In English literary history, the violent underpinnings of surprise are nowhere more vividly explored than in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is an inevitable effect of Milton’s attention to etymology and lexical ambiguity, but it also reflects a larger imaginative engagement with a topos of epic, the technology of modern warfare, and the poetics of the passions. Even as Milton invokes the older military sense of “surprise,” he activates—and arguably shapes—the modern denotations of cognitive response and psychological affect. In a poem signally concerned with origins, the éclat of the word reverberates; but in Milton’s vocabulary of psychic and corporeal experience, surprise is also modulated into emotional states such as fear, wonder, pain, confusion, or joy. One is either surprised by these feelings, or surprised into them by some external event or stimulus. In either case, the experience is characterized by what Robert Solomon calls the “myth of the passions”: the idea that emotion is an event that happens to us rather than a current of feeling that originates from within.1
For a poem that advances a rigorously Arminian account of free will as divinely endowed gift, this notion of the passions as unruly forces might pose a problem. To say that Satan, Adam, or Eve are surprised by sin—either in its allegorical uppercase or abstract lowercase forms—is to suggest the possibility of the involuntary or the compelled. The problem can of course be dispelled by grammatical fiat, in the translation of the passive into the active: God’s intractable creatures are not really surprised by Sin; they commit sins. There is no external force of evil in the world, only evil acts. In strictly moral terms, Milton adopts what could be called a divine perspective toward surprise: Satan has only himself to blame for the conception and execution of his rebellion; Adam and Eve have been given sufficient warning to recognize sinful temptation when they see it; angels and human beings alike have been endowed with a rational faculty to know the good and shun evil. In short, none of them can legitimately claim to have been surprised by decisive actions or outcomes. And yet the language of surprise in Milton’s poem—in all its violent, demonic, irrational force—is too pervasive to be so neatly reduced and dismissed.
While Milton does not subscribe to the myth of the passions as an ethical account of human agency, I argue that he imaginatively adapts it, as he shapes all available mythologies, to his own poetic purposes. In the tradition of allegory, he hovers between the literal and the figurative—between surprise as brute physical force and surprise as emotion or cognition. In essence, he harks back to the classical notion of the passions even as he anticipates the modern understanding of emotions as evaluative judgments and ethical orientations toward the world.2 Above all, the experience of being surprised in Milton’s poem is more than just a passing thought or emotional state; it is a fundamental metamorphosis, a permanent change of body and mind. In the case of the Fall, to have been surprised is to have been irreversibly changed; it is, in the Freudian sense, traumatic. In broad terms, Milton’s inflections of surprise are driven by several concerns: with genre (the revision of classical epic), with allegory (Spenserian models of agonistic learning), with philosophy (conceptions of rationality and free will), and with theodicy (the gulf between divine and human consciousness).
In its use of epic conventions, Paradise Lost inevitably features a military surprise attack in the war in heaven, but it focuses more acutely on the cognitive dimension of that assault, and on its repercussions. The war begins with Satan’s nocturnal sortie against an unsuspecting angelic host, but its true beginning can be traced to Satan’s conception of the plan, which is allegorically represented as both a birth and a military assault. In Satan’s grotesque parturition of Sin, as in numerous other episodes, surprise is instrumental to Milton’s project of epic revision, as it is to allegory more broadly. In Angus Fletcher’s formulation, classical allegory takes the form of either the battle (as in psychomachia) or the progress (as in quests or masques).3 Gordon Teskey has argued more broadly that allegory is predicated on violence: not only the physical strife of battle but also the mental turmoil involved in poetic creation and agonistic reading—the torsion between narrative and symbolic levels, the Ovidian transformation of bodies into monstrous, meaning-bearing forms. “The more powerful the allegory,” Teskey remarks, “the more openly violent the moments in which the materials of narrative are shown being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning.”4
I want to suggest that surprise is instrumental to the allegorical violence articulated by Fletcher and Teskey. It signifies a clash between adversaries, in the martial tactics of ambush or sudden assault; and it discloses both the active energy of stealth or anticipation and the passive condition of unknowingness or inattention. Moreover, it marks the slippage between literal and figurative: what looks like a confrontation with a foe must ultimately be decoded as an internal conflict. The physical event of a sudden attack—whether initiated by the hero or suffered by him—can occasion a moment of recognition or didactic clarification; but that moment often belongs more to the alert reader than to the stunned or oblivious hero.5 Teskey has suggested that while Aristotelian tragedy elicits pity and terror in the viewer, allegory “elicits continual interpretation as its primary aesthetic effect” (4).
In Paradise Lost, that effect has been described by Stanley Fish as a participatory act punctuated by moments of surprise, which are deliberately set traps and snares for the reader—a reader who is at once both pliable enough to take the bait and sophisticated enough to recognize the error after it has been committed. In this way, Milton both represents the Fall and re-creates it in the mind of the reader.6 By implication, the phrase made famous by Fish—“surprised by sin”—denotes two things: 1) the mimetically presented event of falling and committing a sin within the poem; and 2) the rhetorically produced experience of reckoning with sinfulness in the act of reading.
Though we have a good idea of what Fish means by “surprise” and how it functions in his argument about our human susceptibility to error, we have had a less robust sense of what Milton meant by the term. For instance, it can be said that Satan is surprised by the birth of Sin, but in the relevant passage, this is not Milton’s precise wording. Satan is actually surprised by pain, and the sheer corporeality of that feeling should tell us something about the psychosomatic complexity of the experience, and the poem’s oscillations between the literal and the allegorical. (The exact phrase “surprised by sin” is Fish’s own coinage and appears nowhere in the poem, though its meaning is implicit throughout.) Surprise, then, is not only an experience to be recapitulated in the mind of the errant reader; it is also a spectacle to behold, and a military pun dramatized on multiple occasions. In Fish’s paradigm, the poem conditions the reader, formally and semantically, to “fall” along with Milton’s characters; but I argue that it also allows the reader some critical distance, and this is nowhere more evident than in scenes of astonishment, in which the narrative stops to linger over a character’s mental paralysis.
I want to emphasize the embodied nature of surprise in Paradise Lost, and its philosophical implications in Milton’s picture of rationality and moral freedom. As a Christian critique of classical epic, Milton’s poem has long been interpreted as asserting the superiority of spiritual struggle over traditional heroic valor, placing the mental over the physical, the internal over the external.7 And yet as an imaginative expression of Milton’s monist materialism, the poem blurs those distinctions. In Cartesian dualism, wonder, the surprise de l’âme, must be a figurative rather than physical seizure—for the soul cannot be arrested in the way that the bodily frame or the animal spirits can. In Milton’s radical philosophy, however, surprise pertains equally to body and soul, since they are part of a single, indivisible entity. As Stephen Fallon has put it, “Spirit and matter became for Milton two modes of the same substance: spirit is rarefied matter, and matter is dense spirit.”8 By extension, Miltonic surprise is simultaneously a physical and mental event, both a thing (a collision, an attack, an embodied passion) and a thought.
As a kind of seizure, surprise in Paradise Lost looks like a kind of demonic possession, especially in the birth of Sin from Satan’s forehead. This can be interpreted as ironic conceit rather than doctrinal explanation, and it does not morally absolve Satan of the crime; and yet the trope of possession has serious bearing on Adam and Eve’s fall. In his commentary on the Augustinian doctrine of original sin in the Christian Doctrine, Milton notes, “this evil desire, this law of sin, was not only inbred in us, but also took possession of Adam, after his fall, and from his point of view it could be called original” (389). The locution, “took possession” tempts us to think in Manichean terms of demonic invasion and sacramental exorcism; but Milton is appropriating the idea of possession to articulate one of the more disturbing wrinkles in his conception of free will: that God allows evil to happen, both “by not impeding natural causes and free agents” (1.8.330) and by creating the conditions for its furtherance: “For God does not drive the human heart to sinfulness and deceit when it is innocent and pure and shrinks from sin. But when it has conceived sin, when it is heavy with it, already giving birth to it, then God as the supreme arbiter of all things turns and points it in this or that direction or towards this or that object” (332).
These divine pointings might sound like compulsion or necessity but in Milton’s definition they amount not to a positive force but to an absence—the natural pull of a vacuum rather than the arbitrary push of a malevolent deity. In short, God allows the enlargement of sin and its ramification in punishment by “taking away his usual light-giving grace and power to resist sin” (334). Here, an ill will and evil acts can unexpectedly result in good for others and punishment for oneself; and punishment is not so much juridically meted out as it is spontaneously suffered by the malefactor, in the incalculable ripple effect of sin.9 The metaphor of conception and birth in the passage quoted above will spring grotesquely to life in the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost; indeed, the earlier prose explanation can be seen as a proleptic gloss on the allegorical episode. Among its manifold implications: that sin comprises both evil desire and executive action, that its full significance can be neither anticipated nor immediately grasped, and that it comes as a surprise both in the moment of commission (as a kind of demonic possession) and in its incalculable results.
In Milton’s theodicy, surprise marks an uncrossable boundary between God and everyone else. Despite his absolute foreknowledge, God does not deliberately surprise his created beings in the way that they surprise each other—as when Satan launches a civil war against his brethren, or when Edenic guardians sneak up on Satan, or when the fallen Eve returns to share her wondrous discovery with Adam. When Satan and his crew resolve to win God’s mount “by fight or by surprise” (6.87), they invoke the classical distinction between heroic confrontation and stealth, and its incarnation as forza and froda in Dante’s survey of sins. In the heroic values of epic, the first ranks higher than the second, but from a divine perspective, the distinctions between the two collapse. Though force might seem more honorable than fraud, they are merely two words for the same act of disobedience. The dyad of “fight or surprise” registers the difference between brute violence and mental strategy, but in Milton’s allegory, one can signify the other. As I show below, Satan’s first conception of the rebellion looks like a physical attack, and the realization of the plan is represented as cognitive disarray: both are inflections of surprise. In the poem’s demotion of martial valor, forza becomes no better than froda; and within the frame of God’s omniscience, froda looks no different from forza—for there can be no surprises, only endless bursts of clumsily applied force.
This is yet another way that Milton limns the divide between God and his creatures: in this poetic imagination of divine consciousness, the Creator displays a variety of recognizably human emotions, but never surprise. That experience belongs to all other sentient beings, both angelic and human: it is the emotional vector of action and choice in a world framed by rational expectation rather than omniscient certainty; and it is a function not only of rationality but also of unruly passions.10 Playing on the word’s Latinate meaning, Milton registers the intersection between external conditions and moral agency: in the experience of surprise, one feels like both active agent and passive object. That mingled feeling of voluntariness and compulsion does not fundamentally contradict the poet’s conception of free will as a divine gift, but it does add significant nuance to it. As a function of knowledge and expectation, experiences of surprise in the poem elicit the reader’s faculties of judgment, in the articulation of what a character should have known about or anticipated. But as embodied experiences, these moments can elicit what could be called, in eighteenth-century terms, the reader’s sympathy—the capacity to imagine and feel with a character’s affective and perceptual experience.
In evoking that experience, Milton is attuned to the unbridgeable distance between divine and human understandings of surprise. When God sends Raphael to deliver instruction on the ways of Satan, he does so lest Adam “pretend / Surprisal” (5.244–45). In divine usage, surprise is purely a function of rationality: once Adam is forewarned, he cannot legitimately claim to be surprised. To “pretend” here bears the sense of both staking a legal or political claim and engaging in a form of deceit or playacting. (Satan plays the role of royal pretender to a non ex is tent throne, while Adam and Eve lapse into concealment and pretense.) In the human lexicon, however, a post facto assertion of “surprisal” need not carry this second sense of willful lying. Rather, it registers a complex state of mind and body. To say, “I was surprised”—by Satan, by sin, by the behavior of others, by circumstance, by the course of one’s own thought—is to report an experience that goes beyond the subversion of an expectation.
In his fine-grained attention to the emotional, corporeal, and cognitive life of his characters, Milton enables a fuller understanding of surprise than God’s language allows. Since God makes his monitory statement before the Fall, it is tempting to invoke the default distinction between pre-and postlapsarian forms of surprise. In that case, the salient difference might lie in the premise that before Satan’s rebellion, there was no military sense of surprise, since the surprise attack—as concept and as techne—had yet to be invented or deployed. However, insofar as all non-divine beings are fully embodied creatures who think and feel, surprise must have always been around. Milton knows that he is playing on a fallen term of war, but he is also working on deeper etymological levels—on the sense of being overtaken.11 In the compatibilist understanding of Paradise Lost, free will can be reconciled with divine foreknowledge; and though I do not intend to challenge that account, I wish to propose a new picture of Milton’s conception of moral freedom, one that is both active and passive in its contours, one defined by the complex nature of surprise.12 As Milton explains in the Christian Doctrine, the “subdivisions” of sin are “evil desire, or the will to do evil, and the evil deed itself.”13 In Milton’s conception of rationality, that first phase of sin is freely chosen; but in the poetics of thought that Milton would develop in Paradise Lost, an evil desire is as much something that seems to happen to a rational agent as it is caused by that agent. Surprise, like other passions, originates in the psyche but is also suffered by it.
I argue, then, that the idea of being “surprised by sin” has ramifications that extend well beyond the formal experience modeled in Fish’s close readings. In brief, the idea takes several forms:
1) To be attacked or seized by an allegorical adversary called Sin.
2) To be possessed, demonically or cognitively, by the impulse to commit a forbidden act.
3) To be overwhelmed by a feeling.
4) To commit a sinful act that results in incalculable and unexpected consequences.
5) To be astonished or bewildered by the opportunity to commit a sin—a seemingly sudden aperture of possibility.
6) To be retrospectively surprised by one’s own action: the fact that one has committed a sin, or that one is capable of doing so.
In doctrinal terms, the first two of these senses can be seen as pagan props—vestigial superstitions, objects of parody, subordinates to a narrative of Christian triumphalism. And yet as metaphors, they powerfully shape the other senses, which might be called cognitive or psychological. In exploring these senses, I focus on several key moments of surprise in the poem: the allegorical birth of Sin from Satan’s head; the invention of gunpowder and subsequent defeat of the rebel angels; the discovery of Satan in the act of tempting a sleeping Eve; Raphael’s monitory instruction and Adam’s internalization of it; and Adam’s reaction to the metamorphic evidence of Eve’s fall.
Before turning to these instances, I show how Milton’s Protestant poetics of surprise owes a multiple debt to Edmund Spenser: the problem of recognizing error; the emphasis on constant vigilance in the act of reading and interpretation; the fear of sudden snares and temptations; the allegorical translation of external foes into internal forces; the spiritualization of “force” or violence; and the prominent vocabulary of wonder and amazement, along with an attendant suspicion that such passions impair the senses and disable reason. Milton strongly echoes Spenser’s deep suspicion of wonder as disabling passion, but he also departs from his predecessor in seeing it as an enabling theophanic force; it is indicative of the moral complexity of Milton’s vision, however, that good and bad forms of wonder in the poem are so intertwined. Insofar as Spenser’s heroes function as strenuous readers, The Faerie Queene both elicits the act of interpretation and represents it, but Paradise Lost carries that poetic project even further, in dramatically staging scenes of surprise as both Aristotelian reversal and recognition.
Before the Miltonic surprise of Sin, there was the shock of Spenserian Error. In Canto 1 of The Faerie Queene, it becomes strikingly apparent to the reader, though not to the Redcrosse Knight, that a hasty confrontation with Error is itself a form of error. Indeed, an encounter with a beast of this name engages the reader’s expectation of an allegory.14 A darker forerunner of this predicament lies in the grimly funny wordplay at the heart of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: going on a quest to slay a wicked adversary named Death, three rogues meet their own demise. Although the figures of Death and Error might seem like Platonic abstractions, they function more as viral contagions, noxious on contact. Each encounter is not spectatorial, as in a masque-like procession, but participatory. One cannot seek Death without dying, one cannot fight Error without erring; one cannot be surprised by Sin without sinning.
The Redcrosse Knight physically surprises the beast named Error and is violently seized by her in turn, but the true conflict lies within: to say that the hero is surprised by Error is really to say that he is in the grip of an error, that he himself errs in unanticipated ways. Here, as elsewhere in Spenser’s poem, an act of violent surprise carries the symbolic meaning of anticipating and preempting error or sin. But such efforts have what Milton would call, with Latinate import, a redundant effect, with the attempt unexpectedly recoiling upon the hero. In the effort to vanquish a foe, the hero risks being overmastered by his own rage, or struck dumb with amazement. These passions are not inherently sinful, but they are always in danger of running to extremes or leading to ruinous behavior.15 The Bower of Bliss episode in Canto 2 exemplifies this problem. When the Palmer catches Guyon gazing at two naked maidens, he advises the knight on the swift capture of their queen (“Here wonnes Acrasia, whom we must surprise, / Else she will slip away, and all our drift despise” [2.12.69.8–9]). But Guyon has already been smitten by the sight, and the elaborate ekphrasis of the bower and its emparadised lovers (70–80) suggests his total sensory immersion in the spectacle. Before he can surprise Acrasia, he has already been surprised; and though he captures his adversary, he is soon overwhelmed by a different passion, “the tempest of his wrathfulnesse” (83.4). In Spenser’s allegory, Guyon’s destruction of the Bower—and other such acts of purgation—are only provisional forms of repression, not definitive eliminations of evil. The hero who would surprise a foe is himself surprised—overtaken by events he has set in motion, disabled by his own unruly passions.
In the confrontation with Error, the Redcrosse Knight is overwhelmed—physically and cognitively—despite the warning counsel of Una, who functions as both defenseless ward and knowledgeable guide. When she tells him that they have arrived at a place called “the wandring wood” and “Errours den,” she identifies the spot not only by its monstrous resident but also by the wayward movement that has brought them here in the first place. To call this a wood of Error is to invoke historical past, immediate present, and near future all at once: the schism that was supposed to reveal the error of the Roman Church and the truth of English Protestantism; the ongoing errancy of the ever-imperiled Redcrosse; and the specific mistake that the knight will make when he meets the beast—that of rage without reason or faith.
Merely to confront the adversary in its den—as if it could be vanquished once and for all, or as if it demands to be defeated in chivalric protection of Una—is to fall into a conceptual error. Error’s ghastly emergence from the cave incites the knight to retaliate, but he himself has goaded her into that defensive posture; he startles a dormant serpent with her brood before she startles him. And though Redcrosse stuns his adversary, she responds in kind, wrapping him “All suddenly” (18.7) in her mazy grip—a serpentine emblem that is given the motto, “God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine” (18.9). This moral commentary serves as both an idiomatic expression of pathos (may God help such a poor wretch) and as a version of the Protestant ideology of sola fide, which will be amplified when Una urges Redcrosse to “Add faith unto your force” (19.3).
None of this signifies to Redcrosse, whose faculties of perception and judgment are just as dazed as Error’s; and in the heat of struggle, he hears Una’s counsel “in great perplexitie” (19.5). Spenser’s Latinate pun suggests that the serpent gives visual form to the metaphorical twists and folds of Redcrosse’s own mind, but the hero cannot see those contortions for himself; like the labyrinthine wood in which she resides, Error is both adversary (a political and religious foe) and internal condition (the activity and predisposition of wandering from the truth).
Error, then, is a kind of Möbius strip—with no true inside or outside, only one inescapable and endless surface. Whereas it can be visualized in this allegorical conflict, faith cannot: like sin, error comes in an endless variety of forms and disguises; but faith, like truth, is unitary and not easily rendered in concrete and tangible form. It is tempting to read Redcrosse’s inherited shield as such an emblem; but in Spenser’s Protestant poetics, even this risks a kind of idolatry or iconographic literalism. Despite his victory over Error, then, Redcrosse will err repeatedly, as when he mistakes Archimago for a kindly hermit, or fails to detect Duessa’s deception. As Jeffrey Dolven has observed, Spenserian heroes are condemned to repeat their mistakes in new ways, always failing to read properly, while the reader interprets the allegorical meaning of their experiences over their heads and “at their expense.”16 In the ongoing flow of the narrative, experience is crystallized into didactic example, but that archetype fails to prepare the hero sufficiently for the next trial.
The predicament of being surprised by Sin in Paradise Lost is analogous to the experiences of being surprised by Death or Error: all involve being overtaken and engulfed; all turn on an irrevocable choice or action; all feature a putative adversary whose true essence is manifest only in the conflict itself; and none can be reliably generalized to prevent future failure. On the other hand, Milton’s instances of surprise significantly differ from their Chaucerian and Spenserian precedents, for they do not involve teleological narratives of search and conquest. Satan, Adam, and Eve do not attempt to confront or vanquish Sin; rather, sin originates in their separate acts. Moreover, its moments of emergence arise as uncanny repetitions rather than first appearances: Satan’s first narrated confrontation with Sin is really a second encounter, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit echoes a Satanic dream and a divine injunction, and Adam’s participation in that act defies Raphael’s warnings against sinfulness. In their moral blind spots, all three figures can be said to know and not know sin at the same time.
In Paradise Lost, the perennial dichotomy in allegory—between characters and readers, action and meaning—is crystallized in the physical and mental senses of surprise: Satan, Adam, and Eve experience attacks of Sin, while the alert reader is presumably startled by its manifestation, before each character can fully reckon with it. And yet in the wake of the initial seizure, all three figures reach an awareness of their fate that their similarly fallible precursors in Spenserian romance cannot achieve. This is where tragedy and allegory intersect in Paradise Lost—in the dramatic recognition scene. Moreover, the experience of being surprised is both fully physical (being overwhelmed, struck down) and vitally cognitive (reckoning with the aftermath). Among the many critics who have commented on the tragic dimensions of Milton’s epic, John Steadman has illuminated the Aristotelian elements of peripeteia and anagnorisis with particular acuity. Satan’s confrontation with Sin, Satan’s detection in Eden by an angelic guard, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, Adam’s revelation of Christ as future redeemer—all of these moments constitute reversals of fortune and recognitions of that reversal.17 I would add that the multivalent word “surprise” names both phases; and I focus on the complex relationship between two narrative stages of surprise in the poem: first Satan’s, then Adam and Eve’s.
The violent sense of surprise figures prominently in two passages in which Sin is said to attack its victim: Satan is first surprised by Sin, and Adam is later warned not to be surprised by her (or it). Only the first instance is represented with allegorical personification, whereas the second is more clearly a metaphysical statement, with only a faint linguistic vestige of allegory; what binds the two together is the experience—a sensation, a passion, a cognitive event—of surprise. The ontological status of Sin and Death in a poem that otherwise avoids allegorical apparatus famously vexed eighteenth-century readers like Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson.18 Twentieth-century readers, on the other hand, have interpreted these figures as deliberate rather than clumsy, metaphysically profound rather than symbolically naïve; their sheer alien presence is seen to reflect an unsettling truth about Satan’s uncanny nature or about the act of reading itself.19
We might wonder why allegorical figures appear in Satan’s fall but not in Adam and Eve’s. First, it is fitting that a character who is himself an allegorical figure (in the archetypal role of ha satan, the Adversary) gives birth to another; and since his struggle is represented in terms of classical epic, he merits the antique trappings of personified abstractions. In this way, the introduction of Sin and Death serves as an intentionally overblown foil for Milton’s finer-grained depiction of human choice—as if, in the narrative movement from heaven to earth, allegorical generality had been stripped away, and particular meanings stood revealed. There is yet another possible reason for the difference, which I would like to pursue here: the premise that surprise in the poem cannot happen in the same way twice. Even within Satan’s experience, Sin reappears in new ways, in apt display of what must be a family trait. Her birth can be understood in Freudian terms as an originary trauma that is manifested in a repetition compulsion, an event whose significance can be brought to consciousness and understood only belatedly. In Freud’s definition, the cause of trauma is the “factor of surprise, of fright,” which depends upon a state of unpreparedness; and in Cathy Caruth’s elaboration, it is “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”20
The birth of Sin—of evil desire and the willful breaking of divine law—is precisely this kind of event, in that its significance cannot be immediately understood, and its concussive force is registered as accident rather than as wholly deliberate and premeditated action. On his quest to colonize the new world, Satan is startled to find a guardian at Hell’s portal; and his failure to recognize his own daughter ironically recapitulates the moment that she was born. Here, the child must refresh the parent’s memory and narrate her own birth. The passage deserves to be quoted in full, for it not only recounts the trauma but verbally enacts it:
Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem
Now in thine eye so foul, once deemed so fair
In Heaven, when at the assembly and, in sight
Of all the seraphim, with thee combined
In bold conspiracy against Heaven’s king,
All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed
Out of thy head I sprung? (2.747–56)21
Such a passage demands the kind of rigorous rereading modeled by Stanley Fish, but the effect in this case is not to lead the reader into error or misprision; rather, it is to simulate the disorienting and traumatic experience of the sudden and surprising. The clausal complexity of Sin’s breathtaking rhetorical question—the distance between subject and predicate—calls for a prose translation: “Do I seem so foul now in Hell, I who was once hailed as fair in Heaven, when pain seized you and I sprung out of your head, to the astonishment of your compatriots?” Because of the grammatical delay, the phrase, “All on a sudden” is in itself a syntactic surprise, as is the appearance of “miserable pain,” which would seem to clash with Sin’s putative beauty. Moreover, the phrasing of the passage captures the involuntariness in the experience of surprise. Though the narrative concerns Satan’s conspiracy against heaven and the corresponding delivery of Sin into the world, it is really Sin who serves as the active agent here. Satan’s head throws forth flames and Sin, but in a grammatical contortion, the latter becomes an active subject: “a goddess armed / Out of thy head I sprung.” In that syntactic crossing, Sin narrates herself both in the third person as a surprising event that happened to Satan and as an agent in her own right. With her ready-made armor, she is also a military embodiment of surprise, a visual pun: though she appears as an engine of the rebel cause, she has really made a surprise attack on the general himself. The damage, in other words, has already been done; the archdemon has been demonically possessed.
The birth of Sin has antecedents in several genres—not only mythological fable (the birth of Athena) but also drama (recognition scenes) and romance (reunions and intersecting paths). The discovery of paternity and family relationships is of course essential to Sophoclean tragedy; but its revelation, as Aristotle observed, is effected by probable accident rather than supernatural machinery. Milton’s variation plays grotesquely on that pattern, in that Sin is both a natural relation and a supernatural being, both the message and the messenger. Though her bizarre appearance breaks the decorum of Aristotelian tragedy, she exemplifies the difference that Aristotle saw between tragedy and epic—the latter genre offering a greater scope for the marvelous, in its freedom from the visual and physical literalism of the stage.
The very fact that Sin becomes the bard of her own heroic birth underscores her narrative rather than dramatic properties. In the classical topos of wonder, exemplified in Aeneas’s unwitting encounter with his mother Venus, a mortal beholds a woman and cries, “Dea certe!” (“Surely this is a goddess!”). Satan is too astonished to say this, but the rebels supply that reaction; the scene thus involves a two-part surprise: a character’s stunned reaction and a choric elaboration of it. This duality is significant for the poem’s epistemology of evil. Only Satan can be truly said to recognize Sin, not because he has seen her before but because in beholding her he beholds himself—or, in allegorical terms, the incarnation of his own malicious thoughts. In another sense, however, he entirely fails to recognize Sin for what she is. The rebels, meanwhile, are seeing her for the first time, and it falls to them to name this new manifestation in their world:
Amazement seized
All the host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid
At first and called me ‘Sin’ and for a sign
Portentous held me; but familiar grown
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamored…(2.758–65)
The naming of the goddess gives a surplus of meaning through a quite literal addition: as fear melts into admiration, “Sin” becomes “sign,” and the sign is taken for a wonder. Precisely what do the rebels think they signify by the name “Sin”? It is impossible to say for sure, but their meaning surely differs from the reader’s lexical understanding.22 Such a discontinuity is symptomatic of the gap between allegorical characters and readers; it is also a difference inflected by history, the manifestations and meanings that have accrued to the word. In the mythological tradition of misinterpreted signs and misunderstood gifts, Satan and the rebels have the experience but miss the meaning.
Milton’s ekphrasis of speechless amazement harks back to scenes in The Faerie Queene, where such reactions nearly always pose a danger. In partic ular, the unveiling of a stealthy Minervan goddess bears a strong resemblance to wonder scenes involving Britomart in Book 3, such as this one, in which the knights in Malbecco’s castle behold the female warrior newly freed of her armor:
Which whenas they beheld, they smitten were
With great amazement of so wondrous sight,
And each on other, and they all on her
Stood gazing, as if suddein great affright
Had them surprised. At last avizing right,
Her goodly personage and glorious hew,
Which they so much mistooke, they tooke delight
In their first errour, and yet still anew
With wonder of her beauty fed their hungry view. (3.9.23)
The Spenserian features of dangerous amazement are on display here—the mutual glances of incredulity, the trope of surprise attack, the paralytic gaze, the visual double take, the recovery of equilibrium. Practiced in the courtly arts of Neoplatonic vision, the knights sublimate their lust into a “contemplation of divinitie” (3.9.24.4), redirecting their gaze from beautiful surface to the “chevalree” and “noble prowesse” (3.9.24.5–6) signified by it. And yet this allegorical translation does not entirely banish the problem of insatiability, which is formally enacted in the amplification of the alexandrine’s “hungry vew” in the opening of the next stanza: “Yet note their hungry vew be satisfide, / But seeing still the more desired to see” (3.9.24.1–2). Possibly, the restless sensory act of seeing aspires to a new and entirely metaphysical form of seeing, beyond the eidolon to the Platonic idea; but the trope of hunger keeps the passage grounded in bodily cravings. Wonder in The Faerie Queene is always a perilous lacuna.
And so it is in Paradise Lost. As David Hume would later remark in his discourse on the passions, wonder can lead to a disabling credulity or a paralysis of rational thought; and, by Milton’s lights, it verges dangerously close to idolatry. In the rebels’ response to Sin’s dazzling birth, Milton effectively parodies the superstitious belief in marvels. The parthenogenesis of Sin is in itself a wonder: while the rebels gaze at the spectacle of Satan next to his female double, Satan is essentially admiring his own reflection; and it is worth recalling that “admire,” “mirror,” and “miracle” all spring from the Latin verb mirari, “to marvel at.” The intellectual history of wonder is relevant here: as several critics have noted, there are two radically different forms of wonder in Paradise Lost—the true miracles wrought by God (in the form of natural laws and divine intervention) and the false wonders (what Thomas Aquinas called miraculum mendax) associated with Satan (such as his shape-shifting and invention of modern weaponry).23
The birth of Sin is thus many things: a parody of Sophoclean peripeteia and anagnorisis, as well as the Christian annunciation and birth; a figure of dangerous self-absorption and idolatry; a visualized trope for the ethical estrangement of self from action and consequence; and an archetypal enactment of the experience of surprise, as both the total possession by a feeling and the occluded awareness of that state. As an act of doubling, this birth not only suggests Satan’s grotesque self-worship and the self-reproducing nature of evil acts, it also registers Milton’s wary discomfort with the possibility of literalization or fetishization inherent in allegorical personification. Sin is not a creature in the world; it is more elusive—and, indeed, surprising—than that. In rhetorical terms, she can be seen as a function of Aristotelian enargeia: her literal brightness and allegorical clarity give the reader an illustrative picture, while she momentarily blinds Satan himself. Satan’s failure to recognize his own daughter, then, is more Spenserian than Sophoclean, since he cannot achieve the kind of tragic reckoning that Oedipus does: in this respect, he resembles Redcrosse, who sees only a terrifying beast, not a representation of Error and its endless train.
Notably, Sin never appears in Raphael’s narration of the war in heaven, and there are several possible reasons for that omission. In practical terms, it can be seen as reflecting a gap in the angel’s knowledge; and yet this cannot be a wholly satisfying explanation, since Raphael gives other details about the dawning of Satan’s conspiracy that he could not have directly witnessed. What distinguishes the episode of Sin’s birth is that it is narrated entirely by Sin herself: Satan, who has no memory of the event, must rely on the testimony of his daughter, who might be an unreliable narrator, a figment of his imagination, a powerful embodiment of rebel ideology (for Satan’s comrades also see her), a demonic dea abscondita, or a kind of Dantean projection designed to torment him. Raphael’s elision of the birth of Sin, then, suggests that the event is, so to speak, all in Satan’s head. There is no question that Satan is surprised by Sin; but as in the Freudian model of trauma, the meaning of that shock is realized only in a later act of narration. Moreover, the absence of the allegorical episode of Sin’s birth from Raphael’s brief epic makes an allegorical point. Endless and unpredictable variety is the essence of surprise: Sin will appear in countless different guises, not just one.
Though Satan conceives of Sin, he can only ever reencounter her, at both ends of his round-trip journey from hell to earth. Between those two points, she disappears from the narrative, but as I show below, the moment of her birth is imagistically recapitulated in numerous ways: it is an endlessly renewable surprise. Satan’s plan of rebellion is bound to its immediate physical consequences in a variety of ways. For instance, the wonder inspired by Sin is displaced into the calculated pomp of Satan’s arrival on the field of battle in “sun-bright chariot” surrounded by “flaming cherubim and golden shields” (6.100–102). The massive headache induced by Sin’s birth is recapitulated as Abdiel’s “noble stroke” on Satan’s “impious crest” (6.187–88)—a strike so swift that “no sight / Nor motion of swift thought, less could his shield, / Such ruin intercept” (6.191–92). The blanking of Satan’s mental faculties recalls the momentary blindness induced by Sin; and the rebels’ reaction of “amazement” (6.198) to the sudden blow precisely repeats the impact of Sin’s appearance. In its mind-blurring swiftness, the sword stroke also anticipates the surprise of another, later technology of warfare.
With the introduction of firepower into heaven, the genius of Satan’s rebellion returns with a certain alienated majesty. The mingled elements of Sin’s birth—glory and pain, intention and act, illumination and darkness, wonder and terror—are recapitulated in the literal flash and heat of modern battle. Here, I want to emphasize the Spenserian premise that both the surpriser and the surprised—the one who pulls the trigger and the target of attack—are subject to shock. As both a tactical maneuver and an utterly new form of weaponry, Satan’s artillery assault stands at the historical divide between classical epic and what Michael Murrin has identified as the early modern “negative critique of the gun” in poetry that began with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.24 The introduction of cannon technology in heaven, as Claude Raw-son has pointed out, is based partly on the idea that “gunpowder was the invention of the Devil”; but it also enables Milton to “retain the military business and even the martial partisanships of heroic poetry while mounting a massive onslaught on the morality of war and the traditional values of epic” (119).25 In the war in heaven, the rebels’ secret weapon is a rude shock, but it is soon rebuffed by the good angels’ arsenal of hurled boulders and hills. In the divine physics of Paradise Lost, Satan’s action is met with an opposite and overmastering reaction.
As much as the defeat of the rebels depends on that counterassault, however, Milton ultimately represents their rout as an internal phenomenon, one that echoes both the birth of Sin and Satan’s first sense of pain. Once again, a surprise attack becomes an emotional and cognitive event:
what stood recoiled
O’erwearied through the faint satanic host
Defensive scarce or with pale fear surprised,
Then first with fear surprised and sense of pain
Fled ignominious, to such evil brought
By sin of disobedience, till that hour
Not liable to fear or flight or pain. (6.391–97)
Milton does not ignore the epic données of shivered armor, overturned chariots, and foaming steeds, but his true focus is on psychic consequences. A vestigial personification allegory haunts the scene: this time, instead of fair Sin, it is pale Fear that startles the rebels—the terrified blanching of their faces displaced to the ghostly abstraction that now stalks them. In Milton’s finely calibrated poetics of thought, the odd verbal repetition (“with pale fear surprised,” “first with fear surprised,” “till that hour / Not liable to fear”) syntactically registers an incredulous double take. This is a stop-motion anatomy of surprise: first, the sheer feeling of fear, then the processing of that feeling—the realization of a previously unknown emotion. “Till that hour”: surprise defines a new before and after, a rent in the temporal fabric of heavenly existence.
Milton’s narration of the rebellion thus serves as a mythical etiology of the passions: it marks not only the birth of Sin but also the resulting origins of pain and fear. The firstness of these experiences subtly establishes the premise that God has been neither sadistic nor Machiavellian in his rule; rather, his reign is founded on the emotional supports of wonder and joy. These, however, are not constant states, and Milton takes pains to assert that heaven is not an eternally static realm but rather a place of variety and change. This principle of mutability is most obvious in Satan’s case, but it is true of the loyal angels as well, especially in their reaction to their own victory. It is no accident that Milton describes it in the same language that he has used to describe the birth of Sin: “them unexpected joy surprised, / When the great ensign of Messiah blazed / Aloft by angels borne, his sign in Heaven” (6.774–76). In a cathartic cleansing of epic violence, sneak attacks are replaced by a surge of happiness. As in the rebels’ attack of fear, the surprise is twofold: a sudden emotion and a rational processing of that emotion. It is not just a feeling but a function of expectation: in propositional terms, they are surprised that they have achieved this victory. Though they are armed with virtue, the good angels, like everyone but God, cannot predict the outcome of the battle. While downplaying or even parodying the physical trappings of epic, Milton emphasizes the dimension of mental and moral struggle—the reality of choosing a side and fighting for it under uncertain circumstances. Though happiness is a donnée in heaven and the singing of hosannas a daily routine, joy even here has degrees of intensity; and jubilation after the defeat of the rebels is sui generis, another “first” brightly marked in this narrative of origins.
The dual nature of surprise in the defeat of the rebels—rebuffed by the heavenly host, seized by fear—is recapitulated in Satan’s confrontation with the angelic guard in Eden. Satan’s attempt to sow rebellion in God’s latest born represents a continuation of war by other means, and Milton’s language reminds us of this. In a kind of Dantean contrapasso, the invention of gunpowder is answered by an incendiary trope. Just as the artillery war in heaven was triggered by the “nicest touch” of flaming reeds (6.582–84), the merest “touch” of Ithuriel’s spear (4.812) causes Satan to jump up from whispering subversion in Eve’s ear:
Up he starts
Discovered and surprised. As when a spark
Lights on a heap of nitrous powder laid
Fit for the tun some magazine to store
Against a rumored war, the smutty grain
With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the air:
So started up in his own shape the fiend.
Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed
So sudden to behold the grisly king;
Yet thus, unmoved with fear, accost him soon. (4.813–22)
Discovered and surprised: that is to say, detected and caught unawares. In Milton’s materialist imagination, the surprise of Satan is both cognitive (the realization of being found out) and physical (the transformative touch of Ithuriel’s spear). The discovery is comically underscored by a quasi-Ovidian metamorphosis: the angels first find the intruder “squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve” (4.800), but upon being discovered, Satan starts up in his own shape; and the point is reiterated when the allegorically pointed spear of Ithuriel returns Satanic falsehood “to its own likeness” (4.813). While the reference to a toad sounds like metaphor, the archfiend’s return to his own shape implies a real metamorphosis; meanwhile, Milton’s mock-epic simile suggests that the inventor of gunpowder is himself a powder keg. This functions as a recognition scene, but a pointedly occluded one: angelic guardians surprise the toad-like spy into becoming an upright warrior, and identify him as one of “those rebel spirits adjudged to hell” (4.823); but they cannot say which rebel they have caught, and the oversight rankles Satan. (“Know ye not me?” the deposed leader asks with Lear-like pique [4.828].)
Satan here experiences a particular species of surprise. Before his discovery ramifies into fear (his) and amazement (the angels’), there is the root physicality of the startle reflex—signally triggered by sudden loud noises such as gunfire, and common to human and beast alike. In a grammatical reverberation typical of all things Satanic and reminiscent of the rebels’ fearful double take, Milton repeats Satan’s stunned reaction at being detected: “up he starts” and “So started up.” Satan’s reaction thus mingles the voluntariness of self-protection and the involuntariness of a reflex. Succumbing to a basic creaturely impulse, Satan lurches like Error cornered in her den, or like a startled toad; but he also explodes like gunpowder.
In Milton’s materialist philosophy, the tropes of animal reflex and gunpowder detonation are not so different as they might seem, for both involve the spontaneous action of vital matter; both constitute a surprise mechanism; and both disclose not only an animating principle of life but the energy of rebellion. As John Rogers has argued, seventeenth-century theories of vitalism and corpuscular circulation had implications for revolutionary politics: the scientific picture of a self-regulating body challenged the classic metaphor of a body politic governed by a royal head.26 In what is surely a deliberate echo, Adam later describes his own first coming-to-consciousness as such a spontaneous leap: “raised / By quick instinctive motion, up I sprung” (8.258–59). As gunpowder is kindled by a spark, so Adam is awakened by the sun.
As with real firepower, no one—neither shooter nor target—is exempt from the startle reflex: both Satan and the catalytic angel are shocked, the latter stepping back in “half” amazement. Milton’s qualifier, however, pointedly denies that the blast is a source of true wonder or sign of divinity. In Eu rope an narratives of colonial exploration, the gun is often beheld by New World inhabitants as a token of godlike power; but no such credulity attends this spectacle. As usual, Milton uses a finely calibrated emotional vocabulary here: the angelic centurions’ reaction might be called a species of wonder, but it is colored by neither fear nor awe. A later eighteenth-century term would more precisely characterize the occasion of their surprise: neither the beautiful nor the sublime but what Addison called the Novel—the unusual or never-before-seen.
The omission of Sin’s birth from Raphael’s narrative could be called a metonymy for a larger epistemological gap: Adam and Eve cannot know that God knows that they will fall.27 In commanding Raphael to instruct Adam of the danger posed by Satan, God is forearming his newest creation, but he articulates the mission with legalistic fatalism: “this let him know, / Lest willfully transgressing he pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned” (5.243–45). The cleavage between human and divine meanings of surprise are nowhere more evident than here. In an ordinary, mortal sense, there is no pretense or fakery in Adam and Eve’s experiences of surprise: they are genuinely astonished, caught off guard, and overmastered by Satan’s infiltration of Eden and its cascade of subsequent events. In God’s supremely normative sense of the term, however, “surprisal” is indefensible: regardless of how they retrospectively narrate their experience, Adam and Eve should not have been surprised; they should have anticipated and resisted. This is so whether they care to name the agent of surprise as an internal impulse or an external “Satan” or “Eve.” The previous figure to pretend surprisal in the poem was the satanic Pretender himself, in both prospective and retrospective senses of that phrase: presuming to attack an unwitting adversary and then claiming that the ensuing punishment was totally unexpected. God’s command effectively declares any repetitions of Satan’s pretense to be inexcusable. Notably, the stated rationale for teaching Adam and Eve is framed in negative terms—as prevention against saying something rather than the encouragement of a particular behavior. Among the many ways that God might have framed Raphael’s charge, he tellingly emphasizes knowledge rather than action, and post facto excuse rather than practical reasoning. That emphasis essentially reflects the ongoing tension between human freedom and divine foreknowledge; the participial modifier “willfully transgressing” is no hypothetical scenario but rather a certain outcome known only to God.
In carrying out his divinely ordered mission, Raphael echoes God’s command when he warns Adam to “govern well thy appetite, lest Sin / Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death” (7.548–49). The two main senses of “surprise” are implicit here: in allegorical terms, Sin is a foe that attacks the victim in a moment of weakness; and in cognitive terms, the sinner is astonished—too late—by what he has done. Sin itself becomes the ghostly afterimage of a completed act, an idea to be brooded over, a pang of conscience. Death, by contrast, cannot be cognitively reckoned with; it is rather, a brute-force surprise that stops cognition cold. Without Sin’s own interpolated tale—the allegory provided to the reader—it is difficult to know what Adam makes of these personifications. In the absence of any actual death in Raphael’s brief epic, they seem to function as apotropaic ciphers, signifiers of very bad things. Since the distinction between the allegorical and the literal cannot fully signify to Adam, the import of Raphael’s warning is chiefly emotional rather than purely semantic. Up to this point in his brief existence, Adam has no referent for Sin or Death; but in the extraordinary sequence of his own birth, loss of consciousness, and discovery of Eve, he has most certainly felt surprise. This, then, is the core experience that drives Raphael’s warning.
It is thus apt that when Adam recapitulates Raphael’s warning to Eve, he omits mention of sin or death; only the emotional residue of surprise remains. Jeffrey Dolven has observed that in Renaissance humanist pedagogy, successful learning depends upon repetition, the ability to recite a lesson or to do something in imitation of an original (141). While Adam follows that model in instructing Eve, he tellingly translates his preceptor’s terms. In place of Raphael’s allegorical villains, Adam describes man’s capacities and weaknesses as a struggle between two faculties that he knows more directly—reason and will:
Against his will he can receive no harm.
But God left free the will, for what obeys
Reason is free, and reason he made right
But bid her well beware, and still erect,
Lest by some fair-appearing good surprised
She dictate false and misinform the will
To do what God expressly hath forbid. (9.350–56)
This account of error adds psychological and ethical inflections to Raphael’s caveat: being surprised by a “fair-appearing good” is a more complicated experience than being surprised by Sin. Rather than naming the true identity of the danger (e.g., “evil” or “sin”), Milton chooses the word “good,” so that the deception of the adjective infects the noun; the diabolical nature of the surprise lies in the ambiguity of substance and accident. For clarity’s sake, we might wish to place the word “good” in scare quotes, but no such assurance is available, either in Milton’s seventeenth-century orthography or in Adam’s ken. It might even be the case that the proscribed or dangerous thing really does constitute a good of sorts, as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge arguably does; but in Raphael’s teaching about overindulgence and excessive curiosity, there can be too much of a good thing. It is also possible that Milton here exploits the dual sense of the nominal form: a “good” is both a thing that is good and a value-neutral property or possession. Since the Tree is part of the world that God has bestowed on Adam and Eve, its fruits could be considered a “good” in that sense, albeit a proscribed one.
Meanwhile, Adam’s depiction of Reason and Will unwittingly foreshadows his and Eve’s separate falls: Reason, gendered as female, represents both Eve in her entanglement with the fair-appearing serpent and Adam in his susceptibility to Eve’s surpassing fairness. The other main thrust of Adam’s teaching clarifies a particular kind of freedom: though the will “obeys” reason, it is still free, just as Adam and Eve are free even in obedience to God. Both Satan and his Edenic prey are, in different ways, surprised by Sin; but Adam’s terms of Reason and Will really apply only to the first human beings, not to Satan. There is a fundamental mimetic difference here: Satan’s fall is depicted in a grotesque allegory; but Adam and Eve’s separate and complementary falls are represented in terms of faculty psychology.28
Sin’s surprising birth is finally revisited in the story of Adam and Eve’s fall. Adam’s stricken amazement after Eve’s disobedience bears some resemblance to the rebels’ gaping at the birth of Sin and the guardian angels’ startled discovery of Satan. In Milton’s ongoing critique of idolatrous wonder, the terms of the marvelous in Eve’s breathless report are refracted into the description of Adam’s horror. Eve speaks of a “strange” cause for her absence that is “wonderful to hear” (9.861–62), of a serpent given the faculty of “Reasoning to admiration” (9.872); but Adam’s wonder is of an entirely different sort:
On the other side, Adam, soon as he heard
The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed,
Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill
Ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed;
From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve
Down dropped, and all the faded roses shed.
Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length
First to himself he inward silence broke…(9.888–95)
To be astonished is literally to be thunderstruck, but Milton plays on the pseudoetymological commonplace of being turned to stone: the Fall has real and immediate consequences, of which Adam’s Ovidian petrifaction represents an extreme.29 Here, in effect, is the birth of Sin on earth; and, as in the first birth in heaven, a characteristic repetition dilates the moment and registers a kind of double-take. The word “stood” appears twice, in the same syntax (“Astonied stood and blank” and “Speechless stood and pale”); and Adam’s blanching is both mental (psychic blankness) and physical (corporeal pallor). In that paralysis, both hand and rose petals are conjoined in one gravitational fall; in a swift metamorphosis portending the coming of postlapsarian seasons to Eden, a springtime garland succumbs to a wintry chill, and a participle of artistic intent (“wreathed”) gives way to a participle of decay (“faded”). In the revelation of Eve’s sin, a portent of doom is fleshed out, the consequences mapped in miniature.
“How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost” (9.900), Adam laments in his unvoiced apostrophe to Eve, using a typical adverb of surprise. Though the narrative anatomizes Eve’s mental and physical steps toward the fall in great detail, the moment itself still seems sudden when it comes, as death itself is inevitably described with this adjective. (“Sudden” is a word with haste and concealment in its history; it comes from the Latin subitus, past participle of the verb subire, to come or go stealthily.) The suddenness of Eve’s fall has partly to do with Milton’s ethical framing of choice, which is never inevitable or fully predictable, and thus always a surprise when it is manifested. It also aptly figures in Milton’s representation of human affect and perception. In the Augustinian distinction, human consciousness is time-bound and subject to fluctuations between obliviousness and acuity, whereas divine attention is atemporal and constant.30
Surprise is a psychic event that pertains to every conscious creature, both human and angel; it is a powerful emotion, a condition of imperfect knowledge, a successive lapse and stab of recognition, a failure of agency, an Ovidian transformation. It is both a physical fall and its cognitive aftermath, the attack and the realization of it. Nothing, finally, that Raphael could say about Satan’s manifestations of surprise—the forza and froda of internecine war—could fully prepare Adam and Eve for the particular set of shocks that visit them; all seem sudden.
The idea of being surprised by sin, as I have hoped to show, takes on extraordinarily complex shadings in Paradise Lost, and in concluding I would like to summarize several of them, in the form of first-person statements that Adam and Eve might make:
Surprise in Paradise Lost takes a protean array of forms: it is a narratable event, an external provocation, an element of the passions, a bodily state, a rational thought. As a moralist of the passions, Milton was interested in the effect of surprise and its vocabulary: it is a perilous gateway to a more sustained experience of wonder—which variously takes the form of either disabling and idolatrous amazement or curious and reverential awe. As a phenomenologist of the passions, he represents what surprise feels like: the sense of being acted upon or seized from without, the temporal lapse between shock and recognition. Earlier, I mentioned Milton’s philosophical departure from the Cartesian dualism of body and mind; but as Simon Jarvis has reminded us, there are really two bodies in René Descartes’s philosophy—“the objective body, which I may have and which I can myself see and touch,” and “the subjective body, that is to say, the body who I am,” or what Descartes called the res cogitans.31 The Cartesian cogito is not just the act of ratiocination; it is embodied thinking, and includes sensations and emotions such as hunger, terror, desire, and surprise.
This sense of the res cogitans is active in Milton’s imagination of what the first human being would say upon waking into the world. “Tell me,” Adam says to all of creation, “how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live / And feel that I am happier than I know?” (8.280–82). What Adam gathers that he “has” is not the abstraction “being” or “existence” or “soul” but rather activities or states that can be deictically indicated—moving, living, feeling. The Miltonic acuity of emotional language that can be found throughout Paradise Lost is particularly evident here, in Adam’s distinction between feeling happiness and knowing it. (This is somewhat akin to the Lockean distinction between sensation and reflection, but with the proviso that sensation in Milton’s poetics is a kind of knowledge or wisdom.) The very meaning of happiness takes on different inflections in the presence of these two verbs: one is an emotional state (“I am happy”), the other an ontological one (to be fortunate or blessed, to have good hap); and they are two points on a psychic continuum. The same, as I have hoped to show, can be said of Miltonic surprise: first the feeling, then the cognitive processing of that feeling; first the experience and then the naming of it. It is both an object of thought and the temporal warp of thought itself.