XI
At the very outset the problem of the theme of Paradise Lost is bedevilled by the figure of Satan. So mightily alive - indeed the sole living character in the poem - is the Arch-demon that all other concerns than his are from the dramatic viewpoint dwarfed. And, if by the theme is meant whatever grips us most out of a work, Paradise Lost has its burning centre in the fortunes of Satan. Whether Milton intended it or no, the Fall of Satan, his fight against God and Man, his heroism or villainy, his success or failure are the main interest of the epic. But Satan's doings have evidently to be seen with chief reference to the Fall of Man which he brings about: the title of the poem requires attention to be focussed on this Fall and its consequences. And the formal as distinguished from the informal theme is indeed the one which Milton states in his opening lines:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
And supplementing this formal theme is the purpose ex-pressed at the close of the second invocation in the same paragraph, the call to God's creative Spirit to illumine and purify the poet,
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
Milton officially devotes himself to the setting forth of God's justice in regard to Man's Fall which was caused - as in
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answer to the question in the next passage he tells us - by Satan in the guise of a serpent. But, with this answer, he launches on his fundamental though unofficial theme and briefly pricks out the figure of his villain-hero and the tale of his great yet sacrilegious and reprehensible no less than doomed enterprise:
The infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The Mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High
If he opposed, and, with ambitious aim,
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt.1
It is necessary to see Paradise Lost in a complex rather than in a simple manner if we are to cope with its full develop-ment. The poem is multi-mooded and we shall show scarce appreciation of its genius by overstressing either Satan or else Adam and Eve. The spotlight of intention is on the Fall of Man, but the broad revealing sweep of the execution makes the Fall of Satan the epic subject and, in effect, the poet's assertion of Eternal Providence is in relation to both Satan and Man. God Himself juxtaposes them in general apropos of His mention of the freewill gifted to Man:
I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.2
In particular too God juxtaposes Man and Satan when He
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speaks of the future of the rebel Angels on the one hand and on the other the future of human beings:
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-depraved; Man falls, deceived
By the other first: Man, therefore, shall find grace;
The other, none.3
With this word of warning against simplification of the Miltonic theme we may leave Satan aside except for a few remarks, for he has been sufficiently commented on by critics. Sri Aurobindo, touching on Milton's high "aim" and lofty "subject", writes: "there is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he was born."4 Sri Aurobindo here catches Milton's supreme insight in a nutshell. But Milton does not conceive and execute Satan always from a deep-seeing height. Instead of making both his bravery and his baseness natural, as it were, to his fallen supernature on every occasion, a fear in Milton lest the Arch-Rebel should completely run away with the poem works in places, charging the poetry with a self-baulking motive. It is not only in the later parts of the epic that Satan ceases to be heroic under Milton's hand: even in the earlier half we have small "asides", countering the remnant of the original divine principle's greatness. Thus, after one of the bravest outbursts at almost the beginning,5 we get the depreciating "aside" on "the Apostate Angel":
Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair...6
Again, in Book I itself we are told of his
high words that bore
Semblance of worth, not substance...7
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In Book IV we overhear him soliloquising on his boast to his fellows that he could subdue "The Omnipotent":
Ay me, they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan,
While they adore me on the throne of Hell.8
Now we may pass on to Man. We shall dwell on Man's fate as summarised in the divine judgment that he shall find grace. But to find grace must not be understood to mean that Man would be totally and immediately forgiven: payment must be made for transgressing God's law. Only, the payment will not be the final act nor will it be equal to the results of grace. The very next sentence in God's mouth to the one quoted runs:
In mercy and justice both,
Through Heaven and Earth, so shall my glory excel;
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.9
Here we have a statement about God's ways, the work of Eternal Providence.
It is often thought that in regard to Man Paradise Lost is concerned merely with his Fall and God's punishment of him - punishment which, though harsh enough in principle, is tempered with some kindness in practice. Indeed, the actual event poetised of Man's history is this Fall and that punishment: hence the title of the poem. But just as the events in Heaven and elsewhere preceding the drama in the Garden of Paradise are an important part of the epic, so also Man's fate subsequent to that drama is a significant portion of it. Unlike what precedes the drama in Paradise, it is not narrated as fact; but it is rendered vividly present by prophecy and promise and preachment. The epic, in its vision and message, is as much concerned with it as with the
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narrated fact. And Milton takes care in his opening passage itself to bring it in; for, he speaks there of one greater Man coming and restoring fallen humanity and regaining the blissful seat. All these things and not exclusively Man's first disobedience and its consequences, the advent of death and all our woe, are implied as thematic in Milton's opening passage. Eternal Providence, therefore, must connote more than the justice meted out to Man for his disobedience. And what it does connote becomes fairly explicit in phrases pretty early in the same Book that states the theme. Thus a speech of Satan's about God has the words:
... if then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good...10
And soon after these words on the beneficent office of Providence we have lines where Milton formulates God's ways with both Satan and Man apropos of Satan's being left at large,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy, shown
On Man by him seduced, but on himself
Treble confusion, death, and vengeance poured.11
Surely, if infinite goodness, mercy and grace are shown on Man, we have to go far beyond the context of death and woe inflicted on him as penalty for his sin and, if they are shown in answer to all of Satan's malice, we have to view that very death and woe as an expression of them; for the results, which Satan's malice has meant to be death and woe and which apparently are what it has meant them to be, serve as starting-points for the manifestation of infinite goodness, mercy and grace - manifestation which could never have
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happened without those results. It is thus possible to say paradoxically, "Those results themselves are a blessing to Man and they enable him to get gifts from God which he in an unfallen state could never have received." It is this paradox that is not only implied in the passage we have quoted but also hinted at in the later phrase we have already cited:
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.
What is the force of the word "first"? We can understand how mercy could last shine brightest: the end would be glorious. But to shine brightest first the mercy would have to be present in the very situation that sets off the mechanism of justice: in other words, the temptation of Man, his Fall and the punishment it involves must all be intensely visible in the total story of God's ways with humanity as a supreme mercy under temporary disguise.
Such a transfiguring retrospect is analogous to the one suggested by Milton in reference to world-creation. When the starry universe is created with the race of Man at its centre, the multitudes of Heaven sing the Creator's praise and pitting the new World against the so-called loss of worshippers which Satan's defection has caused to Heaven they declare:
Who seeks
To lessen them, against his purpose, serves
To manifest the more thy might; his evil
Thou usest, and from thence creat'st more good.12
But we should note in the same context that the race of men at the core of the "more good" which is the starry universe - "another Heaven/From Heaven not far"13 - is called "thrice happy" with a condition hanging to their happiness: soon after being declared blessed they are re-characterised:
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thrice happy, if they know
Their happiness, and persevere upright!14
This is all in tune with the emphasis on the great woe emanating from Man's disobedience. Milton keeps the woe-motif running everywhere, but his composition is shot with counterpoint: without diminishing the woe-motif he sets up an opposite current of secret significance which prepares us for a dazzling climax in Book XII where the ways of God stand completely vindicated within Miltonic Christianity. Framing this climax we have the phrases addressed to Adam –
then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far – 15
and –
the Earth
Shall be all Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden...16
The one phrase refers to a subjective condition of right living according to Christian precepts and the indwelling "Spirit of God", the other to an objective condition of terrestrial life at the end of history. And both the states are implied in the climax which is put in Adam's mouth after Raphael has revealed to him how Man's historical travail born of his Fall will terminate - historical travail acquiring an utterly new orientation by the coming of Christ once in the midst of history and again for Final Judgment. Adam exclaims:
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense,
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good - more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
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Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more that much more good thereof shall spring –
To God more glory, more goodwill to men
From God - and over wrath grace shall abound.17
Milton-scholars know this passage as the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall. Arthur C. Lovejoy18 has written on it at some length and traced the general idea of it, through several predecessors of Milton in the poetic field, ultimately to an old hymn of the fourth or fifth century A.D., which says, "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!" ("O happy fault, which has deserved to have so great a redeemer!") and to St. Ambrose of the fourth century who cries out: "Felix ruina, quae reparatur in melius" ("Happy is the downfall which is restored for the better"). Lovejoy, how-ever, feels that this idea and Milton's special theme in his epic do not quite interplay. He writes: "... the culmination of the redemptive process in human history was also for Milton the culminating theme in his poem. Yet it undeniably placed the story of the Fall, which was the subject of the poem announced at the outset, in somewhat ambiguous light; when it was borne in mind, man's first disobedience could not seem the deplorable thing which for the purposes of the poet - and of the theologian - it was important to make it appear. The only solution was to keep the two themes separate. In the part of the narrative dealing primarily with the Fall the thought that it was after all a felix culpa must not be permitted explicitly to intrude; that was to be reserved for the conclusion, where it could heighten the happy final consummation by making the earlier and unhappy episodes in the story appear as instrumental to that consummation, and indeed as its necessary conditions."
Lovejoy is right in telling us that there is no explicit intrusion of the felix culpa in the portions of the poem concerned primarily with the Fall. But the implicit presence
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of it is undoubtedly strong and Milton intended the reader to have a glimmering of it - a glimmering only, of course, since otherwise his climax would be spoiled. It is not true that he keeps the two themes separate. I should opine that the Fall-theme is like the crescent moon which carries in its arms the remainder of the orb in a shadowy fashion and, as this theme gets developed, the orb gets more and more filled out with light though its full form shows itself not before that passage in Book XII. The shadowy fashion is perfectly visible -"darkness visible" - from the very First Book of Paradise Lost: the words "O Goodness infinite" and "over wrath grace shall abound" are anticipated there by "Infinite goodness, grace and mercy" and similarly the final
That all this good of evil shall produce
is already there in
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good.
The sole new nuance in Book XII, which introduces the setting out of the fortunate character of the Fall with absolute explicitness, is the phrase: "And evil turn to good."
Book II, in passing, carries on the thread of the theme. After Beelzebub has suggested that the fallen Angels should avenge themselves on God by perverting God's new favourite, Man, about whom rumour has reached them, Milton attributes this "devilish counsel" in origin to Satan himself:
for whence
But from the Author of all ill could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator?19
Then Milton adds:
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but their spite still serves
His glory to augment.
Here also is an anticipation of Man's good coming out of evil, though the terms are general, summed up in God's "glory".
The theme is kept ringing in our ears by a couple of indirect variations on it in the same Book. What the fallen Angels fear of God's subtle design they try in their own way to imitate for their own furtherance. Satan declares from the pit of Hell:
I give not Heaven for lost. From this descent
Celestial Virtues rising will appear
More glorious and more dread than from no fall.20
One of Satan's colleagues, Mammon, plays on the same point:
Our greatness will appear
Then most conspicuous when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse,
We can create, and in what place so e'er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance.21
The expression, no doubt, is perverse, but it serves in a negative fashion to sow more seeds of the theme's later flowering.
Book III develops the suggestions of Books I and II in a manner that almost forestalls Book XII. Even apart from the phrase about mercy, first and last, shining brightest, we have a whole passage foreshadowing the long description of Christ's work and of the world's end in Book XII. Let us look at some of the highlights of this description. Raphael says to Adam:
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thy punishment
He shall endure, by coming in the flesh
To a reproachful life and cursed death,
Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience
Imputed becomes theirs by faith - his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal, works...22
... So he dies
But soon revives; Death over him no power
Shall long usurp. Ere the third dawning light
Return, the stars of morn shall see him rise
Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light,
Thy ransom paid, which Man from Death redeems...23
... This godlike act
Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldst have died...24
Then to the Heaven of Heavens he shall ascend
With victory triumphing through the air
Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise
The Serpent, Prince of Air, and draw in chains
Through all his realm, and there confounded leave;
Then enter into glory and resume
His seat at God's right hand, exalted high,
Above all names in Heaven; and thence shall come,
When this World's dissolution shall be ripe,
With glory and power, to judge both quick and dead -
To judge the unfaithful dead, but to reward
His faithful, and receive them into bliss,
Whether in Heaven or Earth; for then the Earth
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.25
Less than a hundred lines later Raphael reverts to the subject of the World's end after speaking of the decline of Truth and works of Faith:
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So shall the World go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign,
Under its own weight groaning, till the day
Appear of respiration to the just
And vengeance to the wicked, at return
Of Him so lately promised to thy aid...26
Last in the clouds from Heaven to be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted World; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New Heavens, new Earth, Ages of endless date
Founded in righteousness and peace and love,
To bring forth fruits, joy, and eternal bliss.27
Now let us go back to Book III. At first, after God's promise of grace and His demand for a sacrifice to appease justice, Christ is speaking:
Behold me, then: me for him, life for life,
I offer; on me let thine anger fall;
Account me Man: I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased; on me let Death wreak all his rage...28
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil
Death his death's wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of Darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven, shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all thy foes...29
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed,
Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return,
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Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assured
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more...30
God speaks next. Towards the end of His speech we read of Christ's reward on his return and of the Final Judgment:
All knees to thee shall bow of them that bide
In Heaven, or Earth, or, under Earth, in Hell.
When thou, attended gloriously from Heaven,
Shalt in the sky appear, and from thee send
The summoning Archangels to proclaim
Thy dread tribunal, forthwith from all winds
The living, and forthwith the cited dead
Of all past ages, to the general doom
Shall hasten; such a peal shall rouse their sleep.
Then, all thy Saints assembled, thou shalt judge
Bad men and Angels; they arraigned shall sink
Beneath thy sentence; Hell, her numbers full,
Thenceforth shall be for ever shut. Meanwhile
The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell,
And, after all their tribulations long,
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With Joy and Love triumphing, and fair Truth...31
It is clear that almost the whole context within which the paradox of the felix culpa can burst upon us is already present quite early in Paradise Lost. So a reader with a good memory will hardly feel that Milton has gone back on his tracks. The felix culpa is the logical concept arising from those early passages if one realises intensely the drama of redemption - God becoming Man, revealing depths of mercy in divinity that would else have never come forth, and establishing at last a divine kingdom on earth which would compensate for all the tribulations endured. But Milton, master artist that he is, keeps back the one phrase which
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would throw into sharp relief the fortunateness of the Fall much before Book XII. Nowhere in Book III do we have anything corresponding openly to turns like "far happier place" and "far happier days." Only the somewhat cryptic "mercy, first and last" is allowed to glimmer out. And in Book VII a suggestion is indirectly made when apropos of World-creation we read of Satan's evil being used by God to create "more good". Thus Milton works most skilfully towards his climax, so that it is a surprise at the same time that on a back-look it appears inevitable, perfectly prepared. Lovejoy is mistaken in saying that the two themes are held separate: they are really held together but in a subtle manner playing with their congruence without fully catching our attention.
The thematic structure of Paradise Lost is metaphysical in the modern sense, based on the so-called Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century, that there is a tug of opposites, a fusion of contraries, an intriguing uncertainty between a human tragedy and a divine comedy. From the start itself the metaphysical tension is introduced by the subsidiary clause -"till one greater Man..." – in the opening phrase about Man's first disobedience. In Book III the tension reaches a clear form, for there the redemptive process is expounded.
And there, with the treatment of the redemption, a momentous question becomes pertinent which carries us straight into the metaphysical not in the sense of a tug of contraries but in that of an ultimate world-philosophy. Linked with this question are several others arising from the doctrinal passages of Paradise Lost. And some of them have such unexpected implications that no survey of Milton's poem would be true to Miltonism without an appraisal of his metaphysics.
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Notes and References
1. Bk. I, 34-44.
2. Bk. III, 98-102.
3.Ibid., 129-32.
4.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 84.
5.Bk. I, 94-124.
6.Ibid., 126.
7.Ibid., 531-2.
8.Bk. IV, 86-9.
9.Ibid., 132-4.
10.Ibid., 162-3.
11.Bk. I, 214-20.
12.Bk. VII, 613-6.
13.Ibid., 617-8.
14.Ibid., 631-2.
15.Bk. XII, 586-8.
16.Ibid., 463-5.
17.Ibid., 469-78.
18."Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall", A Journal of English Literary History, Sept., 1937.
19.Bk. II, 380-5.
20.Ibid., 14-6.
21.Ibid., 257-62.
22.Bk. XII, 404-10.
23.Ibid., 419-24.
24.Ibid., 437-8.
25.Ibid., 451-65.
26.Ibid., 337-42.
27.Ibid., 545-51.
28.Bk. III, 236-41.
29.Ibid., 236-58.
30.Ibid., 260-4.
31.Ibid., 321-38.
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