RE: Rép. : Re: [Milton-L] Samson as suicidebomber

[Derek Wood]

(See Michael Bryson's question below)
 
Because Samson's God is 'unsearchable. . .' The God of Adam and Moses and Abraham no longer appears or speaks. No bushes burn. Samson is like us, or like17th C. Christians, lonely, sinful and bewildered. There had been signs once for Samson and yet he has come now to be shackled, enslaved and shamed. His apparently divine impulses led him to the Timnan woman and what a mess that turned out to be! His marriage to Dalila was not motioned by God  and now he thinks God wants him to go to the idolatrous forbidden feast of Dagon. Milton himself was doubtful about the provenance of Samson's motions: 'whether prompted by God or by his own valour . . . '(CP 4.1, 102). He records his anxiety about such promptings elsewhere: "divine illumination . . . no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other . . ." (CP 7, 242).
 
The final  words of the Chorus are sometimes taken to be a beautiful concluding comment by Milton himself but they are a tissue of mistakes and ironies e.g. they presume to 'search' what they say is unsearchable; their calm of mind comes from a massive bloodwork of slaughter; 'spent passion' is not admired by Milton elsewhere (e.g. he finds litanies are dead and worthless because they lack the spark of passion); all really is best in the end but the Philistines are not overcome in this false end: perhaps the real end is the eschaton but they do not know this etc.
 
Milton had believed, after the defeat of Charles, that God by 'apparent signes' had signalled his approval of his Saints but now he found himself blind, defeated and shamed. Major General Fleetwood had  cried out in the same situation, 'God hath spet in our faces!'
 
SA is a sad, tragic study of the loneliness of humanity, listening in the darkness for a God who will not respond or appear, One who almost seems to  taunt us with ambiguous scraps that make us a little better than hopeless, even then to deceive our fragile hopes. Samson's best guess at liberation is like mad Lear's: 'Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.' Those e-mails about Godot were unintentionally quite relevant.
 
Derek Wood.
 
 
 
 
 
Derek N. C. Wood,
Senior Research Professor and Shastri Fellow,,
St. Francis Xavier University,
ANTIGONISH,    NS,
Canada,    B2G 2W5
 
e-mail: dwood at stfx.ca
phone: 902-867-2328 (w)
           902-863-5433 (h)
fax:      902-867-5400
web:     http://www.stfx.ca/people/dwood <http://www.stfx.ca/people/dwood/Welcome.html> /Welcome.html 

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 . . .There *is* a Dagon, then, in SA? Then why does Dagon--or Jehovah, for that matter--not speak in SA? Why, of the last three great works, does SA function as the one in which "God" is given no voice but that of human assertion? . . .

Michael Bryson



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