rochester’s Speaker embodies an aspect of the satanic in his role of satirist, and this because of the anger with which he muddles the boundaries between human and bestial behavior. In his discussion of what is termed “smiling,” as opposed to “savage” satire during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, P.K. Elkin notes the clear development of a preference for the “smiling” mode: “Horatian [“smiling”] satire was recommended by the Augustans, in preference to Juvenalian [“savage”] satire, because it is good for the reader. It pleases him and, provided it is sufficiently subtle, may insensibly reform him, too. Some critics pointed out that smiling satire is better for the writer also; or, rather, that a predilection for savage satire may simply indicate ill nature in the writer” (152). Indeed, Rochester’s choice of a title indicates an intention to muddle the borderline between people and the animal kingdom of which humanity is a part. The title, and subsequent editors’ decisions not to modernize the spelling of satyr, direct attention
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
135
to ancient connections between the literary/dramatic form and the half-man, halfgoat of mythology. According to the Oxford English Dictionary: “The confusion between the words satiric and satyric gave rise to the notion that the satyrs who formed the chorus of the Greek satyric drama had to deliver ‘satirical’ speeches. Hence, in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, the frequent attribution to the satyrs of censoriousness as a characteristic quality” (OED, 14: 511).11 The half-man, half-goat is an especially salient image, of course, for a poet who would question man’s rank in the cosmos vis-à-vis animals, even though the body structure of the satyr of mythology clearly indicates that beasts rank beneath humans. The lower half of the satyr, after all, is the nonhuman, as is the case with other familiar human-animal combinations such as the centaur and the sphinx, and Sin of Paradise Lost “seemed a woman to the waist, and fair, / But ended foul in many a scaly fold / Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed / With mortal sting (2.650–653). In his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, moreover, Milton figures Error as “a blind and Serpentine body without a head” (Complete Prose Works 223).12 The Satan of Paradise Lost is compared to various animals, although these are usually what might be termed “normative,” recognizable beasts, rather than monsters, that is, hybrids whose muddling of boundaries between two species is discomfiting to contemplate. The fiend first enters Eden, wherein he is soon to observe a variety of beasts disporting themselves: As when a prowling wolf, Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve In hurdled cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold. (4.183–187)
Having perched on a conveniently located tree, Satan then sat “like a cormorant” (4.196). Although the greedy cormorant was a fairly commonplace image,13 Milton 11 Rochester, moreover, may also have been familiar with Isaiah’s description of the fallen Babylon, that trope of the corrupt city, in which satyrs figure: And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged. (Isa. 13.19–22) The OED notes that in the English Bible satyr is applied to the hairy demons or monsters (in Hebrew: se’irim) of Semitic superstition, who are supposed to inhabit deserts (OED, 14: 511). 12 Both Error and Sin owe much to Spenser’s image of Errour in The Faerie Queene (1.1.13–24). 13 Fowler notes that although anyone “guilty of greedy rapaciousness might be called a cormorant,” the term was applied especially often to “hireling” clergy (203n).
136
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
somewhat less conventionally endows the fiend with the ability to enter into the bodies of a variety of animals. This, as Fowler points out, is contrary to a tradition, dating back to Augustine, according to which Satan was forbidden to make use of any animal other than the serpent (219n) for purposes of temptation. Perhaps proponents of this tradition were pained by the notion that Satan could adopt the disguise of a lion or tiger, or any animal perceived to bear such noble qualities as bravery and dignity. The serpent, after all, occupied a lower rung on the moral hierarchy, because of the “subtilty” that was its chief characteristic. Milton’s decision to enable his Satan to use the forms of animals other than the serpent displays the fiend’s confusion as to hierarchy: Satan, apparently, does not sense that disguising himself as a lion or tiger could be construed as bad taste, or even as evil, as it constitutes a violation of hierarchy. From his observation post at the top of the tree Satan ponders the place of Adam and Eve in the cosmic hierarchy: O hell! What do mine eyes with grief behold, Into our room of bliss thus high advanced Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps, Not spirits, yet to heavenly spirits bright Little inferior. (4.358–362)
Once again we sense Satan’s confusion over the lack of strict hierarchy: humans are of “other mold, earth-born perhaps”; they are not angels, but in their brightness are similar to heavenly spirits. The fiend then abandons his perch and playfully romps among the animal inhabitants of Eden, entering now into one, now into the other, of the garden’s denizens, and apparently having a good time: Down he alights among the sportful herd Of those four-footed kinds, himself now one, Now other [...] [A]bout them round A lion now he stalks with fiery glare, Then as a tiger, who by chance hath spied In some purlieu two gentle fawns at play. (4.396–398, 401–404)
The Miltonic narrator’s comment that Satan used different animals as “their shape served best his end” is parodied by Rochester’s Speaker: “Those Creatures, are the wisest who attain, / By surest means, the ends at which they aim” (94; 117–118). Both the Speaker in Rochester’s Satyr and the Miltonic narrator of Paradise Lost appear to be claiming that there is something satanic in the violation of the strictures of hierarchy inherent in using other creatures, those lower in the pecking order, to achieve one’s own ends. The evil of such exploitation is made fairly explicit by the Miltonic narrator: after all, the “end” at which Satan aims, and that necessitates his first scouting the Edenic territory in the shape of a beast and then addressing Eve, first in the form of a toad (in her dream) and then while inhabiting the body of a serpent, is patently evil. Rochester’s Speaker, however, applauds the so-called wisdom of the animals (“Those Creatures, are the wisest who attain, / By surest means, the ends at which they aim”). Those ends, however, are provision of food and reproduction: “For
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
137
hunger, or for Love, they fight, or tear” (95; 139). The Speaker then calls attention to the veniality of man’s chief motivation, which is fear: “wretched Man, is still in Arms for fear; / For fear he armes, and is of Armes afraid, / [...] / Base fear, the source whence his best passion came” (95; 140–141, 143). The Speaker suggests that the main motive of all human activity is an almost instinctive response to fear. The latter is arguably on a lower moral level than the main motivating factors of the beasts; they, at least, desire to achieve something positive, that is, to supply themselves and their families with food and to create offspring in their own likeness. Yet the Speaker’s ironic claim for the “wisdom” of the beasts’ aims surely smacks of “necessity, / The tyrant’s plea,” which Satan, still in the shape of a cormorant and about to assume the shapes of other beasts, uses to explain away his intended “devilish deeds” (4.393–394). Satan, in Fowler’s words, “is here cast in the role of a contemporary Machiavellian politician, excusing the evil means he resorts to by appeals to such values as ‘the common weal’, ‘the good of the state’, ‘policy’ and necessity” (218n). Or in Machiavelli’s own words, “a prince has of necessity to be so prudent that he knows how to escape the evil reputation attached to those vices which could lose him his state”; at the same time “he must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state” (49). Milton appears to have felt that the very use of necessity as “plea,” as professed motivation for a deed, may bear serious potential for evil. Kahn points out that in books 1 and 2, and especially in book 9, “part of Satan’s Machiavellianism involves ascribing the stereotypically Machiavellian use of force and fraud to God himself” (Machiavellian Rhetoric 228). Satan, in other words, faults God for using force against the rebels, thus necessitating certain responses on the part of the fallen. In rebelling against the exaltation of the Son, Satan was only doing what he was coerced to do by the claims of necessity. There is, after all, something paradoxical in the suggestion that necessity is evil. Whatever is perceived as necessary does not admit of choice, and one who is convinced of the necessity of a particular course of action is relieved of the need to question that action’s morality. This, as Milton would have it, is why necessity is such a dangerous plea. It can be claimed that Rochester’s explication of fear in his Satyr (95–96; 139– 173) is a development of Milton’s suggestion of the great potential for evil in the (mis)use of necessity as justification for action. The sense of fear, after all, does not allow much ground for moral choice; because men’s main motivating force is fear: Most Men are Cowards, all Men shou’d be Knaves: The diff’rence lyes (as far as I can see) Not in the thing it self, but the degree. (96; 169–171)
Questions of necessity are thus intermixed with issues of rank, of position within a hierarchy. And if the question “Who’s a Knave, of the first Rate?” (i.e., Who is the highest-ranking cad?) contains more than a whiff of sarcasm, the claim that the difference between men lies in differing degrees of fear seems straightforward enough. Rochester uses the paradox inherent in theriophily (Are animals truly higher than humans in any conceivable hierarchy? Has any philosopher really constructed such a moral system?) to muddle traditional distinctions between moral and immoral. The
138
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Speaker makes the fairly conventional argument that beasts, unlike humans, do not practice wanton cruelty: With Teeth, and Claws, by Nature arm’d [animals] hunt, Natures allowance, to supply their want. But Man, with smiles, embraces, Friendships, praise, Unhumanely his Fellows life betrays; With voluntary pains, works his distress, Not through necessity, but wantonness. (95; 133–138)
Yet the Speaker contradicts himself in the very next section (lines 139–173) wherein it turns out that man’s betrayal of his fellow man is not wanton, that is, with no other purpose than causing pain, but rather results from fear: “For fear he armes, and is of Armes afraid, / By fear, to fear, successively betray’d. / Base fear, the source whence his best passions came, / His boasted Honor, and his dear bought Fame” (95; 141–144). “Base fear,” as well as man’s “best passions,” reside in the human mind, and in his discussion of the Satyr Gill examines the poem as “the well-constructed expression and dramatization of the fundamental perplexities of a mind aware that mind itself is the source of all perplexity and all imagined virtue and all real vice” (“Mind Against Itself” 571). As I have already pointed out, it is possible to claim that the Tempter of Grace Abounding himself may be a trope for that part of the human mind that encourages the commission of acts that another part of the mind—conscience— knows to be evil. Bunyan’s Tempter aims to benumb his victim’s conscience by instilling in him a sense of despair, which is the conviction that man, as sinner, is unable to influence his state of salvation. This feeling of despair is accompanied by the fear that so concerned Rochester. During his last months Rochester pondered the connection between sinful actions and the feelings that accompany them: if all fallen humans are sinners, what is the significance, or indeed the validity, of the feelings of fear and despair that often accompany sin? For Bunyan, as we have seen, such fear may be of use if it encourages the sinner to repent; despair, however, would usually be dangerous because it could lead one to give up the struggle for redemption. In book 4 of Paradise Lost the Miltonic narrator makes it clear that Satan’s sense of horror, doubt, despair, grief are irrelevancies: “for 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” (4.20–23). Satan himself certifies the narrator’s analysis: “Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell” (4.75). The reader may feel Satan’s pain, but knows that it will not lead the fiend to redemption. In Some Passages of the Life and Death of Rochester14 Gilbert Burnet, the earl’s spiritual advisor during his final illness, describes a conversation with Rochester about the feelings that accompany sinful actions. The earl, in Burnet’s words: 14 Samuel Johnson admired Burnet’s account of Rochester’s reconciliation with the religion of his boyhood (156). Robert G. Walker notes, however, that the hundred years stretching from the late Restoration period until the end of the eighteenth century witnessed fierce debate as to the efficacy of a deathbed repentance. Such arguments “were fuelled and
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
139
did not deny but that, after the doing of some things, he felt great and severe Challenges within himself; But he said, He felt not these after some others which I would perhaps call far greater Sins, than those that affected him more sensibly: This I said, might flow from the Disorders he had cast himself into, which had corrupted his judgment, and vitiated his taste of things. (65)
The dying earl here expresses a sense of confusion as to the hierarchy of sin and his own emotional response to committing sins; it bears resemblance to the Chief of Sinner’s satanically induced wish to “taste the sweetness” of sin and to fill his belly “with its delicates.” It was, of course, a medical commonplace that, as Burnet points out to Rochester, “a Feaverish man cannot judge of Tasts” (65); sin was often described as tasting sweet. Yet Burnet emphasizes Rochester’s confusion; the earl tells Burnet that he has on occasion felt worse after committing a comparatively venial sin than after a “far greater Sin.” This feeling, over which Rochester presumably had no control, is the result of the sinner’s lack of internalization of a hierarchy of evil. Questions of hierarchy—acceptance of one’s place within a political, economic, or cosmic hierarchy, and the interrelations between these various hierarchies— formed a central part of Rochester’s thinking, as they did for Milton and Bunyan. For all three, the figure of the clergyman as shepherd was the locus of struggle with these issues. The shepherd, after all, is at the top of the hierarchy in which he functions. His love for the sheep under his care, unfortunately, stands in contradiction to the possibility that his custodianship will be exploitative, and the clergyman whom we meet in Satyr Against Reason is not a loving father to his flock. The reader can easily imagine the vicar standing before his congregation, making “a pretence / With his obstrep’rous, sawcy Eloquence” (96; 195–196), chiding and railing, proudly looking down from his lofty pulpit at his parishioners (many of whom are his presumably illegitimate offspring), domineering over the council board (97; 206–211). The corrupt minister is envisioned by the Speaker as an orator, one who uses rhetoric to dominate a group of followers. This is, of course, one of the talents of Milton’s and Bunyan’s Satan characters, both of whom are convincing speakers, well able to “work a crowd.” Milton’s Satan character is evident in the person of Rochester’s corrupt churchman, the (mis)leader of his flocks. The priest, and for that matter, God himself, was traditionally figured as a shepherd, dating back at least as far as Psalm 23, one of the Hebrew Bible’s most oft-quoted passages. This figure nevertheless has its flip side: the corrupt, self-seeking leader who uses his powerful position for evil. The Speaker of the Satyr calls attention to this type in a way that Milton would have found familiar, had he lived to read the earl’s poem: None of that sensual Tribe whose Tallents lye, In Avarice, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony. Who hunt good Livings, but abhor good Lives, Whose Lust exalted, to the height arrives, shaped by contemporary events to a much greater extent than other theological arguments. Perhaps the most important of these shaping events was the death of Rochester” (22) and, of course, the publication of reports of his repentance.
140
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature They act Adultery with their own Wives. And e’re a score of Years compleated be, Can from the lofty Pulpit proudly see, Half a large Parish, their own Progeny. (96, 97; 202–209)
Overtones of the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan, in the avatar of the leader who enslaves his followers by means of false offers of freedom, are surely noticeable in this poem. Milton’s combination of priest and poet in the figure of the shepherd (Patrides, Milton’s Lycidas 113–14), is hinted at in Rochester’s description of a churchman preaching, in which poet, priest, and leader conflate in the person of the preacher. Preaching, after all, is a speech act.15 The preacher is a leader who aims to influence listeners to opt for a certain course of action, and Hill has called attention to Rochester’s anticlericalism, which in its fierceness recalls that of Milton and many other Interregnum radicals (“John Wilmot” 305). Having spent years in prison rather than agree to refrain from preaching, John Bunyan was aware of the preacher’s potential power. In Grace Abounding he notes the ease with which the gifted preacher may be led into evil: Thus, therefore, I came to perceive, that though gifts in themselves were good to the thing for which they are designed, to wit, the Edification of others; yet empty and without power to save the Soul of him that hath them, if they be alone [...]. This shewed me, too, that gifts being alone, were dangerous, not in themselves, but because of those evils that attend them that have them, to wit, pride, desire of vain glory, self-conceit, &c. (92; par. 301, 302)
Bunyan herein creates a possibly spurious separation between the shepherd and his flock. He appears to suggest that while the preacher is trying to effect good to his congregants, he may fall into evil himself. The devil, as Bunyan learned from bitter personal experience, could cause the innocent preacher much suffering in another way: by spreading ill-founded rumors as to his chastity vis-à-vis his women parishioners “Sathan laboured by reproaches and slanders to make me vile among my Countrymen, that, if possible, my preaching might be made of none effect” (95; par. 317). In The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1 Christian and Hopeful meet good shepherds. The latter steer the pilgrims clear of the Mountain of Errour, Doubting Castle, and the “By-way to Hell, a way that Hypocrites go in at” (120–122), and as Christian and Hopeful part from the shepherds they sing “Thus by the Shepherds, Secrets are reveal’d, / Which from all other men are kept conceal’d” (123; 5–6). This constitutes a perhaps unintentional image of the priest as bearer of secrets; it contains overtones of the pre-Reformation view of the priest-shepherd whose task is twofold: to receive holy truths and then serve as a conduit, revealing these truths to his sheep.
15 In uttering any sentence, as Gillian Brown and George Yule point out, a speaker can be seen to perform an illocutionary act: “Conventionally associated with each illocutionary act is the force of the utterance which can be expressed as a performative such as ‘promise’ or ‘warn’” (232). Brown and Yule were not specifically discussing the discourse of the preacher, but warning and promising are surely central aspects of preaching.
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
141
The above can not help but remind us of the attack on “corrupt clergy, then in their height” in Lycidas. The young Milton’s greatly admired elegy contains a vivid, unsettling depiction of the connection between animal appetites and misuse of one’s position in hierarchy. The three lines—“Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold / A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least / That to the faithful herdman’s art belongs!” (119–121)—arguably constitute one of Milton’s most stirring attacks on corrupt clergy. In his discussion of the striking image of the “blind mouths,” nineteenth-century scholar Thomas Keightly notes that “[a] Bishop means a person who sees. A Pastor means one who feeds. The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed—to be a Mouth [...]. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook” (239). Keightly’s explication of Lycidas bears more than a hint of the tendentious. Nevertheless, his analysis of the clergy’s betrayal of their “hungry sheep” who “are not fed, / But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw, / Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread” (125–127) is thought-provoking in its revelation of a tendency to confuse victim and oppressor. It is, after all, the sheep, the followers, who are “swoll’n with wind,” but they then become, in Keightly’s words, “the true fog children—clods, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with—corrupt, and corrupting” (241). The victim, in other words, is suspiciously like the corrupt clergyman, as Milton suggests when applying “swoll’n with wind,” a state that we would ordinarily associate with the corrupt priest, to the latter’s victims as well. The pompous priest is surely swollen with wind, or as Rochester’s Speaker in Satyr would have it, “blown up with vain Prelatique Pride” (96; 193), a glutton who hunts good livings, rather than practicing continence (97; 203–204). The strict separation between victim and oppressor, a common assumption underlying hierarchies, has, in other words, been muddled. The Satan of Paradise Regained is also figured as a shepherd, “an aged man in rural weeds, / Following, as seemed, the quest of some stray ewe” (1.314–315) when he makes his first attempt upon the Son. Lest we miss the warning inherent in “as seemed” we are told immediately prior to this vignette of Satan as shepherd that Christ had spent the previous forty days “Among wild beasts [...] his walk / The fiery serpent fled, and noxious worm” (1.310, 311–312). Although the reptilian images do not supposedly pertain to Satan, but rather to the desert backdrop of the scene, the closeness of the description of Satan as shepherd to these images cannot be coincidental. The figure of the corrupt leader as a ravenous mouth (or in the case of the worm, an elongated digestive tract) is found again in Paradise Regained in a reference to the 400 prophets who led King Ahab to his doom (1 Kings 22.6): Christ accuses Satan of having chosen “To be a liar in four hundred mouths; / For lying is thy sustenance, thy food” (1.428–429). Rochester’s Upon Nothing was composed, according to Vieth, before 14 May 1678, that is, about two years after the Satyr, but is often studied and discussed in tandem with it. The offspring, as Farley-Hills avers, of a long line of poems on the subject of nothing, which Renaissance poets composed as an intellectual exercise whose aim was the display of one’s ability to deal with paradox (Benevolence 135),
142
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Upon Nothing is an ironical address to “Nothing,” the “Elder Brother even to Shade.” Tony Barley has called attention to its parody of (or “blasphemous jibes at”) Genesis 1: “Yet Something did thy [Nothing’s] mighty power command / And from thy fruitfull Emptinesses hand / Snatcht, Men, Beasts, birds, fire, water, Ayre, and land” (62; 10–12). The list in line 12, as Barley notes, serves to refute hierarchy and indicates a “chaotic equality,” whereas stanzas 3 through 6 “tease [...] the Miltonic gospel’s narrative of Satan’s rebellion in Paradise Lost” (103). In a figure reminiscent of the “blind mouths” of Lycidas, Rochester envisions the Nothing whom he apostrophizes as a kind of ravenous mouth, “a boundless self” into which “Somthing, the Generall Attribute of all” must inevitably “undistinguisht fall” (7–9). Then: But Turncote-time assists the foe in vayne And brib’d by thee destroyes their short liv’d Reign And to thy hungry wombe drives back thy slaves again. (62; 19–21)
This stanza recalls Miltonic depictions of the satanic space and body. Hell, in which Satan rules as monarch, is conventionally figured as a giant maw;16 and the hungry womb to which the slaves in Rochester’s poem are driven back recalls Sin, Satan’s daughter/spouse, as detailed by the Miltonic narrator in Paradise Lost: about her middle round A cry of hell hounds never ceasing barked [...] yet when they list, would creep, If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb, And kennel there. (2.653–654, 656–658)
Although Sin’s female gender is highly significant in any analysis of the character, it is worth recalling that womb was commonly used as a synonym for stomach;17 when Rochester describes Nothing as a “hungry womb” it is likely that he is referring to the stomach. The first part of the figure “blind mouths”—blindness—is hinted at in the “blind Phylosophies” with which the so-called “wise” amuse themselves:
16 Northrop Frye has noted Milton’s probable familiarity with medieval paintings of the harrowing of hell, in which the latter is usually represented as a leviathan, “a huge, openmouthed monster into which, or whom, Christ descends, like the Jonah whom Christ accepted as a prototype of his own Passion.” Yet Milton appears, according to Frye, to have doubted that Christ actually spent three days in hell after his death. Such a belief, Frye avers, would not have been consonant with Milton’s [mortalist] conviction that “the whole of Christ’s human nature died on the cross, with no surviving soul or spirit able to visit hell” (“Typology” 229). Paradise Lost editor Alastair Fowler claims that “Milton’s belief in the joint extinction and joint resurrection of man’s body and mind was not eccentric heresy, but good Biblical theology” (549n). 17 The OED cites an example of womb referring to “belly,” “abdomen,” from 1684; and in the sense of “stomach (as the receptacle of food)” from as late as 1756 (OED, 20: 490).
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
143
Great Negative how vainly would the wise Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst Thou not stand to poynt their blind Phylosophies. Is or is not, the two great Ends of ffate And true or false the Subject of debate That perfect or destroy the vast designes of State—. (63; 28–33)
The wise would “vainly,” that is, both proudly and fecklessly, pursue their research and conduct their arguments, did not the Great Negative call attention to their blindness. The “Is Not,” or Nothing, parallels the False. Yet all subjects of debate eventually end up “reduc’t” to nothing, where they are, somewhat confusingly, “least unsafe and best.” The damned angels of Paradise Lost, too, pass their time in “pleasing,” though sterile debates: Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy. (2.562–565)
Rochester’s intellectuals engage in “vain,” that is, proud debate; their talk is not vain in the sense of being useless, since the Great Negative points out to them the gratuitousness of their endeavors. Milton, on the other hand, claims that the “wisdom” of Hell’s scholars is rendered useless by its essential falsity. In his argument with the Adversarius the Speaker of Rochester’s Satyr finally sketches out a possible connection between reason and appetite, choosing for purpose of example the appetite for food, although other physical appetites are implied as well. The Speaker declares his readiness to obey his own “right reason,” not the Adversarius’s false reasoning: My Reason is my Friend, yours is a Cheat, Hunger call’s out, my Reason bids me eat; Perversly yours, your Appetite does mock, This asks for Food, that answers, what’s a Clock? (94; 106–109)
In the words of Ronald W. Johnson, the Satyr “appears to be one thing, an indictment of those who regard mankind as superior to beasts on the basis of reason; but the poem is quite another thing, an indictment of all mankind as inevitably dishonest on the basis of common sense” (373). Reason, in Rochester’s view, is a form of what we now call common sense; it does not bid man ignore the exigencies of his body, but rather encourages him to tune into them. The proud reasoner of the Satyr, as Griffin points out, is described in language recalling Satan’s, rather than Adam’s, fall (215). The downfall of reason leads its bearer through “errors Fenny—Boggs, and Thorny Brakes” (92; 15), over “Mountains of Whimseys,” (92; 17), eventually to drown in “doubts boundless Sea” (92; 19). In the latter Griffin traces a pattern whose source may very well be the downfall of Satan in Paradise Lost (215). Once afloat in the boundless sea, “like to drown, / Books bear him up awhile, and make him try / To swim with Bladders of Philosophy” (92; 19–21). The image of the reasoner bobbing up and down, supported by life preservers made of books, is reminiscent of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost who:
144
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. (2.557–561)
The denizens of hell sat, according to the Miltonic narrator, on a hill, “elevate” in thoughts, reasoning “high”; as is Rochester’s reasoner, they are stationed above the rest of the landscape. This height, of course, is ironic, as they are in fact lost in underworld mazes or, in the case of Rochester’s reasoner, about to drown. The Satan of Paradise Regained first tempts the Son with visions of food. Moreover, prior to the last temptation episode, in which Christ is set on the highest pinnacle of the holy temple in Jerusalem (4.549), Satan tempts him with an offer of unlimited knowledge, surely an impossibility for one who is human. The desire for knowledge, it seems, can be a form of gluttony—perhaps, in current terms, an addiction. As Satan reminds Christ, even as a child the Son had seemed “otherwise inclined / Than to a worldly crown, addicted more / To contemplation and profound dispute” (4.212–214). Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind drew responses, some, as might be expected, in the form of parody. One Mr. Griffith, a minister, both parodies the Satyr and argues with its basic premise in a contemporary, though undated “Answer to the Earle of Rochesters Satyre on Mankind”: Boeth Dog, & Beare as well, as men, will fight, And to noe purpose too each other bite; And as for puggy, all his virtues lye In Apeing Man, the onely thinge you flye. The wisest way, these Evills to redresse, Is to bee, what you are, nor more, nor lesse, That is not Man, Dog, Beare, or Monkey neither, But a rare something of them all together. (565)
Griffith is optimistic: “But must Humanity be quite erac’d / Because it is from what, it was, defac’d?” (564) he asks. The minister, that is, raises the possibility of integrating the animal and the human: man’s problematical rung on the hierarchy— beneath the angels and above the animals, yet partaking of aspects of both—can be ignored if man accepts the presence of the dog, the bear, or the monkey in his self. Rochester’s Speaker, however, did not believe in the possibility of such integration; instead he yearned to meet the “meek, humble man [...] Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe, / Misterious truths, which no Man can conceive” (97; 218–219). It is impossible to erase the confusion created by one’s place in the hierarchy; at most one can be aware of its presence. Rochester’s major satires, according to Farley-Hills, “are both a passionate expression of anger against man’s ineptitude and ultimately a triumph of Augustan order over individualism” (Benevolence 156). Yet perhaps it is more exact to see the Satyr as a triumph in its very construction of an individual who cannot accommodate himself to the proposed order. The individual emerging in the Satyr is an avatar
Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox
145
of the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan, a human being whose confusion as to his place in the cosmic hierarchy leads him to question the essential goodness of humanity; an individual who senses the permanence of his commitment to evil actions, but who can at the same time feel anger and loss on contemplating his corruptness. Kahn has suggested that Milton’s Satan acknowledges that what the Machiavel 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” (Machiavellian Rhetoric 214). For Rochester, as for his Speaker, the condition of human action may be a more general, though related, confusion.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 7
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode” In his discussion of the initial reception accorded to Paradise Lost on its first publication in 1667, Nicholas Von Maltzahn argues with the conventional wisdom that claims that the timing of the publication, during a period of persecution of nonconformists, was unfortunate (489). By October 1667, Von Maltzahn notes, the “fortunes of Nonconformity were on the mend” (488). This and more: there is evidence that even supporters of an established church, such as Sir John Hobart (1628–83), who “abhorred” Milton’s politics, were receptive to Milton’s epic because they saw it as “a counterweight to the irreligious court culture of the day.” There was, according to Von Maltzahn, a “revulsion at court excess in 1666–7”; conservatives like Hobart feared that the court’s wickedness had become “monstrous” to the extent of implicating the whole nation in its evil (491).1 The perception of the court as a hotbed of riot and fornication began, in other words, a mere few years after Charles II’s ascendance to the throne, and continued into the next decade.2 Yet the court was undergoing changes that impacted on language and writing. In the words of Robert Holton: In the long process of identifying itself with the center of power, the court was moving in the direction of symbolically repressing violence and sexuality which traditionally constituted a major threat to the stability of the central power structure. The gradual internalization of the socially-based repressions resulted in a transferrence; in discursive forms such as the sonnet, fears concerning violence and sexuality were excluded from the court’s definition of itself and transferred to its conception of the lower classes, thus constituting a definition of class as difference of essence. The difference gradually became inscribed in the language itself with terms such as rude and vulgar, common and mean representing both the common people and breaches in the code of manners governing physical appetites such as eating and sexuality. (55)
Such changes may not have been perceived by many of those living through the period; Rochester, however, was sensitive to their inherent dangers. 1 It is worth recalling, however, as Sarah Wintle contends, that: “In the years of the Civil War and Interregnum, sexual freedom and experiment, though partly induced by the conditions of the war itself, were mainly associated with political beliefs of a radical kind, and such modes of behavior and their implications—even if they were seen as a warning rather than a precedent—were not forgotten in the 1660s and 1670s (143). 2 I have reservations as to Barbara Everett’s argument that “[t]he 1660s and 1670s through which Rochester lived and which, in literary terms at least, he helped to create, were something of a cultural no man’s land, a pause in time equally out of touch with the past and future, the medieval and the modern” (11). Yet it may have been perceived as such by those living through the pendulum-like changes of the period.
148
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
George Etherege’s The Man of Mode owed more than a modicum of its success to the playwright’s creation of “an image of contemporary society which would be eagerly approved,” in the words of Etherege editor John Conaghan (3). Etherege’s version of the sexual excesses and financial-social corruption of those Londonbased nobles who clung to the coattails of Charles II and his senior courtiers was clearly appreciated by its contemporary audience. So, too, had readers like Hobart appreciated Paradise Lost as a perceived critique of court wickedness, whether in the Miltonic narrator’s attack on the courtly love tradition (4.763–770) or in depictions of the interaction between Satan and the “courtiers” of Pandaemonium in books 1 and 2. Milton’s intellect, learning, breadth of vision, as well as the rigors of censorship to which he was subject, made it unlikely that he would base his epic protagonists on contemporary court celebrities. Etherege, however, clearly drew his characters from his own circle of acquaintance. As Vivian De Sola Pinto notes, Rochester, the “perfect ‘wild gallant’ of the period,” was portrayed by his friend Etherege in his famous play as Dorimant, the prototype of a long line of attractive rakes in English comedy from William Congreve’s Mirabel to Oscar Wilde’s Lord Goring (“John Wilmot” 62). John Traugott points out the closeness of Rochester’s life to that of the rake of comedy (388), and, as Conaghan avers, the identification of John Wilmot with Dorimant seems “most reasonable” on the basis of the character’s “wit, amourousness, inconstancy and a fondness for the verses of [Edmund] Waller.”3 Yet, as Conaghan suggests, the “importance of these identifications lies not in their historicity so much as in the way they emphasize the closeness of the play to the Restoration beau monde” (3). Those of Rochester’s contemporaries who supplemented their limited personal acquaintance with him by popular gossip saw the earl as an embodiment of the court rake; they simultaneously found this type embodied in Dorimant. It would not be farfetched to claim that his contemporaries did not always differentiate between Rochester the man and Dorimant the stage character; or, should this sound extreme, they would have viewed Dorimant as a stage rendition of Rochester, while scanning the earl’s behavior for reminders of the stage character. The claim that a general, diffuse, satanic nature pertains to the Restoration rake figure is surely not controversial; indeed, the term rake itself was originally a short form of rakehell. I intend, however, to argue that the rake character who combines elements of the historical Rochester and the stage character Dorimant embodies basic aspects of the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan that I have posited. This character is essentially human; both artists, as I have claimed, envision Satan as a
3 When we first meet Dorimant at the beginning of act 1, he is “repeating Verses” from Edmund Waller’s Of a War with Spain and a Fight at Sea: “Now for some Ages had the pride of Spain, / Made the Sun shine on half the World in vain” (1.1.2–4). As noted by Conaghan, in his Defense of Sir Fopling Flutter John Dennis lists among the “Unanimously agreed” points of resemblance with Rochester, Dorimant’s “repeating, on every Occasion, the Verses of Waller, for whom that noble Lord had a very particular esteem” (123n). Thormahlen, too, notes that “Rochester’s admiration of Waller has traditionally been thought to be reflected in Dorimant’s quotations from that doyen of English verse” (326).
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
149
human being who is led into sin by certain traits that he bears. The latter traits, not evil in themselves, can be numbered among the defining characteristics of the human: the necessity of enduring pain and illness; the inability to sustain a particular emotion/ feeling over long periods of time, including the inability to maintain constancy in love; confusion as to one’s role in hierarchy. The challenge for the man who would put Satan and his ways behind him is, in other words, to sense and avoid the dangers posed by some of those very characteristics that constitute and define his humanity. James J. Stathis and Traugott may represent end points on a critical continuum evaluating and judging the rake character. Stathis suggests that at least three comic Restoration dramatists—Etherege, William Wycherly, and John Vanbrugh— removed the Devil from a traditional theological context and transformed him “into an admirable rake-hero with whom their audience could identify” (107). According to Stathis: The currency of the Devil in the letters, the poetry and the drama of the Restoration can be largely attributed to the impact of the publication, in 1667, of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Critics have focused their attention almost exclusively on illuminating this impact on the poetry of the period, but dramatists and wits like Etherege, Wycherly, Rochester and later Vanbrugh—all felt the power of Milton’s mighty Devil, though they may have ignored the poet’s theology and smiled at the Christian cosmology in Paradise Lost. (107)
Stathis suggests that rake heroes like Dorimant succeed in their intrigues by means of wit, by a verbal prowess that is used by the hero for dissimulation, repartee, and raillery, and that: The end results of their selfish actions, however, are neither frightful nor damaging but beneficial to those characters with whom they have relationships, both relationships that are based on friendship and those that are sexual. [...] Do we really expect the Devil to change? Obviously, he is who he is. But what he does is to cause change in others, and the change that he causes in these plays, ironically, is for the good. Believing themselves free, the devilish rake-heroes of Restoration comedy function as agents of freedom for others. (114–15)
I would claim, however, that to whatever extent Etherege succeeded in “relieving the Devil of his heavy theological burden,” as Stathis argues (108), he did not hold up Dorimant to the audience as an object worthy of imitation. In his comprehensive definition of the Restoration rake, Traugott, too, argues that Restoration comedy is unique in that it “proposes a hero who is handed all the rewards because he breaks all the moral codes.” Yet Traugott suggests that something “is wrong with this comic resolution; it does not quite correspond with our sense of rightness upon which the joy of comedy depends” (381). Traugott’s delineation of the rake character provides a useful background for our view of Rochester/Dorimant as an offspring of Milton’s and Bunyan’s Satan character. The following constitute the main attitudes that for Traugott characterize the rake: 1. “The unending war of the sexes is for him perfect freedom” (382). 2. Will “is the first attribute of personality” and “the exercise of will in a rational man requires knowledge of self and others” (383). Within the framework of
150
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
the exercise of will, sexuality “seems merely a device to exert one’s will, to violate another’s personality” (385). This and more: the rake’s “notion of freedom assumes cruelty because it assumes that in exercising the will one necessarily alters another person” (386–87). 3. The rake “accepts the ever-changing mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds him momentarily to this or that creature” (383). 4. The rake is an aristocrat: “Freethinker, voyeur, masker, ironist, wit, Rochester developed all possibilities of hauteur” (388). An examination of The Man of Mode does not appear to provide evidence of Stathis’s view of the rake as an agent of freedom for others; rather, it supports Traugott’s claim for the rake’s assumption of “perfect freedom” for himself, whatever the cost to others. Certainly Dorimant is not credible as an “agent of freedom for others.” Indeed, what “change for the good,” what acquisition of freedom, even on the part of the hero himself, can we find in the play’s dénouement? The dramatist may have relieved the Devil of a theological burden,4 if we adopt a limited meaning for theology, that is, if we define it as a formalized body of opinion concerning God and man’s relation to the Deity. But Etherege has not relieved Satan of his moral burden; Dorimant bears responsibility for the outcome of his actions, whether to himself or to others. The free rein that Dorimant gives to his lust has painful consequences for Mrs. Loveit, for Bellinda, and ultimately for the hero himself, who appears, with all his compulsive promiscuity, to lead a joyless existence. Or as Dustin H. Griffin notes vis-à-vis Rochester’s poems, the idea that “sensual experience (though it is all man has) is essentially a failure” is a constant theme (90). Although the rake figure as embodied in Dorimant and the historical Rochester seems to lead a life of constant erotic pleasure justified by youth, beauty, and high spirits, he appears to reap little enjoyment from his repeated sexual escapades. As Thormahlen has noticed, joyful, consummated sex is not a main concern in Rochester’s oeuvre. The first-person speakers of his poems are “forever impelled by cerebral whims, pressures and persuasions.” Emotions such as “admiration, pique, jealousy, fear of loss and fear of commitment” are present but, Thormahlen asks, “Where does that leave physical desires, especially the lust which so many have regarded as characteristic of Rochester’s poetry? Very far down on the ‘concern’ scale” (78). Rochester’s aptly titled The Fall is representative of the poet’s sense that “we, poor Slaves to hope and fear, / Are never of our Joys secure: / They lessen still, as they draw near; / And none but dull delights endure” (26; 9–12). Pain is a focal issue here; torment is permanent rather than temporary, “infernal” rather than “purgatorial,” according to Thormahlen, because it pertains to the human condition (79).
4 The narrator of The Pilgrim’s Progress “saw in my Dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his Shoulders, and fell from off his back; and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulcher, where it fell in, and I saw it no more” (38). If the rake’s burden of sin is loosed from off his shoulders and sent tumbling into the Sepulcher by Etherege, the rake himself could be said to follow his burden into hell.
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
151
Rochester’s contemporaries, however, often tended to focus on what is most visible: the young man’s attractiveness. Aphra Behn seems, according to David Farley-Hills, to have genuinely admired Rochester (Benevolence 101); in her eulogy of the poet she adjures “all ye Beauties” to: Think how he lov’d, and writ, and sigh’d, and spoke, Recall his Meen, his Fashion, and his Look. By what dear Arts the Soul he did surprize, Soft as his Voice, and charming as his Eyes, Bring Garlands all of never-dying Flow’rs, Bedew’d with everlasting falling Show’rs. (102–103)
There is something undeniably attractive about both Dorimant and Rochester; their beauty, charm, and energy cannot help but remind us of the attractiveness of Satan in books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost. Yet in Milton’s renditions of the character in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained we rarely see Satan in the person of a lover. Prior to his first acquaintance with Eve, our only view of Satan in any relationship with a woman is in his meeting with his spouse/daughter Sin. On first recognizing Sin, the “subtle fiend” speaks “smooth”: “Dear Daughter, [...] thou claim’st me for thy sire, / And my fair son here show’st me, the dear pledge / Of dalliance had with thee in heaven” (2.817–819). Generations of readers have recognized in this speech a parody of the discourse of the Petrarchan lover.5 Yet the fiend’s very subtlety and smoothness, as pointed out by the narrator (2.815–816), indicate that Satan himself is consciously “feeding Sin a line,” wooing her with words that he knows to be untrue: neither Sin nor their son, after all, is “fair” or “dear” to Satan. Satan’s courting of Sin with sweet, though untrue words is prophetic of Dorimant’s opening speech, a soliloquy in which he admits to himself that his correspondence with Mrs. Loveit will not satisfy the lover whom he is jilting: “What a dull insipid thing is a Billet doux written in cold blood, after the heat of the business is over? [...] Women are i’the right when they jealously examine our Letters, for in them we always first discover our decay of passion” (1.1.4–5, 10–11).6 Both Satan and Dorimant are aware, in other words, of their own dishonesty toward an erstwhile mistress; Dorimant’s use of imagery based on heat and cold is pregnant with satanic overtones. His letters are not merely cool in tone, but seem to be written in cold blood, which modern readers commonly identify as a reptilian attribute. Dorimant’s use of decay to describe the fading or lessening of passion is also redolent of that illness and suffering that are the portion of the human, and of which the Satan character partakes. Swinging back and forth between extremes is also, as I have attempted to show, an aspect of the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan. Bunyan’s Tempter had used the same imagery as Dorimant in outlining his plans to manipulate his victim’s emotions: “I will cool you insensibly, by degrees, by little and little: What care I, 5 Noam Flinker has shown how Milton condemns “[t]he Petrarchan or courtly lover who rarely treats his beloved as an individual with real emotions but prefers to see her as an extension of his own ideas, needs, and ideals” (89) in “Courting Urania: The Narrator of Paradise Lost Invokes His Muse.” 6 Citations of The Man of Mode are to act, scene, and line numbers.
152
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
saith he, though I be seven years in chilling your heart, if I can do it at last; [...] though you be burning hot at present, yet, if I can pull you from this fire, I shall have you cold before it be long” (35; par. 110). Lest we miss these satanic references in Dorimant’s first speech, a mere few lines down Lady Woodvil is said by the Orange-Woman to think him an “arrant Devil, shou’d she see you, on my Conscience she wou’d look if you had not a Cloven foot” (1.1.109–110). Later on Lady Woodvil claims that Dorimant, who plans to marry her daughter Harriet, is “the Prince of all the Devils in the Town, [who] delights in nothing but Rapes and Riots” (3.3.118–119); he has a “Tongue they say would tempt the Angels to a second fall” (3.3.121–122). Mrs. Loveit, who is in the midst of being jilted by Dorimant, calls him a “greater Devil, Monster, Barbarian” (2.2.262). Scholars as well have noted the young hero’s resemblance to Satan: Traugott terms Dorimant “a ruined angel. [...] Dorimant is beautiful, modest, gracious, charming—also poxed, heartless, dishonorable, insincere—and he is witty, a quality that embraces both categories” (401). Early in the opening scene the young man is greeted as “Dorimant my Life, my Joy, my darling-Sin” (1.1.64). For the contemporary audience the latter epithet would have resonated with overtones of nonconformist discourse, in which, as I have already noted, the Christian is never wholly free from his “darling sin.” Throughout the play Dorimant simultaneously attempts to form an engagement with Harriet, the new girl in town, whose fortune will “repair the ruines of [his] estate” (5.2.281–282); to end a tiresome liaison with Mrs. Loveit; and to enjoy a hasty, casual, sexual encounter with Bellinda. Or as Conaghan puts it, “in his dealings with Loveit and Bellinda we see a relatively unconstrained exercise of sexual power. His scope, it seems, extends as far as his ingenuity” (6). The scope of the rake’s sexual adventures is indeed a central issue: discussions of human sexual love routinely interrogate the notion of constancy, and the inability to maintain a given emotion over the course of time is an attribute of the Satan character that I have posited. In Love and Life Rochester concludes with a cry to his lover: Then talke not of Inconstancy, False Hearts, and broken Vows, If I, by Miracle can be, This live-long Minute true to thee, Tis all that Heav’n allows. (44; 11–15)
Against Constancy is not addressed to a specific lady, but more likely to a comrade or servitor; it ends with the call: “Then bring my Bath, and strew my bed, / as each kind night returns, / Ile change a Mistress till I’me dead, / and fate change me for worms” (43;17–20). Both poems conclude with a reference to “heaven” or “fate,” those forces that the speaker feels to have ultimate control over his emotions and actions. Lack of self-control, inconstancy of emotion, or, in this case, the inability to maintain that love for a woman, which is the precondition of sexual loyalty, seems to be a given, a part of the human condition, and in this sense is reminiscent of satanic mood swings. I have already contended that swift changes of mood—or the inability to sustain a given emotion for long—constitute an important aspect of the Satan character
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
153
for Milton and Bunyan. I have also noted that Traugott characterizes the rake by “the ever-changing mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds him momentarily to this or that creature” (383). The distress caused to the individual by swift, uncontrolled changes in emotion is mirrored on the social level by the discomfort caused by swift, uncontrollable changes in the hierarchy of which one is part. Ken Robinson discusses A Ramble in St. James’s Park as: a prime instance of the mercurial change of mood that breeds inquietude of tone. [...] Rochester orchestrates the different tones available to him in the invective, shifting suddenly from tongue-in-cheek expostulation to quite uncomic and forceful repugnance. [...] Something of the earlier note of comic dispraise re-enters the poem in [the] concluding lines, but it vies for supremacy with residual aggression. The result is a feeling of violence only just restrained. (97–98)
The source of these mood changes, according to Robinson, is a “general uncertainty about morals” evident in Rochester’s work, a skepticism that for Rochester “led nowhere, unless it was to a sense of insoluble dilemma. In this cul-de-sac, as in the world of Rochester’s fictional representative, Dorimant, manners replaced morals. There was a categorical imperative to maintain rational self-control, or at least to present a mask of self-control to the world. Rochester’s poetry obeys this imperative, but it does not always project unruffled urbanity” (107–108). If, as Robinson suggests, Rochester lived in a world in which manners replaced morals, that is, in which individuals were expected to relate to one another mainly on the basis of each one’s locus in a familiar hierarchy, it is not surprising that he would attach great importance to maintaining his place in the hierarchy. In a system in which each member finds security in knowing his place vis-à-vis others, any challenge to the validity of the hierarchy is threatening. It can be argued that Rochester’s main criticism of the social life of Tunbridge Wells in the poem of that name is that hierarchy is not preserved. Such a blurring of strict social hierarchy is only to be expected in a seasonal gathering of people from many walks of life who are temporarily thrown together at a fashionable spa;7 yet Rochester does not spare his scorn at the way in which the visitors to Tunbridge Wells are “mixed together”: ne’er cou’d Conventickle, Play, or Fair, For a true Medley, with this Herd compare. Here Lords, Knights, Squires, Ladys, and Countesses, Chandlers, Mum-Bacon-Women, Sempstresses, Were mixt together. (71; 92–96)
As Thormahlen points out in her discussion of Tunbridge Wells, the main interest of the speaker is: people with social ambitions [...]. A certain animus against the gentry is discernible in the lines on the ‘Bawling Fopp’ and the credulous owner of a ‘good Estate’ who hopes for an heir. 7 Cf. the Bath scenes in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, chapters 2–19 and Persuasion, chapters 15–23.
154
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature The young ‘Gallant’ and the impecunious younger sons also seem to belong to social strata below, but not very far below, that aristocracy to which Rochester belonged. This feature could be felt to reflect the characteristic pecking-order disgust with the person just below yourself, as well as the contempt for the booby-squire character which is so prevalent in Restoration comedy. (242)8
For all their apparent rebelliousness against social conventions, Rochester and his mates appear to be uncomfortable with breaches of accepted pecking orders. As a member of an aristocracy in which marriages were often contracted for financial reasons, Rochester may have sensed a connection between the dangers inherent in confusion as to the validity of hierarchy, on the wider social level, and a perceived inability to maintain loyalty to one woman in one’s individual, personal life. Rochester knew that inconstancy is not only the portion of men, but of women as well, though he was not above using women’s supposed frailty as an excuse for his own peccadilloes. In Upon His Leaving His Mistress the poet suggests that his Celia should “live up to thy mighty Mind, / And be the Mistriss of Mankind” (37; 20–21). Employing frankly Edenic imagery,9 the speaker argues that it is a sad waste for his lady to “Contrive to make one happy Man” when “the kind, Seed-receiving Earth, / To ev’ry Grain affords a Birth” (37; 11, 15–16). There is a curiously Miltonic overtone, moreover, when the speaker addresses Celia as: “You whom some kinder Pow’r did fashion, / By merit, and by inclination, / The joy at least of one whole Nation” (37; 5–7). This apostrophe, in which Rochester suggests that his lady undertake a life of promiscuity in the service of a whole nation, appears to parody and perhaps even interrogate God’s praise of the Son for agreeing to renounce his “godlike fruition” and thus be found “By merit more than birthright Son of God” (Paradise Lost 3.307, 309). Conaghan has noted the moral disquiet that The Man of Mode tends to raise, especially regarding the scope allowed to Dorimant’s “sexual opportunism” (6). Whereas moral disquiet would commonly result when such opportunism is not penalized, the characters’ unrestrained sexuality does not, in fact, go unpunished. Dorimant’s affair with Loveit ends in mutual recrimination, as well as misery on the part of the woman. And while Bellinda, unlike Mrs. Loveit, does not make a public spectacle of herself by loud accusations against Dorimant, she complains in an aside that his response to her proferred love is nothing short of cruel (5.2.278–279). Although she overhears Dorimant explaining to Mrs. Loveit that his decision to marry Harriet is a means of improving his financial situation, which, in the play’s milieu, would have constituted a legitimate reason for contracting a marriage, she tells the hero that it is impossible for him to clear himself with her 8 The titular “man of mode” is not, as may be thought, Dorimant; the play’s complete title is The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter. 9 Restoration audiences were assumed to be familiar with a variety of religious texts. In William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), e.g., Lady Wishfort offers Mrs. Marwood a choice of religious reading material from her own boudoir (3.1.66–71). The picture of Lady Wishfort as a steady reader of religious works is, of course, meant to be amusing, but we can assume that Congreve chose these books as examples of the kind of literature that might routinely be found in the home of those who pretended to any level of erudition.
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
155
(5.2.286). When Dorimant hints that they may renew their acquaintance at some future point, Bellinda lashes out: “Never. [...] When we do, [meet again] may I be as infamous as you are false” (5.2.296, 298). Sexual promiscuity is punished by pain, in this case emotional rather than physical. The inability to feel joy, the notion that pain is the default position of existence, pertains to the Satan character of Milton and Bunyan, and is central to that character’s humanity; it thus constitutes a point at which the Milton-Bunyan Satan and the Restoration rake conflate. The disquiet that The Man of Mode evokes in its unabashed depiction of men’s and women’s sexuality was probably the portion of many readers and playgoers during the Restoration. Moreover, readers and audiences were often disturbed by the strength of the anger, the sense of resentment, explicit in much contemporary satire. P.K. Elkin has noted the “troubling doubts concerning the ethics of personal satire” experienced by many “Augustans”: When satire was personal in the sense of being written out of revenge, or to bring down a rival, it was clearly difficult to justify on moral principles. At best it might be excused on the ground that the satirist had been ‘notoriously abused’. There was a sense, however, in which all personal satire could be regarded as inexcusable: it is against charity, and so against Christianity. (118)
The uneasiness with which many of Rochester’s contemporaries viewed satire is given expression by Robert Wolseley in his Preface to Valentinian, Rochester’s adaptation of the John Fletcher tragedy of the same name, which was first acted in 1684, four years after Rochester’s death: “For Satyre, that most needful part of our Poetry, it has of late been more abus’d, and is grown more degenerate than any other; most commonly like a Sword in the hands of a Mad-man, it runs a Tilt at all manner of Persons without any sort of distinction or reason” (146). According to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester’s spiritual advisor, the earl, too, had felt the need to justify the strength of the anger for which his poems are noted, and in Burnet’s hearing declared that one “could not write with life, unless he were heated with Revenge, for to make a Satire without Resentments, upon the cold Notions of Philosophy, was as if a man could in cold blood cut men’s throats, who had never offended him.”10 Dorimant, on the other hand, appears singularly cold-blooded in his abuse of Mrs. Loveit: “the Quarrel being [...] happily begun, I am to play my part, confess and justifie all my Roguery, swear her impertinence and ill humour makes her intolerable, tax her with the next Fop that comes into my head, and in a huff march away, slight her and leave her to be taken by whosoever thinks it worth his time to lie down before her” (1.1.226–232). Nor are Dorimant’s companions, both male and female, discomfited by the anger and despair caused to Mrs. Loveit by Dorimant’s decreasing interest. In response to Emilia’s observation that Loveit has been “uneasie and out of humour these two days” (2.1.119–120), Lady Townley disingenuously declares: “How strangely love and Jealousie rage in that poor Woman!” (2.1.121–122). Medley is vastly amused by Loveit’s displays of suffering, and especially by the idea that the lady has only herself to blame: “She cou’d not have pick’d out a Devil upon Earth so proper to 10 Cited in Pinto, Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. lxxvi.
156
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Torment her, h’as made her break a dozen or two of Fans already, tare half a score Points in pieces, and destroy Hoods and Knots without number” (2.1.123–126). Robert Parsons, Rochester’s family chaplain, preached a sermon at the earl’s funeral, which, as Farley-Hills notes, was the first “in a long line of cautionary publications in which Rochester features as the exemplary late penitent” (Parsons, “Sermon”45). After lauding Rochester’s erudition and intelligence, Parsons contends that the earl was once: one of the greatest of Sinners. And truly none but one so great in parts could be so; as the chiefest of the Angels for knowledge and power became most dangerous. His Sins were like his Parts (for from them corrupted they sprang), all of them high and extraordinary. 11 [...] Nay so confirm’d was he in Sin, that he lived, and oftentimes almost died, a Martyr for it.” (Parsons, “Sermon” 46)
As was Dorimant before him, Rochester is compared to Satan, the chief of the fallen angels, whose sins lead to suffering. Yet unlike his stage alter ego, who at the end of the play is forced into a presumably temporary retreat from a corrupt lifestyle, Rochester is depicted as one whose commitment to sin was at one point so complete, so deep, that without risk of blasphemy Parsons can trope him as a martyr to it. It is not unfair to Parsons to contend that as a clergyman presiding at the earl’s funeral, his religious agenda caused him to emphasize the deceased’s penitence for his sinful life and desire to embrace the truths of Christianity.12 Yet there is a surprising sensitivity in his choice of the term martyr; a martyr, first and foremost, suffers, and Rochester, after all, did suffer for his sexual promiscuity. A careful reading of Rochester’s poems and of The Man of Mode leads to the conclusion that there was a clear lack of joy in the lives of both the historical and the dramatic character. Dorimant’s key expression in the play’s opening scene is arguably “The nasty refuse of your Shop” (1.1.32), with which he refuses to purchase 11 Rochester appears to have been well read, and was versed in a number of languages both ancient and modern. In his literary biography Pinto claims that the young earl received a more than adequate grounding in the classics: at the grammar school of Burford he studied Greek and Latin, and throughout his life was able to read the Latin classics easily and with pleasure. Constant study of the Bible at the local school “gave him splendid models of English prose style.” Wadham College, where Rochester was enrolled in 1659/60, was “the most advanced society in Oxford in intellectual matters, a real center of the English Enlightenment”; its Fellows routinely discussed mathematics, physics, and mechanics at their refectory table (Enthusiast in Wit 5–7). Rochester’s tutor and guide on the proverbial Grand European Tour was Sir Andrew Balfour, “a man with the widest interests, a physician, a naturalist, and an enthusiastic student of all kinds of curiosities and antiquities,” a capable teacher and amusing traveling companion as well (12). 12 In a letter to her sister-in-law Rochester’s mother describes her son’s mood during his last weeks: “though he lies under as much misery almost as human man can bear, yet he bears his sufferings with so much patience and resignation to God’s will [...] . O sister, I am sure, had you heard the heavenly prayers he has made since this sickness, the extraordinary things he has said to the wonder of all that has heard him, you would wonder, and think that God alone must teach him, for no man could put into him such things as he says” (Wilmot, Letters, Appendix II, Letter 1, 248–249).
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
157
the fruit offered him by the Orange-Woman. The hero does not really enjoy what are supposed to be the pleasures of this world. They are nasty, soiled goods, “all one” to him; “nasty refuse” expresses his attitude toward the woman whose favors he is tired of, as well as toward the fruit. As the Orange-Woman says, referring first to the fruit and then to Dorimant’s lovers, past and present: “Good or bad ‘tis all one, I never knew you commend anything, Lord wou’d the Ladies had heard you talk of ‘em as I have done: here bid your Man give me an Angel” (1.1.37–39). The latter is, of course, an amusing instance of hidden biblical imagery: though an angel was a gold coin, sensitive members of the audience would probably have been reminded of biblical meetings of men and angels, as well as of fruit and women, with their Edenic overtones. I have already noted that when an angel falls, as the narrator of Paradise Lost points out, the first result for the sinner is susceptibility to pain, to suffering that may be physical or mental. On the evening of the second day of battle in heaven, when the rebels still entertain the possibility of victory, Nisroc gives expression to the sheer strength of the first experience of physical pain in a cri de coeur unforgettable in its humanness: for what avails Valour or strength, though matchless, quelled with pain Which all subdues, and makes remiss the hands Of mightiest. Sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine, But live content, which is the calmest life: But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and excessive, overturns All patience. (6.456–464)
It is not coincidental that in his narration of the above, Raphael emphasizes the pain to be suffered by the denizens of hell immediately before warning Adam of the dangers of Satan’s imminent attempt on his and Eve’s virtue. As was the case with the fallen angels, the initial, immediate punishment awaiting the fallen humans is their entrance into a world of pain, whether caused to Adam by the physical labor involved in bringing forth bread from the earth, or to Eve by the labor pains accompanying the bringing forth of children. Rochester, not having Satan’s immunity to physical ailments, suffered recurring bouts of venereal disease and eventually succumbed to illness at the age of thirtythree. His close friend Henry Savile writes to the earl of his own “venereall pains,” which forced him to subsist on “dry mutton & dyett drinke” (June 2, 1678; 201). During this period Rochester was himself lying ill at his country home in Adderbury. The two friends, to whom we might apply Raphael’s description of the rebel host— “Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown” (6.661)—commiserate with each other by post as to the rigors of the then current treatment for venereal disease, which involved the ingesting of mercury. After joking about the “chains of quicksilver” and the “loathsome banks of a dead lake of diet-drink,” Rochester suggests that Savile “should break the horrid silence and speak” (July 1678; 202). The latter, needless to say, recalls the opening scene of Paradise Lost, in which Satan and his associates lie
158
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
in “adamantine chains” (1.48), “vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf” (1.52), until Satan breaks the “horrid silence” (1.83) and addresses his nearest mate Beelzebub. Given humankind’s limited ability to alleviate the suffering caused by illness, as well as the difficulty faced by physicians and scientists in their attempts at discovering the causes of disease, it is not surprising that philosophers and theologians alike have sought to explain and justify this most pervasive aspect of human existence. The composers of the Hebrew Bible raised the possibility that sickness may, under certain circumstances, be a punishment for sin. When Miriam and Aaron criticize their brother Moses for marrying an Ethiopian woman, Miriam becomes “leprous, white as snow [...]. And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us, wherein we have done foolishly, and wherein we have sinned” (Num. 12.10–11). When, moreover, the first child of David’s illicit liaison with Bathsheba falls ill, the prophet Nathan tells David that because “thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die” of illness; thus David and Bathsheba are punished for their sin (2 Sam. 12.14–18). In Milton’s early poem On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,13 sickness and its concomitant suffering are not subject to explanation; the believer is challenged to accept illness as an inexplicable burden, a cross to be shouldered. The mother who has lost her baby to a virulent cough is enjoined in a somewhat sermonizing tone to “wisely learn to curb thy sorrows wild; / Think what a present thou to God hast sent, / And render him with patience what he lent” (Poems 73–75). The speaker, however, can hardly bring himself to contemplate the ugliness of the bodily death of an innocent baby: “Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead / Or that thy corse corrupts in earth’s dark womb, / Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed” (29–31). Although the young poet may try to imagine the rotting of the little corpse that has been returned to the earth as if to its mother’s womb,14 and can even compare the child’s crib to a wormy bed of earth, such comparisons prove to be counterintuitive, and the speaker concludes that heaven could not possibly so “strictly doom” (33) the baby. For the the narrator of Grace Abounding the sense of having yielded to Satan’s temptation was routinely accompanied by physical as well as mental anguish: Then was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at sometimes I could for whole days together feel my very body as well as my minde to shake and totter under the sence of the dreadful Judgement of God [...] . I felt also such a clogging and heat at my stomach by reason of this my terrour, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breastbone would have split in sunder. (50; par. 164)
13 Carey and Fowler outline the difficulties in providing an exact date for this poem (Milton, Poems 14n). Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, in The Oxford Authors, also note the problematic dating, given that the dead infant has not been conclusively identified. Suggested dates range from December 1625 to January 1628. Milton was, in any case, in his late teens when he composed this work (776n). 14 Cf. the description of Sin’s offspring who periodically return to their mother’s womb (Paradise Lost 1.795–802).
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
159
Although Bunyan was presumably not familiar with the modern concept of psychosomatic illness, the essential integration of body and soul was obvious to him; even though physical pain or illness was not of necessity a punishment for evil deeds, it could be brought on by the entertainment of sinful thoughts. Bunyan also knew that disease could be the direct result of mistaken choices of lifestyle. In their gleeful depiction of Mr. Badman’s final illness—“He was dropsical, he was consumptive, he was surfeited, was gouty, and as some say, he had a tang of Pox in his bowels” (148)—Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive canvass two possible causes of the disease: it is either visited upon that avatar of Milton’s and Bunyan’s Satan for unknown reasons, or results from sinful behavior of the type that would nowadays fall under the rubric of substance abuse. Attentive contends that although: the best men may die of a consumption, a dropsie, or a surfeit [ ... ] yet I will say again, that many times these diseases come through mans inordinate use of things. Much drinking brings dropsies, consumptions, surfeits, and many other diseases; and I doubt, that Mr. Badmans death did come by his abuse of himself in the use of lawfull and unlawfull things. (148)
Employing terminology proleptic of late twentieth-century sociological/psychological discourse, the speakers emphasize that illness can be caused by unfortunate choices of lifestyle. Unlike many New Agers, however, Bunyan’s speakers do not hesitate to imply a moral dimension in Badman’s afflictions. Badman’s choices are not only regrettable in that they lead to illness, but evil, as they manifest disobedience to divine commands; however, Badman’s disease is presented more as a logical consequence of certain behaviors than as a punishment. In the poetry of what Rochester editor David M. Vieth calls the earl’s “Tragic Maturity” (63), pain and illness are logical consequences of sin, and he whom Griffin terms the “libertine speaker” of Rochester’s poems suffers illness and concomitant sexual weakness. “The Pains of Sex” is Griffin’s apt title for his chapter on those poems in which Rochester “appears to look on himself, his excesses and failures, with a clear-sightedness and guiltless candor rare in literature” (80). In these works the libertine lover is, as Griffin suggests, “a projection of the poet himself. The erotic activities and concerns of the lover are recognizably those of the historical Rochester, notorious in his own licentious age for whoring and sexual profligacy” (79–80). Such behavior leads, however, not to bliss, but rather to disease, to suffering that the sinner has brought upon himself. Pain, in other words, is not an inexplicable divine visitation, or “cross” to be welcomed as an opportunity to prove one’s moral fiber, but rather constitutes a major part of the human condition precisely because it is caused by common human behavior. In Tunbridge Wells, as Griffith notes, Rochester employs a “libertine rogue” as the speaker. The latter details a visit to the popular watering place that gives the poem its name. While beginning as an attack on the follies of humanity, the poem then “concludes by counting the libertine among the fools” (42, 43, 47). The speaker’s visit to Tunbridge Wells is occasioned by his illness, by the hope that taking the waters of the spa would cure his “Squeamish Stomach” (69; 6) and other ailments. Yet the speaker, himself numbered among the patients, gleefully describes how his fellow guests delude others as to the cause of their ills:
160
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature A Tribe of Curates, Priests, Canonicall Elves, (Fit Company for none besides themselves) Were got together; each his distemper told, Scurvy, Stone, Strangury: some were soe bold, To charge the Spleene to be their misery, And on that wise Disease, brought Infamy. (70; 53–58)
The infamy of the patients’ behavior is, of course, exacerbated by their status as clergymen. Beneath the smooth, elegant surface of the fashionable spa lurks the physical corruption of disease brought on by behavior made doubly sinful by the sinners’ profession.15 In a confrontation with Mrs. Loveit during his attempt at engineering an escape from their affair, Dorimant uses the language of medicine to characterize the state of the dying relationship: DORIMANT. When love grows diseas’d the best thing we can do is to put it to a Violent Death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingring and consumptive passion. LOVEIT. Can you think mine sickly? DORIMANT. Oh, ’tis desperately Ill! What worse symptomes are there than your being always uneasie when I visit you, your picking quarrels with me on slight occasions, and in my absence listning to the impertinences of every fashionable Fool that talks to you? (2.2.210–218)
Later on the hero again tropes love as an illness in conversation with Harriet: HARRIET. You made me start! I did not think to have heard of Love from you. DORIMANT. I never knew what ’twas to have a settled Ague yet, but now and then have had irregular fitts. HARRIET. Take heed, sickness after long health is commonly more violent and dangerous. DORIMANT. I have took the infection from her, and feel the disease now spreading in me—. (4.1.150–157)
The use of painful illness as a figure for love is, of course, so deeply embedded in the language that we no longer think of such expressions as pangs of love or lovesick as tropes. Yet given Dorimant’s track record, his repeated attempts at sexual dominance can reasonably be seen as a kind of ague or malaria, causing “fitts” of 15 Cf. Tolstoy’s description of “Soden,” a popular German watering place to which Kitty is sent to recover from the sorrow and possible physical illness attendant upon the conclusion of her love affair with Vronsky. Kitty’s essential innocence and good health, paralleled by the beauty and freshness of the town itself, is contrasted with the obscenity of the illness and death that bring most of the patients to the spa. To Kitty’s father, out strolling with his daughter, “the brightness and gaiety of the June morning, and the sound of the orchestra playing a gay waltz then in fashion, and above all, the appearance of the healthy attendants, seemed something unseemly and monstrous, in conjunction with these slowly moving, dying figures gathered together from all parts of Europe. [...] [H]e felt awkward, and almost ashamed of his vigorous step and his sturdy, stout limbs. He felt almost like a man not dressed in a crowd” (Anna Karenina 206).
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
161
enthusiasm for the love object that may be “violent and dangerous” at their peak, but then taper off into a lingering illness.16 Even Harriet’s determination will probably not be strong enough to, in Conaghan’s words, “subdue Dorimant and reclaim him” from his triviality and “debility of feeling, from the futility of his endeavours and the pettiness of his triumphs” (8). Rochester, as I have suggested, critiqued the muddling of hierarchy that he noted during a visit to Tunbridge Wells. In his Ramble in St. James’s Parke, moreover, Corinna is faulted not for her promiscuity per se, but rather for wasting her favors on middle-class paramours who include a “Whitehall Blade” (65; 45), a “Grays Inn witt” (65; 63) and a “Ladyes Eldest Son” (65; 69). In her discussion of A Ramble Sarah Wintle notes that “the poet-rambler contemplates his mistress’s adventure not with the rural clown or parson but with urban bully boys—porters and footmen17— who fill her with ‘nasty slime’ rather than ‘wholesome juice’. [...] The country in this poem is there to serve the town, but urban civilization is continually threatened by a breakdown in its systems of discrimination” (163). A Ramble is, as Wintle points out, an urban parody of the pastoral (163); this parody is, however, steeped in bitterness, and, unlike Harriet’s rather daunting depiction of the boredom of a rural life, it is not really the country that the rambler critiques, but the city. Thormahlen, too, notes the “darker tone” of A Ramble when compared with The Imperfect Enjoyment, which, like A Ramble, also deals with betrayal and exudes a sense of vengeance (95).18 The rambler, observing his mistress being approached by 16 Rochester was clearly familiar with a variety of current forms and registers of discourse, including that of science and medicine, as can be seen by parodies in his letters. In a letter to his wife he burlesques, as Treglown notes, contemporary philosophical and scientific writing (Wilmot, Letters 75n): as heate and cold, soe greateness and mean(n)ess are necessary ingredients that enter both into the making up of every one that is borne, now when heate is predominant we are termed hott, when cold is wee are call’d cold; though in the mixture both take theire places, els our warmeth would bee a burning, & our cold an excessive freezing, soe greateness or virtue that sparke of primitive grace is in every one alive, & likewise meaness or vice that sense of originall sin is (in a measure) alsoe. (1672–73?; 75) 17 In his discussion of Rochester’s Song (Love a Woman! y’are an Ass) Simon Dentith points out that the sex act is envisioned as drudgery to be performed by the lower classes: “Let the Porter, and the Groome, / Things design’d for dirty Slaves, / Drudge in fair Aurelias Womb, / To get supplies for Age, and Graves” (25; 5–8). “In social and historical terms,” according to Dentith, “Rochester may be seen as symptomatic of a wider crisis of authority” (88). 18 Betrayal, as Rochester knew, is often self-betrayal. In The Imperfect Enjoyment it is the speaker’s own body that betrays him. His angry apostrophe of his limp penis—“Thou treacherous, base, deserter of my flame, / False to my passion, fatal to my Fame” (31; 46–47)— does not help the poet-lover: he remains a “wishing, weak, unmoving lump” (31; 36) who cannot complete the sex act. Griffin notes the use of psychoanalytical theory in explicating this poem: “The Imperfect Enjoyment, on an unconscious level, may in fact represent a hatred not of the penis but of the woman. If she, like other women in the poems, is thought of as an omniverous mouth, then he denies her the demanded meal” (125). Yet the sense of betrayal that the speaker expresses may be caused by a conscious confusion as to the limits of body and mind; the speaker’s anger is caused by a vision of the body as possessing its own seemingly independent, often perverse, existence.
162
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
three young suitors, contends that “There by a most incestuous Birth / Strange woods spring from the Teeming Earth” (64; 11–12). Corinna is pursued by “Three knights o’ th’ elbow and the slur,”19 all urban types generally seen as, in Thormahlen’s words, “vain, affected pretenders to social standing” who are drawn to Corinna not only by her sexual attractions but by “her status as the mistress of a man who keeps the company they aspire to” (97). The freedom to give full play to “natural lust,” according to Wintle, would appear to depend “on a conception of natural order which is violated by the particular nature of the sexual and social promiscuities of Restoration London” (164), in which men could have affairs with lower-class city women, although women were not forgiven for executing a similar crossing of class boundaries. When Harriet agrees to marry Dorimant she makes their union conditional on a move to the country, with its supposedly healthier surroundings and more strictly hierarchical social life. Conaghan notes, however, that though “the prospect of their departure to the country at the end acts as a kind of symbol of fertility, a promise of refreshment from the sterilities of the city milieu,” it is unthinkable that they will long remain in the country (9). Urbanization—that is, the transfer of the social, cultural, and economic center of gravity from the countryside to the cities—traditionally results in the loosening of hierarchical strictures; thus Pinto makes a case for viewing Rochester and his companions as: men who were living between two worlds, one of which was dying, the other struggling into existence. One was the old world of medieval and renaissance culture with its conception of an integrated theocentric universe [...]. Then there was the new world of [...] the great modern city, of international trade and finance, political parties and newspapers [...]. In such a world the Court would cease to be the real centre of national life and become merely a fashionable club for idle irresponsible young people. (“John Wilmot” 57–58)
Barbara Everett, moreover, cites the narrowness of the court milieu of London as ultimately responsible for what she terms the “relative thinness” of Rochester’s work: “Rochester’s general character as a poet is evident to any reader. He is a realist, his world is bounded by the limits of King Charles II’s court and the London that lay immediately beyond. If this makes his field seem narrow, then so it is—compared at any rate with the greater of his contemporaries: Milton, Dryden, even Bunyan, all live and write in a wider, larger world” (91). In her discussion of A Ramble in St. James’s Parke Everett refigures the poem as “a vision of the social scene as a violent phantasm, with the darkness of nighttime London showing through it” (24). Everett’s image is reminiscent of Milton’s vision of Pandaemonium, in which “by subtle magic many a row / Of starry lamps and blazing cressets fed / With naphtha and asphaltus yielded light / As from a sky” (1.727–730). So, too, might the citified rake character remind us of Pandaemonium’s “dread commander,” who “above the rest / In shape and gesture proudly eminent / Stood like a tower [...] as when the sun new risen / Looks through the horizontal misty air / Shorn of his beams” (1.589–591, 594–596).
19 According to Vieth, the elbow and slur refer to common methods of cheating at gambling (Complete Poems 41n).
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
163
Throughout the centuries during which urbanization was the general trend in movements of population in Britain, there was an ongoing debate as to the influence of urban life on moral behavior: conventional wisdom had it that, in the words of Edmund Bertram, the hero of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, “We do not look in great cities for our best morality. It is not there, that respectable people of any denomination can do most good” (501). For Lady Townley and Mrs. Loveit, London was the only possible place to live. Lady Townley’s very name hints that she does not have a viable existence outside the city, and it is hard to imagine Mrs. Loveit trying to forget her disappointments by retiring to a bucolic haven. Yet for landed noblemen like Rochester, whose wife and children could be conveniently stowed away on a country estate, leaving the city for the country was an option. Should he tire of the inanity of court life,20 should he find it difficult to integrate himself into the developing urban world, he could retire to his duties as landowner and pater familias; such retirement would, however, usually be temporary. The speakers of A Ramble in St. James’s Parke, Timon, and Tunbridge Wells all appear to be city folk, and Dorimant, of course, is a city dweller. In an argument that would have surprised Jane Austen,21 Conaghan suggests that the city of London and the social stratum in which Dorimant moves help control and restrain the hero’s sexual ambition: “there is the Town, a cohesive and critical society which imposes its own decorum.” Yet the Town, as Conaghan suggests, merely enforces decorum, that is, adherance to the conventions of polite behavior (7), rather than consideration for the feelings of others. Decorous behavior, moreover, is ultimately circular: its aim is the maintenance of appearances, of itself. Or, as Ulysses knew, when the conventions of hierarchy begin to break down, worthy and unworthy look the same: “Degree being vizarded, / The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.”22 Neither this view of Rochester’s/Dorimant’s London milieu, nor Harriet’s own depiction of her life in the country lend credibility to the permanence of Dorimant’s and Harriet’s move to the countryside: OLD BELLAIR. [...] you shall give Mr. Dorimant leave to wait upon you and your daughter in the Country. LADY WOODVIL. If his occasions bring him that way, I have now so good an opinion of him, he shall be welcome.
20 Shortly after his marriage Rochester was appointed a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber. As Pinto notes, his duties involved personal attendance upon the king for one week out of each quarter. During this week he was expected to sleep on a cot in His Majesty’s bedchamber and help him with his toilette; when the king ate in his private apartment Rochester took his turn, along with the regular servants, waiting at table. Unlike these other servants, as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber his yearly salary was £1,000 (Enthusiast in Wit 44); this generous remuneration may have made the inanity of his chores somewhat more bearable. 21 Cf. Mansfield Park, chapters 21, 30: Henry Crawford is on his best behavior when in the country, especially when fulfilling the duties of a landowner on his own estate, and his lover, Maria Bertram, must leave the Edenic environs of her family estate for the two to give full rein to their sexual appetites. 22 Troilus and Cressida 1.3.83–84.
164
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature HARRIET. To a great rambling lone house, that looks as it were not inhabited, the family’s so small; there you’l find my Mother, an old lame Aunt, and my self Sir, perch’d up on Chairs at a distance in a large parlour; sitting moping like three or four Melancholy Birds in a spacious vollary—Does not this stagger your Resolution. DORIMANT. Not at all, Madam! The first time I saw you, you left me with the pangs of Love upon me, and this day my soul has quite given up her liberty. HARRIET. This is more dismal than the Country! Emilia! Pitty me, who am going to that sad place. Methinks I hear the hateful noise of Rooks already—Kaw, Kaw, Kaw—There’s musick in the worst Cry in London! My Dill and Cowcumbers to pickle. (5.2.400–416)
According to Traugott, Etherege “commences a desperate effort to make Dorimant merely human, that is, sympathetic, before putting him to bed with the witty virgin [Harriet].” The hero will finally be “reduced to the most scornful thing in Restoration comedy, a mere husband” (402). The dénouement leaves the audience with a temporarily subdued, even henpecked hero, and allows the play to close with what is meant to be “a sense of harmony and security,” as Conaghan claims (9). This conclusion can be compared to Rochester’s epilogue to his Satyr Against Reason and Mankind which, as Griffin points out, may have been written after the rest of the poem (239). If there is, the speaker says, a meek, humble Man, of honest sense, Who Preaching peace, does practice continence; Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe, Misterious truths, which no Man can conceive. If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men, I’le here recant my Paradox to them. (97; 216–221)
Both thematically and stylistically, according to Griffin, the epilogue (lines 174–225) “bears some marks of an afterthought, still savagely indignant, but essentially a more conventional form of satire in balanced couplets on dishonesty and corruption in church and state” (239–40). The poet thus attempts a conventional resolution: although most men are dishonest and corrupt, they are redeemed by the rare “meek, humble man of honest sense”; mankind therefore need not lose all hope. Yet as Griffin adds, this “conditional recantation” serves mainly to make the satire “even more relentless” (240). In much the same way, Etherege’s decision to send Dorimant to the country for a presumably short period of rustication created a dénouement that would have been acceptable both to those of his audience who yearned for a conventional “happy ending” and to those who sought for credible social satire; for the latter, Dorimant’s “conditional recantation” or temporary rejection of his previous life would only have made the satire more relentless. Ronald W. Johnson’s delineation of the ending of Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind is eminently applicable to the ending of The Man of Mode: What the persona perceives and articulates is that, first of all, an empirical approach to man reveals that man is corrupt; secondly, if one is going to achieve what he wants, be pragmatic, in a corrupt society, then he will himself be corrupt. [...] Laughter, for the reader, again is lost to the pathetic irony of the persona’s dénouement. The great debater has, in the last act of the debate, been deflated to the point of becoming merely a fellow knave. (370, 371)
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
165
Dorimant has been deflated into a “mere knave,” and it is hard to believe that he will last more than a few weeks in Harriet’s rustic idyll. The play’s ending, as Conaghan has noted, recalls John Aubrey’s description of Rochester’s life in the country (Etheredge, Man of Mode 9). As Aubrey writes in his Brief Life of Rochester (indefinite date; sometime before 1697): [Rochester’s] youthful spirit and oppulent fortune did sometimes make him doe extravagant actions, but in the country he was generally civill enough. He was wont to say that when he came to Brentford [near London] the devill entred into him and never left him till he came into the country again to Alderbury [Adderbury, where his wife and children resided] or Woodstock [where he spent time alone as Keeper and Ranger of the hunting-forest]. (Farley-Hills, Rochester 178)
Pinto notes that High Lodge, the ranger’s official residence, commands one of the finest views in Oxfordshire, and served Rochester as a beloved retreat in which he not only escaped from his family but devoted himself to study and writing (Enthusiast in Wit 147). Although stories of wild behavior on the part of Rochester and friends while at Woodstock made the rounds of the London beau monde, Rochester, if one can judge from letters written to Henry Savile, did not engage in much wickedness while at Woodstock.23 Milton’s Satan, too, being used to the crowds and bustle of the metropolis, may be seen as a parody of the city dweller looking down on his country cousin. In one of his unsuccessful attempts at subverting the Son from his mission of salvation, the Satan of Paradise Regained contends that Christ has spent a disadvantaged youth in the countryside: “Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent / At home, scarce viewed the Galilean towns, / And once a year Jerusalem” (3.232–234). Satan seems to be teasing the Son with the notion that he is little better than a yokel, a country boy who rarely leaves the rural backwater where he was raised: The world thou hast not seen, much less her glory, Empires, and monarchs, and their radiant courts, Best school of best experience, quickest in sight In all things that to greatest actions lead. (3.236–239)
Readers of Paradise Regained should not be surprised by the attraction that a city life has for Satan. The city, after all, figures as a refuge for Satan in Paradise Lost: the first act of the fallen angels is to establish a city in hell (and although pandaemonium simply means all demons, the word has come to represent a busy, noisy confusion more closely associated with an urban environment than with a rural one). Mr. Badman, too, is a merchant, a member of the burgeoning bourgeoisie; the protagonists of Rochester’s poems, and, of course, the poet himself, are city dwellers, and once in the country Dorimant will prove to be the proverbial fish out of water.
23 Having heard, e.g., that tales of a naked romp in Woodstock Park were affording his London acquaintances much amusement, Rochester writes to Savile that he had merely run around in the meadow for a bit in order to dry off after a swim in the river (October 1677; 159).
166
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Neither Milton, Bunyan, Rochester, nor Etherege can generally be said to glorify country life in their writings,24 and Rochester may be the only one of the four who would agree with Edmund Bertram’s critique of urban society. For these artists, however, the urban environment is threatening in its potential for confusion of hierarchy. This, as I have already suggested, is productive of sin for the human being who is unable to integrate such confusion into a viable moral system. The city, too, is unhealthy: the life of the courtiers is corrupt, and the pain, the ailments suffered by Rochester and the protagonists of his poems, involve physical disease—the outward sign of an inner corruption—as well as emotional dis-ease. The free, open, supposedly no-fault expression of sexuality that characterizes the urban milieu of Rochester and Dorimant leads not to joy, but to a notable lack of joy. If even temporary credence, however, is given to Harriet’s success in taming Dorimant, it is possible to contend that in the play’s dénouement Etherege has reversed the Satan-Sin paradigm/parody, in which Satan is freed by his lover from the corrupt city of hell to journey to the countryside, to Eden. The Satan-Sin allegory concludes with the latter’s speech to her lover in which she imagines that: Thou wilt bring me soon To that new world of light and bliss, among The gods who live at ease, where I shall reign At thy right hand voluptous, as beseems Thy daughter and thy darling, without end. (2.866–870)
This picture of king and queen blissfully sitting on their thrones may be hinted at in Harriet’s vision of her life in the country, where Dorimant shall join her (and her relatives) “perch’d up on Chairs at a distance in a large parlour.” On completing her final speech, Sin then: from her side the fatal key, Sad instrument of all our woe, she took; And towards the gate rolling her bestial train, Forthwith the huge portcullis high updrew, Which but her self, not all the Stygian powers Could once have moved. (2.871–876)
Harriet, too, holds the key to the city gate: her good looks, wit, and fortune lead Dorimant to leave the city, while not all the heavenly powers “could once have moved” him. The play’s dénouement, however, in which the virginal beauty tames the beast by fleeing with him to Eden, is not the last word. As Harriet knows, she is going to a “sad place,” in which the daily work of pickling cucumbers is accompanied by the “hateful noise” of the rooks. The play ends with an Epilogue composed by Dryden that begins with the comment that: “Most Modern Wits, such monstrous Fools have 24 L’Allegro and Il Penseroso may constitute exceptions, due to the charm of their rustic scenes. It would be safe to assume, however, that the young poet viewed the composition of these pieces as an exercise, and in any case did not intend them to be taken as a literal recommendation of a rural, as opposed to urban, lifestyle.
The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode”
167
shown, / They seem’d not of heav’n’s making but their own.” “Modern wits,” or “monstrous fools” like Dorimant and Rochester, seem not to have been made by heaven, but rather may be self-made men; of course, the Satan of Paradise Lost claimed to be self-created (5.857–866). Even after their defeat Satan and Beelzebub believe that they have succeeded in standing on their own two “unblessed” feet by themselves: “Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood / As gods, and by their own recovered strength, / Not by the sufference of supernal power” (1.239–241). Much as Sin enables Satan to escape hell by taking the key from her side (2.871), in what is a fairly broad hint at the creation of Eve by means of a rib taken from Adam’s side (Gen. 2.21–23), Harriet “makes” Dorimant, that is, promotes him and offers him the possibility of a bucolic rebirth that, however, is so unbelievable as to be parodic. During much of Rochester’s married life he resided in London while his wife and children remained in the country. The following, written, as Vieth suggests in his edition of Rochester’s poems, “extempore to his Lady, who sent a servant on purpose desiring to hear from him, being very uneasy at his long Silence” (Wilmot, Complete Poems 23), seems like one that Dorimant might have written to Harriet a few months after their marriage: I’le be forever true t’ye, With Low made Legs and Sugard Speeches, Yielding to your fair Bum the Breeches, And shew my Self in all I can, Your very Humble Servant Jan. (121; 6–10)
Etherege’s reversal of the Satan-Sin paradigm is doomed: just as Sin’s lending of the key could not enable Satan to escape permanently from the hell within, Harriet’s success in taming Dorimant, in helping him to escape to a paradise happier far, will be short-lived, and the hero will not be permanently redeemed by the love of a woman. For Rochester confusion and pain are the constants, and words like “duty,” “forever true,” “faithful, humble servant,” have meaning only as parody.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 8
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse Scholars would do well to beware of committing themselves to overly rigid definitions of historical periods, and, as Harold Love has warned, this is especially true for scholars of the seventeenth century: Those Renaissance specialists who concern themselves with Caroline authors further define themselves as studying the end of a process of development which reached its highest point with Shakespeare, while Restoration scholars see themselves as occupied with the beginning of a process which is to reach fruition in Pope and the eighteenthcentury novelists. Despite the existence of the Oxford book of seventeenth-century verse there is no such subject as seventeenth-century literature in our academies. Historians acknowledge the same divide. [...] Differences in interest and professional approach become hypostatized into a belief that there was a sharp and decisive break in the development of English culture in 1660—a year which, in actuality, saw a massive attempt to obliterate all political change that had taken place since 1641. (8)
In the light of the above it is, as I have attempted to prove, a legitimate scholarly endeavor to posit the existence of a Satan character whose development can be traced from the Satan of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained through the Tempter of Grace Abounding and Diabolus of The Holy War. This Satan is, furthermore, evoked in the writings and character of the historical John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, as well as in Dorimant, George Etherege’s stage rendition of the rake character identified with Rochester, and is instrumental in shaping the rakish narrator of the earl’s satirical poems. Indeed, Ronald Paulson has termed Rochester “the difficult transitional figure, in some ways the father of the Augustan mode of satire, in others still an Elizabethan in the tradition of the melancholy satyr-satirist of Jonson and Marston” (104). An examination of Rochester’s use of imagery based on the bodily processes of reproduction and digestion, and the anger expressed by the poet and fostered in his readers by such use, can shed light on a hidden fear of writing, a sense that the narrative endeavor itself contains elements of the satanic that can also be found in the Miltonic narrator’s invocations of his muse in books 1, 3, 7, and 9 of Paradise Lost. Ellen Spolsky defines a set of theoretical attitudes toward the misunderstanding of texts; according to these theories “it is the nature of language to skew, slant, distort, confound, or frustrate the emergence and understanding of meaning, and most often while dissembling cogency. Misprision [...] is blinding, all embracing, and inevitable; perspicacity is an illusion” (“The Uses of Adversity” 25). In his/her ability to dissemble and thus to confuse and frustrate, the speaker of human language
170
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
partakes of the satanic; language itself may therein constitute a danger to writer as well as to reader. Readers of Rochester’s poems have often been offended to the point of anger by explicit references to human excreta, menstrual blood, seminal fluid, as well as to the processes that produce these materials. This is often the case even for the twentyfirst-century reader, who is expected to be inured to the explicit depiction of bodily sights, sounds, smells. “But still, but still—” in the words of R.T. Jones, “there is a kind of gratuitous indecency that contributes nothing to truth, and involves the reader, by the very act of reading and by the honest attempt to follow the argument in good faith, in a transient complicity that leaves him soiled and resentful” (444). Simon Dentith finds paradoxical the almost stubborn refusal of readers to allow themselves to be shocked by Rochester’s frank obscenity (97). It is only fair, however, to recall that Rochester, who unlike Milton and Bunyan did not claim to have a didactic purpose in his writings, would have assumed a severely limited readership for his erotic and scatological verse. Milton had, of course, a stated didactic aim in writing his great epics, and despite his disclaimer— “fit audience tho’ few”—surely hoped that his works would be circulated and discussed. Bunyan turned to the printing press when forbidden the pulpit, and finally reached a much wider audience with his visionary writings and printed sermons than would have been open to him as a preacher at Bedford. In this sense both Milton and Bunyan functioned in a modern print culture, similar to that with which we have long been familiar. Rochester, on the other hand, partook of a distribution culture predictive of postmodern methods of transmission: those currently developing on the Internet and by means of e-mail. The latter technologies aim/claim to make redundant the intermediary, the “jury” of editors and publishers qualified to choose works worthy of being distributed, while culling out the unworthy. Simultaneously, reader and author alike can make unlimited changes in the original text at will. Paul Hammond has called attention to the scholar’s difficulties in definitive attribution of authorship resulting from seventeenth-century manuscript transmission of poems and other writings.1 Such transmission, whether necessitated by subversive political content or explicit sexuality, also had serious ramifications for the reception and interpretation of the text: “In this network of poems which pass from hand to hand in the coffee houses, there is a loss of authorially-sanctioned meaning, which is replaced by a network of meanings generated by readers and scribes: hence multiple political significations became possible, and yet every interpretation is elusive, deniable” (41). Hammond suggests that certain forms of informal control of manuscript transmission did operate during the later seventeenth century, although this control did not necessarily rest with the originator of the text. The original text often passed through the hands of readers making copies for their own use, as well as of professional copyists. The latter sometimes produced idiosyncratic versions of the text to serve the purpose—whether political opposition or erotic stimulation—of the reader who had ordered the copy, and were known to alter texts as a matter of course (42), without 1 David M. Vieth’s Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s “Poems of 1680” details the grave difficulties involved in constructing a reliable Rochester canon.
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
171
clearing their changes with the original author. According to Rochester editor Keith Walker, Rochester himself apparently authorized the publication of only three poems from his juvenilia; he usually distributed his work by giving copies to friends (xii, xvi). Rochester could not, in other words, have known that after his death his poems (and many that he did not write, but that were attributed to him in an attempt to cash in on the cachet of his name) would be published and circulated, often in pirated texts and inexactly rendered copies. Whatever the explicit topic or expected means of distribution of any specific poem, anger was for Rochester a primal emotion, and the primary device for the expression of anger was open depiction of the human body and its various products, which the poet knew would offend many of his contemporaries. Given the methods by which his work was circulated, the poet must have known that he did not have total control over the constitution of his readership. At the same time, he would have expected his writings to reach a small, perhaps even chosen, body of readers. Would it be blasphemous to suggest that this was his revision of Milton’s “fit audience”? Although Rochester is not primarily thought of as a “political poet,” he composed a number of verses that bitterly lampoon the monarch. The publication of such attacks as Dialogue (“When to the King I bid good Morrow”), Impromptu on Charles II (“God bless our good and gracious King”), and A Satyr on Charles II (“I’ th’ Isle of Britaine long since famous growne”) would probably not have been acceptable to any political regime that had censorship in its power. So explosively angry is the Satyr on Charles II that Rochester prudently fled from court after he had inadvertently allowed a copy of it to reach the king.2 In a sarcastic comparison of the warlike Louis XIV of France and the peace-loving Charles II, the latter stands accused of formulating his policy of peace, desirable in itself, according to the dictates of his paramours: “His Sceppter and his Prick are of a Length, / And she may sway the one who plays with th’other” (74; 11–12). His Majesty restlessly “roalles about from Whore to Whore / A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor” (74; 14–15). Should “merry” seem to indicate a lusty, joyous ruler, however, the poem’s third stanza bemoans the “Paynes itt Cost the poor, laborious Nelly [Nell Gywn, the king’s mistress], / Whilst shee imployes, hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs / E’re she can raise the Member she enjoys” (74–75; 29–31). The mouth, as Rochester notes here, or more specifically the tongue, is an organ of sexual stimulation. It is also, of course, a primary organ of speech, and when the tongue in question belongs to a woman, its use in speaking may be evil: His Majesty may be led to make important political decisions by the tongue of a woman. Speaking, in other words, may itself be satanic, especially when the speaker is a woman. As a peer and member of the House of Lords, Rochester had the opportunity to be involved in the politics of the time, and he seems, according to Pinto, to have been 2 See Vieth’s note in his edition of Wilmot’s Complete Poems for details of this affair (60). Given the shameless exhuberance of the poem’s depictions of the royal member, which is both “the swaucyest,” the “proudest, peremtoriest Prick alive” (74; 18, 19) and simultaneously the “dull, graceless Ballocks” (74; 27) of a man of declining years, the king’s willingness to forgive Rochester for writing this lampoon indicates a high degree of affection for his young protégé.
172
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
fairly regular in his attendance at the House during extended periods of residence in London (Enthusiast in Wit 165). In his discussion of Rochester’s Very Heroicall Epistle in Answer to Ephelia Duane Coltharp suggests that the poem’s exotic images of an Oriental court “register some of the pressing anxieties of seventeenth-century constitutional debate: anxieties concerning the power of tyrants, despots, or absolute monarchs to violate subjects’ rights and to dominate their very bodies” (36). The “happy sultan” of the poem reigns “Secure in Solid Sloth” and feels “the joys of Love, without the paine” (113; 41–42) and: Noe lowd reproach, nor fond unwelcome sound Of Womens Tongues, thy sacred Eare dares wound; If any doe, a nimble Mute strait tyes, The True-Love-Knot, and stops her foolish cryes. (114; 49–52)
Unlike the English king who allows himself to be henpecked by his outspoken mistresses, the Oriental monarch employs tongueless servants to silence the tongues of the women, of those whose reproaches might be unwelcome. Death is accomplished by strangulation; the image of the silenced tongue lolling outside the mouth is evoked. According to Coltharp: “Conveying a hyperbolic, parodic image of the absolute monarch, Rochester thus satirizes the absolute self: the self that would expunge the world of all its pain, struggle, and otherness, that would deny its own positionality within the dense networks of bodies and wills that Rochester’s poetry so often acknowledges” (37). Womens’ tongues were, of course, traditionally seen as a source of evil. In what he terms the “manic mode,” Clement Hawes finds an: interesting preoccupation with symbolic gender-reversals that tend to dissociate identity from the physical body. In this same gender-bending spirit, authors in the enthusiastic strain sometimes evoke an androgynous or even female godhead. Ironically enough, it is precisely the relative relaxation of gender hierarchy within the enthusiastic milieu— the visibility, for example, of women who testify, minister, organize, interpret Scripture, prophesy, and write—that becomes, in the orthodox backlash against enthusiasm, an especially favored marker of its social threat and degradation. (12)
Throughout his career as a preacher and writer, Rochester’s contemporary John Bunyan sensed danger in the possibility that women be allowed to speak in public, and especially in nonconformist religious frameworks. According to Tamsin Spargo: The threatening female voice which Bunyan’s texts attempt to silence may be read as an echo of the unruly female speech and writing of the revolutionary period. [...] Attempts to contain this unruly female speech and writing were made throughout the period leading up to the Restoration, as the Commonwealth establishment became a target for its criticism. After 1660 the defeat and failure of much revolutionary activity saw a further reduction in prophetic activity [on the part of women], but the threat implicit in unruly female speech remained (“Contra-dictions” 174).
In 1663 (three years before the publication of Grace Abounding) Bunyan detailed “The Duty of Wives” in his tract Christian Behavior as follows:
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
173
“Thou must first shun these evils. 1. The evil of a wandring and a gossoping spirit: this is evil in the Church, and is evil also in a wife, who is the figure of a Church. Christ loveth to have his Spouse keep at home; that is, to be with him in the Faith and practice of his things, not ranging and medling with the things of Satan [...]. 2. Take heed of an idle, talking, or brangling tongue. This also is odious either in maids or wives, to be like Parrats, not bridling their tongue.” (Miscellaneous Works 3: 33)
The imagery here is familiar: the wife is the Church, the bride of Christ; she must not wander about the town talking with other women, which is really what is meant by gossiping. The woman is an animal: a parrot, loudly and incessantly repeating meaningless phrases, or a horse, who must submit to the bridle. The Puritans, as U. Milo Kaufmann notes, gave high priority to the sense of hearing (233), and by extension to the spoken word/Word itself: “[I]mages deriving from an aural approach to a ‘speaking’ Word can function to gird narrative with the imperious authority of revelation. [...] Revelation in word rather than spectacle or event enjoyed the determinacy and rationality as well as the intimacy of personal address so desired by the Puritan” (240, 249). Yet a clear line had to be drawn between the validity of the act of listening and that of speaking. Every believer could hear, but not all were empowered to speak. In a later tract—A Case of Conscience Resolved, published in 1683, five years after the first publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 1—Bunyan addresses the possibility that women be allowed to speak in public at separate women’s religious meetings or services. Bunyan labors to convince his female readers that separate women’s meetings are not only against church law, but that even in mixed assemblies the female voice should not compete with the male. This point is made repeatedly: women “should also not be the mouth of the Assembly, but in heart, desires, grones, and Tears, they should go along with the Men. In their Closets they are at Liberty to speak unto their God” (Miscellaneous Works 4: 324). The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 2 was published in 1684, scarcely a year after the publication of A Case of Conscience Resolved. In his sequel to Part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan depicts a community of women and children undertaking an idealized version of Christian pilgrimage, during which women may occasionally groan and shed tears, but more often speak, tell stories, sing, rejoice. Bunyan chose, however, to subvert his own clear position, as expressed in the tracts, in a work of fiction, which might lend itself to more than one interpretation; of course, the discourse of Christiana and her companions is not exclusively religious.3 Not only 3 In her discussion of The Pilgrim’s Progress Part 2 vis-à-vis A Case of Conscience Resolved, Aileen Ross argues that “it is thoroughly ironic to find that after the stubborn insistence all along on the frailty of the female pilgrims and the utter necessity of a Protector, the women are casually left on the road with only Mr. Feeble-mind and Mr. Ready-to-halt as guards when Mr. Great-heart decides to fight Giant Despair and tear down Doubting Castle. [...] John Bunyan would not entertain the possibility, even here, that the women might survive and even thrive on their own. The least male is to be preferred to the best female. He says in A Case of Conscience Resolved, ‘When Women keep their places, and Men manage their Worshipping God as they should, we shall have better days for the Church of God, in the World’ [4: 329]. And it is that world he so compellingly portrays in the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress” (167).
174
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
do these women talk about the things of God (Grace Abounding 14; par. 37); they sing, play music, and dance: “Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the Vial, and her Daughter Mercie upon the Lute: So, since they were so merry disposed, she plaid them a Lesson [a suite or sonata], and Ready-to-halt would Dance. So he took Dispondencie’s Daughter, named Much-afraid, by the Hand, and to dancing they went in the Road” (283). Women’s voices, it seems, can be heard openly on the road, but only if one takes into account the metaphorical frame of the work. Christiana’s destination is the Land of Beulah, that sunny Eden whose gentle brightness is reminiscent of Milton’s apostrophe of his muse in book 3 of Paradise Lost: “Hail, holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born” (3.1). Milton’s muse, after all, is a feminine principle, as is Beulah, the “married” land of Israel. In Isaiah 62.4 the holy city (both city and land are feminine in Hebrew) is told that “thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah [desired] and thy land Beulah [married and penetrated]: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.” In this land, according to Bunyan, “the Sun shineth Night and Day” (303); and as Melissa D. Aaron suggests, “by marriage and propagation, education, community of goods, and a secure alternative society, the pilgrims will not only be safe, but slowly transform the threatening Vanity Fair into Beulah” (183). It is not surprising that Bunyan, who had spent so many years in dungeons, would yearn for sunshine, and that Beulah, ever sunny and fruitful, would seem to be a much more comfortable destination for the women of The Pilgrim’s Progress than the private “closets” to which the sermonizing Bunyan had earlier banished the sisters of his church. Yet Bunyan’s message in Christian Behavior and A Case of Conscience Resolved is, unlike the silence of women’s discourse that he favors, loud and clear. In giving tongue to an apparent confusion as to the legitimacy of women’s speech he may be hinting at a confusion as to the validity of his own narrative-didactive endeavors. Although the tongue is used in speaking, eating, and sexual stimulation, it is not surprising that its sexual function has accumulated a plethora of euphemisms. Indeed, a legion of euphemisms and taboos adhere to discussion and depiction of those parts of the human body used in the sex act and in digestion. As Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement aver, “the desire to see—but ultimately all desire—is the sign, the first sign, of the devil” (10). When speaking and writing openly of the human body without recourse to euphemism, the artist enables the reader to see what should be hidden, to envision the organs of reproduction of the species (male and female genital organs, women’s breasts) or maintenance of the individual body (organs of ingestion, digestion, and excretion). The very willingness to speak, the explicit consideration of the human body and the anger that this openness may engender, are germane to the humanity of the Satan character whom I have posited. I have already noted that a main aspect of the Satan character is a sense of confusion as to one’s place. A similar confusion, moreover, can be found vis-à-vis the narrative act itself: the satanic desire to speak what should be hidden is both the result of confusion and an expression of confusion. This confusion may have been Milton’s portion too, despite, or even because of, his commitment to a didactic task. Milton was aware of possible dangers inherent in the narrative act, and his late start as a writer of epic may be the result not only of his preoccupation with political activity during the 1650s, but of the sense that the narrative endeavor itself contains
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
175
characteristics of the satanic. The Invocations at the beginning of books 1, 3, 7, and 9 of Paradise Lost, in which the poet appeals for help, not to his God, but rather to a “celestial patroness” (9.21), may have as their source not only the epic convention; they can also be understood as Milton’s engagement with the frightening possibility that the desire to speak and write is itself a sign of the devil. In her discussion of the Invocations, Anne Davidson Ferry explicated the Miltonic narrator’s use of birds as metaphor for a human nature that strives for redemption while at the same time sensing its fallen state: Because a bird is a creature—mortal and limited—and because its song can have moral meaning only if that meaning is endowed from a source outside itself, the bird can be a metaphor, (a part as we shall see of an elaborate pattern of metaphors) for the speaker as fallen man, whose song must be inspired by the “heav’nly Muse.” (25)
In the Invocation to book 1 the narrator appeals to the muse who “from the first / Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss / And madest it pregnant” (1.19–22). The muse who is to be the source of the poet’s enlightenment, thus enabling him to “justify the ways of God to men,” apparently hails from the primeval ooze, from the chaos that preceded the creation of an orderly universe. This muse is envisioned as a dove, a quiet bird not known for the beauties of its song. In Milton’s rendition it is also androgynous, both male and female, impregnating and nesting; it has laid its eggs and is now brooding on primordial material, in an explicit image of reproductive processes with which Rochester would have been comfortable. Bird imagery is repeated in the Invocation at the beginning of book 3; the narrator again recalls that the muse, this time addressed as “holy Light,” had existed during the pre-creation chaos (3.8–11). This time the muse is not a dove, but rather a songbird, “the wakeful bird”4 in its nest that “Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal note” (3.38–40). The act of narration again finds its inspiration in a dark, hidden, even chaotic stage of existence that predates heavenly attempts at imposition of order. Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light, had previously heard the voice of God and then descended to a dark, chaotic underworld where he created a city. On hearing the voice of God, the muse—“holy Light”—also descended to the dark chaos to take part in the process of creation. The endeavor of the Miltonic narrator bears satanic potential: the poet’s journey to heaven can end in a fall into error; he may fall victim to loss, to confusion that he has brought upon himself by presuming to leave his earthly nest and venture uninvited up to heaven. The fact of Urania’s heavenly birth before the creation of the universe is important enough to be repeated in the Invocation to book 7: her heavenly birth occurred “Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed” (7.7, 8). The poet then reminds Urania that he was “Up led by thee / Into the heaven of heavens I have presumed, / An earthly guest” (7.12–14). His safe return to his “native element,” moreover, is far from assured. The poet’s journey back to earth is fraught with danger 4 Fowler suggests that it may not be coincidental that the soul of Thamyris, one of the blind poets/prophets to whom Milton compares himself (3.35–36), entered into the soul of the “wakeful bird,” i.e., the nightingale (145n).
176
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
from within and without. He may wander forlornly (7.19–20), led astray by error whose source is within himself. Not only blind, but deafened as well by the “savage clamour” of a “wild rout” (7.32–37) recalling both the noise of Restoration revelers that Milton heard at night and the clatter of the demonically built Pandaemonium, he may lose his way because of outer forces over which he has no control. In the Invocation at the beginning of book 9 the muse is the poet’s “celestial patroness, who deigns / Her nightly visitation unimplored, / And dictates to me slumbering” (9.21–23). This is a reversal of the situation detailed in the Invocation in book 7: the poet is not risking the dangers of an uninvited appearance in heaven, but rather expects his heavenly patroness to visit him on earth “unimplored.” The patroness’s visit is justified by Milton’s subject: not armored, battling knights but martyrdom (9.25, 30–33). Fowler moreover argues that Milton is herein establishing a hierarchy of heroic virtues, in which patience in suffering takes precedence over bravery in battle (437n). The narrator is aware, however, that he may not succeed in making his “higher argument”; the period in which he lives, the cold climate, or possibly his own advanced age may “damp his intended wing / Depressed” (9.45–46). The latter image is a gentle reminder of the bird imagery of earlier Invocations: the “bolder wing” with which the poet visits his muse (3.13) and the “Pegasean wing” (7.4) above which he soars on his flight to the heaven of heavens. In his explication of the Invocations, Noam Flinker has shown how the “mythic allusions to the four blind ancients [Thamyris, Maeonides, Tiresias and Phineus: 3.35–36] help to establish a psychological struggle within the narrator that is best understood as the wise shaping of the unconscious or Fansie by his artistic ‘reason’ which recognizes the importance of sexuality and wishes to govern or mold this ‘Wild work’ (5.112) into an acceptable artistic experience.” (“Courting Urania” 96)
In the person of the Speaker of his poems, on the other hand, Rochester may be said to reveal what should be hidden, to give voice to sexuality, without wishing to replicate the Miltonic narrator’s experiment whose aim was, in Flinker’s words, “lay[ing] bare the traditional mythic sources that link sexuality and poetic endeavor to recreate the sublimative process for the narrator” (97). The Rochesterian narrator refrains from engaging with sublimation, and in so doing may cast doubt on the bona fides of the Miltonic narrator’s plea to his muse for aid in carrying forward what he hopes will be a successful sublimative artistic experience. To paraphrase Flinker’s formulation, Rochester’s Speaker did not find it necessary to govern or mold the raw material, the “wild work” of his sexuality, into an acceptable artistic experience since, according to Geoffrey Hughes, Rochester was not subject to the same sociolinguistic constraints as was Milton. In his wide-ranging social history of what is termed “offensive language” Hughes argues that language such as that employed in A Ramble in St. James’s Parke could not have been used in public during the lifetime of Shakespeare, nor, for that matter, between 1700 and 1900: “Rochester’s is a world seen from crotch level, a world stripped of pretence to leave the sole dominating force that of frantic sexual energy.” This frantic sexual energy, moreover, is the energy, not so much of a human as of an animal. In referring to one of the female denizens of St. James’s Park as a “prowd Bitch” who leads about the “Amorous Rout” of “humble Currs” (83–84) (terms recalling Milton’s “savage
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
177
clamour” of the “wild rout” [7.32–37]) the poet gives vent to “contemptuous animal insult” (140). We would ordinarily look to Milton’s political prose as a source of such “contemptuous animal insult,” whether animal refers to the nonhuman creature or to the human body in all its physicality. Insult is the clearest, most direct verbal expression of anger, and Milton’s political writings contain, in the words of John K. Hale, “voluminous insults,” that “cover the entire range of mudslinging.” Such anger would be even clearer to current “humanist readers,” according to Hale, if they were in the habit of reading aloud: Milton was apparently known for his “fierce” pronunciation of the letter R, generally known to Elizabethans as “the growling letter”; and Hale cites Milton’s First Defense in the original Latin as a text in which “the sound of his insults did more for his argument than we can recover except in principle” (167–68). Hale’s suggestion of the sheer orality of Milton’s political prose is significant on two fronts. It indicates a blurring of boundaries between poetry and nonfiction prose: in Milton’s day much prose was read aloud as a matter of routine, as of course was poetry; it also hints at the extent to which a written insult is envisioned as an oral communique;5 the reader imagines the speaker standing face to face with an enemy, even if he is seated at his desk writing to an opponent who is far away. Milton’s insults, Hale notes, “are well described as what the Greeks called parrhasia, meaning simultaneously ‘loose [public] talk’ and ‘free speech’” (159). The insults to which Hale refers have their source in ancient traditions of insulting, dating back to the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, and given voice by the “denunciative force” of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible: For the humanist, the power and joy of insulting, as of everything which a poet could express with force, lay in saying universal and everyday things with a finesse derived straight from antiquity. [...] While insult is virtually universal, therefore, particular forms in the early modern period might have influenced Milton, whether directly or environmentally. They include flyting, defamation actions, philippics, licensed fooling, and the London drama. (161, 162–63).
It is thus not coincidental that in Areopagitica, that great plea for a more open, and therefore rational system of press censorship,6 Milton employs violent sexual and digestive imagery in his attack on the censorship systems of the Roman Catholic Church:
5 Cf. William Kerrigan’s argument that “[t]here is no work of art in our language, perhaps not in any language, that creates a more ample mythology of the mouth [than does Paradise Lost]—the Satanic mouth that first whispers rebellion in the ear of Beelzebub, the mouth of the serpent entered by Satan and inspired with speech, the mouth of the Muse who brings the poem nightly to Milton’s ear, the mouth of the poet-singer, the mouths that take both spiritual matter and forbidden fruit into the human body” (“Milton’s Kisses” 118). 6 Christian Doctrine editor Norman T. Burns calls attention to the many points in that text wherein Milton “gives broad latitude for hate,” making it clear that “hatred and vengeance have a role in the moral life of a Christian” (n.p.), thus legitimizing open expression of anger in published material.
178
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature the Councell of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition, engendring together, brought forth, or perfeted those Catalogues, and expurging Indexes that rake through the entralls of many an old good Author, with a violation wors than any could be offer’d to his tomb. [...] [T]heir last invention was to ordain that no Book, pamphlet or paper should be Printed (as if S. Peter had bequeath’d them the keys of the Presse also out of Paradise) unlesse it were approv’d and licenc’t under the hands of 2 or 3 glutton friers. (Complete Prose Works 2: 502–503)
Digestive and sexual images are violently intermixed. The Council and Inquisition “engender together” and bring forth, but then are guilty of “violation,” of disembowelling the author as they “rake through his entrails”; such evil is perpetrated by “gluttons.” This and more: the “most Antichristian Councel, and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquir’d,” had, according to Milton, instituted a new, vicious form of censorship, figured as infanticide: “Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifl’d then the issue of the womb” (2: 505). Current usage tends to muddle the boundaries between cursing, insulting, and using language that many find offensive. English-speaking children often refer to the proverbial four-letter words as “curse-words,” and may not at first be aware of the earlier, and still extant meaning of curse: to invoke or wish evil upon. Then too, young children often do not understand the connection between words or expressions referring to body parts and bodily processes, and anger. The common denominator of cursing, insulting, and using language that one assumes will make others uncomfortable is, of course, the expression of hostility, of anger. In his overview of traditions of insulting and their function as a channel for verbal, rather than physical expression of aggression, Hale differentiates insulting from cursing. The latter, Hale avers, “arises from deadly serious intent, whereas insulting is more peaceable, an aggression-channeling and harm-averting obverse of cursing” (161). Yet I would argue that in Milton’s assault on the Church of Rome’s censorship mechanisms we find a blurring of strict boundaries between the two to express the anger that engenders both.7 In Rabelais and His World Mikhail Bakhtin exposes the connection between explicit discussion of bodily processes and imagery based on the human body on the one hand, and abusive language—language intended to express anger—on the other hand. Images of the “material bodily principle,” in Bakhtin’s words, are central to what he terms “the concept of grotesque realism” (18): [T]he body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the 7 See William Kolbrener: “The fierce polemicist in Milton, nurtured by a visceral and continually renewed acceptance of ‘duty,’ cannot help but assert the primacy of his own interpretation—the immanence of meaning in the individuated utterance of John Milton. But Miltonic fierceness has another aspect, one which emphasizes that individuation is itself presupposed upon commonality (the ‘spiritual illumination common to all men’), and consequently that ‘inviolable’ truth defies complete embodiment and individuation” (162; Kolbrener’s citations of Christian Doctrine in the above are to 6: 204).
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
179
biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. (19)
This exaggeration, Bakhtin continues, “has a positive assertive character. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimmingover abundance” (19). It is perhaps not coincidental that the latter theme is found in the Miltonic narrator’s descriptions of the superabundance of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian bower (4.693–697). As the narrator notes, most of the First Parents’ prelapsarian work involves pruning of the exaggerated overgrowth of the Garden; the aim of this pruning is to increase the land’s lush fruitfulness (5.211–219). Bakhtin suggests, however, that the “essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19–20). Bakhtin’s use of degradation is neutral; it does not herein bear the term’s current sense of dishonor or disgrace. Yet while the grotesque concept of the body does form “the basis of abuses, oaths, and curses” (27), it is of vital importance to add that: Modern indecent abuse and cursing have retained dead and purely negative remnants of the grotesque concept of the body. Our “three-storied” oaths [Russian for strong, coarse abuse, as noted by the translator] or other unprintable expressions degrade the object according to the grotesque method; they send it down to the absolute bodily lower stratum, to the zone of the genital organs, the bodily grave, in order to be destroyed.” (28)
The angry obscenity for which Rochester’s poems are noted, and which generations of readers and scholars have found so disturbing,8 can, according to Ronald Paulson, usefully be viewed as the point of conflation of political/social satire, the wish to show the “real hollowness, human weakness, and corruption beneath the rich and respectable, supposedly divine, facade of the court” (105) and the poet’s need to critique his own role within the court milieu. At the same time, his uncompromising outing of the often unpleasant sights, smells, and tastes of the human body may be taken as part of a general rethinking of values that Rochester was engaged in:
8 In what seems like an attempt to apologize for the discomfort occasioned readers by Rochester’s lexicon, Samuel J. Rogal asserts that in A Ramble in Saint James’s Parke, e.g., “Rochester had no designs for drowning his reader in a sea of vituperation; he required only the quantity and frequency of baseness necessary to reflect his own despair and distaste, while openly lamenting the fact that his society—as well as he himself, as an active member of that society—saw fit to revel in the animal state to which it had sunk.” Of the 21,423 words found in Vieth’s edition of Rochester’s poems, “offensive language” comprises a mere 0.3 percent of the total: “vulgarisms” (specifically: cunt, fart, frig, fuck, God damn, pissing, prick, shit, swive, and turds) are only found in nineteen of the seventy-five poems that Vieth confidently assigns to Rochester’s oeuvre; in other words, approximately 75 percent of the pieces actually assigned to the Earl of Rochester “may be declared essentially free from offensive language” (34–35).
180
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature The obscenity, for a start, was a facet of the low burlesque or travesty mode; the shock has the satiric function of awakening the reader and, by laying bare in the most vivid way his animal origins, making him reassess customary humanist values. Reacting politically and emotionally against the repressive years of the Commonwealth, many Englishmen—but most of all the Cavaliers—encouraged an attitude that was bent on exposing old pious frauds and treating grave subjects like life or love with disrespect. (105)
Such a reappraisal, however, may lead to conclusions for which one is not prepared. For Rochester, as Paulson asserts, love originally became obscene and life scatological “in order to expose certain simpleminded illusions (or hypocrisies),” but then his own experience in life seemed to prove that “love and life are no more than obscene and scatological, that perhaps this is all there is” (106). If, moreover, “that is all there is” in love and life, “that may be all there is” in art as well. In the painting Rochester and His Monkey, which shows the poet face to face with what is presumed to be a pet monkey,9 the earl appears to be asking both himself and his simian interlocutor whether “this is all there is.” The painter, as Paulson points out, has captured a sense of reciprocity, perhaps even of equality, between the species. Rochester offers the ape a bay tree branch while “the ape (emblematic of imitation) offers the poet a page he has torn out of a book; he is aping the poet, sitting on a pile of books with another book in his hand, a finger marking the place where he has stopped reading or has torn out pages. Rochester himself, however, is holding in his other hand a number of manuscript pages, aping the ape” (116). The figure of the leaf can be carried forward: man and monkey both, by proffering to the other a leaf (whether of bay or paper), are each offering a cover-up—a disguise—for nakedness. Bakhtin addresses the purpose of disguise in his discussion of masks. He calls the theme of the mask: “the most complex theme of folk culture. The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” (39–40). In a reversal of what would be the expected order, that is, that masks are fixed representations of various facial expressions, Bakhtin suggests that “such manifestations as parodies, caricatures, grimaces, eccentric postures, and comic gestures per se derived from the mask” (40). Yet masks also serve to hide the face, to confuse the identity of the wearer, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, and were used for the latter purpose in the cultural milieu to which Rochester belonged. The leaves that Rochester and his monkey are caught in the act of exchanging may indicate the need to cover up that which is too ridiculous, perhaps too discomfiting, too intimate to be shown. If the narrative endeavor partakes of the satanic, the act of seeing, of observing, which must precede the narration, may also be tainted. As Flinker has pointed out, for Milton “[n]ight and light are not opposites but rather different aspects of God’s creation. It is fallen experience that introduces dualism into the universe and much of the justification of the ‘wayes of God to men’ (1.26) is a vision of the potential unity in the cosmos despite the divided nature of postlapsarian reality” (96). At the same time, 9 Rochester and His Monkey (c. 1675) is exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Its provenance is not certain, although Pinto and Treglown note that it is attributed to Jacob Huysmans (Enthusiast in Wit 173; Wilmot, Letters, Fig. 2).
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
181
“[t]he route from blindness to heavenly or ‘Celestial light’ is traversed by the narrator with the guidance of Urania” (95), and in this sense the muse becomes a liminal figure, at once marking and blurring the border between fallen and unfallen nature. As R.T. Jones notes vis-à-vis Rochester, the observer of the human body in all its possible ugliness may feel himself soiled by the very act of observing what had best be hidden (444). Yet Allen Dunn contends that there is a “sublime effect” in the spectacle of power combined with vulnerability, as presented, for example, in figures of the criminal hanged or tortured, Milton’s Satan cast down from heaven, or the suffering Job: “The mangled bodies of Job, Satan, and the hanged man [...] contain elements of grotesquerie and repulsiveness, and, like the bodies anatomized by the satirists, they dramatize the absolute distance that separates human reality from human aspiration”; these spectacular bodies are immanent in the diseased bodies of the “fops, whores and hacks” depicted by Rochester (102). These bodies, too, pose the question: Is this all there is? During the Restoration men as well as women used masks to hide their identity, commonly wore wigs, and used cosmetics. Such means of hiding one’s unadorned appearance bore more than a whiff of the satanic when employed by women, since the latter were presumed to aim at entrapping men by upgrading their appearance with the assistance of perfumes, cosmetics, wigs, corsets, and other so-called beauty aids. Moreover, simply looking at the undisguised, undressed body may bear traces of the satanic. In an anonymous comment at the end of a private collection of seventeenthcentury verse and prose (in the handwriting of Sir William Haward [d. 169_], a knight from Surrey who had served as a gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I), we are told that Haward’s manuscript is “[o]f an exceedingly lewd and scurrilous nature.” The Looking-Glasse, one of the verses found in the collection, is couched in the form of a man gazing at and describing his newly awakened lover. It begins: Mee-thinkes I see you newly risen From your Embroyder’d Bed, & pissing, With studyed meene, & much Grimace, Present your selfe before your Glasse, To varnish, & rubb o’re those Graces, You rubb’d off in your nights Embraces; To sett your hayre, your Eyes, your Teeth, And all the powers you conquer with, Lay frames of Love, & State Intrigues, In powders, Trimmings, Curles, & wiggs. (1–10)
The woman’s conventional use of “powers” to “conquer” and of “State Intrigues” is reminiscent, of course, of Rochester’s Satyr on Charles II, in which the king’s paramour is said to exercise power over the monarch’s policy making by means of her sexual favors. The observer-poet of The Looking-Glasse does not, however, ponder and portray the previous night’s activities, during which the woman was probably undressed, but rather her morning routine. The observer details his lady’s toilet with mock seriousness, reflecting the seriousness with which she is simultaneously observing herself in the glass. He recalls that at night the woman lay down upon an embroidered bed, having previously varnished and rubbed her own body, as if
182
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
she, too, was merely a piece of furniture, an adjunct of the bed. There is, moreover, another piece of furniture involved, or even invoked: the looking glass that gives the work its title. The observer is presumed to be lying in bed, observing the woman gazing at herself in the looking glass; perhaps he even sees the woman in the glass. The glass, not transparent but covered on one side by a layer of silver, serves as an extra layer of mediation between the “newly risen” sun—holy Light—and the man; it is, after all, unwise to look at the sun directly, as Milton knew. Looking and describing, that is, narrating what one has seen, can be confusing and threatening. Rochester was a sharp observer, both of human behavior and the often hidden, apparently insignificant actions that reveal the motives behind behavior, and he reproduced this behavior in his poetry. In A Ramble in St. James’s Parke, for example, the narrator credibly depicts the “Whitehall Blade” who “had heard Sir Edward Sutton / Say how the King lovd Banstead Mutton; / Since when hee’d nere be brought to eat / By’s good will any other meat” (65; 49–52). And the “Grays Inn witt” is believable as “A great Inhabiter of the Pitt / Where Crittick-like he sitts and squints / Steales Pockett Handkerchers and hints / From’s Neighbour, and the Comedy / To Court and pay his Landlady” (65; 64–68). As Norbert Elias has argued, such powers of observation were an important aid to survival in the court milieu; the art of observing was not an amusing intellectual exercise, but was rather necessitated by the importance of understanding the character, motives, abilities, and limitations of others: This courtly art of human observation is all the closer to reality because it never attempts to consider the individual person in isolation, as a being deriving his essential regularities and characteristics from within. Rather, the individual is always observed in court society in his social context, as a person in relation to others. [...] But the art of human observation is applied not only to others but to the observer himself. A specific form of self-observation develops. [...] Accompanying the act of observing people is that of describing them. (104–05)
The Miltonic narrator of Paradise Lost uses angelic narrators as a means of avoiding engagement with those satanic overtones that adhere to the narrative endeavor. As Murray Roston suggests, Milton “maintained that the poet or orator must first be worthy in himself, inspiring confidence in his sincerity, as well as offering a moral message. The image created by the speaker is thus an essential part of the whole” (137). For a being who is unfallen, the source of inspiration would not be a muse, but God himself; and an unfallen speaker like Raphael does not torture himself with questioning the validity of his mandate to speak. When besought by Adam to tell him about the creation, Raphael stipulates that although he had witnessed the war in heaven, he will reveal only as much as the divine censor permits: “such commission from above / I have received, to answer thy desire / Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain / To ask” (7.118–121). Raphael then warns Adam against seeking forbidden knowledge: But knowledge is as food, and needs no less Her temperance over appetite, to know In measure what the mind may well contain, Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind. (7.126–130)
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
183
It is not coincidental, of course, that appetite is used both in its abstract sense, that is, to indicate a strong wish or urge, but also concretely in reference to its function as part of the process of ingestion/digestion. Northrop Frye calls attention to the significance of Milton’s dual usage of this concept: In the soul of man, as God originally created it, there is a hierarchy. This hierarchy has three main levels: the reason, which is in control of the soul; the will, the agent carrying out the decrees of the reason, and the appetite. [...] Of the appetites two are of central importance: the appetite for food and the sexual appetite. Both of these are part of the divine creation, and are therefore good. Even so, it is curious how emphatic Milton is about food as an element of both paradisal and heavenly life. [...] Few can have read Paradise Lost without being struck by the curiously domesticated nature of the life of Adam and Eve in Eden before the fall. Adam and Eve are suburbanites in the nude, and like other suburbanites they are preoccupied with gardening, with their own sexual relations, and with the details of their rudimentary housekeeping. (Return of Eden 60–61, 65–66)10
In warning that a surfeit of knowledge turns wisdom to folly in much the same way as overeating turns gustatory pleasure into gas pains, Raphael defines the place of appetite in the soul of man. He then limits his narration, since participation in the narrative endeavor—whether observing, describing, listening, or reading—can be dangerous for humans, or, as William Kolbrener notes in his discussion of Raphael’s “rhetorical assurances” (e.g., ‘For where is not he / Present’” [7.517–518]): Miltonic language, even in striving towards representing unity, in the attempts to assert “continuity” between the Creator and the created world, inscribes difference, “contiguity.” [...] Miltonic representation is presupposed upon difference, upon the ultimate inadequacy of the signifier to the signified (139, 140). Audience response to Miltonic depiction of angelic and Edenic meals has been decidedly mixed. In his earlier explication of angelic digestion (5.404–443) Raphael, as already pointed out, emphasized its physical reality: both humans and angels ingest and digest their sustenance (5.411–415). Generations of readers have been amused by what seems to be the naiveté of the Miltonic narrator’s explanation that Adam, Eve, and Raphael could enjoy leisurely conversation before partaking of their vegetarian meal without concern that the food would get cold: “No fear lest dinner cool” (5.396); neither does Fowler spare the “hypersophisticated critics [who] despise the domesticity of this line” (281n). Milton, however, seems to have been willing to be the butt of his readers’ amusement in order to confuse the boundaries between human and angel by contending that angels bear elements of human physicality, which humans themselves often find ridiculous. Twenty-first-century readers are sometimes disconcerted by the Miltonic narrator’s depiction of the First Mother “barefoot in the kitchen.” When explicating Eve’s housewifely preparations for the meal that she and Adam are to share with the archangel (5.308–349), even Fowler cannot resist commenting that it was only natural for Eve to have technical knowledge about the storage of food, as “she was in no position to leave such things to the servants” (276n). Readers have, moreover, not 10 Had Frye revised this text ten or so years later, he might have added dieting to the list of the suburbanites’ major concerns.
184
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
failed to notice that while Eve and Adam appear to have a fairly egalitarian division of labor in their work outside the bower, when at home the wife fulfills the traditional housekeeping functions; the description of the preparation and serving of the meal that the First Parents share with Raphael serves to exemplify Eve’s prelapsarian acceptance of woman’s position in the familial hierarchy. For Rochester, women’s sexuality subverts the existing social hierarchy that he both interrogates and defends. While a man may actively wage war against his assigned place in a hierarchy, women blur boundaries between levels of hierarchy by their very passivity, their willingness to “accommodate” sexual partners from various strata. Pat Gill argues that in Rochester’s writing of his “war against class intercourse” (334), what is perceived as women’s sexual abandon “seems both a consequence and cause of social misalliances and always results in monstrous upheavals” (346). Critics must, according to Gill, connect Rochester’s obscenity and scatology to a fear of class confusion, and then, coming full circle, connect that fear to his depictions of women: [W]hat is indistinct, what is blurred and disordered, eventually becomes filthy. [...] [W]omen become conduits of, as well as symbols for, class ambiguity, and either explicitly or implicitly, women’s anatomical attributes, their difference, become the foul passage to polluted equivocation. By allowing what is alien entry, women disintegrate by nature, and so by nature disintegrate social compositions. (347)
If women’s sexuality was indeed tainted for Rochester as a “foul passage to polluted equivocation,” homosexuality was an option, and the speaker of Rochester’s poems appears at times to prefer male lovers to female: Song (“Love a Woman! y’are an Ass”) ends with the claim that “There’s a sweet soft Page, of mine, / Does the trick worth Forty Wenches” (25; 15–16). The Rochesterian speaker is as uninterested as the Miltonic narrator in “dissecting” the “long and tedious havoc” of “fabled knights / In battles feigned” (Paradise Lost 9.29–31): the speaker of Upon His Drinking a Bowl entreats Vulcan not to decorate the cup with battle scenes (or pictures of the constellations), but rather to “carve thereon a spreading Vine, / Then add Two lovely Boys; / Their Limbs in Amorous folds intwine, / The Type of future joys” (38; 17–20); in Grecian Kindness the speaker envisions the Greek victors embracing the Trojan women while “the kind Deity of Wine / Kiss’d the soft wanton God of Love” (19; 7–8). The poet’s male lovers are soft, sweet, lovely; the god who is having sex with another male can be kind, and a carving of two embracing boys predicts future joys. The male lovers clearly are not men, but boys, males whose sexual identity is not fully developed, and whose rank in society’s hierarchy is correspondingly low; as Harold Weber points out, for all their supposedly “liberated” variety, Rochester’s poems never present a sexual relationship between two adult males of equal status (115). Rochester’s engagement with homosexuality in his poetry is, according to Weber, highly unusual in its explicitness; yet Weber claims that this homosexual content manifests itself “in ways that work against a coherent male homosexual subjectivity” (101–02). Even when “attempting to banish women from its sexual economy, Rochester’s homosexual verse cannot differentiate the female body from the male, its economy of desire predicated on a system in which boys and women are interchangeable objects circulating between men of equal position” (102).
The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse
185
Building on Weber’s analysis, Raymond-Jean Frontain contends that Rochester used biblical sources to construct a coherent homosexual identity. Frontain claims that by collaborating in the composition of the play The Farce of Sodom (whose attribution to Rochester is shaky at best),11 Rochester “takes one of the first steps towards the modern reclamation of the biblical narrative most often used to construct—or deconstruct—homosexual identity” (88). Frontain clearly does not ignore the currents of darkness that underlie the use made of Genesis 18–19 by later writers (and filmmakers) in their attempts at creating a homosexual identity. Like Rochester, these artists would create: worlds where the greater heroism is to transgress against biblical authority by indulging socially proscribed sexual desire even when to do so is fatal; indeed, the threat that hangs over the act guarantees its larger meaning and intensifies the pleasure of performing it. [...] [T]he characters in these works freely choose “buggery” because it enhances their sensation of being alive and allows them to enjoy a sexual carnival even while fully conscious of how dark that carnival may finally prove. (88–89)
When all is said and done—and it never is—the carnival is dark, as Frontain avers. The shadow is cast by the need to maintain hierarchy, or, in Weber’s words, “Rochester’s male narrators, for all their ostensible freedoms, are libertines, not homosexuals, flaunting a deliberately provocative self-fashioning that depends on a conventional misogynous understanding of hierarchical relations between the sexes” (115). For Milton, too, the carnival was dark. The self-fashioned, self-imposed task of narrating heaven’s anger and rebuke (9.9–10), with the assistance of a female guide who could only be seen at night, was threatening to the poet himself. Milton might have discovered in the Speaker of Rochester’s poems a reflection of his own fear of speaking, a sense that telling itself partakes of the satanic, that as a human speaker one is not only the object of Satan’s attempt to confuse and seduce; one is also a collaborator or subject. He whose attempt to speak to a clear, didactic agenda may prove to invoke, evoke, and inculcate the very humanity of the Satan that he had hoped, with the help of “holy Light,” to defeat.12
11 See note 1 in Frontain’s essay for his discussion of the play’s provenance (89). In his Introduction to the collected poems Keith Walker avers that it is possible, although not certain, that Rochester collaborated in writing Sodom; he adds that “[t]o assert this twenty years ago would have damaged Rochester’s reputation as much as to deny it today” (x). 12 In Kolbrener’s words: “Just as Milton argues for the sufficiency and insufficiency of reason in Areopagitica; just as he simultaneously articulates providentialist and republican discourses in The Readie and Easie Way; so Milton in De Doctrina [...] simultaneously advocates the God of Will and Reason. This strategy permits the positing of a God who is at once present and absent to his creation, at once constrained and beyond constraint. [...] The coincident monism and dualism of Miltonic cosmology will therefore have specific consequences for theodicy: just as God is simultaneously present and absent to his creation, so ‘God’s ways’ are simultaneously implicit within, though always in part inaccessible to, the language of poetry—even the inspired poetry of Paradise Lost” (137).
This page intentionally left blank
Epilogue
Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes? The dominance of Satan in Milton’s epics, both long and brief, is clear: Milton chose to turn the serpent of Genesis into the larger-than-life commandant of Paradise Lost, whereas Paradise Regained is largely a dialogue between Jesus and the old man, an avatar of Satan. Yet in the poet’s last great work, the story of the repentance and redemption of Samson, Satan is absent. Where is the Satan character of Samson Agonistes? In 1671, three years after Paradise Lost first appeared, John Milton published one volume containing two works. In Paradise Regained the poet sings of the savior who “Recovered Paradise to all mankind” (1.3), whereas Samson Agonistes, as Milton notes in his introduction, tells of “the catastrophe, what Samson had done to the Philistines, and by accident to himself.” On a time line Samson would occupy the middle position between Adam and Christ; in the current terminology of popular culture, Samson Agonistes is a sequel to Paradise Lost and a prequel to Paradise Regained. Moreover, the general scholarly consensus is that Milton’s decision to publish Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained in one volume was not based upon financial considerations alone. As John T. Shawcross suggests: “The wisdom of putting these two works together in the same volume is the commerce that is thus established between them: we see in Samson what the son as Man could have become had he succumbed to any of the temptations of Satan, and in the Son we see what Samson as the ‘great Deliverer’—the ironic earthly counterpart of the true ‘heavenly’ deliverer—should have been” (Uncertain World 52). In Samson we also see, I might add, what Milton’s Satan had become: a man limited by his human vision, yet retaining certain superhuman abilities as leader and prophet: the ironic human counterpart of Satan, the false heavenly deliverer. It is my claim, in other words, that there are hints of the Satan character in Milton’s “Dramatic poem which is called tragedy.” These traces of the human Satan are ironic in that they suggest a certain advantage pertaining to the human vis-à-vis the immortal. Satan, who will never die, stands accused of introducing death into the created universe, and the most terrible punishment called down upon human beings by Adam and Eve’s sin is mortality. Yet the human sinner—unlike his satanic elder brother—can, as a result of his very mortality, ultimately achieve redemption. The human life span is finite. Although in the course of a lifetime the human repeatedly sins, is redeemed, only to sin and be redeemed again, if he or she should die in a state of reconciliation with the creator, redemption is final. Satan, on the other hand, is impaired by his very immortality: there is no point in repenting, since for one who is immortal, the cycle of sin—repentance—sin is eternal. Much has been written on the Samson of Judges as a precursor of Christ, a fully human version of the coming Savior who will oxymoronically, even miraculously,
188
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
embody a human aspect of the divine. It may, however, not be blasphemous to suggest that in his very humanity Samson himself is also an avatar of Milton’s Satan as herein described. After all—and Samson Agonistes was indeed published “after all”—when we first meet the Samson of Milton’s poetic drama the hero, having disobeyed a divine fiat, is fallen, imprisoned in darkness, enchained, helpless, surrounded by “mates” offering a plethora of conflicting advice. Satanic parallels are, therefore, unavoidable. Both the human and his satanic elder brother are players of roles; Samson is at times military leader, judge, and perhaps even prophet. Indeed, one should not lose sight that the main characters of Judges—the leaders of the people—are first and foremost military leaders, as was Milton’s Satan; yet readers are often made uneasy by the frank depictions of bloodshed that flesh out the biblical text. As part of ongoing efforts to reconcile the violent behavior of these major biblical figures with the praise of nonviolence often characterizing postbiblical religious discourse, scholars have sought to justify Samson’s violent actions, while suggesting metaphorical interpretations of these actions that may serve to attenuate the disgust often induced in the reader. As a military leader, Satan wages a stubborn power struggle against the Father. His thirst for revenge upon the deity whom he cannot ultimately defeat may be said to predict Samson’s final act of revenge upon the Philistine nobility. Samson’s last deed is usually seen as heroic; yet his decision to sacrifice his own life to bring down the temple of Dagon on everyone attendant at the god’s feast has drawn scholarly attention in the culture wars of the early twenty-first century, as part of heated debate on the use of suicide bombing as a weapon in political-religious conflicts. In his discussion of attempts at viewing Milton’s Samson as a proto-suicide bomber Feisal G. Mohamed has warned of the serious pitfalls resulting from attempts to remove Milton’s tragedy and its hero from the time when it was composed: Milton shows us a hero of faith achieving the saintly militarism described by [his contemporaries] Lawrence and Vane. That Samson’s actions carry a horrific human cost does not preclude consideration of them as consistent with Providence. [...] In presenting a hero of faith whose ultimate achievement is providential slaughter, Milton shows an ideology marginalizing the humanity of nonadherents—just as he did in his satisfaction over the beheading of Charles, in his triumphalism over Cromwell’s Irish slaughters, and in his advocacy in the final days of the republic of military suppression of the “inconsiderate multitude’s” desire for monarchy. (336)
The traditional typological association of Samson and Christ, dating back to Augustine’s Sermo de Samsone, was adhered to, as Mohamed notes, by seventeenthcentury interpreters (331). The typology was complicated, however, by the violence of the hero’s behavior; what seems to be Samson’s gratuitous bloodymindedness did not and still does not escape the notice of the sensitive reader. Recent scholarly studies of Judges examine Samson’s role as a military leader vis-à-vis the biblical narrator’s argument for the establishment of a monarchy, a point that would surely not have escaped Milton’s notice. Yairah Amit notes that: The Samson cycle [Judges 13–16] is the last of the stories of the redeeming judges; and Samson is the last of the redeemers in the Book of Judges. An awareness of the placement
Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes?
189
of the cycle is vital to an understanding of the trends of editing within the Book. Since the period of the judges is one of anarchy [...], the reader redirects his disappointment away from Samson and toward the leadership of the judges generally. Samson the judge, who was killed by his enemies and ultimately did not rescue his people from the Philistines, represents the failure of the judges as leaders; Samson’s appearance signals the need for a change in the system. (248)
Although the judges were found wanting by the people, leading to the repeated demand for a monarchy, on the religious-moral level the lives of individual biblical military leaders/judges reflect the pattern of sin–redemption–sin. The violent physicality of Samson’s redemptive acts is seen in tandem with that of other protagonists whose stories are related in Judges: Ehud ben Gerah’s slaughter of Eglon, described in unabashedly scatological detail (chapter 3), Jephthah’s sacrifice of his only daughter (chapter 11), and the atrocities committed against the Levite’s concubine by the men of Gibeah (chapter 19). These stories all provide support for the claim that when “there was no king in Israel” it was, in current terms, “each man for himself.” If such is the behavior of the people’s divinely appointed judges, the narrator suggests, a king would be better by far. The latter message, of course, is one that would have been problematical for Milton. Interpreters who subscribe to the typological endeavor have called attention to Samson’s role as a precursor of Christ the savior. The conception and birth of both Samson and Christ is announced by a divine messenger; both are dedicated to the service of God from childhood; both are leaders of their people; and both are arrested, scorned, and finally accept, indeed perhaps initiate, a public, performative death, which is the fulfillment of a prediction. Samson’s decision to “be avenged of the Philistines for [his] two eyes,” his success in slaying at his death “more than they which he slew in his life,” fulfills the prediction that the son born to Manoah and his wife would “begin to deliver Israel.” The hero’s death thus predicts Christ’s sacrifice of self to redeem humanity. It is only to be expected, however, that a man, even one who is a type of Christ, will retain the characteristics of the human, many of which are less than admirable; or, in the words of the narrator of Kings, “there is no man that sinneth not” (1 Kings 8.46). Samson’s acts, outrageous as they often are in modern terms, are metaphorized by the typologist; yet, even if taken literally, they constitute the behavior of an imperfect human. Much as the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are blurred in the person of Milton’s and Bunyan’s Satan character, Samson’s acts may be viewed as simultaneously heroic and satanic, or perhaps it would be simpler to term them human. Milton scholars have analyzed Samson Agonistes as a reflection of Judges 13–16, its source text. It is possible, however, that Milton’s Samson and his decision to “die with the Philistines” can serve as a sort of reverse typology. David Gay has pointed the way to such a reading: “In the encounter with Harapha, Samson’s reaffirmation of the divine strength given to him at birth is an expression of trust which rejects any association with the fallen angels of Genesis 6.4, and which views those ‘sons of God’ as morally responsible humans” (366). In other words, Milton’s closet drama may shed light on the biblical narrative. This methodology thus reveals another possible justification for the biblical narrator’s decision to include Samson’s life and death in Judges. If the hero is seen not only as “a captain and a judge,” but
190
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
as a proto-prophet—and in the Hebrew Bible the Book of Judges is considered the second of the Early Prophets, preceded by Joshua and followed by 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings—his story takes on a meaning that is more than historical: it is figurative-predictive as well. The prophetic role of the young Samson of Judges predicts, or prophesies, the coming of those larger-than-life figures, the later, or classical, prophets. In his role of prophet Milton’s blind Samson reminds us of the Satan character: both Samson and Satan bear the limited vision of the human. Yet a central attribute of prophecy is the ability to predict future events. As Daniel T. Lochman notes: “By its nature, prophecy is a movement beyond the limits, the normal strictures, of the everyday world; it is an excursion into an illogical, unlimited, and often indistinctly perceived future” (195n). The prophet is inspired by God to warn against impending punishment if the people do not mend their ways, although his ability to see the future is limited. He is not an independent oracle, a vouchsafed, unmediated vision into the future, but can merely repeat what the Deity tells him or describe what he is allowed to (fore)see. In his discussion of the “typological echoes of the David and Goliath narrative” in Milton’s vision of a meeting between Samson and the giant Harapha, Noam Flinker argues that Samson’s lack of heroic stature vis-à-vis the Christ of Paradise Regained “lends ironic depth to his situation in Samson Agonistes.” At the beginning of Milton’s drama Samson “represents the human condition at a low point from which he must either rise or collapse into the evil of his opponent” (“Typological Parody” 139–40). This cannot help but remind us of Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost: Satan, too, may be said to represent “the human condition at a low point” from which he rises, only to repeatedly collapse and rise again. Yet a warrior whose birth and future role were announced by an angel of God, one who even as a young man was moved by the Spirit of the Lord (Judg. 13.25), must be more than a valiant soldier. A further question therefore beckons for attention: Was the hero that quintessentially satanic figure, a false prophet? John C. Ulreich, Jr. views the poem as a whole as prophecy; the hero makes use of such prophetic tools as riddles, therein creating a “tension between the apparent, literal sense of the drama—Samson’s heroic vengeance upon the Philistines—and its internal, spiritual meaning—Samson’s heroic martyrdom” (285). Or perhaps Samson Agonistes as a whole is a pattern of false prophecy, a prototragedy that, in Mohamed’s words: accentuates the “new acquist / Of true experience” (Samson Agonistes, Complete Prose Works 1755–1756) granted to God’s true servants by staging imperfect and misguided human understanding of the Saint’s errand, the very point emphasized in the confusion over God’s ways evident in the speeches of Manoa and the Chorus immediately following Samson’s departure (1427–1540). (335)
The prophet who serves not only as a conduit of God’s word but as an interpreter, thus risks not only misunderstanding the holy message, but passing on his false interpretation to those whom he leads: Samson’s “misguided human understanding” of his prophetic role recalls the confusion of Satan as to his own role. As was his biblical predecessor, Milton’s Samson is not only a judge; he is a warrior and therefore a partial savior of his people, destined to “begin to deliver Israel
Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes?
191
out of the hands of the Philistines” (Judg. 13.5). Samson’s role as judge and warrior would certainly have resonated with Milton as he looked back on twenty years spent in the service of a lost cause. Hugh MacCallum’s view of Milton’s Samson can be applied to the poet as well: “[My] approach views Samson as judge or interpreter as well as deliverer, and seeks to put into perspective the elements of tragic loss and tragic insight by stressing the incompleteness of the judgment and consequently also of the deliverance” (259). From here it is merely a short step to suspecting that the endeavor of interpreting holy texts, with its endless possibilities for misinterpreting, may constitute a proverbial “hotbed of sin.” As is the Satan of Paradise Lost, Milton’s Samson is aware of the ramifications of his disobedience to his God. For Samson expiation is an ongoing process in which the sinner accepts the justice of his punishment for revealing a secret entrusted to him by the Deity (488–489, 497–499). Although Samson’s debate with Harapha at times recalls two neighborhood bullies who have just been thrown out of the local pub for brawling (1104–1108), the hero may be said to address the drama’s putative audience when noting that “these evils I deserve and more, / Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me / Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon / Whose ear is ever open” (1169–1172). In his acknowledgment of the possibility of achieving a final pardon, however, Samson differs from Milton’s Satan. As a mortal, Samson knows that he will die, and if he goes to his eternal rest bearing the Deity’s forgiveness, the pardon is, indeed, final. As an immortal, Satan knows that even were he to repent and be pardoned, he would sin again and again. God’s pardon can only be final, in other words, for the human. As Samson grows up and into his heroic role, instances of his insensitivity to divine inspiration are not lacking; these instances are further proof of the hero’s humanity. In the struggle against the Philistines detailed in Judges 15 the narrator informs us that “the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon” Samson, weakening the flax cords that were binding his arms (15.14). After subsequently slaying a thousand men Samson at first appears to take sole credit for the victory: “With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men” (15.16). A feeling of thirst then reminds the hero of the real source of his victory: “And he was sore athirst, and called on the Lord, and said, Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant” (15.18). David Fishelov argues that when Samson calls upon the Lord he is repenting: “This thirst brings with it awareness that his previous words (in 15.16) were proud, as if he thought that he had defeated the Philistines by his own strength, and his prayer expresses his sense that God is the true source of his strength” (174). Even here the hero is reminded of the Lord’s omnipotence by the very human, even animal, feeling of thirst; thus we cannot be sure of the sincerity of Samson’s “repentance.” Once again, the mortality of Samson as seen in his urgent bodily needs reflects the immortality of Satan. Samson’s sense of thirst leads him to recall his dependence upon the Deity; since Satan’s physical being cannot be permanently damaged, he is deprived of this reminder of his dependence on the Father. Milton’s Satan may be thus said to mirror the young Samson in his insensitivity to his own limitations. Unlike the fallen Satan, the fallen Samson consciously reestablishes his relationship with God after his hair grows again. Indeed, it is highly
192
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
significant that Samson does not rely on the renewed growth of his locks—of which he must have been aware—as a guarantee that his strength has returned; rather, he calls on the Lord to remember and strengthen him, “only this once,” so that he may be revenged on the Philistines (16.28). Samson has finally understood that his strength does not lie in physical force (his hair) but in the will of God. The cycle of Samson’s life is now complete: his locks, the sign of his strength, were not to be cut because he was a Nazarite of God. As his hair grows in during his imprisonment, God renews Samson’s strength, thus making his victory over the Philistines, partial as it is, possible. With his death Samson’s redemption of his people was only partial: he began, but certainly did not complete, the work of salvation. Both Milton’s Samson and the Samson of Judges swing back and forth between awareness of a connection to the Deity and concomitant understanding that the tasks imposed are indeed from God, to a lack of awareness of any role as vector for the Divine. This pendulum effect is characteristic of the human, whose very humanity does not allow him or her to maintain a permanent consciousness of the Deity. Samson’s death, however, enables him to achieve a final reconciliation; this option, of course, is denied to Satan. Although Samson’s prophetic vision is seriously impaired, there is one point at which he may indeed be said to predict future events. Having called upon the Lord to remember and strengthen him, the biblical hero declares: “Let me die with the Philistines” (16.30). An onlooker in the house of Dagon, standing close enough to overhear Samson’s last words, would probably have interpreted them not as a plea, but rather as a prediction, a statement of what was about to happen. Let us note, however, that a plea (to the Deity) and prophecy (speaking the word of God), as depicted in the biblical story of Samson, do not necessarily stand in binary opposition. Samson may be said to predict future events without knowing that he is prophesying, that he is speaking in the name of the Lord. He is, in other words, bringing a divine message unawares. Seconds prior to his death the biblical Samson makes another prediction. Before calling upon the Lord to remember and strengthen him, “Samson said unto the lad that led him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them” (16.26). The circle has been closed. Samson is to be buried between Zorah and Eshtaol, the place where his heroic career began (13.25). His request “suffer me” bears a prophetic message, a vision of the future: Samson prophesies that he will soon be able to rest. The first “rest” will be physical, as he lays his arms on the pillars of the temple; he will soon be laid to rest literally and metaphorically in his father’s house. For John Milton, too, the circle was almost closed. Having seen his three greatest works published, the blind visionary was nearing his final rest, a rest vouchsafed to Samson, but denied to Satan. In Joseph Wittreich’s words: By the seventeenth century, the Samson story had achieved the status of myth in a double aspect, its patterns and images providing fictions and metaphors for literature and its conceptual ideas receiving their full extension into theology, philosophy, and political theory. As myth, the Samson story came to express the ideology of Renaissance culture, or rather contending ideologies, encoding their values and assumptions. (Interpreting Samson Agonistes 174–75)
Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes?
193
Despite the more than four hundred years that separate Milton’s lifetime from ours, the poet would surely have understood the dynamics of twenty-first-century ideological conflict. He might have been comforted had he known that for his future “fit audience,” his Samson, his human hero, bearing so many of the human faults of his Satan, still serves, and will continue to serve, to encode the “values and assumptions” of “contending ideologies.”
This page intentionally left blank
Works Cited Aaron, Melissa D. “‘Christiana and her Train’: Bunyan and the Alternative Society in the Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Eds. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 169–85. Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Adelman, Clifford. “The Dangers of Enthrallment.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Eve of St. Agnes. Ed. Allan Danzig. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 99–115. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Amit, Yairah. The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1992. Austen, Jane. The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. London: Penguin, 1983. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barley, Tony. “‘Upon Nothing’: Rochester and the Fear of Non-Entity.” Reading Rochester. Ed. Edward Burns. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. 98–113. Bate, Walter Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970. Behn, Aphra. “On the Death of the Late Earl of Rochester (1680).” Rochester: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Farley-Hills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Bell, Robert. “Metamorphoses of Spiritual Autobiography.” ELH 44 (1977): 108–26. Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Bloom, Donald A. “The Idea of Despair in Four Protestant Authors: Spenser, Milton, Bunyan, and Richardson.” Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia Selected Papers 13 (Spring 1988): 66–72. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Bloomfield, Morton W. “The Tradition and Style of Biblical Wisdom Literature.” Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature. Eds. David H. Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenasy. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984. 19–30. Boas, George. The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. Boitani, Piero. The Bible and Its Rewritings. Trans. Anita Weston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
196
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Budick, Sanford. The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton’s Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Bull, George. Introduction. The Prince. By Niccolo Machiavelli. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. ———. The Holy War. Eds. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ———. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. ———. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 13 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–994. ———. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. James Blanton Wharey. Rev. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. ———. The Poems. Ed. Graham Midgley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ———. “A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan.” Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Burnet, Gilbert. Some Passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester. 1680. Rochester: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Farley-Hills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. 47–92. Burns, Norman T. “Request.” 12 May 2000. Online posting. milton-L@richmond. edu. 13 May 2000. 2 December 2007 . Burrow, Colin. “Knee-pads in Heaven.” 21 September 1998. Online posting. [email protected]. 23 September 1998. 2 December 2007 . Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. London: J. M. Dent, 1977. Campbell, Gordon. “Popular Traditions of God in the Renaissance.” Reconsidering the Renaissance. Ed. Mario DiCesare. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992. 501–20. Carey, John. Milton. London: Evans Brothers, 1969. Carlton, Peter J. “Bunyan: Language, Convention, Authority.” ELH 51.1 (Spring 1984): 17–32. Cixous, Helene, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “From The Statesman’s Manual.” The Portable Coleridge. Ed. I.A. Richards. New York: Penguin, 1983. ———. Lectures on Shakespeare and Other English Poets. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914. ———. “Notes on Milton. 1807.” Literary Remains, Vol. 1. Ed. A. H. Bullen. Lecture X. Project Gutenberg. 3 December 2007 . Coltharp, Duane. “Rivall Fopps, Rambling Rakes, Wild Women: Homosocial Desire and Courtly Crisis in Rochester’s Poetry.” The Eighteenth Century 38.1 (Spring 1997): 23–42.
Works Cited
197
Conaghan, John. Introduction. The Man of Mode. By George Etherege. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973. Congreve, William. The Comedies of William Congreve. Ed. Anthony G. Henderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Coudert, Allison P. “The Myth of the Improved Status of Protestant Women: The Case of the Witchcraze.” The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz. Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1989. 61–89. Curran, Stuart. “Paradise Regained: Implications of Epic.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 209–24. Davies, Paul C. “Rochester and Boileau: A Reconsideration.” Comparative Literature 21 (1969): 348–55. Davies, Stevie. Milton. New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991. Defoe, Daniel. The Political History of the Devil. 1726. New York: AMS Press, 1973. Delany, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Dentith, Simon. “Negativity and Affirmation in Rochester’s Lyric Poetry.” Reading Rochester. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. 84–97. DiSalvo, Jacqueline. “Fear of Flying: Milton on the Boundaries between Witchcraft and Inspiration.” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 114–37. Dunn, Allen. “The Mechanics of Transport: Sublimity and the Imagery of Abjection in Rochester, Swift, and Burke.” Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth Centrury Satire. Ed. James E. Gill. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. 94–109. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. 1969. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood. 1920. London: Methuen, 1969. Elkin, P.K. The Augustan Defence of Satire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Emory, Elliot. “Milton’s Biblical Style in Paradise Regained.” Milton Studies 6 (1974): 227–41. Etherege, George. The Man of Mode. 1676. Ed. John Conaghan. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973. Everett, Barbara. “The Sense of Nothing.” Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. 1–41. Farley-Hills, David. The Benevolence of Laughter: Comic Poetry of the Commonwealth and Restoration. London: Macmillan, 1974. ———, ed. Rochester: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1972, 177–78. Rpt. of “Brief Life of Rochester.” Brief Lives. [1697?]. By John Aubrey. Ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. N.p.: n.p., 1898. Ferry, Anne Davidson. Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001. ———. “Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning.” New York Times 7 September 1999. 29 November 2007 .
198
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
———. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Fishelov, David. Samson’s Locks: The Transformations of Biblical Samson. Haifa, Israel: Haifa University Press / Zemora-Beitan, 2000. Flannagan, Roy. Introduction. Paradise Lost. By John Milton. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Flinker, Noam. “Courting Urania: The Narrator of Paradise Lost Invokes His Muse.” Milton and the Idea of Woman. Ed. Julia M. Walker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 86–99. ———. The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. “Typological Parody: Samson in Confrontation with Harapha.” Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 136–40. Forrest, James F. “Milton and the Divine Art of Weaponry: ‘That Two-Handed Engine’ and Bunyan’s ‘Nameless Terrible Instrument’ at Mouthgate.” Milton Studies 16 (1982): 131–40. Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1971. Forsyth, Neil. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Fowler, Alastair. Introduction. Paradise Lost. By John Milton. London: Longman, 1991. Foxe, John. Book of Martyrs. 1563. Ed. W. Grinton Berry. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1932. Freeman, Thomas S. “A Library in Three Volumes: Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ in the Writings of John Bunyan.” Bunyan Studies 5 (Autumn 1994): 47–57. Frontain, Raymond-Jean. “Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism and the Subversion of Biblical Authority in Rochester’s Sodom.” Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture. Ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain. New York: Haworth, 1997. 71–95. Froula, Christine. “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy.” Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983): 321–47. Frye, Northrop. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. ———. “The Typology of Paradise Regained.” Modern Philology 53.4 (1956): 227–38. ———. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Frye, Roland M. God, Man, and Satan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Furlong, Monica. Puritan’s Progress. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1975. Gardner, Helen. “Milton’s ‘Satan’ and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy.” 1948. Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Arthur E. Barker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Gay, David. “Milton’s Samson and the Figure of the Old Testament Giant,” Literature and Theology 9.4 (December 1995): 355–69. Gilbert, Sandra M. “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey.” PMLA 93 (May 1978): 368–82.
Works Cited
199
Gill, James E. “The Fragmented Self in Three of Rochester’s Poems.” Modern Language Quarterly 49.1 (March 1988): 19–37. ———. “Mind against Itself: Theme and Structure in Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (Winter 1981): 555–76. Gill, Pat. “‘Filth of All Hues and Odors’: Public Parks, City Showers, and Promiscuous Acquaintance in Rochester and Swift.” Genre 27 (Winter 1994): 333–50. Gorecki, John. “A Marlovian Precedent for Satan’s Astronomical Journey in Paradise Lost IX. 63–67.” Milton Quarterly 17.2 (1983): 45–47. Grace, William J. Ideas in Milton. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. Greaves, Richard L. “Amid the Holy War: Bunyan and the Ethic of Suffering.” John Bunyan and His England 1628–88. Eds. Anne Laurence, W.R. Owens, and Stuart Sim. London: Hambledon Press, 1990. 63–75. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greenfield, Sayre N. “Bunyan, Non-Conformism, and the Limits of Allegory.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 303 (1992): 439–41. Griffin, Dustin H. Satires against Man: The Poems of Rochester. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Griffith, Mr. “An Answer to the Earle of Rochesters Satyre on Mankind.” Ms. Don. b.8. p. 564–65. Bodleian Library, Oxford, n.d. Gross, Kenneth. “Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook.” Re-Membering Milton. Eds. Mary Nyquist and M.W. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, 1988. 318–41. Grossman, Marshall. The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Guibbory, Achsah. The Map of Time: Seventeenth Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Hale, John K. “Milton and the Rationale of Insulting.” Milton and Heresy. Eds. Stephen B. Dombranski and John P. Rumrich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 159–75. Hammond, Paul. “Censorship in the Manuscript Transmission of Restoration Poetry.” Essays and Studies 46 (1993): 39–62. Hancock, Maxine. “Bunyan as Reader: The Record of Grace Abounding.” Bunyan Studies 5 (Fall 1994): 68–84. Haskin, Dayton. “The Burden of Interpretation in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 256–78. ———. “Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word.” Milton and the Idea of Woman. Ed. Julia Walker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 169–84. ———. “The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue with the Radicals.” Harvard Theological Review 77.1 (1984): 73–94. Haward, Sir William. The Looking-Glasse. Sir William Haward’s collections. Ms. Don. b.8. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Hawes, Clement. Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
200
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Hawkins, Anne. “The Double-Conversion in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding.” Philological Quarterly 61 (1982): 259–76. Hill, Christopher “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.” The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Vol. 1. Brighton, UK.: Harvester Press, 1983. 298–16. ———. Milton and the English Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. ———. “Milton, Bunyan and the Literature of Defeat.” Mosaic 24.1 (1991): 1–12. ———. A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Holton, Robert. “Sexuality and Social Hierarchy in Sidney and Rochester.” Mosaic 24.1 (1991): 47–65. The Holy Bible (King James Version). London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1967. Hughes, Geoffrey. Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Hunter, William B. “The War in Heaven: The Exaltation of the Son.” Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology. Eds. W.B. Hunter, C.A. Patrides, and J.H. Adamson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1973. 115–30. ———, et al. A Milton Encyclopedia. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1978. Johnson, Ronald W. “Rhetoric and Drama in Rochester’s ‘Satyr against Reason and Mankind.’” Studies in English Literature 15 (1975): 365–73. Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. 1779. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Jones, R.T. “Lord Rochester’s Mother.” Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 444–51. “The Just Devil of Woodstock, or a True Narrative of the Several Apparitions, the Frights and Punishments, inflicted upon the Rumpish Commissioners sent thither to Survey the Mannors and Houses belonging to his Magestie.” London, 10 January 1660. Thomason Tracts E.1055.(10.). Wing W 2091. Kahn, Victoria. “Allegory and the Sublime in Paradise Lost.” John Milton. Ed. Annabel Patterson. London: Longman, 1992. 185–201. ———. Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Kaufmann, U. Milo. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. 1958. Ed. H.E. Rollins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Keeble, N.H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1987. Keightly, Thomas. Account of the Life, Opinions and Writings of John Milton. Milton’s “Lycidas.” 1885. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Kerrigan, William. “Milton’s Kisses.” Milton and Heresy. Eds. Stephen Dobranski and John P. Rumrich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 117–35. ———. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Works Cited
201
“The Key of the Revelations.” Trans. Richard More of Linley. Preface by Dr. Twisse. Published for Phil. Stephens. London, 27 September 1643. Thomason Tracts E.68.(6.). Wing M 1600. King, John N. English Reformation Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Knight, Charles A. “The Paradox of Reason: Argument in Rochester’s ‘Satyr against Mankind.’” Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 254–60. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. ———. “‘Sung and Proverb’d for a Fool’: Samson Agonistes and Solomon’s Harlot.” Milton Studies 26 (1990): 239–51. Knott, John R., Jr. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Kolbrener, William. Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study in Critical Engagements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Krieger, Murray. “‘A Waking Dream’: The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory.” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. 1–22. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Feminist Reader. Eds. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore. London: Macmillan, 1989. 197–217. Le Comte, Edward. Milton and Sex. London: Macmillan, 1978. Lewalski, Barbara K. Milton’s Brief Epic. Providence: Brown University Press, 1966. ———. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. “Time and History in Paradise Regained.” The Prison and the Pinnacle. Ed. Balachandra Rajan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. 49–81. Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Lieb, Michael. Milton and the Culture of Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Lochman, Daniel T. “‘If there be aught of presage’: Milton’s Samson as Riddler and Prophet.” Milton Studies 22 (1986): 195–216. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. MacCallum, Hugh. “Samson Agonistes: The Deliverer as Judge.” Milton Studies 23 (1987): 259–90. Macfarlane, Alan. Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin, 1995. MacKellar, Walter. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. Vol. 4. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Marcus, Leah S. Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978.
202
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Marks, Herbert. “The Blotted Book.” Re-Membering Milton. Eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, 1987. 211–33. Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus and Other Plays. Eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Martz, Louis. Introduction. The Pilgrim’s Progress. By John Bunyan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982. ———. The Oxford Authors: John Milton. Eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler, London: Longman, 1991. ———. The Poems of John Milton. Eds. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1968. Mohamed, Feisal G. “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes.” PMLA 120.2 (March 2005): 327–40. More, Sir Thomas. Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. 1557. London: Sheed and Ward, 1951. Murray, Margaret A. The God of the Witches. 1931. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. N., A. A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Practis’d by Jane Wenham. Printed for E. Curll. London, 1712. Sloane ms. 3943. British Library, London. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “‘By These Words I Was Sustained’: Bunyan’s Grace Abounding.” ELH 49.1 (Spring 1982): 18–34. Owens, W.R. “‘Antichrist Must Be Pulled Down’: Bunyan and the Millennium.” John Bunyan and His England 1628–88. Eds. Anne Laurence, W.R. Owens, and Stuart Sim. London: Hambledon Press, 1990. 77–94. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Parker, William R. Milton: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Parsons, Robert. “A Sermon Preached at the Earl of Rochester’s Funeral (1680).” Rochester: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Farley-Hills. London: Routledge, 1972. 45–46. Patrides, C. A. Milton and the Christian Tradition. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1979. ———, ed. Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. 110–19. Rpt. of “From A Study of Literature.” A Study in Literature. By David Daiches. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948. Patterson, Annabel M. “Paradise Regained: A Last Chance at True Romance.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 187–208. Paulson, Ronald. “Rochester: The Body Politic and the Body Private.” The Author and His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism. Eds. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. 103–21. Peter, John. A Critique of Paradise Lost. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Pinto, Vivian De Sola. Enthusiast in Wit: A Portrait of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester 1647–1680. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Works Cited
203
———. “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and the Right Veine of Satire.” Essays and Studies 6 (1953): 56–70. ———. Poems by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Poole, Matthew. Annotations Upon the Holy Bible, Wherein the Sacred Text is Inserted, and Various Readings Annex’d, Together with the Parallel Scriptures. 4th ed. 2 vols. London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1700. Quilligan, Maureen. The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cite des dames. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. “The Politics of Paradise Lost.” John Milton. Ed. Annabel Patterson. London: Longman, 1992. 120–41. Revard, Stella P. The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Roberts, Ruth Ap. The Biblical Web. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Robinson, Ken. “The Art of Violence in Rochester’s Satire.” English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Ed. Claude Rawson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. 93–108. Roche, Thomas P., Jr. “Spenser, Milton, and the Representation of Evil.” Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance. Eds. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995. 14–33. Rogal, Samuel J. “The Control of Honest Expression: Offensive Language in Rochester’s Poetry.” Ball State University Forum 30.1 (Winter 1989): 33–38. Ross, Aileen. “‘Baffled, and Befooled’: Misogyny in the Work of John Bunyan.” Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Eds. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 153–68. Roston, Murray. Milton and the Baroque. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. Rudwin, Maximilian. The Devil in Legend and Literature. 1931. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1973. Rumrich, John P. Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Ordained Freedom a Paradox?” 28 September 1998. Online posting. [email protected]. 30 September 1998. 2 December 2007 . Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Sams, Horace J. Temptation in Imaginative Literature of Milton and Bunyan: Two Faces of the Puritan Persona. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 1985. Scheper, George L. “Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs.” PMLA 89 (1974): 551–62. Schwartz, Louis. “‘Conscious Terrors’ and ‘The Promised Seed’: SeventeenthCentury Obstetrics and the Allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 32 (1995): 63–89.
204
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Shahar, Shulamith. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages. Trans. Chaya Galai. London: Methuen, 1983. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig. London: Henry Pordes, 1993. Sharrock, Roger, ed. Bunyan—The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1976. 78–80. Rpt. of Folia Litteraria. By J.W. Hales. N.p.: n.p., 1893. 252–55. Shawcross, John T. Paradise Regain’d. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988. ———. The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes. Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2001. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defense of Poetry.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 478–508. Shoaf, R.A. Milton, Poet of Duality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Sim, Stuart. Negotiations with Paradise: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe. New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990. Simpson, Ken. “‘For the Best Improvement of Time’: Pilgrim’s Progress and the Liturgies of Nonconformity.” Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Eds. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 113–26. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. “The Snare of the Devil Discovered.” Printed by Edward Thomas. London, 1 April 1658. Thomason Tracts E.1833.(2.). Wing S 4388. Sondergard, Sid.”‘This Giant Has Wounded Me as Well as Thee’: Reading Bunyan’s Violence and/as Authority.” The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. Eds. K.Z. Keller and G.J. Schiffhorst. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993. 218–37. Spargo, Tamsin. “Contra-dictions: Women as Figures of Exclusion and Resistance in John Bunyan’s and Agnes Beaumont’s Narratives.” Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill. Keele, Staffordshire, UK: Keele University Press, 1996. ———. The Writing of John Bunyan. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997. Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. London: Penguin, 1987. Spolsky, Ellen. Introduction. Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory. Ed. Ellen Spolsky. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. ———. “The Uses of Adversity: The Literary Text and the Audience That Doesn’t Understand.” The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in Reader Response. Ed. Ellen Spolsky. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990. 17–35. Stachniewski, John. The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Works Cited
205
Stathis, James J. “Those Admirable Devils: The Heroes of Restoration Comedy.” All the World: Drama Past and Present. Ed. Karelisa V. Hartigan. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982. 107–16. Steadman, John M. Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Stebbing, Henry. Prefatory Remarks to The Holy War. 1859. The Complete Works of John Bunyan. Vol. 4. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970. Stein, Arnold. Answerable Style: Essays on Paradise Lost. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953. ———. Heroic Knowledge. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Stranahan, Brainerd P. “Bunyan’s Special Talent: Biblical Texts as ‘Events’ in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress.” English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 329–43. “Strange News from the West.” Printed for J. Jones. London, 30 March 1661. Thomason Tracts E.1086.(6). Swaim, Kathleen M. Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan Progress. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Swiss, Margo. “Satan’s Obduracy in Paradise Lost.” Milton Quarterly 28 (1994): 56–61. Talon, Henri A. John Bunyan. London: Longmans, Green, 1956. Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Thormahlen, Marianne. Rochester: The Poems in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1963. ———. The English Epic and Its Background. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946. Traugott, John. “The Rake’s Progress from Court to Comedy: A Study in Comic Form.” Studies in English Literature 6 (1966): 381–407. Trotter, David. “Wanton Expressions.” Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Tur-Sinai, N.H. [H. Torczyner]. The Book of Job: A New Commentary. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1967. Ulreich, John C., Jr. “‘Beyond the Fifth Act’: Samson Agonistes as Prophecy.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 281–318. Underwood, T.L. “‘For then I should be a Ranter or a Quaker’: John Bunyan and Radical Religion.” Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Eds. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 127–40. ———. Introduction. Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Ed. T.L. Underwood. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
206
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Vieth, David M. Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s “Poems of 1680.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. ———. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Villee, Claude A., and Vincent G. Dethier. Biological Principles and Processes. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1971. Von Maltzahn, Nicholas. “The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667).” The Review of English Studies 47 (1996): 479–99. Wakefield, Gordon S. “‘To Be a Pilgrim’: Bunyan and the Christian Life.” John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus. Ed. N.H. Keeble. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 111–36. Waldock, A.J.A. “Satan and the Technique of Degradation.” 1947. Milton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louis L. Martz. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1966. 77–99. Walker, Robert G. “Rochester and the Issue of Deathbed Repentance in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England.” South Atlantic Review 47.1 (January 1982): 21–37. Ward, Graham. “To Be a Reader: Bunyan’s Struggle with the Language of Scripture in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.” Journal of Literature and Theology 4.1 (March 1990): 29–49. Watson, Melvin R. “The Drama of Grace Abounding.” English Studies 46 (1965): 471–82. Webber, Joan. The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth Century Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Weber, Harold. “‘Drudging in Fair Aurelia’s Womb’: Constructing Homosexual Economies in Rochester’s Poetry.” The Eighteenth Century 33.2 (1992): 99–117. Werblowsky, R.J. Z. Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. West, Robert H. Milton and the Angels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955. Wheale, Nigel. Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660. New York: Routledge, 1999. Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Williams, Arnold. “The Motivation of Satan’s Rebellion in Paradise Lost.” Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 253–68. Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Complete Poems. Ed. David M. Vieth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. ———. The Letters of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ———. The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. Ed. Keith Walker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Wintle, Sarah. “Libertinism and Sexual Politics.” Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. 133–65. Wittreich, Joseph. Interpreting Samson Agonistes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———. Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1979.
Works Cited
207
Wolseley, Robert. Preface. Valentinian, a Tragedy as ‘tis Alter’d by the Late Earl of Rochester, together with a Preface by one of his Friends. 1685. Rochester: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Farley-Hills. London: Routledge, 1972. 137–60. “A Wonder in Staffordshire ... Of a strange and horrible apparition of the Divell.” Printed by Francis Coles. London, 12 February 1661. Thomason Tracts E.1085.(10.). Wing W 3358. Worthen, W.B. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance.” PMLA 113.5 (October 1998): 1093–107. Wyke, Clement H. “Distanced Experience and Faded Vision in The Holy War.” Humanities Association Review 26 (1975): 21–32.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Aaron, Melissa D. 21, 174 Abdiel 104, 107 Achinstein, Sharon 40, 55, 70n, 95 Adam and Eve 5, 7,14, 16, 20, 22, 26, 28, 58, 63, 76, 79, 85, 105, 106, 109, 120, 125, 136, 179, 183, 187 Adam Unparadiz’d (Milton) 81 Adelman, Clifford 46 Against Constancy (Rochester) 152 allegory 19, 35–6, 55–6, 58–9, 61–4, 67, 72, 108, 110–13, 117–120, 166 Alter, Robert 82n, 99 Amit, Yairah 188 angels 10–11, 12, 16, 25, 62, 98, 105–7, 122–3, 125, 136, 157, 183; angels, fallen 5, 8, 15, 27, 39, 44, 65, 69, 71, 73, 81, 91, 94, 107–8, 110, 132, 143, 156–7, 165, 189; see also individual angels and War in Heaven. animals 130, 132–6, 144, 173, 176, 177, 179–80; see also serpents, theriophily Antichrist 72 Ap Roberts, Ruth 64 appetite 49, 132, 141, 143, 147, 163, 182–3 archetype 1–2, 101–2, 129 Areopagitica (Milton) 10, 26, 74n, 177, 185 Aubrey, John 165 Austen, Jane 25, 153n, 163n autobiography 33, 35, 49, 50, 72 autobiography, spiritual 17, 26, 33–4, 53 Badman, Mr. (character) 57–8, 60, 115–18, 159, 165 Badman, The Life and Death of Mr. (Bunyan) 53, 56–8, 115, 117–18 Bakhtin, Mikhail 178–80 Barley, Tony 142 Bedford (town) 33, 40, 56, 58, 67, 119, 123, 170 Beelzebub 15, 70, 76, 107–8, 158, 167, 177 Behn, Aphra 151 Belial 73, 92–4, 107–8
Belial, sons of 93 Bell, Robert 35 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman 21n, 33n, 39 Bevington, David and Eric Rasmussen 92 Bible, see individual books Bible, Hebrew 5–6, 35–6, 45, 63–4, 74, 85, 139, 158, 177, 190 Blake, William 126n blasphemy 76, 129 blood 38, 67, 92, 141, 170 Bloom, Donald A. 57 Bloom, Harold 102 Bloomfield, Morton 64–5 Boas, George 133n Boileau, Nicholas 133 Boitani, Piero 36–7, 37n Book for Boys and Girls, A (Bunyan) 47 Brown, Gillian and George Yule 140n Budick, Sanford 10, 20, 29, 79–80 Bull, George 130 Bunyan, John and despair 1, 14–15, 17, 42–5, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59–60, 72, 114, 138 and family 115 and imprisonment 33–4, 40, 41, 56–7, 63, 65, 67, 114–15, 120, 124, 140; see also individual works Burnet, Gilbert 128, 138–9, 155 Burns, Norman T. 177n Burrow, Colin 7n Burton, Robert 9n Cain 28, 58, 85 Campbell, Gordon 40n, 74, 92n Canne, John 54 Carey, John 11 Carey, John and Alastair Fowler 158n Carlton, Peter J. 65 Case of Conscience Resolved, A (Bunyan) 123n, 173–4 censorship 31, 148, 171, 177–8 Charles I 40, 52, 129, 181, 188 Charles II 2, 77, 127–9, 131, 147–8, 162, 171, 181
210
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Christian Behavior (Bunyan) 123, 172, 174 Christian Doctrine (Milton) 8, 79, 86, 108, 177 Christiana 173–4 Chronicles, First Book of 6 Church of England 1, 2, 109, 131 Civil Power, Of (Milton) 10 Civil War 3, 13–14, 21, 27, 31, 53, 70, 125, 129–30, 147 Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement 174 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 81n, 89–90, 112 Coltharp, Duane 172 Comus (A Masque) (Milton) 82 Conaghan, John 129, 148n, 152, 154, 161–5 Congreve, William 148, 154n conversion 26–7, 34, 39, 43, 52–4, 72, 88, 117, 124 Corinthians, Epistles to 75, 86 Coudert, Allison P. 20–21, 23 Cross, the 16, 26, 66–8, 142, 150, 158, 159 Curran, Stuart 82n “darling sin” 13, 16–18, 25, 27, 152 Davies, Paul C. 133n Davies, Stevie 126 Death of a Fair Infant, On the (Milton) 158 Defoe, Daniel 7 Delany, Paul 33n Dent, Arthur 54 Dentith, Simon 161n, 170 Devil, the 32, 35–7, 38, 48, 55, 61, 69, 71, 75, 79, 90–2, 114, 140, 149–50, 152, 155, 174–5; see also Diabolus, Lucifer, Satan, the Tempter. Diabolus 1, 53–4, 57, 59–60, 65–6, 68–77, 116, 119–20, 126, 129, 177; see also the Devil, Lucifer, Satan, the Tempter. Dialogue (Rochester) 171 digestion 106, 169, 174, 183 DiSalvo, Jacqueline 24, 45 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The (Milton) 135 Dorimant 1, 2, 129, 148–67, 160–67, 169 Dryden, John 129, 162, 166 Dunn, Allen 181 Education, On (Milton) 26n Elias, Norbert 182 Eliot, T.S. 48, 120 Elkin, P.K. 134, 155
Elliot, Emory 98 Emanuel 66–8, 71, 72, 74–5, 119 envy 11, 18, 71, 87, 90 Esau 43–4, 64 Etherege, George 1, 129, 148–50n, 164, 166–7, 169; see also Man of Mode Everett, Barbara 147n, 162 Eve’s dream (PL 5.28-94) 2, 9, 23–5, 28, 45–6, 48–9, 52, 63, 76, 82, 86, 136 evil 1–2, 5, 8–10, 14, 26–8, 37–9, 41, 46, 66, 68, 72, 74–5, 79, 85, 92–3, 99, 101, 103, 108, 114, 116–17, 119, 126, 129–30, 136–9, 140, 145, 149, 159, 178 and women 171–3 exaltation of the Son 8–10, 11, 27, 105–7, 137 Exodus, Book of 95 Fall, the 5–13, 16, 18, 19, 26, 29, 54, 70, 80, 85, 98, 100, 104, 119, 123, 125, 143, 175, 183 Fall, The (Rochester) 150 Farley-Hills, David 129, 134, 141, 144, 151, 156, 165 Father, the of Paradise Lost 7, 10–11, 12–14, 20, 25, 28, 29, 55, 71, 74, 93, 104, 105, 108, 132, 188, 191 of Paradise Regained 84, 85, 86, 100 Faustus 37, 89, 91–2 Ferry, Anne Davidson 175 First Defense of the English People (Milton) 177 Fish, Stanley 79n, 103n, 114n Fishelov, David 191 Flannagan, Roy 132 Flinker, Noam 41, 63, 151n, 176, 180, 190 Forrest, James F. 67 Forrest, James F. and Roger Sharrock xxi, 57–8, 115, 119n Forster, E.M. 108n Forsyth, Neil 1, 6–7, 25, 31, 79, 86, 111n, 117 Fowler, Alastair 5, 6, 7–8, 24, 27, 44, 75n, 106–7, 106n, 120, 135–7, 135n, 142n, 175n, 176, 183 Foxe, John 91, 96–7, 119–20 Freeman, Thomas S. 119 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 185n Froula, Christine 20 fruit 12, 23–4, 28, 45, 76, 85, 86, 157, 177
Index Frye, Northrop 64, 71, 79, 85, 88, 142n, 183n Frye, Roland M. 85 Furlong, Monica 33, 37n, 40, 51n, 76 Gabriel, Archangel 7, 71–2, 81, 84, 107 Gardner, Helen 37n, 76 Gay, David 189 Genesis, Book of 5, 27, 36–7, 64, 74, 121, 142, 185, 187, 189 Gilbert, Sandra M. 19, 20, 23, 44 Gill, James E. 133, 138 Gill, Pat 184 Gorecki, John 89n Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Bunyan) 1, 2, 31, 101 and blasphemy 44, 129 and conversion 39, 44, 53 and despair 43, 45, 52, 113, 114 and Eve 48–9 and Holy War 53–5, 57, 58–9, 72, 116 and the mind 37, 39, 114 and Pilgrim’s Progress 34, 113 and Rochester 133, 138 and Scripture 41, 49–50, 64–5, 110 as spiritual autobiography 17, 26, 33–4, 53 and temptation 38, 42, 45, 158; and women 173–4 Grace, William J. 59 Graves, Robert and Raphael Patai 8n Great Consult, the 13, 70, 90, 107, 121 Greaves, Richard L. 77n Grecian Kindness (Rochester) 184 Greenblatt, Stephen 102–3 Greenfield, Sayre N. 62n Griffin, Dustin H. 128n, 130, 133, 143, 150, 159, 161n, 164 Griffith, Mr. 144, 159 Gross, Kenneth 13, 36 Grossman, Marshall 102, 121 Guibbory, Achsah 83 Hale, John K. 177–8 Hales, J.W. 63 Hammond, Paul 170 Hancock, Maxine 31, 64, 65 Haskin, Dayton 67, 98, 112, 117, 124n Haward, Sir William 181 Hawes, Clement 172 Hawkins, Anne 26, 34
211
Hebrews, Epistle of Paul to the 8 heresy 9, 126, 143 hermeneutics 35, 63, 65 Hill, Christopher 7, 14–15, 27, 31, 43–4, 47n, 53, 54, 60, 67n, 80, 84n, 89, 134, 140 Holton, Robert 147 Holy War, The (Bunyan) 1, 2, 35, 101, 102, 109, 118, 169; and Badman 56–8; and battle scenes 62, 65, 73, 184 and Bunyan’s military service 54, 60–61, 65; and characterization 56 and conversion 53–4 as epic 119–20 and fear 71–2 and humor 73–7 and Miltonic influences 54–6 and pilgrimage 63–4 and political leadership 69–70, 72–3, 75, 125 reception of 53–4 and repentance 59 and salvation 66–8 sources 54 and texts, attitude toward 65, 66, 68 Hughes, Geoffrey 176 human body, the 19, 24, 28, 52, 110, 149, 151, 157–8, 170–71, 174, 177–9, 181, 183 human characters 2, 111–12, 114, 116 human, definition of 102–3 human emotions 1, 2, 12, 16, 55, 61–2, 68, 70–71, 73, 77, 80, 109, 115, 129, 134, 145 human history 9, 12, 66, 106, 111, 119 human mind, the 9, 32, 36–8, 55, 56, 59, 80, 86, 93, 94, 115, 122, 129, 132, 138, 190 human reason 113 human sexuality 152, 174 human soul, the 58, 59, 66, 68, 71, 72, 117 humanity, fallen 26, 59, 84, 98 Hunter, William B. 5n, 8n Il Penseroso (Milton) 166n Imperfect Enjoyment, The (Rochester) 161 Impromptu on Charles II (Rochester) 171 Interregnum 31, 39–40, 95, 127, 129, 140, 147
212
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Invocations (Paradise Lost) 169, 175–6 Isaiah, Book of 6, 135, 174 Jackson, Walter Bate 124 Job, Book of 6, 38, 81–4, 181 John, Gospel of 64, 96 Johnson, Ronald W. 143, 164 Johnson, Samuel 63, 81n, 138n Jones, R.T. 170, 181 Joshua, Book of 66, 190 Kahn, Victoria 55, 131, 137, 145 Kaufmann, U. Milo 34, 59, 173 Keach, Benjamin 54 Keats, John 23, 46, 48n Keeble, N.H. 11n, 14, 29, 34n, 36, 41n, 43, 46, 49, 56n, 57, 59, 80, 109n, 123–4, 127–8, 130 Keightly, Thomas 141 Kerrigan, William 22, 28, 74, 177n Kerrigan, William and Gordon Braden 22 Key of the Revelations, The 124n King, John N. 68, 109n kisses 22 Knight, Charles A. 134 Knoppers, Laura Lunger 17 Knott, John R., Jr. 67, 80n, 97, 110 Kolbrener, William 10, 73, 178n, 183, 185n Krieger, Murray 112–13 Kristeva, Julia 19, 24 L’allegro (Milton) 166n LeComte, Edward 20, 24, 28 Lewalski, K. Barbara 76, 84, 88, 94, 99 Lewis, C.S. 7, 13–14, 103n, 105, 107 Lieb, Michael 29 Lochman, Daniel T. 190 London 31, 57, 92, 131, 162–5, 167, 172, 177 Love and Life (Rochester) 152 Love, Harold 169 Lucifer 6, 38, 70, 81, 119, 122, 175; see also the Devil, Diabolus, Satan, the Tempter. Luke, Gospel of 33, 88, 100, 121 Lycidas (Milton) 140, 141–2 MacCallum, Hugh 191 Macfarlane, Alan 22n Machiavelli, Niccolo 55, 130–31, 137, 145 MacKellar, Walter 84, 87, 96, 100, 121–2
Maltzahn, Nicholas von 147 Mammon 8, 107, 108 Man of Mode, The 147ff, denouement 164–5, and rake character 150 reception of 149 and sexuality 155–6 title, choice of 154; see also Dorimant. Marcus, Leah S. 20–21 Mark, Gospel of 84–5 Marks, Herbert 85, 98, 99 Marlowe, Christopher 84, 89, 91–2, 109 marriage 21–2, 154, 167, 174 Martz, Louis 55 masculinity 20, 22 masks 105, 163, 180–81 Matthew, Gospel of 84, 87 Michael, Archangel 9, 12, 23, 29, 65, 106–7, 124 Midgley, Graham 47 Milton, John and battle 89, 109, 120, 125, 176; and blindness 99, 135, 141–2, 175–6, 181, 190, 192; and censorship 31, 148, 171, 177–8; and the crucifixion 80; and despair 1, 14–15, 27; see also individual works Mohamed, Feisal G. 188, 190 Moloc 107 More, Sir Thomas 51 Murray, Margaret A. 38n Norbrook, David 8n, 9, 13, 127n Numbers, Book of 96 Nussbaum, Felicity A. 39, 65 Orgel, Stephen and Jonathan Goldberg 158n Owens, W.R. 72 Pandaemonium 1, 44, 65, 69, 93, 148, 162, 165, 176 Paradise Lost (Milton) 1, 2, 5; and the angels’ rebellion 5, 6, 8, 11–14, 20, 21, 26, 28–9, 70–71, 77, 104–5, 107, 116, 142, 185; and Badman 57–8; and Baroque 16; Book 9 120–21, 125–6; chronology 5, 8, 85; and despair 14–15, 25, 57;
Index early books (Books 1–5) 6, 13, 17, 70, 85, 86, 93, 103, 104, 107 as epic 80 exaltation of the Son 11 and Grace Abounding 31, 33, 56, 58, 102 and Holy War 54, 62, 63, 68, 69–70, 75, 119 and narration 8, 9, 75, 82, 93, 182 and political leadership 40, 44, 70, 77; and the Restoration 17, 149 and Rochester 129–31, 136, 138, 143, 151, 154, 158 and Samson Agonistes 187, 190–91; see also individual characters Paradise Regained (Milton) 1, 2, 101 and baptism 88, 90 and dating 80, 187 and the desert 120 and narrative method 81–2, 84, 94, 98 and sacrifice 79 and serpent 96 and the Son 80, 84, 86–7, 100, 121, 126, 165 and temptation 79, 82, 93, 100, 144; see also individual characters Parker, William R. 9n, 81 Parsons, Robert 156 Patrides, C.A. 5n, 140 Patterson, Annabel M. 98 Paulson, Ronald 169, 179–80 performance 50, 52, 54 Peter, John 14, 17, 71 Philemon, Epistle of Paul to 24 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) and allegory 34, 35–6, 44, 53, 64, 112, 117 and characterization 55, 111–12 and composition 34 and despair 114 and reception of 53, 56, 115 and shepherds 140 and women (Part 2) 76n, 173 Pinto, Vivian De Sola 127–8, 127n, 128n, 131, 148, 155, 156n, 162, 163n, 165, 171, 180 Poole, Matthew 83 preaching 34, 37, 42, 52, 53, 56, 114, 140 Prodigal Son, the 33, 100 Psalm 23 139 Psalm 91 89 Psalms, Book of 62
213
Quilligan, Maureen 110n, 111 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann 70 rake (character) 2–3, 128, 129–31, 148–50, 152–3, 155, 162, 169 Ramble in St. James’s Parke, A (Rochester) 2, 153, 161–3, 176, 179, 182 Ranters 41, 127 Raphael, Archangel 8, 10–12, 19, 23, 27, 97, 104, 106–7, 109, 157, 182–4 Readie and Easie Way, The (Milton) 10, 90, 185 Reason of Church Government, The (Milton) 81n rebellion, angels’ 5, 8, 11, 13, 18, 62, 71, 125; see also individual angels, War in Heaven. Restoration 1, 2–3, 14, 17, 27, 31, 39, 43, 56–7, 80, 90, 101, 109, 123–4, 126, 127–31, 138, 148–9, 154–5, 162, 164, 169, 172, 176, 181; see also Charles I Revard, Stella P. 62, 116, 125 Revelation, Book of 5, 45, 56, 72, 104, 119, 123–4 Robinson, Ken 153 Roche, Thomas P., Jr. 112n Rochester and childhood 127–8 and constancy 152, 154 and despair 179 and Henry Savile 131, 157, 165n and hierarchy 2, 129–34, 136, 139, 141–2, 144–5, 153–4, 161, 163, 16, 184 and homoeroticism 184–5 juvenilia 171 and obscenity 131, 159, 170, 179–80, 184 at Oxford 128–9 and venereal disease 157; see also individual works Rochester and His Monkey (painting) 180n Rogal, Samuel J. 179n Romans, Epistle to 49 Ross, Aileen 173n Roston, Murray 16, 69, 73, 81n, 182 Rudwin, Maximilian 6n, 38 Rumrich, John P. 7, 26, 39, 69 Rushdie, Salman 12 Russell, Jeffrey B. 38n, 66
214
The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
St. John, Anne 128, 156 salvation 2, 7, 16–17, 21, 26, 28–9, 33, 35, 42–3, 47–50, 54, 57, 66–8, 70, 80, 84, 91, 101, 103, 109, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124–5, 138, 165, 192 Sams, Horace J. 55–6, 72, 74, 87 Samson of Book of Judges 187–92, of Samson Agonistes 2, 187–93 Samson Agonistes (Milton) 1, 187 and Harapha 190, 191 and imprisonment 192 and Judges 189–90 and myth 192 and prophecy 189, 192 publishing of 187–8 and Satan 187–8 and thirst 191; see also Samson Samuel, First Book of 190 Samuel, Second Book of 6, 190 Satan and adoration 7, 71, 117; and beauty 12–13, 18, 25, 28, 92–3 and confusion 1, 7, 13, 24, 66, 99, 121, 129, 132, 136, 145, 174, 190 and decision to rebel 7, 11, 20, 29, 71, 132 and despair 12, 14, 15–16, 21, 25, 29, 44, 71–2, 99, 109, 123 and flying 24 and hierarchy 86, 105, 129, 132, 136, 145, 149 and identity 2, 17, 21, 24–5, 35, 39, 44, 48, 80–81, 87, 92, 103 as leader 2, 18–19, 44, 52, 69–70, 73, 81, 89, 91–2, 94, 100, 104–5, 116, 139–41, 187 and pain 19–20, 36, 38, 69, 72, 117, 119, 126, 129, 138, 155, 157, 159 of Paradise Regained 2, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 90–92, 94, 96–7, 122, 125–6, 144, 151, 165 and pride 6, 11–14, 17–18, 27, 90, 103–4, 116 and remorse 14, 16, 18, 26, 116 and repentance 17, 25–6, 107 of Samson Agonistes 187–93 as serpent 2, 14, 18, 25, 27–7, 52, 86, 94–5, 97, 102, 103, 105, 110, 135–6, 141, 177 and sexuality 19, 23 as shepherd 141
and Sin and Death allegory 19, 55, 85, 111, 112 soliloquies 37, 94, 104, 109 and the Son 7, 12, 27–8, 74, 80–82, 87–100, 121–3, 126, 141, 144, 165 and suicide 71 and the sun 24–5; see also the Devil, Diabolus, Lucifer, the Tempter. Satyr against Reason and Mankind (Rochester) 128, 131–6, 138–9, 141, 142, 143–4, 155, 164, 169 Satyr on Charles II (Rochester) 161, 181 Scheper, George L. 62n Schwartz, Louis 19–20 Second Defense of the English People, The (Milton) 132 serpents 5, 21, 26, 56, 76, 95–6, 187; see also animals, Satan, theriophily. sexuality, prelapsarian 19, 22 Shahar, Shulamith 22n Sharrock, Roger 64 Shawcross, John T. 80, 87–8, 91, 187 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 13 Shoaf, R.A. 71 Sim, Stuart 53–4, 60 Simpson, Ken 120 sin 42–3, 48, 49, 58–9, 61, 76, 89, 93, 96, 98, 105, 109, 114, 115, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129–30, 132–3, 138–9, 149, 150, 156, 158–9, 161, 166, 187, 189, 191; see also “darling sin” Sin and Death allegory (Paradise Lost) 19, 55, 85, 111, 112 Smith, Nigel 31n, 118 Sodom (biblical locale) 74, 123, 135, 185 Son, the exaltation of 11 identity 79, 87, 121, 123 of Paradise Regained 80, 84, 86–7, 100, 121, 126, 165 and Satan 7, 12, 27–8, 74, 80–82, 87–100, 121–3, 126, 141, 144, 165 Sondergard, Sid 114-15, 114n, 120 Song (“Love a woman…”) (Rochester) 161 Song of Songs/ of Solomon 41, 63, 76 Spargo, Tamsin 41, 49n, 67, 123, 172 Spengemann, William C. 49 Spenser, Edmund 87n, 112, 135 Spolsky, Ellen 35, 169 Stachniewski, John 17, 37, 42, 51–2 Stathis, James J. 149–50 Steadman, John P. 66, 71
Index Stebbing, Henry 54 Stein, Arnold 14, 17–18, 38, 73n, 82n, 92, 94 Stone, Lawrence 21 Stranahan, Brainerd P. 41, 45, 49, 65 suicide 71, 188 Swaim, Kathleen M. 40 Swiss, Margo 109n Talon, Henri A. 33 tears 14, 16, 69, 92, 109, 173 Tempter, the (Grace Abounding) 1, 32, 35, 37–45, 48–52, 57, 58, 64, 113–14, 115, 116, 120, 129, 138, 151, 169 Teskey, Gordon 64 theodicy 32, 33, 74, 185 theriophily 133, 137; see also animals, serpents. Thickstun, Margaret Olofson 56 Thormahlen, Marianne 129n, 148, 150, 153, 161–2 Tillyard, E.M.W. 53–4, 56–7, 132 Tolstoy, Leo 160n Traugott, John 129, 148–50, 152, 153, 164 tree 6, 23, 28, 48–9, 180 Treglown, Jeremy 161, 180 Trotter, David 127n Tunbridge Wells (Rochester) 2, 153, 159, 161, 163 Tur-Sinai, N.H. 6 tyranny 8, 69–70, 73 Ulreich, John C., Jr. 190 Underwood, T.L. 41n, 123n Upon His Drinking a Bowl (Rochester) 184 Upon Leaving His Mistress (Rochester) 154
215
Upon Nothing (Rochester) 141–2 Very Heroicall Epistle in Answer to Ephelia (Rochester) 172 Vieth, David M. 128n, 141, 159, 162n, 167, 170n, 171n, 179 Villee, Claude A. and Vincent G. Dethier 101n Wakefield, Gordon S. 16 Waldock, A.J.A. 13 Walker, Keith 127n, 171, 185 Walker, Robert G. 138n Waller, Edmund 148 War in Heaven, the 5, 7–8, 11, 54, 62, 71–3, 81, 109, 182; see also individual characters and angels Ward, Graham 113 Watson, Melvin R. 34 Webber, Joan 53 Weber, Harold 184–5 Werblowsky, R.J.Z. 15, 71n West, Robert H. 106 Wheale, Nigel 31n Whitman, Jon 111–12, 114 Williams, Arnold 105, 110 Wilmot, Henry, first earl of Rochester 127–8 Wilmot, John, second earl of Rochester, see Rochester Wintle, Sarah 147n, 161–2 Wittreich, Joseph 192 Wolseley, Robert 155 “Wonder in Staffordshire, A” 39n Worthen, W.B. 50, 52 Wyke, Clement H. 53–4, 56, 59, 72, 73
