Milton and Justice

Because Milton is often hailed as a proponent of liberal thought, it becomes quite easy to insist that Milton saw a one-to-one equivalency between human and divine ideas of justice, and that he fully intended his God to possess a sort of rational justice and goodness towards his creation.¹

In trying to resolve this tension, Harold Skulsky has gone as far as to read Paradise Lost as a trial between man and God with Satan as the accuser.²Skulsky resolves his theological and philosophical arguments by stating that Milton has God share in humanity's suffering in the form of the son.³Without perhaps intending to, Skulsky has here implied that the only way one can reconcile God 's justice with human ideas of justice is to have God partake in a human ontology.

It is indeed something anterior to ethics and theodicy which connects politics and theology to suffering so tightly in Paradise Lost. By realizing God's apparent incongruence with the ideas of law and justice, we come upon “the moment in which the foundation of law remains suspended in the void or over the abyss, suspended by a pure performative act that would not have to answer to or before anyone.”⁴ Divine justice is anterior to humanly-held ideas of justice and law, but it is also the force which creates them, and therefore has a direct correspondence to Milton's theory of political obligation:

...unjust thou say'st

Flatly unjust, to bind with Laws the free,

And equal over equals to let Reign

One over all with unsucceeded power

Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute

With him the points of liberty, who made

Thee what thou art, and form'd the Pow'rs of Heav'n

Such as he pleas'd, and circumscrib'd thir being? (PL. V. 818-825)

This is Abdiel's retort to Satan's assertion that God forces laws upon those whose “being [is] ordain'd to govern, not to serve” (PL.V. 802). Yet the fact that Satan insists that his being was made to govern because he “without Law errs not” (PL.V.798-99) only reinforces Abdiel's rebuttal, for it shows that Satan cannot really comprehend an existence which is anterior to law. The word “err” implies that his perspective is precedented on law.

Abdiel's reply refers the argument back to its inseparable connection with ontology. Satan's status as a created being imposes the law over his actions and makes it impossible for him to argue against the nonlaw of the creator—“shalt thou give Law to God” (PL. V. 822). Consequently, Abdiel pictures Satan's argument as ludicrous, reminding him that law is intrinsic to one's being. Satan cannot argue with the creator who made him what he was.

He cannot argue with one who as he “pleas'd circumscrib'd thir being”(PL. V. 825) because his ontology contains its own limits. The rebuttal is simply and always that there is a difference that cannot be effaced between creator and created.

For Milton, the demonic is to conceal one's creation, and therefore to conceal one's ontological difference with the divine. Hence, Satan replies to Abdiel, “...remember'st thou / Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? / We know no time when we were not as now” (PL.V.857-859). Politics meets ontology with this statement. Satan insists that there was no origin, no founding act which gave him law and gave him being. He thus believes there is nothing but creaturely law, or the laws established by created beings. He refuses to acknowledge that God in a moment that was neither just nor unjust—in a movement anterior to such constructions of justice—created the laws.

Yet because God is anterior to the law, Abdiel declares that granting sovereignty to someone who was created in the law, to an equal, is the great injustice: “But to grant it thee unjust, / That equal over equals Monarch Reign" (PL. V. 831-832). Concealment of one's origin as a created being is not merely abhorrent because it is blasphemous, but abhorrent because it separates law from one's intrinsic ontology and ignores the inscription of the law within each individual.

It turns the law into something ignorant of the originary power which gives it being and which is woven into the ontology of every created thing. The demonic reduces the political to a series of external roles, all the time claiming “we know no time when we were not as now” (PL. V. 859) in its defense.

For this reason, it is not surprising that Abdiel reflects the dissenting position, where outward conformity and inward conformity cannot be separated because politics and ontology cannot be separated; and politics and ontology cannot be separated because they have a divine origin.⁵

If the demonic obscures the relationship between politics and ontology, divine wrath recovers it: “Then who created thee lamenting learn, / When he who can uncreate thee thou shalt know” (PL. VI. 894-895). This is Abdiel's final reply to Satan's refutation of a divine creation. The only way Satan will realize that his law is inscribed in his being is when he experiences suffering and, ultimately, destruction; then and only then will politics return to his ontology.

1See Dennis Danielson,Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), 149-154.

2See Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in Paradise Lost (Newark: University of Delaware University Press, 2000).

3Skulsky,172-227.

4Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority,'” in Acts of Religion, ed. by Gil Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228-298.

5Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 120-127.