Milton's use of opposing forces to create drama in Paradise Lost

¶ … Meeting of Opposites

John Milton's world in Paradise Lost is God's world -- a world that is highly ordered, fundamentally hierarchical and relentlessly dualistic. It is a world in which everything has a pair, an opposite, a mirror image. This is not a world of subtle differences and tones of gray. This is a world -- a universe -- in which there is a constant balancing of opposites that results in a series of judgments about who is right and who shall be left behind. This constant meeting up of opposites -- Gabriel and Satan, God and Adam, Adam and Eve, Eve and the Serpent -- creates the atmosphere of metaphysical violence that runs throughout the epic, that crackles through the poem like lightning flickering around the edges of a storm.

This tension never resolves, for Milton is not interested in giving us a tidy, happy ending. Rather, he is determined to give us a vision of the universe as he believes it to actually be: A cauldron in which the good and holy are always being tested -- and always overcoming -- its dark cousins . And, of course, even were Milton to want to give us a tidier ending, he is compelling to repeat the story that the Bible presents us with.

One of the most compelling aspects of the epic to me is the level of drama that Milton is able to conjure given that so very little actually happens in the poem. I believe that this sense of drama, the sense that we have as readers of pushing ever forward through the very fabric of the universe arises, through Milton's constant pairing of opposites. It is possible to read the epic as if it were a sort of divinely inspired version of War or other similar simple card games in which each player slaps down a card, only to be answered by another player and another card.

Yet we are caught up in the story as if we did not know what the ending would be is a testament to Milton's skill as a writer. Like reading Romeo and Juliet and hoping each time for a happy ending, we read Paradise Lost and hope this time to leave Adam and Eve happily munching anything-but-apples in the Garden of Eden.

Milton, I realize, might not have appreciated this analysis of his epic as a sort of metaphysical game of chicken, for he intentionally did not write a saga full of overt heroism. He did not want to write about evil and goodness fighting with literal armaments on a battlefield because he wanted his readers to be more thoughtful about the moral issues involved rather than simply listening like small children to a martial epic like The Iliad. Paradise Lost is more than anything else a series of conversations (and thus in many ways reflects classical traditions of discourse as the chief way to educate others). We hear what Milton's characters think as well as what they say.

When this happens -- when opposing characters come together to talk with each other -- we are witness to proselytizing. We become witness to a series of debates that illuminate the nature of God and goodness. In this work, beings speak with each continually, and as we watch they learn (or refuse to learn) the truth. And so -- or so Milton hoped -- we would each in turn learn the truth ourselves.

A Muse Higher Than the Muses

Milton's poem owes a great deal to the classical writers and their poetic and narrative traditions. He establishes this connection to the classical world throughout the first book initially by appealing to his Muse. And yet, even as we are pulled back into the classical world in which the Muses spoke to mortals to inspire them to greatness, Milton reminds us that his Muse is far greater than those other ones, for his Muse is no other than the Holy Spirit. Thus Milton's story is greater by far than any written by even the greatest of Greek and Roman writers because they were merely pagans, wooed by the feminine (and therefore no doubt treacherous) Muses of the ancient world.

This is the first fundamental opposition that Milton sets up for his readers. There are two kinds of stories, Milton tells us. There are those of the pagan world that, while they may be beautiful and may call out to us, are forever limited because they are divorced in fundamental ways from the Truth. And then there are stories that only a man of faith like Milton can tell us, stories that are inspired by God, stories that will endure forever. It is hard not to hear in this something very much like an overweening sense of pride -- not a very Christan feeling. But this runs throughout the poem, this sense that Milton has of being in possession of the most important of truths. Which raises an important question: When does surety in one's faith become arrogance?

Milton presents us in Book One with a series of fallen gods -- those whose stories will not endure as they increasingly eclipsed by the Christian God.. Milton's description of them is a continuation of this initial opposition that he has established, the difference between the pagan and Christian (and more specifically between the pagan and Protestant) world. This is how Milton describes the dead pagan gods to us:

And Devils to Adore for Deities: Then were they known to men by various Names, And various Idols through the Heathen World. Say, Muse, thir Names then known, who first, who last, Rous'd from the slumber, on that fiery Couch, At thir great Emperors call, as next in worth-Came singly where he stood on the bare strand, While the promiscuous croud stood yet aloof? [ 380 ]?The chief were those who from the Pit of Hell-Roaming to seek thir prey on earth, durst fix-Thir Seats long after next the Seat of God, Thir Altars by his Altar, Gods ador'd-Among the Nations round, and durst abide [ 385 ]?Jehovah thundring out of Sion, thron'd-Between the Cherubim yea, often plac'd-Within his Sanctuary it self thir Shrines, Abominations; and with cursed things

(Book One, lines 373-389)

This is an important passage for it serves three separate functions for Milton. First, it helps him near the beginning of the epic establish his dualistic world and -- secondly -- it furthers his message that this dualism specifically divides the world into realms in which all things in his Christian world of light are contrasted with other, darker images. As he builds up evidence as to the way in which the world is divided into -- as it were -- the lambs and the goats, he is also raising the overall tension. By the time that we meet Adam and Eve, with whom we identify as the protagonists, the level of discord and discontinuity between the forces of darkness and light has risen to the point that it is almost unbearable -- at least for us, the readers. Adam and Eve, however, remain in ignorance both of their own fate and of the more general sense of doom.

Finally, the passage cited above serves as a reminder that transformation is possible. For this is an important element of Milton's universe: The world is divided into darkness and light -- but the position of any being (except for God) can shift from one of these realms to the other. Indeed, the shifting of beings from one side of the bright line that lies between goodness (and God) and evil is the entire action of the epic. No one -- no being divine, semi-divine, or mortal -- can straddle the line, But they can change sides.

A Bright (Broken) Line

It might seem that the theme of potential transformation (in which entities can change their allegiance from good to evil or evil to good any number of times) might undermine Milton's vision of a dualistic universe, for a world in which things are either on the side of God or not (and especially a world as hierarchically structured as is Milton's) might seem to be one that is highly static. But Milton's vision of dualism and his insistence on the necessity of allowing for transformation both arise from his own understanding of Christianity. For his world is one in which there must be an unequivocal difference between good and evil. And yet it is also a world in which there must be the constant possibility of redemption, for if there is not the possibility of shifting from the darkness to the light then the God whom he worships would not be the merciful God of his understanding.

We see one of Milton's most masterful expositions of the intersection of dualism and mutability in the poet's description of Satan when he flies out of the lake where he has been imprisoned and suffering. After his own departure this fallen Prince of Light calls upon the other fallen angels to gather with him. As the other demons obey Lucifer's call, Milton describes how these are false gods, who were once worshiped but now have been transformed into terrible beings -- such as Moloch, once worshiped as a god, now a devil who demands human sacrifice. This is the kind of transformation that Milton uses to tell his story: This is an archetypal story of how the lightness is made dark. His description of the diminishing of once-great and powerful (and beneficent) gods and their transmutation into their own opposites provides us with an epistemological microcosm of Milton's world. (Milton would no doubt argue that this is also a microcosm of God's world.)

Whose Story?

One of the most important structural aspects of the poem is that as we move through it we shift our connection to the characters. The point of perspective does not shift, or not exactly, for we always hear the story through the narrator's voice. But as different characters take center-stage in the story, we feel our own sense of not quite allegiance but identification shift. Milton takes nearly one quarter of the epic to tell us the story of Satan and it feels impossible not to identify with him in some measure. And even although we know this story, even though we know who is good and who is evil and where this is all heading, as we hear Milton's description of Lucifer's strength and even his magnificence (for he is wondrous, if dark) we find ourselves sympathizing with Lucifer.

The story for the first several books is Lucifer's story, or it seems as if it might be (Forsyth 16). For Milton makes it clear the strength that Lucifer has gained in his fall and how naive Adam and Eve are. As we read through the first four books, as we read of Satan's stratagems and, we are made viscerally aware of the ways in which Eve and Adam will be dragged across the line into the world of darkness with Lucifer, of how they have been transformed. And of how much energy the original humans will need to turn themselves back to the life (Fish 71). As we read Milton's version of this well-known story we understand the choice that each of us has to turn to the darkness or the light.

Book Four, lines 416-429

Adam will later acknowledge that their expulsion from Eden is something of a lucky fault, which is Milton's reminder to the reader that it is possible to turn from one pole to the other. This reconsideration on Adam's part of the meaning of humanity's mortality arises not from a contrasting of good and evil, for the pair outside of the garden are not evil but simply lost. So when Milton has Adam reflect that perhaps losing paradise was good for the two humans he is reminding us that Adam and Eve have returned to the side of God, who never, of course, abandoned them as they abandoned him.

One of the most fascinating symbols in Book Four -- and I think of the entire epic -- is that Satan, when he enters the garden and hides from Adam and Eve, disguises himself as a cormorant. I think that Milton chooses this disguise for Satan in part because cormorants are large, dark birds, and Milton wants to emphasize the fact that Satan is the same kind of massive, dark, and lurking presence that these birds embody. But I believe that Milton also chooses this particular avatar for Satan because cormorants are ambiguous creatures. Seabirds, they belong to both the water and the land, or the water and the sky. They posses in themselves their own duality, which for Milton makes them inherently suspect. In his world, things are either one thing or another and cormorants are neither fish nor fowl (nor good red herring, to complete the trope). Anything that contains both sides of a dualistic equation in such a perfect balance must be fundamentally untrustworthy (Kelly 135).

Unintentional Ambiguity?

In a rather different vein, the snake is an ambiguous figure, although Milton may not have intended it to be so, for in his version (and this was generally true in his era) the snake is entirely, well, satanized. It is a symbol of evil, the instrument by which humans are turned to the darkness. But there are echoes within Christian tradition of the snake as a much more ambivalent figure. It is designated as one of the unclean animals in the Old Testament and is one of the plagues that God sends against an erring humanity.

But there is also the example of the brazen serpent that God requires Moses to make to cure those who were bitten by the snakes. Thus we are presented in the Old Testament with the image of snake as both killer (for it helps to force Adam and Eve from the garden and so into the perils of mortality) and as savior. (The bishop's crook is a derivation of the shape of this brazen serpent.)

In Arabic, the words for "snake," "life," and "teaching" are all related to the name of Eve -- the biblical version of the Goddess with her serpent form, who gave the food of enlightenment to the first many Of course, in the Bible both Eve and her serpent were much diabolized; but Gnostic sects of the early Christian era retained some of the older ideas about their collaboration concerning the fruit of knowledge. Some sects worshiped the snake as a benevolent Female Spiritual Principle, who taught Adam and Eve what they needed to know about God's duplicity... The Gnostics honored Eve and the serpent for providing the essential knowledge that made human beings human (Walker 527).

Milton seems to reject entirely this more beneficent version of the serpent, and it seems likely that his readers would have done so as well, given the orthodoxy of the time. But for us, as postmodern readers from the twenty-first century, we can perhaps better appreciate the complexity of the symbol of the snake (Herman 181).

Concluding Ambiguities

One of the great questions in the reading of any important piece of literature (and, I suppose, of any trivial as well) is to what extent should we try to read and appreciate a work from the perspective of its author and his or her moment in history or from our own time and frame of reference -- or if we should try to hold both interpretations simultaneously. I have tried to do this latest with Paradise Lost. Milton's world is very different from my own: It is far simpler in many ways. Our own time (less driven in general by faith) is shaded more in grays than striated in black and white. I believe that I am more likely to see characters as ambiguous and ambivalent, not so much capable of (or inclined to) shift from the darkness to the light or the reverse but to embrace both at the same time. Viewed from this perspective, I find Eve and the snake to be the most interesting characters in the poem (and in the story of Genesis).

I have always felt that Eve was the heroine of the story of Genesis rather than its villain, for (as noted above) she provides the mechanism through which we become fully human. Looked at from a viewpoint that Milton would no doubt find heretical, I would argue that if we consider humanity as we are when God is finished with us (in the story of Genesis), then we are still half-made, an incomplete and hardly satisfactory product (Dobranski and Rumrich 49). And this is true from both a Christian and a secular viewpoint. If humans are simply obedient to every dictum of God, then there is no free will and no possibility of true faith or salvation, and so Eve brings into possibility the potential for true faith.

And if we view the issue from a secular viewpoint, then it is Eve who grants us one of our most essential human qualities: That of our curiosity and our search for knowledge. Eve -- and with her the snake -- is a redemptive figure, not a condemnatory one. That this interpretation should have been so soundly rejected in the post-Augustinian church demonstrates both its misogyny as well as the kind of dualistic thinking that pervades Milton as well.