A Critique of Dennis Danielson:
Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, Eng. 1982.
As William Empson's famous reading of Paradise Lost is called Milton's God, and Dennis Danielson's later book, Milton's Good God, it seems that Danielson is attempting to rebut Empson. However, some of Danielson's expressions about the Christian God raise grave doubts whether he is equal to the task. At one point, having to consider the possibility that God is not entirely good, Danielson fears that "such thoughts are not altogether compatible with the piety and reverence that one ought to exhibit in the divine presence"(p.107).Elsewhere he calls the proposition that God is wholly good one "to which anyone concerned with piety will presumably assent"(p.3), implying that his readers are all concerned with piety and believe in the goodness of the Christian God. Well, if you believe you have to exhibit piety and reverence toward the Christian God, and if you imagine that mere thinking can violate this obligation, what are you going to do when Empson calls the Christian God "the torture monster"? What are you going to do when Empson argues at great length that Milton's God is one degree short of being the ghastliest monstrosity in the annals of comparative religions, while the Christian God, as distinct from Milton's version, lacks that degree and is that monstrosity? The more I read these neo-Christian scholar-critics, the more perverse they seem. Eleanor Vicari in her book on Robert Burton picks the most skeptical, and so far as holy orders go, the most cynical Caroline prose writer I know of and tries desperately to prove that his book is a sermon. Barbara Lewalski tries to prove that the seventeenth-century religious lyric is devoid of Counter-Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic images and themes, and finds herself able to do this only by eliminating Milton, Marvell, Herrick and Crashaw from her survey. And now here comes Dennis Danielson, intent on thinking nothing but pious thoughts, yet preparing to grapple with William Empson. "What fools these mortals be!"
Apart from being hamstrung by his own piety, Danielson appears to have read Empson's book without appreciating its literary merits. On page 205 he speaks of "Empson's railings." But Empson never wrote a word of railing in all his long career, and the tone of Milton's God is of a man aghast at an emergency too imminent and life-threatening to waste words on. Again and again he bids for Understatement of the Year:
...if some bully said he would burn me alive unless I pretended to
believe he had created me, I hope I would have enough honour to
tell him that the evidence did not seem to me decisive (p. 89)
...Satan has a war on his hands...(p.109)
(Christ volunteering to be crucified) Death for a day and a half any of
us might proffer, but we would find slow torture worth mentioning
even given a doctor in attendance who guaranteed recovery after
unconsciousness had finally supervened (p.121).
The style is monosyllabic, and never hides an ugly image behind vague or general language, for which reason it generates some of the most shocking sentences I have ever read:
Crucifying relays of cats night and day in the cathedral, for
example, might be found an efficient technique (p.257).
"If I had my rights, I'd be sitting in that police-station already,
pulling out people's finger-nails" (p. 263).
Empson's erudition, the succinctness with which he deploys it, his lucidity and refusal to compromise make his book the most devastating attack on Christianity I know of--but I must descant no more on this topic which is indeed the raison d'etre of my website. Back to Dennis Danielson.
Danielson's book has little to do with Milton's poem and almost nothing to do with Empson's book. To make this clear, let me set forth two versions of the Problem of Evil.
The first version takes three statements as true a priori : (1) God is omnipotent (2) God is wholly good (3) nevertheless, there is evil in the world.
This evil takes three forms: metaphysical, moral, and natural. Metaphysical evil consists in the fact that some things are not as good as others (a housefly is not as good as an eagle) so the question arises why God, willing the best possible world, should have made these second- and third-rate things. Moral evil results from the moral decisions of human beings (rape, murder, unjust war, the Ice Capades). Natural evil is the loss, pain and death caused by agents in nature: hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues.
The three statements, like an imperfect syllogism because the third does not follow from the first two, become the Problem of Evil as the philosophers try various methods to save God's omnipotence and goodness, both. Plato, in effect, qualifies God's omnipotence by saying that he was compelled to make the universe out of a resistant stuff, matter, which to a certain extent frustrated his design. Christians after Arminius explained moral evil by the Free Will Defense: that to deprive man of free will, stripping him of his chief glory, would be an evil worse than all the rapes, murders, thefts, and abstract-expressionist paintings that result from the exercise of this free will. Danielson spends 130 pages, or more than half his book, on these topics, which are familiar; most of them are in Maynard Mack's notes to Pope's Essay on Man. Pope, in fact, is more to the point than Danielson because he tries to explain both mtaphysical and natural evil, as well as moral. Danielson, when he sets forth the Free Will Defense, treats it as a solution to the whole Problem of Evil, though it leaves metaphysical and natural evil completely unaccounted-for; and he fathers the same blunder on Milton. Kinds of evil that are not moral are nevertheless seriously in need of justification. Henry Adams renounced his Christian faith and became an atheist when he saw his sister die of tetanus, an outstanding instance of the intractability of the problem of natural evil.
Nothing in the traditional arguments is a posteriori. The philosophers do not collect evidence in the Bible, the world, the historical record or epic poems to ascertain whether God is good or bad. Instead, they take the first two propositions (God's goodness and omnipotence) as given, and try to explain how, nevertheless, he created a universe partly bad.
But William Empson was a New Critic, one of the movement's founders. He approached Paradise Lost, as he approached every poem, without preconceptions. Especially, he did not read it as a Christian hero trying to become an even more heroic Christian hero, the method recommended by Professor Stanley Fish. He responded to the poem in all candor, letting it work on his mind without referring it to traditions of any kind from outside the text, and thus arrived at the second, or a posteriori, statement of the Problem of Evil.
Empson finds that God provokes Satan's rebellion so that the rebels may be "pursued with infinite malignity to eternal torture"(p. 95). God makes an "appallingly malignant" joke about the rebellion, intending to "give the rebels false evidence that he is a usurper, and thus drive them into real evil"(p. 97)."...to give no reason at all for the Exaltation [of Christ] makes it appear a challenge"(p. 102). God created heaven as "a forcing-house to develop the pride of Satan"(p. 109). God "intended to humiliate" the angels by ordering them to fight Satan's rebel army (p.110). The loyalist Raphael has a "timid slavish mind"(p. 111). God "lets Satan do to Eve as much as a hypnotist really can do"(p.118). Raphael's mission to the earth to talk to Adam and Eve is "an extremely unpleasant bit of work" resembling Rubashov's errands of betrayal for Stalin in Darkness at Noon (p. 174). God in Book III apparently resents Adam with the resentment an artist feels against a bad piece of his own workmanship, and if so it "would be one of the few decent feelings ever allowed to God by Milton"(p. 175). Because God perpetrates, and is, all these vicious things in order to produce eternal torture for the rebel angels, eternal torture for most of the human race, and three hours of torture for his son, a conclusion emerges, unforeseen in any of the three terms of Danielson's Problem: God is himself evil. To seek explanations how a good God could make an evil world is thus utterly beside the point. Empson gives us billions of helpless and more-or-less well-meaning creatures trapped in a universe dominated by a fiend. This version of the Problem of Evil may be paraphrased: how do we escape from this evil God?
"Milton's theodicy," writes Danielson, "centers on the Freewill Defense"(p.123).This is so nearly true that the difference between two theological quodlibets--the Freewill Defense and sublapsarianism--becomes very difficult to negotiate. Supralapsarianism--the doctrine that God, when he decreed all the events in the history of the world before creating it, among them decreed the rebellion and fall of Satan and the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve--was widely denounced as making God the author of evil and the only sinner, and thus revolted Milton to that degree that he said refuting it would be tantamount to constructing a long argument to prove God was not the Devil. So Milton espoused the view that God uttered his decrees sub lapsum, after Adam's fall (i.e., when, and because, he had foreseen it), and these decrees left most humans free to damn or save themselves by accepting or rejecting God's grace (III. 185-202) while leaving some curiously bound to do no wrong; these persons are on the road to heaven, no matter what they do (III. 183-4). So Danielson's "freewill defense" is not quite right as not everyone has (is cursed with) free will. (See more on this topic at "John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians, and the Incompetence of God," a link in this website.)
By not informing himself of the sublapsarian doctrine, Danielson has blurred his account of Milton's theodicy, but by making free will the point, he storms an open door. Empson never doubts that God's creatures have free will, but holds him supremely evil because, first, he contrives for millions of them to undergo eternal torture; second, he compels those of them who shall inhabit heaven to witness, as a thing to be enjoyed and delighted in, this eternal torture. Hence he is unbelievably corrupting because, in order to seek and enjoy his salvation, one must desire to do nothing for all eternity but witness scenes of torture. That this God endowed his creatures, or some of them, with free will, is thus beside the point; his evil quality is quite unredeemed by his leaving them free either to suffer eternal torture or to revel in it, just as they choose.
The previous paragraph is written of the traditional Christian God, of whom it might be said that the biggest favor he could do for his creatures would be to commit suicide. But Milton's God does plan to commit suicide. Weary of reigning over millions of angels, he wants to pass his power on to his son, who unlike himself, will reign in a gentle and mild manner (III.339-40); to make sure this power is intact, he stages the whole ghastly drama of the history of hell and earth, from Satan's revolt to the Last Judgment, to impress on the unfallen angels the proposition that the divine power is not to be contradicted. This having done, he plans to become a neoplatonic God and "dissolve into the landscape" (Empson, Milton's God, 1965 ed., p.133). And this, if Empson is right, is Milton's theodicy: this sadistic God, doing us a great favor, will rid us of himself.
Since this, in Empson's opinion, is Milton's view, what does it signify for Danielson to quote Moses Amyraldus, Lancelot Andrewes, St Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Jacob Arminius, St Augustine, Theodore Beza, Boethius, John Calvin, Meric Casaubon, Stephane Curcellaeus, Erasmus, John Goodwin, Thomas Goodwin, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Hoard, Thomas Hobbes, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Luther, Marcion, William Perkins, William Prynne, Samuel Rutherford, Socinus, Peter Sterry, Tatian, Tertullian, Theophilus, William Twisse, Vorstius and Zanchy to prove that the Freewill Defense is traditional and that Milton did well to adopt it? None of these men thought hell was evil. They all, except Socinus, thought it was good; and one, Tertullian, wrote a prose-poem on the ravishment of watching the torments of the damned from a front-row seat in heaven that scales heights of rhetorical ecstasy far exceeding the feeble efforts of the Marquis de Sade. The list I have just written exudes a pleasant odor of leather, vellum, and foxed pages, of hours spent in the twilight of ancient libraries, filling 3 by 5 cards with forgotten lore, proving absolutely nothing. I will not scold; I have done it myself.
Danielson now attacks the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall, saying first, that it was not universally held among Christian theologians, and second, that Milton himself never adopted it. The difficult idea that Danielson finds in Paradise Lost is the Unfortunate Fall; that the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ repair the damage done by the eating of the fruit in a manner sufficiently triumphant to justify Adam's rejoicing at XII. 375-85; yet still, it would have been so much better if the earth had remained without sin and death, and mankind had ascended to heaven in the manner described at V.496-500, that the eating of the fruit must be regarded as a real, and not merely a seeming, disaster. This seems perilously close to saying the Incarnation of Christ is a pis aller, a suboptimal event, and the result of an inadvertancy, which also, coincidentally, is the weak point of the sublapsarian doctrine. And, it is against the text of the Paradise Lost itself in which Adam says clearly that because of his sin "much more good thereof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Man From God"(XII.476-78), and the authorial voice says Satan is set free to tempt Eve in order to produce "infinite goodness, grace and mercy"(I.218).
The fact is that the perennial fascination of the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent probably grows from its ambiguity, that if you read it without preconceptions you can't tell whether the decision to eat the fruit was good or bad. Students of comparative religions inform us that the original fersion of the tale was probably a Babylonian myth in which Yahweh was a tyrant, mankind's captor, and the snake was mankind's deliverer.In more recent times it is sport to see what knots Christians tie themselves in to establish, first, that because of the goodness and power of God, whatever happens, happens for the best; second, that the eating of the forbidden fruit is an irretrievable disaster. Gibbon's epigram on the decretals of Nicea comes to mind; "within these limits the tremulous and almost imperceptible ball of orthodoxy might be allowed securely to vibrate." Or in other words, Danielson's idea of the Unfortunate Fall is as good as any other attempt to resolve the contradiction.
But he has mistaken Empson's intent, and the basis of his argument. Empson was the first to notice that the epic journey and the raid on Eden, II.629-IV.1015, though made to seem like a great adventure, are virtually a sure thing owing to the connivance and collusion of God with Satan. God puts the key of hell-gate into the hand of Sin, who is eager to open it for Satan as soon as she learns his errand. God puts the entire universe apart from hell, heaven and the mundus into the hands of Chaos, a pro-Satanist ("Go and speed," II. 1008). God sees Satan coasting the wall of heaven and does nothing about it, but instead predicts that his temptation of Eve and Adam will succeed. Climactically, when the angelic guards have arrested Satan inside the garden, God signals them to let him go (IV. 985-1015). This is enough, and more than enough, to enable a Miltonist and New Critic to say that Milton's God desires the eating of the fruit and actively arranges it.
But, being the first critic in centuries to say this, Empson naturally welcomed support, and was glad to be able to praise A. O. Lovejoy in "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall" for having "splendidly taped down" the idea that God was working for the Fall all along, a feat Lovejoy had attempted by quoting theologians, mostly medieval. So Danielson mounts a mighty attack on Lovejoy (pp.202-227) in a chapter which, as far as I can see, never mentions Satan's epic journey or raid on Eden. The New Critics had a point. One must stay close to the text in question, or find "no end, in wand'ring mazes lost"(II. 561).
Chapter 6 of Danielson's book, "Eden and the 'Soul-Making' Theodicy" advances the view that there can be no virtue without sin, vice or folly being present, at least as a possibility;that Milton believed this, he proves very solidly by quoting Areopagitica. He further argues that this breeding of virtue in human beings by means of moral, metaphysical, and natural evil justifies the evil in the postlapsarian world. (In passing let me remark what an unconvincing statement that is: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Verdun, Guadalcanal, Buchenwald, Passchendaele and now September Eleventh are indispensable because the survivors grew in courage, generosity, patience, compassion. If so why do some people develop excellent character without going through any extraordinary suffering?) He goes so far as to say that God implanted evil into Eden itself to produce this soul-making effect, for Eve weeps at V. 129-35--a striking quotation to make a striking point. At length it appears that this importation of evil into Eden for purposes of soul-making is a great Miltonic innovation, in part anticipated by Spenser.
It seems to have escaped Danielson's notice that his concept of the Unfortunate Fall and his concept of Soul-Making clash head-on. If we need evil to make virtue possible, then the prelapsarian world was suboptimal in an extreme degree and we should be grateful to Adam and Eve for eating the fruit. Hence the fall is not unfortunate but fortunate. If we want coherence in Paradise Lost, Empson's reading is still best.
One last point has to be made regarding the second proposition in the traditional Problem of Evil: that God is good. Danielson says that anyone concerned with piety will affirm this. True, in the 21st Century; but not at all true in the 17th. In those days theologians let their logic carry them straight to affirmations that God is a deceiver, that he does cruel deeds, or that before the creation of the universe he subsisted in a moral and ethical, as in a physical, vacuum so that his wickedness cannot be condemned as such. That believing age was more frank about such matters than this unbelieving one. I have already published a paragraph on this in this website, but let me recapitulate it here: John Calvin discusses the justice of God playing "so cruelly" with his creatures as to select at random the ones predestined to hell. As for those who will die as unbaptized babies, and burn in hell for that, he admitted it was a horrible decree and said it should terrify us. William Twisse said that part of God's sovereignty over his creatures was doing evil to them. John Bunyan, trying to pray though he believed himself reprobate, seemed to hear God saying, "Alas, poor fool, it is not for such as thee to have favour with the highest." Gilbert Burnet said that the depictions of God in controversial literature by Arminians and Calvinists bordered on blasphemy. William Perkins compared God to a butcher. Reprobation, the cruel play of which Calvin had spoken, was justified by Samuel Willard as follows:
...Reprobation is no act either of justice or injustice, but of meer sovereignty.
Justice and injustice, as they are distinguished from absolute supremacy,
refer to a law or transaction between God and his creatures: but there is no
such law to direct God in this act; but he was at perfect liberty: He had not
transacted with the creature at all, for it was not; only he had a supream
right with him, as, either to give, or not give it a being, so to dispose of it
according to his wisdom and will (A Compleat Body of Divinity, Boston, 1726:
p.269, col.1).
As one must willingly suspend his disbelief in order to enjoy a poem, one must imagine a completely amoral universe in order to accept this God.