In the context of Milton criticism what was needed was a way of breaking out to

the impasse created by two interpretative traditions. In one tradition, stretching

from Addison to CS Lewis and Douglas Bush, the moral of Paradise Lost is
‘dazzlingly simple’; disobedience of God is the source of all evil and the content of
all error; obedience to god brings happiness and the righteous life. In the other
tradition, strongly announced by Blake’s declaration that God was of the Devil’s
party without knowing it’ and Shelley’s judgement that ‘Nothing can exceed the
character of Satan’ and continued in our century by AJA Waldock and William
Empson among others, disobedience of God is a positive act that rescues
mankind from an unvarying routine of mindless genuflection ad makes possible
the glorious and distinctively human search for self-knowledge and knowledge
of the Truth. For one party God and his only begotten son are the obvious co-
heroes of the epic; for the other the poem’s true energy resides in the figures of
Satan and Eve who ‘Bold Deed has presum’d’ (IX.921), figures whose actions
would seem to exemplify Milton’s declared preference in his Areopagitica for a
virtue that is active rather than ‘fugitive and cloister’d’ (Fish, p.x)

I was able to reconcile the two camps under the aegis of a single thesis: Paradise
lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are; its method, ‘not
so much a teaching as an entangling is to provoke in its readers wayward fallen
responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the
narrator, God, Rafael, Michael, the Son. In this way I argued the reader is brought
to a better understanding of his sinful nature and is encouraged to participate in
his own reformation. (Fish x)

In claiming that the tension was deliberate, Fish healed an old division in Milton
studies. Provided that our sense of his splendour may be corrected repeatedly
by the normative declarations of discursive judgement, we may permit the
romantic and the theological Satan to evolve in us. We are obeying intentional
meaning, fulfilling the strategy of the poet, even when our feelings about the
mythopoetic Satan contradicts this judgement, The psychological elegance of
Fish argument is that the pious reader can entertain rebellious attitudes knowing
that, as a sign of his fallenness, these attitudes already confirm the doctrinal
argument of the poem and therefore have a pity all of their own (Kerrigan in
Fish xi)

Kerrigan’s complaint is that in my Paradise Lost real oppostion is impossible, or

to put it into the vocabulary of some recent theory, difference is always and
already subordinate to the order of the same and is finally illusory. What I am
always discovering, he says, is ‘a duplication of discursive meaning,’ and the
overall effect of [Fish’s] reading is to promulgate a tyrannical notion of aesthetic
unity at the expense of introducing, without overt recognition, a new and
unheard of flaw in the poem: the alarming idea that its mythopoesis is not
generative but repetitive’ (Kerrigan in Fish xii)

Kerrigan identifies what is probably the main criticism directed at Surprised By

Sin: it describes and attempt to extend into the life of its readers a stifling
authoritarianism. In John Rumrich’s words, the books relentlessly reductive
argument for the voice heard in Milton’s ‘most complex, splendidly varied, and
sublime composition’ ‘a knuckle wrapping peremptory prig . . . who already
knows the truth of things, humilates and berates his charges for their errors and
requires conformity to his authoritative understanding. (Fish xii)

When Milton allows Mammon thus to undercut himself, it is not to make an

ascetic point. He is rejecting not gems and gold but the impoverished vision
whihch, in a kind of negatve transubstantiation, impoverishes them (xv-xvi)

Raphael’s lesson extends beyond the present example to a general instruction for
reading the world: whatever you encounter, either in nature or in the society of
men, read it – see it – as a manifestation of godly power and beneficence. To
proceed in the other direction and look for meaning in the phenomena
themselves as if they were their own cause and the independent determinants of
their own value is to mistake that which has been created for the creator, and the
name of the mistake is idolatry. Idolatry, worship of the secondary, is what
Mammon practices when he can find nothning higher than the lustre of gold and
gems. Even engages in an almost comic (yet tragic form) of idolatrywhen she
bows down to a tree as if to ‘the power/That dwelt within’ (ix. 835-6), attributing
it to the effects of illumination no merely natural process could produce. Adam
in his turn, commits idolatry when he can imagine nothing worse than losing Eve
(‘to lose thee were to lose myself,’ ix.959) drawing from the Son an instant and
devastatingly concise rebuke, ‘Was she thy god?’ (x.145): that is don’t you
remember that there is only one proper object of worship and it isn’t Eve (or
God, or a tree)? Xvii

Worship of the secondary is at bottom self-worship because it accepts as full and

complete – as godly – the limited perspective of the worshipper. As Linda
Gregerson explains it, ‘to rest content in worldly understanding is to make an
idol of human insuffiency’. Satan concludes that he and the other rebel created
themselves because ‘we know not of any other time when we were not as
now.’(v.859, Fish xvii)

The answer, as we have already seen, is that evil comes from free agents – angels
or men – who for whatever reasons […] incorporate matter (gold, trees, Eve into
a project whose purpose, always frustrated, is to break away from God and
establish a kingdom and realm of values: ‘it is not the matter nor the form which
sins. When matter or form has gone out from God and become the property of
another, what is there to prevent its being infected and polluted? Xix

What all of this means is that Milton’s monism, the notion that gives coherence to
Milton’s thought and provides some of its most attractive features, is also the
source of the resistance and dissatisfaction felt by so many readers. While
monism redeems the world and generously gives value to everything, it doesn’t
let anything have its own value. Indeed either claiming or finding independent
value are only ways of pride and idolatry. These are paths of danger only for free
agents who are free not in any absolute sense, but in the sense permitted in a
monistic universe. They are free ot affirm the truth or to deny it, and by denying
it to lose it and themselves. Freedom in a monistic universe is both a gift because
not all creature shave it and a burden because not all creatures are subject to its
risks. The freee agent is one who has the capacity to make the right choice and
also the capacity to make the right one, as opposed to natural objects which do
not wake up in the morning with the possiblilty of altering the conditions of their
existence. […] The happiness of free agents is also a property of their created
existence, but they must will its persistence. They can also will its loss by
deciding (Oh, event perverse’) to ‘break union’ (v.612) (xxiii)

But hers the rub. The loss that results will accrue to them and not to the god from
whom they try and break away. Breaking union as a positive gesture – as a
gesture whose effect is to inaugurate a new and separate mode of being […] is
not a possible form f action in a monistic universe because there is literally
nowhere to go […] The free agent who forsakes his freedom by choosing
wrongly, by choosing an unavailable state of independence, merely returns to the
state of chaos. xxiii

There is only one purpose and it will be served no matter what the intentions or
actions of other agents. ‘Who can impair thee?’ (vii.608), ‘who can make thee
less?’ God’s choristers ask rhetorically, and the answer is obvious: No one,
nothing. Xxiv

The only answer to the question ‘why does Satan think himself into a state of
impairment’ is tautological and unhelpful. Satan thinks that way (in a manner
that impair him even as he worries abou being impaired) because he is capable
of doing so, although the fact that he can think that way doesn’t mean that he
must think that way; it is a possible and not a determined direction of thought.
That is what free will means: a will poised between alternative conceptions (and
therefore between aternative programmes for action) the choice of which is
entirely within its power as opposed to being dictated by the pressures of
external circumstance. As Adam puts it, the free agent is ‘Secure from outward
force; within himself/The danger lies, yet leis within his power:/Against his will
he can receive no harm’ (ix.348-50). The formulation is precise and is designed
to ward of two mistakes; the mistake of enthralling the will to forces outside it,
and the mistake of turning the internal vulnerability of the will into a form of
determinism […] the danger within the agent’s control, and the space of control
(or its loss) is precisely the space of free will.