Hell in a Handbasket

What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals ("brutes"). Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God's angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness... Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the "other"; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human.

Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan.

No doubt due to a fairly devout Catholic upbringing, the concept of Satan has always fascinated me. As a child, I expressed a disbelief in the very concept of evil - and along with that, disbelief in sin or Hell. That said, I suppose I've had to reevaluate that over the years.

Now I certainly don't believe in Hell as a physical place with devils and little red pitchforks; I'm a confirmed secular humanist (read atheist for those of you who don't want to look that up) and I think the notion of either god or a devil rather absurd in most senses. I think they're very interesting semiotic referents, however.

The very sense of divinity and devilry - of a god and a devil - is one that intrigues me so deeply that I've decided to dedicate my life to it. I believe not in the literal nature of such things, but in the symbolic value of them. Evil - and Satan - is something that human beings use as a scapegoat: "he's evil, that's why he did it," and that sort of thing. Now evil in the sense of abject cruelty, sociopathic behavior, murder, and so on I can believe in. People who are intentionally sadistic and whose behavior does far more harm than good - if any good at all - most certainly fall under the domain of "Evil."

But that isn't the evil of Satan.

Satan's evil is far more abstract than that and, as my students suggested while reading Paradise Lost, is an evil that arises from the ideology of subjugation. Satan is evil not because he is cruel, but he is evil because he chooses to rebel against godhead. The oppressive state apparatus - to borrow a term from Althusser - of religion uses Satan as a means by which to enforce obedience to their institutional ideology. Of course, there were devils and dark gods long before the rise of the Church, so naturally that isn't where it all begins, but they all seem to serve the same purpose.

But I digress. Pagels' point in the above paragraph is that we see in the figure of Satan a kind of kinship that is - whatever Milton may say about it - not one of superior beings to a lowly and base creature. Satan is not a "brute"; Satan's allure is that he is as human as we are, and yet more than human. He was an angel, the greatest of them, and his disobedience to god caused his demonization. Semiotically speaking, Satan is what we risk becoming when we risk rebellion; any act of subversion or tactic of defiance creates in us a mirror of Satanic behavior. Yet, Pagels suggests, Satan is more than human, as well. He is "a spirit" whose strength springs from "intense spiritual passion... strength, intelligence, and devotion" (xvii); Satan is more than humans can become because he begins as more than we are. Satan is both like us and Other to us; as god - since humans are ostensibly made in god's image - is both like and unlike us, so Satan is both like and unlike us.

Satan seems to me the more interesting of the two. But then, as my advisor tells me, I "do evil." Not brutality or cruelty, of course, but rebellion. And it strikes me that in a nation founded on the fundamental principles of freedom enforced by rebellion, we'd be a little less wrapped up in our righteousness, but that's a rant for another day.

Honestly, though, if you had to choose between godhead and defiance, which would you choose? Me, I'll go with defiance, thanks. Makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.

Besides, who says Satan isn't part of the whole ineffable plan?

The Doctrine and Discipline of Milton

A reaction to John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Of Education, and Areopagitica. The first is a defense of divorce, the second elucidates Milton's ideas on Education, and the third is a defense of publication freedom.

In the excerpt from Writing the English Republic, Norbrook suggests that Milton, “Finding that the government was dealing well with liberty in the state… turned to domestic liberty, in which he included marriage, education, and freedom of speech. This is a very broad category; but one of Milton’s aims is to span conventional distinctions between the political and the religious, the public and the private, authorship and citizenship” (109). In reading Milton’s treatise on Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and Of Education, one cannot help but notice the way in which Milton conflates these dichotomies; each treatise implies the natural conflation of all three of the pairings Norbrook mentions, especially as they concern authorship.

Milton’s frequent use of “Author” in Paradise Lost to imply the master in the relationship – both for god and Adam – is an apt demonstration of the way in which Milton seems to suggest the power of the written word. His eloquent defense of free speech in Areopagitica implies the necessity for the citizen-author to the freedom of both individual and nation. The figure of the author-citizen, as the use of “Author” in Paradise Lost implies, is a figure of considerable authority and, naturally enough, represents the image of the authoritative scholar Milton projects. This author-citizen was a synthesis not only of public and private, but of a modern man and “a return to that lost civic virtue and purity of language” (Norbrook 113) that Milton valued in Classical writing and government. As author and citizen, Milton’s suggestions, especially in treatises that could be construed as somewhat controversial, resonate with his image of the ideal nation; he desires England to be a nation of rationality and the author-citizen is the ideal member of that nation.

However, the author-citizen figure so staunchly defended in Areopagitica is already present in both Doctrine and Of Education. The rational tone that combines the language of legal and religious discourse in Doctrine attempts to argue the value of the author-citizen as more valuable to the public sphere if he is contented in the private: “The republican male must be fit of rthe public sphere, and ideological antagonism in marriage disrupts that fitness” (Norbrook 115). This conflation of the two spheres – which had hitherto and would thereafter often be kept completely separate – completely embodies Milton’s republicanism in which, Norbrook says, “he wants to destroy… a hierarchy in which power is handed down from above” (110). Although Norbrook focuses on Milton’s early defense of monarchy, specifically in Of Reformation, the ideas contained therein continue to apply to Milton’s later ideas, and Norbrook suggests that these ideas were always more compatible with republicanism than monarchy: “[Civill Government mentioned in Of Reformation] is a commonwealth in which all the parts are subordinated to the whole rather than the body’s being subordinated to the monarchical head” (113). Milton, Doctrine’s author-citizen, refuses to accept either religious or political authority that would attempt to dictate rules that suffocate the private person, rendering him unable to participate in the public sphere.

Of Education seems to be a synthesis of Milton’s republican attitude of defying authority with an understanding of self-discipline that would enable the educational system to produce more author-citizens. Following these, Areopagitica is rather unsurprising; the figure of the author-citizen – a man educated in a republican fashion and allowed to escape the strictures of a religious authority that does not have his happiness and peace foremost in mind – must have the freedom to be an author-citizen and must not be stifled by an oppressive government whose irrational fears have begun to lead it away from republic and back toward tyranny. The fundamental element of the author-citizen, as Norbrook suggests, is that he is a synthetic figure; he fuses both the public and the private, the religious and the political, and, most important of all, the citizen and the author.

The questions that arise from the depiction and articulation of the author-citizen relate to the contradictions inherent in the act of synthesis. As Norbrook points out, Doctrine is rife with contradictions both to itself and to Of Education: “As in his relations with democracy, a certain opening in the direction of wider communication creates an abrasive effect when it is then sharply limited. He expected wives to converse, but the ideal curriculum he set out in Of Education… made no mention of women” (118). Other contradictions that are complicated rather than resolved by Milton’s synthesizing appear in his desire to limit Catholic publications – “Milton then does not object to the suppression of royalist opinions in a time of war” (Norbrook 120) – while speaking against the limiting of publication in Areopagitica. At what point do we listen to the author-citizen and at what point to we ignore the strictures he sets forth? When is the authority of the author liberating and when does it cross the line it professes to defend between freedom and tyranny, especially in light of Norbrook’s observation that “Areopagitica would have been still less accessible to the artisans who were enthusiastically entering political debate. It speaks for, rather than to, them; the community it speaks to is that of intellectuals deeply versed in literary culture” (125)?

Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.