The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton's Rejection of God as King (review)

Michael Bryson's book is dedicated to justifying William Empson's belief that the Christian God is really Satan, and that Satan's descent into tyranny was enforced on him by Milton's tyrannical deity. Yet if in theory Empsonian, this profoundly illogical argument shares little of its "Original's" strategical skill. By claiming that the God of Paradise Lost is not Milton's God but a "trap" to trick the unwary reader, Bryson essentially recreates Stanley Fish's harsh "Taskmaster" Milton along with his tiny "fit audience" over his own objections to Fish's elitism. To avoid this paradox, he invokes all the now-fashionable historical suspects — Quakers and other mystics (who ironically were often just as exclusive and judgmental as Bryson's much ostracized "orthodox") — as Milton's "real" intended audience. Yet the critic's own audience is obviously quite different: politically correct secularists and ultra-modern Christians whose God "is rather closer to the Jesus(es) of popular imagination — the baby of the manger, the preacher of love and tolerance, the challenger of the judgemental who declares that only those without sin may cast the first stones — than . . . to the God figure of Milton's greater and lesser epics" (12). Bryson is apparently innocent of the idea that this same Jesus did not declare unconditional love for sinners but only forgiveness for sins — an ultimately very different concept — and that in the fullness of his kingdom he becomes a universal Judge, not just a universal "lovey."

Nevertheless, these threadbare Empsonian themes could have been made more respectable if Bryson's repeated attempts to deny his category errors did not further confirm them. First, he claims that Milton's Father is not an "impersonal Absolute" (15) but an arbitrary Hebraic deity, a terrifying Holy of Holies who has nothing to do with the Christian/Platonic concept of goodness. Although this claim seems flatly refuted by the opening invocation of Paradise Lost, Bryson never refutes or even rereads it but simply declares Milton's theodicy invalid since Satan, his putative source of evil, is actually a "marginal figure" who can absorb none of the blame (17). Yet in nearly the same breath, he declares Satan the poem's real hero because unlike him, God is too "personal" and "exclusive" (17) — unlike Satan (!). Most of this bizarre blame-shifting is supported by declarations (not arguments) that the Milton who rejected earthly kingship "must" have rejected heavenly kingship, although Bryson consistently refuses to acknowledge the differences between a fallible mortal who inherits or seizes a throne and the Creator of the universe who literally "fathers" both its laws and its rational creatures. Instead, he simply affirms that Milton's "elect" readers (30) perceive the continuities behind the overwhelming differences, although we are never told how they were "elected" in the absence of such a Creator. Milton's heretical Arianism supposedly explains this inconsistency, even though this heresy actually gives far more power to God than to the Son who in Bryson's most un-Arian imagination replaces him. Nor does Bryson explain why Satan is justified (69) in seizing the vile Power nobly rejected by the Son of Paradise Regained, but it is apparently because "there are neither focus groups, nor voting booths, in Milton's heaven" (66).

As the latter point suggests, this argument trivializes heaven's very real debates and even Milton's republicanism itself, since it completely ignores how republicanism's intrinsic "rightness" ultimately demands the absolute standard of Truth and Justice that Bryson himself anathematizes. And without such a universal standard, how can governments rule by persuasion alone, as he claims they must to avoid tyranny? In fact, all democracies become tyrannies by this criteria, which Milton rightly shows to be unworkable even for angels. To say that this author seems to have a "Father-complex" is obviously an understatement, without an executive power...