Milton's Satan, lecture by Professor Paul Stevens

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Dr9JnBGJk.

  • Stevens is very engaging and funny, has some good jabs at milton, jabs at CS Lewis, “the Son is no wanker!”
  • Miltonists envious of Shakespeare. Without Milton, no American revolution, no science fiction!
  • works through historic phases of Satan’s reception. 1st, romantic Satan over 18th century; 2nd, 20th century, academic satan; 3rd, “Milton’s Satan” (this seems to be Stevens’ angle, that we can get at Milton’s actual Satan without the encumbrances of prevoius scholarly biases.
  • Starts as a mystery: how did we come to live in this world of death? The answer starts out as clearly Biblical: Satan. Problem is that Milton’s Satan isn’t very biblical.
  • Dryden, who worked with Milton as young man in Cromwell’s gov, says “we have no chance to produce a poem like this”. Another colleague, Marvel, wonders whether he would “ruin the sacred truths” in his representation of Satan. Another early reader, John Beale, royalist country parson, writes a few years after M’s death, “M is the only decent poet the puritans ever produced” but “no man who fears god can endure to read it or survive it without a poisonous impression”. As soon as Satan starts speaking, you have a problem, not biblical; not just sympathetic, also indomitable, creative. By the time we get to romantic century, “you cannot pick up a novel without someone who sounds like Satan”, he appears everywhere. Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliffe; Ivahoe’s de Bois-Guilbert; Fennymore COoper’s last of the Mohicans, Magwar; Byronic hero, even Prince’s personality reminds Stevens of Satan. Haswick in 1812, Satan most heroic, lofty hero says Satan has “no physical deformity” which is obviously wrong, opening image is of Satan as great chaos monster lying on burning lake, the beast from revelation. When you enter book 1, you enter the mind of Satan, allusion to midsummer nights dream. but not till end of 19th century, achievements of the scholars is to have dismantled or radically qualified our perception of Satan. CS Lewis, Stanley Fish. When you look extremely closely, in fact pace Haswick, the poem is not about Satan at all. There are 3 epic poems, nestled within each other. First is Satan’s great colonial venture; real epic, 2nd, begins in book 3, heroic figure there is son of God, culminating in books 11 and 12 arc of redemption. Third epic is nestled in the middle, means by which God begins the process of regeneration, Raphael’s story, how God will defend man from Satan.
  • Joseph Summers and Ann Ferry anticipate Fish’s work: what is happening with Satan is not that he is a hero, but that Milton is seducing, testing you, teaching you by intangling. You are being put on your mettle in the 1st two books. Reading is an active critical process, requires work and thought, must read PL like scripture, reading is a diving process, we receive God’s grace, sola scriptura from M’s protestantism. Not just Fish’s argument, but the academic orthodoxy. Aeriopagitica: good and evil grow up together, knowledge of good interwoven with evil can hardly be discerned–“what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil”. This is why reading Spenser is more valuable than reading philosophy/Aquinas, you must experience it, go through it. We have two weapons: God-given reason, and revelation. So when Satan says he fearless endangered the perpetual lord, you must understand he is bluffing (Fish also notes that Satan avoids “eternal” in favour of “perpetual”). Rebelling against your creator is rebelling against your very being, against your power to rebel. The Satanic position is illogical; but when Satan says “evil be thou my good” this is a quote from Isaiah 5, “woe unto them that call evil good and good evil… that are wise in their own eyes”. Satan shaking god’s throne is also a fantasy, Isaiah 14. “The scriptural echo corrects the reading… our reason in tandem with the book of revelation.” - Blake says “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it” but Stevens says the inverse is true, Satan is of God’s party without knowing it.
  • That is the formidible academic orthodoxy. Fish articulate this in 1967, still reigns supreme. The problem though is that the M from the academic account is someone you just don’t recognize in the masses of prose and books. The academic M is a know-all figure, controlling you, manipulating you into thinking Satan is good and laughing at you. 2nd problem is it “tends to encourage a loss of focus on what exactly does evil mean.” Milton’s Satan, according to Stevens, is neither of these. Stevens connects evil with Auschwitz, with Arendt’s banality of evil: that Eichmann was an ordinary man, not the devil, who got caught up in a vast bureaucratic machine that just happened to be dedicated to industrial slaughter. You could say “the instrumentalism of his occupation was blinding him” but Stevens is more interested in how his life got locked into a pattern, his life had meaning when he joined the Nazi narrative, “the wind had blown him into history”. Satan has a number of grand stories, his struggle with God, he briefly steps out in book 4, but is enmeshed in his stories. Unlike these, Milton was able to step outside: Satan is Milton analyzing himself. People said it was Charles I, or later that it was Cromwell. But Stevens maintains it is Milton admitting his failures and culpability; M was wedded to a great national narrative, “England will become a new Rome in the West”, image most powerfully articulated in Aeriopagitica. The danger is the narrative can become a solipsism, as it did for Satan and Eichmann. M is neither of them of course, but he does have blood on his hands: encouraging English retribution against Irish: if someone has slain your family, you have the right to slay their family. Also his advocation of regicide. Stevens cites some really brutal texts advocating violence even against children. “Myself am hell” Milton is guilt-ridden and conflicted at the point of PL. Helen Gardner: Satan is not biblical, but more renaissance drama Faustus, Iago, Macbeth. PL’s Satan “is certainly about Milton. MIlton was of the devil’s party. He knew it and despised himself for it… He knew and represented it and pulled it out so we can see it”, M stepping outside the grand narrative. The virtues of Satan are not lost, the are rewritten into the Son, not entirely taking authority, in book 3 the Son challenges the Father, “there has to be mercy”. Milton’s Satan, when read in terms of Milton’s life, doesn’t obliterate the romantic or academic Satan, but you get a new dimension.