I remember my first reading of Paradise Lost when I was too young to “get it” but old enough to fall in love with Satan. Now that I’m older I’m less enamored of Satan (maybe of bad boys in general) but I find myself quite taken with the complex eschatology Milton outlines; with the work he makes his readers do unpacking a thesis nestled deep within the onion-layers of the text. He threads a precise needle: By throwing his ventriloquist’s voice into the mouths of various characters, who are all persuasive and argue viable philosophical schemata, he forces readers to work through conflicting worldviews. It is wonderfully disorienting to one moment be convinced by Satan’s slick, libertarian rhetoric (with its encoded hypocrisy), and the next by Raphael’s gentler but equally unstable and contradictory cosmology-lessons. The reader (this reader, anyway) struggles with these rhetorical contradictions until it becomes clear that the Socratic process itself is the point. An internal dialectic seems to be Milton's ethos. And while I’m not smart enough to truly “get” everything he lays down there is something that bothers me. I keep hitting my head against the same limitation in his theology. After finishing Book XII, the limitation is intensified rather than resolved: I think Milton has a God problem.
Pardon me for saying, but his God is awful. I do not mean to disrespect the Judeo-Christian God: I am gently agnostic in practice. But Milton’s God just—sucks. No matter how I look at it, I see a bully and a petty tyrant whose legalistic attitude about the behavior of his creations does not fit with his generous acts of creation. Nor am I the first to suggest such a thing. In “A Defense of Poetry,” from 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes my feelings more eloquently than I can (without once using “sucks” as a verb):
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 is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments (57).
It doesn’t stop there. A cursory search in Google Scholar yields the iconoclastic words of William Empson, who, in Milton’s God, likens the deity to Joseph Stalin (89). (Imagine how controversial, writing that at the height of the cold war when religion was supposed to be a bulwark against communism). God gives free will but also requires blind loyalty and His idea of loyalty feels arbitrary. I am concerned about the world Milton creates: His God seems to need the fall; else he is afraid he has created an immense puppet show. After the poem’s events, I’m not convinced he hasn’t.
I can’t stop thinking about this as I read. I haven’t cracked the case yet. I think it might come down to this: Milton is too intelligent for his scriptural sources. The Christian God is just not the same character as the Old Testament God, and Milton runs into issues when he superimposes the one on top of the other. The Old Testament God is bespoke for a specific set of people whose loyalty He must vie for with other gods. He requires sacrifices, admits to mistakes, has preferences for certain times of the day to come to earth, and frequently changes his mind. He is a very powerful but human entity. His people can negotiate their covenants with Him (I’m reminded of my mother’s friend, a man who became a rabbi late in life because he missed the “manipulative” relationship he had with God as a child). The Old Testament God is intimate with His creations. Christianity, on the other hand, imagines this deity as perfectly remote, a force of nature, a tesseract that human beings can apprehend only partially, an embodiment of the inscrutability of the universe we live in. Both ideas of God make sense to me in their contexts. What does not make sense to me is the “rational” God that Milton imagines as a fusion of the two. Milton is too smart and learned: I imagine him as like Giordano Bruno before him, telling the church, “Your God is too small!” (until they killed him for heresy). God here is, in every sense, too small. He has no subjective life outside the life of His creations. Because of this He seems to amuse himself with senseless games of chess with their lives and happiness.
The distant, unknowable Christian God is mitigated in scripture by Jesus, a semi-divine ambassador who advocates for more lenient sentencing for those who pray to Him. So far so good, and one could argue the muse is Milton’s Holy Spirit, rounding out the trinity. But The Son here is too much like God; His pre-arranged sacrifice is so meaningless as to not feel like a sacrifice at all. A God who knows what is going to happen in a world of his own creation is cruel if he doesn’t understand that the life of obedience he offers feels, to some anyway, like slavery. It’s difficult not to side with Satan, who rages and suffers and prefers evil to slavery, over a God who creates the world, the rules, the punishments for disobedience—and who bears no responsibility for His own actions.
God is not complex enough maybe. Milton's cosmology and ethics are so wonderful and nuanced and I can't stop thinking about them in my spare time. Everything here is perfect—except for this big clumsy lumbering God crashing the party.
Works Cited
Empson, William. Milton’s God. New Directions, 1961.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defense of Poetry and Other Essays. Biblioteca Virtual Universal, 2008, pg. 57.