Victor Sensenig
Department of English
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Satan’s escape from the prison of Hell
and traversal of Chaos in Book II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost
not
only marks a beginning of humankind’s woe but presents the poet with a
more
pressing dilemma in the progression of his undertaking.
Having sprung his protagonist,
In Paradise Lost, everybody
watches everybody else, and Book III systematically captures and
critiques the
gazes of Satan, God, and the unseeing narrator.
A host of dangers accompany sight, the most significant sense of Paradise
Lost. These dangers become fully apparent as the poem progresses, as
the
narrator clearly identifies the roving eye as the first step toward
transgression and nearly a sin in itself.
According to Raphael’s explanation to Adam, when the unfallen
Satan sees
the coronation of Christ, his resentment rises, and he cannot close his
eyes to
sleep. Raphael presents Satan’s sin as
rooted in a visual comparison of elevation; he “could not bear/ Through
pride
that sight, and thought himself impaired” (5.664-5).
Satan will later use the means of his own
downfall to trap God’s new creatures. As
he tempts Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, “Fix’t on the Fruit she
gaz’d,
which to behold/ Might tempt alone” (9.735-6).
Satan’s main objective consists of enticing Eve to the tree; the
sight
of the fruit, drawing Eve to possess by devouring, can accomplish the
rest. Voyeurism, viewing that victimizes
its object and desires to see without being seen, ranks high among the
dangers
of looking in the poem. Regina Schwartz
provides a reading of Satan’s predatory spying in which “Satan has
turned
Eve-the-exhibit into Eve-the-voyeur; for once he fixes her/his gaze on
that
fruit, she must possess it, just as Satan possesses her . . . having
dared to
look, she must suffer exposure. Eve
becomes aware that she is naked” (91).
Although Schwartz later explains the problem with this reading,
she admits
“evidence that this is a poem preoccupied with voyeurism” (152).
Book III represents
Shine inward, and the mind through all her
powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist dispel
from
thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight
(3.52-55)
The
phrase “see and tell” provides a key to reading this book and Paradise
Lost
as a whole for the one justifies the other. The narrator intends to
repay his
debt for divinely granted eyes by telling of the glory he sees with
them. By situating his poem as a hymn of
praise,
the narrator justifies the lofty proposal of his first book to compose a
song
“That with no middle flight intends to soar/ Above the Aonian
Mount” (1.14-15). As
Uriel later states, the glorification of God can reach no excess. Even more fundamentally, the poem’s
invocation reinforces the necessity of sight, if not physical then
intellectual
or spiritual, for the poetic venture.
He wastes no time in putting his
vision to use now that the mist has been purged and dispersed. The narrator’s eyes turn upward, and we
suddenly find ourselves looking upon the One who sees all:
Now
had th’
Almighty Father from above,
From the pure Empyrean where he sits
High Thron’d above all highth, bent down his
eye,
His own works and their works at once to view
(3.56-59)
While
God does bend down his eye, the narrator does not disclose the precise
location
of these divine organs of sight. Indeed,
seven angels, including the archangel Uriel, serve as God’s Eyes as they
rove
through the Heavens and Earth (3.650-51).
The nature of God’s look also escapes definition.
God does not observe passively, and the
effects of his sight exceed the power of language. Around
his throne stand Sanctities of Heaven,
who experience the benefits of the power of his divine sight and “from
his
sight receiv’d/ Beatitude past utterance” (3.61-62).
On the other hand, God’s look does not unduly
interfere with his creatures. William
Kerrigan
observes that vision has traditionally represented God’s presence in the
world
because eyes, unlike some other senses, can see without disturbing the
object
of sight; foresight, in this sense, does not imply determination (141).
Yet this looking without the object’s
awareness
suggests voyeurism and invites an interesting question for
The presence of the Son somewhat
mitigates the implication of God as the ultimate voyeur.
As the narrator tells it, he “to his onely
Son foreseeing spake” these words: “Onely begotten Son, seest thou what
rage/
Transports our adversarie” (3.79-81).
The word “foreseeing” could describe the prophetic nature of the
Father’s forthcoming speech, but it could also refer to the “Son
foreseeing,”
eliminating the idea that the Son had not been looking or had even been
distracted by some more petty concern.
In any case, the differentiation in the Godhead allows the Father
to see
and then turn and tell what he has seen, the poem’s formula for
blameless
looking. The appearance of the Son also
justifies the gaze of God by providing an indirect way to see the
Almighty. As God speaks and fills heaven
with ambrosial fragrance:
Beyond compare the
Son of God was seen
Most glorious, in
him all his Father shon
Substantially
express’d, and in his face
Divine compassion
visibly appeered,
Love without end,
and without measure Grace
(3.138-41)
The
Son provides visual access to God, so that the beings of heaven may view
God’s
substance and nature by seeing this translation of God’s light. The emphasis of this passage lies on the way
the Son “was seen” or “appeered.” Part
of the goodness of God, suggests the narrator, consists of his adoption
of an
appearance that reflects his true nature.
Immune to the hypocrisy of false appearance, the nature of God,
as seen
in the Son, may be understood upon observation.
This line of thought derives from neo-platonic theories of beauty
and
goodness, and Castiglione’s Pietro Bembo perhaps demonstrates it best in
a
conversation in The Book of the Courtier:
I say that beauty springs from God and is like a
circle, the center of
which is goodness. And so just as one
cannot have a circle without a center, so one cannot have beauty without
goodness. In consequence, only rarely
does an evil soul dwell in a beautiful body, and so outward beauty is a
true
sign of inner goodness. (330)
The
radiance of Christ perfectly communicates the inner goodness of God, and
the
assumption of trustworthy appearance immensely benefits a poet committed
to
“see and tell.” To follow Bembo’s logic,
looking upon God and understanding God amount to the same thing, and
this
vision bolsters the poet’s confidence that his sight may effect a true
telling.
Satan soon arrives to disturb any confidence
in the
virtue of a beautiful body. His arrival
on earth becomes a catalog of the transgressions of the satanic gaze. Satan, in Book III, first alights on the
outer regions of the world. It seemed a
Globe at a great distance, but now it seems to him “a boundless
Continent/
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night” (3.422-23). The dangers of perspective characterize the
satanic gaze, a way of looking that changes depending on the angle,
proximity,
or the focus of the eye. Such a way of
looking at God may have led the Devil to believe that he could overthrow
the
Almighty. Close to God in Heaven, Satan
could not grasp the vastness of omnipotence.
Plotting after his fall to Hell, he nursed his contempt and
renewed hope
of success due to the visually diminishing effects of distance.
His difficult journey through Chaos completed,
Satan
wanders for a long time until “a gleam/ of dawning light turnd
thither-ward in
haste/ His travell’d steps” toward the stairway to heaven (3.499-501). Later the sun also “allur’d his eye”
(3.573). For a poem so concerned with
establishing Satan’s guilt, such a deflection of responsibility may
surprise
the reader, but a look at Renaissance visual theory may serve to explain
this:
Before Kepler, light was not central to the
process; rather, objects
were visible by their own agency. Visual
power lay not in the eye of the observer, but in the object seen, for it
generated infinite images of itself through space until it reached the
receptive human eye. Images were active;
the eye was passive. (Schwartz and Funicci 7)
Such
passivity, associated with Satan, may characterize the fallen eye and
emphasize
the need to control where the eye wanders and probes but to also closely
guard
the eye from the attack of the active object.
Able to control his line of sight, God bends down his eye to the
objects
below, while Satan find his eyes pulled this way and that by the random
transmission of images by the objects themselves.
Standing on the lower step of the forbidden
stairway
to heaven, Satan “Looks down with wonder at the sudden view/ Of all this
World
at once” (3.542-43). This look of Satan
seems intent to capture, to wrap the whole earth in the predatory grasp
of his
vision. As Stevie Davies observes, “An
image seen at this remote perspective is diminished enough to be
assimilated
into the eye of the voyeur in its totality.
The eye engrosses and corrupts its object” (134).
Satan’s eyes seem to transgress in their
attempt to look from God’s perspective; his vision becomes a flight to
where he
can view all from a lofty perspective.
Indeed, the dream he feeds the organs of Eve’s fancy involves a
flight
above the Clouds where Eve sees the “Earth outstretcht immense, a
prospect wide/
And various” (5.88-89). Wonder seizes
the Devil, “but much more envy seis’d/ At sight of all this world beheld
so
fair” (3.553-54). The feeling of wonder
opens the possibility of praising the Maker of this sight, marvelous
even to
one who has seen Heaven, but the abruptly ensuing envy precludes this
response
and more fully characterizes the lustful satanic gaze.
Satan’s voyeuristic tendency, fully exhibited
later in
his temptation of Eve, becomes apparent in Book III.
Spying Uriel on the sun, Satan approaches him
for directions in the guise of a stripling cherub with flowing curls and
gold-sprinkled wings. He expresses his
desire to visit the new Creation, an “Unspeakable desire to see, and
know/ All
these his wondrous works, but chiefly Man” (3.662-63).
Unlike the narrator who proposes to “see and
tell,” Satan lets slip his voyeuristic intent to “see and know.” His stated purpose most tellingly reveals the
vast difference between hidden lust and the acknowledgement of worship:
“That I
may find him, and with secret gaze,/ Or open admiration him behold”
(3.671-72). Even as he speaks, he
remains “unperceiv’d,” though Uriel to him “strait was known”; only the
narrator observes his secret gaze. Uriel
moves to mildly correct him and points the way to blameless looking:
Fair Angel, thy
desire which tends to know
The works of God,
thereby to glorifie
The great
Work-Maister, leads to no excess
That reaches blame,
but rather merits praise
The more it seems
excess, that led thee hither
From thy
To witness with
thine eyes what some perhaps
Contented with
report hear onely in heav’n
(3.694-98)
This
young angel could well remain in at ease in glory and simply pick up
stories of
the new creation from among the swirling rumors of Heaven, but Uriel
affirms
the privileging of seeing over hearing in the precocious cherub’s desire
to see
and then be one who tells. Uriel’s
instructions sum up the ostensive message of Book III thus far: Look, if
you desire,
but only to glorify, lest it lead to the gaze of Satan, lustful,
envious, and
destructive.
The observant reader will note some hesitation
on the
part of the narrator to fully endorse Uriel’s credibility.
This high-ranking spirit, victim of the first
disguise, both sees falsely and tells ignorantly, ushering in a host of
sorrows
by informing Satan that the “spot to which I point is
Significantly, the first glimpse we have of
Satan in
Book I are his eyes—“round he throws his baleful eyes/ That witnessed
huge
affliction and dismay/ Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate”
(1.56-57). Immediately after seeing
Satan look about him, the poet lets us look through those baleful eyes,
and we
see what the fallen angel sees: “The dismal Situation waste and wild,/ A
Dungeon horrible” (1.60-61). This
narrative move demonstrates the ease with which the reader may adopt the
satanic perspective and the danger that a looking at may become a
looking with. Regina Schwartz, in
her discussion of voyeurism in Paradise Lost, demonstrates how
the poem
ultimately muddles the seemingly discernable lines of sight. According to Schwartz, the poem challenges
the conventional understanding of voyeurism.
Voyeurism supposedly assumes an unseen watcher and positions a
subject
and object, but in Paradise Lost, someone else always watches,
and the
subject both looks at the object of sight and identifies with it.
In Paradise Lost, the polarization of
voyeur/victimizer/man over against exhibit/victim/ woman is attached
most
persistently, as we have seen, to Satan, to the temptation of Eve, and
to the
Fall. Satan does not only prey upon Eve;
his impulse to polarize power begins when he regards the Son’s elevation
as his
own reduction . . . Eve’s error may not be seizing the gaze but
interpreting it
(like so many film critics) as polarizing power into victims and
victimizers
(154-55).
Schwartz ultimately intends to
portray Eve as an
“active exhibit” and empower her by demonstrating that viewing an object
does
not mean degrading it. Schwartz’s
empowerment of Eve as the “object” of sight cannot occur without the
simultaneous drainage of power from the poem’s range of lookers—Satan,
God, and,
most significantly, our intrepid narrator.
I find her argument most useful for my own purpose of troubling
the
authoritative nature of sight, visual and intellectual.
To “see and tell” entails the subjugation of
the sight by the imagination and language of the storyteller. Not only, as Uriel demonstrates, does the
sight fall prey to deception, but seeing is essentially artificial and
already
an act of creation. It creates victims
and victimizers and objects and subjects.
Schwartz observes that “it is not possible to determine clearly
where
God ends and his objects of his sight begin, where the narrator ends and
his
delineations of the cosmos begin, and where the reader end and her
vision of
all of the above begin” (157). The
separation of all these elements begins with a story that delineates
figures
and distinguishes lines of sight.
Even
the nature of Celestial light points to the primacy of the Word of God. Addressing the “holy Light” in his
invocation, the narrator takes a stab at understanding its origins. It may be the first creation, the “offspring
of Heav’n first-born” (3.1), or an uncreated aspect of God, “Bright
effluence
of bright essence increate” (3.6). The
poet also concedes that the possibility of an entirely obscure origin,
with
light springing from a “pure Ethereal stream,/ Whose Fountain who shall
tell?”
(3.7-8) But he does approach an answer
in the following lines, as light “at the voice/ Of God, as with a Mantle
didst
invest/ The rising world of waters dark and deep” (3.9-11). In the Hebraic account of creation, light
originates in the words of God: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and
there was
light” (Gen. 1:3).
The complication of the injunction to “see and
tell”
requires the reader to view the invocation of Book III in a new light. Given the prominent place of sight in Paradise
Lost, one might expect a passage similar to the complaint of Samson
at the
beginning of Samson Agonistes,
written at some point during the composition of Paradise Lost. Of all his complaints, Samson most bewails
his loss of sight:
Since light so necessary is to
life,
And almost life it self, if it
be true
That light is in the Soul,
She all in every part; why was
the sight
To such a tender ball as th’
eye confined? (90-4)
For Samson, the absence of light
almost entails a
living death, demonstrating his fundamental confusion concerning the
nature of
light. Aware of the vulnerability of
sight to temptation and deception,
Ironically, Samson’s apparent weakness
ultimately provides him with the
opportunity for revenge when he pushes over the pillars of the theatre
to kill
the assembled Philistines. The narrator
of Paradise Lost comes to a
similar conclusion. The
privileged position of sight receives the ultimate challenge with the
poet’s
suggestion that his inspiration does not simply overcome but derives
from his
loss of sight. With Nature’s works
“expung’d and ras’d” and “wisdom at one entrance quite shut out,” the
poet
allows that “so much the rather” may the celestial light flood through
him. Kerrigan effectively argues this
point from a psychological standpoint: “We know that blindness for
Kerrigan’s commitment to psychoanalysis
inspires his reading in terms
of ego, the rational and conscious aspect of the psyche, and superego,
the part
of the psyche that has internalized societal norms.
While psychoanalysts typically view ethical
maturity as the slow “assimilation of the superego into the ego,”
Kerrigan
understands
While I find Kerrigan’s argument for the
psychogenesis of Paradise Lost convincing, I would
contend that
To justify
the ways of God,
Bibliography
Castiglione, Baldesar.
The Book of the Courtier.
Trans. George Bull.
Davies, Stevie.
Kerrigan, William. The
Sacred Complex.
Milton, John.
---. Samson
Agonistes. The Complete Poetry of
John Milton. Ed. John
Shawcross.
Schwartz,
Schwartz.
Schwartz,