Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence

7: “Shifting Contexts” Artists’ Agon with the Biblical and Miltonic Samson

137 7  “Shifting Contexts” Artists’ Agon with the Biblical and Miltonic Samson Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia James Tufte Perhaps better than any of Milton’s poems, Samson Agonistes illustrates the proposition...that interpretation...provokes reinterpretation. —Joseph Wittreich The past decade has abounded with readings of Samson Agonistes—a remarkable number of them published, with weird appropriateness, in 2001–02. Yet as Derek N. C. Wood remarks, “There is less agreement now than there ever has been about [its] meaning....Quite simply, even accounts given by belated liberal humanists and ‘close readers’ of what happens in the play can differ so startlingly from one another that the reader is left wondering if their authors have been reading the same text.”1 Nowhere is this disagreement sharper than with regard to the questions—all but suppressed by earlier readers—raised by the horrific violence suffered and inflicted in the play. “The still pressing question,” Joseph 138 Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia James Tufte Wittreich writes, “is whether Milton, like Euripides and like the redactor of the Judges stories, deplores the culture of violence he depicts.”2 Michael Lieb’s provocative answer—worked out in a number of ways between 1994 and 2002—could not be more stark: “In no other work of Milton is the sparagmatic experience more germane than in Samson Agonistes. The drama is a work of violence to its very core. It extols violence. Indeed, it exults in violence.”3 Lieb also takes up, and answers, a corollary question: What, given the world represented in Milton’s play, are we to make of Milton’s God? Far from the rational, theodical God of Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s 1978 reading, Lieb’s godhead is revealed, incarnate, in Milton’s shockingly primitive hero: “By virtue of his ‘livingness,’ God becomes ultimately a ‘non-rational essence’ that eludes all philosophical speculation. To appreciate the force of such a view of deity is to acknowledge ‘the non-rational core of the biblical conception of God.’”4 Wittreich’s contrasting answer—although worked out in ever more detail and in ever more contexts—is still essentially that argued in his earlier Interpreting Samson Agonistes: that “Samson is no type of Christ..., not at all of Christ triumphant and only ironically of Christ suffering.” His deeds are entirely evil and reflect only inversely the justice of Milton and of Milton’s God, whose nature can be read only through the Son in Paradise Regain’d. “Milton’s point,” writes Wittreich, “is obvious: evil is imputable to man, not God”; only his permissive will can possibly be read in Samson’s deeds, as the epic voice explicitly reads it in Satan’s. Samson is connected to the Son exclusively by inversion: the taker of life juxtaposed, as in the 1671 volume, with the giver of life and Savior of humankind.5 Yet to admit, with Wittreich—quoting Luther—that Samson is no model to be followed,6 is not necessarily to reduce Samson’s role to that of pure Antichrist. John T. Shawcross suggests that “disjunctive reading should, rather, be replaced by a reading that holds up multiple readings of the text in mind conjunctively, opposed though they may seem to be”—a discipline he models “Shifting Contexts” 139 in The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes.7 And Derek Wood, benefiting from every reading mentioned here, substitutes synthesis for Shawcross’s dialectic, bringing Wittreich and Lieb’s horror together with a critical candor that allows Samson some possible redemption, while recognizing his ethic as barbaric. The tragedy, he writes, does not question whether Samson is a hero of faith, nor does it affirm that he is a “Christian” hero. Samson is tragically ignorant of the exemplary life of Christ as he shapes his own agonized moral choices, honestly but painfully and uncharitably....Against Samson’s divinely confirmed faith, Milton sets this questionable moral consciousness, this...condition of un-Christian savagery acted out in all honesty by human beings ignorant as yet of the living example of Christ’s life in time. Samson, for Wood, is no Christ figure. On the other hand, “Samson’s final achievement was not satanic; he was, according to the Word of God [Hebrews 11:32–34], a hero of faith, but his morality was fashioned in the darkness under the Law, and Milton’s text, for all its indirection, does not obscure...