“The recent controversy about the poem, on the other hand, has largely been conducted between attackers who find it bad because it makes God bad and defenders who find it all right because it leaves God tolerable, even though Milton is tactless about him. Surely this is an absurd spectacle; the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power.” pp. 13

Tuck away in a footnote where I firtst mention Milton's "liberalism" as an anachrtonism

“Like most Englishmen, I never know what Americans mean by a liberal; the story goes that the only way for an academic American to be quite safe from this smear, which would cost him his employment, is to give the secret police documentary proof that he has beaten one of his slaves to death with his own hands. 'Why, that settles it; that's American freedom; he can't be a liberal'; but nothing less than that is enough. We in England should feel grave sympathy for the predicament of our American brothers, but need not I think puzzle our heads a great deal over its intellectual effects.” pp 15

Information abotu DDC

“the later Milton was known to have stopped attending the meetings of any sect or having any set prayers for his household, and evidently did rather despise the general reader. The idea was only refuted by the discovery among State papers, where it had been hushed up, of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana; which happened in I823, the year after Shelley was drowned. This made clear that i n later life Milton was an Arian, disbelieving the identity of the Son with the Father, and held some other rather technically heretical opinions; but that he would very much expect a reader of his epic to take its argument seriously.” pp 16

Calls Milton not even a Christian

“Most Victorian literary men would prefer to decide that Milton's picture of God was harsh and eccentric; well, Shelley had happened to be correct there, because Milton had turned out not to be a Christian anyhow, so there was no more bother.” pp 17

This quote from Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry → Perseverance ≠ virtue, though!

“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture” pp 20

Empson assumes that we are entitled to God's mercy, that it can coexist with justice outside of a zero sum

“Thus the argument turns on the mercy of God; 'we' (the race of man, perhaps) are not convinced of his goodness, very intelligibly, till we learn that he will do better than what he calls justice to ourselves. But Mr Diekhoff firmly goes on to point out that there is a problem, if not about Satan, at least about the inferior angels: "for them God does not make merciful concessions; the Son does not offer to sacrifice himself for them"-whom he knew personally, as he did not yet know Man. God is now said to be good even when he isn't merciful:” pp 23

Eliot's 1936 essay has had some staying power in the crit sphere

“He [T.S. Eliot] had previously let drop a number of remarks that Milton's style was a bad influence on mode poets, and now this speech would put his cards on the table, or give definite examples to discuss; it was nearly all about style. He did express towards the end a firm distaste for Milton's God, but he presented that as merely his own prejudice which perhaps ought to be discounted.” pp 25

“The essay is very candid; you are shown T. S. Eliot's mind in depth, that is, both the points about style which he has in focus and the feelings about the poem which he has yet pursued to their logical consequences. His feelings seem to me evidently right; indeed the poem, if read with understanding, must be read with growing horror unless you decide to reject its God.” pp 25

Eliot shoots himself in the foot

“ ‘is not thinking or conversing, but making a speech carefully prepared for him, and the arrangement is for the sake of musical value, not for significance.’ It is odd to reflect that this was written while the spellbinder Lloyd George was still a power in the country. A speaker can at times feel so much in contact with the minds of a large audience that, instead of doing any these three things, he invents at the moment what will swing them decisively on to his side; and here Satan made to do it at the electric speed of thirty lines. It is so thrillingly 'spoken' that one is driven to inquire why so good a critic could not understand how it is meant to be read.” pp27

“so Mr Eliot fell back on some theory of Mr Ezra Pound that the words are only musical'. I agree that the scene is a surprising one, and must examine its politics later on. But, to start with, if one view makes a bit of poetry very good, and another makes it very bad, the author's intention is inherently likely to be the one that makes it good; especially if we know that he writes well sometimes. We could not use language as we do, and above all we could not learn it when babies, unless we were always floating in a general willingness to make sense; of it; all the more, then, to try to make a printed page mean something good is only fair. There is a question for a critic at what point this generous and agreeable effort of mind ought to stop, and with an old text (the Hamlet of Shakespeare for example) it is no use to impute a meaning which the intended readers or audience could not have had in mind, either consciously or unconsciously.” pp 28

fire quote about Eliot's criticism

“ So long as you gave Mr Eliot images of someone being tortured his nerves were at peace, but if you gave him an image of two people making each other happy he screamed.” pp 30

Empson is a polarizing critic

But also this does not exonerate Satan. No other angels seems to have this issue...

“Satan's "very situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero, and Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him a fool". This has led to discussion on the basis "Hero or Fool?" (the title of an essay by Sir Rostrevor Hamilton which makes a number of good points); but until Satan is in sight of Paradise he is convinced that God is not Omnipotent” pp37

“Milton tells us that one of the chief pains of Hell, as in human prisons, was deprivation of sex, if it may be so called (IV. 510). God had made their substance thicken just enough keep them from their pleasure of total interpenetration. To be sure, the rebels could not have foreseen this, but there is no suggestion that they chose revolt to gain pleasure; they did it on a point of honour or, if we need a derogatory term, out of pride.” pp53

What Empson calls “stupid scifi” is the closest thing to a tradition epic

• This is just wrong?

“It is convenient to deal here with the Sixth Book, recounting the War in Heaven, which bears out this argument but is otherwise tiresomely absurd. God invents pain, for bad angels only, and it cannot subdue them; they are impressively superior to the good ones. What can war have meant before, with no death, and bodies which can leak out of any hold? Both sides wear armour though they can turn themselves into gas (350); this must be unusually stupid Science Fiction.” pp54

“this speech [IV.110 Niphates?] admits his previous speeches to have been all lies; a view which makes the character consistent by making him ridiculous, though I think some critics combine it with complaining that he has become a quite different character. We have not had Satan alone before— he has always been either negotiating with rival powers or encouraging his followers, so this is the first time he could have told us that he regards lying to his followers as a painful duty.” p65

“The chief merit of the shape of the poem, I think, which has often been called magnificent architecture, is that it presents the change in Satan with such force. We first meet him certain of the righteousness of his cause though defeated, follow him into doubt and despair, switch back in the narrative of Raphael to find him confident that his cause will be victorious as well just, then return to the story and find his character rapidly rotting away. As there is no slip-up anywhere in this involved programme, we can at least be sure that it was intended” pp 71

Quotation from M. Saurat: “Milton had more sympathy for heretics than for Fathers of the Church, but it is difficult to see what he could derive from the Gnostics. Some of them, exaggerating the old notion that found some good in the Fall, came to worship the Serpent, the cause of the Fall, as the great benefactor. It was probably as a polemical device, and to confute these Ophites, that Epiphanius declared that the Serpent who had tempted Eve was no other than Satan. It is only then, about 380 A.D., that the tradition of the Fathers at last caught up with Jewish myth. The Jews had reached that conclusion during the first century. (p. 223.)” pp85

on DDC

“Maybe he had simply forgotten where it came from; in any case, it did not carry for him the implications which had rightly shocked Plotinus. Both can be fitted into a long-familiar pigeon-hole as 'Manichaean'; thus the translator of the De Doctrina remarks, in a footnote to Milton’s proof that God created the angels: ‘The opinion that the angels were not created, but self-existent, according to the Manichaean system, is with great propriety attributed to Satan in Paradise Lost.' I felt rather snubbed, after adventuring among such peaks of learning, to find that the point was obvious to a theologian in 1825, but perhaps it helps to show that the illiberal attitude to Satan is a recent one” pp 88

mischaracterization of who Milton was plus who satan was. Satan is supposed to be obviously bad from the outset. It is Milton who then makes him sympathetic onyl to justifie the righteousness of God. No one would read this poem thinking "Satan is probably neutral" to begin with wtf

“My object in giving this rather sketchy bit of background is to recall that Milton, being so learned a man, would not seriously despise Satan for disbelieving his creation; nor should we read that into the poem, because Satan is not meant to become contemptible until his character collapses after he has doubted his own thesis upon Niphates' top” pp 88

lol Empson hates God. Makes sense sicne he's a commie

“he treats creation by a personal God as the only theory of origin which is not mere jabberwocky, whereas the audience presumably accepts the Darwinian account of the emergence of mankind. I too find that more numinous, more imaginatively stirring, than to say 'God just made us; and the earth stand on an elephant, and the elephant stands on a tortoise' especially as, in the past, the argument has tended to continue 'if you ask me what the tortoise stands on I'll burn you alive'.” pp 89

God has jokes, which are sometimes in poor taste

“[V. 720] Here we are actually shown God 'doubting his empire' which is what Satan began the poem by telling us God had done. Many a Christian reader must have been sufficiently unnerved here to wonder whether Milton's theology was going very wrong, till a few lines later the reply of the Son reassured him that this is merely one of God's jokes.” pp 96

“Most readers, of course, have found no such horrible implication in God's joke; they have found it pretty flat, but thereby all the more jovial in an Old Testament manner. Even so, they have felt that such a joke, while natural enough from simple Omnipotence, does not suggest a transcendent God whose Godhead is mysteriously identical with Goodness.” pp97

“Masson found that the Rev. T. Tomkins, then aged twenty-eight, was the official who licensed the poem for publication, and supposed with Victorian gaiety that he could not stand more than the first Book. But this was a time when the Anglicans really did persecute, and the poem must have been scrutinized.” pp 100

“On being upbraided for this breach of hierarchy, and told that "Love hath his seat in Reason, and is judicious," he says in effect 'Come now, what do you know about this? Have you got any sex?' and Milton to his eternal credit makes the angel blush. Raphael explains that the angelic act of love is by total interpenetration (VIII. 620), a thing which human authors have regretted that they cannot achieve. Lewis decides that the idea is 'certainly not filthy' (p. 109), but does not explain why the angel blushes at a mere reference to the topic; it cannot be for the noble reason he has given.” 105

“As to the idea that Milton betrays homosexuality by letting angels love each other, which Robert Graves used as an accusation, and C. S. Lewis felt to need earnest rebuttal, I think that a sensitive man who took Milton's attitude to women, especially a classical scholar, would be bound to toy in fancy at least with the happiness of having an understanding partner who need not be continually snubbed. There is not much evidence that Milton felt so, but if he did it is to his credit. We know from the Divorce Pamphlets that he considered an understanding partner as the basic requirement for the ennobling of a physical act of love. Donne of course was not made homosexual by this high conception of love, because he believed he knew at least one woman who was adequate for the purpose; to present the belief as firmly as he did in The Extasie was inherently a blow at the doctrine of the inferiority of women. Milton would perhaps consider such love forbidden to our fallen condition, as to the devils, but he would find nothing in it to make an angel blush.” pp 106

Idk how much of this stuff it even makes sense to include if we just factor in that Empson categorically misreads the whole poem acc to decorum

“Thus to describe the God of Milton as 'legalistic' is too charitable; what we are offered is a parody of legalistic behaviour, a thing in itself often necessary and reassuring, but also often suspected of being employed to gratify the privileged few; and it is evidently used in Heaven for that purpose alone.” pp 109

Good point about all the angels knowledge of everything according to their assembly in Book III and how everything after that is problematic.

“[VIII. 230] They knew, and they knew that God knew that they knew, that this tiresome chore was completely useless. Apparently most of them did not want to see Adam emerge into consciousness, but Raphael says that he did, and also that he assumes God gave him a job at the time merely to disappoint him. I grant that Milton is on strong ground so far as the situation is a military one, because an army does get disciplined like this; but then, consider the morale of this army. They know that they failed to deafeat the rebels, and that God need never have ordered them to try, indeed must have intended to humiliate them, because as soon as he chose he removed the rebels with contemptuous omnipotence. Similarly, when he chooses to let Satan out of Hel, he simply orders his troops out …” pp 110

“[IV. 1000] Gabriel interprets this to mean that God forbids him to try, pointing out that he and Satan can only do what Heaven permits; so Satan escapes, 'murmuring', but free to continue with the Temptation. I do not see what the incident can mean except that God was determined to make man fall, and had supplied a guard only for show;”

Fire

“He had already published the Divorce Pamphlets before he got the job; well now, if you are setting out to be severe and revolutionary on the basis of literal acceptance of the Old Testament, the most embarrassing thing you can be confronted with is detailed evidence about the sexual habits of the patriarchs; it is the one point where the plain man feels he can laugh. Milton always remained liable to defend his side by an argument which would strike his employers as damaging; his style of attack is savagely whole-hearted, but his depth of historical knowledge and imaginative sympathy keep having unexpected effects. He was not at all likely to feel that he had forfeited his independence of mind by such work.” pp 123

“In Paradise Lost he [The Son] often seems half ashamed of the autocratic behaviour of his Father, because his role is to induce the subject angels to endure it; but when he is alone on the earth-visit which has been arranged for him we find he has merely the cold calculating pride which we would expect from his training. However, we already find this trait, decides M. Morand, at the early public moment when he offers his Sacrifice; he is unable to avoid presenting himself as solely interested in his own career (p. I69)” pp 125

Role of pain in the poem, or lack thereof

“I do not know whether there is a standard explanation for this lack in the poem, and do not remember to have seen it noticed. The reason for it, surely, is that Milton would not dirty his fingers with the bodily horror so prominent in the religion. We need not be surprised, because all his heroes fiercely refuse to let the prospect of pain so much as enter their minds while deciding what they ought to do; his devils are so superior to pain that we actually cannot remember they are all the time in bodily agony.” pp 128

I don't think this is true...

“All is rather a pet word in Milton's poetry but I think he never gives it a capital letter anywhere else, and one would expect that by writing "All in All" he meant to imply a special doctrine, as we do by writing "the Absolute." Then again, this is the only time God calls the angels Gods, with or without a capital letter.” pp 135

Someone else points out that this has nothing to do with zohar

“Milton goes on to give other reasons for his conclusion that "create' in the Bible does not mean 'from nothing, and by doing so he has in effect enough sense to admit that his negative argument does not make a positive one. These problems about sources are often very subtle, because a powerful mind grabs at a hint of what it needs admittedly, the Zohar was not the only possible source of these large mystical ideas;” pp 141

“God must be supposed to intend his words to suggest to the angels what they do to us, but any angel instructed in theology must realize that God has intended throughout all eternity to spite Satan, so that when he presents this plan as new he is telling a lie, which he has also intended to tell throughout all eternity. No wonder it will be ‘far happier days’ after he has abdicated (XII. 465).” pp 145

Maybe include this in the section about the Fall – Aside from all the hierarchical inequalities, given that the angels were privy to the announcement about the inevitability of man’s fall in Book III, all of the angel’s (Rapha’s) conversations have been necessarily guarded and uncomfortable.

“At lunch the angel practically offered them their wings, and towards evening he sharply refuses to answer a question relevant to way-finding, which is asked by Adam as soon as the narrative is concluded. Adam accepts the snub with adroit good humour, but they are bound to feel it as another bit of calculated bafflement. Raphael then suggests that God made astronomy difficult so as to be able to jeer at astronomers.” pp 156

unfortunately fire

“A bullfighter of course does praise a bull if it is brave, but he means to kill it anyhow” pp 158-159

“Difficult puzzle about his [God’s] intentions; but this is very understandable, once you admit that she recognizes them as a puzzle: In plain then, what forbids he but to know, Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not. (760) This means that you ought not to obey a God if your conscience tells you that his orders are wrong; and that, if your God then sends you to Hell for disobeying him, you were still right to have obeyed your conscience. Any Christian missionary might find himself saying this when wrestling for the soul of a pagan, and a critic who jeers at it seems to me simply immoral. Nor does Eve take the further step of deciding that her God must be bad; if she did that, she might fairly be blamed for impatience and perhaps for disloyalty, in jumping ahead of the evidence before her.” pp 160

Empson’s God is leering, sardonic, wicked, cruel, tyrannical (cmd + f for mentions of “as usual”)

“Milton had not got the legal power to kill his children held by an Ancient Roman, and even those famous aristocrats regarded torture as only applicable to slaves, so that they too would not be allowed by their fellows to torture their children indefinitely. One expects the morality of a God to be archaic, but this God seems to be wickeder than any recorded society. The myth might indeed be justified as a warning that Nature is unjust, for example when innocent actions give us shocking diseases; but Milton insists that there was no magic about the apple, and that it was chosen by God as a random test of obedience.” pp 161

But I don’t think that arguments predicated on conscience are valid because, prior to eating of the fruit, conscience does not exist yet – just the singular rule not to eat of the fruit…

“I cannot think it morally wise for pious critics to try to turn this against her: What fear I then? Rather, what know to fear Under this ignorance of good and evil, Of God or Death, of law or penalty? Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine ... (775) That is, she does not know the moral sanction behind this law, or even the meaning of the repeated obscure threats of a penalty. You might think that nothing needed 'curing' in Paradise, but she has already protested that it is too miserable to live in such terror of the unknown that they dare not spend half an hour apart.” pp 162

“The Greeks liked to say that they had learned all their virtues from Homer, and the Renaissance deduced that each modern nation needed an epic of its own to live nobly. Milton thought that the English no longer deserved a patriotic epic, but badly needed making nobler somehow.” pp 165

Raphael is wrong! When he furrows his brow

“M. Saurat remarked, with so much depth that he too almost deserves the dignity of the Mother of Mankind: Here Milton happily forgets his theories of the predominance of reaso, and the influence of ‘female charm’ on Adam is this time his salvation." pp 167

Paracelsus

“Mr Walter Pagel's treatise (Paracelsus, 1958) struck me as full of echoes of the problems raised by Milton: Until the nineteenth century, Paracelsus was charged with 'Arian and Gnostic heresy'. Pantheistic speculation is indeed evident in his idea that the 'virtues' and 'arcana' in Nature are direct emanations from divinity and 'uncreated' (p. 42). There is a distinct materialistic ring about Paracelsus' concept of higher and lower soul-which are in need of food: For heaven and ferment are Christ, and verbum domini is the word of the father that has become matter and is the material food of the soul' (p. 118). It was a gnostic thought that the soul of the world flows constantly into us with our food, for it is the same soul that dwells in plants, animals, and men. The idea that man 'is what he eats' is Paracelsan (p. 208). ” pp 170

Fire quotaiton

“Dr. Tillyard said in his Milton (1930) that, if Milton had been in the Garden, he would have eaten the apple at once and written a pamphlet to prove that it was his duty.” pp 172

Angels hands are tied in their prelapsarian education of man

“The generous imagination of C. S. Lewis was stirred by this picture of Adam as the reality of which our Kings and Popes are a pale shadow, reminded perhaps of the Chief Selenite in The First Men in the Moon; it is clear from the word generations that the rest of us would still be dying, out of courtesy to our children, as we do now, whereas Adam could last on without public inconvenience. But surely, all we learn from these remarks is what use the two angels make of their briefing by God when they speak to mankind. Michael is a pig about it, whereas the affable Raphael is embarrassed; but both of them have heard God say beforehand (III. 95) that the Fall is certain, therefore no great weight need be attached to their estimates of the alternative.”

Angels hands are tied in their prelapsarian education of man

“Raphael, when he is sent to exhort Adam and Eve to stand firm, has just recently heard the speech of Book III, which made clear that his work can have no use except 'to render Man inexcusable'; no wonder he seems rather oddly anxious not to let drop anything he mustn't tell them, because is it an essential part of his assignment not to tell them that they are certain to fall. God has set him an extremely unpleasant bit of work here, which more than anything recalls the earlier loyal activities, presented in a flash-back from before his imprisonment,” pp 174

Milton agreed with Eve

“One important answer has been given by the splendid detective work of Sewell on the manuscript of the De Doctrina; at the time when Milton was writing the poem, his beliefs were coming so near to the position taken by Eve that it is actually hard to say when he thought he differed from her. When Dr Tillyard made his joke, he did not realize that it was literally true; I expect indeed that having read Sewell (1939) helped eventually, by a noble paradox, to make him decide to renounce it. Milton had come to believe that even a Jew living before Christ did not literally have to obey the Mosaic Law, though God had pronounced it specially for the Jews; clearly then, Adam and Eve did not literally have to obey the apple prohibition made specially for them, either. This makes even greater nonsense of the assertion by God 'Die he or justice must'” pp 177

“The answer is that he was bringing out pamphlets so fast that he was almost like a modern 'columnist'; and to go on printing such things meant practically asking for death when Charles I was restored. The increasing fierceness of the writing makes clear enough that he expected the Restoration.” pp 179

“Milton no longer feels in Samson, as he nearly does in describing Eve, that your own conscience must come first; he now feels that you must do whatever God inspires you to think his will, however bad the rest of your conscience tells you this action to be. Considering how many crimes have been committed by fanaticism, the distinction is a practical one.” pp 180

“What Adam has recently confessed to the angel (VIII. 550) is almost the same: 'The trouble is, when she wants me to do something, I tend to think that it's actually the right thing to do.' Such is more or less what now happens; all that Milton insists upon by his comment is that Adam, even at the moment of this wholehearted decision, was aware of the objections to it. Only in this rather remote sense does Milton consider Adam to be overcome by female charm, but he finds it sufficient. The difficulty only arises if we do not realize that Milton, here as in all the other cases, pitches a temptation staggeringly high.” pp 183

reduces eve to the station of temptress. If you read PL as Empson does, Milton is evil

“We are made to feel that he regards God not as an absolute lawgiver but as a human father; as when God answers the petition of Adam by saying, in effect: 'What d'you want a woman for, hey? I don't want a woman.' Adam says he then 'used freedom' in defending his petition; the words as he reports them seem very tactful, but at any rate God said he was pleased (VIII. 440). He is bound to think of God as a jovial though pompous old buffer here; the incident is pointless unless translated like that, though the language retains its grandeur. When we consider the whole story, this joke by God is as sinister as all his others, because by supplying the temptress he is machining the Fall; but Adam does not know this, and is shown in a mood of trustful gaiety.” pp 184

“The chapter-headings of the Authorized Version list this as "Marriage Instituted', but the discussion by St Paul which quotes it is only optional in the Anglican Marriage Service. Adam said it before the Fall, at her creation (as in Milton, VII. 495), and had had no experience of human parents, so that St Paul and others have evidently rather doubted how much weight to put on his opinion. Still, if it is a rule, and if God is his father, he must be admitted to keep the rule. In presenting both sides of the question, Milton would feel that he was only giving the full drama of the sacred text, and could not be blamed if God appeared unsympathetic” pp 187

Empson hates God

“The poem somehow does not encourage us to think of an alternative plan; Milton would perhaps have said that Adam’s failure to think of one provides his lack of trust in God, but his God is as usual peculiarly unfitted to inspire trust.” pp 189

Use this in the discussion of the delta between editions

“The history of mankind, though varied and sometimes thought cheerful by Adam (590), is explained by the angel to be monotonously horrible, and all the result of eating the apple. For the second edition Milton divided the last book into two, perhaps to make it less heavy, but added very little except three lines about madness; he had forgotten that Adam ought to have his nose rubbed in having caused all that horrible madness too (XI. 485).” pp 190

“But come now, we need not pretend we have never heard of real justice; surely it is obvious that Adam had better put his affairs in the hands of a steady family lawyer. He is in no condition to stand up to all this police bullying. What he is really saying, apart from the emotional condition he has been reduced to, is 'Oh, so you did want us to eat the apple, after all? Well, I'm pleased to hear that, because Eve rather thought you did, at the time.' It would mean that there is no reason for all the evils Adam has just been shown on earth, let alone the pains of Hell.” pp 191

“Their new assumption that the curse is upon our whole stock perhaps feels more natural in the poem because we have just been shown the devils being turned into snakes, but we are not told how to interpret the corresponding activity of God among mankind. The point where God should have warned Adam of the threat to his descendants is reported in the jovial Book VIII, and the sequence of God's remarks is positively misleading: [TODO: quote]” pp 193

On discussion of the fairness/unfairness of all of Adam’s posterity being damned as well, which was not communicated to him Fire info about Milton’s principled stance on treason / disobedience

“Much interest therefore attaches to Milton's attempt at justifying God on this point in Chapter XI of the De Doctrina, where it is at least clear that he felt the difficulty: If all did not sin in Adam, why has the condition of all become worse since his fall? Some of the modern commentators reply, that the deterioration was not moral, but physical. To which I answer, that it was as unjust to deprive the innocent of their physical, as of their moral, perfection; especially as the former has so much influence on the latter, that is, on the practical conduct of mankind.

It is, however, a principle uniformly acted upon in the divine proceedings, and recognized by all nations and under all religions from the earliest period, that the penalty incurred by the violation of things sacred (and such was the tree of knowledge of good and evil) attaches not only to the criminal himself, but to the whole of his posterity, who thus become accursed and obnoxious to punishment. Milton easily proves this with a long series of references to the Old Testament, also Thucydides and Virgil, and then recalls modern custom in cases of high treason; besides, we all know what are the recognized rights of war' against innocent persons such as women and children (he means nothing is too bad for them). 'God declares this to be the method of his justice.' It is hard to believe that Milton could avoid wincing when he included high treason, under which his own children might have suffered” pp 198

Empson hates God

“Recent science thus made the doctrine easier to argue for; but its chief merit for Milton was to make God less tirelessly spiteful.” pp 202

DDC is PL's dual, defining a spiteful God who needs defending

“Such no doubt was the rock-bottom reason why Milton, like many other good men, continued to struggle to defend a God whose actions were revolting to his own conscience or right reason.

I hope these extracts will be enough to make clear that Milton genuinely considered God in need of defence, and indeed that, when Milton said at the beginning of his epic he intended to justify God, he was so far from expecting a reader to think the phrase poetical rhetoric that he was not even stepping out of the usual procedure of his prose.” pp 204

Milton a heretic + information surrounding the translation of DDC

“What first struck me, when I began to nose about in the English translation of the De Doctrina, rather belatedly, was that its tone is very unlike what the learned critics who summarize it had led me to expect. But maybe, I thought, having no judgement of Latin style, this is only a result of translation; the work was done by Sumner, later an Anglican bishop, who must have been working fairly rapidly; it was printed (and reviewed by Macaulay) in I825, two years after the Latin text had been discovered. One can imagine a translator making it sound like Gibbon, partly because that was an easy formula but also through feeling a certain impatience with this heretic.” pp 206

Fire, but not hopeless

“Milton when he embarked upon his epic was exactly in the position of the Satan he presents, overwhelmingly stubborn and gallant but defending a cause inherently hopeless from the start.” pp 208-09

Summary of Samson’s predicament

“Milton goes out of his way to suggest that Samson acts for an underprivileged class or minority group rather than a separate nation, and makes plain that only Samson is still fighting. Some of this may be called dramatic convention; thus, it is usual in a play to make opposing nations talk the same language; but in Milton the well-to-do father of Samson is lobbying against the Philistine lords to have his son’s imprisonment converted to a fine, and this makes the whole society feel more settled. Samson himself boasts that the Philistines became his enemies because he provoked them (640)” pp 213

Samson as a fundamentally nihilistic character

anachronism

“In effect, he is what the 1890s called a Nihilist, so that few of the literary critics who praise him would be on his side if they met nowadays” pp 213

c.f. Eve/Samson doing wrong

Eve did not yet have a sconscience

“Samson regularly gambles on knowing the purposes of God, and this is held to be justified because they are inscrutable. But Eve also broke a literal commandment on the prompting of her Inner Light; why did she too not turn out lucky? The answer has to be that she allowed her conscience to actuate her, and did what she thought right. Samson only wants to do what God wants, and does not even consider whether it is wicked, except that it will be more fun for him if it is rude” pp 217-218

“The aristocratic girl, we gather, married the nihilist in the belief that she could quiet him and save him from crime; but as soon as they were married he said, ‘Now you must help me to murder all your relations; that’s the only thing I married you for, you fool. Don’t you know it’s your duty to do anything I tell you, now that we’re married?’” pp 219

Explanation of Dalilah’s betrayal and then her own betrayal at the hands of her people who blind Samson

“To recall the Israelite Jael is a telling stroke; Shelley could have said here too that the decisive proof of Milton’s genius is that he alleged no moral superiority for Jehovah’s religion over Dagon’s. But she has no impulse to rub it home; she continues sadly and peacefully to say that, knowing she has done her best to reconcile the quarreling factions, and has now made certain that the division is beyond healing, she will not count it heinous to receive eternal public honour from one side only, nor too much disapprove of herself for becoming a national heroine, imagined by the people to have been as savage as the Israelite Jail. It is one of the noblest speeches in Milton. A similar attempt to prevent the division of India singlehanded would perhaps be the nearest modern parallel. I grant that she arrives at this tone of self-abnegation because she has strong personal grounds for regret, or what she may regard as guilt; her own people blinded Samson after they had promised her not to hurt him (800)” pp 221 -22

Does not damage Dalilah’s character as a “great lady” + explanation of Milton’s subtle deviation from the source material from Judges insofar as he proposes that they be married

“The belief that she is a Vamp, I think, comes from supposing that the old puritan must have wanted to make her one but did not know how, so that it is a kindness to let our fancy help him out. So far from that, he has laboured to describe her as a high-minded great lady, wholly committed to the values of ‘the world’. The author of Comus was not ignorant of such characters indeed the importance of appreciating the merits of an aristocratic patron, even if her morals were rather dubious perhaps, would not be beyond his imaginative range even in the days when M. Morand counts him uyet unsmirched.” pp 224

SA is sufficiently different from Milton’s own predicament that we need not read too much into it as an autobiographical revenge fantasy, but nevertheless …

“The Chorus also complains how cruelly God treats his heroes in later life, and various critics have thought that Milton is blaming God at this point for his gout (700), not being able to claim that Charles II had martyred him; but Rose Macaulay in her too brief book on Milton said that he was grizzling over the executions of regicides he had known, which were carried out with the traditional barbarism. The sense of public shame and baffled hunger to argue that it is undeserved are presented to the read much more intimately here than in Satan or Adam, and the parallel to Milton’s own life is so direct that he must have wanted it to be intriguing.” pp 225

SA as a meditation on his own mortality and imminent death as a disgraced erstwhile nationalist

“It has been said that Milton showed historical understanding or conscious artistry in Samson by making no mention of a future life; he was unusual for his time in realizing that Samson woul not have expected one. On the other hand, the always reverent-sounding Sewell lets drop a belief that Milton did not expect one himself: Men are known by God, either as good or evil, persevering or backsliding. I think that Milton must have held that to be their immortality.” pp 227

Milton’s penchant for moral paradoxes with staggeringly high stakes

“It may be objected with sad truth that the mind has a rather dreadful power to retain a resentment while losing almost everything else, including its affections; so that the old man was probably getting his knife into Delilah … Milton’s power was evidently not failing, and he would keep his love of moral paradox, or rather adjudicating high and subtle points of conscience. … It seems to me that critics of Milton become cross and puzzled each time they do not realize that the temptations are meant to be pitched staggeringly high” pp 228

Ought to let Px burn me alive

“We are often told that the ancient belief in the need for sacrifice corresponds to a profound spiritual truth, though one which was never expressed in its full purity and splendour until fulfilled by Christianity. I agree at once that no good mode of life is secure unless its participants are ready to make sacrifices for it. For example, I ought to let Christians burn me alive rather than pretend to accept their evil belief, which if powerful enough will do grave public harm” pp 242

Trinity is Orwellian double talk + evil

“But even without this result any such construct is precarious, because the mind so easily falls back on the primitive assurance that the Father and the Son both are and are not identical. The machine is best described in the terrible book 1984, where it produces a number of such horro-sloganssuch as ‘War is Peace’.. I have thus to conclude that the Doctrine of the Trinity is a means of deceiving good men into accepting evil; it is the double talk by which Christians hide from themselves the insane wickedness of their God.” pp 245

Bottom left thru top right shows his disdain for God

“Shelley remarked that no man of honour could go to Heaven, because the more he reverenced the Son who endured the more he must execrate the Father who was satisfied by his pain. But this is only the basic moral objection to religion, which had been found obvious ever since its beginning; the ground for even more severe” pp 250

“Much has been said in recent times of the marvelous intellectual completeness of the religion, securely based upon its profound paradoxes; but they are a matter of jamming together all available contradictions with the standard solution ‘Heads I win, tails I burn you alive.’” pp 253

All Empson’s critiques must be taken in light of the fact that he believes all forms of Christianity to be synonymous with direct worship of the Devil

“All the current accusations against the Totalitarian State are simply inherited from anti-Christian polemic; ‘brain-washing’ is not a new scientific invention, and Hitler had no opportunity to use ‘the technique of the of the biggest lie’ as grandly as Christians–since they worship as the source of all goodness a God, who as soon as you are told the basic story about him, is evidently the Devil.” pp 255

Px is devil worship

“The chief thing I felt I had learned, after trying to consider ethics in a fundamental manner, is that what Christians are worshipping, with their incessant advertisements for tortue, is literally the Devil” pp 260

Empson’s condition for appreciating Milton is public renunciation of God lol. His criticism becomes increasingly laughable as his book progresses and the communist sympathizer paints a constrictingly reductive interpretation not only of the poet’s triptych, but on all of Christianity

“However much they lecture us upon morality without having any idea what the word means, since they think it means licking the boots of some earthly or heavenly policeman. But, as a matter of ethical theory, the two processes are the same. I see no hope before Christians until they renounce the Devil and all his works; that is, stop worshipping a God who is satisfied by torture, and confess in public that they have done so. Such is the kind of background, I consider, which a present-day reader needs if he is to appreciate what Milton was getting at in Paradise Lost;” pp 266

Plainly in the tradition of the bard

“The claim is a larger one; with his eyes sacrificed and his life miraculously spared (the first paragraph [of PL] is unlikely to have been written first) he was now plainly in the ancient tradition of the bard.” pp 274-75

the root of all his power

“The major thing people feel about Paradise Lost, if it works on them at all, is the fascination of its barbaric power, which Milton himself feared that being born ‘an age too late’ he might be unable to recapture. And one does not feel about Paradise Lost that its barbaric power comes from living in a malignantly specialized society,as one ought to recognize about the art of Benin. The Puritans do indeed give that impression, but their minds were working on very central matters for Europe; and Milton has stretched his historical imagination very far. ” pp 276

What a hateful bastard lol

“If you praise it as the neo-Christians do, what you are getting form it is evil.”

related