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c h a p t e r 2 Infernal Prophesying Unsaying God’s Name in the Demonic Council Scene of Paradise Lost Rhetorick is an art sanctified by Gods Spirit, and may be lawfully used in handling of Gods word: there may be given . . . instances of all the parts of Rhetorick out of the Scripture. And therefore the Art is to be approved, and only the abuse thereof is to be condemned. —Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard (1609) Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words To thy large heart give utterance due. —Milton, Paradise Regained (3.9–10) When Satan is discovered by the angels Ithuriel and Zephon in Eden, having already half-accomplished his task in his insidious whispering to the sleeping Eve, he is brought before Gabriel to account for his presence . Satan first replies that he has escaped hell to “boldly venture to whatever place / Farthest from pain” he can find, and blames God’s carelessness in not securing “His Iron Gates” (4.892, 898). When Gabriel mocks the “courageous Chief[’s]” hasty flight from the pain of hell, while his faithful rebel cohort still suffers, Satan replies that he has escaped to “spy /This new created World” in order “to find / Better abode, 59                   60 and my afflicted Powers / To settle here on Earth” (4.936–940). Gabriel immediately draws attention to Satan’s doublespeak:“To say and straight unsay . . . / Argues no Leader, but a liar trac’t” (4.947–49). Gabriel’s provocative statement that Satan’s speaking is at once an assertion and a negation suggests that his language is deceptive, full of half-truths, diversions, and illusions. This is made all the more intriguing when we consider that such language is not only “trac’t” back to the perfidious leadership of Satan as a point of origin, but also that Milton directs his polemical career against the many pamphlets and “tracts” that in his opinion employ similar tactics by correspondingly false leaders.1 Implicit in Gabriel’s statement is the gesture toward a satanic semiotics in which language is divorced and in exile from the Presence of God. Milton recognizes the threat that satanic language, contemporaneously a saying and an unsaying, poses toward the divine gift of language. In this crucial scene, Gabriel as the “strength of God” and bearer of the divine Sign is juxtaposed against the Arch-Fiend, here for the first time directly called “Satan,” the “enemy” or “accuser,” in the poem by someone other than the narrator, and whose grammatical apposite is “liar” (4.950).2 The Arch-Fiend comes not as Lucifer the “bearer of light,” but as the bearer of “mournful gloom” (1.244) and a new semiotics of flux, hiddenness, and negation. These dynamics of satanic language find one of their most sinister expressions in the demonic council scene of Paradise Lost when the newly vanquished demons assemble to debate their next course of action against heaven’s King and the Anointed One. This scene has been approached from a number of provocative perspectives, and the general consensus has been to investigate the orations as reflections of political debates in English Parliament during the revolutionary years.3 To my knowledge no one has approached the infernal speeches within the context of preaching, itself a very political endeavor. Thomas Cogswell argues that the Stuarts looked upon the pulpits as “a formidable platform for disseminating the royal line.”4 Jeanne Shami comments further that “[p]reachers were becoming more actively engaged in propaganda for and against public policies” even though the pulpit was “at best an unpredictable political tool.”5 Far from being the sword-tongued heralds of the new age, many early modern preachers (at least those who desired to keep their benefices and their ears as well) were often spin-doctors or ventriloquists disseminating royal policy. Milton left the ministerial path in part because of his refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to the king and Carolingian ecclesial policy. When we examine the discussions in hell within the context of preaching, we find that Milton’s fallen angels follow suit as a congregation of dissenters who “dislodge, and leave / Unworshipt, unobey’d the Throne supreme” (PL 5.669–70). In their dissent they preach the gospel of the “liberty” of conscience and “freedom equal” from below (5.679, 793, 797), not the gospel of the newly raised Son. While Milton was sympathetic to dissenters generally, however , we will find that he is...

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