Milton died on the eighth or ninth of November, 1674, a little before his sixty-sixth birthday. At the time of the Restoration he was in his fifty-second year. Had he died then—or even if he had suffered those penalties short of death proposed by Parliament for men not technically regicides but criminally associated with the regicide cause—we should have been deprived of all but a fragment of Paradise Lost; and of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes—two works concerned in their very different ways with the patterns of heroism to which Milton desired his own life to conform—nothing would have been written.
It is the author of these works—an old man, blind and quiet—rather than the ardent scholar of Christ’s, or the exalted chiliast of the forties, that I discuss here. Always, according to his lights, a hero and “separate to God,” he now understood better than before what was required of a man honored by such an election.
An impartial historian’s account of the political crisis of 1658–1660 would be unlikely to devote much space to Milton; the relevant volume of the Oxford History of England, though it is the work of a writer exceptionally well acquainted with Milton’s biography, mentions him in this context but once. Yet to the poet himself it must have seemed otherwise, and he would have been surprised to learn that his part in the story had come to seem so inconsiderable. He could not have denied that he had failed to save the Republic; but he would surely have defended himself against the charge that his efforts were trivial. Nor would he have thought himself to blame for their failure: “That fault I take not on me, but transfer / On Israel’s governors and heads of tribes.” While his fickle countrymen betrayed their historical mission and, as he put it, crept back into servitude, Milton continued to see himself—older though he was, and partly incapacitated—as the same elected champion he had more manifestly been in the days when he was the very voice of England’s newly won Christian liberty, the agonist who lost his eyes when they were
overplied
In liberty’s defence, my noble task
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
That great task had not fallen to him by chance. “It is a singular favour of the Divinity towards me that I, above others, was chosen to defend the cause of liberty.… This favour I have acknowledged, nor can the time ever come when it will cease to be my duty to acknowledge it.” Thus the Defensio Pro Se of 1655, in which the poet, not for the first time, represents himself as elected, as “separate to God,” and confident that no historical circumstance could ever induce him to deny either his duty or his privilege.
As General Monck’s army moved southward to London, Milton spoke out once more, in the Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, for liberty as he understood it. There was still some hope that Monck would decide in favor of the Rump, and had he done so Milton’s pamphlet would not have mattered much. But since there was at least a clear chance, and probably a good deal more than that, of Monck’s deciding otherwise, Milton’s act must be called very bold. Johnson found in it occasion for another gibe at egotistical whiggery: “he was fantastic enough to think that the nation, agitated as it was, might be settled by a pamphlet.” And it is true that Milton was always prone to this kind of exaggerated estimate of his influence. Perhaps he was incapable of imagining that God might produce for his Englishmen a scenario of national crisis in which there was no major role for Milton. At any rate, he would not have thought himself free to abstain, though he must have known perfectly well that on this occasion obedience to divine prompting, to that intimate impulse which moves the elect as agents of the divine plot, was more hazardous than it had been in the past.
He showed no precautionary politeness to the Stuarts. “If we return to kingship, and soon repent, as undoubtedly we shall when we begin to find the old encroachments coming on little by little upon our consciences, which must necessarily proceed from king and bishop united inseparably in one interest, we may be forced to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never like to attain thus far as we are now advanced to the recovery of our freedom.” Even before these words appeared in print the ejected members were reseated in the Commons, and the Restoration became virtually certain. Milton knew this perfectly well; but he retracted nothing, rather added, at the beginning of his book, this almost cavalier defiance: “If their absolute determination be to enthral us, before so long a Lent of servitude they may permit us a little shroving-time first, wherein to speak freely, and take our leaves of liberty.”
For he would, he says, have spoken out in the language of “the good old Cause” even if there had been no hearers save “trees and stones.” But he was determined to bring his words to the notice of more dangerous auditors. He wrote Monck a letter, more or less summarizing the pamphlet and advocating a republican government “without single person.” And then, when he despaired of Monck, he produced a further edition of the Ready and Easy Way in which he positively invited attention to his past record as the defender of the lost heroic cause, and as the voice of the English people against tyranny.
Though he did them such dangerous service, the English people have in general found it hard to love Milton. Yet surely one can withhold admiration for such unconsidering courage, only condemning it as excessive. Milton must have known, or must have thought he knew, what would follow if the newly restored king should take note of him, as he seemed to require. The son of the supposed author of Eikon Basilike could hardly be expected to feel clement toward the undisputed and unrepentant author of Eikonoklastes, or to forget that Milton had published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates only two weeks after the judicial murder of his father the king. Royalists who had professed to believe Milton’s blindness a divine punishment for such earlier presumptuousness might now be expected to hold that these renewed outbreaks of heretical impudence called for more immediate discipline, humanly administered.
Even before the king reached London the newly enlarged Commons was considering how to deal with his enemies. There was to be an Act of Oblivion pardoning all treasons committed between 1638 and 1660, with certain specified exceptions. The regicides—defined by Charles himself as “the immediate murderers of my father”—were excepted; they would suffer death. A second class of offenders, to be nominated to the number of twenty, were to suffer penalties short of death. A few great men not technically regicides were separately named, Lambert and Vane among them. Not to be named was, of course, to escape retribution altogether.
Milton might well have expected to be named in the second group of twenty, but he was not. Edward Phillips, his nephew, says he had friends in both Council and Parliament who “made a considerable party for him.” This must be true, but the story is more complicated than Phillips suggests.1
Early in the summer of 1660 Milton rather uncharacteristically went into hiding. About the same time the Commons requested the king to call in the Defensio Populi Anglicani and the Eikonoklastes, and ordered the attorney general to arrest the author. Meanwhile they went on with the grisly business of choosing twenty names for the list of second-class culprits. Milton was proposed for the twentieth vacancy, but the proposal was not seconded, and so not debated; the place went to Ralph Corbet, a colonel who had disagreed with Monck. Milton’s friends were serving him well, for some of the names on the list were of persons who had, on the face of it, been much less injurious to the royal cause than he.
The order for his arrest was mysteriously held up; it was issued only on August 13, seven weeks late. Godfrey Davis conjectures that the poet’s friends contrived this, supposing that the order would be ineffective if delayed until after the Lords had accepted the Bill of Indemnity. This they eventually did on August 9, having made some more exceptions not including Milton. A proclamation of the Council now let it be known that Milton, and another offender named Goodwin (nineteenth on the Commons’ list, though a much less important figure than the poet), had “fled, or so obscured themselves, that no endeavour used for their apprehension can take effect, whereby they might be brought to legal trial and deservedly receive condign punishment for their treasons and offences.” This curious announcement, apparently designed to discourage the officers responsible for the pursuit, was probably another device of Milton’s friends. They had done their work well, and he was as good as saved.
Or so it must have seemed; but now something went wrong, and Milton was arrested by the Sergeant of the House of Commons, a man insensitive, we must suppose, to the tone of the proclamation. So Milton went to prison after all, and remained there long enough to run up a large debt for keeper’s fees. Eventually, as we are told by the reliable Anonymous Biographer, he “sued out his Pardon,” and was released on December 15.
Probably, as Godfrey Davis suggests, the friends of Milton had arranged a deal: he would not be named in the Act, but he must suffer the disgrace of having two of his books burned by the common hangman. And that would be the end of it; but the machinery proved too complicated, the proclamation trick went wrong, and the order for Milton’s arrest, never seriously intended, was carried out. Had all gone well he would hardly have suffered at all, but in the event this unlucky accident not only sent him to prison but compelled him to sue for pardon. That he hesitated before doing so is perhaps suggested by the length of his imprisonment. But there was no other way to safety; he had to sue, and thus acknowledged the authority of the king.
There is little direct testimony to Milton’s mood in these days. Richardson says “he was so dejected he would lie awake whole nights”; but though he claimed to be reporting the words of a contemporary of Milton, Richardson was writing seventy years after the event, and perhaps remembering the opening of Paradise Lost, book 7:
though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude …
According to Marvell, one of his boldest champions, Milton now “expiated himself in a retired silence”; but Marvell had good reason at this stage to be politic. Still, it is reasonable to guess that the poet was not exactly delighted at the course of events. All about him his enemies were systematically destroying everything he had worked for, and he could say nothing about it. He was blind and also poor, for he had lost his savings in the failure of a Commonwealth bank. And worst of all, perhaps, he had been compelled to sue for the royal pardon and add to his other afflictions the sense of a vocation or an allegiance betrayed.
In the past he had been calm, even in a measure exultant, in adversity. His blindness, he tells us in the Second Defence, brought him no sense of divine displeasure; on the contrary, he had enjoyed, in the most critical moments of his life, a full consciousness of God’s favor and protection. In the fifties he would write in autograph albums the motto “My strength is made perfect in weakness,” alluding to 2 Corinthians 12:9–10: “And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then I am strong.” In contumeliis, in necessitatibus, in angustiis pro Christo … In 1654 Milton, in the Second Defence, paraphrased the apostle and brought him into conformity with his own case; for at that time his infirmity lay not in persecution or poverty but in blindness: “Let me be one of the weakest, provided only that in my darkness the light of the Divine Countenance more brightly shines. For then I shall be at once the weakest and the mightiest—at once blind and of the most piercing sight. Thus through my infirmity I may be consummated.” Cum enim infirmor, tunc potens sum.
Since the troubles of these earlier years could not shake his confidence in his election, in his power to respond to the intimate impulse, he had no occasion to qualify what he had written in Eikonoklastes concerning his political responsibilities: “They who with a good conscience and upright heart did their civil duties in the sight of God and in several places to resist tyranny and the violence of superstition banded both against them we may well be sure will never seek to be forgiven that which may be justly attributed to their immortal praise, nor will assent ever to the guilty blotting out of those actions before men, by which their faith assures them they chiefly stand approved.” These words have unexpected ironical force when we think of Milton in the last days of 1660, for they occur in the course of a discussion of a possible Restoration and a possible Act of Oblivion. To the Milton of 1649 these expedients were as undesirable as they were unlikely to occur. But they were included in God’s plot; and when they came to pass Milton was forced, apparently by a mere accident, to seek forgiveness for what, in justice, ought to have been attributed to his immortal praise, and to assent not only to the Restoration (for he acknowledged the authority of the king to pardon him), but also to the guilty blotting out (what else was the Act of Oblivion?) of actions by which his faith assured him he chiefly stood approved.
One can scarcely exaggerate the significance of that plea for pardon. Such a man, one may think, could easily have borne all the disgraces and dangers of 1660 except this one. He who had called it a singular favor of God to defend regicide now humbled himself before inherited and unjust royal authority. Such was the position into which God had compelled him. He might now have used the words he later gave to the injured Adam: “Inexplicable / Thy justice seems” (Paradise Lost x.754–755), or those of the Chorus in Samson Agonistes, commenting upon God’s apparently “contrarious” treatment of his elect:
Not only dost degrade them, or remit
To life obscur’d, which were a fair dismission,
But throw’st them lower than thou didst exalt them high,
Unseemly fall in human eye
Too grievous for the trespass or omission … (687–691)
But we must note that Milton nowhere encourages us to believe that he held himself guilty of any trespass or omission, or thought his miseries in any sense the consequences of his own acts. It might now be more difficult to understand the purpose of his sufferings, but it is not suggested that their cause lay in his own acts. We note that when Samson offers that explanation he is proved wrong.
In what follows, as in what I have already said, I assume that Samson Agonistes is a late work of Milton. It has lately been the fashion to treat it as early, usually as belonging to the last years of the forties. W. R. Parker, the author of the most recent full-scale biography, was the chief proponent of this view, and it has the support of John Carey, the most recent editor of the tragedy. Nevertheless I feel as sure as it is possible to be, in the absence of positive evidence either way, that these scholars are wrong. This is not the occasion to argue about it, but I ought to say, I suppose, that if Parker and Carey are right the argument of this essay is, like Eve in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, separated from its best prop.
I shall discuss the tragedy in relation to Milton’s own life and hope in doing so to avoid the errors with which others are perhaps justly charged. I shall not be saying that Samson Agonistes makes detectable allusions to events in post-Restoration England that displeased Milton, though I will admit that I should not be very surprised if it sometimes did. What I believe, without reservation, is that Milton was extremely interested in the problems created by the peculiar conduct of God toward his elected heroes, including Milton; and that in writing a tragedy about Samson he was exploring these problems and giving privileged expression to complaints about, though of course also vindicating, that inexplicable justice.
It is important not to be melodramatic about this. We are under no necessity to think of the poet as living in perpetual despair, eyeless in Gaza, bleakly preoccupied with the suffering elect. Aubrey testifies to the contrary, reporting his subject as “cheerful even in his gout-fits” and “extreme pleasant in his conversation … but satirical.” Others represent the old man as handsome and musical, of a deportment “sweet and affable,” and a gait “erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness.” He was, we learn, studious and industrious; a little hard on his daughters, perhaps, but patient under many provocations. He proved capable of “demeaning himself peaceable,” as the Anonymous Biographer puts it, adding that he “was so far from being reckoned disaffected, that he was visited at his house on Bunhill by a chief officer of state, and desired to employ his pen on their behalf.” (I suppose we must not presume to remember this interview when reading of Samson’s encounter with the Public Officer of the Philistines.) We have no cause to think the old poet desperate of demeanor, and all we can hope to say is that we have a faint conception of the process by which he achieved his heroic calm of mind.
Paradise Regained meditates the heroism of the saint who suffers rather than acts. Jesus undergoes all the temptations exactly as a man might who sees and knows and yet abstains. Even at the climax of Satan’s assault, when all the temptations of sense, pride, and curiosity have failed and we see the hero agonistes, in combat with the adversary, he does nothing, strikes no blow, merely rejects: “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (iv.561). All the action, all the energy, is demonic, and to obey Satan, Jesus would have to break the law; to leap from the pinnacle would be to subject God to an impious test.
But not every hero is called upon to reject and stand. Some must act, in order to alter the world and history. And the ways of God to them are more difficult to understand. They are subject to promptings and impulses which impel them to break the laws of man, perhaps the laws of God. If in consequence they find themselves suffering as if they were common criminals or sinners—suffering even beyond the measure usually meted out to such offenders, with pangs “too grievous for the trespass”; the temperate afflicted by the diseases of intemperance, the noble sharing the fate of the felon—they may be tempted to complain that the impulse was untrustworthy, or that God has deceived them. For example: an impulse, thought to be of God, impels a man, against the law, to marry a Philistine woman; and time proves that the prompting was indeed divine. A second impulse urges him into marriage with a second Philistine woman, there being no palpable difference between the two cases; but this time the outcome is by all appearances disastrous. To the first wife the hero reveals a secret; and the consequence is not shame and condemnation but the glorious slaughter of many enemies of God. To the second he reveals a secret, and the consequences are mutilation, degradation, and separation from God. Was the second prompting false, and if so, how was this to be known? It almost appears that God neither cares for nor understands his human agents.
Let me, for a moment, consider another electus. This man was educated in an atmosphere of purity fanatical beyond the fantasies of Nazarites. He learned that only in performing unconditionally the will of another could he hope to enjoy true liberty; that freedom was obedience, that obedience was continually tested by irrational prohibitions; that all offenses, and especially sexual “pollutions,” were certain to attract extremely severe punishments. This man lived a chaste and useful life until, in his forties, he suffered a breakdown characterized by the formation of a delusional system of which the main element was the patient’s special relationship with God. He maintained that it was God’s way to enter into such relations with exceptionally gifted men. He himself had been chosen as the instrument of a millennial change; he would give birth to a new race of men. In order to do so he must suffer emasculation and become a woman. At first he thought this command “contrary to the order of things,” but later he came to see it as consonant with that order. It was God’s method to manifest his power in miracles that might well seem to men, with their limited information and understanding, futile, absurd, or cruel.
The case is that of Schreber, as described by himself, by Freud in his classic study of paranoia, and by Schatzman in his book Soul Murder. Schreber’s delusional system was extremely complex—he invented, for example, a whole heavenly hierarchy. He never doubted his election, always denying that he was insane, and in general behaving with intelligence and affability. There were, however, many occasions when he complained with apparent justice of God’s inexplicable and arbitrary dealings. God, he once remarked, “has more or less absurd ideas, which are all contrary to human nature.” God “did not know how to treat a living human being”; for some reason he felt that his authority was precarious, and therefore formed conspiracies against the innocent and degraded without compunction his most temperate and obedient servants.
After such complaints Schreber invariably rallied to the defense of his God, annulling blasphemy with reverence. God may behave as if he wants to be rid of his human agent. God never seems to learn from his experience of human beings. Nevertheless he is supremely just, and the torments of the elect are devised by Love.
I mention the Schreber case not because I am concerned with its etiology, as disputed between Schatzman and the Freudians; and certainly not to suggest that Milton was paranoid; but simply because it offers another famous instance of the human imagination at work on the questions of election and suffering and the divine plot. There does seem to be a measure of similarity between the delusional systems of paranoia and tragic plots. Oedipus at Colonus is certain of the innocence of his life, certain that the gods contrived his misery and then abandoned him to a punishment unrelated to any criminal intention on his part; yet he swears by them still, and they return to him at the end. “We share in his blessing,” says Theseus, telling the daughters of Oedipus not to weep. The mutilation of the elect in his “apprehensive tenderest parts” (Samson Agonistes 624) follows divine election and somehow leads—for Schreber, for Oedipus, for Samson—to the renewing of the intolerable world.
Samson Agonistes is so undeniably a tragedy in the Greek manner that we forget the rest of the truth; it is a tragedy in the manner of an imagined Hebrew archetype, of which the Athenian plays are but deviant descendants. That is why Milton’s irregular strophes shun the Greek model and look back to Old Testament poetry; and that is why his hero, antecedent to the Greek tragic heroes, is drawn from the list of the Old Testament elect, as certified by the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Such a saint has obvious advantages—in a Christian world which knows the truth about such matters—over his Greek derivatives, Oedipus or Heracles; though there is a wide and troublesome space between the Paul Bunyan-like figure of the folktale in Judges and the God-abandoned hero of Milton.
Scholarship has attempted to fill some of his space by telling us what centuries of exegetes made of Samson. He was an argument for chastity, or at any rate for marriage within one’s tribe. He was, according to Gregory the Great, an exemplum of the authentic hubris and the authentic hamartia; or of the possibility, as some said, of godly suicide; or simply of the turning of Fortune’s wheel and the inevitable falls of illustrious men. But when such conjectures occur in the tragedy they are credited to the Chorus or to Manoa, or to Samson himself at his lowest point. They are all erroneous conjectures, made by characters who erroneously suppose that they are commenting upon a completed action and therefore can hardly avoid the inference that Samson is responsible for his own plight and is therefore being punished. Milton, you might think, had said enough in his time about moldy exegetes to discourage us from thinking they could explain his tragedy. In making sense of the bully-boy of Judges he imposes his own interpretations and uses those of the exegetes merely as instances of erroneous opinion.
What happens in Samson Agonistes? Samson breaks the law three times, twice by marrying and once by going to perform for the Philistines. He married the woman of Timna, “the daughter of the infidels,” against the wishes of his parents:
they knew not
That what I motioned was of God; I knew
From intimate impulse … (221–223)
Samson does not doubt—nor, incidentally, does the author of Judges—that this marriage, in which he gave away the secret of the riddle about sweetness and strength, was the occasion of his beginning “Israel’s deliverance.” The Chorus, however, does doubt it. Why should a Nazarite be prompted by God
Against his vow of strictest purity
To seek in marriage that fallacious bride,
Unclean, unchaste? (319–321)
However, it goes on to reflect that the woman of Timna was not unchaste till later, so that Samson contracted from her no moral stain but only, one is left to suppose, some merely ceremonial pollution. This curious distinction has some importance. Milton later alters the account in Judges by marrying Samson to Dalila, probably to make a similar point: the law he broke was not moral but ceremonial. And we remember that he omits any reference to Samson’s famous misdemeanor with the harlot of Gaza. He will not, it seems, allow Samson to be like Hosea, whom God commanded to take a wife of whoredoms; the laws he breaks are all of the kind subsequently abrogated by reason and by revelation. So that whether or not the Chorus is right in asserting that God breaks his own laws when he chooses (314), he does not, it seems, force Milton’s Samson to break the moral law.
Nevertheless, by inducing Samson to marry the woman of Timna, God does, in the furtherance of his own designs, cause Samson to break his vows as a Nazarite. Samson understandably supposed, when he conceived a desire for Dalila, that the same process was beginning again: “I thought it lawful from my former act, And the same end …” (231–232). So he married Dalila, though Judges neither calls it a marriage nor suggests that the union was in this instance the consequence of divine prompting. And something went wrong; instead of slaughtering Philistines Samson found himself eyeless in Gaza. As Manoa remarks, it seems hard that a hero twice before his birth described by angels as having a special relationship with God should end by suffering such “foul indignities” (371). Samson, however, says he himself must take all the blame; he should have known by the experience of his first marriage that a Philistine wife would betray him. That was the only correct inference; he had been wrong to think that lusting after their women would always place him in the position of slaying Philistines, as if God were bound not only to devise absurd bits of plot but also to repeat them.
It is at this point that we first hear from Manoa about the Philistine intention to display Samson at the feast, that is to say, to compel him into uncleanliness. A thousand lines later the invitation is delivered, and Samson, stimulated by his successes against Dalila and Harapha, rejects it; his reason for doing so is precisely that he will not break the law and present himself as “a Nazarite in place abominable” (1359). However, he now experiences an intimate impulse, feels “some rousing motions” (1382); and this familiar sensation causes him to change his mind and commit the uncleanness after all. God, he observes, will no doubt provide dispensation:
that he may dispense with me or thee
Present in temples at idolatrous rites
For some important cause, thou need’st not doubt. (1377–79)
This is the peripeteia, brought on by Samson’s deciding to obey his impulse and break the law, just as he had done to good effect in his first marriage and, as will now appear, in his second as well; for this genuinely Aristotelian complexity (metabasis, peripeteia, and anagnorisis all at once) requires us, among other things, to reevaluate the consequences of the Dalila marriage and the authenticity of the impulse that led to it.
When God overrides Samson’s scruples about appearing in the unclean place—and we know from the outcome that it was his doing—we have no choice but to believe that all of Samson’s intimate impulses, however wanton, however contrary to his vows of purity, are authentically of God. There is accordingly no doubt that, like his uncleanness, his misery, mutilation, and humiliation, cruel as they are, form part of the divine plot—especially since his wretchedness arises from a remorse he has no real cause to feel, since he had simply obeyed God’s orders. God had never stopped using him, and so, despite appearances, had never abandoned him:
all this
With God not parted from him, as was feared,
But favouring and assisting to the end (1718–20)
says Manoa, relieved to find his son’s election authenticated, and now ready to speak of torture as evidence of love.
We now see the structure of God’s peculiar plot; it takes this form:
intimate impulse
lawbreaking
condemnation
vindication.
He has scruples, it seems, about breaches of the moral law. It is clear from the divorce tracts and the De Doctrina that Milton would regard Old Testament limitations on exogamy as mere “national obstrictions” and the rules about ceremonial purity as completely abrogated; so it must be said that God shows a respect for the moral law (his own) and causes Samson only to violate unimportant taboos. We note that when Dalila argues that Baal can dispense with his own laws, Samson at once condemns the position as illogical:
gods unable
To acquit themselves and prosecute their foes
But by ungodly deeds, the contradiction
Of their own deity, Gods cannot be. (896–898)
So the Chorus is presumably wrong, as usual, in arguing that the Hebrew God can do it. But there are certain ironies in this situation, which seem not to have attracted the attention of expositors. For instance, Dalila also claims the authenticity of her impulse, which she thinks is proved by the outcome—she has saved her country from Samson. And she boasts that she will be posthumously celebrated and have flowers brought to her tomb. But of course she is wrong, and Samson gets the flowers (983–997, 1741–43). These passages are eight hundred lines apart, but we are presumably expected to put them together; and perhaps there is a certain openness in the whole treatment of the question whether Jehovah and Baal can dispense with their own laws.
What is clear, however, is that Samson’s sufferings are not his fault, though he allowed himself to be polluted, and revealed what ought to have been kept secret. Under another dispensation these would be the crimes of Oedipus, unintended yet requiring punishment. Samson’s sufferings feel like a punishment, but are not. They are none the less intense, of course; when we read his lament, “O that torment should not be confined / To the body’s wounds and sores” (606ff.), we remember that Milton seems to have had a special horror of physical mutilation, which he here applies to the agony of remorse. For although Samson has been physically mangled in his “apprehensive tenderest parts” he is here applying the expression of his spiritual torment to the guilt he supposes himself to have incurred by mistaking the nature of a sexual impulse.
The question why God should encourage such an error, and then punish it savagely, naturally gives rise to some stifled complaints. But in the end both Samson and God are explicitly exonerated. Samson was never what he seemed, nor what people said about him: not a suicide—“self-killed / Not willingly” (1664–65)—not false to his vocation, since he has “fulfilled / The work for which he was foretold / To Israel” (1661–63), and not even truly blind—“with inward eye illuminated” (1687)—for which last point there is a parallel in the Alcestis, but also in the Second Defence. As for God, his self-vindication is so complete that in the end the Chorus can utter words of which its descendant in Oedipus at Colonus dares offer only a watered-down, relatively noncommittal version. Not only is there nothing here for tears, but
All is best, though we oft doubt
What the unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close. (1745–48)
It is occasionally remarked by commentators that very little in fact came of Samson’s act, and that Israel went on serving just the same, notwithstanding Samson’s annihilation of many important Philistines; the suggestion is that since Milton was of course familiar with this fact we must suppose he wanted us to bear it in mind when considering the triumphant end of the tragedy; the millennial opportunity afforded by Samson’s feat was missed. It is true that Samson complains of Israelite back-slidings in the past, and Manoa observes that the tribes must “find courage to lay hold on this occasion” (1716). But I cannot attach much importance to this. It is a bit like the suicide problem: Milton knew that Samson’s last prayer was “let my soul die with the Philistines,” so takes steps to prevent suicide from becoming an issue in his tragedy; he knew that Israel went on serving after Samson, and so touched on the point without making a central issue of it. Instead he makes the slaughter as complete as possible: “The vulgar only scaped who stood without” (1659). Whatever happened next, an epoch had been completed by the successful exertions of the elect. His separation from God—however perverse God may sometimes appear, with his trivial miracles of fox’s tail and ass’s jawbone, his irrational prohibitions, his willingness to dismiss his heroes into uncleanness and servitude, mangled in their apprehensive tenderest parts, suffering under a “sense of heaven’s desertion” (632)—was quite illusory. He suffered in innocence, and his ceremonial lapses were of no significance except as elements of God’s peculiar plot.
I began by speaking of Milton and went on to talk about Schreber and Samson. I must now explain this peculiar plot. Milton tended always to see his life according to patterns of various kinds, doubtless divine in origin; in this he somewhat resembles Luther. The long choosing and beginning late, the emergence from contemplation to action (parallel to that of Christ in Paradise Regained)—the return from Italy under the compulsion, as he tells us in The Reason of Church Government, of an “inward prompting”—the coming to maturity of his heroic career in the Defences—all are part of a pattern. He was an agent of God: “When God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous and jarring blast, it lies not in his will what he shall say or what he shall conceal,” as Milton remarks in the same work. We know how he came to write against episcopacy, then against the divorce laws, and then against licensing; but in his own account of these matters in the Second Defence he omits all tribute to chance and the tide of his personal affairs, representing this part of his career as a systematic effort toward “the promotion of real and substantial liberty,” duly divided into subordinate topics. And, as we have already seen, his taking his election so seriously sometimes involved exaggeration of his heroic achievement.
After the Restoration he had the time, and the store of memories—some painful—to devote himself to an old and very characteristic project. As early as The Reason of Church Government he had announced a desire to discover “what king or knight before the Conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero.” He now knew that the pattern must be sought not in romance but closer to the source. The passive hero was, indeed, Jesus himself. What of the suffering elect who must act, possibly against the law, or what passed as the law, in the furtherance of God’s purposes?
Tillyard once remarked that if Milton had found himself in Adam’s position he would at once have eaten the fruit and sat down to write a pamphlet justifying his act. Probably he would have attributed his disregard of an arbitrary prohibition to an intimate impulse. Certainly he is on record as believing that laws might on proper occasion be broken: “No ordinance, human or from heaven,” he wrote in Eikonoklastes, “can bind against the good of man”; and, in the same book, “Great worthies heretofore, by disobeying law, oftentimes have saved the commonwealth.” The law in question here was that by which the king commands obedience; Milton had already, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, explained the circumstances in which he did not.
The deposition and killing of the king, Milton always represented as rational and indeed virtuous acts. It is by no means part of my purpose to inquire whether, in the dark of his mind, he may have experienced some trace of atavistic guilt, some sense of pollution or parricide. W. R. Parker has noticed how some of Milton’s insults upon the dead king in Eikonoklastes return to plague their inventor: “Whom God hardens, he also blinds.” And, of course, Milton’s enemies liked to think of his blindness as a punishment. But for all we know he was quite untroubled by such superstitions. He lost his eyes as part of God’s plan, suffering, like the Apostle, persecution, hardship, contempt, and poverty that he might be the stronger instrument of the one true arbitrary and autocratic master. He was right to break the law of kings, which he thought human and not from heaven. Confident of his election, he could explain all his actions and all his sufferings; except, perhaps, his submission to the authority of Charles II.
This was a violation of his own purity, and could well have seemed likely to be the worst of his pains. Yet to accept those pains as a punishment would be to destroy the structures of belief that had made sense of his life. It might seem necessary to redesign those structures so that they incorporated the violation as a necessary part of the divine plot. A man, one of the elect, who had, with justified confidence in the authenticity of his impulse, repeatedly broken what others took to be the law, now finds himself, on obeying the same impulse, apparently condemned to misery and impurity. It must turn out that this is an illusion. The submission to Charles II—a purely ceremonial submission—is part of a plot, the end of which will prove that after all every impulse was authentic. The justice of God, expressed in his arbitrary designs (Milton’s friends were thwarted in their attempts by what seemed the merest accident), must not be expected to make immediate human sense.
For God often seems indifferent to human beings; he seems not to understand them. His plots cause them excruciating pain and are unrelated to the human sense of justice. He is contemptuous of equity, even of sanity; think again of those trivial miracles, set between the great miracle of the annunciatory fires at the beginning, and the great miracle of the hero-phoenix at the end, dying into a new saeculum. Schreber’s god, with his absurd angels and petty miracles, his enforced pollutions, his disregard for human pain in the apprehensive tenderest parts, and his absolute rightness and justice, is, of course, a god of madness. But Milton’s is his distant ancestor, the God of the archetypal Hebrew tragedy, perceived behind its Greek shadows, and defined by Milton’s experience as his Christian agent. Human kings he could set below the law, but there was another monarch, who called fear love and bondage freedom; in the end, however, he would reveal the purpose for which he required his elect to suffer and to commit uncleanness.
Milton’s old age was a little too like the one Manoa planned for Samson—domestic comfort under the license, dearly bought, of the Philistine lords. I do not say he waited for some last prompting, some last occasion to offer freedom to his fickle tribe, some explanation of that interlude of misery. Indeed it is unnecessary to do so. The divine plot naturally contains its peripeteia; the last intimate impulse was to write Samson Agonistes, a heroic examination of all such intimate impulses, and a vindication of the peculiar justice of a God whose arbitrary decisions and devices alone make sense of the hero’s world, and are that of which he must make sense.