- 标题：The Politics of 'Paradise Lost'
- 作者：Katie Kadue
- 发表日期：2025年8月20日
- 发表平台：The Chronicle of Higher Education
- 版块：The Review | Essay
文章主要内容
- 主题：探讨约翰·弥尔顿的史诗《失乐园》在政治、文化和宗教方面的争议及其在不同时代的解读。
- 背景：2024年12月，学者Orlando Reade关于《失乐园》的著作被《纽约客》贬低，引发了关于弥尔顿作品政治化解读的争议。
- 核心观点：
- Reade的书探讨了从18世纪至今《失乐园》的"革命性后世"，分析了不同历史人物对这首诗的解读，包括威廉·华兹华斯、马尔科姆·X和约旦·彼得森等。
- 这些解读既有偏见也有选择性，但Reade展示了这首诗如何激发了关于自由、反抗、女权主义和白人至上主义等思想的讨论。
- 《纽约客》的批评家认为"政治化"《失乐园》是可耻的，甚至将其与撒旦联系在一起。
- Alan Jacobs的《Paradise Lost: A Biography》则从更温和的角度探讨了《失乐园》的政治化，认为这种政治化更多地是将其驯化为温和的自由主义，而不是激发叛乱。
- 文章还讨论了弥尔顿的基督教观点，尤其是他的自由意志论和一元论，这些观点对理解《失乐园》至关重要，但Jacobs在书中并未充分探讨。
- 作者指出，弥尔顿的诗歌和神学观点常常被忽视或简化，而这些观点正是《失乐园》意义丰富的原因。
文章结构
- 引言：通过提及Orlando Reade的书被《纽约客》贬低的事件，引出《失乐园》在政治解读上的争议。
- 主体：
- 第一部分：讨论Reade的书如何分析不同人物对《失乐园》的解读，以及这些解读如何影响了对这首诗的政治化理解。
- 第二部分：介绍Alan Jacobs的《Paradise Lost: A Biography》，探讨《失乐园》的政治化如何更多地被驯化为自由主义，以及这首诗在不同时代的接受史。
- 第三部分：深入分析弥尔顿的基督教观点，尤其是他的自由意志论和一元论，以及这些观点如何影响《失乐园》的解读。
- 第四部分：批评Jacobs在书中对弥尔顿基督教观点的忽视，指出这种忽视导致了对《失乐园》的简化解读。
- 第五部分：通过具体诗句的分析，展示《失乐园》如何通过其复杂的诗歌结构和神学观点，激发读者的思考和讨论。
- 结论：强调《失乐园》的意义丰富性，以及在解读这首诗时需要考虑其诗歌和神学的复杂性。
关键人物与作品
- John Milton：英国诗人，创作了《失乐园》。
- Orlando Reade：学者，著有《What in Me Is Dark》，探讨了《失乐园》的"革命性后世"。
- Alan Jacobs：批评家，著有《Paradise Lost: A Biography》，从政治和文化角度介绍了《失乐园》及其接受史。
- William Wordsworth：浪漫主义诗人，对《失乐园》有独特解读。
- Malcolm X：民权运动领袖，对《失乐园》有个人化的解读。
- Jordan Peterson：心理学家，对《失乐园》有现代解读。
- C. S. Lewis：英国文学家，著有《Preface to Paradise Lost》，提出了对《失乐园》的基督教解读。
- William Empson：英国文学批评家，著有《Milton's God》，对《失乐园》的基督教解读提出了批评。
- Stanley Fish：美国文学理论家，著有《Surprised by Sin》，分析了《失乐园》如何作为道德和精神教育的工具。
关键结论
- 《失乐园》的政治化解读：《失乐园》的政治化解读并非单一的，而是随着时代和读者的不同而变化。从革命性到自由主义，这首诗被不同的群体以不同的方式解读。
- 弥尔顿的基督教观点：弥尔顿的基督教观点，尤其是自由意志论和一元论，对理解《失乐园》至关重要。这些观点不仅影响了诗的内容，也影响了读者对诗的理解。
- 诗歌的复杂性：《失乐园》的意义丰富性来自于其诗歌和神学的复杂性。这首诗通过其复杂的结构和多样的解读，激发了读者的思考和讨论。
- 现代解读的局限性：现代对《失乐园》的解读往往忽视了其诗歌和神学的复杂性，导致了对这首诗的简化理解。
In a recent skirmish in the current war on woke, John Milton's Paradise Lost was caught in the crossfire. In December 2024, the scholar Orlando Reade's book on the "revolutionary afterlife" of Milton's poem, from the 18th century to the present, was contemptuously dismissed by The New Yorker for reducing a complex, kaleidoscopic text to the black-and-white terms of political morality. In What in Me Is Dark, Reade considers without endorsing the interpretations of Paradise Lost by his subjects, who range from William Wordsworth to Malcolm X to Jordan Peterson. Their readings were partial in both senses of the word, biased as well as selective; a few of them seem not to have made it past the second of the poem's 12 books. From these misreadings, strong and weak, Reade shows how generative the poem has been, over the centuries, of ideas about freedom, rebellion, feminism, and white supremacy, both for and against. Yet the mere idea of "politicizing" Paradise Lost — a poem about an antimonarchical rebellion, written by a notorious polemicist who publicly defended regicide and who served in Oliver Cromwell's republican government for a decade — was deemed scandalous, even satanic, by The New Yorker's critic. The fact that Milton's Satan built a literal bad-faith politics out of resentment makes it easy, for some, to discount all the devil's sympathizers, even those not best known for dispensing specious self-help to the manosphere.
In Paradise Lost: A Biography (2025, Princeton University Press), the critic Alan Jacobs covers some of the same ground as Reade, though he strides less stridently: Politicizing the poem, Jacobs suggests, has more often meant domesticating it into meek liberalism than inspiring insurrections. The book's nominal interest is in Paradise Lost as a Christian poem — it was published as part of a series on religious texts — but in practice it functions, like Reade's book, as a general introduction to the poem and its political and cultural reception, though here the focus is on moderate statesmen, feminist professors, and Oxbridge theologians rather than revolutionaries and abolitionists. The first four chapters of Paradise Lost: A Biography competently survey the text and context of Milton's epic, covering the poet's life; the major and some minor strains of the poem; and, over two chapters, its most famous fans. The reception history begins with John Dryden, who personally asked for Milton's permission to rewrite Paradise Lost as a drama in rhyming verse, which quickly became more popular than the original. (Milton's regicidal reputation, in the early days of the Restoration, didn't help his sales.) In the early 18th century, Joseph Addison's serialized essays on Paradise Lost helped rebrand Milton from an outspoken political loser into a canonical poet, a status which Jacobs's next historical figure, Samuel Johnson, regarded with annoyance. Reading Paradise Lost "is a duty rather than a pleasure," Johnson complained; "None ever wished it longer than it is."
Illustration for John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' by Gustave Doré, 1866.Wikimedia Commons
The Romantics, who apparently did wish Paradise Lost longer, expanded on the poem with energetic riffs and adaptations, many of which took inspiration from the idea of Satan as a Romantic hero. William Blake famously explained why he only half agreed with Johnson about the poem's appeals to duty and pleasure, contrasting Satan's soaring poetry, most heavily concentrated in Books 1 and 2, to the drier theological statements found especially in Book 3: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." The statement, of which Jacobs provides only the last and most-quoted clause, subverts Milton's religious beliefs by aligning them with his poetic and political sensibilities: A "true Poet" writes "at liberty" because of his satanic party affiliation.
By the Victorian era, the sexiness the Romantics found in Paradise Lost had been neutered, and the poem became, in Jacobs's words, "domesticated or marginalized." Milton had been demoted from sublime poet to good liberal, a republican robbed of radicalness. Insofar as his poetry was still understood as great, it was "in strictly poetic, or more broadly intellectual terms," voided of any explicit political or religious content. His poem had become once again a dour duty, the example chosen by Mark Twain to illustrate that classic line about a classic: "Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
What resurrected the poem's reputation, we learn in this book's illuminating fifth chapter, was what Jacobs calls, riffing on Milton's War in Heaven, a "War in Academic Publishing." The current desire to free Milton from politics was prefigured by a decades-old debate about Milton's idiosyncratic Christian views — which, in their emphasis on freedom, were entangled with his politics — and whether his poem could be kept innocent of them. Around the outset of World War II, an Oxford University Press editor named Charles Williams wrote an introduction to a volume of Milton's poems that set off lively intramural debate. "We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when the reputation of John Milton has been seriously attacked," Williams's essay begins, framing crisis as opportunity: As any reader of Milton should know, even a fall from grace can be "fortunate." For some, this meant restoring Milton's Christianity to its rightful place in our understanding of the poem; to others, it meant casting religion into hell and shutting the gate for good.
C. S. Lewis was among the fortunate few to hear Williams's lectures on Milton, which inspired him to begin what became his influential 1942 Preface to Paradise Lost. Responding to the "orthodox" view of the literary scholar Denis Saurat, who had said that to read Paradise Lost properly was "to disentangle from theological rubbish the permanent and human interest," Lewis wrote that it would make as much sense "to study Hamlet after the 'rubbish' of the revenge code had been removed, or centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs, or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches." Instead, he proposed "to plunge right into the 'rubbish.'" Reading Paradise Lost as a Christian poem led Lewis to conclude, "Many of those who say they dislike Milton's God only mean that they dislike God."
Among those who disliked Milton's God because they disliked God was the great English critic William Empson. Lewis awoke Empson's distaste for dogma from its slumber and spurred him to write his magisterial Milton's God (1961), which casts God, character and deity, as a tyrant — implying, like Blake, that Christianity was an enemy of both political and poetic freedom. The two men, despite or because of their fundamental disagreement, had a longstanding friendly correspondence. This dialectic between Christian and anti-Christian readers of Paradise Lost is, in a way, sublated by Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin (1967), which shows how the poem works as a machine that, as Jacobs puts it, "constantly invites responses which it then critiques" as part of an "ongoing moral and spiritual education." Milton's sensuous poetry, and his biographical similarities to the rebellious fallen angel, constantly tempt us into sympathy with the devil, or with pagans, only to expose that sympathy as symptomatic of our sinfulness. A gorgeous passage in Book 1 appeals to readers of classical epic by revealing that the Greco-Roman god they know was in fact a member of Satan's crew:
Jacobs describes the effect of that jarring "Erring" as being "pulled up short by a zinger of an enjambment" (the line break, preceded by a comma, is not technically an enjambment, but the error is innocent enough). The spell of the gently swaying lines is broken by a loud incorrect buzzer as Milton rectifies beauty with truth, and in so doing establishes his own poem's priority — "for he with this rebellious rout / Fell long before" — over that of the Iliad, despite coming nearly two millennia later. Pretty words — Homer's, Satan's, even Milton's — are not to be trusted. That so many of these comeuppances come as we move down from one line to the next makes for a kind of formal pun, replaying the trauma of the Fall in miniature as we suddenly fall from the meaning we expect into the one we deserve. Later, in the section of the poem set in Eden, Milton apparently offers us access to a prelapsarian paradise only to remind us, by again pushing us off the battlement of a line of verse or sneaking a lustful double meaning into an apparently innocent word (Eve's "wanton" curls are only physically loose — or are they?), that we can't have it.
In his analysis of Mulciber's fall, Jacobs seems to be taking up Williams's invitation to enliven Milton's static canonicity through "actual reading," through "a genuine encounter with Milton's poetry — and with his theology." Yet Jacobs, who holds an endowed chair of Christian thought at Baylor University, says little about Milton's Christianity, which he describes, in literal big-picture terms, as "architectural and cosmological." He makes no mention of Milton's heterodoxies, most notably his affinity with Arminianism, which argued (contra Calvin) against predestination and for free will, and that deeply informs Paradise Lost — a poem about, above all, freedom. Also unmentioned, and equally important to understanding the poem, is Milton's monist materialism. As the angel Raphael explains to Adam and Eve, everything that was created, from the angels down to the tiniest speck of dust, is made of the same stuff, a single substance "more refined, more spiritous and pure" the closer you get to Heaven, and coarser and denser the further you get, "differing but in degree, of kind the same." This makes Jacobs's remarking that Adam is superior to Eve "not merely in degree but in kind" patently false. Raphael's explanation of monism even comes close to endorsing Satan's claim, in his temptation of Eve, that she can become equal not only to Adam, but to something higher: "Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit," Raphael tells the couple, "Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend / Ethereal, as we." (Eve conveniently ignores the "tract of time" part, and the caveat that this can only happen if she and Adam are "obedient" to God.) Many scholars have described how such heterodoxies inform Milton's poetry, and Jacobs, who closes his preface by acknowledging his "debt to and admiration for" Miltonists, might have consulted a few and done for his readers what the pedagogical angel Raphael does for Adam: get the refined matter down where the layman can eat it.
Poetically as well as theologically, Jacobs elides a lot. He fails to mention, for example, when rehearsing the feminist argument that Milton's misogyny leads him to make Eve inferior, that the explicit introduction of gender inequality in the poem comes in lines implicitly from Satan's perspective as he spies on the first couple upon his arrival in the garden:
Adam and Eve are first described in entirely equal terms: They are "Two of far nobler shape" than the other animals; both are "Godlike erect"; both "seemed lords of all"; in both "their looks divine / The image of their glorious Maker shone." Only eight lines into this description do we get the first glimmer of doubt — "though both / Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed" — that soon hardens into the symmetrical and authoritative pronouncement, "He for God only, she for God in him." Rather than trusting this account of what "the fiend / Saw" as fully sanctioned by the poem, or of the poet, we might read it as Satan's raw data getting corrupted by his own preoccupation with inequality. Or we might not know what to think: They only "seemed" unequal, but they also only "seemed" equally "lords of all," a confusion that prefigures Eve's own as she struggles to understand if her inferiority is real or illusory, fixed or changeable. Later in the book, Jacobs chivalrously endorses Mary Wollstonecraft's reductive interpretation of this same passage as straightforward sexism: "Milton does explicitly say that Adam was formed 'for God only,' Eve 'for God in him' — Wollstonecraft is not reading him uncharitably." What she isn't doing is reading him poetically.
The animating ambiguities that Jacobs too often neglects, or mentions in passing as merely curious complications, are what make Paradise Lost so endlessly productive of meaning, leaving the reader at worst "in wandering mazes lost," like the devils debating philosophy in Book 2, and at best moving erringly but purposefully, like when Adam and Eve, in the poem's final lines, leave paradise with providential guidance but "with wandering steps and slow." Milton's fondness for the word "or" inscribes on an atomic level the simultaneous importance of holding two ideas in one's mind and (or?) choosing one over the other. ("Reason is but choosing," Milton declared in one of his early prose tracts.) In the poem's first lines, he gives his heavenly muse the choice of two inspiration points: either "on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai," the two names for the mountain (or, depending who you ask, the two different mountains) where Moses encountered God, "or if Sion hill / Delight thee more," referring to the site of Solomon's temple, that would also work. Projecting vantage points from two (or three) mountains brings different parts of biblical history, and the world, into parallax view.
At his best, as in his chapter on the Miltonic method wars, Jacobs shows how multiple viewpoints enrich both the poem and its criticism. The book begins with a trinity of well-chosen epigraphs expressing conflicting views that are "upheld," as Milton says when Eve makes a fruit salad of diverse ingredients that nonetheless comes together beautifully, "with kindliest change." The first is Addison, extolling the poem's relatability: It is impossible, he says, "not to be related" both genealogically and affectively to Milton's Adam and Eve, the "representatives" of all that is human. Next comes Virginia Woolf, whose problem with the poem is that it's impossible to relate to: "Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one's own joys and sorrows?" To mediate, Jacobs recruits Empson, who concludes, "The poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions." Paradise Lost is "horrible and wonderful," relatable and alienating, theological and humanist, political and purely poetic. "The satisfactions of Paradise Lost for us do not lie in its views on God and man," Susan Sontag declared in her 1965 polemic "Against Interpretation," "but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem." Reason, we might think, requires choosing between these two options. Or does it?
No comments:
Post a Comment