‘<i>Farewel happy fields</i>”: the problem of Satan by the confrontation between the Milton poet and the Milton christian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22409/cadletrasuff.2016n53a82Keywords:
Satan, Milton, criticism.Abstract
Paradise Lost’s criticism usually takes two contrasting directions, due to the fact that Milton was both a revolutionary as a Christian poet. In one of them, Milton’s Satan is interpreted as a revolutionary figure; in another one, he is considered the enemy of mankind. Thus, we intend to discuss the problem of Satan by the confrontation between the Milton poet and the Milton Christian.Downloads
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References
‘segundo suas próprias condições humanas” (LINK, 1998, p. 175).
‘[o] Satã de Milton é verdadeiramente o adversário supremo, forte na batalha o suficiente para abalar o trono de Deus. [...] Satã recusa-se a humilhar-se, recusa admitir que pecou e permanece inflexível em sua oposição ao Todo-Poderoso” (LINK, 1998, p. 191).
‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (MILTON, 2007, p. 21)
[…] Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
(MILTON, 2007, p. 19).
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look’st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome, still paying, still to ow;
Forgetful what from him I still receivd,
And understood not that a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd;
(MILTON, 2007, p. 92-93).
‘som other Power/ As great might have aspir’d, and me though mean/ Drawn to his part” (MILTON, 2007, p. 93)
[...] which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
(MILTON, 2007, p. 93).
‘[f]or never can true reconcilement grow/ Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc’d so deep” (MILTON, 2007, p. 94)
‘[...] Farwel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;/ Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least/Divided Empire with Heav’ns King I hold” (MILTON, 2007, p. 94)
‘[a] retórica de Satã no topo do Ninfate enfatiza a infinitude da obrigação [...]. Ele não culpa a si mesmo, embora não de maneira convincente, dado o relato de Rafael no quinto canto de como a rebelião começou” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 132).
‘side by side with his rebelliousness, his individualism, and his love of liberty, his equal love of discipline, of hierarchy” (LEWIS, 1971, p. 7)
From this doctrine of good and evil it follows (a) That the good can exists without evil, as in Milton’s Heaven and Paradise, but no evil without good [...]. That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miresable when it adheres to itself. [...]. This two corollaries explain all those passages in Milton, often misunderstood, where the excellence of Satan’s Nature is insisted on, in contrast to, and agravation of, the perversion of his Will (LEWIS, 1971, p. 67).
‘[a] fallen man is very like a fallen angel. [...] It is too near us” (LEWIS, 1971, p. 101)
‘[t]o admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote no only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of a wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography” (1971, p. 102)
‘[...] is interesting to read about; but Milton makes plain the blank uninterestingness of being Satan” (1971, p.102).
‘Satanic pronouncements are now met with a certain caution” (FISH, 1973, p. 157).
‘is never quite strong enought to resists the insidious attack of verbal power” (FISH, 1973, p. 157).
He is for ever tortured with compassion and affection for those whom he betrays and ruins; he is racked by a vain abhorrence for the desolation of which he is the instrument; he is like a man compelled by a tyrant to set fire to his own possession, and to appear as the witness against and the accuser of his dearest friends and most intimate connections, and then to be their executioner and to inflict the most subtle protracted torments upon them. As a man, were he deprived of all other refuge, he might hold his breath and die – but God is represented as omnipotent and the Devil as eternal. Milton has expressed this view of the subject with the sublimest pathos (SHELLEY, 1973, p. 65-66).
The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames, is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil – but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. (HAZLIT, 2010, p. 112) .
‘[t]he Hell within him, for within him Hell/ He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell/ One step no more then from himself can fly” (MILTON, 2007, p. 92)
The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, ‘rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,” it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed – but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god (HAZLIT, 2010, p. 112).
‘the first and greatest sin? How, more importantly could he be “against’ a Satan who denounces the person of God and the laws of heaven in impassioned diatribes which bear such a striking resemblance at the tone and moods of his own early prose?” (DYSON, p.19).
Milton believed in the 1642s the God was about to produce a purgation of England by revolution, which would be followed by a rule of the saints. He did not, therefore, take the Hobbesian view that revolution would lead to anarchy and to the loss of freedom; he believed that a monstrous tyranny, imposed by God’s enemies in God’s name, would be replaced by glorious liberty of the childrem of God. Always he would have take for granted that disobedience to earthly leaders might be true obedience, but that the same attitude, when turned against God Himself, was the essence of sin and death (DYSON, p. 20).
‘[f]ire is the appropriate symbol for the spirit and knowledge which is in man and by which he “aspires to divinity’ and becomes a god” (WEBLOWSKY, 1973, p. 138).
‘is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in self the sole motive of action” (COLERIDGE, 2007, p. 175).
‘a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity”. (COLERIDGE, 2007, p. 176).
‘We find our intellects cloured, our anger, envy, lust played upon; we are brought ot the actual place of the original fall. We discover thar Satan remains as real and powerful an enemy” (DYSON, 1973, p.22).
‘Heaven is made by God, and is filled by Him; Hell is the experience of whatever consciousness is in exile from God” (DYSON; LOVELOCK, 1973, p. 228).
‘esse heroísmo sombrio, essa dura obstinação, essa pungente ironia, esse braço orgulhoso e rijo que cerra a dor como uma amante, essa concentração de coragem invicta, que, curvada sobre si mesma, tudo encontra” (TAINE apud PRAZ, 1996, p. 73).
While Satan is re-envisioned as the image of expanding human consciousness and desire, rebelling against oppression and limitation, he also comes into view as a fallen figure who loses Paradise in an attempt to locate the divine source within, whose rebelliousness may turn tyrannical and revengeful in his authoritarian reign in hell. This aspect of the Satanic figure is especially prominent in the mythic representations of oppression and insurrection in Blake and Shelley (SCHOCK, p. 39, 2003).
‘em Shakespeare, bem mais que na Bíblia inglesa. A Bíblia e Homero, Virgílio e Dante, Tasso e Spenser foram para Milton recursos fecundos. Shakespeare é diferente: ele vem sem ser convidado” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 126).
Shelley afirmou certa vez que o Diabo deve tudo a Milton, mas o Satã de Milton devia o solilóquio a Hamlet. Em certo sentido, tudo o que Hamlet e Satã dizem é solilóquio: seus espíritos mútuos definham gloriosamente no ar da solidão. Ambos se dirigem – nos momentos fundamentais – somente a si mesmos, pois quem mais parece ser real? Não acreditamos no amor de Hamlet por ninguém – exceto por Yorick, quando o príncipe era criança – nem no de Satã, com diferença de que Satã desejaria ao menos amar a si mesmo, enquanto Hamlet não quer nem isso.
Macbeth deu a Satã sua angústia proléptica; Iago, sua sensação de mérito ferido; e Edmundo, um desejo de defender os bastardos. Hamlet, contudo, deu a Satã o próprio Satã: a prisão do eu. (BLOOM, 2011, p. 126).
‘após a retomada do poder por Carlos II, compôs a maior parte de sua obra-prima. Se Satã é subversivo, o mesmo pode ser dito de seu criador, o poeta e profeta da revolução de Cromwell” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 133-134).
‘Milton, na minha leitura, inaugurou a tradição literária do protestantismo sem o cristianismo, que seria seguida por Blake [...]” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 135).
‘[s]uas heresias, se somadas, são impressionantes, porém secundárias. O que mais importa é seu temperamento áspero. A religião, a política e a moral são todas consequências de seu orgulho, que entre os poetas, só se equipara ao de Dante”. (BLOOM, 2011, p. 142).
‘um aspecto de beleza decaída, de esplendor ofuscado pelo tédio e pela morte; ele é majestoso embora em decadência [...] A beleza maldita é atributo permanente de Satanás” (PRAZ, 1996, p. 73).
‘[o] Satã de Milton é verdadeiramente o adversário supremo, forte na batalha o suficiente para abalar o trono de Deus. [...] Satã recusa-se a humilhar-se, recusa admitir que pecou e permanece inflexível em sua oposição ao Todo-Poderoso” (LINK, 1998, p. 191).
‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (MILTON, 2007, p. 21)
[…] Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
(MILTON, 2007, p. 19).
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look’st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome, still paying, still to ow;
Forgetful what from him I still receivd,
And understood not that a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd;
(MILTON, 2007, p. 92-93).
‘som other Power/ As great might have aspir’d, and me though mean/ Drawn to his part” (MILTON, 2007, p. 93)
[...] which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
(MILTON, 2007, p. 93).
‘[f]or never can true reconcilement grow/ Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc’d so deep” (MILTON, 2007, p. 94)
‘[...] Farwel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;/ Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least/Divided Empire with Heav’ns King I hold” (MILTON, 2007, p. 94)
‘[a] retórica de Satã no topo do Ninfate enfatiza a infinitude da obrigação [...]. Ele não culpa a si mesmo, embora não de maneira convincente, dado o relato de Rafael no quinto canto de como a rebelião começou” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 132).
‘side by side with his rebelliousness, his individualism, and his love of liberty, his equal love of discipline, of hierarchy” (LEWIS, 1971, p. 7)
From this doctrine of good and evil it follows (a) That the good can exists without evil, as in Milton’s Heaven and Paradise, but no evil without good [...]. That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miresable when it adheres to itself. [...]. This two corollaries explain all those passages in Milton, often misunderstood, where the excellence of Satan’s Nature is insisted on, in contrast to, and agravation of, the perversion of his Will (LEWIS, 1971, p. 67).
‘[a] fallen man is very like a fallen angel. [...] It is too near us” (LEWIS, 1971, p. 101)
‘[t]o admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote no only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of a wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography” (1971, p. 102)
‘[...] is interesting to read about; but Milton makes plain the blank uninterestingness of being Satan” (1971, p.102).
‘Satanic pronouncements are now met with a certain caution” (FISH, 1973, p. 157).
‘is never quite strong enought to resists the insidious attack of verbal power” (FISH, 1973, p. 157).
He is for ever tortured with compassion and affection for those whom he betrays and ruins; he is racked by a vain abhorrence for the desolation of which he is the instrument; he is like a man compelled by a tyrant to set fire to his own possession, and to appear as the witness against and the accuser of his dearest friends and most intimate connections, and then to be their executioner and to inflict the most subtle protracted torments upon them. As a man, were he deprived of all other refuge, he might hold his breath and die – but God is represented as omnipotent and the Devil as eternal. Milton has expressed this view of the subject with the sublimest pathos (SHELLEY, 1973, p. 65-66).
The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames, is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil – but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. (HAZLIT, 2010, p. 112) .
‘[t]he Hell within him, for within him Hell/ He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell/ One step no more then from himself can fly” (MILTON, 2007, p. 92)
The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, ‘rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,” it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed – but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god (HAZLIT, 2010, p. 112).
‘the first and greatest sin? How, more importantly could he be “against’ a Satan who denounces the person of God and the laws of heaven in impassioned diatribes which bear such a striking resemblance at the tone and moods of his own early prose?” (DYSON, p.19).
Milton believed in the 1642s the God was about to produce a purgation of England by revolution, which would be followed by a rule of the saints. He did not, therefore, take the Hobbesian view that revolution would lead to anarchy and to the loss of freedom; he believed that a monstrous tyranny, imposed by God’s enemies in God’s name, would be replaced by glorious liberty of the childrem of God. Always he would have take for granted that disobedience to earthly leaders might be true obedience, but that the same attitude, when turned against God Himself, was the essence of sin and death (DYSON, p. 20).
‘[f]ire is the appropriate symbol for the spirit and knowledge which is in man and by which he “aspires to divinity’ and becomes a god” (WEBLOWSKY, 1973, p. 138).
‘is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in self the sole motive of action” (COLERIDGE, 2007, p. 175).
‘a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity”. (COLERIDGE, 2007, p. 176).
‘We find our intellects cloured, our anger, envy, lust played upon; we are brought ot the actual place of the original fall. We discover thar Satan remains as real and powerful an enemy” (DYSON, 1973, p.22).
‘Heaven is made by God, and is filled by Him; Hell is the experience of whatever consciousness is in exile from God” (DYSON; LOVELOCK, 1973, p. 228).
‘esse heroísmo sombrio, essa dura obstinação, essa pungente ironia, esse braço orgulhoso e rijo que cerra a dor como uma amante, essa concentração de coragem invicta, que, curvada sobre si mesma, tudo encontra” (TAINE apud PRAZ, 1996, p. 73).
While Satan is re-envisioned as the image of expanding human consciousness and desire, rebelling against oppression and limitation, he also comes into view as a fallen figure who loses Paradise in an attempt to locate the divine source within, whose rebelliousness may turn tyrannical and revengeful in his authoritarian reign in hell. This aspect of the Satanic figure is especially prominent in the mythic representations of oppression and insurrection in Blake and Shelley (SCHOCK, p. 39, 2003).
‘em Shakespeare, bem mais que na Bíblia inglesa. A Bíblia e Homero, Virgílio e Dante, Tasso e Spenser foram para Milton recursos fecundos. Shakespeare é diferente: ele vem sem ser convidado” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 126).
Shelley afirmou certa vez que o Diabo deve tudo a Milton, mas o Satã de Milton devia o solilóquio a Hamlet. Em certo sentido, tudo o que Hamlet e Satã dizem é solilóquio: seus espíritos mútuos definham gloriosamente no ar da solidão. Ambos se dirigem – nos momentos fundamentais – somente a si mesmos, pois quem mais parece ser real? Não acreditamos no amor de Hamlet por ninguém – exceto por Yorick, quando o príncipe era criança – nem no de Satã, com diferença de que Satã desejaria ao menos amar a si mesmo, enquanto Hamlet não quer nem isso.
Macbeth deu a Satã sua angústia proléptica; Iago, sua sensação de mérito ferido; e Edmundo, um desejo de defender os bastardos. Hamlet, contudo, deu a Satã o próprio Satã: a prisão do eu. (BLOOM, 2011, p. 126).
‘após a retomada do poder por Carlos II, compôs a maior parte de sua obra-prima. Se Satã é subversivo, o mesmo pode ser dito de seu criador, o poeta e profeta da revolução de Cromwell” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 133-134).
‘Milton, na minha leitura, inaugurou a tradição literária do protestantismo sem o cristianismo, que seria seguida por Blake [...]” (BLOOM, 2011, p. 135).
‘[s]uas heresias, se somadas, são impressionantes, porém secundárias. O que mais importa é seu temperamento áspero. A religião, a política e a moral são todas consequências de seu orgulho, que entre os poetas, só se equipara ao de Dante”. (BLOOM, 2011, p. 142).
‘um aspecto de beleza decaída, de esplendor ofuscado pelo tédio e pela morte; ele é majestoso embora em decadência [...] A beleza maldita é atributo permanente de Satanás” (PRAZ, 1996, p. 73).
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Published
2017-01-15
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SANTOS, A. DE J. R. DOS. ‘<i>Farewel happy fields</i>”: the problem of Satan by the confrontation between the Milton poet and the Milton christian. Caderno de Letras da UFF, v. 26, n. 53, 15 Jan. 2017.
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