I have read vv 498-506 over and over. Raphael continues the narrative describing the personal disappointment of individual fallen angels that they hadn't a role in the development of gunpowder and then imagines that one might "devise like instrument to plague the sons of men for sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent." In the ears of Adam and Eve a nightmare unimaginable, But for us, evidence of the perversion that we've suffered and suffer on others. Lord, have mercy.
That is such a powerful passage, Peter. Haunting really. Your comment made me go back and find it to re-read. I’m pasting it here for the benefit of others reading this (from an online version I don’t usually use):
To be th' inventer miss'd, so easie it seemd
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Its funny you mention what you do about gunpowder. Milton wasn't alone. In Luther's Table Talk, the reformer muses about the origins of firearms.
No. 3552: Modern Instruments of War Deplored
March 19, 1537
Afterward he [Martin Luther] spoke of firearms and cannons, those most inhuman devices which smash walls and rocks and slay men in battle. “I think these things were invented by Satan himself, for they can’t be defended against with [ordinary] weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what’s coming. If Adam had seen such devices as his descendants have constructed to fight one another, he would have died of grief.”
In an earlier book we hear that Satan and his angels can only be destroyed completely by annihilation. They are exiled by God but not destroyed. And in this book, in the final victory, 853-855 Jesus (with one hand tied behind his back) "checked His thunder in mid volley, for he meant not to destroy, but root them out of Heaven." So the long game of God in this pissing contest between angels and God, and humanity and God, seems to me intended to create every opportunity and incentive for repentance and reconciliation, to the extent that Christ died and preached to the imprisoned spirits in hell after he was crucified. In the midst of all this rage and pain, yet I think I see God's grace at work.
I love that: with one hand tied behind his back. Truly! And also, God’s long game: his patient, long suffering toward us, even descending to the depths of hell. What love!
I really enjoyed your overview of the gunpowder plot, and the discussion of the weapons. I got a bit lost in the battle descriptions, but I was struck by the description of Satan's speech as "scoffing in ambiguous words" (568). It reminded me of how evil is always attempting to obscure truth, even, or especially in its manner of speaking. The ambiguity can give evil a plausible deniability, which makes it difficult to counter. I feel like I'm seeing this a lot right now in several arenas of life.
Thank you so much for this fantastic exploration of the machines of war. How fitting that they should be "invented" (but not created) by Satan himself.
I found so many little devotional nuggets in this, including lines 381-5 about Satan's hubris being all bluster amounting to nothing. It reminded me of Percy Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," which is refreshing in days when there's a lot of bluster and pride that should amount to nothing.
And, on the other side of the battle, stand the righteous. And the source of their strength is their righteousness (401-5). My pastor preached last Sunday about true obedience breeding resilience of this kind. What confidence and stability we have when confident in integrity and consistency - a very different kind of confidence than the bluster divorced from Truth that Satan emits.
Also, I couldn't help but notice some of the similarities between PL and the Iliad, which I'm reading with Matthew Long. The section we read for this week was about gods on the battlefield and included almost identical descriptions of wounds to immortal bodies. As Milton puts it:
"A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed..."
This made me think the extent to which Milton is writing an epic here, and one not a little influenced by Homer. The difference here of course is that the angels are having their own battle instead of helping the humans... But so many things about how Milton writes seem odd to me until I remember he's writing an epic inspired by Homer - and these little things seem like his "tells." Is that fair, or perhaps I have not read enough epic.
I really love what you say about the source of their strength being their righteousness. And that righteousness is in Christ. Interestingly, there is cultish movement among Christians that say it comes from obedience rather than Christ. It seems perhaps at first to be a subtle distinction, but in the end it’s a huge difference in both foundation and fruit.
And, yes! Thank you for the reminder that Milton is writing an epic and employing many epic conventions, imagery, and allusions. So neat for you to do these readings side by side. I’m so glad you are here!
What an important distinction about our strength being in Christ, not our own obedience! And that brings the argument full circle, as Milton says Satan’s strength fails because it is “from Truth divided.” If we are in Christ we are in Truth.
Has anyone else read the Aubrey and Maturin Series, also known as the Master and Commander series of books? (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was made into a movie in 2003 starring Russell Crow.) These brilliant historical fiction books written by Patrick O'Brian were taken from HMS ships captain's logs kept during the Napoleonic Wars and had numerous descriptions of maritime battles. The battles were used as the framework for various stories and fascinating subplots within the narrative. Milton's description of the angels' war brought back memories of reading those descriptions of war - chaotic, violent, destructive and difficult to sort out as a reader. But the descriptions of the pursuits of war are always like that, aren't they? Messy, ragged, confusing and filled with disaster.
Again, I marveled at the use of present-day scientific words in the text such as invention and engineer, in a book as old as Paradise Lost. I also wondered if the phrase "wrack and ruin" was originally used here?
"... and now all heaven had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread..." (669-670)
I saw many allusions to scripture, particularly Luke 23:30 and Revelation 6:16 where people cry out for the mountains to fall on them to spare them from judgment, Jesus' prayer of unity with the Father in John 17, and to Christ's Resurrection in "the third sacred morn." (747)
And the fateful last line of warning to Adam and Eve, "Remember and fear to transgress." (912)
So grateful to be able to join in the reading of this great classic.
I thought the movie was wonderfully filmed and quite true to the book on which it was based. There are 20 books in the series, so I certainly did not expect one movie to capture the expansive story line, but I think the spirit of the saga was captured in the actors' portrayals of the Englishman, Commander Jack Aubry (Russell Crowe), and Irishman, Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), the ship's surgeon (who has a side-hustle as a British spy), who become close friends, and sometimes frenemies, during the course of the books. They nearly come to a duel in the first chapters of the first book, but in a toe-to-toe confrontation at a musical performance, they find out that each one is an amateur musician, and there-in a fast friendship is born. The music in the movie is a reflection of this friendship and is from the era in which the story is set.
As difficult as it was to figure out the sea battles in the books, understanding the design of a man-of-war, ship of the line of the Royal Navy was just as complicated. But the non-naval reader has a compatriot in Dr. Stephen Maturin, a land lubber if ever there was one, who rarely made it aboard ship without a fall into the drink or some other mishap. Expertly researched and beautifully written.
Ok, I’ve got the Riverside note which says that Milton’s use here “gives new force to the colloquial phrase ‘gone to wrack and ruin’.” So it already existed but he made it more prominent. The OED later went on to cite Milton’s use in a second definition of the word “wrack.” Good eyes, readers!
As one very limited in understanding good literature, I’m reading this as a story. It reads like a story of good against evil with evil much more resilient and clever. Especially book 6, now, when the first two days of battle come to a draw and the demons seem to resurrect the next day. It feels like the good angels, and even God, are weaker, nicer, easy to overrun. It feels like Ukraine, or like current US politics. Nice people are overrun. God is just too damn patient.
As I read, I was thinking Milton probably had the recent English Civil War in his mind when writing this battle scene, with his side, the Roundheads/Puritans, as the faithful, and the Royalists as the rebellious. The Roundheads certainly thought God was on their side.
On Guy Fawkes Day: One of my brothers in-law is from the Canadian province of Newfoundland, which was primarily settled by Catholic Irish immigrants. Yet my in-law says Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes/the 5th of November, was, in his childhood and youth on the island, celebrated in Newfoundland, by those same Catholic Irish. People just like a reason to have fun. We never observed it in my childhood, but, because my nieces and nephew love any kind of celebration, we at least make some parkin to mark the night.
I think you would succeed in selling us ‘The Rape of the Lock’ - one of the most satisfying things in this group is feeling that I can’t tackle a particular work - and then we do! And I enjoy it!
Thanks for this essay. You took an unexpected path, but I'm glad you did. It was illuminating.
I'm in awe of Milton's creativity with the Bible—it inspires me. I wonder, after reading things like this, why we were discouraged in my Christian school to not be creative with the Bible in particular. We were almost discouraged from exploring the Bible creatively because we could not "add or take away from it." Reading something like this does not make me feel that way at all; it only awakens my soul when I see something in here that I recognize from the Bible. Like lines 731-733:
"...when in the end
though shalt be All in All, and I in thee
For ever, and in me all who thou lov'st"
These lines reminded me of one of my favorite scripture passages when Jesus prays for all believers: "I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me." Jn 17:21 NLT
There is so much fear of the imagination. Perhaps in not understanding its goodness it is easier to fear its power for ill—how much more so when it comes to the Bible. It will be interesting to contrast the use of imagination in this work to that in (the more acceptable) Pilgrim’s Progress.
I love that connection you make between those lines and the passage from John!
Milton always seems to be toying with the idea of what it means to be free. I keep going back in my mind to a discussion from my days in college. One of my degrees is in philosophy, and one year we were able to invite several notable Christian philosophers to debate the question of free will. One of the philosophers used the illustration of raising his hand. He asked where the thought originated. He put forward the idea that we had to have a thought to have a thought to have a thought, ad infinitum, to raise the hand. What does it mean to have a thought? What does it mean to raise one hand?
Here in this passage Abdiel criticizes Satan for the madness he is engaged in in his rebellion and for his chastising Abdiel for going over to God's side. Abdiel taunts Satan as to why one would choose to side with the rebel rather than God? Why side with madness, weakness, and pride against the giver of all good things? He ends with this insight that Satan really isn't free but is enthralled to himself.
There are two ways we can look at this. One way is to understand that we really do not have a self. We see a person who we call self, but this is separate from our consciousness of the self. For instance, a person may be an alcoholic and maybe be the last person to realize that he or she is an alcoholic. A person may be in denial that they have a talent for a particular field of study while everyone around them knows they have a gift. And we have all heard the stories about people who were the last to realize that they shared feelings for one another. We can, as it were, be a mystery to ourselves.
So, in this passage, Satan may believe that he is following freedom when in reality he is unaware that he is a slave to his pride, masquerading as freedom. More than this, he is constantly devising new shackles of logic to bind him more and more into the prison of pride.
The other answer, and the one I think is more plausible, is the fact that none of our wills are truly our own. In his famous reply to Erasmus, "The Bondage of the Will," German theologian. Martin Luther compares the will of a human being to that of a beast of burden, which will either be written by God or by something else. The will doesn't choose what it's destination will be more than the beast of burden does. The will is not something complex that must discern the best path forward. Luther never really clears this up satisfactorily, but his protégé Philip Melanchthon seems to believe that the point of the will is to accept the Gospel. It is, so to speak, as if the only point of the will is to toss off any rider apart from its true Master.
Satan is being driven by forces beyond his understanding and is so enthralled to the sensation that he is constantly devising self soothing excuses and reasons for why he is really not out of control. The irony is that Abdiel realizes that free will as Satan imagines. It is some monstrous phantasm that blinds him from seeing what he has become. It is liking those horror movies when someone is infected by a terrible virus, and everyone else can see it, but the victim is succumbing to the madness.
Once again, Milton is not content with simplistic, explanations of free will, but has each one of his characters explore this puzzling question. So far, he has not let one of his characters be a stand in for his own opinions. This has been a pleasant discovery for me as so many authors would not be able to resist the temptation of having one character come forth and speak on behalf of the author. I think Milton sees that the world is filled with many opinions on this particular matter and feels it necessary that each opinion should put forth its case.
This is so very insightful. It gives me a lot of food for thought. It may seem basic or obvious, but the way you describe Satan’s will in bondage makes me think of social media and algorithms are directing our perceptions and attentions in ways we don’t know or realize, and yet it feels like we are choosing in total freedom.
I keep noticing, as I read, the ways in which this work has influenced people who wrote after it. Multiple people have mentioned C. S. Lewis, but this chapter actually reminded me of Tolkien’s more obscure material. Specifically, his back-story to The Lord of the Rings in The Silmarillion contains a number of references to wars between what are essentially angelic powers that take place in Middle Earth. Landscapes are destroyed, and the destruction is so great that the good powers often hesitate to fight lest the whole world be reshaped. The details are rather sketchy, and it’s only upon reading this chapter that I realise what Tolkien’s idea of angelic war must have been shaped by! It’s odd to see how many literary imaginations have taken this work as an implicit foundation.
Oh wow! I’ve not read much Tolkien (but of course I still read a lot about him, haha!) but this makes total sense. What a great connection. I don’t think we could ever measure Milton’s influence!
Haha! Every social media platform has its own lingo. A restock is like a retweet or a re-share or a repost. It is a good thing that helps pose to get more visibility so feel free! :)
I am so glad you focused on the gunpowder/firearm passage, because that is what struck me also. After the Chinese first invented them in the tenth century, they were not very lethal yet they struck fear in opponents and they won many encounters on that basis alone. At first, actually, gunpowder was just used as fireworks for the fear factor. Slowly the new technology spread to the rest of the world when first cannons and then guns were invented. I commend to you Jack Kelly’s comprehensive book, Gunpowder, which tells the history well. Reading Milton’s description makes me think of how nuclear bombs were described in the 1960’s - breathlessly and ominously.
In my earlier series on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, I mentioned how Marlowe was one of the first to use special effects on the stage, those effects being the use of gunpowder to create small explosions. That connects well with your point about gunpowder not being used in very lethal ways at first. It makes more sense that gunpowder would’ve been used the way Marlowe did, and it never quite made sense before. Thank you!
I did think of the atomic bomb as well.
And it’s not at all the same thing but I also think about AI. For all the good it might do, it’s going to be used for warfare. It probably already is in ways we have yet to see.
I have read vv 498-506 over and over. Raphael continues the narrative describing the personal disappointment of individual fallen angels that they hadn't a role in the development of gunpowder and then imagines that one might "devise like instrument to plague the sons of men for sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent." In the ears of Adam and Eve a nightmare unimaginable, But for us, evidence of the perversion that we've suffered and suffer on others. Lord, have mercy.
That is such a powerful passage, Peter. Haunting really. Your comment made me go back and find it to re-read. I’m pasting it here for the benefit of others reading this (from an online version I don’t usually use):
To be th' inventer miss'd, so easie it seemd
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible: yet haply of thy Race
In future dayes, if Malice should abound,
Some one intent on mischief, or inspir'd
With dev'lish machination might devise
Like instrument to plague the Sons of men
For sin, on warr and mutual slaughter bent.
Its funny you mention what you do about gunpowder. Milton wasn't alone. In Luther's Table Talk, the reformer muses about the origins of firearms.
No. 3552: Modern Instruments of War Deplored
March 19, 1537
Afterward he [Martin Luther] spoke of firearms and cannons, those most inhuman devices which smash walls and rocks and slay men in battle. “I think these things were invented by Satan himself, for they can’t be defended against with [ordinary] weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what’s coming. If Adam had seen such devices as his descendants have constructed to fight one another, he would have died of grief.”
Oh, wow! Thank you for bringing your depth of reading here, Philip. This is not at all surprising. So helpful to have the connection.
In an earlier book we hear that Satan and his angels can only be destroyed completely by annihilation. They are exiled by God but not destroyed. And in this book, in the final victory, 853-855 Jesus (with one hand tied behind his back) "checked His thunder in mid volley, for he meant not to destroy, but root them out of Heaven." So the long game of God in this pissing contest between angels and God, and humanity and God, seems to me intended to create every opportunity and incentive for repentance and reconciliation, to the extent that Christ died and preached to the imprisoned spirits in hell after he was crucified. In the midst of all this rage and pain, yet I think I see God's grace at work.
I love that: with one hand tied behind his back. Truly! And also, God’s long game: his patient, long suffering toward us, even descending to the depths of hell. What love!
I really enjoyed your overview of the gunpowder plot, and the discussion of the weapons. I got a bit lost in the battle descriptions, but I was struck by the description of Satan's speech as "scoffing in ambiguous words" (568). It reminded me of how evil is always attempting to obscure truth, even, or especially in its manner of speaking. The ambiguity can give evil a plausible deniability, which makes it difficult to counter. I feel like I'm seeing this a lot right now in several arenas of life.
That phrase is really priceless in all the truth it conveys. Thank you for highlighting it!
Thank you so much for this fantastic exploration of the machines of war. How fitting that they should be "invented" (but not created) by Satan himself.
I found so many little devotional nuggets in this, including lines 381-5 about Satan's hubris being all bluster amounting to nothing. It reminded me of Percy Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," which is refreshing in days when there's a lot of bluster and pride that should amount to nothing.
And, on the other side of the battle, stand the righteous. And the source of their strength is their righteousness (401-5). My pastor preached last Sunday about true obedience breeding resilience of this kind. What confidence and stability we have when confident in integrity and consistency - a very different kind of confidence than the bluster divorced from Truth that Satan emits.
Also, I couldn't help but notice some of the similarities between PL and the Iliad, which I'm reading with Matthew Long. The section we read for this week was about gods on the battlefield and included almost identical descriptions of wounds to immortal bodies. As Milton puts it:
"A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed..."
This made me think the extent to which Milton is writing an epic here, and one not a little influenced by Homer. The difference here of course is that the angels are having their own battle instead of helping the humans... But so many things about how Milton writes seem odd to me until I remember he's writing an epic inspired by Homer - and these little things seem like his "tells." Is that fair, or perhaps I have not read enough epic.
I really love what you say about the source of their strength being their righteousness. And that righteousness is in Christ. Interestingly, there is cultish movement among Christians that say it comes from obedience rather than Christ. It seems perhaps at first to be a subtle distinction, but in the end it’s a huge difference in both foundation and fruit.
And, yes! Thank you for the reminder that Milton is writing an epic and employing many epic conventions, imagery, and allusions. So neat for you to do these readings side by side. I’m so glad you are here!
What an important distinction about our strength being in Christ, not our own obedience! And that brings the argument full circle, as Milton says Satan’s strength fails because it is “from Truth divided.” If we are in Christ we are in Truth.
Yes! Love this connection! ⚪️ Full circle!
Has anyone else read the Aubrey and Maturin Series, also known as the Master and Commander series of books? (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was made into a movie in 2003 starring Russell Crow.) These brilliant historical fiction books written by Patrick O'Brian were taken from HMS ships captain's logs kept during the Napoleonic Wars and had numerous descriptions of maritime battles. The battles were used as the framework for various stories and fascinating subplots within the narrative. Milton's description of the angels' war brought back memories of reading those descriptions of war - chaotic, violent, destructive and difficult to sort out as a reader. But the descriptions of the pursuits of war are always like that, aren't they? Messy, ragged, confusing and filled with disaster.
Again, I marveled at the use of present-day scientific words in the text such as invention and engineer, in a book as old as Paradise Lost. I also wondered if the phrase "wrack and ruin" was originally used here?
"... and now all heaven had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread..." (669-670)
I saw many allusions to scripture, particularly Luke 23:30 and Revelation 6:16 where people cry out for the mountains to fall on them to spare them from judgment, Jesus' prayer of unity with the Father in John 17, and to Christ's Resurrection in "the third sacred morn." (747)
And the fateful last line of warning to Adam and Eve, "Remember and fear to transgress." (912)
So grateful to be able to join in the reading of this great classic.
I recall the film by that name but haven’t watched it. Is it good? I don’t know if I could bear the books with so much description of “action.” 😅
I recall reading something about the phrase or word “wrack” in a footnote somewhere. I will look it up and see if it is something Milton contributed.
Oh, yes. Those echoes of scripture are powerful. As is that warning.
I’m so glad you are here for the journey, Teri!
I thought the movie was wonderfully filmed and quite true to the book on which it was based. There are 20 books in the series, so I certainly did not expect one movie to capture the expansive story line, but I think the spirit of the saga was captured in the actors' portrayals of the Englishman, Commander Jack Aubry (Russell Crowe), and Irishman, Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), the ship's surgeon (who has a side-hustle as a British spy), who become close friends, and sometimes frenemies, during the course of the books. They nearly come to a duel in the first chapters of the first book, but in a toe-to-toe confrontation at a musical performance, they find out that each one is an amateur musician, and there-in a fast friendship is born. The music in the movie is a reflection of this friendship and is from the era in which the story is set.
As difficult as it was to figure out the sea battles in the books, understanding the design of a man-of-war, ship of the line of the Royal Navy was just as complicated. But the non-naval reader has a compatriot in Dr. Stephen Maturin, a land lubber if ever there was one, who rarely made it aboard ship without a fall into the drink or some other mishap. Expertly researched and beautifully written.
It sounds like a movie I would enjoy and would benefit from watching! One my husband would enjoy, too. 😀
I wondered that, too, about "wrack and ruin."
Ok, I’ve got the Riverside note which says that Milton’s use here “gives new force to the colloquial phrase ‘gone to wrack and ruin’.” So it already existed but he made it more prominent. The OED later went on to cite Milton’s use in a second definition of the word “wrack.” Good eyes, readers!
Not odd at all! And so sorry I wasn’t clear. That info also comes from the Riverside footnote!
This might be an odd question, but do you use a paid subscription for access to the OED?
As one very limited in understanding good literature, I’m reading this as a story. It reads like a story of good against evil with evil much more resilient and clever. Especially book 6, now, when the first two days of battle come to a draw and the demons seem to resurrect the next day. It feels like the good angels, and even God, are weaker, nicer, easy to overrun. It feels like Ukraine, or like current US politics. Nice people are overrun. God is just too damn patient.
You absolutely should read this as a story! Brava!
And I totally get that sentiment. That’s a hard but good insight.
As I read, I was thinking Milton probably had the recent English Civil War in his mind when writing this battle scene, with his side, the Roundheads/Puritans, as the faithful, and the Royalists as the rebellious. The Roundheads certainly thought God was on their side.
On Guy Fawkes Day: One of my brothers in-law is from the Canadian province of Newfoundland, which was primarily settled by Catholic Irish immigrants. Yet my in-law says Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes/the 5th of November, was, in his childhood and youth on the island, celebrated in Newfoundland, by those same Catholic Irish. People just like a reason to have fun. We never observed it in my childhood, but, because my nieces and nephew love any kind of celebration, we at least make some parkin to mark the night.
Aw, I love that. So many celebrations can be partaken of by all on some level. Christmas is one such one!
I think you would succeed in selling us ‘The Rape of the Lock’ - one of the most satisfying things in this group is feeling that I can’t tackle a particular work - and then we do! And I enjoy it!
😊😊😊
Thanks for this essay. You took an unexpected path, but I'm glad you did. It was illuminating.
I'm in awe of Milton's creativity with the Bible—it inspires me. I wonder, after reading things like this, why we were discouraged in my Christian school to not be creative with the Bible in particular. We were almost discouraged from exploring the Bible creatively because we could not "add or take away from it." Reading something like this does not make me feel that way at all; it only awakens my soul when I see something in here that I recognize from the Bible. Like lines 731-733:
"...when in the end
though shalt be All in All, and I in thee
For ever, and in me all who thou lov'st"
These lines reminded me of one of my favorite scripture passages when Jesus prays for all believers: "I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me." Jn 17:21 NLT
There is so much fear of the imagination. Perhaps in not understanding its goodness it is easier to fear its power for ill—how much more so when it comes to the Bible. It will be interesting to contrast the use of imagination in this work to that in (the more acceptable) Pilgrim’s Progress.
I love that connection you make between those lines and the passage from John!
Just fixed a typo that made the above make nonsense!
"Thy self not free, but to thy self enthrall'd;
Yet leudly dar'st our ministring upbraid."
Milton always seems to be toying with the idea of what it means to be free. I keep going back in my mind to a discussion from my days in college. One of my degrees is in philosophy, and one year we were able to invite several notable Christian philosophers to debate the question of free will. One of the philosophers used the illustration of raising his hand. He asked where the thought originated. He put forward the idea that we had to have a thought to have a thought to have a thought, ad infinitum, to raise the hand. What does it mean to have a thought? What does it mean to raise one hand?
Here in this passage Abdiel criticizes Satan for the madness he is engaged in in his rebellion and for his chastising Abdiel for going over to God's side. Abdiel taunts Satan as to why one would choose to side with the rebel rather than God? Why side with madness, weakness, and pride against the giver of all good things? He ends with this insight that Satan really isn't free but is enthralled to himself.
There are two ways we can look at this. One way is to understand that we really do not have a self. We see a person who we call self, but this is separate from our consciousness of the self. For instance, a person may be an alcoholic and maybe be the last person to realize that he or she is an alcoholic. A person may be in denial that they have a talent for a particular field of study while everyone around them knows they have a gift. And we have all heard the stories about people who were the last to realize that they shared feelings for one another. We can, as it were, be a mystery to ourselves.
So, in this passage, Satan may believe that he is following freedom when in reality he is unaware that he is a slave to his pride, masquerading as freedom. More than this, he is constantly devising new shackles of logic to bind him more and more into the prison of pride.
The other answer, and the one I think is more plausible, is the fact that none of our wills are truly our own. In his famous reply to Erasmus, "The Bondage of the Will," German theologian. Martin Luther compares the will of a human being to that of a beast of burden, which will either be written by God or by something else. The will doesn't choose what it's destination will be more than the beast of burden does. The will is not something complex that must discern the best path forward. Luther never really clears this up satisfactorily, but his protégé Philip Melanchthon seems to believe that the point of the will is to accept the Gospel. It is, so to speak, as if the only point of the will is to toss off any rider apart from its true Master.
Satan is being driven by forces beyond his understanding and is so enthralled to the sensation that he is constantly devising self soothing excuses and reasons for why he is really not out of control. The irony is that Abdiel realizes that free will as Satan imagines. It is some monstrous phantasm that blinds him from seeing what he has become. It is liking those horror movies when someone is infected by a terrible virus, and everyone else can see it, but the victim is succumbing to the madness.
Once again, Milton is not content with simplistic, explanations of free will, but has each one of his characters explore this puzzling question. So far, he has not let one of his characters be a stand in for his own opinions. This has been a pleasant discovery for me as so many authors would not be able to resist the temptation of having one character come forth and speak on behalf of the author. I think Milton sees that the world is filled with many opinions on this particular matter and feels it necessary that each opinion should put forth its case.
This is so very insightful. It gives me a lot of food for thought. It may seem basic or obvious, but the way you describe Satan’s will in bondage makes me think of social media and algorithms are directing our perceptions and attentions in ways we don’t know or realize, and yet it feels like we are choosing in total freedom.
I keep noticing, as I read, the ways in which this work has influenced people who wrote after it. Multiple people have mentioned C. S. Lewis, but this chapter actually reminded me of Tolkien’s more obscure material. Specifically, his back-story to The Lord of the Rings in The Silmarillion contains a number of references to wars between what are essentially angelic powers that take place in Middle Earth. Landscapes are destroyed, and the destruction is so great that the good powers often hesitate to fight lest the whole world be reshaped. The details are rather sketchy, and it’s only upon reading this chapter that I realise what Tolkien’s idea of angelic war must have been shaped by! It’s odd to see how many literary imaginations have taken this work as an implicit foundation.
Oh wow! I’ve not read much Tolkien (but of course I still read a lot about him, haha!) but this makes total sense. What a great connection. I don’t think we could ever measure Milton’s influence!
I hope you don’t mind, but what’s a restack?
Haha! Every social media platform has its own lingo. A restock is like a retweet or a re-share or a repost. It is a good thing that helps pose to get more visibility so feel free! :)
I am so glad you focused on the gunpowder/firearm passage, because that is what struck me also. After the Chinese first invented them in the tenth century, they were not very lethal yet they struck fear in opponents and they won many encounters on that basis alone. At first, actually, gunpowder was just used as fireworks for the fear factor. Slowly the new technology spread to the rest of the world when first cannons and then guns were invented. I commend to you Jack Kelly’s comprehensive book, Gunpowder, which tells the history well. Reading Milton’s description makes me think of how nuclear bombs were described in the 1960’s - breathlessly and ominously.
In my earlier series on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, I mentioned how Marlowe was one of the first to use special effects on the stage, those effects being the use of gunpowder to create small explosions. That connects well with your point about gunpowder not being used in very lethal ways at first. It makes more sense that gunpowder would’ve been used the way Marlowe did, and it never quite made sense before. Thank you!
I did think of the atomic bomb as well.
And it’s not at all the same thing but I also think about AI. For all the good it might do, it’s going to be used for warfare. It probably already is in ways we have yet to see.