A Poem to the Unknown God: Samson Agonistes and Negative Theology
2008; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1094-348x.2008.00181.x
ISSN1094-348X
Autores Tópico(s)Indian History and Philosophy
ResumoGod is unknowable either in this world or in the world to come, for in this respect every creature is darkness. [. . .] God is known to God alone. Samson Agonistes is a dark, painful, and difficult work. Among its highlights are a character who kills with astonishing efficiency, and others who defend that killing as the will of God while celebrating the terrifying deaths of the enemies. In a day and age in which God is once again invoked to justify war and its accompanying horrific episodes of brutality, vengeance, and devastation, can a work which includes the killing of those described as “Infidel[s]” (221)1 be read with anything like sympathy? How can we understand Milton's portrayal of Samson's violence and justifications for violence? Each of Milton's works can and should be read in relation to the entire body of his work; however, in the case of Samson Agonistes, contextual reading becomes even more important. Considered in terms of the date of first publication and the order of printing, Samson is the last of the great works. As such, Samson Agonistes, to be properly understood, needs to be considered in the light of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The three works form a literary triptych, a three-paneled painting of God, or more properly ideas of God, in which the two shorter works continually reference and comment on each other as well as on the great epic. As I have recently argued, Paradise Lost presents its image of God as an object of criticism, while Paradise Regained presents the Son as both a new positive image, and as a negation and rejection of the Father's image (Bryson, passim). Samson Agonistes also functions as a negation, though it does not present any image of deity whatsoever. That refusal (not failure) to present an image of God in Samson Agonistes is the primary source of the work's power, and the center of its critique of those whose religious certitude enables them to engage in and/or excuse violence of the most brutal and horrific nature. Milton creates a portrait of what results from acting with the appearance of certainty, but without its actual presence or substance. In other words, Milton's Samson does not present an occasion for celebration, but an occasion for doubt, reflection, and the realization that we may not truly know what we think we know, especially if what we think we know is the mind and will of an absent, unnamable, and unknowable God. According to Joseph Wittreich, “the Samson story functions as a warning prophecy, an oracular threat, that would avert the disaster it announces and contravene the situation it seems to court” (Interpreting xii). Milton, after crafting the Son's rejection of politics and violence in Paradise Regained, is not presenting us with a Samson whose primary talent is killing people in order to recommend him; rather, as Wittreich goes on to argue, “Milton casts the Samson story as a tragedy, exemplifying through its protagonist what not to do” (16). Milton's great works are engaged in an extended poetic and theological meditation on the differences between God and ideas of God. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes form a chain of affirmations and negations, a series of representations of God that are successively dismantled. In essence, Milton's great poetic works are vividly imagined presentations of one of the central problems in Western theology—the tension between the God with qualities and the God without qualities, the “Gods” of cataphatic and apophatic, positive and negative theologies. This tension, most notably presented in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, can be described as a continuous process of affirmation and negation, a “yes, but no” approach to trying to understand that which, ultimately, is beyond human understanding. The “yes, but no” pattern posits and then negates qualities (Goodness, Being, Righteousness, etc.) that might be used to understand the divine. It is for this reason, I believe, that Samson Agonistes is printed with Paradise Regained, and printed in the second and final position. Samson Agonistes is the negation of the affirmations made in Paradise Regained. The short epic is the “yes,” while the play is the “but no” of Milton's poetic pairing.2 The essential pattern of affirmation and negation is established by Pseudo-Dionysius in his works the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology.3 Dionysius starts with “the most important name, ‘Good’ ” (DN 68), and makes a case for an understanding of the divine that emerges from what he calls “the processions of God” (DN 68). For Dionysius, these “processions” (Good, Being, Wisdom, Truth, etc.) must be understood in causal terms, that is, in terms of God as the Cause of Goodness, Being, Wisdom, and Truth as they manifest in creatures and the created world. What Dionysius outlines is an inductive approach to the divine, reasoning from the manifestation to the cause thereof, from the observable instance to the unobserved (and unobservable) principle or cause.4 Much like Milton's “ways of God to men,” Dionysius's “processions of God,”5 are the observable effects of the divine as translated into human terms—the conceivable and categorizable “aspects” and “actions” by which human beings are able to represent God to themselves in the world. The words we use to speak about God only point to that which we cannot truly speak, capture, sum up, or define in human terms. For Dionysius, the “words we use about God [. . .] must not be given the human sense” (DN 106). In fact, we must withdraw the words we use about God almost as soon as they are uttered. We can do no more—no matter what name, quality, or combination of names and qualities we use—than point to our own inability to truly describe and understand the divine: [W]e use the names Trinity and Unity for that which is in fact beyond every name, calling it the transcendent being above every being. But no unity or trinity, no number or oneness, no fruitfulness, indeed, nothing that is or is known can proclaim that hiddenness beyond every mind and reason of the transcendent Godhead which transcends every being. (DN 129) Thus, we require negation, or apophatic theology, not merely as a correction to, but in a fuller sense as a complement to the affirmations of more traditional cataphatic or positive theology. Negation also serves as a necessary safeguard against idolatry, against making idols of our own cherished images and ideas.6 Negation is necessary because it reminds us that our images and our concepts are not identical to that to which they merely point. In Dionysius's words, “the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming” (MT 139); thus it is imperative to remember that the divine is “beyond intellect” and that as we approach it “we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing” (MT 139). From this negative or apophatic perspective, what we say about “God” says little or nothing about the divine itself, but it speaks volumes about us, and the ways in which we understand and categorize our experiences of the world. The divine as it actually “is,” is “beyond every assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it” (MT 141). Dionysian ideas were available to Milton and to his contemporaries (an English translation of the Mystical Theology was published in 1653),7 though due in part to the controversy surrounding the authorship and dating of the texts, they were viewed with suspicion by such reformers as Luther (post-1516) and Calvin.8 Though Luther, in his early work Dictata super Psalterium (Lessons on the Psalms—generally dated between 1513 and 1515), sounds remarkably at one with Pseudo-Dionysius,9 in his later work, he seems to reject Dionysian ideas.10 However, the basic insight of Pseudo-Dionysius—that images and concepts of God, the realm of “thinking and speaking,” must finally be regarded as lesser than that which lies within “the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing” (DN137)—is one that Luther shares.11 In On the Bondage of the Will, Luther describes a second and much more radical sense of hiddenness as a distinction between God preached (the word of God, as revealed in scripture and in the crucified Jesus) and God hidden (the inscrutable will of the unknowable God). Luther argues that Erasmus revealed his ignorance “by not making any distinction between God preached and God hidden, that is, between the word of God and God himself.” Though Luther goes on to argue that humans must “pay attention to the word and leave that inscrutable will alone” (Rupp and Watson 201), the distinction between God and “God-for-us” is as clear in Luther as it is in Pseudo-Dionysius. The Milton who declares in De Doctrina Christiana that “God, as he really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone his understanding” (CPW 6: 133),12 would have had no trouble agreeing with the basic Dionysian and Lutheran idea of God as hidden and unknowable. In fact, as Michael Lieb has recently argued, “For Milton, the whole project of attempting to know God is already called into question by the fact of God's hiddenness” (Theological 77).13 But Milton moves past Luther's first sense of God's hiddenness, and comes directly to the more radical—and Dionysian—sense, as is evidenced by his refusal ever fully to portray in his poetry the “humiliated and crucified Jesus” that Luther finds indispensable. Rather than present such an image of Jesus, what Milton offers are iconoclastic poems that regard the divine, as it actually is, as “beyond every assertion and denial.” In his three great poetic works, Milton tries to refocus his readers beyond the visible, constrainable, and definable in order to sweep away old concretized images of the divine, idols—even that of a “humiliated and crucified Jesus”—which have become impediments to understanding that all anyone (poet or preacher, ruler or ruled) can do is make “assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it.” And, it is in this context that we can—and I believe should—understand the violence and the justifications offered for violence in Samson Agonistes. Here we must backtrack briefly in order to put Samson Agonistes into context. In pursuing his stated goal to “assert Eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to men,” Milton posits two conceptual models of divinity—the Father and the Son. Milton's work, of course, explores various understandings of and perspectives on those two models. Paradise Lost alone contains several passages where different—even contradictory—ideas of the divine are expressed. For example, the invocation to light in Book 3 contains several possible ways of imagining, understanding, and describing the divine; other useful examples include the devils' perspectives from Books 1 and 2 on their now-sworn enemy, Raphael's observation about the Father's mixing “destruction with creation” in his conversation with Adam, and Adam and Eve's darkly foreboding prayer that they receive only good from God. Each of these constructions of the deity says more about the one constructing it than it does about the deity itself, and each of these constructions is contradicted or negated almost as soon as it is made. Why? Negation, the project I see Milton undertaking in his great poems, requires—as a complement, as a co-laborer, if you will—proliferation.14 Milton pushes this dynamic nearly to the breaking point, proliferating divine images and characteristics in order to erase or contradict them, asserting, then negating, multiple images of “Eternal Providence,” the phrase that serves Milton as a way of speaking about a God beyond “God,” a divinity beyond all images and concepts that can only be pointed towards, never captured or summed up, in such terms. The Father is drawn as a king, a deliverer of (often self-justifying) speeches, a passible or emotionally moveable character who expresses anger (in Book 3) and derision (in Book 5),15 and who shows a remarkable concern with power, glory, and obedience (paid to him) within a hierarchical order. But just as for Pseudo-Dionysius, so also for Milton, “God, as he really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone his understanding” (CPW6: 133); by definition, the character of the Father in Paradise Lost is neither beyond “man's imagination” (having, in fact, been imagined by a man—Milton), nor “his understanding” (having been created by a human author, and analyzed by countless human readers and writers since). The Father is an image, a symbol, and exists well within the limits of a limited, and positive (in the sense of positing) theology. From the externality of the Father in Paradise Lost, Milton takes us to the opposite extreme of the internality of the Son in Paradise Regained. In Paradise Regained, Milton presents the Son as distancing himself from nearly everything that had defined the “divinity” of the Father: kingship, military power, and the receiving of endless rounds of praise and obedience delivered during days “spent / In song and dance about the sacred hill” ([PL] 5.618-19). Where the Father demands public appreciation, the Son seeks solitude and private contemplation. Where the Father's idea of reign is reflected nowhere so well as in his ultimatum in Paradise Lost 5.600-15 (“Hear all ye Angels, Progeny of Light, / Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, / Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand . . .”), the Son's idea of reign could not be more different. The kingdom is to be found within; the kingdom is of the inner man. For the Son, nations are guided, not by military force or by monarchical authority, but by “saving Doctrine,” by the power of the “inward oracle” ([PR] 1.463) to guide each individual to truth. Such guidance is an affair of the inner man, having little or nothing to do with the shows and trappings of a secular and clerical government that “o'er the body only reigns / And oft by force” (2.478-79). Finally, where the Father emphasizes externality, the Son emphasizes internality. It is to highlight this negation of the external that the Son returns, not to his Father's house and a heavenly, and therefore public and universal throne, but to “his mother's house private” (4.639) at the end of Paradise Regained. But at this point, rather than being merely a negation of the external, the Son is more powerfully an affirmation of the internal—a new model, a new image of the divine. Every affirmation is limited, pointing to something that cannot be contained, or fully defined and understood, in the human language and ideas used to make the affirmation. The more ingenious the affirmation, in fact, the more radical will be the breakdown when the limits of affirmation are reached. In Dionysius's terms, as “we take flight upward,” and go higher and higher in attempts to describe the indescribable affirmatively, “we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing” (MT 139). Considered in this light, Samson Agonistes is a marvelous illustration of the limits and the dangers of the affirmations made in Paradise Regained. Though the Son as negation moves beyond the image of the Father, the Son as affirmation is another image—only this time, the image is not “God as King” but “God as Everyman” (or God in Everyman). Resting here, without moving beyond this new affirmation, without continuing to the “but no” in relation to this new “yes,” is perhaps even more dangerous than simply remaining with the earlier “yes” that posited kingship and military power to the divine. If any action can be explained as the result of divine guidance from the “inward oracle” ([PR] 1.403), and the “spirit of truth” (1.402) that dwells within, then what is to prevent this reasoning from being used to justify violence, up to, and including, killing? This is the situation that the reader is presented with in Samson Agonistes. Samson claims divine warrant for otherwise unspeakable actions. Samson claims to act, as the Son claims to act, from an internal ground. What the Son refers to in Paradise Regained as listening to an “inward oracle” (1.463), Samson describes as responding to an “intimate impulse.” In explaining (excusing?) why he had a taste for Philistine women, Samson argues that his actions are, in their origin and motivation, God's actions: “what I motioned was of God; I knew / From intimate impulse” (222-23). Samson's father, Manoa, confirms that Samson had made this claim earlier: “thou did'st plead / Divine impulsion prompting how thou might'st / Find some occasion to infest our Foes” (421-23). Both expressions use causal language—God is posited as the efficient cause of the actions that play themselves out in the world through Samson (as the material cause). God is claimed to provide the motion (“what I motioned was of God”) and/or the impulse that powers the motion (“Divine impulsion”). What is especially interesting about Samson's claim, delivered in the context of describing his motives for wedding the Philistine woman from Timna, is how radically Milton's depiction differs from that of the Book of Judges. As Feisal Mohamed has recently written (though in the context of Milton's construction of Samson's dialogue with Harapha), when Milton “departs completely from his biblical sources” this “suggests that this portion of the drama is particularly significant to his view of the Samson story” (330). Milton's Samson delivers the claim of divine impulsion himself; a reader has only Samson's word that “what I motioned was of God” (222). In Judges, the claim of divine direction for Samson's choice comes directly from the narrative voice: “But his father and his mother knew not that it was of the LORD, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines” (Judg. 14.4). While the dramatic form of Samson Agonistes demands that someone speak this line, Milton's choice of genre neither excuses Samson, nor validates his claims. It is quite the opposite—in choosing to present Samson's story in dramatic form, Milton focuses our attention on the subjective and potentially unreliable nature of his Samson's claim to divine impulsion. What Judges establishes as truth, Milton's Samson Agonistes opens to doubt and skepticism.16 Like Samson, the Son claims that his actions are God's actions, though in a sense far more complicated than Samson's. For the Son in Paradise Lost, true divinity is only to be found within, through obedience to an inner voice, an inward oracle. In Paradise Regained, the Son and Satan have diametrically opposed views on what constitutes obedience to an inner voice; in fact, the Son rebukes Satan for making a claim that, at first, sounds very similar to that of Samson's claim of “intimate impulse.” In reference to the Father, Satan says “what he bids I do” (1.377). The Son's withering response reveals a vital distinction between his “inward oracle” and Samson's “intimate impulse”—fear (and its frequent companions, violence and revenge). “Wilt thou impute to obedience what thy fear / Extorts[?]” (1.422-23). Just as he does at 1.223, where he expresses his preference to “make persuasion do the work of fear,” the Son here regards actions taken out of fear (or out of the desire to create fear in others) as contemptible, like the actions of Satan who once “fawn'd, and cring'd, and servilely ador'd / Heav'n's awful Monarch” ([PL] 4.959-60). Actions taken out of fear or a desire for revenge do not have their source in an “inward oracle” no matter how often or how loudly the claim of “intimate impulse” or “Divine impulsion” is made. A truly internal connection to the divine, an “inner light” or a sense of the divine within is a refuge from fear, not a cover for or sublimation of fear. The Son's “obedience” is not rendered out of fear, nor is it an elaborate embroidering of violent and vengeful actions; rather, the Son's continual rejection of the kinds of earthly power (offered by Satan) that would enable such violent and vengeful actions makes the opposite case. While both the Son and Samson argue that their actions are prompted by the divine within, it is, to paraphrase Matthew, by their fruits that you will know them. What are the results of the claims of the Son and Samson to divine warrant for their actions? And, what can be gleaned from those results about their respective motives? In asking these questions, I, of course, am foregrounding the very external factors that Stanley Fish's argument seeks to minimize. For Fish, Samson Agonistes presents a world in which “Ultimate effects, which would provide a true standard of judgment, are known only to God; we can neither act by calculating them, nor evaluate actions as if we were cognizant of them. From the human vantage point, only intention is capable of being unambiguous” (427). However, when viewed in terms of questions about results (the visible effects Fish argues that Samson is indifferent to), the differences between the claims (and perhaps the motives) of the Son and Samson are clear. Where the Son “unobserved / Home to his mother's house private returned” ([PR] 4.638-39), seeking to “make persuasion do the work of fear” (1.223) in attempting to deliver the people, Samson does quite the opposite—moving, not only out into the Israelite world, but into the world of the Philistines, using “fear” (and violence) to do the work of “persuasion.” Far from seeking out the obscurity of a “mother's house,” Samson seeks an audience for and makes a grand show of everything he does. Even Samson's death is described, after the fact, in a way that drives home the differences between himself and the Son as Miltonic characters. Manoa announces his intention to “fetch him hence and solemnly attend / With silent obsequy and funeral train / Home to his Father's house.” There, Manoa will build him a “Monument” where all his “Trophies [will be] hung, and Acts enroll'd / In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song” (1731-37). Young Israelite men of future generations will see this great monument and be inspired to be like Samson: these young men shall “from his memory inflame thir breasts / To matchless valor, and adventures high” (1739-40), while the young women, far from being disturbed by the body count Samson left in his wake, will only mourn “His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice” (1743). At this level, that of preferring public glory to the trials and satisfactions of private life, the ending of Samson Agonistes is reminiscent of nothing so much as it is of the Iliad. Samson, though neither “swift-footed” nor a “breaker of horses” is certainly qualified for a modified Homeric epithet like “killer of Philistines”; Samson, like Satan in Paradise Lost, is presented as a kind of classical battle hero. Like Achilles, Samson is presented with a choice between an inglorious life and a glorious death, and like Achilles, Samson chooses the latter. Had Milton revisited Samson in a later work—in the way Homer revisited Achilles—Samson may well have learned a variant of the heartbreaking lesson that Achilles expresses in the Odyssey: that it would be better to be alive, even as a slave, than to be king among the dead. Samson might have learned this lesson, though I doubt it. There is more humanity in Achilles than appears in Samson. Samson's lesson would more likely be modeled on Milton's Satan: “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n” ([PL] 1.263). Samson could not, in fact, be more different from the Son as presented in Paradise Regained. Aside, in fact, from their respective claims to internality as connection to the divine, the Son and Samson resemble each other almost not at all. By far the more profound resemblances are to be found between Samson and Satan. Where Paradise Lost embodies a God concerned with power, and—to no small degree—revenge, Samson Agonistes shows us the effects of belief in such a deity on the humans who imagine the divine in such a way by worshiping, in the terms of Gerrard Winstanley, “[their] own imagination, which is the devil” (qtd. in Hill141). If in Paradise Lost, “War wearied hath performed what war can do” (6.695), in Samson Agonistes war and violence are presented as the near-permanent mode of human existence and of (mis)understanding the divine. “Pale, ire, envy, and despair” ([PL] 4.115) are Samson's emotions as much as they are Satan's. Samson is introduced as a character who bemoans his fallen state: he suffers from “restless thoughts, that [. . .] present / Times past, what once I was and what am now” (19, 21-22). Like Satan, Samson is weighed down by a sense of loss—first and foremost, the loss of his own former glory: O wherefore was my birth from Heaven foretold Twice by an Angel [. . .] Why was my breeding order'd and prescrib'd As of a person separate to God, design'd for great exploits; if I must die Betray'd, Captiv'd, and both my Eyes put out, Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze; To grind in Brazen Fetters under task With this Heav'n-gifted strength? O glorious strength Put to the labor of a Beast, debas't Lower than bondslave! Satan provides the model for Samson's complaint: “O Sun [. . .] how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphere” ([PL] 4.37-39). Samson's complaint goes on to echo Satan's sense of his own blameworthiness—”Nay curs'd be thou; since against his thy will / Chose freely what it now so justly rues” (4.71-72)—when he says, “Whom have I to complain of but myself?” (46). Samson's outwardly greater piety (at least when compared to Satan's rather low level of piety) might seem to get him off the hook of the Satanic comparison I am making here. After all, he expresses a concern not to “quarrel with the will / Of highest dispensation” (60-61), does he not? But immediately thereafter, he reenters, and brings to its highest pitch, his “Pale, ire, envy, and despair” mode (one can only imagine what Samson would look like to the eyes of Uriel, as the blind strongman certainly goes through an extremity of negative emotions, “more than could befall / Spirit of happy sort” ([PL] 4.127-28). In grieving his blindness, Samson reaches a level of despair that, in all of Milton's works, is perhaps most closely matched by Satan.17 Making reference to “all my miseries; / So many, and so huge, that each apart / Would ask a life to wail” (64-66), Samson goes on to describe his blindness as “worse than chains, / Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age” (68-69). Samson does not merely suffer his blindness, he is his blindness—so thoroughly and completely does Samson inhabit the darkness that blindness has cast him into, that he, like Nicholas of Cusa's “every creature,” quite literally “is darkness” (127). Samson's blindness is, in fact, a wonderful illustration of the creaturely darkness Nicholas of Cusa insists is the effect of being unable either to comprehend “infinite light,” or the “God [that] is known to God alone” (127). The wages of this darkness is death. Being blind is, for Samson, “To live a life half dead, a living death” (100), and even more dramatically (and Satanically), Samson describes himself as carrying death inside him: Myself my Sepulcher, a moving Grave, Buried, yet not exempt By privilege of death and burial From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs, But made hereby obnoxious more To all the miseries of life, Life in captivity Among inhuman foes. Satan's despair, and sense of himself as identical to the pain he suffers, is remarkably similar: Me miserable! Which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n. Samson is his own grave “Myself my Sepulcher” and Satan is his own hell “myself am Hell”: Samson—The man of action whose solution to every problem is violence (or threats of violence—see his impotent taunting of Harapha at 1109-29) Samson is almost nothing like the Son of Paradise Regained who once felt that his “Spirit aspir'd to victorious deeds” and “heroic acts” to “subdue and quell o'er all the earth / Brute violence and proud Tyrannic pow'r” (1.215-20). Unlike the Son, who develops to the point that he “held it [. . .] more heavenly” to “make persuasion do the work of fear” (1.221, 223), Samson never breaks out of this mode of thinking and acting. For Samson, just as for Satan in Paradise Lost, his own “right hand / Shall teach [him] highest deeds, by proof to try / Who is [his] equal” (5.864-66). Where Paradise Regained embodies a Son who rejects temporal means to temporal power, Samson Agonistes gives us a human “hero” who is much like the superhuman hero of Paradise Lost, the Satan who embraced violence as a tool in both rebellion and reign. The very language of the scenes in which Samson is recognized (“O change beyond report, thought, or belief”[117]; “O miserable change!”[340]) suggests the language employed in hell: “If thou beest he; but O how fallen! how changed . . .” ([PL] 1.84). Samson is Satan on a human scale, claiming to fight for freedom while, in reality, seeking to “oppress . . . oppressors” (232-33), and in the process, becoming the very thing he fought against. Samson even speaks in the political and philosophical vernacular of the devils of Paradise Lost: when he criticizes those Israelites who love “Bondage with ease more than strenuous liberty” (271), he echoes the style of Mammon, who preferred “Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp” (2.256-57). Samson is Milton's warning of what can and will go wrong with violent rebellion. Killing sets no one free, and the self-appointed avenger drowns in the very blood-dimmed tide he sets loose upon the world. Looking back from the vantage point of a revolution that ultimately failed, Milton writes a
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