Mortal brinksmanship: Niobe, Satan, and artistic hubris

What madnesse is it (quoth she) to prefer the heavenly rout
 Of whome ye doe but heare, to such as daily are in sight? 

Or why should Laton honored be with Altars? Never wight
To my most sacred Majestie did offer incense. Yit
My Father was that Tantalus whome only as most fit
The Gods among them at their boordes admitted for to sit.
A sister of the Pleyades is my mother. Finally 

My Graundsire on the mothers side is that same Atlas hie
That on his shoulders beareth up the heavenly Axeltree.
Againe my other Graundfather is Jove, and (as you see)
He also is my Fathrinlawe, wherein I glorie may.
The Realme of Phrygia here at hand doth unto me obay.
In Cadmus pallace I thereof the Ladie doe remaine
And joyntly with my husbande I as peerlesse Princesse reigne
Both over this same towne whose walles my husbands harpe did frame,
And also over all the folke and people in the same.
 ~ Metamorphoses 6.170-79

The speaker is Niobe, queen of Thebes. The prophetess Manto has been urging the women of her country to worship Latona, and they are obeying. Niobe, angered, says the people should be worshiping her own royal self, and offers many reasons - her beauty; her lineage through Tantalus to Zeus; her husband, Amphion, also descended from Zeus. But most of all, her maternal glory. She has 14 children -- Latona has only two.

Arthur Golding's 1567 translation captures something of the haughty Royal tone. But it's hard to beat Ovidian concision. The passage opens:

“quis furor, auditos” inquit “praeponere visis caelestes?"

"What madness," she said, "incites you to put hearsay Gods before those you see?"

Niobe is not merely contemptuous of Latona. Even as she brags of her relation to Zeus, she rehashes the cliched materialism of the non-believer. Put your faith in what you know from experience, she says. Size matters. Number matters. Being right here matters. Latona couldn't even book a room for her labor, etc.

A recurring motif of the Metamorphoses is precisely this brinksmanship, this willingness of supremely gifted mortals to contend with the divine. Ovid's immediately preceding story told of Arachne's challenge to Athena, and Thebes was still "howling" (fremit) from that news. Another tale of art and hubris, Marsyas's contest with Apollo, follows. Niobe's metamorphosis of the natural honor of motherhood into hollow, virulent pretension elevates her to an elite class of mortals doomed to suffer forever. It's a small group, but it includes, of course, her father.

The dangerous reach of Dante's art is readable as presumption; Niobe is his Medusa.

Niobe's disdain for the goddess is in play here in the Primum Mobile, precisely the threshold separating what one hears about the divinity from what one may experience for oneself. This is the final juncture toward which the poem, and all of creation, are moving. Dante and Beatrice aim beyond time and space with the escape velocity of Seraphic ardor.

To question that something -- the Empyrean, e.g. -- exists beyond this outermost bound of the Primum Mobile is to challenge what one has heard -- through Scripture, family, revealed truth. If modest Latona parallels the Creator, Niobe poses the classical counterweight to Satan. (For a persuasive reading of Satan's fall from a doctrinal perspective, see Alison Cornish, "Planets and Angels in Paradiso XXIX: The First Moment," discussed briefly here. My point is that Dante's use of ancient myth -- here the tales of Latona and Niobe -- adds substance from rich classical sources of philosophy and poetry.)

Apply Ovid's brief introduction to the tale of Satan, which we just touched upon, and the consistency is clear: To prefer what is seen to what is spoken of is, in the language of this canto (l.28), to seize upon a slice of the spectrum, the realm visible through light, at the expense of the totality (the triforme effetto) -- the invisible, or not-yet-visible, all the effect of its maker (suo sire).

Light of course is essential to our sensory reality, but to equate all of reality with what light enables us to see is to center reality within our sensory selves, and to deny the possibility that something more than is currently accessible is yet to come. Our narrow axis of experience lies in us; all else is old wive's tales.

As a story of materialism vs. something more, the tale of Niobe is about substituting oneself as center in place of an other we've only heard tell of. It's Augustine and Beatrice's basic choice: we are arrows of love -- do we aim for the other, or for ourselves?

The highest created being in the Commedia ends spun from the Empyrean, frozen in his tears, as immobile as Ovid's queen of Thebes:

Childless— she crouched beside her slaughtered sons,
her lifeless daughters, and her husband's corpse.
The breeze not even moved her fallen hair,
a chill of marble spread upon her flesh,
beneath her pale, set brows, her eyes moved not,
her bitter tongue turned stiff in her hard jaws,
her lovely veins congealed, and her stiff neck
and rigid hands could neither bend nor move.
—her limbs and body, all were changed to stone.
Yet ever would she weep: and as her tears
were falling she was carried from the place,
enveloped in a strong and stormy whirlwind
far to where, in her native land, fixed upon
a mountaintop, a stone turns liquid --
even now marble drips tears.
~ Metamorphoses 6:300-312 (Brookes More, trans. (the last four lines have been modified by me.)

Milton's Hamlet?

From a review of Harold Bloom's latest book, The Anatomy of Influence.

“The Anatomy of Influence” is Bloom’s effort — his last, he says — to recalibrate his great theory, only shorn of its “gnomic” obscurities and written in “a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking.” One of those changes is that over time his notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.

In a superb chapter, “Milton’s Hamlet,” Bloom shows how the Satan of “Paradise Lost” is the offspring of Hamlet, each a soliloquist who stands at a remove from the tragedy that engulfs him, puzzling out eloquent conundrums that press toward “depths beneath depths,” limitless self-consciousness. “It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not,” Bloom writes. “Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza.”

Book VI: Bum's Rush

As our reading of book 6 comes near to the end, a few things stood out in our discussion. To briefly summarize, Milton pulls out all the stops in bringing the first, cyclic half of his poem to a climax:

- the three-day structure of the book echoes the larger three-part structure of the poem, and of sacred history, which begins with a war in heaven, continues with a messianic triumph on Earth, and concludes with an apocalyptic final battle at the end of time.

- the hint that God and his creation are moving toward an ultimate convergence when God shall be "all in all."

- the diminished role of Satan, who is not directly presented or given a speech, yet ends up being mercilessly parodied.

- Milton's flawless use of Homer and the Bible, especially Exodus and Ezekiel, in portraying the action of the third day, when the Son in his Chariot singlehandedly triumphs over the rebel angels. The parallel with Achilles, whose rage dooms him, and the parody of Satan as a misguided Moses, leading his people to take a final stand before an onrushing King, only to find that instead of the Red Sea rolling back, the walls of heaven part to disclose a Promised Wasteland.

- The remarkable structure of the poem that presents a complete whole, or circle, narrating the doom of fallen Satan, then with Book VII opens a new book, a new world, and a new sense of what is at stake, of what can be lost, and where this might lead,

with wandering steps and slow.

Whatever the second half of Paradise Lost is, it is not a circle.

A few sources for P.L. 6

Andrew Marvell admits he had his doubts about Paradise Lost:

When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown'd, Gods Reconcil'd Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,

One has to wonder if those dubieties peaked with the War in Heaven of Book 6. This action-packed "epic" ("mock epic" seems not right, but nearly just as right as "epic") features sword-wielding angels in cubic phalanxes, mountains flung like mudpies, a novel mode of canon-formation, truly execrable puns, and the Merkabah, a souped-up Chariot that blows away the works of drag-racing enthusiasts.


Some critics pass over Book 6 in as few words as possible. It has to be one of the strangest poetic concoctions ever undertaken, and it's a measure of the poet's confidence that he boldly proceeded with his over-the-top treatment of the war of Satan against the Heavenly Hosts in such detail -- a scene that receives the barest mention in a few scattered places in the Bible. After the quiet meal and contemplative conversation of Book 5, Book 6 is non-stop action. But the strange poetic mode might prod us to wonder: what is action?

Shackling Michael and Gabriel in Homeric garb is one thing -- after all, they are traditionally envisioned as warriors. But the escalation of the techniques of violence from swords to howitzers to mountains seems all Milton, and it risks falling into comic-book bathos as precipitously as Satan and his legions plummet into the gaping maw of hell at the book's end. Once again in the poem, a fall is staged, but here in full military regalia. With Marvell, we might want to ask: what was he thinking?


A few bits of fable and old song to have in mind for Book 6 would necessarily include Hesiod's battle of the Olympians and Titans from his Theogony, Homer's accounts of duels and combat in the Iliad, the chariot of Ezekiel 1 and 10, and the allusions to the war in heaven in Rev. 12. If others come to mind, be sure to share them as we make our way through this strangest of literary depictions of war.

From "Who saw?" to "I see"

This post is a bit long, and not finished. Just trying to tie together several threads that emerged from our close look at Book 5 of Paradise Lost this fall.

We noted the other day a contrast in the poetics of the book: on earth, the rich, full-blooded Keatsian bounty of Eve's table:

fruit of all kindes, in coate,
Rough, or smooth rin'd, or bearded husk, or shell
She gathers, Tribute large, and on the board
Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the Grape
She crushes, inoffensive moust, and meathes [ 345 ]
From many a berrie, and from sweet kernels prest
She tempers dulcet creams,

In heaven, the somewhat anodyne, music-box routine of the angels:

Forthwith from dance to sweet repast they turn [ 630 ]
Desirous, all in Circles as they stood,
Tables are set, and on a sudden pil'd
With Angels Food, and rubied Nectar flows
In Pearl, in Diamond, and massie Gold,
Fruit of delicious Vines, the growth of Heav'n.

On the level of sheer poetry, the book is already arguing that to be human is to share Satan's impatience with too much passive ease and involuntary order.

Book 5 looks at how we got from paradise to humanity -- the problem of the fall, and of knowledge -- from a variety of perspectives. As Professor Rogers has noted, the poem opens out to multiple models of the world that are not necessarily in agreement with each other:

As a poem, Paradise Lost places all of its divergent theories and all of its competing ideologies and visions of the way the world works -- places them all side by side on something like a level playing field, the playing field of the poetic line.

We've looked in particular at the complex imagery of stars and sun, dawn and eclipse interwoven throughout the book. With regard to the theme of mind, of knowing, they offer an entirely consistent model of human understanding as illumination: a power of seeing, clarifying, distinguishing:

know that in the Soule [ 100 ]
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief

This is science, and it's entirely rooted in nature and compatible with the classical model of education, of paideia in Plato's sense as a turn from darkness to light, shadow to truth.

So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves [ 480 ]
More aerie, last the bright consummate floure
Spirits odorous breathes: flours and thir fruit
Mans nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital Spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense, [ 485 ]
Fansie and understanding, whence the Soule
Reason receives,

Via the alchemy of conversation, or dialog, one communes, questions and consumes, digests, ruminates and refines in the manner of the chain of being:

one Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return, [ 470 ]
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu'd with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure, [ 475 ]
As neerer to him plac't or neerer tending
Each in thir several active Sphears assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportiond to each kind.

As Raphael's narrative continues, God, invisible in brightness, puts something new into this order -- his only begotten Son. The dawn of this Son, unlike the natural sun, is not something that simply rises out of the order of things. It is new, and it confounds the sense of reason that has been developing throughout the book. How can the Son be new if, as Word, He created the angels and all else? Is he the same as the Father or different? The new Son disturbs, runs counter to all that can be "understood" through natural light. It's going to take more than conversation, observation, and rumination to digest this new being.

At the same time, ignorance is not an option: all are under orders to actively acknowledge and obey this power, or be forever fallen:

him who disobeyes
Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordaind without redemption, without end. [ 615 ]

Satan will invoke reason in his resistance to this mandate:

Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchie over such as live by right [ 795 ]
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedome equal? or can introduce
Law and Edict on us, who without law
Erre not,

Satan is using all the resources of logic and rhetoric to persuade his followers. Only Abdiel remains unmoved, and intuitively goes to the question of origin, generation, primacy:

But to grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals Monarch Reigne:
Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count,
Or all Angelic Nature joind in one,
Equal to him begotten Son, by whom [ 835 ]
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev'n thee . . .

And it is this that Satan seizes upon, because he can summon reason to assist him:

who saw
When this creation was? rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?

If Abdiel can't provide empirical evidence, Satan suggests, then isn't it more likely, more"reasonable," to understand that we are self-generated?

We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power,

But as he immediately goes on to say, to understand this sort of origination is to invoke a model of the world as determined, a natural system guided by Fate:

when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

We are all sons, but natural offspring of an order that runs on its own, without any Maker. No one created the program, it just runs -- always has, always will, nothing new under the sun.

Abdiel wastes no time arguing the issue. Instead he responds to Satan's "Who saw?" with "I see":

I see thy fall
Determind,

For Abdiel, it's not reality that's determined, but Satan. By choosing to deny the Son, he denies the Father, and in choosing that, he commits to an understanding -- "reasonable," to be sure -- that removes all freedom, not from the world, but from himself. Abdiel doesn't just "see" this, he hears it:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall; [885]

Against the visual, differentiating, communal, scientific world of reasoned knowledge -- which Milton and Raphael both value as the pinnacle of human being -- this introduces another kind of knowing. Abdiel here is neither seeing Satan literally falling, nor hearing audible decrees. Yet he "sees" that Satan's passport to paradise has been cancelled, just as Adam and Eve, in a sudden revelation that has nothing to do with argument, evidence, or the light of the sun, will see that they are naked. The book ends:

And with retorted scorn his back he turn'd
On those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom'd.

Abdiel turns away from a world that is doom'd by its knowledge that actively ignores power or knowing that might lie beyond the sun.

For Milton, as for Dante, all that the human mind can learn from itself and about nature falls within this doom. This is the natural world of science, the seasons, the rising and falling sun, the arc of life, the inevitability of death.

In Dante's Purgatorio, what lies outside that system arrives with Beatrice in the garden at the top of the mount. Here in Book 5, what lies outside that system is what Satan rejects: the Son and the inexplicable obligation that is imposed with Him.

Abdiel rejects that rejection, and foretells the eclipse of Lucifer. It's interesting to note that untold millions of angels, including other Seraphim (Abdiel is "among the Seraphim" in Satan's retinue), are swayed by Satan.

Rogers argues with some detail that Paradise Lost is not coming down finally on any side of this. He says, for example:

it's not absolutely clear to me that Satan is wrong to claim that the angels are "self-rais'd / by their own quick'ning power." I think on some level this has to be seen as true, at least according to what we know of the dynamic processes in Milton's account of the monistic Creation.

More than ever, then, we as readers are Adam, hearing a story that seems to have justice on both sides. So it'll be worthwhile to look at the horrific destruction of the War in Heaven in Book 6, and at the Creation in Book 7, with these complications in mind.

High matter, warring spirits

The natural language and ordering of the world as found in Adam and Eve's morning orison, and in Raphael's description of the system of nature -- essentially a kind of heliotropism, all in keeping with the metaphorics of dawn in Book V -- seem to be jettisoned as the angel, in response to Adam's request, begins to tell the origin of the war in heaven.

High matter thou injoinst me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits;

It might be worth asking some straightforward questions about how Raphael/Milton choose to tell this story. For example, while it seems to narrate a tale with a clear beginning, a sharp conflict, and a definite ending (at the end of Book VI, which leads right into the opening scene of Book I), does it reflect the natural ordering of time, space, agency, etc. that belong to nature and science, or is this a different kind of telling? Does it obey what we normally think of as the dictates of Reason?

In the description of the angelic congregation (580 ff), much is made of hierarchies, degrees, flags, a kind of militant order, and geometry is invoked:

Thus when in Orbes
Of circuit inexpressible they stood, [ 595 ]
Orb within Orb

Any observations about this sort of mathematical ordering?

How does the angels' meal compare with that of Adam, Eve and Raphael?

Since all the angels were used to worshiping the Father, why does Satan begin to conceive malice when he hears the decree about the Son?

How odd is it to find God smiling, and the Son joining in his laughter at Satan?

How cogent is Satan's reasoning when he says:

rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;

How is Abdiel "seeing" when he says:

I see thy fall
Determind,

How does he hear/know of these decrees:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall;

Why does Abdiel leave the towers of Satan behind?

What other questions come to mind?

Dawn in P.L. 5

If we needed assurance that Paradise Lost breaks neatly into thirds, consider the opening of Book 9:

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblam'd:

The poem that opens with Satan landing in hell with a thud turns, in book 5, to a human state suffused with images of dawn, of flowers and fruits, of the primal world of humanity working the world and conversing with angels. There's a striking difference between Adam and Eve's work in the garden and the harsher world of Virgil's Georgics, where the varied labors of cultivation require unremitting effort as well as study. If labor vincit omnia in Virgil, it does so with the qualifier improbus, whose relevant meanings include restless, indomitable, persistent, as well as, connotatively, fierce and violent. One result of the Fall is that we fell into Virgil's world of labor improbus.


The opening of Book 5, the mid-section of the epic, puts enough stress on dawn that the reader would be well advised to consider the manifold chain of images that invariably comes with it: figures of a gradual (rosie steps) enlightening that entails an ever more detailed differentiation of the visible realm; initiation of the temporal realm of hours, of the approach of the sun and the train of things that derive from it, the clearing of mists, the creation of rain leading to the biosphere, where all things consume and are consumed. And Dawn is naturally accompanied by the fairest of stars (166).


Adam's paean to the sun (of this great World both Eye and Soule) greets the day, and Dawn is the "sure/pledge of day" (167-68). Before the hours run, at the very beginning, is Prime - it's worth noting how that word returns four times in Book 5. The first occurrence is when we hear Adam, calling to the still sleeping Eve, we lose the prime (21).


Lucifer precedes dawn, but dawn is followed by the advent of Raphael, who, to Adam

seems another Morn
Ris'n on mid-noon

The angel will speak to Adam and Eve of high things - the appointment of the Son as head, the revulsion of Satan, and the prophetic voice of Abdiel. At this point we are beyond the natural light of the sun, but it would be worthwhile to consider echoes of the first half of Book 5 as they occur in the second half -- Satan's speech to Beelzebub, or words such as "impair'd" and "entertain." Milton seems to not use a word without its interestingly resonating with other instances of the "same" word.

Dawn and primacy resonate throughout: Look, for example, how at the end of Book 5, Satan can't swallow the idea that he was made, authored. Parodying the voice out of the whirlwind of Job (parody is the ultimate in secondary tropism), Satan can't accept that he is not primordial:

That we were formd then saist thou? and the work
Of secondarie hands, by task transferd
From Father to his Son? strange point and new! [ 855 ]
Doctrin which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

The speed with which the angels intuit, decide and act is in marked contrast to the gradual taking in and development of knowledge, thought and feeling in Adam and Eve, or for that matter, in the reader of Paradise Lost. For Satan there is no logical argument or intuitable evidence that anything, including the Sun/Son, preexisted him. It is never going to dawn on him that he derives from something more primal than himself. The cogent logic of Book Five's images helps us see how and why no creature other than Lucifer could be the morning star.

Guarding the issue: Divine Children and their defenses

In a preceding post, ("The Air Jordan of English Poetry") we looked somewhat closely at an instance where a poetic hairball of allusions seems to have gone astray, and asked:

Has a bastardization of myths taken place here? ... The divine stories have wandered, or gotten torn from, from the original springs of inspired speech. They've gotten polluted, contaminated; there's no clear stream.

I don't want to convey the impression we're accusing Milton of nodding, although the blind poet might readily be forgiven if he did happen to slip on one or another bit of arcana. But moving from a description of the passage to an initial effort at interpretation, I wish to argue that Milton knows very well what he's doing here, and that the "mash-up" of gods, mortals and fabled gardens from various literary tributaries here suggests larger thematic and poetic concerns. After all, consider what's at stake: the stable continuity of divine and royal houses through the survival of the children.

Look at where in the text this happens: Milton is about to describe our and Satan's first view of our forebears in Paradise. Before getting to this, we go on a detour through four major ancient myths involving divine or royal children protected or unprotected by gods or kings: Proserpina, Daphne, Dionysus and the Ethiop line of Abassin Kings.

The series begins with the daughter of Demeter who was raped by Hades -- the god of the Underworld, brother of Zeus, took her, made her his queen, and later allowed Demeter to share her -- accounting for the birth of the diversity of seasons. Daphne was about to be raped by Apollo when she became a laurel. Dionysus, born of a woman then re-born of Zeus, had to be hidden from the wrath of Hera; of the Abassin kings, we have no myth, just the tale of their high secret garden at the headwaters of the Nile.

In other words, we are reminded at this crucial juncture of a world in which helpless children must be hidden, concealed, protected -- from other gods as well as from men and beastly predators. Dynasties are fragile, and children in this world are defenseless unless a wise and nurturing divinity, or a concealment or strategic defensive position, protect them from harm.

We've seen that Paradise is also a high place, protected by thorns and bramble, but the dangers here are not those of overpowering force. Adam and Eve are not defenseless babes. They are lordly, serene, and, though naked, fully capable of defending themselves, like David before Goliath, or Daniel in the lions' den. They are unexampled among pagan children of gods, since they were made to take care of themselves: sufficient to have stood, tho' free to fall. Angels surround them to ward off bad spirits, but bad spirits can and will gain access. The entire burden of defense is placed upon the children of God, because they have free will.

In light of Milton's portrait of the first couple, the preceding fables of hidden gods, including Ammon and Zeus himself, serve a key function. They offer a vision of a contrasting fallen world, in which even the highest deities and royal progeny are subject to the vicissitudes of force and desire. Only here in Paradise are found first-born children who are equipped to handle all comers. The ancient fables, Milton's web of allusions suggests, spoke of a world of mere nature, a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog and devil-take-the-hindmost world, in which the linear order of generations goes astray, bloodlines and families are muddled or disrupted, and nations share (or blend) gods as children share crayons. The series of allusions end in fruitless confusion when, at the very secluded (and very legendary) source of the Nile, we are driven to question the purity of our sources, the authority of their genesis. For Milton, so much depends upon beginnings. The passage turns out to concern the purity of the memory of origins and of poetic filiation as well as royal and biological generation.

Unlike the pagan fables, Milton's tale will sing of how the devil took the foremost. But not without the understanding that it didn't have to be that way.

BOOK IV - Satan in Eden

Here's a brief outline of Book IV - our first view of Eden, Paradise, and our human ancestors. (A full outline can be found here).


At last on terra firma, Milton can allow his sensuous powers of description and rich palette full play. But note that our entrance and gaze are complicated by the fact that we do not enter the garden on our own, but rather as voyeurs looking over Satan's shoulder as he furtively sneaks in.

A. Satan enters Eden [1-287] 

• . . .  1. His passionate speech to the Sun [32-] 
• . . .  2. He approaches Paradise [114-] 
• .  . . 3. He enters the Garden [172-287] 
• .  . . . . . . . a) He hides in the Tree of Life [172-] 
• .. . . . . . . . b) The Garden of Eden described [205-] 

B. Satan discovers Adam and Eve [288-539] 

• . . . .1. Satan sees the human couple [288-] 
• . . . .2. He expresses jealousy of them [358-] 
• . . .  3. Taking the forms of various animals, Satan eavesdrops on them [408-] 
• . . . .4. He plots their ruin [502-] 

C. Uriel warns Gabriel of Satan's presence [540-] 

D. Satan is banished from Paradise [598-1015] 

• . . . .1. Adam and Eve retire [598-775] 
• . . . . . . . .. a) Their discourse on the night sky [610-] 
• . . . . . .  . . b) They go to the bower and say evening prayers [689-] 
• . . . . .. . . . c) They lay together in conjugal love [736-] 

. . . .2. Satan is discovered [776-1015] 

• . . . . . . . . .a) Gabriel sends his angels to patrol the Garden [776-] 
• . . . . . . .  . b) Satan is found near the human couple and is apprehended [797-] 
• . . . . . .. . . c) Gabriel banishes him from Paradise [864-1015]

Light on, or at least in, Book III

Looking back at Book III, one could very well call it the "book of light." It begins with the invocation to light,

Bright effluence of bright essence increate

.and rises to a climax on the source of worldly light:

The golden Sun in splendor likest Heaven

This being Milton, there's more to light than first appears, and we're not bathed in the neutral, evenly distributed fluorescence of the observational laboratory of scientific reason. 

The invocation in Book III addresses primordial holy Light, not the sun. If we think of "light" as a spectrum from the highest holy light to the dimmest light of "darkness visible," we discover that at the high end, we see nothing: God's beam is blinding, even when in a cloud. And material light is not invariably revealing: Satan manages to hide his actual identity from the sharpest-eyed archangel, Uriel, precisely at the brightest spot in creation.

Clearly (no pun intended) Milton is trying to establish light's importance even as he suggests critical ways in which it can fall short. Light does not show us, our eye -- everything we need to see, to understand. We learn of God and the Son's plan to counter Satan's schemes via a difficult, tightly coiled verbal maze of an argument; nearly all of it deals with supersensory concerns, like Justice, Mercy, and Grace.

Light can also lead astray. Satan sees the ladder to Heaven, but is attracted like a moth to the Sun, a shiny new bauble.

All of which is to suggest that there's more to what is going on in Paradise Lost than meets the eye. The power of light to carry or to reveal knowledge, truth, is shown as compromised, less than all-sufficient, fallible. When Uriel describes creation, first comes an act of the word:

I saw when at his Word the formless Mass,
This worlds material mould, came to a heap:
Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar [ 710 ]
Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd;

One might ask, what was it that he "saw", and how could he see it? Only at the Word's "second bidding" did light cause the world to appear. We're dealing with something more - or other - than purely a solar system.

For the reader, it's perhaps illuminating to sense the reservation, the skeptical brackets, being put around light in the poem. This may resonate more when Lucifer seduces with his promise to enlighten Adam and Eve.

One tweets, the other doesn't

jillybobww: Hey ... lookee there. The word "Ides" is trending, and a certain pubescent vocal performer is not. Who says Twitter doesn't have cultcha?

This morning on Twitter, one of the hottest topics is "Ides." It seems everyone must take time from their day to tweet the fact that it was on this day 2054 years ago (give or take a bit of calendar tweaking) that a band of Roman conspirators ended the life of Julius Caesar (and two years later, deified him).

Twitter seems to partake of such short-lived conversational modes  - whatever is occurring in the moment becomes a hot topic, and, a moment later, belongs to oblivion.

One might call such linguistic environments "modes of the short now" - the preoccupation is of the instant, tending to the trivial, the ephemeral, the next fashionable thing, the hyped meme, or nano-meme. These stand in contrast with the long now, the now found in theological and philosophical notions of eternal consciousness, godlike, synchronic apprehension of all time, past and future, within one pervasive, perdurable, uninflected NOW.

I mention this just to briefly note that Milton does a stunning thing with these very different kinds of temporality in Book III. It's quite clever, and easy to summarize. The last we see of Satan is at the very end of Book II, when he's crawling out of the realm of Chaos like a waterbird from oil sludge, sees the pendant world hanging by a golden chain:

Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies. [ 1055 ]


Then comes Book III's soaring invocation to light, followed by the first appearance of God:


Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure Empyrean where he sits
High Thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye ...


And it's in this now that he spies Satan:


Coasting the wall of Heav'n on this side Night
In the dun Air sublime, and ready now
To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet


Satan's now is the now of finite movement, of step after step as he clambers out of the abyss and onto the backside of the universe. He's approaching, he's not yet landed. Look what Milton now does: he presents the dialog of God with the Son, in which is foreseen and foretold the outcome of Satan's efforts, Adam and Eve's fall, the resulting impact upon mankind, and the provision of a new plan that involves the son's volunteering to become the new Adam, and to die for man and for Justice, leading to an eventual resurrection, day of doom, transformation of the world in refining fire, and elevation of the Son as God/Man to eternal sanctity in a Paradise in which God is "all in all."


Milton has compressed the entire "Satan problem" and its solution, and with it the entirety of human history and God's sacred plan, into a few hundred lines, ending:

O unexampl'd love, [ 410 ]
Love no where to be found less then Divine!
Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Fathers praise disjoine. [ 415 ]


At which point the narrator takes up the thread from the moment that Satan "lights" on the world:


Mean while upon the firm opacous Globe
Of this round World, whose first convex divides
The luminous inferior Orbs, enclos'd [ 420 ]
From Chaos and th' inroad of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks: 

In the interval between Satan's approach and his actual alighting, Milton has pinched the Now of God, in which Satan's future, and that of mankind, are decided. Indeed, a future is literally provided for humanity: an alternative to the now of finitude and Death. The architecture of Milton's narrative dramatically gives us two kinds of time, two kinds of now. Satan tweets; Providence...provides.

Waking to interpretation

Gerry forwarded two notes from a Finnegans Wake List, which draw on the difficulties of grappling with the Wake to address the larger question of how to read literature:

1. (From Jack Kolb) March 11, 2010
Finnegans Wake, Chop Suey

On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun "Work in Progress," the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later: "Yesterday I wrote two pages -- the first I have written since the final "Yes" of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. . . ." Though increasingly plagued by eye problems -- ten operations, and counting -- Joyce's lifestyle had improved from the Ulysses years, thanks to Weaver's continued support, and money given by Sylvia Beach against future royalties. He and his wife, Nora, were able to get new clothes, a new flat, even new teeth: "The dentist is to make me a new set for nothing," wrote Joyce to Miss Weaver, "as with this one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style of writing) yawn. . . ."

Nora was not fond of her husband's style of writing, and not usually content with a yawn. When she discovered that he was "on another book again," just a year after the misery of Ulysses, she asked her husband if, instead of "that chop suey you're writing," he might not try "sensible books that people can understand." Although she did not tighten her purse, Weaver was also unimpressed by those sections of "Work in Progress" which Joyce sent her, and by his explanation that he was attempting to go beyond "wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot":

I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language systems. It seems to me you are wasting your
genius.

Ezra Pound agreed with her -- "nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization" -- but Samuel Beckett did not:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.


2. (From Richard Stack:) Many thanks to Jack for bringing this remarkable sentence from Beckett to light:

"You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself."

Over the past year I have returned to teaching, and have become increasingly convinced of the truth of this view. My students have great difficulty reading poetry, and the reason, I have come to believe, is not that they read badly, but too "well", that is, too fluently, too habitually. Confronted by the difficulty of the poetic text, it is their fluency as everyday readers which becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle.

They seem to find rereading, pondering, working through a difficult text almost impossible to imagine doing. I have found myself trying to get them to imagine the text as great food - something to be chewed, savored, something which sets the mouth to work:

while the nigh thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw;

(Coleridge Frost at Midnight)

rather than something to be merely "understood".

By the same token, I have found that the text of the Wake - or at least the handful of bits I know well - is best approached in the same sort of manner, not as something to be "understood" but rather as a wonderful piece of "music, something to be rehearsed, played, enjoyed, learnt by heart perhaps. I performed Anna Livia once, and by the time I knew it by heart I could not remember what it was that was supposed to be so difficult about it.

==

Can we relate their discussion to Milton, and more generally, to our experience of classic works? Below is a rudimentary first stab:

 Beckett's description, marvelous as it is, evokes the idea of the poem as end in itself - not unlike the tradition of "art for art's sake," which, since Kant, has brought to the fore the notion that art (poetry, sculpture, painting etc.) need not be about something - need not be burdened with a message that aims to inform, persuade, teach, or inspire. In Kant's memorable formulation in the Critique of Judgment, pure art stems from an activity that can be described as "purposiveness without purpose."

The idea of the art object as "autotelic" -- from the Greek, telos, cause or end -- is particularly associated with Modernism. In earlier periods, art was conceived to serve various purposes, and to bear various messages. For Aristotle, tragedy was a mode of medicine, a purgation of civic ills; for the Greeks, Homer was the teacher of civilization; for Lucretius, whose poems intended to teach the findings of science, his poetry was also a mode of medicine, in which beauty made more palatable the bitter truth:

Lucretius compares his work in this poem to that of a doctor healing a child: just as the doctor may put honey on the rim of a cup containing bitter wormwood (most likely Absinth Wormwood) believed to have healing properties, the patient is "tricked" into accepting something beneficial but difficult to swallow ... WP

The Old Testament similarly stages scenes that provoke, move, and entertain, but also dramatize the act of interpretation -- as when Joseph's life turns upon dreams and his explication of them, or when David, falling for Nathan's parable, discovers that the story he's been hearing works on a different level, and carries a potent bit of news aimed directly at himself.

These are texts that don't just invite interpretation; they incorporate acts of interpretation into their narratives. They demand it.

Where does Milton stand (or, fall) along this spectrum? Insofar as his stated aim is "to justify the ways of God to man," he's declaring his purpose. Yet the poem is also full of rich sound, structural complexity, allusive richness, varied levels of style, musicality, and rhythm. It's difficult to quickly absorb, or to read "too habitually." These lines too are "to be chewed, savored, something which sets the mouth to work."

We are considering the artistic meaning of Milton's poem, but what about art in Paradise Lost? One might well ask, as we join Satan on the backside of the Universe, what purpose is served by the glorious art of the gate of heaven:

 farr distant he descries
Ascending by degrees magnificent
Up to the wall of Heaven a Structure high,
At top whereof, but farr more rich appeer'd
The work as of a Kingly Palace Gate [ 505 ]
With Frontispice of Diamond and Gold
Imbellisht, thick with sparkling orient Gemmes
The Portal shon, inimitable on Earth
By Model, or by shading Pencil drawn. P.L. III

Milton evokes a rare image of a human artist making art in order to deny that what he's describing could be imitated; (interestingly, Dante also gives us a vignette of himself writing his poem at the very end of Purgatory -- and running out of space -- before he ascends to Il Paradiso) -- yet in the next "breath," we're given the vision of Jacob:

The Stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw [ 510 ]
Angels ascending and descending, bands
Of Guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz,
Dreaming by night under the open Skie,
And waking cri'd, This is the Gate of Heav'n [ 515 ]


From the moment of seemingly pure, disinterested aesthetic beauty, the scene has shifted to something far more disturbing, even terrifying: the moment in Genesis 28 when Jacob wakes to the  shock of the meaning of his dream:

16	And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.
17	And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful  (Grk: φοβερός; Latin: terribilis) is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

It's worthwhile remembering Jacob's terror -- at the advent of his dream's meaning -- as we observe Satan's apparent lack of interest at the foot of the ladder, despite the fact that

Each Stair mysteriously was meant, 

P.L. III.437-39

But in his way lights on the barren Plaines

Of Sericana, where Chineses drive

With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light:

source: Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4

see also, JSTOR.

Paradise Lost II: The Movie

The marketing of the Inferno as a video game made me wonder how Milton's epic might fare. Which led to thinking about Book II of Paradise Lost visually. Apart from the spectacular spaces and places -- the ocean of confusion, anarchie and eldest Night outside the gates of hell, the pavilion of Chaos and more -- there's Milton's cinematic use of close ups, middle shots, pans, and long shots.

The council scene (1-505) consists of tight head shots of each speaker in turn. After the meeting breaks up, the narrator pulls back to stage Satan's triumphant exit (506 - 520), then, via the blare of the "sounding Alchymie" the narrator pulls back to pan the fallen angels at their liberal pursuits (521 - 628). (One notes that there is nothing we normally associate with "evil" here - they joust, play, discuss philosophy, sing - indeed, they are probably partaking of the same pleasures they once enjoyed in Heaven.)


The long description of their exercises in killing time until Satan's return has its own structure. From mid-shots of Hell's Angels at play the narrative pulls back and up, following those who choose to explore their new homeland, beginning at 570:


     Another part in Squadrons and gross Bands,
     On bold adventure to discover wide
     That dismal world, if any Clime perhaps
     Might yield them easier habitation


The "camera" surveys the Angels surveying their world, and the farther they go, to their dismay, the grimmer, more inhospitable and monstrous, it becomes:


     Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
     Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, [ 625 ]
     Abominable, inutterable, and worse
     Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd,
     Gorgons and Hydra's, and Chimera's dire.


The narrative then moves back to a middle shot of Satan making his way to the gates of hell -- where the confrontation with Sin and Death will call for more close-ups as well as dramatic camera angles.


Milton's cinematic effects here produce a remarkable variety. From the very first line of Book II, that superb establishing shot:


HIgh on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat,


 to "dire," the narrative is at pains to give us a pretty firm idea of where the characters are, and where we observers stand in relation to them. But when Satan stands 


    on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
    Pondering his Voyage: 


he "spurns the ground" to waft into a vast abyss which defies stable point of view, and standard ideas about motion, direction, space. We, following along, will find no firm ground for a while -- and will have every right to feel confused.

New points of view

The Council scene in Book II leaves the impression that all the "rational options" have been presented, discussed, and decided upon. The joint decision is to suspend any final decision while Satan makes a solo voyage from hell through Chaos and old Night to the backside of the new, pendant world, and on to the Sun.

Each stop in his journey brings new characters who raise questions about tone and perspective, and pose interpretive difficulties. How does Sin, the dual figure, woman and serpent, complete with barking hellhounds, relate to what is fundamentally a theological concept? How are we to take the new elements (and back-story) of the plot, e.g. the encounter between Satan, Sin, and Death? What do the placement of Chaos and Satan's scene there say about the universe, the setting in which this whole drama unfolds, and about Satan himself? Why does the fate of the demons appear to hang upon the outcome of Satan's "success?"

1688 folio edition

After reading Book II's narrative of Satan's odyssey, it's worth taking a look at the Devil's own account of the same in Book X as he regales the demons upon his return.

Satanic promises, corrosive ironies, and final judgment

At the end of Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton made it clear that hell's powers were not all democratically equal - there were the pygmy masses, and the great princes and potentates who are about to meet in secret conclave at the opening of Paradise Lost II.

Satan's speech to the council, then, is the occasion for frank and open consultation -- he's talking to his peers -- at least that is the understanding -- and there's no need for spin, social media tweaking, or talking points:  he's speaking in confidence as he solicits his advisors' advice. It's a scene that echoes the great council scenes of the Iliad and Odyssey,  the Aeneid, the Book of Samuel, and more. It's a moment of crisis that's going to require the collective wisdom of the best and the brightest to forge a way forward, when all around seems shrouded in darkness and despair. Satan begins:

Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heav'n,
For since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigor, though opprest and fall'n,
I give not Heav'n for lost. From this descent
Celestial vertues rising, will appear [ 15 ]
More glorious and more dread then from no fall,
And trust themselves to fear no second fate:

Does Satan drink his own swill? At what point does irony here begin and end? On an initial level, we have Satan as pitchman, rallying his inner circle. "I give not Heav'n for lost" - easy to say, but what is this other than sheer marketing bravado - "stick with me, I've only begun to fight," etc. It's not long before Satan drops this pretense of regaining Heaven in favor of a scheme to drag mankind to hell.

Then there's the satanic version of the felix culpa, the fortunate fall (as we talked about last time) -- from descent, failure, disaster, come "celestial virtues" -- but from where, one might deflatingly inquire -- hell? And of course these virtues "will appear more glorious and more dread" -- enabling Satan to justify his sound bite by claiming that he's talking about appearance, which will lamentably but quite predictably fall somewhat short of the reality. Anyone for a spot of triumphalism?

Thanks to a still further turn of the screw, the alleged higher destiny of the demons resulting from the fall will in fact become the literal truth revealed to Christian interpreters of the Old and New Testaments as sacred history: the tragic fall of man, the loss of Eden, ends in a comedic reversal. The messiah's sacrificial act of redemption opens eternal life to the race of men, who had been merely destined for earthly happiness until Adam and Eve fell, occasioning the possibility that "one greater man restore us. . .."

Packed into Satan's address, then, is bald lie, coupled with subler marlarkey about a far-fetched promise, interlarded with a kind of bowdlerized prefiguration of literal scriptural truth, an exact template of the core of Christian faith, hope and (literally far-fetched) redemptive promise. A diabolical compounding of truth and lie indeed. In fact Satan's address at the opening of Book II is almost a parodic inversion of the opening lines of Book I, which encapsulate in miniature the beginning, middle and end of sacred history:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, 

Where do the ironic reversals end? Is Satan doomed to enact an absurd parody of the Messiah? Or will Satan's master narrative of rising higher for having so deeply fallen act as a corrosive poison, silently seeping into the foundational core of Christianity? Does scripture voice the authority to reduce Satan, his legions and all the countless evils of life to elfin figments of pygmy size? Who will judge where the ironies begin or end -- where, in point of fact, does anything end in the porous cosmos Milton gives us? Who will be on hand to judge these questions if not Milton's reader? Felix culpa indeed.