[Milton-L] Knowledge, free will, etc.

[Gregory Machacek]

Although I found Michael Bryson's neo-Empsonian argument in Tyrrany in
Heaven engaging, I think that in the heat of this argument, working less
carefully than there, he may have offered a more extreme position than even
he would really want to maintain in the claim that, focusing on "Milton's
poetic creation," he finds it "*perfectly* consistent with Milton's
theodicy to say that the Father may (or does) want Eve to fall" (emphasis
added).  To find it so, one would have to read strongly against the grain
of Milton's Father's direct statement about what he wants:  He states
emphatically that He derives "pleasure" from "obedience" (3.107).  That
that obedience must be voluntary to be pleasing, and that the option of
disobedience must be real for voluntary obedience to be possible is, I take
it, Carol Barton's argument as to why God permits so many things that
conduce to Adam and Eve's exercizing their option to disobey.

The parent / child analogy works to a certain extent, but breaks down in
the way Bryson points out, and forces this reader, in the end, to observe
Milton's own actual formulation: Creator / creature.  On Milton's reasoning
in the epic, unless a being has brought itself into existence, it has been
brought into existence by a Creator, and in such circumstances a proper
sense of gratitude for one's existence calls for obedience to that
Creator's expressed will.  We (Satanic) moderns don't like the notion of
absolute obedience to anyone's will, let alone to the sort of necessarily
arbitrary interdiction that will serve as the sign of such obedience.
Milton foresaw that about us, and his doing so accounts for much of the
impassioned critical commentary his epic has called forth.  (But neither
did he cast creaturely obedience as unthinking; Adam arrives at it by a
process of logical reasoning).

Greg Machacek
Professor of English
Marist College