Paradise Lost

So here's my thing with Milton's Paradise Lost: the text taken itself would seem to confirm the whole Renaissance-era belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely--for in this epic poem, we have Satan the archetypal rebel being thrust down to hell for opposing the rightful supremacy of the King of heaven.

If I didn't know better, I'd just assume Paradise Lost was written by a pro-Monarchist seeking to vilify the republicans who, Satan-like, dared support the deposition and regicide of divinely-ordained King Charles I in 1649 (the loss of the King being a loss of paradise), and then celebrating the rightful restoration of the monarchy in 1658 now that the rebels has been defeated and metaphorically thrust down to hell.

The problem with that reading, however, is the simple fact that John Milton himself was an ardent anti-Monarchist. Under the brief English Republic, he was offered a civil servant position and happily accepted it; he wrote defenses of the execution of Charles I, anticipating John Locke (and Thomas Jefferson) in arguing that govt. is a social contract between ruler and subject that can be broken, not a divine heavenly right; he published tracts attacking press censorship and promoting the liberalization of divorce laws; when the Monarchy was restored, he justly feared for his life due to his vocal opposition to Kings; he was allowed to live only because he'd gone blind, a "clear sign" that God had punished this "wicked rebel"; and when Paradise Lost was first published, the Monarchists actually felt threatened by it.

This seemingly pro-Monarchist text was written by (and perceived as) an anti-Monarchist. Something does not quite compute in my modern mind.

Some have tried to get around this dilemma by claiming, as did William Blake, that Milton "was of the Devil's party without knowing it." The reasoning goes that since Milton's Satan is so sympathetic, then Milton is clearly establishing his sympathies with the rebels themselves. Now, certainly Milton's Satan gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost and is by far the most interesting character; the problem, of course, is that Milton himself was a good Puritan, for whom to identify with Satan would be abhorrent.

Blake might then argue that Milton made Satan sympathetic in spite of himself; but even disregarding Milton, the text itself makes unequivocally clear that Satan is wicked and evil and the bad guy, that he is the source of all sin and death and suffering, that his defeat was man's victory, and that the redemption made possible through Jesus Christ is mankind's sole source of peace, happiness, and salvation. Paradise Lost's sympathies are most assuredly not with its rebels.

(Milton, in my opinion, merely made Satan interesting, not good; and frankly, if Satan became the good guy, it would be a dull, predictable, sanitizing move--Milton's Satan is interesting for the same reason The Dark Knight's Joker is interesting, precisely because he's so evil.)

Perhaps the solution lies within Milton's own Puritanism--the writer to the introduction of my edition of Paradise Lost claims that the tension in the text isn't so much between ruler and rebel as it is between signifier and referent. (Bare with me.) He discusses how historically, in the mid-17th century, the monarchy and Church of England was seen as less Protestant but more aligned with the Catholic Church, a religion featuring holy relics and icons and transubstantiation of bread into Christ's actual body and so forth--in other words, in Catholicism, the symbol was constantly confused for the thing it signified.

The Puritans, by contrast, rejected this veneration of icons, calling it idol worship--their Churches had crucifixes, but they didn't worship the crucifix itself, for they understood that the crucifix is not Christ. That is, in Puritanism, the signifier (or symbol) is always separate from the signified (or referent). The symbol and the referent have no inherent relationship; the Puritans were proto-Post-Structuralists.

Such a doctrine would be threatening to a Monarchist Anglo-Catholic, for if the throne has no inherent connection with the ruler, then the King has no inherent right to rule. Just to be Protestant, then, would be to naturally reject the supposed "divine right" of Kings to rule as Satanic, for the King merely represents divine rule on earth, and is not actually divine rule itself.

One can arguably see this Protestant separation between symbol and referent in Paradise Lost, as when Satan first wages war against heaven--one critic posits that Satan made the mistake of confusing God's throne with God Himself, treating the throne as an object, an artifact, an icon, something that could be taken or possessed. But the throne is not God Himself, and so to threaten the throne is not actually to threaten God personally.

Also, as other critics have noted, Satan alone calls the forbidden fruit an "apple," while everyone else--Rafael, Michael, Adam, Eve, the Father and the Son--calls it "fruit," fruit having the double meaning of "consequences," as in "the fruits of one's actions." In other words, the righteous understand that the fruit is a symbol, a signifier, representing disobedience and sin, but is not the thing itself.

Satan, by contrast, is incapable of making any such distinction--his punishment is to not just inhabit the serpent but to become the serpent, that is, to continue to conflate the symbol for the thing itself. He and his minions snap at the fruit of an image of the tree of life that appears in hell, fruit that turns to ashes in their mouths, for they continually confuse the representation for the actual thing itself. Satan's comrades are all given the names of idols that were worshiped in ancient Canaan, showing how their conflation of symbols with the referent is a Satanic mistake made on earth as well.

The implication is that any time we confuse a symbol for the referent (e.g. confusing cars for status, clothes for beauty, politics for morality, sex for love, money for success, etc), then we, too, are being idolatrous and foolish, just as the Satan who thinks the apple is the thing itself, failing to understand that the symbol and the referent are not the same thing, just as the Catholics fail to realize that the bread is not actually Christ's body, just as the Monarchs fail to realize that the throne is not actually divine rule.

If such a reading is the case (and given the historical circumstances, I see no other way around this dilemma than by accepting this Protestant reading of Paradise Lost), then the Post-Modernists must relinquish any prior claims to originating Post-Structuralism and Deconstructionism; the late-Renaissance were already thinking like Derrida centuries before Derrida--they were just using a different vocabulary. They understood that "the just live by faith," for if all we have to go off of are images, impressions, symbols, and signifiers for percieving reality, then we of necessity are living by faith all the time anyways. Lit.-theory-wise, we are just now catching up with them.

Much as I am wary of fetishizing some mythical "golden age" or "simpler time" of the past when everyone was supposedly smarter and more polite (I have no desire to return to the racism, sexism and intolerance of 500 or even 50 years ago), I truly must tip my hat to the brilliance and insight of Milton and the Renaissance.