English literature’s first terrorist

From the Introduction to John Carey’s new book:

Honour and empire, with revenge enlarged,
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else though damned I should abhor.

(Paradise Lost, Book 4:  390-92)

“This is a terrorist’s logic, and the Satan of Paradise Lost is English literature’s first terrorist. Terrorism—the destruction of the innocent for political ends—was of interest to Milton. Two years before his birth the greatest terrorist atrocity ever planned in Britain, the Gunpowder Plot, was foiled. The plotters’ intention had been to destroy the royal family and the entire British ruling class, gathered for the state opening of Parliament.
. . .

“Satan is not only a terrorist. Like many terrorists he is also a political leader. Milton was closer to the centre of British political life than any other poet has ever been. He saw how politicians behaved at times of national crisis, and the character of Satan grows from that observation. He shows that Satan’s public and private selves are different. In public, before the mighty throng of his followers, Satan manipulates the levers of power with confidence, banishing self-doubt. He seems genuinely ignorant of facts – that God is invincible, that God created him – that when he is alone he acknowledges as unquestionably true. Milton’s Satan is a study in the intoxication of leadership, and its capacity to numb parts of the brain that operate as a restraint in normal people. When alone Satan is capable of pity – capable, at least momentarily, of becoming a quite different creature. This happens when he watches Eve in the garden.

That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge. (Book 9: lines 463-6)

“It is an extraordinary moment—the most evil thing in creation ceases to be evil—and it shows that Satan could still relent. The tragedy need not happen. The mere sight of innocence disarms him and frees him from hatred. Also extraordinary is Satan’s earlier reaction when he first sees Adam and Eve and tries to work out what kind of beings they are:

Not spirits, yet to heavenly spirits bright
Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance . . . (Book 4: lines 361-4).

“Satan says he could love the human pair because they look like God. But doesn’t he hate God? Isn’t God his enemy? Does Satan suddenly realise he loves God when he sees the human pair? Or have love and hatred of God furiously contested in him all along? We can’t know. Satan is unfathomable, whereas Paradise Lost’s God, being all-knowing, is as single-minded as a timetable, and cannot experience remorse and self-doubt as Satan does.”

It wasn’t my intention to write about terrorism, not now nor in my last post. I was rereading Carey’s Unexpected Professor, after recommending it to a fellow-blogger who had posted about another book of his and also about George Orwell. The Unexpected Professor devotes many pages to Orwell and many more to Milton, whose most famous poem I’ve never managed to read. Then I discovered Carey’s just made reading Paradise Lost easier, with an edition which keeps the best bits and summarizes the others. It made me think I could have another go at Milton, but l but can’t yet afford Carey’s book as it’s only just been published, therefore not available dirt-cheap in used condition, as most best-sellers are, after a suitable interval. Instead, Amazon offers a free Kindle sample, which offers enough food for thought.

Apart from terrorists—the real life plotter Guy Fawkes and the imagined Satan—Carey has another angle to bring out: the notion that Paradise Lost has in a sense two authors. Its lines, as Carey tells us, came ” ‘unpremeditated’, as he relates dictated each night by a divine female visitor.” Each morning, as I learned from a visit to Milton’s Cottage, now a museum and not far from here, he would recite them to a scribe summoned for the purpose. He called his muse Urania, and claims “it was she who inspired Moses to write Genesis and the other Mosaic books of the Old Testament. That is to say, she is capable of dictating material that has biblical authority.