Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence

5: God’s “Red Right Hand” Violence and Pain in Paradise Lost

89 5  God’s “Red Right Hand” Violence and Pain in Paradise Lost Diana Treviño Benet 1. Introduction Among the many “firsts” in Paradise Lost, pain stands out by happening for the first time twice. Both first experiences belong to Satan, but as many readers have noticed, the poem ascribes the new sensation to different moments. Chronologically, the first time Satan experiences pain is when Sin bursts from his head while he conspires with the seraphim “against Heav’n’s King.”1 The second “first time” occurs when Michael’s sword “shear’d / All his right side” during the war in heaven (PL 6.326–27). Dolor permeates the first half of Paradise Lost. An essential aspect of human experience, pain plays a central role in Christianity. It is present at the beginning and at the end of the human story, according to the Bible, which defines its spiritual significance. God designates pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for disobedience: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16); finally, after the endof -time battle, God will cause Satan and other sinners to be “cast alive into a lake of fire” (Rev. 19:20) and to “be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:10). Religion and language come together in “the very word ‘pain’ [which] has its etymological home in ‘poena’ or ‘punishment.’”2 To represent the causal relationship the Bible establishes between sin and corporal punishment, Milton must treat pain, which means he must deal with the punitive God: pain in Paradise Lost is the direct consequence of divine violence, of what Michael Lieb identifies as the odium Dei.3 A consideration of God’s violence must focus on the war in heaven as the event that witnesses his invention of pain for the rebels,4 and on hell, the place he designs for eternal suffering. Readers over the years have found fault with numerous aspects of the war, and Milton’s hell is riddled with as many inconsistencies and seeming absurdities. These noticeable strains in the fabric of the poem highlight the difficulties Milton confronts in representing his supernatural characters’ actions and motivations—his theology—but scholars either ignore the strains, or they argue or assume coherence where none exists. One of the few exceptions is John Wooten. Though Wooten writes exclusively about the war (which he characterizes as “a flawed effort”), he comments, also, on the critical stance that glosses over evident problems in the epic: The tendency in criticism, and an admirable one it is, is to arrive at, if at all possible, an interpretation that will hand a great poet success on as many levels as possible. Miltonists, like critics of other great writers, regularly make such an appropriately humbling effort....Yet at times it is necessary for the sake of a truer understanding to say something else: namely, that the poetic intention is betrayed by the poetry itself. In this instance, what I wish to do is to urge the view that Paradise Lost shows unmistakable signs of finding the issue of violence an intractable one, despite Milton’s best efforts.5 In this essay, I shall focus on some of those signs of Milton’s struggle with violence and pain in hell and the war in heaven. I approach them neither as unconscious errors that must be silently ignored 90 Diana Treviño Benet for the sake of postulating artistic “unity” nor as inadvertent slips that expose flaws in the poet’s theodicy. Instead, I adduce three underlying contexts with a straightforward relevance to the topic of pain. The medical treatment of pain, its spiritual significance, and the thinking on Christian warfare are contemporary matters that threaten to subvert Milton’s stated objective of justifying God’s ways to men in several ways: by creating an unacceptable sympathy for the apostates; by elevating them to heroic stature and simultaneously lowering the stature of the obedient angels; by pointing to the intrinsic unfairness of the war in heaven; and by exposing God’s undisguised violence. I use the cultural contexts as guides to understanding how Milton deals with his knotty material . My working assumptions are that Milton was cognizant of the problems inherent in his material, and that he used various more or less successful strategies to save the appearances of his divine apparatus. Inconsistencies and incongruities remain in hell...