Central to Areopagitica is the idea that man cannot know what is right unless he is willing to entertain views that are alien to his own. Such an attitude, of course, is based upon the assumption that man’s fallen nature will not allow him to experience good without experiencing evil also pp4

Because God knows that man will fall, this is still compatible b/w Areo & PL

Only through the dialectical method of engaging in the “sublimest points of controversie,” Milton maintains in Areopagitica, will man experience Truth as a transcendent thing. pp6

Reason doesn't exist (or at least need to be valued alongside obedience) without the Fall.

Indeed, what may be called the “systematic oppositions” of conventional dialectics^ appear as dramatic events in Paradise Lost. The development of the argument conforms to Kenneth Burke’s definition of dialectics in general as the “interplay of various factors that mutually modify one another, and may be thought of as voices in a dialogue or roles in a play, with each voice or role in its partiality contributing to the develop¬ ment of the whole.”® Thus, in one respect, the role of the Son finds its counterpart in the role of Satan, and we cannot begin to understand the function of one without a complete awareness of how the other functions.^ In another instance, God’s act of creation operates most significantly when viewed in the light of its opposite, the defeat of Satan in Heaven. pp 6-7

Comparison is never explicated, because trinity

"Or, to cite a critical commonplace, the contrast between the holy Trinity of God, Son, and Spirit and the unholy Trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death allows us to see how the divine world is parodied by the degenerate." pp 7

quoting svedsen

"When Milton reached the composition of Paradise Lost, he had had long experience in formulating analogies from animal and human reproduction. The motifs of miscegenation, hermaphroditism, and disnatured conception occur in the prose and have their counterpart in the epic." pp10

"Svendsen has catalogued a series of Miltonic invectives, from “canary-sucking” prelates and vomiting and belching conservatives, who cause God himself to vomit, to a henpecked Salmasius, who is at once an hermaphrodite and who publishes dunghills and resembles a “true cock.”

Milton uses the same degenrate rhetoric from the polemics in his epic to describe Satan and his ungenerations

"I suggest that in reading Milton’s statement we substitute the word “Satanism’’ for the word “Prelatry” with this consideration: if the prelates, who are merely the types and shadows of evil, are subject to the kind of castigation we have seen in Of Reformation, how strong, then, will be the vilification of the arch-exponent of evil, Satan himself!" pp12

Near Timaeus

"Chaos embodies two possibilities: one productive and one destructive. The Abyss is not inherently evil, although it can be put to evil use." pp 17

"HIS" [the abyss] consort --> Gender fluidity

reference in the context of Milton's willingnss to use grotesque imagery w/ Sin & death.

"As the most ancient bearers of offspring, Chaos and his “Consort” Night are “Enthron’d” on the “wasteful Deep” (ii, 960-963)." pp 18

C.f. God's creative disposition vs. Satan's uncreative ends

"From God’s point of view an entrance into a “womb” implies eventual egress in a renewed state. And yet to Belial that identical activity implies just the opposite. The Abyss as Belial envisions it is not a place of potential creation but a world into which things are reduced and “swallowed up.” “Womb” ironically suggests the annihilation of life or the causing of life to be without (that is, '"devoid” of) “senseand motion.”

"The area of generation receives what has already been created into its nothingness and uncreates it. From the Satanic point of view, “womb” is a place which negates generation. It manifests itself in images of swallowing rather than in images of giving forth, in images of entering into wide openings rather than in images of exiting from openings. Such is the diabolic attitude toward Chaos: it envisions the Abyss not as a world out of which things come newly arisen but as a world into which things go to lose their “being” and never come out again." pp 22

Which, ironically or troublingly, is ontologically identical to the monist vision of heaven

"As the dark Abyss is “uncreative” to Belial, it is “unessential” to Satan. “Unessential” here has the same implications as “uncreative.” If, as William B. Hunter, Jr., suggests, “essence” implies individuality,^ then “unessential” describes a world that indicates the complete absence of individuality. Chaos becomes a realm which reduces the “essential” or quickening aspect of existence to the “unessential” or complete negation of existence. It, therefore, “threatens” whoever enters it “with utter loss of being,” with a complete reduction of his identity to that substratum of which Chaos is composed." pp 23

Satan is remidiless

"Satan characterizes the feeling of being swallowed and devoured in a hole just before he penetrates the confines of Eden:

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. (iv, 75-78)

That Satan does “escape” temporarily from the physical confines of Hell and is able to voyage to earth in no way contradicts his inability to escape from the moral and psychological confines of his own damnation. Indeed, even after he “succeeds” in overcoming his physical imprisonment, he laments that he has not escaped at all. His soliloquy reveals an essential ambivalence that confronts the unregenerate consciousness: the inability to escape the torments of the fallen self as opposed to the diabolic horror of self-annihilation. ... No exit exists: the hole is self-contained, sealed up, and cannot be opened except for the purposes of a further descent. And yet Satan persists in penetrating places where he does not belong. pp 25

shidded out

"Consequently, what Satan is giving birth to in his “ascent” may be related to what Chaos is excreting as Satan travels through the “crude consistence” (ii, 941) of the Abyss. I am implying that Satan’s “successful” egress out of the hole of Chaos fuses the oral-anal-sexual imagery previously discussed and that through such a fusion Satan becomes triumphantly debased.^" pp29

Perhaps summarize scatological criticism in the anelic discussion of eating. Contrast Adam's transubstantiation to Satan's ungeneration

"Consequently, within the immediate context of the description of Chaos and the realm beyond Chaos, we find the motifs of birth, excreting, and eating as they are related to the diabolic consciousness." pp 32

Satan flees his own grave, God's womb, to attempt to pervert Eden into a similar self-begotten grave

Dialectic analysis is the most edifying from a content perspective. Ambivalence of Chaos as WOMB or TOMB is so cool: debased creativity

"The fallen angel is bereft of the blissful security he once knew, and his only recourse is uncreative: in his despair he will violate the wide aperture that leads down into the unfallen world (iii, 526-529). Bent on his voyage of perversion, he will plummet “down right into the Worlds first Region” (iii, 562), which he will attempt to transform into a grave." pp34

whereas Empson & Ross argue that God has abandoned history, Lieb asserts that PL lays the necessary groundwork for a creative rebirth

"Creativity is a glorious activity as opposed to the inglorious activity associated with the uncreative process. That is not to say that the process of creation has nothing to do with its antithesis; on the contrary, a consideration of the poet as fallen individual reveals that the positive or glorious aspects of creativity manifest themselves only after the negative aspects have been overcome. That is, the poet must confront the uncreative aspects of the fall in order to create positively." pp37

Cannot overstate how highly Milton thinks of himself and his task

" Milton allusively associates the poet of Paradise Lost with those very mediatorial offices that are so important to the theological discussions in Book i. Chapter 15 of the Christian Doctrine: I refer to the offices of prophet, king, and priest.^" pp 38

Book I, yearning to be first, to antedate creation itself

"Desiring that knowledge given to prophets on the secret tops of mountains, he hopes in turn to educate his people in the ways of creation. Indeed, through such means, Moses sang of the “Beginning,” of the way in which the “Heav’ns and Earth /Rose out of Chaos” (i, 6-10). But the poet goes even further: he wishes to become imbued with the divine omniscience which allowed the Spirit to be an actual part of the grand creative event." pp42

Fire quotation for Book I and shaping the poet

"Now we can more fully understand what Milton means when he talks about his “adventrous Song” (i, 13) upon which he stakes all and through which he “attempts” what has never been attempted (i, 16). His journey to the nether world risks all the dangers and horrors of the descent, and it is only by means of the divine creative power that he is able to “escape” the “Stygian pool” (iii, 14),

III.19-20

He must resort to Chaos and create himself out of that Chaos; he must resort to that part of him yvhich has been uncreated in the fall and attempt to issue out newly created. (The uncreated Satan, we remember, attempted the same act in Book II, but his “birth,” although apparently successful, was really not so because it was performed without God’s aid.)" pp49

Milton figures himself the classic hero in the nuclear monomyth

"In mythic thinking, the experience of the hero is generally referred to as the “nuclear unit of the monomyth,” and it involves three stages: “separation,” “initiation,” and “return.”2’^ ... The second or initiatory stage of the monomyth involves the attempt at a conquest to be “Won from the void and formless infinite” (iii, 12), the ‘'horror vacui,” as C. G. Jung calls it,32 of oneself. The poet becomes a Redeemer who must destroy himself, uncreate himself, so that he may conquer himself in birth. After being impregnated by the divine exterior power, the poet withdraws into himself to “brood” or meditate in introversion.^^ “Initiation,” then, is the paradoxical act of destroying and creating through meditation (a feeding on thought or a symbolic digesting) as a means to rebirth." pp50-51

Cite Bodkin for reference about Miltonic poet as Shaman

"To my knowledge, Maud Bodkin first saw the shamanistic elements in Milton’s concept of the poet.^ Like the shaman, the poet cures his people by first undergoing corruption himself The initiation of the shaman is one of returning to the womb to be digested, to be taken into the monster’s jaws (the vagina denta) and then of finding one’s way out.^® In Milton’s poem, one finds egress from Death’s maw through Christ, of whom the Christian poet as Redeemer becomes the type. Digestion is a prelude to rebirth in the process of creation." pp 52

Fn 39 contains explication of the recurring theme of dismemberment which has figured strongly in Lycidas and Areo

"For further instances of the dismemberment motif, see Areopagitica. I quote the passage to point out the associations here of dismemberment and the apocalypse:" pp54

"as a complement of God’s cosmic creativity, Adam and Eve’s creativity finds expression not only in gardening, in love-making, and in praying, but also in eating. Through each of these activities, unfallen man enacts in his own limited environment what God has enacted in his grand cosmogony. If man were to continue in such activities obediently, he would eventually ascend to ultimate union with God (vii, 155-161). But man is to fall, and the idea of creativity is to find its counterpart in uncreativity before man is allowed to discover a means of regeneration." pp78

Aspirations for Godhead and creation thereof

"In this instance, creation becomes intimately associated with the idea of kingship. Indeed, the various aspects of godhead take on overtones of birth. ... As the center of ideas, then, the head becomes intimately associated with creativity, with the manifestation of the Wisdom (vii, 9-10) that characterizes God as Logos (see Pr. 8:22-31 andjn. 1:1-5). The dramatic counterpart of such an idea, of course, may be found in Satan’s giving birth to Sin through his head (ii, 752-758). If that act parodies cosmic creativity, it likewise contrasts with God’s fathering of the angels through the Son (appointed as “Head ) and with his saving of man. In the last instance, the Son as Savior (and therefore “Head of all mankind ) fathers man in place of Adam, the original progenitor (iii, 285-286)." pp82

War in Heaven can be understood as a microcosm of the generative pattern present throughout all of PL (when talking about the canons)

"Rebirth will spring from destruction, as a final conflagration foreshadowed by the War in Heaven will yield a new world. The promise of that apocalyptic “moment,” the final return to the womb, underlies the basic concept of regeneration that motivates the action of the poem. The central pattern, as I hope to demonstrate, is one of union, followed by fission or forced birth causing destruction, and a final reunion.® Or, put in another way, the pattern is one in which union proceeds through destruction to reunion. Destruction thereby beco'mes the vehicle by which the ultimate state is attained." pp 85

Only mention of Lucifer

"[V.757-766] According to Arnold Stein, Satan attempts “to possess the power of spirit by means of matter” and therefore elevates the self to godhead by means of the material.Satan’s purpose is to mimic God’s “begetting” of the Son by creating as closely as possible the entire accoutrement of that generation. The assumption is that in order to simulate the sublime creativity of the godhead, one must accumulate as much of the apparent glory associated with the godhead as is possible. The mode of accumulation is, of course, entirely physical. Satan would “affect” equality with God by imitating the “Mount” of generation, not through a spiritual attempt at birth but through a physical approximation of the birth process. Thus Satan, incapable of spiritual ascent, undergoes a physical ascent by raising himself literally upon a high seat." pp 90

Troubling parallels to A&E's own equal freedom

Satan’s references to freedom are deceptive and, in contrast to the freedom that results from obedience, contradictory. Desiring to maintain his own omnipotence and yet at the same time to convince the angels to rebel against the omnipotence of God, Satan must manipulate his terms so that they will serve his own purpose. He says to the angels that even if they are not “equal all,” they are still “free,” Equally free; for Orders and Degrees Jarr not with liberty, but well consist. (v, 792-793)

Implying his own superiority over the angels, Satan tells them that they are not all equal and yet states that they are “equally free.” Their “equality” ultimately resides in their own unswerving obedience to Satan, and their “freedom involves the necessity to become servants of Satan’s tyranny." pp99

Structured similarly to the classics

"HE USUAL METHOD of describing warfare is to focus I upon individual confrontations (soldier against soldier) ^ or mass combats (army against army). Milton employs both methods. Like Homer in the Iliad and Vergil in the Aeneid, Milton concentrates upon large-scale figures, in addition to whole armies. His narrative runs the gamut of the experience of war. If, on the one hand, Satan and Abdiel (or, later Satan and Michael) meet face to face like Turnus and Aeneas, on the other hand, the entire force of the unfaithful angels meets its match in the force of the faithful angels. The narrative technique, however, is in no wayarbitrary, but follows a definite and discernible pattern." pp 107

Other critics have calle the whole scene a farce, but Lieb contextualizes it well

"As Milton backs further and further away and as his perspective becomes more objective, the “heroic” qualities of the War seem to degenerate, to become a mockery of their own uselessness, a veritable Chaos controlled by Chance." pp107

Chaos, Hell, Adam's side, and angels – constantly references wounds as generative sources of birth

"I shall argue that the opening and closing of the wound and the substance that “issues” therefrom (vi, 332) repeat a similar movement that characterizes the poem’s major generative pattern. We may begin in Heaven, where a “wound” originates with the forced opening of Heaven’s side to let forth its “issue” followed by the consequent closing of the “breach.” In Hell, as I shall discuss, Satan and his crew inflict a “wound” on the soil as a prelude to the creation of Pandaemonium (i, 689). The prime example, however, occurs on earth." pp 112

Nisroc: an artificer, inventor, but "deliverer" or "creator" not.

"After Satan completes his lecture, the rebel angels set about their new “creative” mission with renewed hope. Their creation of the instruments of destruction is an act that brings to mind a sexual violation and an assault. In the perverted attitude of an offender performing a gross operation, the rebel angels “turn” up “Wide the Celestial soil, and [see] beneath / Th’originals of Nature in thir crude / Conception” (vi, 509-512). The turning up of the “Celestial soil” reiterates the pattern of creating an opening as a prelude to the “creative” act. Their peering into the opening at the “originals of Nature” recalls Satan’s perverted peering into the hole of Chaos as a violation of privacy." pp118

"Here the “heroic” qualities of individual combat begin to degenerate. Milton no longer refers to the fighting of angel with angel. Rather, he describes objects encountering objects. The battle has become completely depersonalized, and seen objectively, it represents the warring of the elements." pp121

The Son anti-types (? i confuseD) Ezekiel's vision

"The Son arrives, as suggested, to uncreate (and thereby symbolically re-create) in the same Paternal Chariot that carries him on his creative mission into Chaos in Book vii. Milton's adaptation of Ezekiel’s vision is particularly relevant to the creational imagery.^ As a revelation of divine and living wrath, the Chariot’s “multitude of eyes” (vi, 754-756, 845-847) deprive the rebel angels of their strength, “And of thir wonted vigour left them draind, / Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall’n” (vi, 849-852)." pp 123

Extremes of damnation

"There is a similar bodily extension in both, and whereas in Hell the element of Satan’s unfulfillment is expressed in the heat of fire, in Eden the element of Adam’s unfulfillment is expressed in the coldness of “damps and dreadful gloom” (x, 848). In both cases the atmosphere of the fall is one of extremes: there is no longer the unfallen climatic or psychologic temperance of “cool” and “mild” (x, 847). Creation as the product of such temperance is denied in both, and what we have, rather, is a cursing of creation (Hell, we recall, is created as the result of a curse [ii, 622-623]). Impotency is the punishment of such an uncreative posture, so that with respect to both Satan and Adam, one cannot be productive within the fallen, uncreative condition." pp 129

Book II – Fallen angels, especially Satan, can at best only parody the creative process of God through the son

"Moloch’s stern admonition of his fellow sufferers will offer a fit point of departure: [II.52-54]

...We recall that the poet must also meditate or “brood” in order to give birth to his poem. Dialectically, the fallen angels re-enact the same pattern of sitting and brooding in order to effect their uncreative ends. When Moloch says “sit contriving,” then, Milton is allowing him to draw upon the very images that describe the Spirit of God’s “physical” and “mental” postures in the creative act.

Moloch’s use of the word “contrive” is, of course, ironic: it suggests the artificiality that characterizes debased creativity. (As suggested earlier, the cannons invented in Heaven are artificially “contrived,” as opposed to God’s works, which are naturally generated.) Indeed, the entire council in Pandaemonium implies a debasement of sublime generation, for when the fallen angels attempt to “contrive” through deception and fraud a means of overcoming God, their solution is uncreative and results in their ultimate defeat. Furthermore, as that which is “contrived,” the democratic atmosphere of debate in the council becomes a fa9ade that serves only to glorify Satan’s predetermined plans. pp 136-37

All rebel efforts are perversions of God's creations. all cognition is reduced to absurd antithesis

"the basic idea relating to the union is that of reciprocity: the faithful angels return to God to celebrate him and to receive sustenance from him. Moloch’s suggestion perverts the creative concept because it desires that the angels return to God to torture him. As I shall discuss in greater depth, such a perversion of creativity occurs allegorically in Hell with the hellhounds of Sin returning to her womb to torture her. The return to torture, then, becomes a debased counterpart of the return to glorify. Both acts are based antithetically upon the idea of creativity." pp 139

"By these means the fallen angels would supposedly assert their own greatness in defiance of God. Mammon’s world is totally one of delusive appearances based upon the vain idea that that which looks impressive is so. (For example, he would have the fallen angels “imitate” God’s “Light [ii, 269—270]^^ and out of Hell’s soil “raise/Magnificence; and what can Heav’n shew more” [ii, 271—273].) Thus the angels would overcome their torments by creating that which is beneficial to them out of those torments. As a means of defying God, they would create in the illusion of their own ability to create and thereby blind themselves to the reality of their own impotence." pp 140

Sin and Death are the personification of uncreation – they are so important and Critics mistake them for violtions of decorum

"the extended consequences are discernible in the figures of Sin and Death. Centered in them are the primary motifs through which the perverted form of the dialectics manifests itself ^ Sin and Death become pivotal figures through whom all the varieties of sexual perversion, including incest and narcissism, find expression. Conception, pregnancy, birth and offspring in their most degenerate forms originate here.^" pp 143

"The father-husband meets his daughter-wife and son-grandson. The Arch-Demon is compelled to learn of Sin "what thing [she is] thus double-form'd, and why / In this infernal Vale first met [she] call'st [him] Father, and that Fantasm call'st [his] Son" (II, 741-43)

C.f. Spenser's "Errour" in TFQ:

Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and fulle of vile disdaine

pp143 nested in a FN

"sinister" w/ more unfortunate parallels w/ Satan & Eve

"Sin seduces her creator, her father, into having incestuous relationships with her. For Satan views in Sin his “own perfect image,” falls in love with his image, and copulates with it. Thus are the perversions of incest and narcissism combined as Satan in his revolt against God engenders his own self-image—his daughter Sin—and, like Narcissus consumed in his egocentric world, becomes “enamour’d” of himself and copulates incestuously with the self. The result of such a perverted, internalized relationship is the death of the individual." pp147-8

"[IX 955-959] Adam is drawn to himself; his only wish is to possess the self; his only fear is to lose the self. In submitting to Eve and in disobeying God, Adam is essentially committing the act of narcissism. He is loving his own image in Eve rather than God’s image in himself. Eve becomes his mirror, his pool, and he yields to what the mirror reflects." pp 151

A&E become a model of generative redemption through the Son (and the protoevangelium), whereas Satan remains a model of damnation

"However, because man is capable of regeneration, whereas Satan is eternally damned, Adam and Eve will find recompense in their fall because of God’s grace (x, 1050-1056). Adam and Eve are not wholly lost; even the generative curse pronounced upon them has positive ramifications. The “fruit” of Eve’s womb, although painful in the bringing forth, is not necessarily a curse but may be joyous. Likewise, Adam as a progenitor will be able to provide sustenance through his labor." pp 159

Sin and Death

"The pattern of incest and its culmination in monstrosities continues right down to the relationship between Sin and Death and their offspring. The cycle begins with Satan the father copulating with his self-image in Sin the daughter, is followed by Death the son raping Sin the mother, and is completed in the monstrous hellhounds being perpetually born and perpetually ravishing the womb of their origin.^ Not only are the monsters of incest “hourly conceiv’d/ And hourly born,” but they continuously rape the very source of their birth. The first incestuous rape begets a perpetuity of rapes. Finally, the whole incest pattern beginning with Satan and Sin represents a continuous return to the womb, in which the mother is forever made to have relations with her offspring." pp 162-3

"The diabolic return to the womb that parodies the return enacted by God’s faithful offspring, however, has still further implications. I refer to what in Milton becomes a fusion of two acts: sexual assault and diabolic eating. A debasement of the renewal and sustenance that the faithful angels experience in their return to God, these two acts, we recall, are portrayed by the hellhounds, who renew and sustain themselves by simultaneously raping and devouring the womb of Sin. That is, they “gnaw” Sin’s “Bowels” as their means of sustenance. The motif of eating as it relates to the sexual act is not an unusual concept with Milton, for we find it expressed quite succinctly in the following line from “On Time”: “And glut thy self with what thy womb devours” (1. 4). Such a fusion of oral-sexual imagery, then, finds expression early in Milton’s poetry and culminates in the debased figures of Paradise Lost." pp 167

"The dialectic which involves the fusing of sexuality with eating expresses itself in the following manner: gluttony is associated with lust and with the narcissism of self-copulation, the offspring of which are physically and morally deformed.^ The gluttonous aspect of the narcissistic relationship begun by Satan and perpetuated incestuously in Sin, Death, and the ravenous hellhounds is manifested in the temptation and fall of Eve. Eve’s gluttonous eating of the forbidden Fruit symbolically re-enacts the lust of Satan’s original narcissism." pp 168

Gross ovet expression of creative perversion made manifest as a bridge harbinging Satan's dominion over earth till the Son expels him back the the Abyssal womb of hell

"When Satan meets his “Ofspring dear” (x, 349), his “fair / Inchanting Daughter” (x, 352-353) addresses him as “Parent,” and Satan responds in like manner by addressing his offspring as “Fair Daughter, and thou Son and Grandchild both” (x, 384). Because Satan is ultimately responsible for the Bridge, Sin addresses him as a creator:

X.354-373

Although Satan’s “hands” did not build this Bridge, he is still the creator or “Author and prime Architect.”’ For the Bridge is the result of Satan’s deeds, and Sin and Death are the agents" pp 175-6

As Adam and Eve’s dominion was originally creative, helping things to grow. Sin and Death’s dominion will be uncreative, causing things to die. Satan’s language parodies God’s language of creation originally heard by the unfallen Adam and Eve, to whom God said: VIII.338-341" pp 177

"With Satan’s return to Hell and consequent transformation, the extended effects of Satan’s fall are clearly discernible, for such will ultimately be the fate of evil when it is eternally degraded, eternally humiliated, and no longer of any threat to God’s creatures. In Sin’s transformation, that degradation, that humiliation is prefigured. Even Sin and Death, ironically, have a premonition of their own end (ii, 806-809). For us to have that same premonition, we must constantly be aware that Paradise Lost is, at each instance, revealing what the future will be. The extended consequences of Satan’s fall are contained, indeed, defined by, the immediate consequences. When Satan greets Sin and Death, he greets his past, present, and future. To God they are all one, all instantaneous. To the poet writing a poem in time, they are made one by the essential dialectical technique that unifies Paradise Lost." pp 182-3

Satan's whole MO

"Satan employs the same mode of persuasion that characterized his argument with Abdiel in Heaven. He presumes to deprive God of the power of his creativity by refusing to acknowledge God as his Creator: The Gods are first, and that advantage use On our belief, that all from them proceeds; I question it, for this fair Earth I see. Warm’d by the Sun, producing every kind. Them nothing. (ix, 718-722) Satan again disputes divine creativity: he maintains that because man was created after the Gods, man is being duped into believing that all creation proceeds from the Gods." pp 196

C.f. Joseph Campbell quote about doors opening when we follow our whimsy

"Metaphorically, we are presented with the Satanic idea of forcing openings where none previously existed. Like Satan, who rifled the bowels of both Heaven and Hell and intruded upon the privacy of Chaos, Eve will be able to force openings in sacrosanct areas (ironically, only to find in those recesses the hellhounds barking in the womb of Sin). Initiated into the ways of deceit, she will be able to penetrate beneath the surfaces of things and hide from all sight what she has found there. Because of her newly discovered secrecy, finally, the experience of hypocrisy will hardly be foreign to her in her fallen condition." pp 198

It is, for Lieb, precisely through man's uncreation and God's recreation through the Son, that the Argument is fulfilled

"The implication is that God’s carrying through with such a threat would show folly. God would then be a faulty Creator who did not know what he was about when he generated his “prime Creatures” and dignified them over “all his Works.” Through such rationalization, Adam, like Satan and Eve, not only questions God as a Creator, but relieves himself of the responsibility of maintaining his obedience. He does not believe that God shall “uncreate” and thereby frustrate his creativity (ix, 943-944); Adam does not realize, however, that he in his transgression will be uncreating himself, since divine Justice must be fulfilled if free will is to have any meaning. He is blind to the fact that God’s decrees are not arbitrary but purposeful and that one must bear the responsibility for his own transgressions. ... Satan’s importance as a figure diminishes after Book x, and the poem focuses upon the new creation effected by God through man. The argument of the poem is fulfilled, then, only when we see the full process: creation—uncreation—re-creation." pp 200-01

"The fall of man results in a cosmic and psychological return to disorder. Satan, at least temporarily, has accomplished his uncreative ends of causing creation to be uncreated and partake of Chaos, Satan’s own natural environment. Cosmically, the process of uncreation manifests itself in various ways. The sun moves in such a manner as to “affect the Earth with cold and heat/Scarce tolerable,” thereby creating winter and summer (x, 651-656). The moon and other planets form a type ofuncreative union, a “joyning” in “Synod unbenigne” (x, 656-661)." pp 205

Fire, Satan's short-lived victory is confined to book X. Though his reign will span for thousands of years, its dramatic victory is nipped by Michael's education

"Psychologically, Adam suffers the consequences of being initiated as fallen man into the Chaos that composes his subconscious mind. He attempts, like the fallen angels lost in labyrinthine thought, to “disburd’n” himself of his troubles through “sad complaint.” Such an attempt at disburdening or productive release, however, proves ultimately fruitless, for complaining about one’s situation does not improve it." pp 206

"Adam’s complaining reveals one important aspect of the poem’s meaning. Whether in the form of Satan, Eve, or Adam, when a creature rebels against God, the essential mode of argumentation he employs in his rebellious stance is that concerned with creation. The rebel eventually winds up questioning God’s creativity in some way, and ultimately, the means of his rebellion have undeniable creational consequences." pp 208

God is able to co-opt even the most vile manifestations of uncreation for benevolent purposes of divine regeneration

"The foulness and grossness attributed to them clearly have overtones of the vitiated qualities associated with Satan, and the “inhar¬ moniousness” of the mixture applies to the “inharmonious ness” of Chaos, whose mixture of elements is opposed to the harmony of the created order.

With the regenerative potentialities that man now possesses, on the other hand, his corruption is not eternal, for God has “provided Death,” which suddenly takes on positive qualities in its association with the idea of regeneration. Paradoxically, rather than negation. Death becomes man’s “final remedie,” a means of new birth:" pp 213

not a dismissal but a generative reversal

"While Adam ascends the Hill in order to awaken to foresight. Eve sleeps below. Milton deliberately describes the sleeping and waking here to Adam’s once having slept while Eve “to life was formd’’ (xi, 366-369). Instead of Adam sleeping and Eve being created. Eve sleeps and Adam is “created,” that is, awakened to foreknowledge and humanized by experiencing the torments of the future world." pp214

"The entire cosmogony of the first ten books is viewed from a new perspective. That perspective embraces not only man’s individual re-created psyche but a future cosmos in which “time stand[s] fixt” (xii, 555) in the apocalyptic “All in All.” Until that event, when internalized paradise and externalized paradise are fused in an ultimate union, Adam and Eve must become part of the “Race of time” in “this transient World” “measur’d” by Michael in the vision (xii, 554). That is, they must become progenitors of that “Race” as well as undergo time’s flight, but within themselves, they will be sustained by a timeless re-created realm." pp 218

FIRE

"The point is that Milton’s poetry does respond to this kind of analysis and that Milton as a poet was aware of what he wrote. Coming to terms with Paradise Lost must take account of its poetry, that is, its subtleties and complexities of meaning, its variety and flexibility of execution. A genuine assessment of Paradise Lost, I think, will reveal a very different performance from the insubstantial “greatness” that Eliot attributes to Milton’s epic and the rigid, single-minded egotism that Empson attributes to it." pp 224

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