Author: staceymeeker

Today Paul de Man’s name is not heard as often as before in academic discourse. Although he has not fallen into oblivion—there was, for example, a biography of him published several years ago—his popularity has waned significantly, partly, as some say, because the important insights of deconstruction have been absorbed into everyday practices of literary criticism, partly because of his prohibitively abstruse style of writing, and partly, no doubt, due to the discovery of his wartime writings. I think, however, we need to revisit his theory, because its implications and anthropological intuitions have not been properly appreciated. In this paper, I will remind the readers of de Man’s deconstructive method and show how closely his ideas came to those of Generative Anthropology. I will also point out how the concept of scenicity would have made his astute account of eventfulness as a passage from the cognitive to performative modes of language more complete. Finally, I will briefly sketch out my own view of eventfulness as informed by Generative Anthropology.

I will preface my discussion by saying that I cannot be sure whether de Man was the first person who extrapolated J.L. Austin’s discussion of performativity from the philosophy of language to literature, but he was certainly one of the most important thinkers to have grasped its importance to the enterprise of understanding the meaning of meaning. Austin’s definition of a performative is that of a specific kind of utterance that can do things in the world in some real sense, that is to say, effect a real change, as he explains in his seminal mid-20^th century work, How to Do Things with Words. Instead of being purely descriptive, or “constative,” these utterances are “operative,” that is to say they declare, promise, name, impose punishment, or affirm a contractual obligation, and so on, such as the phrase “I take this man/woman for my lawful wedded spouse” when pronounced by a person in front of a priest or “I sentence you to 5 years in prison” when pronounced by a judge or “I promise to repay this debt before the first of January” when recorded in a legally-binding promissory note. In other words, to be effective, these utterances need to satisfy the conditions of what he calls “felicity,” i.e., satisfy the agreed-upon conventions of usage.

De Man looks at the phenomenon of performativity from a higher perspective, connecting it to the power of language, all language, not just special language, to effect changes. To begin with, the operation of language is one-directional: what is read cannot be unread, what is understood cannot be un-understood in the normal functioning of the brain/mind. De Man stresses that reading is irreversible; we can call it entropic in that it follows an arrow of time. This in itself connects to eventfulness insofar as a moment that triggers an irreversible change is what can be properly called an occurrence or happening. But what is subtle about de Man’s reasoning is that it is not the act of understanding itself that is eventful, not the “Aha, I see it now!” moment, but that eventfulness lies somewhere in the interaction between the two (incongruent, in some sense) features or compartments of language, its referential and cognitive registers.  The former is completely distinct from the latter; you cannot bring them into the same conceptual space. What his deconstructive method consists in is close-reading a passage and then demonstrating that its “performative rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, fail to converge” (AR 300).

The reason he uses “the rhetoric of tropes” interchangeably with “cognitive rhetoric” is because, according to him, the process of cognition is nothing more than an endless chain of metaphorical recombinations. Metaphors create necessary cognitive links that multiply and propagate themselves through the momentum of exchanges and substitutions, contributing to the expansion of cognitive webs of meanings. But the next moment in de Man’s deconstructive reading occurs when he observes that this infinitely generative system of exchanges and substitutions cannot close itself off on its own, and can only be brought to a stop by some underhanded and illegitimate means.

De Man gives numerous examples of this. One, an especially lucid one, comes from his essay on irony in the Aesthetic Ideology collection. In his exposition of Schlegel’s reading of Fichte’s dialectics, he clarifies the meanings of synthetic and analytical judgments. In synthetic judgments you notice that one thing is like another. But in order to do this, you must also notice that it is unlike it in some respects. Symmetrically, in analytical judgments, you notice that one thing is different from another. But in order for you to do this, you must also observe some similarities. His examples are 1) making a synthetic judgment that a bird is a kind of animal, which implies that there are distinctions between animals that allow me to make this kind of comparison; and 2) making an analytic judgment that a plant is not an animal, which involves uncovering a common principle of organization that allows me to make this distinction (174).  These two kinds of judgments form a system in which every synthetic judgment implies and presupposes an analytical judgment based on the structure whereby individual properties circulate between different entities and are easily exchangeable. This circulatory structure that underlies the act of judgment is “the structure of metaphor, the structure of tropes. This very movement … is the circulation of properties, the circulation of trope, within a system of knowledge” (174). Thus “The structure of the system [of knowledge] is tropological” (176).

But dialectics is incomplete without a third kind of judgment, which Fichte calls “thetic,” a self-reflexive statement of identity or properties, which is not reducible to synthesis or analysis, the elementary form of which is “I am.” A thetic judgment is different in kind from the first two in that it cannot be inscribed into the system of exchanges and substitutions because it is grounded in the “ability of language to posit, the ability of language to setzen, in German. It is the catachresis, the ability of language catachretically to name anything, by false usage, but to name and thus to posit anything language is willing to posit” (173). “False usage” occurs also in Schlegel’s writing on authentic or primal or original language that rises to the surface in myth and humor. This language causes confusion because it is based on error and madness, and this, in turn, is because, such language is “a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system” (181). Presumably primal language retains the frivolous power of random positing. De Man emphasizes that positing is “a purely empty, positional act” (173) that stems from the performative power of language because language is machine-like: it’s a “text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness” (181).

Another example occurs in de Man’s reading of the episode of the ribbon in Rousseau’s Confessions. In his article “Excuses” included in Allegories of Reading, De Man deconstructs the ribbon story—Rousseau’s confession of his theft of a ribbon in an aristocratic household where he worked as a young man. What was even worse, Rousseau falsely accused an innocent maid, Marion, for the deed. In this short paper, it will be impossible to follow the multi-step, intricate logic of de Man’s close reading of this episode, and I will just summarize a few salient points. First of all, an act of confession, which is a performative act that Rousseau purports to carry out in his written narrative, merges with another performative act, that of an excuse, when the author says “But I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not reveal my inner sentiments, as well, and if I did not fear to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth” (280). As de Man notes, this opens up a discrepancy between an internal state of feeling and external state of the world. A confession does not need to knowingly acknowledge what the confessor was thinking or feeling because you confess the act itself: only the fact of the act that has been committed is relevant. An excuse, on the other hand, needs to account for how the act was committed in order to clear the excuser and assuage his feelings of guilt and shame. Rousseau planned to give this ribbon to Marion because he liked her, and so, as he says, he accused Marion of having done what he wanted to do in the first place. The ribbon serves as a substitution for Marion because it is Marion he really wants to possess instead of the ribbon, while Marion herself is a substitution for Mme de Vercellis who had rejected him before he transferred his affections to Marion. In addition, the shame Rousseau experiences has a complex multi-level structure. He is ashamed of having slandered Marion, which substitutes for his shame of being exposed as a thief, which itself substitutes for the shame he felt in confessing his feelings for her on the scene of the accusation, which, he suggests, is so great that he would rather resort to slander. But de Man adds another layer to Rousseau’s profound self-insight  by making an additional, Freudian, point that Rousseau’s shame is at bottom exhibitionistic: what he really wants is “neither the ribbon nor Marion, but the public scene of exposure” (285). What is also interesting, and perhaps surprising, is de Man’s claim that the very act of Rousseau’s excusing himself is only superficially performative but not so in real fact since it is, in turn, subsumed by the complex cognitive scheme of substitutions produced by desire. Once we understand that Rousseau was motivated by desire, his hiding and revealing, preening and embarrassment, self-exposure and defensiveness become understandable. And his gestures of confessing and making excuses “become comprehensible enough to be incorporated within a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge” (287).

There is, however, another “properly” performative moment, which undermines the tropological chain of substitutions around the excuse. It is the very moment of Rousseau’s uttering Marion’s name. When he explains how it happened, he says: “I excused myself upon the first thing that offered itself” (288)—an odd statement considering that it follows on the heels of his painstakingly constructed explanation where he confessed his feelings for Marion. How can she be “the first object that offered itself” given that he offers Marion’s name as a ruse to hide the real reason for his theft? Thus the referent, Marion’s name, as de Man explains, does not logically follow from the previous discourse. It is instead produced by the catachrestic logic of metonymy that negates the metaphoric logic of cognition. In another place, Rousseau returns to this episode, saying that his reply was the “automatic result [l’effet machinal]” of his embarrassment (294). De Man latches on to this phrase as emblematic of the random, machine-like ability of language to produce material effects through its referential function. “Without the scandal of random denunciation of Marion … there would have been nothing to excuse since everything could have been explained away by the cognitive logic of understanding” (298), says de Man. Therefore, he concludes, “performative rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, fail to converge” (300).

Moreover, as de Man later develops his insight about the two incompatible domains of language, he would point out that they coexist in a specific temporal order such as the performative intrudes on the cognitive and interrupts the dynamics of exchanges and substitutions.  He connects this interruption to his peculiar understanding of materiality as an act of reference. Such would be the originary designations of a primal language; such would also be Rousseau’s act of betrayal in naming Marion’s name (Marion was set up, bringing to mind a not-so-incidental pun on setzen, a formal act of positing). Elsewhere de Man assigns this sense of materiality to the notion of the sublime, which asserts the power of reason over imagination. This could be an aesthetic experience of the sublime, which cannot be subsumed by metaphor, or the mathematical sublime as a tangible manifestation of incommensurability between the finite and the infinite or discrete and continuous.  As mentioned above, the moment of recognition of the material power of the referent arises for us as an irreversible moment: an event is taking place.  In his “Kant and Schiller” lecture from Aesthetic Ideology, de Man insists on the irreversibility of this event as a crucial phenomenon through which we can understand the nature of language and representation:

When I speak of irreversibility, … this is because in all these texts and those juxtapositions of texts, we have been aware of something  which one could call a progression, … a movement, from cognition, from acts of knowledge, from states of cognition, to something  which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs… [The] linguistic model for the process I am describing, … which is irreversible, is the model of the passage from trope, which is a cognitive model, to the performative … Not the performative in itself … but the transition, the passage from a conception of language as a system, perhaps a closed system, of tropes, that totalizes itself as a series of transformations which can be reduced to tropological systems, … to another conception of language in which language is no longer cognitive but in which language is performative (132).

To summarize, he is not talking about Austin’s performatives, such as “I pronounce you husband and wife,” but of performativity as a referential function of language that possesses power and materiality, performativity in a broader sense of the word.

In Material Events, Andrzej Warminski, whose gloss on de Man I find very useful and whose wording helps me make my case, calls the act of naming in the ribbon episode a super-performative: “if one still wants to speak of “performative” at all in relation to the random utterance ‘Marion,’ then one would have to think of it as something of a ‘super-performative’—that is, not one that functions within an established juridico-political system (within which it can come off or not), but rather one that itself is the inaugural act of positing that puts such a system into place in the first place” (26). A super-performative, or radicalized performative, is an event that marks the passage from the cognitive conception of language to its performative playing out. The text passes from trope to performative because the tropological system of the text cannot close itself off. Another way of saying this is that the text cannot ground itself, not being able to account for its own production or “for the inaugural act that put it into place in the first place in its own terms” (24). And so the next step is a reading motion that empties out the tropes and carries the reading from cognition to another mode of language, to performance. What is performed is a reenactment of the inaugural act produced by the blind and mechanical referential power of language or, as de Man and Warminski refer to it, the power of material inscription. This irruption is what Warminski calls an event, cautioning his readers not to identify eventfulness with the performative per se but see it as “the point of ‘transition’ or the ‘intersection’ of two divergent systems, two divergent models, cognitive and performative” (25).

In giving this brief summary of de Man’s views, I have been careful to include or quote the wording that will likely trigger some associations with Generative Anthropology and allow the reader to appreciate how closely some of de Man’s ideas come to the conceptual framework of GA. But his theoretical conclusion about the underlying incompatibility, or divergence, or disarticulation between the two modes of language lacks specifics. In what ways do they diverge? How and why are they incompatible? I propose that the event of the origin of language as described in GA suggests some satisfying answers.

De Man’s mentioning of the word “scene” in his analysis of excuses adumbrates a more radical and precise approach of GA to the question of performativity. The titles of Eric Gans’s recent works that summarize, refine and elaborate on the originary hypothesis, A New Way of Thinking and The Scenic Imagination, capture the point I want to make. Generative Anthropology proposes a new way of thinking about language and representation, and this new way of thinking consists of conceptualizing what was previously thought of as a space of representation as a scene instead. The implications of scenicity are very profound. Without a scene we cannot properly understand performativity because a performative must be performed, and for something to be performed, you need a stage or a scene. What does it mean to happen on a scene? It means to happen now, this moment. “Nowness” cannot be projected onto a conceptual space or explained as a structure. We need a new kind of thinking, new thought categories imbued with temporality that lend themselves to talking about eventfulness, something that GA makes possible.

Thus what in deManian deconstruction is called an inaugural act that put the tropological system into place, GA describes as the originary event that gave birth to language and symbolic thinking. This event occurs on the scene of representation. The scene comes into existence simultaneously with the event. This new way of thinking suggests that we should re-conceive of cultural, linguistic, and philosophical categories as scenic and eventful. To quote Gans: “human experience . . . is uniquely characterized by scenic events recalled both collectively and individually through representation, the most fundamental of which are the signs of language” (SI 1).

To recapitulate what Gans calls the minimal heuristic hypothesis, we are to imagine a group of pre-linguistic almost-humans poised in mimetic tension around an appetitive object. All of them are making an appropriative gesture toward the object, and in doing so are threatening to upset the established hierarchy that gives precedence to the alpha member of the group. The instinctual, rank-based order of distribution is put in jeopardy as a conflict seems to be nascent. There is a moment of hesitation.  This is not yet a scene. This is not yet an event. And then the suspended moment of hesitation resolves itself when one member of the group understands the threat of violence and aborts his gesture of appropriation. Other members of the group understand his understanding and abort their gestures of appropriation, as well. The aborted gesture becomes the first sign, and the appetitive object becomes the significant object of designation that is inaccessible to collective desire on the scene that comes into being with this event.

The moment in which the scene is born on which the sacred is born is inherently paradoxical: the real, physical object is in front of us; and yet it is inaccessible according to the law of symbolic interdiction. As Gans writes in his article, “Paradox and the Sacred,” this is “the fundamental paradox of signification, [namely that] the sign confers signification on its referent as already significant” (8-9). It is not yet significant and it is already significant at the same time. What do we call it if not a kind of time warp experienced as an oscillation between two opposing aspects of the sacred, which both repels and attracts, is inaccessible and desirable, at the same time. As a taboo, it embodies the threat of violence and tells the participants of the scene to stay away. But it is also infinitely desirable, inspiring in the participants the fantasy of its possession. The appetitive referent of the sacred is never fully forgotten. Its materiality “lurks underneath,” as it were, and threatens the symbolic economy of the sacred.

In his recent chronicle on “The Originary Performative,” Gans addresses performativity in a way that is compatible with de Man’s theory of the performative but also adds an important scenic element to it. His point that the meaning of performativity is “the transformative effect of language in creating meaning, and thereby a cultural reality, where none previously existed” (2) bears important similarities to de Man’s insight about performativity as material power. But there is also a crucial difference that has to do with factoring in the human scene. Deconstruction does not have a concept equivalent to the scene and therefore lacks the ability to theorize context, and as a result, it is a tragic view of language as an infinite regress of meaning that makes communication theoretically impossible. The inaugural act of designation in de Man is bound to be a case of false usage, error, and madness given that it comes into being through the sheer arbitrariness of the mechanical language-machine with its “random-meaning-generator” algorithm. This is why in his linguistic model, the performative can only catachrestically disrupt the infinite churning out of tropological substitutions, but the result of this disruption can take one no further than a contemplation of the abyssal nature of signification. In the scenic view of language, on the other hand, the sign is subtended by the communal recognition of the significant. As Gans puts it, “inherent in the sign [is] that God/the human community guarantees the meaning of its signs” (3)—and this is why we can have trust in meanings that we generate through language. “Primal” meanings are produced on the human scene that underwrites and allows us to recognize a well-made sign.

I would further like to suggest that when de Man notices a fundamental disjunction between the cognitive and performative aspects of language, he refers to the same phenomenon that Generative Anthropology with greater precision calls the paradox of representation. What happens at this moment is the birth of detached representation that allows that first participant to anticipate the result of his action that will almost certainly result in violence.  As a result, the act of appropriation is replaced by one of designation, but, as mentioned above, the appetitive referent remains on the private scene of representation, creating an experience of oscillation between the symbolic and appetitive meanings of the object. I locate the cognitive in this scheme in the attracting energy of the sacred, insofar as it is associated with the first moment of cognition. Each participant’s envisioning of appropriating the attractive appetitive object takes place in the domain of the imaginary; it belongs to the anticipatory movement of cognition. In contradistinction to this, the performative force of language is rooted in the suspension of desire and the origin of the symbolic configuration of the scene:

We can summarize this by saying that while we appropriate in the imaginary domain of the cognitive, we are ourselves appropriated by language in the realm of the performative. And what we can further add to this is that this model of performativity, connected to the desire of appropriation, gives a more coherent explanation of why performatives compel us to respond to them. In suspending an appetitive desire, a performative keeps me in its temporary and unstable thrall on the scene, whose “now”-quality is, I think, the experiential epiphenomenon of this paradoxicality registered by us as the suspended moment of oscillation.

And finally, I would like to briefly discuss the constitution of narrative, which I call the narrateme,  as an exemplary structure that captures the paradox of representation. My take on narrative is that it reenacts or decodes human scenic events and entangles two layers of narrative communication, the cognitive and performative. The traditional narratological distinction between the story and discourse reflects this split, although it doesn’t account for the performativity of discourse. On the level of the story, we identify with the character embedded in his situation. What this means, I think is that we align with the character’s desire to come to the position of centrality on the fictional scene of representation. Martin Heidegger’s concept of subjectivity is relevant to modeling a character’s narrative self-understanding on the level of the story, and I will outline some aspects of it briefly. The gerund form that Heidegger invents for its subject, Dasein or Being-in-the-World, is meant to emphasize the subject’s practical and active entanglement with the world. As a practical subject embedded in the world, Dasein is oriented toward the future because it places various projects in front of itself and is in the process of carrying them out. To have a project means to be in the mode of planning and projecting towards its future possibilities.

But Dasein’s past, which Heidegger calls its condition of thrownness, is equally important, because Dasein’s opportunities are limited by its unique circumstances, such as the historical period it is born into, its family, geographical location, and so on. It is thus the past that can to a large extent determine Dasein’s individual possibilities and choices. In Heidegger’s schema of subjectivity, the past and the future are intimately interrelated to the point of inhering in each other, with the past being understood only from the future. What this means is that in Dasein projects itself into some future point, and from that future, it comes toward itself, as Heidegger puts it, but it does not come toward its present time but toward its understanding of itself as thrownness  (I was meant to be so and so or do such and such in the future as attested by my past). In a very insightful choice of terminology, Heidegger calls this grasping of the future-past entanglement an event of appropriation or en-ownment: in accepting its situation, the subject appropriates its authentic possibility of existence. For students of Generative Anthropology, the word appropriation immediately brings to mind the aborted gesture of appropriation on the originary scene. This gives an anthropological interpretation of the character’s quest to appropriate its future possibilities: namely, the story line captures the character’s desire to appropriate a position of significance on the imaginary fictional scene. I cast this schema of subjectivity in terms of a prospective-retrospective orientation of narrative interests. The past and the future can be seen as two entry points for consciousness that also serve as two anchoring points of a narrative unfolding; a character can understand his past from the vantage point of the future and contemplate the eventful nature of the future from the perspective of the past, where more than one scenario were open to it.

The level of discourse, how the story is actually told, reflects the renouncement of the appetitive object and the group’s re-configuring itself around the significant, which, in turn, reflects the outer frame of narrative communication, that of the narrator and narratee (although this connection is not usually made in Narratology). In taking place on the scene, the narrative-narratee communication reproduces the dynamics of the originary scene. As Gans writes in “New Thoughts on Originary Narrative,” “Submission to the narrator is analogous to submission to the mimetic mediation of the first in the originary event, just as the desires we espouse under the narrator’s influence are analogous to the desire aroused by the originary central object. Like the first user of the sign, the narrator and in general the esthetic subject must persuade his audience that the outcome of the operation will be the deferral of mimetic conflict” (3). The joint attention dynamics that entangles the narrator and (multiple) narratee(s) and that is happening in “real time” corresponds to the performative layer of the narrateme. What Narratology describes as suspense, which is an experiential or phenomenological aspect of a narrative, is the performative force that upholds the scene of joint attention and the deferral of mimetic conflict, as Peter Brooks reminds us in his analysis of the Sheherazade-Sultan interaction in Reading for the Plot.

We can see how this works in the Marion episode. Naming Marion as the culprit is one of the key events in Confessions. By telling a lie, Rousseau’s narrator issues a performative (an assertive in Searle’s classification of speech acts) in an ethically transgressive, infelicitous way. But it also happens to be an ostensive, which, according to Gans, is the first sign on the originary scene, the act of naming. This sign is now compromised, the originary configuration having been desecrated, which is registered as a significant occasion and processed as a narrative. Within the narrative form, paradox can be seen as a split, convoluted, and counter-directional structure. The split is that of consciousness into two disjoint conscious perspectives. When the first member of the group aborts the gesture of appropriation, a time warp is created, since in anticipating a violent outcome, his consciousness jumps ahead of itself into the future, and from the future appreciates his current situation. In reflecting this split, a narrative forms two entry points, the perspective of the source and that of the receiver.

But this counterpoint configuration is itself double. The outer frame is constituted by the performative act of story-telling with the narrator and narratee at opposite ends. The primary orientation of this narrative dynamics is toward the future, even if the story is not told in a strict chronological order. But its temporality is suspended in the present by the performative power of its reciprocal narrative desire, held up by the tension between the narrator, who feels compelled to tell his story, and the narratee, who is gripped by suspense. The inner frame is the dynamics of cognition, split between the prospective and retrospective points of understanding. The significance of telling a lie is appreciated by the narrator post factum and constructed retroactively as a narrative because the workings of cognition are always belated. The act of understanding aligns itself with the future and assumes a retrospective orientation, while the innocent position of consciousness is placed at the event and is future-oriented. While from the perspective of the event, nothing irreparable has yet happened and everything is still possible, it is the retrospective, postlapsarian position of consciousness that is the main orientation of cognition. Thus narrative, to return to de Man, can be seen as a way of “healing” the incompatibility of the performative and cognitive dimensions of language by resolving it into the seemingly coherent and integrated structure of the narrateme that is, in “reality,” paradoxical and divided against itself. I would, however, disagree with de Man’s claim that confessing is not a proper performative. On the contrary, its performativity is stressed by de Man’s own shrewd observation that Rousseau’s narrator delights in the piquant predicament of public exposure, thus usurping the center as a transgressive big man of the early scene. While the act of understanding a story puts us in the domain of the symbolic, the act of narration inseparable from it, which makes the act of understanding possible in the first place, awakens us to the materiality of the referent. What a narrative tries to paper over is the temporal split of consciousness and its convoluted forward-backward orientation.

Even some of John Milton’s greatest admirers will admit that Paradise Lost is a work beset by contradictions. His decision to make an episode from the Bible, the fall of Adam and Eve, the subject of his epic masterwork was fraught with unintended consequences.[1] Imposing the world of epic onto the biblical story is an uneasy marriage at best. Making the biblical Satan into an epic protagonist, for example, creates the well-known Satanist controversy. Likewise, representing the Christian God using conventions from ancient epic is the source of the debate surrounding Milton’s God.[2] These are real conflicts and difficulties. But I will show how epic and Bible actually need each other in Paradise Lost. They complement each other on one level even while they inevitably conflict on other levels. Epic and Bible need each other by the logic of Renaissance aesthetics as theorized by Eric Gans.[3]

Gans articulates literary history in terms of the opposition of center and periphery on a scene of representation. The center is the position of power, but it is vulnerable to the resentments of the periphery. Because Oedipus is the tyrant of Thebes (among other reasons), he must suffer the punishment of his fate. The problem for the central figure is maintaining authority. This problem is enacted within the world of the text but also in terms of the readers’ relationship with the work. The authority of Milton’s God, for example, is called into question by readers as well as by Satan. While Satan’s rebellion against God drives the plot quite effectively, readers’ resistance to the representation of God can sabotage the success of Milton’s work.

The epic cosmos in Paradise Lost needs Christianity in a special sense, which will take a few paragraphs to explain. The classical aesthetic is characterized by “fullness” of representation: Achilles is supremely confident in his centrality (Gans, OT 133). His confidence reflects the assured value of divine hierarchy in the ancient world. But the Renaissance or neoclassical aesthetic is another story.[4] The figures of the sacred center no longer have the authority they once had. Their power stands in need of justification. Why is this? To some extent this is an internal development of literature itself. In general, literature, in contrast to ritual and myth, stages centrality and explores its function in society. But perhaps the most important influence is Christianity, which asserts the equality of all souls before God. Each soul, in effect, is its own center of sacrality. Gans writes,

As soon as we feel ourselves the potential equals in triumph and in suffering of the participants of the agon, we are no longer in the world of the classical aesthetic. Classical decorum is lost; the rivalry of the audience with the central figure reflects a more deeply symmetrical form of resentment than classical form can tolerate. In order to defer the corrosive effect of this internal resentment, the neoclassical aesthetic must abandon the naïveté of the classical and represent the scene itself within the work. (OT 148-9)

Modern readers and spectators are becoming more resistant. Authors are aware on some level of this resistance and find ways to counter it, with profound consequences for literary history.

The classical aesthetic focused on the struggles of the central figures, positioning the audience as the periphery of the aesthetic scene, whereas the neoclassical aesthetic stages the periphery and the center, a doubling of the scene of representation. Neoclassical art is self-conscious and self-reflective. The play-within-a-play found commonly in Renaissance drama is one expression of this. Renaissance art finds itself forced to reflect on its own anthropological basis. This development reveals centrality as the function of a scene. The authority of the scenic center cannot be separated from its scenic configuration. The central figure requires explicit support from the periphery.

The notable self-consciousness of so many Renaissance characters, and their internal conflicts, constitutes an exploration of alternative modes of centrality. The private or internal scene emerges as a rival to the public scene, and the protagonist becomes separable from the public center. Hamlet at the margin of his uncle’s coronation is emblematic in this regard. In its representation of public scenes, however, the Renaissance aesthetic is still attached to the traditional model of centrality, that is, divine hierarchy, for lack of feasible political alternatives at the time.

Because Christianity undermines the classical aesthetic, an epic narrative in Milton’s time typically seeks to reinforce itself, to answer in some way to that challenge. The way that epic finds to defend itself from Christian iconoclasm is by integrating it into itself. Christianity is like the pharmakos from “Plato’s Pharmacy”: the poison that is also the remedy.[5] The answer to the problem of authority is drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The neoclassical aesthetic needs Christian ethics as a supplement to the classical scene. The very fact that Milton chooses a biblical subject for his epic suggests the weakness of the classical aesthetic in the Renaissance, despite its nominal revival.[6] Legendary subjects did not have the kind of gravitas that Milton sought.

The Christian tradition needs epic in a different sense, because its weakness is unlike that of epic, although derived from the same root: Judeo-Christian iconoclasm. Christianity tends to undermine itself from within. The problems with Christianity for Milton are related to monotheism, which is not generally hospitable to myth or literature. Monotheism is founded on a critique of idolatry, the rejection of pagan gods and myths, divine hierarchy, and by extension, pagan literature. Its iconoclastic strength is its weakness in literary terms.

It’s difficult to tell a story in which the monotheistic God is a character. Anytime something unfortunate happens to a good character, readers ask why God allowed it to happen. The monotheistic God has a tendency to turn into the villain of whatever story in which he is a character. And those who reject his seemingly arbitrary rule appear heroic by contrast.

Bible narrative avoids these pitfalls by making God absolutely transcendent. He is hidden, and He only appears on his own terms. The biblical God is not presented as a narrative character comparable to other characters. Biblical episodes tend to be minimal, “fraught with background,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase (12), and not given to narrative dilation. The Genesis story of Adam and Eve is completed in 695 words (KJV), while Milton takes almost 80,000 words.

As Bible scholar T. J. Wray observes, “Pure monotheism is theologically and existentially unstable” (166). For these reasons, the Jewish and Christian traditions tend to resort to pagan or gnostic elaborations, as for example in the non-canonical Book of Enoch. I use the word “gnostic” in a limited sense, such that a pagan cosmos is imposed on the Christian narrative, with multiple gods or god-like figures (mythic or epic heroes) in competition and conflict with each other, in a setting which is mythic, in contrast to the historical setting of the Gospels and Acts.

In sum, Christianity in Paradise Lost needs epic to create literature, while Milton’s epic needs Christianity as anthropological supplement. The result is more gnostic than Christian, but it succeeds as epic to the extent that it goes against strict monotheism (or rather, to the extent that readers can ignore the problems raised by the premise of monotheism).

A contrasting view on the role of monotheism in Paradise Lost is presented by Abraham Stoll in his book on the subject. Stoll recognizes a conflict between monotheism and narrative in Paradise Lost, but he conceives of monotheism and the problems it causes in different terms than I do. Whereas Stoll sees Milton’s monotheism as tending to abstraction, creating “a God of flickering subjectivity,” I argue that the representation of God in Paradise Lost contradicts monotheism, serving instead the literary requirements of epic. Stoll’s defense of Milton’s monotheism often involves special pleading. For example, in the rebellion against God in Book Five, the angels seem unaware of God’s status as God; Stoll explains this as an example of “local forgetting” that serves to reinforce monotheism when God reasserts his primacy in the person of the Son (Stoll 151-2). In any other narrative on any other subject, such a blatant contradiction would be recognized as an artistic fault. Stoll waffles on the question of whether the angels, good and bad, recognize God or not. In my reading, it’s not a case of the narrative temporarily “forgetting” God’s power, but rather, as we’ll see below, that the rebel angels do not recognize God as omnipotent, because they inhabit what is fundamentally a pagan cosmos. Stoll acknowledges that Milton is not consistently faithful to monotheism, but the contradiction of monotheism combined with epic narrative is more radical than Stoll allows. Milton’s commitment to epic is finally deeper than his commitment to monotheism, to the detriment of his attempt to justify God. Stoll falls into the camp of those who see the problem of biblical epic largely in terms of literary technique, a technical problem which finds a technical solution, which is more or less successful. But the conflict between monotheism and epic is ultimately an issue of authority and social order that goes to the heart of Modernity, a conflict between hierarchy and egalitarianism, with meritocracy serving to mediate between them.

Election

In the neoclassical aesthetic, we recall, the central figure becomes subject to resentment because of a new reciprocity between the audience and the protagonist. Traditionally, in the classical period, a “legendary or historical guarantee for centrality” was enough; but now “centrality must be demonstrated as a product of the scene” (Gans, OT 149). One way to authorize the protagonist is through “a sign of election,” which serves to “distinguish the central figure from the spectator who would otherwise be a rival” (150), thus assuaging the potential for resentment. Election, in various forms, becomes a typical concern for modern literature, replacing the battle for centrality in classical epic.

Falling is a major action in Paradise Lost, but rising is given equal weight. There are several scenes of election in Paradise Lost, including two just for the Son of God. Both of these scenes take place in heaven and precede his earthly Incarnation. Remember that the Son in Paradise Lost is not the prophet and martyr of the Gospels but rather a quasi-epic hero who defeats Satan and his army of rebel angels. In Book Three, a public scene in heaven, God asks for a volunteer to save humanity by suffering the penalty for their sins:

” . . . man disobeying,
Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high supremacy of Heav’n,
Affecting Godhead, and so losing all,
To expiate his treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say Heav’nly powers, where shall we find such love,
Which of ye will be mortal to redeem
Man’s mortal crime, and just th’ unjust to save,
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?” (3.203-16)[7]

At this point Milton inserts a pregnant pause into the action:

He asked, but all the Heav’nly choir stood mute,
And silence was in Heav’n: on man’s behalf
Patron or intercessor none appeared,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set. (3.217-21)

It looks for a moment like all of humankind might be doomed to eternal punishment, but then the Son volunteers to become human and suffer the penalty for sin demanded by God’s justice, although he knows he will be resurrected.

“Behold me then, me for him, life for life
I offer, on me let thine anger fall.” (3.236-7)

His earthly life and death will serve to defeat sin, death, Satan, and the forces of evil. His choosing to do so is the occasion for his heavenly adoration by God and the assembled angels, which is narrated at length. The idea of election traditionally requires an external power for validation, as well as some form of narrative motivation. Although the Son’s free choice motivates his election, it comes from outside himself, from God. The Son’s election in heaven is framed for us by his dialogue with God and by an audience of heaven’s angels. This scene thus exemplifies the two main strategies of neoclassical aesthetics: the sign of election and the doubling of the scene of representation within the work—reinforcements to epic narrative derived from and in response to New Testament influence. The neoclassical aesthetic operates by supplementation. The scene in heaven reinforces the Son’s authority for readers and for the angelic audience.

Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection are the paradigmatic signs of election for the medieval and neoclassical periods. For theologians, the Exaltation of Christ generally refers to his Resurrection from the dead and Ascension to heaven. The Son’s exaltation in Book Three explicitly anticipates the later exaltation.

Election is the Christian response to the imperatives of iconoclasm, which undermines and subverts all worldly, public images of authority. Election provides a new model of authority not based on divine hierarchy. By election, a carpenter’s son, even an executed criminal, can be the Son of God. The Son’s election in Book Three, however, seems redundant to the biblical event. Why does Milton include the scene of exaltation in Book Three with only the thinnest of scriptural justification, while neglecting the main event?[8] According to the logic of Modernity, election is a necessary supplement for centrality; but the need for supplementation never ends. Iconoclasm has no logical stopping place. So it follows that election needs to be supplemented with further elections. And in Paradise Lost, the exaltation in Book Three is followed by yet another scene of exaltation in Book Five (though chronologically earlier), and then a brief narration of the Crucifixion and Resurrection in Book Twelve.[9] Iconoclasm can lead, ironically, to the replication of images rather than their simple destruction.

The relationship of the Book Three exaltation with the orthodox event is more, however, than simply anticipation and replication. The scene doesn’t just reproduce the original, it also critically revises and even replaces it, again according to the imperatives of iconoclasm. After the Son volunteers to save humans in Book Three, God elects him to a new identity that goes beyond biblical models:

“Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more than great or high; because in thee
Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne.” (3.305-314)

For Milton, the Son’s virtuous actions practically replace both his Sonship (“By merit more than birthright”) and his suffering on the cross as the source of authority. Does the Son’s merit then make the crucifixion unnecessary? Yes and no. Setting aside Milton’s Arianism, his atonement theology is conventional, as we saw in God’s speech given above: “Die he or justice must.” The Crucifixion is necessary for man’s forgiveness. But there are two parts to salvation in Milton’s theology: forgiveness and justification. Humans’ justification in the eyes of God depends on Christ’s just life in heaven and on earth, his total obedience to God’s requirement for righteousness. Christ’s righteousness is then imputed by God to humans, by faith. The Son’s obedience substitutes for Adam’s lack thereof. Milton affirmed the necessity of Christ’s Crucifixion, but he chose to emphasize his virtue and merit in Paradise Lost. We find this emphasis also in his brief epic, Paradise Regained, which narrates Christ’s temptation in the desert, where his active resistance to Satan’s temptations is presented as the ground of human salvation.[10] Without that obedience and the resulting merit, the Crucifixion would have been nugatory. In terms of Milton’s oeuvre, therefore, we can say that the Son’s obedience almost replaces the Passion of the cross.

Milton’s position on the Son has affinities with certain heresies, notably Socinianism and Arianism, which were punishable by death in the seventeenth century. Milton had a lofty concept of the Son, but in his theological treatise Christian Doctrine he argues at length that the Son is a created being and not of the same essence as the Father, although equal in other respects. Milton refrained from publishing Christian Doctrine almost certainly because he knew his theology was considered heretical, and the manuscript was not discovered until the nineteenth century. Readers have noticed that the portrayal of the Son in Paradise Lost seems Arian since its publication.[11] And with the publication of Christian Doctrine, the evidence now is conclusive that Milton’s concept of the Son is Arian.[12] The scenes of exaltation in Books Three and Five in particular support an Arian understanding of the Son. A Son co-eternal with God would not likely need a scene of exaltation in heaven prior to his human Incarnation; he would have been exalted from eternity. He wouldn’t need promotion, and much less a public announcement. For Trinitarian orthodoxy, it is the incarnate, human Son who receives exaltation. The Son of God for Milton is a creature in the literal sense, which is unmistakably a demotion from the orthodox Trinitarian God, no matter how high he is promoted by the Father.[13] His identity as creature means that he needs glorification in order to achieve his full potential, just as every creature in the Miltonic cosmos may rise in status through obedience (or fall by disobedience). This could be understood as leveling (see Gregory Chaplin), since the Son is a creature like us, except that he does what all other creatures cannot. Rather it shows one way that Milton’s theology supports the politics of meritocracy. The Son’s created status in Milton’s theology may have been simply a result of his desire to stay strictly faithful to the doctrine of monotheism, but the result, ironically, is to limit God’s magnitude (pace Chaplin). God is apparently unable to save humans by himself. He needs the Son to accomplish His plans.

God asserts that the Son is “By merit more than birthright Son of God,” a shocking claim for Christian orthodoxy. The phrase “By merit more than birthright” might serve as a motto for political Modernity, but it is problematic when applied to the Son of God, whose authority transcends considerations of merit in Trinitarian theology. The main problem is that individual merit is necessarily relative to the merit of others, thus making the Son subject to competition (more on this below). In one sense, merit is another neoclassical supplement to authority, but in this case it also harkens back to the traditional justification of divine hierarchy that the well-born deserve their status by virtue as well as divine sanction. The Son deserves his position by merit and birthright. Milton wants it both ways in this case. Milton’s representation of the Son places him in the epic tradition, where nobility (in action, character, and birth) and divine favor determine identity; but Milton’s Son also fits into political Modernity, where merit begins to replace birthright.

In Milton’s late political tracts, he argued for meritocracy, although he expected that the best-bred (by birth and education) would for the most part merit the positions of power.[14] In regard to commoners, Milton’s Christ asks rhetorically, “what [are] the people but a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble, who extol / Things vulgar, and well weighed, scarce worth the praise?” (Paradise Regained 3.49-51). Milton recognized, however, that merit does not always coincide with birth, and in such cases, an hereditary king’s removal from power was necessary and legitimate.[15] If divine hierarchy is the thesis, and egalitarianism is the antithesis, then meritocracy might well be the synthesis: retaining an elite, but one based on merit rather than birth.

The story of the Son in Paradise Lost exemplifies both sides of my thesis. A Trinitarian (and in that sense monotheistic) Son would not be nearly as amenable to epic narrative, since he wouldn’t need exaltation or “begatting” in heaven, and he would hardly be seen as a rival by Satan (as in Book Five). The biblical Son requires a gnostic transformation in order to serve effectively as an epic rival to Satan. Because Milton’s Son is created, however, he needs the Christian supplement of election, with merit as a characteristically modern basis for status. He becomes central during the course of the text; his status is earned and legitimated in narrative terms.

Gregory Chaplin argues that Milton’s version of the Atonement in Paradise Lost goes “beyond sacrifice” because free choice and obedience are the source of salvation rather than the violence of crucifixion. Milton’s Son, for Chaplin, is a positive role model, an ideal of independent action, rather than a spectacle of redemptive suffering. While it’s true that in terms of emphasis within Milton’s oeuvre (if not his theology), the Atonement depends more on the Son’s obedience than his Crucifixion, I disagree that Milton succeeds in going beyond sacrifice in his epic.

We must consider whether Milton’s attempt to go beyond sacrifice is actually successful in terms of its reception. Let’s step back a moment and review our theoretical framework. Gans’s literary history foregrounds the potential of resentment among readers for a literary artwork’s central figures. For authors, the problem becomes how to authorize a central figure as worthy of readers’ attention. Authority, of course, is a typical concern thematically within narrative and dramatic literature, whether explicitly or implicitly. But Gans calls our attention to the authority of a work’s protagonists for the readers.[16] Authority involves assuaging the potential for resentment inevitably aroused by centrality. In the most practical terms, a work has to justify the time we spend to read and understand it. The problem of a work’s authority is central to literary history, in ways which go well beyond the terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. An anthropological approach to literature needs to consider the readers’ responses and how a work functions in society.

The Son volunteers to save humanity, so he comes off better than God in moral terms. Nevertheless, the Son has not stimulated the intense reactions accorded to Milton’s God or Satan, and he hasn’t inspired great admiration either. The Son is considered important mainly as Satan’s epic rival and in terms of Milton’s heterodox theology. There are a very few critics who admire the Son and have devoted considerable attention to him and his role in Paradise Lost, but it’s fair to say that the Son loses in comparison to the other protagonists.[17] In reception at least, the Son is overshadowed by Satan, God, Adam and Eve. In reference works such as The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost, separate chapters on Satan, God, and Eve are typically included, but not for the Son. A key difference for the Son’s reception is that readers have the New Testament biography as a point of comparison.

The main problem with the Son in Paradise Lost is that Milton neglects the suffering of the Cross, with the result that his Son lacks the pathos of the New Testament portrayal. Milton’s heavenly Son knows he will be resurrected, in contrast to Christ, who cries out on the cross that God has abandoned him. The Son perhaps has more depth than Milton’s God, but he pales by comparison with the Gospel presentation, not to mention Milton’s Satan, who claims an unparalleled psychological depth and interiority. Despite the Son’s modern virtues, which Chaplin articulates well, and despite his two major scenes of election in the epic, we must recognize that Milton’s Son has considerably less authority than the traditional Christian figure. Milton wrote “to justify the ways of God to men,” but this justification has been successful only for readers who are already Christian. Non-Christians are generally confirmed in their disbelief. The election(s) of the Son in Paradise Lost is addressed to the problem of authority, but the contrast with the New Testament Christ creates a new problem of significance. Milton’s representation of the Son is less than successful, and this lack of success speaks to the problem of authority in neoclassical aesthetics.

Problems of authority

In the New Testament, the Crucifixion serves effectively to authorize the Resurrection. Christ merits his Resurrection precisely because he did not merit his Crucifixion. In Gans’s reading, the apostle Paul is the first to realize (in both senses) the meaning of the Crucifixion, in his revelation on the road to Damascus.[18] The one whom he persecutes (“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”[19]) is his God. This is not simply a psychological insight but a datum of experience for believers. The earliest preaching of the Apostles, recorded in Acts, reminded the hearers of their role in Christ’s Crucifixion. For those not contemporaneous with Jesus, this recognition is experienced vicariously through the preaching of the Apostles or by reading the Gospels and Acts. From an anthropological perspective, by being part of the crowd persecuting Jesus, one mimetically centralizes him in the imagination and memory, the basic mechanism for sacrifice and sacralization. A personal, imaginative engagement with the event of the Crucifixion can be said to produce faith and the conversion experience. Jews who felt no responsibility for Christ’s suffering could not share this experience.

We can also think of the Crucifixion in terms of Judeo-Christian iconoclasm, the act of destroying an idol. Christ is not an idol of course, but his Crucifixion creatively destroys the conventional idea of God in glory, as Martin Luther recognized in his “theology of the cross.” Moreover, Christ on the cross is a literal destruction of what Paul calls “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1.15, KJV). The Crucifixion is a peculiar kind of image, an image that negates itself in the act of signifying.

Self-negation is another, ironic form of supplement, necessary in the modern world due to the imperatives of iconoclasm and the resentment that accompanies individualism—Leopold Bloom, for example, who is humiliated in so many ways before his triumph in the final chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses; or Prospero, who ritually abnegates himself at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Modern authority is dialectical in respect to the audience.

The Crucifixion, like tragedy, has an anthropological content, derived from their common heritage in ritual sacrifice. In general, sacrificial ritual functions to support the divine hierarchy of ancient societies. But the Passion and ancient tragedy reveal the perspective of the victim, thus problematizing sacrifice. Nevertheless, tragedy in the final analysis justifies the sacrifice of the protagonist. As Aristotle recognized, spectators accept the protagonist’s suffering as necessary and experience catharsis. Spectators of the Crucifixion, on the other hand, to the extent that they recognize their complicity, experience faith in the risen Christ and communion with other believers. As the author of the book of Hebrews argues, the Crucifixion is the sacrifice to end all sacrifice (Hebrews 10.10-12). In Book Three, Milton’s Son volunteers to suffer for humankind, but during the scene he actually enjoys glorification. Milton may have wanted to authorize the Son but he leaves out the main source of the Son’s New Testament authority: the pathos of the cross, which generates the dialectic of conversion. Milton neglects the anthropological heritage of the Crucifixion in ritual sacrifice, the Aufheben of which makes possible new forms of authority and social order.

The representation of the Son in Paradise Lost may reflect Milton’s personal experience of faith. As Stephen Fallon writes,

Where anxious self-examination and conviction of sin is a Protestant norm enforced by Lutheran and Calvinist theology, Milton writes instead of his blamelessness and heroic virtue. . . . Milton’s accounts of his youth . . . reveal a boy who is godly and dutiful without benefit of the conversion experience obligatory in Christian autobiography. (21)

Milton didn’t have the dramatic conversion from guilt to repentance typical of seventeenth-century Protestants, because apparently he devoted himself to Christian purity from a very young age. He records in his prose tract, An Apology for Smectymnus, that he was trained in and followed Christian precepts from a young age, and that he had “a certain reservedness of natural disposition and moral discipline learnt out of the noblest philosophy” (852). As a result, he preserved his chastity in body and mind, and consciously crafted his life as “a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things” (850). I agree with Chaplin that “Milton refuses to internalize the Crucifixion . . . because of his own sense of dignity” (359). His faith was not apparently based on sympathetic communion with the crucified. One might say, with Chaplin, so much the better. But this abandons the anthropological content of the cross, leaving Milton insensitive to the sacrificial implications of representing God and the Son in epic terms. Pace Chaplin, in the end, Milton’s version of the Christian narrative is more, not less, sacrificial than traditional Christianity, precisely because he leaves out the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion is the anti-sacrificial model, because the Passion narrative teaches that humans are responsible for sacrificial violence, not God and not the devil. Satan actually becomes the sacrificial victim in Paradise Lost instead of the Son. The Romantic glorification of Milton’s Satan is an ironic reflection of the biblical Passion.

The Son in Paradise Lost doesn’t offer an effective model of identity for ordinary readers, who don’t share Milton’s purity. He doesn’t suffer, and he doesn’t have pangs of conscience and internal conflicts, in contrast to the Gospel figure, who sweats drops of blood on the night before his Crucifixion. In Milton’s Paradise Regained the Son fasts for 40 days and never feels any hunger until the last day (2.246). He never feels any temptation to give in to Satan’s offers. It’s true that his answers to Satan’s temptations point to a religion that is private rather than public, but this is mainly a theoretical point, performed only in a limited sense by his withdrawal to the desert to seek inner illumination. In Paradise Lost, the great figure of interiority is Satan, and to a lesser extent, the fallen Adam and Eve. Milton’s God and Son are essentially too perfect to manifest the internal conflicts which serve to authorize modern protagonists.

Satan

So far we’ve been examining mainly the role of the Son in Paradise Lost; now we expand our view to include Satan and his role in Milton’s justification of God. The fact that God apparently needs justification exemplifies the weakness of monotheism in literary terms: the difficulty of constructing a narrative in which God’s role is justified. Milton needs Satan to supplement the literary weakness of any purely monotheistic explanation. At the end of the opening invocation of Paradise Lost, the narrator asks the muse,

Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Moved our grand parents in that happy state,
Favored of Heav’n so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt? (1.27-33)

The answer comes immediately: “Th’ infernal serpent; he it was” (1.34). It’s worth noting that the serpent of Genesis is never identified as Satan in the Hebrew Bible. The Christian understanding of Satan originates in the period between the Old and New Testaments, when the Jews were subject to Seleucid and then Roman rule. It is hypothesized that the identification of Satan with cosmic evil was a way for Jews, under the influence of pagan religions, to make sense of the oppression they suffered by what seemed to be an evil empire.[20]

The very fact that Milton chooses to implicate Satan in the downfall of humankind and for the origin of evil is significant. It’s true, of course, that this is the conventional Christian answer, which is rooted in the New Testament scriptures, and thus inherent to his choice of subject matter. But the convention itself is problematic. Blaming Satan for sin, evil, and human suffering is in tension with the claim that our free choice accounts for evil. Making Satan into the cosmic opponent of God, with humans as his innocent, if not completely helpless, victims, undermines the Christian message of moral reciprocity.

The “problem of evil” is a side effect of the conceptual instability of monotheism. The Hebrew God undergoes certain changes under Greek and Roman influence. The biblical God becomes transformed into the “omni-God,” a deity who is omniscient, omnipotent, completely good and just. There are passages in the Bible that support this idea, but the omni-God is essentially a product of theologians, conceived under the pressure of philosophy after the Bible was written. God is reduced to a list of powers and traits. The concept of the omni-God encourages humans to understand God in terms of human qualities like knowledge, power, and morality. But the monotheistic God is primarily a creator: God alone creates a universe by speaking a word, an event with no analog to human experience. According to the Book of Isaiah,

Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself. (44.24, KJV)

The essential but unacknowledged starting point of the problem of evil is the idea: if I were God, I wouldn’t allow this or that source of suffering to exist.

The monotheistic God is a God of history. He has a plan for his people, and history therefore has a shape and meaning, which was elucidated by the prophets. But God was not to be subjected to rational questioning. Such, in effect, is God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind in the final chapters of the Book of Job, emphasizing his role as creator. Such was God’s answer to Moses at the burning bush, when Moses asks God for His name. God is the primeval “Other,” absolutely transcendent, free, and not subject to human judgments. The late-medieval nominalists revive an abstract version of this idea, although it is not very satisfactory to human understanding. Hans Blumenberg argues that the God of nominalism is practically equivalent to the evil demi-urge of the Gnostics (150-203).

Neither the problem of evil nor the character of Satan is essential to Judaism and the story of Adam and Eve, and in some ways they contradict the essential premises of Old Testament monotheism and New Testament morality. To call in Satan to account for the existence of evil is the first step on the path to Manichaeism and Gnosticism.

It might be objected that the New Testament is already gnostic in this sense, in which Satan is the embodiment of evil and God’s cosmic opponent. There’s some truth to this charge, especially in regard to the Book of Revelation. The Christian understanding of Satan is derived from the New Testament. In the Old Testament, Satan is not the embodiment of evil nor a cosmic opponent of God.[21] Christians were able to use only some brief mentions from the Old Testament to fashion the character of Satan, and these passages were used out of context. The most detailed biblical portrayal of Satan comes in the temptation of Jesus in the desert. But even there his character is not developed in any depth. Satan’s appearance in the Book of Revelation as “the great dragon” is very powerful but also frankly allegorical, in contrast to Milton’s Satan, who has realistic psychological depth and motivation. In an episode from the Gospels, Jesus refers to Satan in the Old Testament sense as the agent of temptation, a role and not a specific person, when he says to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16.23). Elsewhere the Gospels suggest that Jesus has already defeated Satan and inaugurated the Kingdom of God (Mark 3.26; Luke 10.18). The Sermon on the Mount is devoted to religious morality and does not mention Satan. The preaching of the Apostles as recorded in the Book of Acts makes almost no mention of Satan. The Gospels show humans as responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ, and Satan plays only a minor role by inspiring Judas. Milton’s portrayal of Satan is derived mostly from paganism and theological speculation, not the Bible. In terms of Satan’s psychological depth, the model is Shakespearean tragedy. The grand role of Satan in Paradise Lost is an example of how Milton transforms his biblical theme using epic and dramatic conventions to supplement the literary weakness of strict monotheism. Paradise Lost is ostensibly the story “Of man’s first disobedience,” but without Satan it would be like Hamlet without the prince.

William Blake famously wrote that Milton was “of Satan’s party without knowing it,” and since then controversy has raged over whether Satan is a hero or villain. For Blake, we should note, Satan is really another face of God, of authority equal to or greater than the Son (an “alternative Trinity” to borrow A. D. Nuttall’s phrase: Son, Satan, Father). So that the rebellion of Satan is really a justified rebellion against the conventional concept of God. Blake is a Romantic heir to Christian iconoclasm, destroying the idolatrous representations of God. Blake actually questions the very terms of the debate sparked by his famous comment. For Blake, God vs. Satan is a false dichotomy, since they are two sides of the same coin. Just as with the ancient Jews and Protestant Christians, the target of Blake’s iconoclasm is ultimately the human institutions that derived their power from a particular concept of god.

Epic poet

The important question is what kind of cosmos does Milton create such that Satan’s rebellion is possible. Milton’s intention to “justify the ways of God to men” is no doubt quite serious, but his epic ambitions are even greater. In an autobiographical passage from The Reason of Church Government, he states his goal, that

by labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. (840)

In Milton’s time, it was agreed that such an ambition could be accomplished only by writing a great epic. The opening of Paradise Lost clearly establishes Milton’s epic aims. He invokes the muses both classical and biblical to aid what he calls,

 . . . my advent’rous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. (1.13-16)

Milton here throws down the gauntlet to all past, present, and future epic poets, serving notice that he intends to compete with them on the battlefield of epic poetry. Milton proclaims his ambition to write the epic of epics, and in fact, his poem ends up being the epic to end all epics, since it is the last great traditional epic in the English language. His essential concept of Satan in Paradise Lost is an epic, tragic protagonist. His portrayal of Satan and his trials is arguably the most powerful part of his epic. Adam and Eve are compelling characters too, but their story, by itself, is less than epic.

In the opening to Book Nine, the narrator attempts to qualify and revise conventional ideas of epic, calling the story of the fall of Adam and Eve “Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles” (9.13-15). He also rejects

Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed, chief mast’ry to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
In battles feigned; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung. (9.28-33)

There is no doubt about the magnitude of his accomplishment in retelling the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, but we can certainly question whether their representation is “more heroic” than Achilles’ wrath, not to mention Satan’s rebellion and fall. Arguably Milton’s most important innovation in Paradise Lost was to give Satan a realistic psychology and depth of character. Despite his acknowledged debt to Edmund Spenser, he rejected the allegorical mode for a psychological realism indebted largely to Shakespearean tragedy. This entailed the need for situations in which a character’s motivations could be understood as persuasive: an imperative which, as we will see, ends up conflicting with the premise of monotheism. Milton’s mastery of all elements of literary construction was unparalleled, but even he could not reconcile his epic ambitions with biblical monotheism without contradiction.

Hierarchy

In his errand to Adam “to beware / He swerve not too secure” (5.237-8), the angel Raphael tells the story of Satan’s rebellion, which begins with a public assembly of the angels in heaven:

“. . . on a day
(For time, though in eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future,) on such day
As Heav’n’s great year brings forth, th’ empyreal host
Of angels by imperial summons called,
Innumerable before th’ Almighty’s throne
Forthwith from all the ends of Heav’n appeared
Under their hierarchs in orders bright;
Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,
Standards, and gonfalons twixt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees;
Or in their glittering tissues bear emblazed
Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love
Recorded eminent.” (5.579-94)

Chronologically, this is the very first moment in the epic. The heavenly assembly is explicitly organized by hierarchies, orders, and degrees. We need to consider at some length the role of hierarchy in the Miltonic cosmos, since hierarchy and its associated conflicts are distinguishing features of epic. Achilles’ wrath, in Homer’s Iliad, is addressed to what he perceives as a slight to his hierarchical status, just as with Satan in Paradise Lost. Why does Paradise Lost need hierarchy, and to what extent does divine hierarchy conflict with the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Milton’s ostensible subject matter?

The titles of the angelic orders feature prominently in Paradise Lost—”Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers” (5.601). The titles are derived from the New Testament and repeated (with variations) several times; by God, the narrator, Satan, and Abdiel. Individual angels are often given titles. Milton does not, however, follow the angelic ranking system created by the medieval author known now as Pseudo-Dionysius, and the titles are not used in any consistent manner.

While the names of the orders are derived from the Bible, there is little biblical support for the idea that the angels are arranged into an epic hierarchy such as Milton describes. Medieval and Renaissance theologians, however, were fascinated by the idea of angelic hierarchy, and speculation on the subject was widespread. Milton resists the guesswork of most theologians about the overall arrangement of individual orders, refusing to assign certainty where there is only speculation, but there is no doubt that the angelic community in Paradise Lost is arranged hierarchically. The narrator often comments on the relative hierarchical status of the angels and how this affects their interactions. For example, Satan, disguised as a “stripling Cherub” (3.636), gives thanks to the Archangel Uriel, one of the “sev’n Spirits that stand / In sight of God’s high throne, gloriously bright” (3.654-55):

. . . Satan bowing low,
As to superior Spirits is wont in Heaven,
Where honor due and reverence none neglects. (3.736-738)

Several angels, including Satan, are expressly designated as elevated by rank above others.

Some critics have suggested that it is only the fallen angels who have hierarchy, not heaven.[22] It’s true that assemblies in hell are ordered by rank, but so is the rest of the cosmos. The narrative of Uriel’s encounter with Satan and other episodes clearly note that there are privileges that accord to rank, that the lower angels conventionally honor the higher ones.

Milton gives us a clue to his views on earthly political hierarchy in the Archangel Michael’s account to Adam of the biblical Nimrod. In ancient times, humans

“Shall spend their days in joy unblamed, and dwell
Long time in peace by families and tribes
Under paternal rule; till one shall rise
Of proud ambitious heart, who not content
With fair equality, fraternal state,
Will arrogate dominion undeserved
Over his brethren, and quite dispossess
Concord and law of nature from the Earth;
Hunting (and men not beasts shall be his game)
With war, and hostile snare, such as refuse
Subjection to his empire tyrannous.” (12.22-34)

Michael condemns Nimrod for acting “in despite of Heav’n,” usurping the proper leadership of God for humanity. For humans in ancient times, at least, Milton sees the ideal social order as one of fraternal equality with “paternal” and divine leadership. It’s not apparent how this ideal can be reconciled with his vision of heaven, with its military orders and ranks.

When the angels assemble in heaven, they don’t form a random crowd but a strict, seemingly-military order. Milton uses words with military associations such as “host” (archaic for “army”), “imperial,” and “ensigns . . . / Standards, and gonfalons.” As Empson notes, the angelic assembly in Book Five is “weirdly political” (138) and, I would add, quasi-military, even before Satan’s rebellion introduces the concept of battle to them. In the dialogue between Gabriel and Satan in the Garden of Eden, Gabriel accuses Satan of having betrayed “military obedience, to dissolve / Allegiance to th’ acknowledged power supreme” (4.955-6). The hierarchy of angels in Paradise Lost is largely pagan and gnostic with only faint support from the Bible.

Satan’s rebellion is based on what he perceives as an infringement of his rightful place in the heavenly hierarchy. He sees himself as equal to the Son, who is elevated over him. Refuting Satan’s claim to equality with the Son, the loyal angel Abdiel maintains that they were created in ranks:

Equal to him begotten Son? by whom
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev’n thee, and all the spirits of Heav’n
By him created in their bright degrees,
Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Essential Powers. (5.835-41)

The idea that angels are “created in their bright degrees” finds support by the example of Adam, who is created higher than Eve but lower than the angels.

But Abdiel doesn’t mention any connection of rank with merit, except for the Son. The idea of creation by God implies perfection. By the tenets of monotheism, each creature is created perfect. Adam and Eve are created perfect for the conditions of their existence. Yet, according to Raphael, they are capable of improvement and progress. He explains to Adam, in reference to the angels’ need for food:

“O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live of life;
But more refined, more spiritous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flow’r
Spirits odorous breathes: flow’rs and their fruit
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding, whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
Wonder not then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you
To proper substance; time may come when men
With angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may at choice
Here or in Heav’nly paradises dwell
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progeny you are.” (5.469-503)

Raphael confirms Abdiel’s claim that everything is created perfect and in ranks, “more spiritous, and pure, / As nearer to him placed.” Every creature and substance is implicitly ranked by its distance from God, as evidenced by its refinement and purity. Everything created is substantial and physical according to Milton’s material monism (“one first material all”), yet the creatures closer to God are more spiritual and pure, just as the scent of a flower is more refined than the dirt clinging to the flower’s root, yet still physical. Furthermore, the flower transforms dirt (along with air, water, and sunshine) first into roots, then into stem, leaves, flower and its scent. The seeds and fruit can be eaten by humans and further transformed by the process of digestion into spirit and reason. The creature’s proper motion is to return closer to God. Different species are limited, however, in how far they can progress: “their several active spheres assigned, / Till body up to spirit work, in bounds / Proportioned to each kind.” Each creature is assigned its own sphere of activity, which is bounded by its “kind” or God-given nature. Raphael promises that humans are capable of progressing as far as the angels in their proximity to God.

A rational creature can perceive his or her status in the divine hierarchy and seek to become closer to God through obedience, as Raphael notes. Raphael doesn’t imply that advancement involves any competition. Ideally, one seeks advancement with no reference to the relative status of others. One should look to the goal, God, not how far or fast others are progressing in comparison to oneself. But as we’ll see with the conflict between Satan and the Son, rewarding merit makes competition inevitable. The very fact of rankings creates resentment. J.M. Evans, among others, has shown that Satan’s successful temptation of Eve depends on creating the perception that her inferior status as woman is unfair, and that she can remedy this injustice by gaining knowledge of good and evil, and becoming like an angel—bypassing the process of obedience and overcoming the limitations of divine hierarchy (283-4).

In his account of the heavenly assembly that occasions Satan’s fall, Raphael says that the angelic “orders” bear “ensigns, . . . Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love / Recorded eminent,” which serve for “distinction.” Angels are distinguished and rewarded for their “acts of zeal and love.” Previously, Raphael suggested to Adam that his and Eve’s advancement in status was a function of time and obedience, yet “acts of zeal” suggest more than mere obedience (in the case of Adam and Eve, not eating the forbidden fruit); such acts are rewarded with ensigns or banners which are associated with rank, just as a scout’s rank in the Boy Scouts of America reflects his number of merit badges.

Abdiel, however, in his refutation of Satan (see above), suggests that on one level heavenly status is fixed and non-negotiable, deriving from God’s creation. Satan’s rebellion, according to Abdiel, contradicts their created nature. God created the angels and at the same time “Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named / Thrones,” etc. If we consider Raphael’s speech to Adam along with Abdiel’s speech, we may reasonably conclude that that there are different “species” of angels, each with its own title and “active sphere assigned” along with “bounds” or limits “Proportioned to each kind.” Milton’s representation of angelic hierarchy suggests that some angelic orders have more noble or distinguished “spheres of activity” than others. The “glory” of their created status presumably reflects the nobility of their sphere of activity, yet there is no reason given for why some angels are created lower or higher.

The angelic hierarchy in Paradise Lost bears a close resemblance to a typical aristocratic hierarchy. One’s rank and social role are determined by birth. (But the angels all have one parent, God; and there doesn’t seem to be any angelic equivalent to commoners.) The nobility can earn distinction in the performance of their role. In Renaissance England, one could be rewarded by the monarch with a new title and rank. Originally, as in Homer’s Greece, aristocratic hierarchy was largely military, but in Milton’s England it had lost much of its military orientation and was based mainly on property, wealth, and political power.

There doesn’t seem to be any personal property in the Miltonic cosmos, in heaven or earth; neither are there any battles to be fought before Satan’s rebellion. Raphael explicitly mentions that the battle with Satan’s army is a novelty for all concerned. Apart from creation, the basis for the hierarchy in heaven is ambiguous at best. Why do they even need a hierarchy, and what tasks are the angels obliged to perform before Satan’s rebellion? What possible opportunity for heroism could there be? What are these “acts of zeal and love” in an unfallen heaven? What does it mean to be a “stripling Cherub,” since apparently the angels do not reproduce? Hierarchy is a plot necessity for epic, but it creates contradictions when combined with a monotheistic cosmos. The biblical cosmos tends to be leveling in political terms (although still patriarchal), but it accepts election as a basis for centrality. Glory, however, is generally restricted to God. Satan and his rebellion belong to the ancient world of class hierarchy, and he is demonized on that basis. Yet his identity is largely a function of the cosmos which he inhabits. His stature, and the success of Milton’s epic, depend on a pagan cosmos which makes his rebellion not only possible but almost inevitable. We know that Milton was an elitist, but his was an elitism based on merit and education, not birth. His recourse to an epic cosmos in Heaven is essentially a supplement to the biblical story, and it leads to the mixed messages for which his epic is famous.

Begotten

Continuing now with our reading of the Son’s exaltation in Book Five: After calling all the angels together before His throne, God, though invisible, speaks directly to them:

“. . . Thus when in orbs
|Of circuit inexpressible they stood,
Orb within orb, the Father infinite,
By whom in bliss embosomed sat the Son,
Amidst as from a flaming mount, whose top
Brightness had made invisible, thus spake.
‘Hear all ye angels, progeny of light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your head I him appoint;
And by myself have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great vicegerent reign abide
United as one individual soul,
Forever happy: Him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end.’ ” (5.594-615)

The theology behind this passage is rather complicated and requires some explanation. We’ll look first at Christian orthodoxy and then Milton’s heterodox theology. Most readers will recognize lines 603-4 as a paraphrase of Psalms 2.7, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (KJV), a passage which some New Testament writers interpreted as a prophetic reference to Christ in his role as Savior: the Incarnation and especially the Resurrection (Acts 13.33; Hebrews 1.5-6, 5.5). The author of the Book of Hebrews interpreted the Psalms’ “begotten” in a metaphorical sense as “exalted” or “glorified”:

So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, today have I begotten thee. (Hebrews 5.5, KJV)

The New Testament usage of “begotten” supported the doctrine of Christ’s Sonship, although it seemed to contradict his status as a member of the Trinity and therefore eternal. The orthodox solution was to give “begotten” a special sense, such that Christ was “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,” according to the Nicene Creed. The Son is begotten from eternity. But if there is no event in time, why use the term “begotten,” aside from the fact that they had to reconcile Trinitarian doctrine with biblical usage? The answer given is that “begotten” describes the unique (“only-begotten”) Father-Son relationship of God to Christ, who is “of one substance with the Father.” For Christian orthodoxy, therefore, “begotten” has a dual reference: to the Son’s unique relationship to the Father from eternity; and to the Son’s exaltation, which occurs at the Resurrection. Furthermore, in accordance with Trinitarian theology, begotten-as-exalted has a dual sense, such that the Son is also eternally exalted, as a function of his eternal begetting and his role as creator God.[23]

Milton devised his own interpretation of the relevant biblical passages. First of all, as an anti-Trinitarian, he interpreted the begetting literally as referring to an event in time. The problem of the Book Five scene above is that God says, “This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son,” but Paradise Lost makes clear that the Son is already literally begotten before this scene. Both Paradise Lost and Christian Doctrine affirm that the Son was the first creation of God, and the Son then created everything else, including heaven and the angels. In his Christian Doctrine, Milton writes,

In scripture there are two senses in which the Father is said to have begotten the Son: one literal, with reference to production; the other metaphorical, with reference to exaltation. (1172)

Clearly, then, the Son is actually exalted in Book Five and only metaphorically begotten. The Son, apparently, was not exalted over the angels at his literal begetting because the angels did not yet exist. After the Son creates the angels, he is still not yet exalted over them, since this action, evidently, can be performed only by the Father. The New Testament emphasizes in several places that the Son does not glorify himself; the Father glorifies him, at least in regard to his earthly career. The Son’s heavenly exaltation in Book Five has no support in orthodox theology but is made possible, if not necessary, by Milton’s Arianism. Since the Son is not eternal, there is no begetting or exaltation from eternity. The Bible does mention that the Son is set over the angels as king, but in reference to his triumph as Savior (Hebrews 1.5-6; 1 Peter 3.22). It’s not clear exactly how Milton would justify the Book Five scene in theological terms, but precisely this lack of justification within the text makes an important point about God’s freedom, as Fowler comments in his footnote to the passage (more on this below). The Book Five exaltation, we should note, is explicitly a political event, raising the Son to kingship in heaven.

Significantly, the narrator does not associate the Book Five exaltation with the Son’s earthly Incarnation, although readers have found analogies.[24] Raphael’s narration makes no reference to the Son’s role as Savior in this scene. Raphael does refer to the Son as “Honored by his great Father, and proclaimed / Messiah King anointed” (5.663-4). Corns notes that the usage of “Messiah” here denotes his kingship rather than his role as Savior:

The word ‘Messiah’ derives from the Hebrew word meaning anointed, and the Bible explicitly speaks of God anointing Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost [Acts 10.38]. Priests and kings of Israel were anointed at the initiation of their office, as were kings of England. (46)

I agree with Stella Revard (78) that God’s announcement and Satan’s reaction in Book Five have no connection to the Son’s earthly life. Perhaps confusingly, Milton’s Son is exalted thrice: in heaven in Book Five, again in anticipation of his saving work for humans (Book Three), and yet again at his Resurrection.[25] For our purposes what is important in the Book Five scene is that Milton’s Son is a created being newly raised to kingship, which is precisely as all the angels perceive it.

We’ve seen how election works as a typical supplement for centrality in Modernity. Election is usually carefully justified in narrative terms, which often constitutes the plot of a literary work: how and why the protagonist earns centrality, establishing his or her identity as a worthy hero. But election is inherently ambivalent. In the New Testament, Christ did not want to be crucified, nor did Paul choose to be an Apostle to the Gentiles. Their election comes from without, and not by choice, although the narrative prepares readers for the event. Dante’s election to his status as prophetic seer involves a harrowing journey through hell. Classical literature, especially tragedy, warns that centrality is an ambivalent curse-blessing. Christianity makes the curse of sinfulness into the blessing of redemption, but recognition of the curse is still necessary as the first stage of election. This tradition continues in Reformation conversion narratives, which include a necessary transformation from sinner to repentant Christian. The “internalization” of the crucifixion by Protestant authors serves to authorize identity for self and others on the psychological level. A protagonist must earn authority by various ordeals. As Gans notes, a “legendary or historical guarantee for centrality” is no longer adequate in the modern period (OT 49).

Satan also finds his election in Book Five, election to a new identity as the cosmic opponent of God. Satan, however, unlike the Son, elects himself. He wills his new role independently of any external sanction. Satan’s authority, as such, is a demonic reversal of Christianity, harkening back to paganism, and looking forward to Romanticism.

The Book Three election lacks the trials which are essential for authorizing centrality, but it does grant the Son merit as the basis for his election. The scandal of the Book Five election is that God gives no reason for it. Revard claims that God’s purpose is the unification of the angels “For ever happy” (57). It’s true that God commands the angels to “abide / United, . . . / For ever happy,” but He doesn’t explicitly state this as his purpose, nor is there any hint that the angels were not united and happy before this event. God simply commands the angels to worship the Son, abide united, or suffer the consequences. In the event, the announcement does not unite the angels but provokes the opposite response, which not only God but readers could anticipate.

In Christian Doctrine, Milton argues that the Son’s begetting must be God’s free action: “it did not arise from natural necessity, as is usually maintained, but was just as much a result of the Father’s decree and will as the Son’s priesthood, kingship, and resurrection from the dead” (1174). The doctrine of the Trinity makes the begetting of the Son a “natural necessity,” that is, a function of the Triune God’s eternal nature. But in Book Five, the begetting is completely separate from “the Son’s priesthood, [earthly] kingship, and resurrection from the dead,” leaving only “the Father’s decree and will” to justify his elevation to kingship.

The election of the Son in Book Five is initially justified by nothing else but God’s freedom as absolutely transcendent. On one level, the Son’s election expresses radical monotheism. If the Son’s election in Book Three lacks the dialectic of conversion, Book Five doubles down on this lack, leaving out any merit or reason whatsoever. From Satan’s perspective (which Raphael’s narrative seems to follow), the exaltation is “justified” merely by the threat of punishment. God’s power is asserted and then tested by the following rebellion. Again, the fundamental question here is the nature of the Miltonic cosmos. Assuming we resist, temporarily, Satan’s reading of the Son’s election, how could the scene be justified on the premise of monotheism?

God’s demand to worship the Son in heaven can be understood by analogy to the demand of Christianity that we worship the Son on earth. Introducing his narration, Raphael asks rhetorically, “what if Earth / Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein / Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?” (5.574-6).

In heaven, God is invisible but the angels hear his word. The same is true for earth if the preaching of the Bible is accepted as God’s word. While we cannot see God, Jesus has appeared to humans. The angels likewise see the Son. But Jesus appears just like any human, hence the scandal of his claim to divinity. Raphael does not describe how the Son appears to the assembled angels at his begetting, but it seems that he appears as another angel—none of the angels question or even mention his appearance. If the Son looks like them, this would help explain Satan’s claim to equality. Abdiel likewise asserts the kinship of the Son to the angels (more on this below).

The epistemological situation of the angels is essentially the same as that of humans. Christianity requires humans to have faith, the “assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1, ASV). The same applies for the assembled angels in Milton’s heaven. God is more or less hidden and inscrutable, both in heaven and on earth. The requirement for faith is fundamental to religion in general, and especially for the Judeo-Christian tradition, which asserts the transcendence of God.

Satan’s rejection of God’s demand for worship can be understood by analogy with the situation of humans. Just as Satan feels justified in rejecting the Son’s claim to special divinity, so too do many humans.

In the Gospel of Matthew, drawing on Psalms, God publicly announces at Christ’s baptism, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (3.17, KJV). The elevation of the Son in heaven parallels the Epiphany of the Son on earth. The Son’s election to heaven’s kingship is rejected by the rebel angels, which replicates the rejection of Jesus by humanity during his earthly career. And Jesus promises punishment for those who reject him, just as does God in Book Five. To sum up, if Christianity is justified in asking for human faith in the incarnate Son, then Milton’s God is justified in asking the angels for faith (as obedience) in the heavenly Son. This seems to be the reasoning behind God’s demands at the Son’s elevation in Book Five.

Rebellion

The New Testament never introduces Satan’s response to the earthly Epiphany of Christ with any detail or psychological depth. This is where the analogy to the Son’s earthly life breaks down. A close examination of Satan’s response to the Son’s begetting in Paradise Lost reveals a cosmos more epic than monotheistic. Following God’s announcement, the angels spend the night sleeping or singing hymns:

“. . . but not so waked
Satan, so call him now, his former name
Is heard no more in Heav’n; he of the first,
If not the first Archangel, great in power,
In favor and in pre-eminence, yet fraught
With envy against the Son of God, that day
Honored by his great Father, and proclaimed
Messiah King anointed, could not bear
Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired.
Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,
Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipped, unobeyed the throne supreme
Contemptuous, and his next subordinate
Awak’ning, thus to him in secret spake.
‘Sleep’st thou companion dear, what sleep can close
Thy eyelids? And remember’st what decree
Of yesterday, so late hath passed the lips
Of Heav’n’s Almighty. Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart;
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent? New laws thou seest imposed;
New laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise
In us who serve, new counsels, to debate
What doubtful may ensue, . . . ‘
So spake the false Archangel, and infused
Bad influence into th’ unwary breast
Of his associate . . . .” (5.657-82; 694-96)

The immediate problem here is how Satan could have thought that rebelling successfully against God was even possible. When the fallen angels wake up in hell, the repeated refrain is “who knew / The force of those dire arms?” (1.93-4). Satan poses the rhetorical question:

“. . . what power of mind
Foreseeing or presaging, from the depth
Of knowledge past or present, could have feared,
How such united force of gods, how such
As stood like these, could ever know repulse?” (1.626-630)

Satan even claims that God deliberately “his strength concealed, / Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall” (1.637-642).

In his monologue on Earth later, Satan admits to himself that God did not deserve his rebellion (4.32-112). But even in his soliloquy, he doesn’t acknowledge God as God but at best a benevolent tyrant. As throughout Paradise Lost, Milton wants (and needs) to have it both ways: to give Satan realistic motivation in order to create a compelling narrative, but also justify God’s punishment of Satan and his followers, by implying they should have known that God is God.

The underlying problem of the Book Five exaltation is that Milton’s narrative is working on two levels simultaneously, epic and monotheism, which need each other but contradict each other at every point. Paradise Lost is the new wine of monotheism poured into the old bottle of pagan epic, with the predictable result that the bottle is bursting at every seam. The Miltonic universe is actually epic, and the power of the scene depends upon its epic underpinnings; the plot is driven by the conflict between the god-like beings in heaven, such as we find in Homer’s epics and pagan mythology.

We could try to harmonize these two perspectives (epic and biblical) by observing that Satan’s psychology is completely human, which means that he has different levels of knowledge and desire. The Apostle Paul and Augustine teach us that it is possible for humans to act contrary to their better knowledge (as we see also with Milton’s Adam), while convincing themselves that their action is necessary or justified. But as we shall see, the dramatic situation in heaven implies a pagan cosmos, not a monotheistic one. Milton’s dual purpose, to write a great epic, and to justify the ways of God to men, inevitably contradict each other.

We have to grant that on one level at least Satan initially believes that he is capable of defeating God in battle.[26] Confirming this hypothesis is the fact that his associates think so also. When Abdiel leaves Satan’s camp to inform God of Satan’s rebellion, he doesn’t account for the fact that God is omniscient and therefore doesn’t need his information. Furthermore, the loyal angels think it necessary to try to put down the rebellion, even though their efforts prove fruitless and destructive. So if even the loyal angels are not quite clear on the concept of the monotheistic God, then the conclusion is inescapable that the rebel angels do not recognize God as God. Raphael calls them “the atheist crew” (6.370), which Fowler glosses as “impious” in his edition of Paradise Lost, but Milton would not elide the main definition of “atheist.” On one level, they don’t really believe in God as such. The rebel angels conceive of God as an arbitrary ruler, “upheld by strength, or chance, or fate” (1.133) And in fact, the account of the rebellion and defeat of the angels is given almost purely in terms of power, not just by the rebel angels but also by Raphael and the narrator (Strier 30-1). The devils’ observation in hell that God is more powerful is true, although it is not a mere happenstance as they think. We might say, in defense of Milton’s account, that there are many humans who don’t recognize God as such either. But in this case, they simply don’t believe in God, even if they still believe in magic (the situation for Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus). The rebel angels articulate their cause as a rejection of God, not just the Son (pace Revard). So the analogy to the human situation in light of the Son’s Incarnation just doesn’t hold. The dramatic situation in heaven cannot be justified by recourse to any human situation or cultural tradition except polytheism. Milton’s heaven is a de facto polytheistic cosmos.

Suppose we compare Milton’s God to an earthly ruler whose authority is conventional, and who is really just another human. When this scenario is transposed to heaven, the result is Gnosticism. The monotheistic God must be recognized as God or not at all. To see him as simply a powerful ruler comparable to oneself is not possible within the biblical, monotheistic tradition. The New Testament revises and complicates the monotheistic understanding of God, but Trinitarian theology reasserts it.

In purely psychological terms, Milton’s narrative is wholly convincing. All of us are familiar with the situation of a person in authority whose position is not merited, whose rule is arbitrary and incompetent, and who is obeyed simply because of a position of power. Or we have experienced the emotions engendered by the promotion of one less worthy than ourselves. As an epic narrative, in these terms, the story of Satan’s rebellion works well. We can sympathize with Satan’s pride, which is not necessarily a bad thing. As Raphael says to Adam,

” . . . Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed.” (8.571-3)

Satan’s pride is sinful only in relation to God, whom Satan does not recognize as such, and whose status in the poem is equivocal.

Satan’s ignorance could be justified in terms of the limits of knowledge in monotheism, according to which our comprehension of God is always, at best, incomplete and provisional. But originally those limits are asserted in situations where it is not possible to question God’s authority: Moses at the burning bush, or God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind. The rebel angels know that God exists, and they choose to reject him, a situation that implies polytheism.

The strategic withholding and revealing of information is one way an author motivates characters and creates plot tension. What Milton has done in this scene is transform the limits of knowledge in monotheism (traditionally a limit only for humans, not for angels) into the tactical withholding of information in narrative to make possible Satan’s rebellion and motivate it. We might call this a brilliant adaptation of biblical theology to epic genre, but in fact it contradicts the central premise of biblical narrative, that God is God. If we can forget the biblical context and read it simply as a modern epic, then the narrative works, but this involves ignoring the premise of monotheism in Paradise Lost. This is essentially the Satanic reading. Milton needs the epic supplement (although it ends by being more than a supplement) of a pagan cosmos to create literature from the biblical story.

Satan’s speech in the rebel camp in heaven illustrates the pagan context for his rebellion:

” . . . [Satan] with calumnious art
Of counterfeited truth thus held their ears.
‘Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of King anointed, for whom all this haste
Of midnight march, and hurried meeting here,
This only to consult how we may best,
With what may be devised of honors new
Receive him coming to receive from us
Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile,
Too much to one, but double how endured,
To one, and to his image now proclaimed?
But what if better counsels might erect
Our minds, and teach us to cast off this yoke?
Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend
The supple knee? Ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves
Natives and sons of Heav’n possessed before
By none, and if not equal all, yet free,
Equally free; for orders and degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist.
Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedom equal? Or can introduce
Law and edict on us, who without law
Err not? much less for this to be our Lord,
And look for adoration to th’ abuse
Of those imperial titles which assert
Our being ordained to govern, not to serve.’ ” (5.770-802)

Critics have often attempted to deconstruct Satan’s speech, and Raphael accuses Satan of calumny and counterfeit. But Satan appears to be truthful and sincere within the limits of his knowledge. He asserts that the angels of heaven were “Possessed before / by none,” and that they lived “without law,” yet erred not. Before the exaltation of the Son, therefore, he claims that the angels were not required to serve anyone by law. There’s no evidence to contradict this claim. It was their custom to serve God, but their service was voluntary, not enforced with any threat of punishment. The exaltation of the Son is completely new, an event the likes of which has never before been seen in heaven. No one questions that the command to worship and obey the Son as king is a novelty in heaven.

Before the begetting of the Son, the angels were in the same situation as Adam and Eve in the Garden but without the forbidden fruit. Apart from that prohibition, Adam notes, “the rest, we live / Law to ourselves; our reason is our law” (9.653-4). And elsewhere, he observes, “what obeys / Reason, is free” (9.351-2). Adam and Eve worship God solely out of free and spontaneous gratitude. Likewise, the angels were previously free; there was no compulsion or threat of punishment for disobedience. In this sense, there is no contradiction with Satan’s own position of command among the angels. He does not threaten them with punishment, nor did God before this announcement. Satan’s followers are free to obey him or not: “they durst dislike [God’s] reign, and me preferring” (1.102). His claim, “orders and degrees / Jar not with liberty, but well consist,” is true given that there is no law requiring obedience. We don’t know what privileges accord to status in pre-fallen heaven, but they don’t give the power to compel other angels.

Satan claims,

“Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedom equal?”

Satan admits that they may be “in power and splendor less” than God but are nevertheless His equal in freedom. What does it mean to be “In freedom equal”? It’s not clear exactly what freedom the angels have before the fall. Presumably they don’t have permission to sin, which Satan’s claim that they “err not” implies (in other words, he knows what sin [erring] is and knows that he has not sinned). But they were not apparently given laws which would be the occasion for disobedience. Paul writes, “I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Romans 7.7, KJV). There’s no reason to doubt Satan’s claim that they all have equal rights and freedoms if not equal “power and splendor.”

What reason or right does God’s Son have to rule over them, is a relevant question, even if posed rhetorically. For reason is precisely what is lacking from God’s announcement, nor does God actually assert his or the Son’s right. The Son’s authority, such as it is, derives from his anointing and depends upon God’s bare proclamation and the threat of punishment. That the angels will be happy obeying God is a claim which Satan never tests because he never accepts it; the promise that they will be happy does not, by itself, justify God’s demand.

The Book Five begetting is necessary for Milton’s purpose to make an epic narrative with characters with realistic motivations and an interesting plot. Milton was not a Satanist as such, but his epic ambitions necessitate that Satan be given compelling motivation. Raphael’s account virtually confirms Satan’s claim that God deliberately “his strength concealed, / Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall.” Milton’s biblical story needs the rivalry between heroic figures. The typical critical excuse for Milton on this point is that all these epic supplements are represented as evil; but they are more than simply Satan’s fantasy; they are intrinsic to the Miltonic cosmos.

Abdiel responds to Satan,

“Oh argument blasphemous, false and proud!
Words which no ear ever to hear in Heav’n
Expected, least of all from thee, ingrate,
In place thyself so high above thy peers.
Canst thou with impious obloquy condemn
The just decree of God, pronounced and sworn,
That to his only Son by right endued
With regal scepter, every soul in Heav’n
Shall bend the knee, and in that honor due
Confess him rightful King? Unjust thou sayest,
Flatly unjust, to bind with laws the free,
And equal over equals to let reign,
One over all with unsucceeded power.
Shalt thou give law to God? shalt thou dispute
With him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art, and formed the pow’rs of Heav’n
Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
Yet, by experience taught we know how good,
And of our good, and of our dignity
How provident he is, how far from thought
To make us less, bent rather to exalt
Our happy state under one head more near
United. But to grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals monarch reign:
Thyself though great and glorious dost thou count,
Or all angelic nature joined in one,
Equal to him begotten Son, by whom
As by his Word the Mighty Father made
All things, ev’n thee; and all the Spirits of Heav’n
By him created in their bright degrees,
Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Essential Powers, nor by his reign obscured,
But more illustrious made; since he the head
One of our number thus reduced becomes,
His laws our laws; all honor to him done
Returns our own. Cease then this impious rage,
And tempt not these; but hasten to appease
Th’ incensèd Father, and th’ incensèd Son,
While pardon may be found in time besought.” (5.809-48)

Let us examine Abdiel’s argument in detail. Abdiel calls Satan an “ingrate / In place thyself so high above his peers.” It’s not immediately clear why Satan’s high place makes his rebellion ungrateful, but Abdiel and Raphael acknowledge that Satan is a ruler of sorts in heaven, which sets up a pagan scenario of god against god in heaven. In Book Two, the narrator in fact identifies the rebel angels with the pagan gods of biblical history. (The Bible usually denies the reality of pagan gods, as in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal [I Kings, Ch. 18].) As I discussed previously, Abdiel’s claim that creation determines status conflicts with the meritocracy we find elsewhere in Paradise Lost. If one’s place is purely a gift, it’s not clear how it would entail any glory. Winning the lottery gives riches but not glory. Even though Satan’s high status in heaven may be related to his creation, presumably he has merited his place by glorious deeds of one kind or another, “acts of zeal and love.” If he merits his position, then strictly speaking the charge of ingratitude does not apply.

The next point that Abdiel makes is the classic monotheistic move of asserting God’s status as creator, by means of the Son, a claim which Raphael clearly supports. But Satan responds to Abdiel:

“That we were formed then say’st thou? And the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? Remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quick’ning power, when fatal course
Had circled his full orb, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav’n, ethereal sons.
Our puissance is our own, our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal: then thou shalt behold
Whether by supplication we intend
Address, and to begirt th’ Almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging. This report,
These tidings carry to th’ anointed King;
And fly, ere evil intercept thy flight.” (5.853-71)

We must grant Satan some honesty, since the other angels do not dispute Satan’s claims, and they find Satan more convincing that Abdiel. Satan, in essence, asserts his freedom and merit, which are independent of the conditions of his origin. Satan finds his origin in “nature” not God. Many humans deny God as their creator, so we shouldn’t deny the same possibility to Satan, who shares the same epistemological situation.

Abdiel serves to demonstrate the Miltonic point that individuals always have the ability to choose what is right, despite all external circumstances, thus justifying God and his punishment of those who disobey Him. But this point is undercut by the fact that Abdiel has knowledge that is not immediately available to the other angels.

Abdiel proclaims, “by experience taught, we know how good /And of our good and of our dignity / How provident he is.” In other words, Satan should know from experience that God wants what is good for them, and that God provides the same. But what is “good” is precisely the kind of thing that rational, well-intentioned creatures can disagree about. And for some, freedom, even to disobey, may be the highest value; as Satan argues in hell, worth the sacrifice of heaven if God’s command is enforced merely by superior power: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (1.263). From the perspective of monotheism, of course, there are problems with the rebel angels’ “freedom,” but the example of Prometheus, in a pagan cosmos, provides a different perspective, whereby defying the supreme god can be heroic.

Satan has asserted the injustice of one set up to rule them who is their equal, the Son. Furthermore, Satan believes that the Son’s exaltation had “impaired” his own glory, since he becomes lesser in comparison. Abdiel, on the other hand, affirms the authority of the Son to rule since he is greater than any angel, having created them, and by authority of the Father’s “begetting.” But the whole plot hinges on the fact that both Satan and the Son are created beings. The Son’s worth, therefore, is relative not absolute. From both Satan and the reader’s perspective, the Son’s exaltation appears arbitrary, because the Son has not yet proven his merit, thus making Satan’s resistance plausible and reasonable (the Book Three exaltation by merit is chronologically later, though earlier in narrative terms).

Perhaps the most dubious part of Abdiel’s argument is the claim that the exaltation of the Son actually exalts the angels too, by association: the angels are

” . . . nor by his Reign obscur’d,
But more illustrious made, since he the Head
One of our number thus reduced becomes,
His Laws our Laws, all honour to him done
Returns our own.” (5.841-45)

This passage is a more than a little ambiguous. The phrase, “he the Head / One of our number thus reduced becomes,” is usually interpreted to mean that the Son is “reduced” to being an angel, that is, newly revealed in angelic form by his begetting, having previously been hidden in God’s bosom (“embosomed” [5.597]).[27] In this reading, since one being, the Son, becomes an angel (or takes on angelic form) and is exalted, then all angels are glorified by association; just as humans are glorified by the Incarnation according to theologians. According to Abdiel, when they honor the Son they are honoring themselves. I agree that Abdiel is claiming that the angels are exalted by the Son’s begetting, but there are problems with the mechanism identified by Labriola and others.

For Abdiel’s speech, Milton apparently drew on the Book of Hebrews, chapters one and two, which also argues the superiority of the Son to the angels—thus assuming that the Son can be compared to the angels, which is the premise of Satan’s rebellion (and of Milton’s Arianism). As he often does, Milton extrapolates from scripture for the purposes of his story, suggesting rather obliquely that the Son indeed takes the form of an angel in heaven. But God’s proclamation mentions nothing about the Son becoming one of the number of angels, or that he is thereby reduced. God says the angels will “abide / United as one individual soul” under the Son’s reign, not united together as one with the Son. Milton needs to distinguish the Son from the rest of the angels but also make him comparable, in order to make Satan’s rebellion conceivable. The fact that the Son takes on angelic form is very important, since it plays into a pagan conception of heaven, and this is the reason why it’s not clearly stated in Paradise Lost, although made necessary by the plot. The important question remaining is whether the Son was known to the angels before his “begetting,” or whether the Son was newly revealed.

Abdiel claims the angels are exalted (not impaired, as Satan claims) because “he the Head / One of our number thus reduced becomes.” We can separate this out into two statements. Clearly, “he the Head . . . becomes.” The Son is set up as head of the angels. No question about that. The other part is “One of our number thus reduced,” which critics interpret as “he is reduced to [being] one of our number.” In this case the complete statement could be paraphrased: “The Son becomes our head and is thus reduced to being one of us,” which is an obvious non sequitur. Critics assume the phrase “Thus reduced” (5.843) refers back to the Son as “the Head” (5.842). But the syntax of the passage actually suggests a different and more satisfactory reading. The more grammatically correct and intuitive reading is that “thus reduced” refers back to “our number,” the more immediate antecedent, so that “our number is reduced.” In this case, Abdiel’s statement could be paraphrased: “the Son becomes our head,” and “our number [is] thus reduced”; that is, when the Son is promoted to kingship, the number of angels is reduced, just as when one of an earthly King’s subjects (say a Prince) becomes King, there is one less “subject” for the new King to rule. My reading suggests that the Son is already known to the angels as one of them, which makes sense because no one expresses any surprise at the existence of the Son, only his exaltation. Satan refers to the Son as “his [God’s] image now proclaimed” (5.784). His status as the image of God has been proclaimed, not his existence. Abdiel’s point is that an angel has been promoted to king, and while he is no longer (just another) angel, as such, the fact of his promotion glorifies them all by association.

But there is a further problem with this passage, which is that Abdiel’s main point is strained, to say the least. By analogy, if one human being is exalted to kingship, no matter the sacrifice or merit involved, why would I or anyone feel exalted simply because I happen to be a human being also? I suppose this argument might work for family members, but the gathering in heaven is explicitly political and threatening, which doesn’t harmonize with a reading of the angels as all one big family.

If the Son is really glorified in his heavenly exaltation, then logically he is not “reduced”; just as Milton argued that if the Son is really God’s Son then logically he is not God. If Milton had wanted to make the surprising point that the Son’s heavenly exaltation was also a humiliating descent into angelhood, then he would have emphasized it and stated it more clearly. If the Son was known already in heaven, as an angel, and not publically exalted, it clarifies Satan’s scandalized reaction, and it shows how the conflict between the Son and Satan is in effect a rivalry between pagan gods or epic heroes.

Conclusion

The problem of Renaissance aesthetics, at the most fundamental level, is iconoclasm. The Mosaic revelation fosters a new and critical attitude toward the figures of the sacred center, a skepticism which leads eventually to a recognition of the sacrality of the internal scene of representation, a sacred to which no one has a more privileged relationship than another. With Christianity, in its Protestant development, the personal relationship with God is the locus of the sacred, while the public, ritual scene becomes vulnerable to accusations of idolatry. The Protestant Reformation gives full expression to the iconoclastic potential of the New Testament. To some extent, this is the story of Milton’s Satan, who iconoclastically rejects God on the basis of his internal sense of divinity, although still within a hierarchical framework. Satan believes their worship of God is mere idolatry.

But it is also the story of the reader’s relationship to epic protagonists during the Renaissance. Modern readers feel themselves, in principle, equal in significance to the literary protagonist. For a successful narrative, their potential resentment must be ameliorated, which can be accomplished in various ways. The narrative authorization of the protagonist becomes a major subject matter for literature. This is not just a narrow literary problem but connected to the larger issue of how authority figures are legitimated within a society in which divine hierarchy is in the process of disintegration.

By staging the scene of representation within the work, the author distinguishes the protagonist by his fictional audience and from his readers. Furthermore, by means of his self-consciousness, the protagonist, in effect, serves as his own audience. The election of the central figure serves to authorize the protagonist, an election which often involves trials, temptations, and suffering; which humble him and demonstrate his commonality with readers. The protagonist’s internal conflicts, the so-called internalization of the crucifixion, serve to authorize a character just as with the military conflicts in epic.

The characters in Paradise Lost who best fulfill the requirements of the modern protagonist are Eve and Adam. Their story, however, by itself, did not have the epic scope that Milton needed to compete with Homer and Virgil. It was Milton’s pride and ambition that made for the flaws of Paradise Lost as well as its greatness.

The heavenly rivalry between Satan and the Son (before the creation of the world) is not a biblical topic, but rather a revision of the Christian narrative under pagan influence. Milton did not invent their rivalry, but his development of this topos is still startlingly original. The Archangel Michael, narrating to Adam the final defeat of Satan by the Son in his earthly career, warns Adam not to think of their battle in military terms, but rather in terms of Christ’s obedience to God’s law and his suffering on the cross (12.386-435). But Milton, despite his own warning, does exactly this in books Five and Six of his epic: describing their conflict in epic and military terms.

Because Satan is portrayed in epic and tragic terms, Milton needed to counterweight his appeal with the representation of the Son, who enjoys two extended scenes of election, first in Book Three, and then again in Book Five. The Book Three election is based on the Son’s volunteering to suffer the penalty for human sin, and God declares that he is “by merit more than birthright Son of God.” But the mere fact of being willing to suffer is not the same as actually enduring the Crucifixion, so that his election seems more or less gratuitous. He doesn’t suffer the humiliations and internal conflicts that are represented in depth by the New Testament, and his election fails in its intended purpose. The Son’s Book Five election is justified by nothing more than God’s freedom as the monotheistic God, but the fact that the Son is a created being means that he is comparable to Satan and thus subject to competition and heavenly conflict. The epic battle in heaven between the loyal and the rebel angels is made possible on the premise that the angels don’t recognize God as God, so that their conflict takes place in a de facto pagan cosmos. Milton’s predicament, then, is that he needs a pagan cosmos to make possible the great epic drama of Satan’s rebellion, but he also needs the premise of monotheism in accordance with his biblical source. Milton tries to finesse this problem by limiting the knowledge available to creatures at crucial junctions. But without that knowledge, God’s judgment of them becomes questionable.

The liberal world order presents itself as a vast mapping of “rights.” No political or social question can be discussed without being framed in terms of “rights”—someone’s rights being violated, or recognized, or clashing with some other set of rights. Even when we speak of “balancing” rights against some other imperative, like stability, prosperity or order, we are still speaking about balancing one set of rights against another, for terms like “stability,” “prosperity” and “order” merely represent the rights individuals have to be protected from violence, or to have their pensions paid on time and in full, to have a job, and so on. If, through some globally imposed Oulipian constraint, we were forbidden to use the word “rights” in discussing public events, no one would have the slightest idea of what to say.

The saturation of our political discourse by “rights” has been noted for generations—one of the better known dissections was Mary Ann Glendon’s 1991 Rights Talk. The concern of those critical of rights talk has usually been that it marginalizes an older discourse of virtue, community and responsibility that once prevailed in Western polities. This is no doubt true, but at least as important is the thoroughly paradoxical nature of “rights.” If there are to be rights, they must be enforced, by some agency large enough to enforce them without hindrance. The state, naturally. The more rights we discover, acknowledge, and demand enforcement of, the more powerful and unhindered the state must be. If we are talking about “international human rights,” we must therefore be speaking of a state, or states, capable of exercising imperial control over other states: to compel other states to enforce the rights in question, and to remove their governments if they can’t or won’t.

In that case, when we are speaking about rights, we may believe we are looking to the uniqueness and dignity of each individual, in an ever more refined and sensitive way; what we are in fact doing is imagining enhanced forms of sovereignty. We can put this very bluntly. If rights need to be defended, they need to be defended against someone. When we posit a right, or advocate for one, then, we are imagining a state willing and ready to act against specific people assumed to be potential violators of that right. Each new right conjures a state with more and longer tentacles. When one advocates for homosexual rights, one imagines a state willing to act against those who will violate those rights—who will not hire homosexuals, who will not rent or sell to them, who will assault them, who will murder them. If the state is to be ready to act against some people, it must have some idea who they are; at any rate, in the process of enforcing the right certain profiles will emerge. The state, and all those acting in conjunction with the state, can say who they are on the watch for: “homophobes.” The entire victimary bestiary of homophobes, racists, sexists, transphobes, xenophobes and so on are nothing more than “superstructural” or “ideological” projections of the sovereignty necessarily imagined by rights talk.

I have not forgotten that the first calls for rights were for rights against the state. There is something paradoxical in the first consistent articulation of rights that exist separate from and prior to the state, that of Hobbes: the most basic right, that of life, and therefore of self-defense, so that one has the right to defend one’s life even against the state (so, the prisoner on death row being taken to execution has no obligation to go peacefully), leads to the first argument for a state to which nothing is forbidden, except perhaps disregard for its own survival, which really just means the right to self-defense of the sovereign himself. If the individual is to surrender all rights (except self-defense in the last, hopeless, resort) in order to have his most fundamental right defended more effectively by the sovereign, he must accept a sovereign that is capable of doing anything, anytime, to anyone.

Hobbes was at least consistent enough to realize that you cannot have rights against the state. The “laborist” argument for rights introduced by Locke initiated the tradition of positing rights against the state, limiting its powers. This is the argument that has, of course, been institutionalized and venerated in the United States, and we still see significant vestiges of this argument among American conservatives, and more than vestiges when it comes to the defense of gun rights. So, it might appear as if this original, “classical liberal” understanding of rights has been distorted by later victimary rights claims: this distinction is what the argument over “equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes” and “negative vs. positive rights” comes down to. But it’s not really the case that advocates of these rights stood outside of any entanglements with the state, and just wanted to be left alone to add their labor to various pieces of nature surrounding them. They wanted the state (first of all a liberalizing monarchy) to be deployed against the Church, aristocracy and other privileged groups, such as corporations chartered by the state, independent towns, banks, and guilds. It’s easy for us to overlook this, since the most formidable of those entities either no longer exist (or exist in a thoroughly neutered form), and few today could muster any historical sympathy for them. But that just means that we identify with the state that swept them into the dustbin of history, or broke and trained them. The history of the United States, meanwhile, the first modern society with neither a monarchy or aristocracy, has been the history of different groups trying to influence the state so as to defend their rights against some other, “privileged” group. Meanwhile, defending rights of free speech and bearing arms generally involve trying to bring the state into your quarrel with some local public authority, and whichever groups support it. So, even the most “natural” of rights involve using the state against one’s enemies.

If I am right, I am pointing to an enormous discrepancy between what we are saying and what we are doing in our rights talk—between the constative and the performative effects of that talk. We can formulate the discrepancy as follows: the more the distribution of goods and status is centralized, the more vehemently we deny the existence of any center. Are “rights,” then, real, and is advocacy for them effective? Yes, they can be—the state can genuinely take the side of one group of citizens against another. Beyond that purely political consequence and the benefits that follow, though (it is surely good to have the state on your side), there is no correlation between an increase in rights and an increase in other goods, like human dignity or human flourishing. That is a very difficult claim to defend, of course—or to refute: we would need to have some shared language through which we can evaluate “dignity” and “flourishing.” But we don’t have such a shared language, precisely because the effect of the direct relation between state and individual created by the system of rights makes any such shared language impossible: any assertion of shared values or virtues would inevitably privilege one group over others and therefore be the ground for a claim that the former were violating the rights of the latter. So, if we can agree that being bereft of a shared language for discussing human dignity and flourishing is itself detrimental to human dignity and flourishing, then to that extent at least, I have made the case.

I would also say that, on the face of it, the very discrepancy I am pointing out subverts any claims that rights talk has enhanced human existence. If rights talk has been so beneficial, why must the obvious correlation between the growth of the centralizing state and individual rights be so overlooked? Why are the actual power relations obscured, rather than celebrated? No group or individual has an interest in an explicit statement of the facts: I do what I can to use the state against those who obstruct or irritate me in some way. Rights talk constitutes a virtually universally shared, one might say “constitutive,” delusion that is required for the perpetuation of the system. But the reliance of a political order on hysterical and escalating delusions is an indictment of that order. So, it might be worth the effort to imagine a social order without “rights.”

If the most telling defect of rights talk is the denial of the center behind vituperative claims that others wish to possess it, it may be that renewed attention to the center might provide a way of replacing “rights.” The originary hypothesis involves a group of proto-humans surrounding a central object; the emission of the originary sign generates, out of that object, a sacred center that subsists even when the object itself has been divided and devoured. If the significant is ultimately the sacred, there can be no significance without a center. We can take the relation to some center to be constitutive of human being. In The End of Culture, Eric Gans’s reconstruction of the center-periphery relations subsequent to the originary scene follows the succession of ostensive, imperative and declarative cultures. What he shows along the way is that the center as an agent is constructed prior to any agency on the margins, with the latter form of agency being modeled on that originally attributed to the center. In his analysis of imperative culture, Gans notes that the memory of the sacred object must conceive of that object as

a sacred being that exists above and beyond the concrete manifestations it may take on. The “signified” of the word/gesture of designation has thus become partly independent of its referent. This independence is not merely formal; the imperative is effective only insofar as it is addressed to this “signified,” summoning it to be present. Thus the sacred being in imperative ritual possesses, in the eyes of the participants, an intentional ability to manifest itself or not.

The asymmetry of the imperative is a step in the direction of establishing symmetry between the sacred being and its worshipers—in a word, of humanizing the sacred. The animal images and masks that we may associate with the imperative level of culture are in fact signs of a growing anthropomorphism. This is the beginning of a development with profound ethical consequences… The ethical conception of the community depends no longer on the mere ad hoc appearance of the sacred being but on the will of a being whose judgment whether or not to manifest itself in the rite reflects the real cohesion of the community. (115)

The sacred being at the center exists above and beyond any of its concrete manifestations, it is addressed, it has intentionality, it can choose to be present or not—before any of these capacities are attributed to any of the members of the community. The sacred being is “humanized” before the humans are, it is anthropomorphized before there are humans on which to model the non-human—the human community takes on the attributes by modeling itself on the sacred being it has modeled. The center precedes the margin in every sense, and if agency on the margins was first constructed by analogy with the agency attributed to the center, it’s hard to see when that would have ceased to be the case. So, my argument above that the presumably individualizing insistence of rights is in fact a way of imagining ever more comprehensive modes of sovereignty, can, if anything, be formulated even more forcefully: any time we designate an individual, event, or activity as protected, in actuality or possibility, by the sovereign, we are in fact modeling the agency of that sovereign. And there is no individual, event or activity in a society governed by a sovereign that could be intelligible other than as protected or proscribed by the sovereign.

The agency of the center is constructed through the ongoing interaction between center and margins. On the originary scene, the center repulses the grasping of the members of the group, compelling them to stand down. The implication from the beginning is that once we have signification, the center is irresistible: there is nothing without the center, and a particular center can only be replaced by another center. Within imperative culture, the center-margin interaction proceeds through an exchange of imperatives: the members of the community make requests of the center, requests which must ultimately be reducible to the request that the center make itself available; meanwhile, the center issues orders to the members, orders which themselves must be reducible to serving and preserving the center. Any exchanges among the members themselves generate new centers that ultimately “orbit” the sacred center of the community: at the very least, if we are talking about something, we share the same language, and we can look at some object together without falling out, and must therefore share a relation to a prior center. Finally, declarative culture takes form in narrating and commenting on activities taking place at the center, which involve the central figure providing or failing to provide for the community, with an increasingly complex system of discourse detailing all the different ways the center and the periphery can serve, betray, and disappoint one another. These are tales of the resentment of those on the periphery toward the center. And the secular discourses that emerge from mythological ones, and that are able to place human, mortal figures at the center, are modeled on the agency of the center, while incorporating resentment at being denied centrality themselves.

Gans has also argued that all resentment is ultimately resentment of the center (“The center as unique locus of significance is by this fact the focus of resentment,” “The Centre,” Chronicle 579). Gans identifies such resentment as being present on the originary scene itself, in the member’s resentment of the center for not presenting itself, for being unavailable while subsisting after the consumption of the object. That all resentment is ultimately a form of resentment towards the center is a difficult, but very illuminating concept. If a friend, for example, takes advantage of my friendship to advance himself at my expense at work or in some community activity, isn’t it him, my friend, that I am resenting, rather than the center? My focus certainly seems to be on my friend: I want to tell him what I think of him, I want to get back at him, I want others to know that I should really be in his place. But all of those actions, whether imagined or actually carried out, are actions that are prohibited under normal conditions, and part of the reason I fantasize about doing or doing them is precisely because they are prohibited. You don’t say things to someone else just for the sake of hurting them; you don’t interfere with the operations of some shared activity for the sake of slaking your own desire for revenge; you don’t indulge your vanity when you are charged with public responsibility. The reason you don’t do those things is that the center forbids them: all moral commands forbidding such “sins” come from the center. In that case, then, your resentment is, in fact, directed toward the center: the center has failed to ensure that the rules have been followed, and so you consider lifting your obligation to follow those rules yourself. This resentment might take the form of losing faith in God, or becoming more cynical about civic institutions or leaders, which is to say, those obliged to represent and preserve the center.

The Big Man’s usurpation of the sacred center, in Gans’s historical account perhaps the most revolutionary act in human history, can be understood as evincing just such a resentment of the center. The sacred center within the egalitarian community could not provide due recognition of the Big Man’s actual status. At the same time, the Big Man’s usurpation resolves some crisis within the community—if the Big Man were just acting on his own desire for centrality, he would have no idea what to do once he acquired it. It was either him or another contender, or an increasingly destructive struggle amongst various contenders. The Big Man knows, more or less consciously, that he must manage the very resentment that enabled his own elevation, resentment that will now be directed towards him. Resentment within the community is now modeled on this new mode of centrality—it is no longer directed towards the absent center for not presenting itself, but towards the occupant of the center precisely for occupying it and thereby denying my own centrality (which I model on his). We should note the paradoxical nature of this resentment, which depends upon its object for self-definition: the more the Big Man preserves his own centrality, the more I am being denied my own. In archaic forms of sacred kingship, this takes the form of conferring ever more significance upon the king, who mediates between the community and the cosmos; while at the same time making the king far more vulnerable, as he is now responsible for any misfortune that befalls the community, and can fairly easily be removed by precisely the same kind of unanimous confrontation with the center through which humanity first emerged.

We could hypothesize that this vulnerability led to the establishment of more defensible forms of (still sacred) kingship, which we could call “imperial.” The imperial king is removed from the ostensive grasp of his community; in fact, he rules over many communities, each with their own local cults. His sacrality is more abstract, and less bound up with the ebb and flow of everyday life. The ancient empires lasted a very long time, in some cases millennia, and it’s worth considering why they nevertheless vanished, never to be recreated. They clearly weren’t viable past a certain point. If we are to see the center as the final cause of social developments, and the management of resentment toward the center as the main problem of government, we must look there to account for the limits of imperial sacral rule. Imperial sacral kingship introduced two major innovations. First, the conquest and subsequent mass enslavement and conscription of entire populations; second the introduction of money and trade, ultimately linked to the former (in particular military necessities), but carried out by far more elite layers of the population. We have, as part of the same system, increasingly sophisticated institutions and therefore conceptions of justice (giving to each “his due”), that make it possible to distinguish between various forms of intention and responsibility; and the generation of massive organizations of human fodder, with sufficient excess populations for the institution of large scale human sacrifice. The incommensurability of these two interdependent systems sets the stage for the cross-civilizational crisis leading to what Karl Jaspers first called the “Axial Age.” (I am indebted to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years [Melville House: 2014] for this analysis.)

Resentment toward the sovereign center must come from the elites: it’s impossible to imagine something like a slave or peasant revolt in the ancient empires (and there were a lot of them) without some form of elite sponsorship. Such resentment would be located within the justice system, most likely the upper echelons of that system, and would involve some figure being treated “unjustly” in a very visible way. Such injustice would be more visible if carried out against an exemplary figure, someone relatively independent but previously trusted by the sovereign, even a favorite, and a figure capable of articulately framing his mistreatment in the terms of abstract justice. All that would be necessary would be to narrate such an event (which may, of course, have happened many times, with a synthetic version ultimately emerging) modeled on the imposition of social death and human sacrifice upon the conquered population. This exemplary individual sets himself apart, is ready to face social death, to explain himself and to do so publicly. The imperial sacral order would then become unviable, at least in the long term, because there is now a new mode of self-sacrificial sacrality that can address the crises produced by sacral imperial rule. This new mode of sacrality can be embraced by elites and the broader populace alike, and would therefore be a pole of attraction for the new merchant, priestly, and scribal classes (a more comprehensive account would have to connect these developments to the emergence of both money and literacy in the ancient world). Defeats and failures attributable to the sovereign would redound to the credit of the new, “Axial Age” sacralities, gradually discrediting the system of sacrifice and the divinities sanctioning it. For quite a while, though, this counter-sacrality might serve to sharpen the tools of imperial rule, as post-sacral, literate modes of thought can be applied to the mechanisms of domination, public manipulation, and war. Any viable form of governance must be able to trace its origins back to some such dialectic.

Gans focuses on the Axial Age acquisitions Judaism and Christianity, and sees their rejection of a sacrificial center and creation of a universal morality as the basis for the ultimate unfolding of liberal democratic market society. Each individual becomes a center with liberalism and the market model. Gans’s analyses of Romanticism, in which individuals present themselves as universally excluded from society in order to create a style or mode of being that enables them to circulate within society (see, for example, Originary Thinking 164-171) lays the ground for his understanding of the omnicentrism of liberalism. Gans makes perhaps his most unequivocal claim along these lines in the conclusion of Originary Thinking: “[t]he historical movement of desacralization operates neither through the endless deconstruction of the originary center nor through its definitive rejection, but through its omnicentric multiplication. Even ‘decentralization’ is a dangerous term; what is required is rather the universal proliferation of centers—every human being a center” (219). But as Gans also recognizes, someone will always present him/herself centrally first, so omnicentrism is as asymmetrical and the modern market Gans theorizes in his essay “On Firstness”: “market exchange maintains a permanent distinction between production and consumption, creating a permanent asymmetry between the consumer and the producer” (45), creating new forms of resentment. The paradox of market omnicentrism, then, is that it is the production system that produces the very forms in which new centers, denouncing that production system, are projected.

If this highly asymmetrical omnicentrism does not lead to violence it must be because a powerful central state ensures that it doesn’t: indeed, consider how strong and centralized the state must be, and what a civilized political culture it must have inculcated, for the romanticist and later modernist cultural entrepreneurs to have flouted social norms so blatantly not only with impunity but for fame and profit. It should be mentioned that Gans does not often feel obliged to refer to the state in conducting such discussions, and in those cases rarely referring to its coercive and controlling functions, relegating it to the role, essentially, of redistribution, or addressing those resentments regarding market asymmetries that might threaten the system.  Liberal democracy is a kind of replication of the market model:

“[t]he liberal-democratic model is based on the regulation of the economic market by a political system that shares the quality of the market by bringing to bear collective judgments rather than granting absolute powers to a tyrant or self-perpetuating decision-making group. Freely contested elections and political debate are essential to allowing the various members of society to propose and enact measures to assuage their resentments. (“Liberal Democracy in Question,” Chronicle 562).

But if the political system works in exactly the same way as the economic system, by aggregating individual choices into a collective result that no one really chooses, why should it not simply aggravate the resentments generated within the market system? The voter is doing exactly the same thing as the consumer: “purchasing” a piece of power from a producer (the political party and its donors and patrons) in order to express her resentment at being ignored by the center. In the political sphere, it is even worse, because the voters, far more openly than consumers, are choosing against others, in order to frustrate and humiliate their rivals. The system, as proposed here by Gans, can only work if the “measures” proposed to “assuage” the resentments of the various individuals and groups in the social order actually do so. But why should we assume that those measures do, on balance, “assuage”? They can only do so if they are reasonable measures, effectively implemented, and if the legitimacy of decisions made by those implementing is accepted sufficiently to prevent the emergence of violent factions. Does the democratic system provide ground for assuming that any of this will be the case—that the measures will be reasonable, that they will be monitored beyond the minimal necessity of showing that a response has been made to some highly publicized resentment, that institutions and agencies are in place to implement the measures effectively, that they will be accepted by those by whom they must be accepted (rather than, for example, taken as a down payment for the next set of measures)? If the measures are actually implemented in such a way as to assuage, it will be in spite of, not because of, democracy: it will be because authority has been granted to institutions that is not revocable on a regular basis. But if reasonable measures can only be carried out by institutions placed, if only by convention, beyond direct public accountability, how is the functioning of those institutions improved by providing them with the task of “assuaging” in the first place? In other words, to the extent that governing institutions are trusted it is insofar as much of their operation remains beyond the reach of liberal and democratic demands, but this is what liberalism and democracy are unable to accept. Everything must eventually be politicized.

The role of governance in originary thinking must be framed in terms of our understanding of resentment. There seems to me in Gans’s discussions of resentment and the various modes in which is gets “discharged” and “assuaged” in liberal democracies an assumption about resentment that is unwarranted by originary thinking itself. That assumption is that the resentments we see in these societies are simply the natural expression of unmediated resentments: it is natural that blacks would resent whites, or “racism”; it is natural that women would resent men, or “sexism” or “patriarchy”; it is natural that homosexuals would resent… and so on. The assumption is circular: because these resentments have been given the most prominent and explosive public expression, they are therefore the most “real” and “authentic” ones. It is just as easy to see these resentments as ones that have been opportunistically seized upon and inflamed within a system of “rights” that invites and even depends upon the perpetual stoking of resentment. If liberalism and democracy are to be taken as “natural” forms, including in the sense that they are “higher” social forms than the monarchies that preceded them, then these might very well be the most promising resentments for political entrepreneurs to incite insofar as resentments will be sorted out in accord with the order in which rights have been allocated to various groups. But if allocating rights and using them to deploy resentments against a social order which was removed violently rather than “refuted” was in fact the means by which liberalism and democracy were installed in the first place, then this appearance of naturalness dissolves. If resentment is always resentment of the center, then the center must play a formidable, even formative, role in shaping those resentments. Temporary occupants of the center in a liberal democratic order will promote those resentments that enable them to prolong their stay at the center, while their opponents will promote those that will enable them to take over the center themselves. If the occupant of the political center, the wielder of central power, has a far more permanent status, he will have no need to hype potential resentments, and if hope of displacing him is non-existent, neither will anyone else. In other words, a central figure in a system without rights would have more of an incentive to govern and allow other institutions to perform their primary functions. There would still be resentments—certainly an acceptance of the originary hypothesis compels us to grant the constitutive nature of human resentment—and we could also concede that they will be directed toward the political center, but the contents of the resentments will be radically different, and far less conducive to violence. In a well governed order, the form taken by resentments will be towards the failures of institutions in fulfilling their primary function. Are managers placing employees in the positions they are best suited for? Do teachers maximize the learning potential of students? Do producers provide products worthy of selective consumers? Resentments along these lines, even when “irrational,” which is to say driven by mimetic rivalry rather than an informed estimate of the actual situation, will not be implicitly insurrectional. They will be calls for more firmly and intelligently exercised authority.

What generates power, and gives one person power over others? Here as well we must think in terms of proximity to the center. The first instance of human power was on the originary scene, where a group of newly formed humans collectively deferred their desire and allowed a new reality to emerge at the center. This provides us with a model of human power: creating realities by following the lead of the object at the center of shared attention, rather than rivalrous desires. Power is always differential because some members of any group, in any situation, will exhibit greater powers of deferral: they will be able to stop and examine a situation while others are rushing in, and they will have the patience to wait and see when the unfolding reality provides an opening for action. To the extent that the group is successful, they will follow those exhibiting a greater power of deferral, which means those individuals will have the power, and, ultimately a single individual will have the power because someone must exhibit the greatest power of deferral. Power is an interpretation of the demands of the center, and the center can only demand one thing at a time: whoever best articulates that demand governs, regardless of how close others might have been to doing so. This need not exclude all kinds of consultation, and an awareness of the needs and resentments of others in the group will make the exercise of power more steady and secure but I am making a kind of absolute ontological claim here: whenever many act together, we can identify a single leader who makes every decision that counts. If common action seems consensual, that just means that a strong sense of common goals and a shared ability to set aside rivalries masks the fact that, perhaps in a somewhat more subtle way, someone is taking the lead at every point where a disagreement is possible; if different people decide at different times, that means that either group is changing configuration while there is always a single head, or that the head has implicitly or explicitly delegated decision making power to others or, perhaps, that the group is in process of splitting up.

Power is therefore also a relationship: as soon as power is in someone’s hands, he is obliged to continue to exhibit and even enhance his powers of deferral. He is now responsible for his fellows, and he must treat and respond to them as the center would have him do, setting aside his own resentments in the process. He must register and re-present their resentments of him as occupant of the center: each will, at times, believe that he or she could better play the central role, and sometimes some of them may be right. The holder of power has to convert these resentments into new forms of cooperation, emulation and friendly competition. We are not used to thinking of power this way, as earned leadership, even if there’s no other way of explaining the earliest and still most basic forms of informal hierarchy: liberal and democratic attacks on the center encourage us to see power as arbitrarily held until proven otherwise—and even the proof is always considered provisional. But it must also be said that most forms of power in the contemporary world don’t really look like this—the occupants of power often attain their positions through more or less subtle forms of violence, deception and manipulation. But these degenerate forms of power are only possible because social institutions once founded on the kind of deferral Philip Rieff called “charisma” have shaped the reality of the community so thoroughly that only under the most extreme circumstances will abuses of those institutions lead to their abandonment. Indeed, as I have pointed out, only the creation of a new, equally viable center could make such abandonment even thinkable. Such is the necessity of the center, and such the power of the memory of the founding of (especially) political institutions, that there is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation. And it must also be said that even when the highest levels of social institutions are held by those who exploit the credit of the institution for personal or factional benefit, or short term ends, much of the rest of the institution might be in the hands of those still acting in accord with its primary purpose; in this way, institutions can be maintained even through disastrous leadership. For a while, at least.

Power must be distributed and transferred, and this can be done only by those who hold power. The distribution of power is also modeled on the originary event. Now, when we think about a center, we think about a circle, and so we imagine the members of the originary community arrayed symmetrically equidistant from the central object. The first ritual would most likely represent the event in this way, and there would be extremely compelling reasons to maintain this ritual form. But just as the order of deferral on the originary scene must have been unequal, so must have been the approach to the object in the sparagmos. Some members of the group would manifest their deferral earlier and more clearly; and some would eat more and take better portions, just never so much as to re-ignite the mimetic crisis at the origin of the event. But in order to ensure that no one takes too much more, some members of the group would have to intervene where conflicts seem to be getting out of control. Those who get better portions might often be those who then have to “adjudicate” between other members of the group, since they are already assured of their part. The adjudicators may very well have been those who deferred first and were therefore deferred to. Any distribution of power will likewise be uneven, as it must be guided by the needs of following the commands of the center.

The transfer of power is the more difficult problem. Whoever has seized the center may eventually become less fit than others to wield that power, or at the very least must eventually die. Here we see the paradox of power in its fullest form. My analysis so far has suggested that power must ultimately be held by a single member of the community, who is in turn responsible for its distribution. Needless to say, every new power holder does not revisit every decision ever made on which person is to occupy which position; rather, by allowing many, most, or all to continue in their positions, he now takes responsibility for the decisions that put them there in the first place and demonstrates his faith in the judgment of those who exercised power before him. Every member of the community knows, more or less explicitly, that there must be someone occupying the center, but part of the way each knows this is through his resentments directed toward the center. Those resentments will be at their most powerful when there is uncertainty at the center, and therefore no clear “framing” of those resentments. The transfer of power is therefore that moment where both the sanctity of the center and the power it confers is formalized and where resentments toward the center are most “unbound.” The formalization of power can quell those resentments by referring back to previous framings and implicitly promising their renewal, or it can make the attempted seizure of the center all the more attractive in the knowledge that any occupant can be sanctified by the same formalities.

The election of those who are to occupy positions at the center is best seen as an attempt to resolve the paradox of the transfer of power. Election was a common way of choosing kings in primitive communities and was replaced by hereditary rule once the kingdom became, through conquest, the property of the king, which could therefore be transferred like any other form of property. Sooner or later there will be a situation in which there is no clearly eligible heir, in which case violence becomes a very likely way of settling the question of succession. The problems with election run even deeper than that, though. Through elections the power centers distributed throughout the community become permanently antagonistic to each other, and if there is no permanent occupant of the center, then the state just becomes an instrument in the hands of one faction, or coalition of factions, or the other, with every incentive to make as much use of it as possible until it passes back into the hands of your opponents.

That the temporary holder of power holds it on popular sufferance is seen by democracy advocates as a virtue, but in fact those without power can have no way of knowing how those with power should use it. All anyone can know authoritatively is the sphere of activity in which he participates, along with the specific mode of power allocated to him for that purpose. Elections formalize and make explicit the dependence of the power holder on those he leads or governs, but they do so in the worst possible way, outside of the context of the responsibilities and powers of the subjects themselves. The dependence of power upon its base is far better formalized through modes of consultation through which all members of the community act as eyes and ears of the sovereign and communicate to him through established channels. Finally, elections inevitably raise the question of rights, first of all the right to vote: who should be allowed to vote? What age is the cut-off? What about foreigners? The introduction of rights talk means that any attempt to establish a responsible, qualified, invested electorate will be undermined and replaced by universal suffrage. Universal suffrage seems to empower everyone maximally, but it just ensures that no serious decisions can be left to be decided by the electoral process, making it necessary to manage, limit, deceive and ignore in turn the expressed desires of the majority; indeed, the electorate gets turned into proxies of those who actually exercise power, as they fight their battles with their rivals, and themselves ultimately become incapable of fulfilling the functions of an elite.

That still leaves the problem of power transfer unsolved. This problem can’t be solved by some formal mechanism of selection, since any formal method will be open to interpretation and manipulation and, like any rule, must have its exceptions. The problem is that the transfer of power must involve initiation into power, which means that the occupant of central power must take on the responsibility for recruiting and initiating candidates for succession; but in doing so will he not be raising potential rivals, of each other as well as him, with no filial sympathy of obligation to the sovereign but having been told by that sovereign that he might be a worthy successor? The solution is to gear the entire social order towards the resolution of the problem of power transfer. The meaning of social life, the telos of the social order, is to ensure the orderly transfer of power to the worthiest successor. Every institution has its purpose, which constitutes its center: to educate, to protect, to do research, to produce some good or service, to excel in some activity. In each case a power hierarchy is established in the way I have been describing through my discussion of power—the power hierarchy serves the end of the institution, which is why it deserves the respect of the members. The purpose of the sovereign is to ensure that all institutions maintain the form of power proper to their respective purposes. In turn, all institutions report to the sovereign and contribute to the initiation of prospective successors, chosen by a process overseen by the sovereign and no doubt institutionally based, on the model of military academies, officer schools and other highly selective elite-promotion institutions. Obedience to the sovereign is sharply distinguished from the contribution to the initiation of the candidates (the sovereign always has a ranking recorded in case succession becomes immediately necessary but is constantly revising the ranking as a result of his oversight of the initiation process). Any obedience to an order of the candidate, much less one contradicting orders given by the sovereign, would stand out, would be alarming, and would be immediately reported, instantly disqualifying that candidate. The candidates don’t give orders, in other words—a representative of the sovereign gives whatever orders are necessary on their behalf, as needed for the process of initiation. (Those candidates never chosen to be sovereign can, of course, play other highly valued roles as advisors to or representatives of the sovereign.) Such a breach by a candidate (and possibly by those hoping to be his client) could take place in any institution, as all will participate in the initiation process, and so all institutions must internalize the distinction between obedience to the sovereign and presentation of “work processes” to the candidates—in this way, no breach will go undetected.

Making this distinction between commands from and obligations to the sovereign, on the one hand, and participating in the process of initiation of potential sovereigns, on the other hand, is, then, the most fundamental tribute to the center paid in a “rightless” system. This distinction will run through all institutions, practices and discourses, in various ways, explicit and implicit. But it then follows that all assessment and even policing of social activities will involve detecting and deferring breaches of the boundary between the present sovereign and the future of sovereignty. The distinction in question presupposes that the only thing that stands outside of sovereign power is the paradox of power itself, which is in fact instantiated in the temporalizing of sovereignty. Degeneration in governance and disloyalty will be effects of and contribute to the treating of potential sovereigns as present or imminent sovereigns. The social order will develop “specialists” in making the distinction, which is to say specialists in the paradox of power.

The Axial Age acquisitions have always involved the creation of congregations of those who meet to explore together the consequences of the post-sacrificial revelation regarding the paradox of power they have received. Whatever the differences between Confucian thought, Platonism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and other products of the Axial Age, they all rely upon the at least occasional, but usually institutionalized, commitment of “adepts” to clarifying and renewing the revelation in the face of its obfuscations by poorly managed resentments toward the center. It is in the creation of such small groups, or disciplines, that we can identify the retrieval of the originary scene against the background of the crisis of resentment. Such groups call for some kind of ascension or heightening of deferral, in this case deferral of the very resentments that have brought the social order into crisis and made existing forms of sacrality ineffective. The disciplines guard the boundary between themselves and the norm of ordinary attentional spaces, while at the same time moving throughout the social order in various ways, inviting recruits, trying to modify especially egregious social practices, seeking the ear of the powerful, leaving records of the discipline’s thinking and practices. This remains the case even when a particular discipline, like the Christian commemoration of the crucifixion, itself becomes the social norm—that just means new disciplines need to be created to preserve the original revelation against its dilution.

In identifying the paradoxical nature of power in a way that the sovereign can never completely grasp in the act of exercising power, the disciplines potentially set themselves against the sovereign. After all, they have pledged themselves to a center older and higher than the sovereign center, and must judge the sovereign center to be lacking in comparison. We can already see the implications of this construct in the relations between the prophets and kings in the Hebrew Bible, but the potential becomes full-blown reality in the European Christian Middle Ages. From a strictly theoretical point of view, all of modern political thinking, most especially the “rights talk” I began this essay by discussing, emerges out of this ultimately unsolvable problem: the sovereign is God’s regent on earth, which makes him subordinate to God’s will; but God’s will can only be interpreted by God’s representatives on earth, creating from the very beginning the elements of dual sovereignty, or imperium in imperio. This division is what provides the opening to modern liberal and democratic politics, which simply replace “God’s will” with the “people,” or the “individual,” or the “nation,” or the “oppressed,” or the “workers,” or some other entity in positing a “real” sovereign to which the actual sovereign must defer. All of modern politics involves trying to subordinate the actual sovereign to one or another version of supposed “real” sovereignty. The implicit, real, sovereign is who has given one one’s “rights.” Behind the scenes are rival powers using these purported legitimations to pin the actual sovereign to their own mapping of actual onto real sovereignty. The state is centralized, power is accumulated, the state becomes a bigger prize, power is more insecure, and the government does less and less governing.

The Axial Age revelations regarding the paradox of power can be integrated into a secure social order by situating the disciplines within institutions, and charging them with maintaining the distinction between present and future sovereignty. In this way they provide feedback to the sovereign without claiming to answer to some higher authority. Any command can be obeyed in different ways, and the more open-ended the command the more the servant is confronted with the distinction between its “letter” and “spirit.” The disciplines display their loyalty to the sovereign by presenting their obedience to the particularly open-ended charges they are given as in the “highest” spirit of the sovereign—in this way, they never place themselves outside of sovereign power while “reading” the sovereign’s commands back to him (declaratively) in a way that enables him to sharpen his own understanding of the intent informing them. This is the most basic form taken by the paradox of power: that the one commanding is himself constituted by the ways his command will be taken up. As Gans shows in his analysis of the imperative in The Origin of Language, for the one commanding the command is essentially an ostensive, a sign whose very issuance generates the reality it indicates; for the one receiving the command, meanwhile, the imperative represents a desire, which by its nature can never be fulfilled in the exact form in which it was conceived. The disciplines stand in this gap between the ostensive and desiring dimensions of the imperative. The disciplines also represent, then, the solution to the other problem endemic to autocratic rule: how to remove the manifestly the unfit ruler. The disciplines go as far as they can in making the ruler fitter, while in the last extremity they might work counter to the usual process and transfer their loyalty to one of the potential sovereigns. Of course there are dangers implicit here, but that is the case with any social order comprised of desiring and resentful beings, and we would have to rely upon the people produced within such an order having the intelligence, responsibility—in sum, the sovereign imaginary—to go through the established layers of trust (first of all the sovereign, but then those whom the sovereign himself has trusted…) in such a way as to maintain the singularity of the center. The founding assumption that the occupant of the center must not be subject to any “higher” or “more real” form of sovereignty is preserved.

I hope it is clear that the post-liberal, post-democratic form of social order I am proposing here does not involve a return to some earlier, more primitive social form. In fact, the most prominent form taken by the disciplines today is, of course, that of the scientific discipline, organized around the laboratory and the experiment. The study of the paradox of power would be the social science, taking many forms and treating all social institutions as its “laboratories.” Needless to say, the kind of experimentation possible with the disciplines of physics, chemistry and (with some limitations) biology are inapplicable to social relations. The “praxical” study of social order takes the form, rather, of making the norms, rules, hierarchies, and, again, the sovereign imaginary followed tacitly by everyone, more explicit. And then a little more explicit. When anomalies emerge, new practices need to be acknowledged. The center is served and “verified” by naming practices, entities and agencies that have so far gone unnoticed and unacknowledged. Those in the disciplines invent names and take on names that bring more of the tacit to light, and allows it to be authorized and recuperated within the system.

A word on economics and technology. By now, the only remaining justification for the liberal order seems to be that it has made us rich (claims that it makes us freer are, it seems to me, made much more tentatively and taken much less seriously these days—when Twitter, Facebook and Google are rejiggering their algorithms to marginalize “problematic” sites and users, the mask of power is thinning rapidly)—so far, at least, we are still wealthier than the Chinese. It may very well be that the liberal governance of the 19^th and early 20^th century provided a space for the extraordinarily rapid and comprehensive industrialization of Western societies. The loosening of sovereign order allowed a few very talented, very intelligent, and sometimes very sociopathic individuals to exploit the simultaneous rapid centralization of those societies to put scientific and engineering disciplines to work in unprecedented ways. There is no need to surrender any of these acquisitions, even if we think that the social order which provided a hothouse for their development by now (at least) causes far more harm than the benefits offered by technological advances it still enables (in increasingly limited ways). There is also every reason to support some kind of market, but one constrained (as every market has always been constrained) by the needs of sovereign power. At the very least, for example, the sovereign wants all the means needed for maintaining armed and police forces (weapons, the science and technology needed to produce weapons, the raw materials—metals, sources of energy—information technology and so on) to remain at hand. And the corporate form, with deep roots in Western culture, which involves the chartering of enterprises (mostly but by no means only economic) by the sovereign, provides a structure for managing relations between economic units and the state.

Clearly, international order would need to be rethought radically on post-liberal terms. Ultimately, we can assume hegemonic relations between larger, more powerful and more dependent states—there is nothing particularly new in that, even if liberalism prefers to conceal such relations behind the supposed sovereign equality of all states. The hegemonic states would grant sovereignty to their clients up until the point where ineffective or treacherous governance on the part of the client state subverts the larger order of sovereignties itself. Rivalries between hegemonic states, over acquiring clients among other things, may be inevitable, but the respect for sovereign order provides a better basis for peace than human rights or some such chimera. It will be argued that state sovereignty has already been tried as a basis for international order in the post-Westphalian world, but it must be said that the coincidence of this order with the emergence of the extreme disorder introduced by liberalism makes this an invalid test of the concept. We will still be left with might be the greatest problem facing humanity since World War 2, even if we discuss it far less now than during the Cold War: the existence of nuclear weapons, whose use could in minutes destroy all of civilization. The best answer to this threat is the development of prophylaxes which can neutralize the danger. Missile defense shields are the first step in this direction, but as yet unimaginable advances will certainly take place. One thing all (but at least the most powerful) sovereigns may be able to agree on is that it would be better if more scientific resources and sophistication were to go into rendering social orders immune from not only nuclear weapons but from the weaponization of all forms of scientific and technological development. As Peter Sloterdijk has argued, the self-immunization of social orders from threats of all kinds, including internal ideological and psychopathological threats, is essentially synonymous with civilization. Those sovereigns behind in the process of self-immunization might object to having their offensive weapons neutralized before they can catch up, but a tipping point can be reached, with the aid of the firmness, moderation and generosity of the more advanced state, beyond which self-immunization will make “offensiveness” of diminishing value. What is at any rate certain is that only centered sovereignties could bring their actions into correspondence with discussions of this kind.

Not too much thought should be given to the specifics of post-liberal social order—doing so just creates disputes that cannot be settled. Liberal theory is a very aggressive, uncompromising and universalizing theory, and is very difficult to confront head on without getting involved in its own paradoxes. To argue with liberalism is to acknowledge it as a legitimate debating partner and, since liberalism is in power, it is to accept its legitimation of you as a legitimate disputant. No matter how the discussion or debate turns out, liberalism wins. What can be done, though, is to display the wreckage liberalism leaves in its wake: as an idea, what is most basic to liberalism is the autonomy of the individual relative to social obligations and traditions; liberalism, therefore, must function as a battering ram against all obligations and traditions (and, by now, even biological reality). This destructive activity is constant and extensive, because all of our social reality is constituted through obligations and traditions. In the present moment, in particular, the wreckage is piling up in ways that can no longer be avoided or denied without very obtrusive media and state intervention and manipulation: families broken by feminism, nations broken by immigration and free trade, individuals broken by consumerism and de-industrialization, institutions and communities broken by victimary viciousness.

But more important than all this material and social wreckage, in fact, inclusive of it, is the breaking of meaning effected by liberalism. I mean “meaning” in the most literal sense here: liberalism makes it less and less possible for people to say what they mean, or to mean anything at all, at least if they want to communicate and circulate within the existing order. By “meaning,” what I mean is that there is a shared ostensive that “seals” any discourse. The shared ostensive doesn’t have to be a thing in the world, a referent—it can just as readily be a concept, or a distinction between things. If I note something about “the roof on that house over there,” it’s easy enough to see where the meaning lies: you can direct your attention to where I am drawing it and see whatever I saw as noteworthy about the roof of that house we can both see. Meaning is established rather differently in a scientific discipline organized around experimental protocols. But what provides for meaning in social order is the conjunction of power and accountability. If I say “Smith is considering putting a traffic light on that corner,” the sentence makes sense (has meaning) if we know who Smith is and if Smith is someone whose thinking about putting a traffic light on that corner has some determinate relation to a traffic light actually ending up there—say, the mayor, or a traffic specialist hired by the city. If the only Smith we both know is a pianist who lives across the country, you can’t really know what I’m talking about. The more we all know who is responsible for making things happen, and the more those people actually do make those things happen, the more meaningfully we can speak. The presumption of a shared order is just as necessary for more abstract and theoretical discussions, which depend upon a shared intellectual tradition, shared texts, a range of known interpretations of those texts, institutions that perpetuate the study of those texts, and so on. Even more “rogue, “avant-garde” or “unorthodox” intellectual spaces distinguish themselves from the more established ones, upon which they therefore depend for making meaning.

Now, let’s remind ourselves of my opening discussion of “rights.” “Rights” can make sense to the extent that they are themselves embedded in social obligations and traditions—for example, the “rights” peasants may have “acquired” over the centuries to use some part of the master’s land for grazing their animals. But we haven’t spoken about “rights” like that in a very long time, a fact that itself testifies to the wreckage liberalism has wrought on the language: now, “rights” above all refer to claims on others with no basis in tradition or established social obligations; indeed, that is their justification, that those traditions and obligations have constituted unjust exercises of power, marginalization and exclusion upon those expected to respect them. “Right” is coming to refer to some demand no one would have thought of before hearing it, and yet which (or for that very reason) indicts the entire social order of crimes beyond reparation. The point of rights talk now is to generate new forms of power, to be enforced by new centralizations of the state power, informed by new splinterings of power centers grasping at access to state power. The corrosive effects work through all political language but eventually all language, to the point where if you make sense in a liberal order, you make sense in spite of and against that order: by creating a space where discourse can be shared and contained. (Complaints against specialist jargon are legion, but I’ve never seen anyone consider whether every day, commonsense discourse in liberal orders might, in fact, be far more littered with empty, bizarre and unintelligible terms than the most abstruse jargon. I’m not referring to slang—I have in mind the ordinary ways people come to speak of desires, hopes, obligations and so on. “Meaning,” in the more “existential” sense is clearly implicated here as well.) Responsible language, under late, spiraling, liberalism, must face and record honestly and without blanching the wreckage; and, on the other side, create spaces where meaning is possible because accountability can be joined to power.

So, what is to be done? Infiltrate the most proximate discipline. Study its origin in the paradox of power. Make the paradox of power explicit where it is now tacit. Become a living, breathing sign of the paradox of power. Listen very carefully for commands from the center. Wait until the center is made singular again, and initiates a new distribution. Be ready to commemorate the transfer of power.

Peter Goldman is Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He is also President of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). Peter teaches classes and has published articles on a variety of topics including Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His current project is a book on Shakespeare, Milton, and the problem of iconoclasm.

Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a  collection of essays on Generative Anthropology. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and is currently editing a series for Noesis Press, Deferrals and Disciplines.

Marina Ludwigs teaches English Literature at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine and has worked with, and presented papers on, both Girardian theory and Generative Anthropology. Her current interest is bringing into dialogue narratology and Generative Anthropology.