Satan's Motives for Rebelling Against God in Milton's 'Paradise Lost', Papers of English Language

Download Satan's Motives for Rebelling Against God in Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and more Papers English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Cringing before the Lord: Milton’s Satan, Samuel Johnson and the Anxiety of Worship Andrew Barnaby / University of Vermont In between on Sunday afternoons we had to study the Westminster Shorter Catechism for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have. —Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It It is too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist; that discovery is called the Fall of Man. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” The two epigraphs offered here are intended to mark out, in an admittedly jagged way, a foundational debate within Judeo-Christian thought over the nature and purpose of existence. For Norman Maclean in his moving novella, A River Runs Through It, the answer to the question, “what is the chief end of man,” is as simple as it is satisfying: we exist “to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” What is not so simple or satisfying for him is why his brother, Paul, so blessed by God—so filled with grace and beauty—in certain areas of his life is so utterly devoid of those in other areas. “Beaten to death by the butt end of a revolver,” Paul Maclean remains forever a mystery to Norman, and in the end he can find no satisfying answers to his more persistent, and more troubling, questions: “what happened” to his beloved younger brother “and why?” Still, for Norman this is a mystery of the human heart, not a theological question. It is not a question that fundamentally challenges his faith in God’s ultimate goodness (a faith powerfully rediscovered in the closing cadences of the novella) or forces him to confront the possibility that a life dedicated to the glorification of God may be problematic. Emerson’s much more cryptic assertion, by contrast, seems quite deliberate in its intention to trouble us. Emerson is not so much interested in answering the “why” of 2 existence, as though that question were part of some traditional catechism, the “What is the chief end of man?” question posed by Maclean’s Presbyterian-minister father to his two young sons. Rather, he is concerned with the bare fact of existence itself—“the discovery we have made that we exist”—even as it leaves mysterious his unstated premises: there can be a time in human life before such a discovery; we can somehow exist without knowing that we do. Maclean is certainly interested in the actual content of the answer to his father’s question: the answer is primarily informational. At the same time, that information has ethical and emotional resonances. Maclean seems to believe that to recognize the true nature of our existence is to participate in it more fully, and that participatory knowledge is redemptive: we fulfill our “chief end” in part by acknowledging what it is. Like Maclean, Emerson is at least as interested in the process of coming to know (“the discovery we have made”) as he is in the content of that knowledge (“that we exist”). But unlike Maclean, Emerson views the process of coming to knowledge as tragic, simultaneous as it is with the “Fall of Man.” Of course, Maclean tells a tragic story as well: how a man falls off the path of grace and beauty. But Emerson poses something grander and more encompassing, a tragic condition inseparable from existence itself. If Emerson were to answer the question posed by Maclean’s father we might expect to be told that our “chief end” is to discover the irremediably fallen condition of existence itself. Whatever the “Fall of Man” is for Emerson, it is something that touches all of us just because we exist; or perhaps it touches all of us to the extent that we are willing and able to contemplate the fact of existence. To see existence as it is—to come to know “that we exist”—is, for Emerson, to alienate ourselves from our own false consciousness 5 Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed, That were ignominy and shame beneath This downfall. (1.111-16) As we know, of course, the poem will problematize the heroic, republican Satan in a number of ways. One of the most intriguing of these, if not the most obvious, comes in the only prelapsarian portrait we get of Satan, the unexpected image provided by Gabriel at the end of Book 4: And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem Patron of liberty, who more then thou Once fawn’d, and cring’d, and servilely ador’d Heav’ns awful Monarch? (4.957-60) Brief as it is, Gabriel’s account is certainly surprising, for it leads us to believe that, at some unspecified point in the past, Satan was not particularly bothered by God’s tyranny. And even if, as we suspect, Satan is lying in Book 1 about his republican sentiments, we still need to ask what motivates his shift from cringing adorer of God to self-proclaimed rebel against a tyrant or, what seems more likely, to one who wants to replace God and become the grand tyrant himself. We might pause for a moment to notice the rhetorical design of Gabriel’s lines (and in a moment we will look at another instance of this peculiarity of Miltonic poetics, where Satan’s motives for rebelling are again on display). Gabriel’s lines are structured to achieve their chief effect—on the reader rather than on Satan—by surprising us. The lines here lead us to expect that Gabriel’s description of the prelapsarian Satan will culminate in an explanation of just what Gabriel means by calling Satan a hypocrite. 6 More specifically, we expect that the accusation of hypocrisy—which involves Satan’s representing himself as “Patron of liberty”—will lead to Gabriel’s full portrait of Satan’s motive for rebellion: that it was actually motivated by his desire to rule the cosmos himself. The image of Satan the would-be sultan that opens Book 2 has already provided sufficient evidence of this possibility (and more will be provided in Books 5 and 6 in Raphael’s account of the rebellion).2 Under the circumstances, we would not be all that surprised to discover that Satan had found it difficult to keep this desire hidden; that is, his ambition to reign in heaven might have been manifest in his prelapsarian conduct and perfectly obvious to such an astute angel as Gabriel. But if that is what the lines lead us to expect, they manage to create meaning by defying our expectation. For what we discover, instead, is that Satan is a hypocrite in rebelling against God because, at that unspecified point in the past, not only did he accept but he even, apparently, endorsed divine despotism. A similar rhetorical surprise has come earlier in Book 4 in the soliloquy in which Satan self-consciously reflects on his various motives for rebelling against God. Here is part of that soliloquy: Ah wherefore! he deserved no such return From me, whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. What could be less then to afford him praise, The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks, How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me, 7 And wrought but malice; lifted up so high I sdeind [disdained] subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest ... (4.42-51) Before looking more carefully at the rhetorical play of this passage, we might simply ask why one who previously had so obsequiously fawned over, cringed before, and adored God now want to be placed above him (“set … highest”). If Satan is motivated primarily by his own tyrannical ambitions, the lines in the soliloquy make sense—deposing God will make him Heaven’s new alpha wolf—but they would fail to explain Satan’s earlier relationship to God (at least as that relationship will later be described by Gabriel). The first part of the soliloquy offers one possible solution to this conundrum, what we might call the Augustinian interpretation of the angelic fall: Satan’s rebellion is motivated primarily by envy against the Son: Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view Lay pleasant, his grievd looks he fixes sad, Sometimes towards Heav’n and the full-blazing Sun, Which now sat high in his Meridian Towre: Then much revolving, thus in sighs began. O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd, Look’st from thy sole Dominion like the God Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs Hide thir diminisht heads: to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams 10 We can tell that Milton wants to call attention to this other motive because of the special rhetorical play he provides in the soliloquy. For just as with the Gabriel passage I quoted earlier, a key section of Satan’s soliloquy generates meaning by defying our expectation of how the statement will be completed. Note how the passage I previously quoted from the soliloquy (ending in the phrase “one step higher / Would set me highest”) raises certain expectations in our minds. We are expecting that Satan will either lay bare his own tyrannical ambitions or acknowledge his jealousy towards the Son. But as we see in the lines that immediately follow he does neither: … lifted up so high I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude, So burthensome still paying, still to ow; Forgetful what from him I still receivd, And understood not that a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and dischargd; what burden then? (4.48-57; emphasis added) At a minimum, to the extent Satan is here articulating a motive for rebellion, this motive is different from any we have previously seen, and it is not obviously consistent with what will come later in the poem. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that this motive is the most profound of all Satan’s conscious or unconscious motives for rebelling against God. It is such a profound motive that it is difficult to be sure that Milton is himself fully aware of it and its implications. And it is certainly impossible to determine if, from 11 Milton’s view, this motive is intended to supersede and absorb the other motives, displace them, or simply mark the fact that, psychologically speaking, the rebellion is overdetermined. Certainly, unless Gabriel’s portrait of Satan is simply wrong, it is hard to figure out if the Satan who during the Book 4 soliloquy speaks of the burden of owing God can possibly have the same attitude toward God that the Satan depicted in Gabriel’s scathing denunciation (towards the close of in Book 4) might have had. That is, if Satan felt about God then (at the point in the past alluded to by Gabriel) the way Satan feels about God now (in the soliloquy), then how is it conceivable that he could he have fawned over, cringed before, and servilely adored this God? This shift in attitude would only make sense if something had fundamentally changed in his relationship to God or to himself, something that would now make him understand just how “burdensome” it is to worship this God. Given what Satan is saying at the opening of Book 4, one would think that in his earlier manifestation (what is being recalled by Gabriel) he would have been more like Gabriel himself, who, in his exchange with Satan, appears rather put off by the very necessity of worship (a point to which I shall return later in the essay). How, then, should we understand this new motive for rebellion, this sudden recognition of, and reaction against, the “debt immense of endless gratitude,” the burden of giving thanks to God? How and why are we being encouraged to view the worship of God as a burden for an angel or for a host of angels? In what sense does this particular motive displace, supersede, absorb, or conceptually compete with all the other motives for Satan’s rebellion? And to whom can we turn for help in grasping the poem’s shifting focus? 12 II There may be many answers to this last question, but the one I want to give is, perhaps a bit surprisingly, Samuel Johnson. Harold Bloom once remarked that “a hidden element in [Johnson’s] ambivalence towards the Metaphysical poets” was a “great distrust of devotional verse.”4 But if this is true, we need to figure out precisely what he distrusted in it. And I think that “distrust” is too pale a word here. For, buried in his aesthetic attack, Johnson’s attitude is, as I will try to demonstrate, akin to Gabriel’s attitude toward Satan at the moment of his recollection of the latter’s servile adoration. So what exactly does Johnson say? As part of a broader discussion of Abraham Cowley’s epic, Davideis, Johnson writes: Sacred History has been always read with submissive reverence, and an imagination over-awed and controlled. We have been accustomed to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative, and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only useless, but in some degree profane. Such events as were produced by the visible interposition of Divine Power are above the power of human genius to dignify.5 In his inimitable way, Bloom captures something of the rhetorical and moral complexity of Johnson’s position here in his comment that Johnson’s criticism is meant as Cowley’s 15 simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that pious verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but is supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick of ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.7 Johnson’s main contention here is that, when it comes to devotion and piety, there is really nothing for poetry to do: it merely exposes its own limits, shows what it is incapable of doing. Johnson seems to be arguing, in short, that devotional poetry merely embarrasses itself. Of course, as my first epigraph suggests, this kind of embarrassment, or creaturely humbling before the divine, is foundational in Jewish and Christian experience; hence, there is something strange about Johnson’s assertions here when read in conjunction with his critique of Davideis. For in his discussion of Cowley’s epic, Johnson represents the experience of faith in relation to “Sacred History” as humbling, even humiliating from an aesthetic point of view. We might ask, then, why the aesthetic failure of contemplative piety does not rhetorically mimic the very experience of faith Johnson seems to be espousing: faith as the experience of limit. By exposing its own limits in the face of divine truth—and thereby it subordination to a higher truth— devotional poetry could very well remind us of what we lack, that we reside within limits, that our imagination is, or at least should be, “overawed” in relation to the divine Word. As Johnson continues in the passage I previously quoted from the “Life of Cowley,” “the miracle of Creation, however it may teem with images, is best described with little 16 diffusion of language: ‘He spake the word, and they were made.’” In other words, the necessary failure of devotional poetry should act as a powerful stimulus to the recognition of the very religious experience Johnson seeks to champion: “submissive reverence,” “passive helplessness,” “humble adoration.” Seventeenth-century metaphysical poets were, of course, particularly quick to recognize a general analogy between the poetic and the spiritual . This insight and the impulse to celebrate figurative expression as essential to the process of coming to know God are given perhaps their most direct statement in Donne’s famous “Expostulation 19” from his 1623 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say, a literall God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord I intend it to thy glory, …) … a figurative, a metaphoricall God too: A God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extentions, such spreadings, such Curtaines of Allegories, such third Heavens of Hyperboles, so harmonius eloquutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding perswasions, so perswading commandments, such sinewes even in thy milke, and such things in thy words, as all profane Authors, seeme of the seed of the Serpent, that creepes … This hath occasioned thine ancient servants, whose delight it was to write after thy Copie, to proceede the same way in their expositions of the Scriptures, and in their composing both of publike liturgies, and of private prayers to thee, to make their accesses to thee in such a kind of 17 language, as thou wast pleased to speake to them, in a figurative, in a Metaphoricall language.8 Following this logic, Donne and others seem to have viewed the writing of poetry as akin to the writing produced by God’s “ancient servants (“publike liturgies, and … private prayers”). They thus viewed the poetic-spiritual analogy as a rhetorical opportunity, something to be exploited rather than avoided, and an opportunity that might be effectively realized in the celebration of figurative expression itself as essential to the process of coming to know God. In this way, the writing of poetry could at once represent and enact devotion as a form of human expression. George Herbert’s poetry, for example, about which Johnson is uncharacteristically reticent, often plays on the speaker’s discovery that his struggles, desires, and ambitions as a poet run up against devotional intent. Herbert typically uses this scenario to make the writing of poetry an analogy for the experience of faith very generally. But perhaps more deeply, as we shall consider in detail in the case of Andrew Marvell, works such as Herbert’s Jordan-poems also often mark a relationship between the recognition of human expressive limits and what we might call an edifying spiritual humiliation. It is worth reminding ourselves in this context that Johnson’s attack on Cowley’s religious poetry comes in the same discussion in which he levels his famous, sweeping critique of metaphysical poetry. This critique, we recall, is focused especially on the metaphysicals’ penchant for figural excess (precisely the sort of excess suggested by the previously quoted passage from Donne’s Devotions); so Johnson famously remarks: Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of 20 Though set with Skill and chosen out with Care. That they, while Thou on both their Spoils dost tread, May crown thy Feet, that could not crown thy Head.10 Marvell here calls special attention to the act of devotion by linking it at once to the writing of poetry in general and to a self-consciousness concerning the figurative conditions of writing in particular. The poem’s explicit subject, moreover, is how the recognition of poetic failure in the face of divine majesty might function both as an analogy of and a means to a soteriological spiritual humility. In very broad terms, Marvell’s poem offers us a glimpse of the conditions of writing religious poetry, its form, origins, goals, and rhetorical problems. The speaker self-identifies as at once a sinner—one who, through the typological imagination so prevalent among seventeenth-English poets, reveals himself as mysteriously implicated in the crowning with thorns episode from the crucifixion account—and a poet.11 In the first 12 lines, he reveals a dual devotional aim: to praise God and to “redress” the “wrong” of his continuing complicity in Jesus’ suffering. And he tells us that he will accomplish both aims by drawing on his previous experience as a poet. His new poetry will thus be built out of the dismantled figures (flowers) of his love poetry, which he claims will now crown his “Saviours” rather than his “Shepherdesses head.” But even before this section is concluded, the speaker has introduced a discordant undertone that will both grow more audible as the poem continues and eventually threaten to undermine his claims on behalf of his new poetic vocation: “And now when I have summ’d up all my store, / Thinking (so I my self deceive)” (ll. 9-10). Calling attention to the poet’s very writing as a form of self-deception, these lines move the meditation on poetry’s redemptive possibilities in a 21 new direction even as they introduce a new theme: the problem of misdirected, even sinful, figuration. By lines 13-18 Marvell has fully clarified this problem: “the Serpent old … twining … About the flow’rs disguis’d” (is it the serpent or the flowers that are disguised?) debases his poetic efforts and insults heaven by substituting forms of self- promotion—“Fame and Interest … And mortal glory” (ll. 16, 18)—for true devotion. Ironically, then, the poet’s efforts to crown Jesus not with thorns but with poetic flowers—what is clearly intended as an act of contrition—only serve to perpetuate his fallen condition. And this is so because the poetic invention that aims to honor God perversely imagines itself as able to create something greater than God might Himself create, “a Chaplet … As never yet the King of Glory wore.” We are reminded here of Donne’s remark that, by comparison with God’s own figurative powers, “all profane Authors … seeme of the seed of the Serpent, that creepes.” Of course, Marvell takes the remark further in warning that even authors with sacred intent (perhaps even those, who, like the “ancient servants[,] … delight … to write after [God’s] Copie”) might find their efforts already contaminated by the serpent’s presence. Indeed, how can a fallen human claim to redress a wrong done to God? How can that person, a mere poet after all, presume to create the conditions of his own unmerited grace? Marvell here seems to be anticipating Johnson’s attack on the indecorous presumption of devotional poets: like Cowley, Marvell’s speaker fails to understand that what is “produced by the visible interposition of divine power is above the power of human genius to dignify”; he had thus, foolishly, even sacrilegiously, attempted to exalt omnipotence, to amplify infinity, to improve perfection. But now, the 22 aesthetic failure of the speaker’s “metrical devotion” exposes the limits of such devotion in the face of a higher spiritual truth. That failure thereby reminds us that our imaginations are indeed “overawed” in relation to the divine Word. Marvell, then, might be said to be writing a devotional poem built on the very premise by which Johnson will later attack devotional poetry; or, to put it another way, Marvell’s speaker-poet seems almost presciently aware of the objection Johnson will later make to precisely this kind of poetry even as the poem tries at once to show why Johnson is right and to use that truth to construct a meaningful metrical devotion anyway. Marvell’s concern here is not just with the state of the speaker’s soul, then, or with the problems of sin and salvation generally. Rather, he is more particularly concerned with the relation between devotion and its visible expression, which, in a poem means especially the figurative and metaphorical language that announces, describes, or meditates on devotional activities—confessing, worshipping, praying, lamenting, supplicating, giving thanks, imploring mercy, or anything else. What we might call a meta-poem, “The Coronet” is finally, and paradoxically, about the (near) impossibility of writing efficacious religious poetry even as, perversely, Marvell shows that he can make a devotional poem out of this very topic. I say near impossibility because the poem’s final eight lines attempt to redefine a true devotional vocation for poetry, one that can avoid the creeping serpent. The most obvious way Marvell’s speaker attempts this recuperation is by reimagining the poem’s very rhetorical structure. Switching at line 19 into direct address (“But thou who only could’st the Serpent tame”), the poem, in effect, becomes a prayer. And what that prayer requests more than anything else is that the very poem we are reading, and perhaps also 25 where the serpent might be thought of, futilely of course, as still resisting this situation, it is precisely what the poet is praying for. By crowing the savior’s feet, where he could not crown his head, the poet escapes from the charge he leveled against himself at the outset: that he was complicit in a crowning with thorns that afflicted a perpetually suffering Jesus. Crowning Jesus’ feet with ruined poetic figures rather than crowning his head with thorns, the poet’s work seems more akin to the work of service prescribed in chapter 13 of John’s Gospel, where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples and then explains that his act of humility is meant to be an example, “that you also should do as I have done” (John 13.15). The verses that follow, in fact, read as if they could have been taken as the epigraph to Marvell’s poem: “Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their masters, nor are the messengers greater than one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (John 13.16-17). Jesus’ humility here, as on the cross, does not negate his status as master (his Apostles are still his servants despite the fact that he has washed their feet). Indeed, we might be led to believe by John’s account that an activity of servants, though itself modeled on Jesus’ own example, should yet testify to their inferiority to him; it should remind them, and us, that we will never be greater than the master. In fact, it is precisely the learning of this hard lesson that will, finally, separate the serpent from the servant. Marvell may be at once insisting on this critical difference and representing his own art as a kind of redemptive subservience by modeling his work less explicitly on Jesus’ act as recounted in John 13 than on the account of Mary of Bethany’s act provided in the previous chapter: 26 Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12.1-3)12 Luke’s version of this event is also worth noting. While Luke’s anointer is, as in Mark’s and Matthew’s account, anonymous, she does, like John’s Mary, anoint Jesus’ feet rather than his head (which is how Mark and Matthew present it): One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisees’ house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisees house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. (Luke 7.36-38) In response to the Pharisee’s silent observation that if Jesus were a real prophet he would have known that the woman was a sinner, Jesus rebukes him, saying: “You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love” (vv. 46- 47). The episode concludes with Jesus’ direct address to the woman: “And he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace’” (v. 50). Marvell may be figuratively conflating the two accounts, John’s and Luke’s, and then linking this conflated version to build an image of his poem as a devotional act that possesses saving efficacy. As in Luke’s account of the anointing, Marvell’s speaker 27 insists on his own unworthiness (like the woman, he is a sinner). Moreover, Luke’s unnamed woman, like Marvell’s speaker, seems to be shown shifting from a planned anointing of Jesus’ head (verse 46 in Luke suggests that the anointing of a guest’s head would have been considered a proper sign of regard) to an actual anointing of his feet; the implication here is that the shift occurs because the woman is overcome with a sense of humility before the Lord, though her tears perhaps also represent a sense of shame for her past sins. Jesus refers to the woman’s “love” (v. 47) and “faith” (v. 50), but overall the episode leaves the impression that Jesus forgives her because she is humble and contrite: anointing Jesus’ feet is at once an act of penitence (she seems to be imploring his mercy) and an acknowledgement that she is unworthy of him. But if this image of a penitent sinner receiving forgiveness, and the promise of salvation, might have an obvious appeal to Marvell the pious Christian, Marvell the poet might have been more impressed by the remark in John that Mary’s ointment was a “costly perfume” (“made of nard”) that “filled [the house] with [its] fragrance” (v. 3). Marvell’s poetic flowers (“set with Skill and chosen out with Care”) are similarly costly, but they are to be tread upon by the savior. They thus, paradoxically, crown his feet. Marvell makes no explicit mention of their scent, but we might surmise that the crushed flowers of the poem, like Mary’s ointment, give off a fragrance that fills the house. Such a fragrance honors the one anointed, insists on the perfumer’s inferiority, and provides both beauty and a valuable lesson to all who can observe. Marvell’s poem, then, does not simply represent humility as the virtue distinguishing the servant from the serpent. Rather, it puts the actual learning of humility on display as though such a public display—here couched in the poem’s formal rhetorical structure—were a necessary first step in the process of salvation. 30 From Father to his Son? strange point and new! 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 By our own quick’ning power. (5.853-61) Clearly, to be “self-begot, self-rais’d” would be a negation of God’s monopoly on “quick’ning power,” a power he will assign in Book 7 to the Son for the creation of the world. As Abdiel tells the rebel angels, moreover, God has previously assigned this power to the Son for the purposes of creating the angelic host, a transfer of power Satan here mockingly refers to as “work / Of secondarie hands”: Thy self thou great and glorious dost thou count, Or all Angelic Nature joind in one, Equal to him begotten Son, by whom As by his Word the mighty Father made All things, ev’n thee, and all the Spirits of Heav’n … (5.833-37) Part of what makes this entire exchange so curious is that we cannot accurately assess the status either of Abdiel’s knowledge or of Satan’s denial. We assume that Abdiel is telling the truth here—the angels are created beings and the Son created them13—but is it possible that the angels had never before learned this “doctrin?” What would it mean to say that Abdiel is actually teaching them something “strange and new?” Is it possible that he alone among the angels knows this? And is he learning it for the first time (and is 31 this, then, the first instance of prophecy in the cosmos)? It is difficult to imagine that Satan and his cohort had simply forgotten such an important fact. And while it is easy enough to imagine that Satan might want to lie in his attempt to refute Abdiel’s claim, it would be hard to lie before the other angels since, we would surmise, they would know as much as Satan and Abdiel do about the facts of their own creation. But if this is not prophecy and if Satan is not simply lying, could this be a moment of collective denial among all the rebel angels for whom the begetting of the Son—his elevation to a privileged, monarchical status within the heavenly hierarchy—has unleashed a memory they cannot admit into consciousness? And would such a denial be a way of staving off the moment of the Emersonian fall? This fall would be constituted by the discovery they have made that they exist, which, in Milton’s cosmos, would entail an acknowledgement that they exist precisely because they have been created and hence possess no “quick’ning power” in themselves. In this context, we might reconsider the passage from Book 1 I quoted earlier: To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deifie his power, Who from the terrour of this Arm so late Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed, That were ignominy and shame beneath This downfall. Viewed from the perspective of Gabriel’s comment at the end of Book 4, Satan's vehemence in Book 1 seems a kind of psychological defense, a way of forgetting how that “ignominy and shame” have already been his. That shame is, of course, the very condition of being 32 created. Satan and the rebels angels owe and, unless Abdiel’s account is prophecy, deep down they know they owe the very fact of their existence to another. They may be immortal—indeed, they have had immortality bestowed upon them—but they are not eternal. They are dependent and inferior; in short they are “secondarie” beings. As much of a fantasy as Satan’s position might be, he and the other rebel angels need to assert their own “quick’ning power” in order to cope with the trauma of origins. This point is powerfully reinforced by what Gabriel’s comment about Satan tells us about Gabriel himself. How did he, a still unfallen angel, experience heaven before the fall of the rebel host or even before the begetting of the Son? Gabriel’s disgust with Satan’s prelapsarian conduct is as surprising a feature of the Book 4 exchange as that very conduct he describes. For Gabriel’s comments suggest that, even before Satan’s fall, all was not well among the heavenly host. Gabriel, after all, seems to have been disgusted by Satan's obsequiousness before God—that is, he is remembering his earlier disgust with the situation of worship in heaven—even though obsequiousness before God is all there can be for a created being. Gabriel’s charge seems to contain a note of jealousy (his own sibling rivalry), as if he recalls Satan out-hustling him on the worship scene. At the very least, he is rebuking Satan for violating some assumed decorum of devotion. More implicitly, though, and perhaps even unconsciously, Gabriel’s disgust might also be directed toward God: his snapshot of the prelapsarian, pre-begetting Satan suggests in God a vain, all-too-willing recipient of his creatures’ fawning and cringing and adoration. Gabriel seems to be remembering, in a pained way, that God is the creator of the situation in which even the greatest angels must servilely compete for his attentions. Gabriel’s disgust therefore masks 35 the situation he is rebelling against after the begetting of the Son had predated that begetting. And indeed, from what Gabriel tells us we must assume that Satan was perfectly happy with this arrangement prior to the Son’s begetting. What we are asking, in short, is what exactly changes with the Son’s begetting that might prompt Satan to rebel when he had not previously contemplated this course of action. There are two possible ways to answer this question. The first, something we’ve noted previously, is that Satan is suffering from a form of sibling rivalry. He doesn’t mind ceding authority to the Father-god as long as that Father-god showers most of the attention on him. He rebels because he is jealous: he of the first, If not the first Arch-Angel, great in Power, In favour and præeminence, yet fraught With envie against the Son of God, that day Honourd by his great Father, and proclaimd Messiah King anointed, could not beare Through pride that sight, & thought himself impaird. Even his way of rebelling, imitating the power and status accorded the Son, might be understood simply as another way of getting his Father’s attention. Given the profound contradiction, however, between the beginning and the end of Book 4—the contradiction between Satan’s earlier fawning and cringing and the “debt immense of endless gratitude” he now claims to feel—it is equally plausible to imagine that God’s command that the angels must bend their knees before the Son and “confess him Lord” forces into Satan’s consciousness a deeply disturbing recognition of what was 36 (is?) always already true. That is, with the Son’s begetting, Satan now comes to see his pre-begetting behavior toward God as Gabriel must have seen it: as servile adoration. We cannot entirely eliminate other possibilities: it may be that Satan is jealous of the favored status as the “onely Son”; it may be that Satan wants the other angels to bend their knees to him; it may be that he simply refuses to bow down before a fellow creature15; it may be that he suddenly gets politics and rejects heaven’s hierarchical design. But if we take seriously Gabriel’s prelapsarian perspective, we must be willing to admit that the primary motivation for Satan’s fall—its first and deepest cause—is shame. Satan’s embarrassment about the very nature of his existence not only produces self- loathing but also leads to actions best understood as psychological defenses against what he doesn’t want to remember. And his pride, manifested in a variety of way throughout the poem, is the chief effect of this embarrassment. In short, a kind of existential humiliation is the fall itself, and pride is Satan’s chief means of coping with it, a way of forgetting what he once was: a servile adorer, a fawner and cringer before “Heav’ns awful Monarch.” The begetting of the Son is the condition of possibility for Satan’s discovery that he exists, a discovery of what it means to exist in God’s cosmos, where the “chief end” of any creature is to “glorify God … forever.” Johnson’s distaste for metrical devotion is, I would like to argue, not so different really from Satan’s self-loathing; it marks the disgust he feels for what that poetry exposes about his own status before the creator and redeemer, about the very nature and meaning of worship. When Johnson claims that the language of devotion should “suppress curiosity,” the curiosity that is being suppressed, I suggest, is precisely the secret that Gabriel reveals about Satan’s prelapsarian conduct. For Johnson and for 37 Milton’s Satan (if perhaps not for Milton himself), the revelation of this secret is the religious equivalent of the viewing of the primal scene—a recognition of the structure of creation in which we must live perpetually as supplicants of the Creator. Like Satan’s rebellion, devotional poetry seeks to carry out an impossible task; for such poetry that task is “to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.” But the real problem for Johnson may be that lurking within the necessary failure of this profane task is a Satanic memory that wants to stay hidden.