The Double Hermeneutic of Paradise Lost

It is not necessary to be a visitor from Mars to be perplexed by the theology of Paradise Lost. China or India provides a sufficient distance. A historical distance can also create its complications, since John Milton lived in a society that was fervently Christian and we in worlds that are ostentatiously secular.

It is possible that God created history out of boredom with the consensus. In doing so he was not without options. He could have created a space of difference bridged by interchanges responsive to the dynamics within the space. An Indian, or for that matter William Blake, might prefer this possibility, but God chose instead a profoundly adversarial model of reality in which an enemy is all but summoned into being by a totalitarian call for absolute obedience. History begins with a declaration of war and the installation of otherness. We can question the usefulness of this model as a lens for reading the complexity of events. Such questionings are deepened by the model's threatening tendency to write history as well as to read it.

We might desire a matrix for history that is slightly less militant but the world of Paradise Lost is a confrontational and antithetical world. In accepting its reality we must also ask how the narration of that reality is to be read. At this point I offer the proposition that an adversarial universe calls for a double hermeneutic - a hermeneutic of suspicion in reading things Satanic and one of commitment in reading things celestial.

Today's reader is not accustomed to a double hermeneutic. His predisposition is to act as an umpire while the participants to a dispute provide their opposing arguments. This posture would be more convincing if the reader were not the substance of the dispute as well as its would-be arbiter. A double hermeneutic becomes necessary to save him from the quicksand of himself.

The inherent complication of a double hermeneutic is that it must be exercised in sharply different ways. It has to strain against the barren tautology that Satan is always wrong because he is Satan and God is always right because he is God. To do so it must camouflage the real in the apparent, making the Satanic persuasive and the celestial arbitrary. Milton commits himself strongly to this strategy. The poetic investment in the Satanic is heavy enough to make us wonder about the status of poetry itself. Both the experience of defeat and the tenacity of resistance are replete with contemporary resonances. The conclusion is not that the Good Old Cause is Satanic but that it is vulnerable to Satanic distractions which we must learn to read into the text as its failure.

A hermeneutic of suspicion approaches Satan, respecting his ability to make the unreasonable appear eminently reasonable. Suspicion is not difficult today. It may in fact have become the current mode of responding to the world's varieties of incitements. A hermeneutic of commitment, on the other hand, presents major difficulties in the implementation. It is deeply contrary to what we instinctively are. It calls for both resistance and submission, with discriminating opposition to the worldly educating us in our surrender to the divine. Milton is well aware of the contest between the two cities and of the siege of contraries on the human site. His (typical) response is not to moderate the great contention but to strain to its maximum the hermeneutic of commitment.

To elicit the true depth of commitment, the eternal consensus must be not merely challenged but uprooted. The event that triggers the explosion of history must be a non-negotiable assertion of authority demanding total obedience to the divine will with annihilation as the price of disobedience. Nascent deviance from complete conformity must be brought into the open by the sheer provocativeness of the divine command. A purge is not possible if the will to purge is not unconditionally asserted. These are the specifications of the Son's exaltation in Book 5. Milton's uncompromising boldness in narrating the big bang that is history's beginning is given less than its due in Milton...