“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism
2009; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1094-348x.2009.00208.x
ISSN1094-348X
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoHistory is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. (James 163) Milton's rigorous application of the terminology of fraud and force in reference to Satan's methods, his “guile/Stirrd up with Envy and Revenge” (PL 1.34-35), has not escaped critical notice. Irene Samuel's comparative study of Dante'sDivine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost records how, just as Dante allots force and fraud to the seventh and eighth circles of hell respectively, situating perpetrators of force within the walled City of Dis and perpetrators of fraud below Dis within the ten trenches of Malebolge, Milton's Satan deploys force and fraud to accomplish his objectives (94-104).1 James Freeman's Milton and the Martial Muse documents the strategies of fraud and force as the insistent preserve of martial epic, the histories of ancient Roman triumphs, and the artes militares of late Renaissance war writers, well before the fraud-force collocation entered Milton's Paradise Lost and came to color Satan's rhetoric and shape his contrivances and methods. Freeman's study chronicles the dyad in such seminal texts as Homer'sOdyssey (9.406), Hesiod's Theogony, Virgil'sAeneid (2.390), Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (5.858), Ovid's Metamorphoses (1.127-32), the orations of Cicero, the histories of Livy and Silius Italicus, and the works of the early modern war writers Richard Bernard and Henry Hexham (156-77). To Freeman's catalogue one might add the forceful and fraudulent tactics of Herodotus's Persian King Cambyses and General Amasis (3: 65, 4: 201); the advice of Torquato Tasso's Satan to his consistory of fiends “or la forza s'adopri ed or l'inganno,” that is, “to adopt either force or deceit” (4.16.8, cf. 8.3.3); Edmund Spenser's pairing of the “slie shiftes and wiles” of Dolon (FQ 5.6.32), whose speaking name means “Guile” (Eng. dole; Gr. δóλος; Lat. dolus), with the guerilla warfare of “bold and stout” Malengin (FQ 5.9.4); and the Discourses Concerning Government, in which Algernon Sidney chronicles how the early Christians “did with the utmost vigor defend both their civil and religious Rights against all the Powers of Earth and Hell, who by force and fraud endeavored to destroy them” (282).2 Freeman traces these two “most important categories of thought in our Western tradition” (157) and concludes, “Milton is so intent upon exploding the damnable respectability his generation imputed to force and guile that he mentions them repeatedly” (172). Samuel and Freeman limit their studies, though, to Paradise Lost alone. Force and fraud, I am arguing, can be seen to relate to the Satanic heroic mode across Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as a pejorative revaluation of both the ancient heroic code—as ancient epic is arguably foundational for the fraud-force collocation—and the Renaissance political philosophies of Machiavelli and Milton's contemporary, Thomas Hobbes. Set against the Satanic mode, an opposing Messianic mode of heroism can be evinced, its paradigm grounded in the incarnate Son of God of Paradise Regained, the revealed Miltonic hero, who is exemplary, if not to a nation, then to Milton's readers, fit though few. Stephen Fallon's reading of Milton's War in Heaven interprets the scene as a battle among the philosophers waged between Milton's angelic-animist materialism and Hobbes's diabolic-mechanist materialism. His analysis briefly but incisively adverts to the antinomy of fraud and force, associating both terms with Satan: “For the unity of strength and wisdom, Satan substitutes the dichotomy of force and fraud (1.121). Fraud and force inform the European epic tradition; the generic archetypes are enshrined in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The alternatives show up, interestingly, in Leviathan” (228-29). Two momentous assertions need to be fleshed out here. Fallon's first claim concerning the “generic archetypes” of Homeric epic accords with Freeman's conclusion that the crude policies of fraud and force drawn upon by Milton's Satan are an exact conjunction of the Homeric and Virgilian epitomes of professed epic content. The basic subject of debate Milton's Satan puts to both diabolic councils in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is to determine upon a strategy of either “op'n Warr or covert guile” (PL 2.41); each term describes the ethical foundations of Homer and Virgil's epics and the conspicuous qualities that define their principal protagonists. The invocations to these formative epics declare as much. The Iliad promises to narrate the havoc of war arising from “the accursed wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus” ( . . . Πηληϊάδεω/ [1.1-2]); the Odyssey sings of the guile of that “many-sided man Odysseus” ( . . . [1.1]); and, in the Aeneid's hero, the Trojan refugee Aeneas, both aspects of Homer's warfaring and wayfaring heroes are fused when the epic exordium pronounces as its theme “arms and the man” (Arma virumque[1.1]). Roman pietas, the central Augustan virtue ethic that the true Roman hero should sacrifice all out of devotion and allegiance to the Imperial state, had allowed Virgil, in his revised account of the sack of Troy, to reassess Achillean rage as proud, selfish savagery and Odyssean resourcefulness as mercenary, slippery wiliness, especially when viewed with pathos from the perspective of the homeless hero “pious Aeneas” and his besieged, defeated, and outraged Trojans. Milton similarly reinterprets the entire code of primitive heroic virtue in classical epic by displacing these Homeric and Virgilian “virtues” onto the deceitful character of Satan and by revaluating and overturning these warrior values against Messianic heroism.3 As John Steadman has noted, Milton attributes to Satan these codes of conventional heroism with the two-fold aim of “discrediting a popular, but inadequate conception of heroic virtue” (Milton's Epic Characters 391) and of effecting a “Copernican revolution” within the epic heroic paradigm, “a literary renversement that overthrows and displaces its predecessors” (Milton xx). Odysseus, the archetypal “Artificer of fraud” (PL 4.121), uses the riddle of “no man” to thwart the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer's subtle hero protects himself with moly in his descent into the underworld, conspires with Nausicaa to procure the ideal conditions by which he might gain King Antinous's hospitality and succor, and, upon Odysseus's homecoming in Ithaca, the cunning hero dissembles as a beggar to test the loyalty of his household, his son Telemachus, and even his wife Penelope. However, in the case of Milton's Satan, his fraudulent tactics, so different from Odysseus's schemes of “constructive” deception, succeed only in spoliation and ruin. To take one example: when Satan, Odysseus-like, departs from hellgate and embarks upon a voyage through the hubbub of Chaos, he makes a pact with the old anarch for safe passage. The terms in which the pact is sealed involve, on Satan's side, a promise not “With purpose to explore or to disturb / The secrets of [Chaos's] Realm” (PL 2.971-72). Chaos has now been reclaimed and overdeveloped by God's consecutive creations of the heaven of heavens, heaven, hell, and the mundane creation, so that there is “little which is left so to defend” (2.1000). No sooner is Satan granted a passport across Chaos's dark abyss than the narrator informs us of Satan's violation of his bargain with Chaos (2.1023-33). Sin and Death construct “a Bridge of wondrous length” (2.1028) that beats a path across the chaotic abyss and grants Satan's pernicious spirits intercourse between earth and hell. Satan's league with Chaos is treacherously broken, and a “Disparted Chaos,” the reader is later informed, “over built exclaimd” (10.416). There is no honor among thieves, for, as Homer's Odysseus dupes Polyphemus, and Virgil's Aeneas plays false with the infatuated queen Dido, neither is the word of Milton's Satan his bond as he denudes Chaos of another slice of his diminishing domain. Fallon's second observation, which makes passing reference to Hobbes's appropriation of fraud and force in his political philosophy, warrants closer inspection. It is probable that Hobbes borrowed the fraud-force collocation quite deliberately from Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses where, in a well-known passage, with his signature pessimism about l'ordine delle cose, the Florentine tenders his blueprint for the ideal worldly prince to combine within himself the might of the lion and the cunning of the fox:4 I take it to be very true, that seldome or never it comes to passe, that men of meane fortunes attaine to any high degrees without force or fraud: unless that dignitie, which a man hath gotten, came to him by gift, or was cast on him by inheritance. Neither doe I thinke, wee ever find, that force alone suffices, but we often see, that guile alone avayles. . . . And I beleeve, that there was never any plac'd in a low condition that ever came to any great dignitie onely by plaine force, and ingenuously; though I grant that by guile alone one well may: . . . And that, which Princes are necessitated to do in the beginnings of their increase, Republiques are likewise forc'd to, till they are become mighty, then force alone suffices. . . . Wherefore we find the Romans in their first growth wanted not that guile, which they had need to make use of, that from low beginnings ayme to mount high, which the more covert it is, is the lesse discommendable, as was this of the Romanes. (Machiavels Discourses 317-21)5 Hobbes was to adapt Machiavelli's antinomy to devastating effect in his Leviathan in a chapter entitled “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery” (74-78). Here Hobbes communicates his famous definition of human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short [solitaria, indigna, bruta et brevis]” (Leviathan 76, sive de Materia 65). Hobbes extends the powers of Machiavelli's prince to include the self-interest of all men and women in a picture of society that, stripped down to its fundamentals, betrays a humanity craving mastery over some commodity that they cannot share. Humanity's elemental natural state is a state conceived of violence, thoroughly inimical, unconscionably pleonectic, so that humans, “in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy or subdue one another” (Leviathan 75). Granting that brute strength alone may be the means to accomplish supremacy, Hobbes cautions, “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself” (Leviathan 74). The presence of the Hobbesian other will always necessitate a primitive, survivalistic struggle for dominance and an interminable cycle of the one pitted against the other, a desperate condition of scheming and striving one against all: “And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation, that is, by force or wiles [vi et dolo] to master the persons of all men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him. And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed” (Leviathan 75, sive de Materia 64). For Hobbes, there can be no licit frame of reference or moral categories for evaluating the justice of one's actions. Necessary ends legitimate the adoption of any and every available means for conquest. In one of the most chilling propositions to be advanced in any political philosophy, Hobbes pushes nominalism to its moral extremity and imagines a nihilistic society in which all are starkly embattled against all: “To this war of every man against every man [bello omnium contra omnis], this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues [Vis et Dolus in Bello Virtutes Cardinales sunt] (Leviathan 78, sive de Materia 65). This radical transvaluation or, some might say, devaluation of values, a privileging of force and fraud to the status of cardinal virtues, constitutes the fundamental Hobbesian principle of existence. The formulation of “force or wiles” has evolved within Hobbes's discourse into a kind of hendiadys, “force and fraud,” an umbrella phrase that envelops the idea of a state of lawlessness in which any underhand or irregular method to secure one's personal paramountcy becomes licit. Hobbes continues: Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct, but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in, though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason. (Leviathan 78) The marginal note accompanying this paragraph concerning humanity's innate propensity to compete, depredate, and possess reads simply, “In such a War, nothing is Unjust.” Hobbes's putative state of nature was, of course, his justification for the necessity of the check and balance of an absolutist regime, yet his radical vision of a depredatory humanity fomented considerable controversy in his own time. Samuel Mintz's reception history of Leviathan reconstructs an early modern world in which “scorn and abuse of Hobbes were the rule, not the exception,” where, in Hobbes's “materialist doctrine, his scepticism of witchcraft, his determinism, his ethical relativism, his ‘low,’ pessimistic view of human nature,” Renaissance critics “found him a prime example of the philosopher whose doctrines are wrong in themselves and dangerous to the public welfare” (151-52). Milton shared these misgivings, if we are to credit the information that his widow, Elizabeth Minshull, gave in conversation with John Aubrey that “Mr. Hobbs was not one of [Milton's] acquaintance: [tha]t her husband did not like him at all: but he would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts, a learned man. Their Interests & tenets were diametrically [opposite]” (Darbishire 7). Milton, then, whose eyesight was waning, if not nearly extinguished, when Leviathan emerged into print in 1651, some sixteen years before the publication of Paradise Lost, seems to have apprised himself of the contents of this worldview of the “monster of Malmesbury,” perhaps by having choice portions of Hobbes's major treatise read aloud to him.6 Few would dispute the existence of strong correspondences in thought between the philosophies of unqualified ambition and egoism of both Niccolò Machiavelli and his intellectual successor, Thomas Hobbes. Mintz's study associates Machiavelli's thought-world with that of Hobbes when he documents how “[i]n the heroic drama of the period the Hobbist was presented as a rebel, usurper, tyrant, or Machiavellian, and he expressed, either by word or deed, a point of view loosely adopted from the Leviathan, and largely distorted” (137-38). Mintz might almost have been writing about Milton's Satan. Certainly Milton was fully acquainted with the thought of Machiavelli: the young Milton's Commonplace Book is littered with references to Machiavelli's Discourses and Art of War, in which Machiavelli justified tyrannicide or championed the institution of a republic over that of a monarchy (CPW 1: 456, 477). Machiavelli's preference for republicanism aside, Milton's attitude toward the cold-faced Florentine, as in his opinion of Hobbes, would appear to be skeptical, to say the least. Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric presents a persuasive case for Satan as “a skillful orator and casuist, who uses rhetorical force and fraud to wheedle and coerce his fellow fallen angels” (209). Yet Kahn further advances “a rhetoric of indifference” wherein, not only Satanic resourcefulness, but even Milton's justification of the ways of God to men and the conditions of God's virtue or virtù, stigmatized by Satan, themselves operate upon Machiavellian premises (210; cf. 171-84). According to Kahn, “Milton's Machiavellian defense against the force and fraud of the Machiavel,” rather than asserting merely “that force and fraud are simply evil,” maintains instead that “the possibility of deception means that appearances must be interpreted, and that the activity of interpretation is itself an occasion of free will” (231). By Kahn's estimation, the resultant unstable concept of “virtue must be denaturalized so that it no longer appears as an object of perception but rather as an activity of interpretation” (231). Kahn's hermeneutic of indifference proposes that “Milton thus uses what contemporaries stigmatized as the Machiavellian indeterminacy of language, its potential for force and fraud, as an argument for free will” (234). Her thesis rests upon the assumption that attendant upon “the conflation of truth and the realm of things indifferent is the suggestion that the exercise of Christian virtue may be inseparable from a self-aggrandizing stereotypically Machiavellian virtù” (235). In my reading of the poem, I find neither the aporia characteristic of Kahn's reading of Paradise Lost nor the inherent interpretive instabilities that derive from her posited rhetoric of indifference. Although such a dualism is somewhat unfashionable critically, to my mind the poetry instead bears out a far less ambiguous or ambivalent relationship between, on the one hand, the virtue of Milton's God, his Son, and his angels, and, on the other, the Machiavellian virtù of fraud and force displayed by Satan and his minions; rather, the poem seems to insist upon a more defined polarity between the virtue of Milton's God and the virtù of his Satan than Kahn subscribes to. Milton's major poetry, as we will see, is rigorous in its application of force and fraud as terms indicative of the deviousness of Satanic policy. This Satanic pattern of fraud and force is not isolable to Milton's diffuse and brief epics. Milton's defense of the regicide, Eikonoklastes (1649), shows itself to be far from indifferent in its ascription of Satanic fraud and force to Charles I's methods of attempting to regain and secure power in the turbulent First and Second Civil Wars. During the First Civil War (1642-46), Charles had lost the day despite his implementation of force on the battlefields of Marston Moor, Naseby, and Langport. In the period between the wars, during which Charles initially surrendered himself into the hands of the Scottish Presbyterian army at Newark and was later confined to Carisbrooke Castle, the King's clandestine negotiations exhibited a contemptible use of fraud—intriguing with the Irish and the French, conspiring to foment an English Catholic insurrection by liaising with the Pope, and playing, one against the other, the Parliamentary, Scottish Presbyterian, and Independent factions. Next, during the Second Civil War (1648), Charles struck up a stealthy bargain with the Scots and promised three years of English Presbyterianism in exchange for an abetted restoration to the throne. Milton's language for Charles's policy in Eikonoklastes is strictly Satanic in its comparison between Charles's measures, first of force during the First Civil War, and then of fraud throughout the intervening time period and the Second Civil War: “What providence deny'd to force, [the King] thought it might grant to fraud, which he stiles Prudence: But Providence was not couzen'd with disguises, neither outward nor inward” (CPW 3: 545). Fashioned by Milton's polemic, Charles becomes an unadorned and consummate Machiavel, hazarding by fraud that success which eludes his grasp by force. In the closing chapters of Eikonoklastes, Milton advises those readers who have resisted the force of the royal party neither to fall at the last stand and be deceived by the seductive words of the Eikon Basilike nor to be an “Image-doting rabble” (601) beguiled by William Marshall's frontispiece depicting Charles as a royal martyr. He deplores the notion that “they should deliver up themselves to these glozing words and illusions of him, whose rage and utmost violence they have sustain'd, and overcomm so nobly” (582); and in his peroration he warns the reader against seduction by the King's “cunning words” and, above all, to resist being “inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib'd with a new device of the Kings Picture” (600-01). The fraud-force pattern is discernible in Milton's poetry as early as his epyllion on the Gunpowder Plot, In Quintum Novembris (c. 1626). In this poem, Satan, in the guise of a monk, steals into the Pope's bedchamber in Rome on St. Peter's Eve and instills in the papal imagination the idea of committing actions of fraud, rather than force, against King James I and the English “heretics”: Nec tamen hunc bellis et aperto Marte lacesses, Irritus ille labor, tu callidus utere fraude, Quaelibet haereticis disponere retia fas est. [Do not challenge this enemy nation with wars or in open engagement—that would be a useless labor—be cunning, use fraud; it is right to deploy any snare you can against heretics.] The collocation resurfaces in A Maske, which was performed on 29 September 1634, and was then published in Milton's Poems late in 1645. The Attendant Spirit describes the harm that Comus causes as being accomplished “Through the force, and through the wile / Of unblest inchanter vile” (906-07). Susanne Woods appears to evoke this collocation of terms in her description of the Lady, whose “virtue is assaulted, and she not only stands firm but actively asserts it in the face of guile and force” (25). John Shawcross, writing on Milton's Ludlow masque, compares the diabolic Comus's calculated series of offensives upon the Lady with Satan's temptations of Jesus both in Paradise Regained and in the Lukan temptation narrative. Shawcross also sketches the increasing intensity of Comus's three assaults upon the Lady. According to his reading, there are two assaults by fraud, first in Comus's proffering a charmed glass of cordial, and second in his argument against virginity and Nature's “waste fertility” (729). One final assault follows, this time by force, in the Lady's paralysis and her near rape. Comus proffers a drink to ease the Lady's thirst—a rendering of the first temptation of necessity in Luke; next he admonishes that the earth's riches and beauty must not be hoarded and the Lady should partake of them—a rendering of the second temptation of wealth and glory by fraud in Luke; and finally he employs a form of the third temptation of violence in Luke by immobilizing her in a chair with overtures that would lead to sexual rape. (Shawcross 143) In Milton's mature poetry, fraud and force operate expansively and consistently as a prevalent motif in connection with Satan's machinations. Satan's negotiation of the twin methods of overt “force” and covert “fraud” permeates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The precise vocabulary governing each stratagem of hell may vary slightly–“power,”“war,”“might,” and “violence” instead of “force,” or “subtlety,”“guile,”“solicitation,” and “wiles” instead of “fraud.” Nevertheless, there is an unerring consistency in Milton's charting of these two principal modes of Satanic seduction. Let us first consider the use of “force” and “fraud” as the reader encounters these terms throughout the chronology of Paradise Lost's epic action. When read against fraud and force, Satan's heroic model stems from the heroic virtues of the Western tradition, the prototypical Achillean force and Odyssean fraud of primitive epic, and again from Milton's antipathy toward the anomie of Machiavellian and Hobbesian natural law. Early in the epic chronology of Paradise Lost, during the War in Heaven, the rebel angels are pictured taking envy at the sight of Messiah and “by force or fraud / Weening to prosper” (6.794-95). In the matter of fraud, Satan implements wily devices to justify “the suggested cause” for waging war against God and, to convince one third of the angelic company to rebel, casts between them “Ambiguous words and jealousies, to sound / Or taint integritie” (5.702-04). Diabolic war stratagems on the second day of battle intermix force and fraud so that the devils “weend / That self same day by fight, or by surprize / To win the Mount of God” (6.86-88). Satan buries “in hollow Cube . . . devilish Enginrie . . . To hide the fraud” (6.552-55) of his pernicious cannonry. However, Satan's essential method against God is an open demonstration of hostilities, rebelling in plain sight against God and brazenly fighting in the name of “The strife of Glorie” (6.290). The energy of battle is a vainglorious show of force on Satan's part and a mounting turmoil that results from Satan's inventions “more forcible” (6.465), namely his gunpowder and artillery. After the fall of the rebel angels, Satan's diabolic council convenes to determine an alternative offensive against God, “by what best way, / Whether of op'n Warr or covert guile” (PL 2.40-41). Bellicose Moloch, the first devil to speak, heartily advocates “op'n Warr: Of Wiles, / More unexpert, I boast not” (51-52), but Belial proposes “flat despair” (143), since by “force or guile” (188) the devils cannot realistically hope to coerce an omnipresent and omniscient God. Mammon, the third debater, sides with Belial in preferring the working of “ease out of pain” (261) to a pursuit “By force impossible” (250). It requires the smooth political graft of Beelzebub, Satan's proxy, to steer the debate back to the fundamental question of the favored method of temptation against Adam and Eve, “how attempted best, / By force or suttlety” (357-58)? Satan, through his instrument Beelzebub, dictates his preference for the most expeditious method available, either by forceful devastation and violent enslavement, or by fraudulent seduction: . . . either with Hell fire To waste his whole Creation, or possess All as our own, and drive as wee were driven, The punie habitants, or if not drive, Seduce them to our Party. The concilium diabolorum, then, establishes the boundaries to Satanic initiative as force and fraud. Milton seems to have been against the devil's party and to have known it. Some of Milton's angels resist, or anticipate resisting, Satan's onslaughts of force and fraud. God commends Abdiel for withstanding the “Universal reproach” (PL 6.34) of Satan and the rebel angels, and contrasts Satan's reproach of God with his show of force in the War in Heaven. The insidious case against God that Satan presents before Abdiel runs that it is “far worse to beare / Then violence” (34-35) since it is the “easier conquest . . . to subdue / By force” (37, 40-41). Abdiel confirms this position before Satan, deeming it “just, / That he who in debate of Truth hath won, / Should win in Arms, in both disputes alike Victor” (121-24). The Son predicts no such victory for Adam and Eve, who will “Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd / With his own folly” (PL 3.152-53). What is perhaps most startling about God the Father and the Son's words, both here and in the heavenly council of Book 3, is the revelation that they are fully aware of the operation of Satanic fraud and force against humanity, and that they seem to connive (in the Miltonic, Latinate sense of connivere or “blink”) at Satan's purposes. In line with the high value Milton's Arminian, libertarian epic places upon the principle of freedom either to stand or fall, even for fallen angels (who can fall deeper still), Paradise Lost espouses a doctrine of permissive evil. God's providence must not impinge on creaturely voluntarism for the theodical justification of God's ways to persuade readers who are declared to be “Authors to themselves in all” (3.122). Satan cannot even raise his head from hell's floor without “the will / And high permission of all-ruling Heaven” (1.211-12), and Sin and Death's causeway goes ahead by “the will of Heav'n” (2.1025). Whether one wishes to adopt the Empsonian view and deduce from this that Milton's God is a sadist is perhaps to take a bridge too far. During the separation scene, Eve, feeling slighted by her husband, champions her self-sufficiency and questions the goodness of a God who would leave man “In narrow circuit strait'nd by a Foe, / Suttle or violent” (9.323-24). The Godhead, however, is provident about the temporal limitations set upon Satanic and inhuman fraud and force, and God the Father anticipates a state of perfection at the end of the race of time when, alluding to 1 Corinthians 15.28, God will receive all the virtuous saints into himself and “God shall be all in all” (3.341). The Father and the Son know that fraud is the only viable strategy open to Satan against prelapsarian Adam and Eve because force is, for the happy couple, resistible. Adam and Eve, like the unfallen warring angels, have had no experience of pain or death and are immune to Satanic violence, although they are not safe from fraud. When engaging Raphael to forewarn Adam and Eve, God advises the sociable angel to admonish Adam about the risk to his happiness of a Satanic assault “By violence, no, for that shall be withstood, / But by deceit and lies” (PL 5.242-43). Prior to her fall, Eve debates, in two unrhyming tercets, Satan's effectiveness in deploying force and then fraud. She first reasons with Adam along the same lines that, because their immortality renders them impervious to force
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