In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Satan and the Wrath of Juno
  • Maggie Kilgour

On the third day of the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost, the Son of God, resplendent in the Chariot of Paternal Deity, appears to the angels for the first time. Sent to bring an end to the war, the Son does so by dividing the good angels from the bad. However, while he claims that he will distinguish God’s “Saints unmixt, and from th’impure/ Farr separate,” it is the angels’ own reactions to his appearance that seem to determine definitively which side they are on.1 While the good angels are with “unexpected joy surpriz’d” (PL, 6.774), the bad “stood obdur’d” (PL, 6.785), and are “hard’nd more by what might most reclame” (PL, 6.791). Rejecting the offer of reclamation presented here, the rebels confirm their “envie” (PL, 6.794) and “rage” (PL, 6.814) against the Son. Divine power therefore takes the form not of mercy but of wrath, when in response the Son: “into terrour chang’d / His count’nance too severe to be beheld / And full of wrauth bent on his Enemies” (PL, 6.824–26). The presentation of events suggests that the rebels choose their own damnation when they drop their weapons, flee in terror, and “headlong themselves they threw” (PL, 6.864) straight into Hell. A moment of potential conversion slides into a demonstration of devilish perversion; the narrator, Raphael, is astonished by this scene of suicidal self-damnation, exclaiming: “In heav’nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell?” (PL, 6.788).

As long noted, the rhetorical question here echoes the famous opening of the Aeneid: “tantaene animis caelestibus irae” (Can anger so fierce dwell in heavenly breasts?).2 The subtext at this crucial moment of choice not only deftly displays Raphael’s excellent education, but also sets up a correspondence between the role of divine anger in the Aeneid and that of satanic perverseness in Paradise Lost. The substitution is revealing: the rebels are thus not essentially the victims of the anger of God, or, specifically here, the Son, in the way that Aeneas was the target of the wrath of Juno; rather they are the victims of their own perverse natures which willfully distort divine mercy into ire. It seems therefore as if they are in fact projecting their own anger onto God, as Satan will later his own envy, when speaking to Eve he too echoes and rewrites Virgil: “is it envie, and can envie dwell / In heav’nly brests?” (PL, 9.729–30).3 [End Page 653]

In both epics, however, these questions concerning the presence of destructive emotions in spiritual beings have deeply disturbing implications for our understanding both of the nature of the divine and the origin of evil.4 Specifically, John Milton’s allusion to Virgil suggests that in Paradise Lost the role that the furious Juno played in the Aeneid will be played by the perverse Satan. Some parallels between the two characters are obvious. Like Virgil’s Juno, Satan both sets the plot in motion and then tries to delay its inevitable, ordained end.5 Juno and Satan are both associated with confusion, transgression, and boundary breaking (Satan is quite a bounder in every sense). They thus oppose the figures of Jove and Jesus, who, as the Son’s appearance in Paradise Lost book 6 also indicates, are both connected with order, closure, and the setting of limits through discrimination and differentiation.6 The echo thus suggests that Milton appropriates the antithetical principles that structure Virgil’s cosmos for his own representation of cosmic conflict. However, in the transmission the couple is transformed, not only metamorphosed from husband and wife into an all-male model, but also redefined in terms of the absolute moral categories of good and evil. The effect is similar to that of Milton’s rewriting of Spenserian “Error” as “Sin”: a serious raising of the stakes, with the deepening and intensification of the categories. The advantage is that it transfers the negative aspects of the divine onto a force explicitly identified as evil and differentiated from the good aspects of God. However, for Milton to identify the...

pdf

Share