Satan's Poetry: Fallenness and Poetic Tradition in <i>Paradise Lost</i>

4. Justifying the Ways of God to Men

145 Four  Justifying the Ways of God to Men Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. —Luke 17:21 The previous chapters have demonstrated the intimate link between Satan’s development in the poem and Paradise Lost’s self-conscious construction as a poem, both in its own right and as a work necessarily situated within a tradition. As the first to fall, Satan creates a world in which self-generation is possible, in which agents other than God can create independently , and in which every created thing is necessarily new and particular, standing against the world as it is to posit a new possibility. Because Paradise Lost understands this world as part of its own history, indeed as the first moment in its history, Satan’s fall—its causes, its methods, and its consequences —constitutes the framework within which Paradise Lost must exist as a poem, as a thing created. Thus, my argument to this point has attempted, by examining the convergences between Satan and the narrative voice, to demonstrate 146 Satan’s Poetry how the poem constructs its own genesis, how it comprehends itself both as something that comes to be and, more importantly, as something that is able to come into being in the first place. Paradise Lost explains to us how it is possible that it can soar above the Aonian mount, and reveals the conditions that allow it to sing things unattempted yet—possibilities and conditions that find their origin in Satan. But if the previous chapters explained how Paradise Lost is able to come to be as something new, as a self-sufficient, immanently legible work of art, the question left to explore here must be how Milton’s epic is actually new. What is so unique about Paradise Lost among the works that it identifies as its tradition, and what unattempted yet is attempted here? Chapter 2 demonstrates how Paradise Lost differs from other texts at localized moments, such as the poem’s allusion to Orlando Furioso at 1.16 and its wounded tree imagery in book 9. But saying that Paradise Lost at specific moments separates itself from other texts in its tradition is not necessarily the same as claiming that the poem is itself a unique poem, and so my purpose here in part is to show how the first claim leads to the second, how Paradise Lost itself becomes something new and self-standing out of its many points of differentiation. More importantly, while the fact that Milton’s epic is indeed a unique poem is on some level selfevident —no other poem exists that is Paradise Lost—I want in this chapter to give some account of Paradise Lost’s truly revolutionary turn, of its individuality not just as a poem among many poems, but as a text that opens up possibilities that had not existed hitherto (which is what any text in a tradition like the one Paradise Lost projects will do). Insofar as the Fall creates an intersubjectivity that links subjects by cutting them off from one another, rendering them distinct and to some extent opaque, the concept of the individual underwriting Paradise Lost’s construction of its characters and of itself is something new in the realm of epic poetry. Justifying the Ways of God to Men 147 Insofar as this intersubjectivity governs how the poem understands its tradition and itself within that tradition, Paradise Lost offers a new way of thinking about poetic creation—and particularly epic poetic creation—within a tradition. In order to do so, however, the poem will have to make one additional break, turning away from not only the other texts in its tradition , but from the origin of that tradition: Satan. Argument Not Less but More Heroic Paradise Lost explains at the outset that it will do something new when it claims to be pursuing “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme” (1.16). One of these “things,” as I mention in chapter 2, must be the poem’s “argument,” which in the modern sense of the word (i.e., argumentation) indicates the narrator’s attempt to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.25–26)—the significance of which I will return to later in this chapter. But the narrator in line 16 claims that the poem pursues things unattempted yet...