Salcido 1

Jason Salcido

Mrs. Turnbaugh

AP English Lit. & Comp. 1

12 April 2016

j milt

In a time of grand political and religious discord, John Milton stood as a staunch

supporter of change. England had been ruled by an idolatrous king, and while a revolution

formed and conquered Milton stood as a moral compass for England's progress through his

written works. Milton uses his literature, including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and

Samson Agonistes, to expose the idolatry not only in people of power but to also argue how

those who seek justice are also capable of the sin.

John Milton studied in various locations throughout his life, including abroad in Italy

for a year. His eventual return to England in 1639 was decided when he learned of the

increasing political and religious tensions. He had “...manifested remarkable talent as a

linguist and translator and extraordinary versatility as a poet” (Labriola) but with the given

circumstances he decided to move from artistic poetry to activism. Milton openly opposed the

king himself who had started to be seen as tyrannical in the way he disregarded Parliament.

Understandably, Milton was met with “...English and Continental polemicists who targeted

him as the apologist of radical religious and political dissent” (Labriola), but he was known to

retaliate to any such critics harshly.

The growing tensions of the religious and political turmoil led to what is known as the

English Civil War, in which time the king, Charles I, was executed for treason and the

Commonwealth, a republic government, was established. However, the republic eventually

fell as well and the son of Charles was placed on the throne, reestablishing the monarchy

which was known as the Restoration. Milton went into hiding, during which time his books
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were burned by supporters of the crown. Even in hiding he “... supported the Commonwealth

to the very end” (“John Milton”) and this was when he published his most famous work,

Paradise Lost.

In Paradise Lost John Milton argues that a man is no better than another simply

because he wears a crown rather than rags. The poem is a story of Satan’s rebellion and his

temptation of Adam and Eve told through the perspective of Satan. However, Paradise Lost

is not simply an assertion to please God and chastise Satan, but a piece written to interpret the

word of God towards man (Milton 11). Milton uses Satan’s relationships with God the

Father, God the Son, and Adam and Eve to expose the sin of idolatry and its corruptive nature

over humanity through literary devices such as puns, imagery, and metaphors. 

The grave sin of idolatry takes many forms, one being mistaking a physical

manifestation as the reality. An important distinction to make when understanding the

relationship of Satan and God is the difference between God the Father and God the Son in

the poem. God exists as both simultaneously, which is a concept that Satan cannot

understand. In Paradise Lost; however the Son is somewhat of a reflection of the Father in a

physical form and describes the Son as “My word, my wisdom, and effectual might” (Milton

84), which exemplifies the notion through repetition that although the Son is subservient to

the Father he acts directly as the Father’s will making them equal. Understanding this

relationship is key because it is a critical flaw in Satan that he is unable to comprehend it.

Satan directs his wrath towards the Son, while he envies the father’s omnipotence. Upon

Satan’s arrival on Earth, he mistakes the light of the sun for the Son and speaks to it, saying,

“O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,/ That bring to my remembrance from what state/ I

fell” (Milton 106). Milton's use of a pun emphasizes Satan’s obsession with physical idols as

a form of worship. This scene is a reference to the idolatry present in Milton’s world at the

time in the form of worshipping a king as a God. It came as a result of the doctrine of the
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Divine Rights of Kings, which states that kings have just as much authority as God himself.

Milton argues here that doing so is as heretic as viewing the sun as a God, as Satan was seen

to do.  

Another reflection of idolatry is assuming oneself as equal to God, and is often shown

through self-delusion and vain expressions of power. Satan’s envy of the Father is consistent

throughout the poem and is manifested through his obsession with equaling Him in authority.

At first he victimized himself and argues that God tempted the angels into rebellion by

claiming he “ tricked the bad angels by holding the Son in reserve” (Quint 2) during the battle

in Heaven. He claims the Father gave them false hope into thinking they stood a chance

against God’s might. It becomes increasingly clear throughout the poem that Satan’s effort to

match God “through servility, militarism, and false aspirations to kingship... are contrasted

with the kingliness of God” (Hopkins 249) and leads to the eventual degradation of his

character. It’s absolutely absurd for a creation to “defy th’Omnipotent to arms” (Milton 12)

because He is just that: Omnipotent. Satan believes that he can overpower God through

militaristic stratagem when it ultimately amounts to a farce no matter what. Following the

angels' fall, they erect Pandemonium as a council chambers for Hell. Milton's elaborate

imagery of the "Doric pillars overlaid /With Golden Architrave; nor did there want/ Cornice

or Freeze, with bossy Sculptures grav'n,/ The Roof was fretted Gold" (Milton 61) within

Pandemonium effectively illustrate the vanity of the fallen angels in their replication of God's

kingdom. A strong sense of self-idolatry is seen in Milton's time as the reigning king

gradually grew more tyrannical and vain. Milton argues that no authority, whether it is a king

or an angel, can match God's; regardless of their accomplishments especially when they only

amount to materialism and militaristic strategy. 

Idolatry can also become evident through one's own self, and does so through their

pride. As a the faux hero of the poem Satan does possess a tragic flaw (among many others)
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which is his pride. The Son will always overpower him, the Father will always outwit him,

yet Satan still clings to the notion that he “Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”

(Milton 19) as though he had the same power of creation as God. Satan’s decline of valor

comes as he slowly realizes this fact, and that he is only capable of corrupting and perverting

that which has already been created. Satan commits such perversion by tempting Adam and

Eve with his greatest flaw: pride. By projecting his own sin of pride on the pure couple he

enforces a hierarchy upon them where none existed before. The relationship of Adam and

Eve is similar to the Son and the Father in that Eve is subordinate but also equal to Adam.

Satan distorts the perception of equality by tempting Eve when saying “O fair plant...with

fruit surcharg’d,/ Deigns none to ease thy load and taste thy sweet?...is knowledge so

despis’d?” (Milton 146), commending her for her beauty as though it was hers alone to take

pride in. Satan's rhetoric is key to note, especially in his uses of metaphors, because it shows

his salacious methods of temptation. The temptation leads to the distancing of Eve and Adam,

which allows Satan to tempt her even further into the eating of the fruit. Such a notion goes

hand-in-hand with the aforementioned manifestation of idolatry in that it plays on humanity's

vanity; however Milton distinguishes the idolatry in Adam and Eve as not vanity in the form

of material objects, but rather in a human's body and mind. Regardless of a person's beauty or

brilliance as a king they can amount to God's authority.  

Satan’s idolatrous mindset is what leads him to his tragic flaws of pride, envy, and

wrath. Each of these manifest because of Satan’s idolatry: the obsession of physical

presences. His erection of a vain kingdom in hell, his misconception of the sun as God

himself, and his temptation of self-idolization in Eve all highlight the sin that is idolatry: a

creation that may  “overvalue itself, or be overvalued, and lose its role as a pointer to the

Creator” (Edwards 257). The reason Milton argues that the idolization of man is what led to

their lose of paradise and the distancing of their relationship with God is because this was
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what he was seeing happen within his own society. Milton was witnessing a ruler lead men

astray through idolatrous means, and set it upon himself to write a poem to expose its

corruption of his fellow men.  

Within Paradise Regained, Milton both directly and indirectly identifies a grave flaw

of man: the idolization of the physical world. In the poem Satan uses the same tactics of

persuasion against Jesus Christ that he used on Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, but is

thoroughly refuted on every argument by Christ. The poem identifies Satan and his fellow

demons’ corruption over the world since the loss of paradise. Milton depicts Satan as the

embodiment of sin, while Christ as the embodiment of purity, and such an interaction

articulates what man is, and what man should be. Milton uses allusions, personification,

imagery, and repetition to argue that the idolatrous figures and desires corrupted man on

Earth while contrasting said sinful natures with Christ’s purity.

To find fascination within physical objects is another prominent manifestation of

idolatry, which extends to human beings objectifying others through lust. The idea of

idolization of objects and lust was also touched upon in Paradise Lost, as are most of the

forms of idolatry. The similar themes of idolatry aren’t coincidental, the two poems are “twin

halves of a single epic vision” (Wittreich 3) of exposing the existence of idolatry in the world

and how it can be rectified. Such is seen in Paradise Regained, as one of Satan’s methods to

tempt Christ is to present him with comfort as he trekked through the desert while starving

and without human contact. Satan conjures “A Table richly spred, in regal mode,/ With

dishes pil’d, and meats of noblest sort/ And savour, Beasts of chase, or Fowl of game/”

(Milton 28) in an effort to tempt Christ into a gluttonous indulgence. Elaborate imagery of the

feast is meant to convey how tempting Satan’s offer is, and the key use of the word “regal” is

a deliberate connection of said vanity to the king in Milton’s time. Furthermore, the feast had

guests including “Ladies of th’Hesperides, that seem’d/ Fairer then feign’d of old” (Milton
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29) in order to tempt Christ through lust that would exceed any of the allusions Milton

makes. Both of these attempts fail as Christ uses his own rhetoric of personification to refuse

his offers. He criticizes Satan’s advances saying that he should “Extol not Riches then, the

toyl of Fools...To slacken Virtue, and abate her edge,/ Then prompt her to do aught may merit

praise” (Milton 32), effectively personifying wealth and virtue to depict how the former is

toxic to the latter. Milton uses Satan’s temptation of physical objects in order to have Christ

expose their corruption of the world.

Although Satan’s conjurings to tempt Christ only existed for said purpose, Milton

makes it a point to identify the existence of idolatrous structures in the real world. During one

of Satan’s temptations of Christ Milton uses imagery as Satan spirits him away from the

desert onto a temple in Jerusalem, as “The holy City lifted high her Towers,/ And higher yet

the glorious Temple rear’d,/ Her pile, far off appearing like a Mount/ Of Alabaster, top’t with

golden Spires” (Milton 62) which prompts the reader to visualize idolatry in a real city. The

scene depicts Satan’s final endeavor at temptation in which Christ must stand on the temple

roof or fall and trust his angels will come to save him. Though the scene shows Christ

overcoming Satan’s final temptation through the use of a temple, a common symbol of

idolatry due to the worship of idols, it is not a coincidence. Milton uses the scene “to cram

into its imaginary, twice doomed walls correlative political and theological ideas that are

central to his religious as well as aesthetic thinking” (Reisner) that focuses on the vain nature

of the city around the temple, suggesting that a house of idols is capable of corrupting an

entire city. Milton uses the conjurings of Satan to expose idolatrous desires of men, but in the

final temptation scene Milton has Satan place Christ atop the temple in order to understand

how idolatry already existed and spread in the world since the loss of paradise.

Idolatry takes form in several different ways, one of which being the idea of glory in

oneself through enterprise and militaristic prowess. Milton saw a strong existence of the
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military in his time due to a rebellion, and “Paradise Regained rejects militarism as a means

of change” (Oldman 355) because Milton believed that such a tactic, even when done in

righteousness, deserves no glory. In Paradise Regained Milton identifies the obsession of

glory within humanity through Satan’s persuasive techniques against Christ. Satan had

seduced mankind into believing self-glorification is an admirable goal for an individual.

Satan’s use of repetition when telling Christ that his “actions to thy words accord, thy words/

To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart/ Conteins of good” (Milton 34) is an effort to

distance Christ from God and inducing individualism into Christ by glorifying him. Christ

counters this with his own form of repetition when saying “on Earth.../ Where glory is false

glory, attributed/ To things not glorious, men not worthy of fame” (Milton 36), effectively

dismissing the notion that what men aspire to does not qualify as glorification, and that

anything he does as a human is only done through the glory of God. Furthermore, Christ goes

on to chastise glory found in military saying that “Nothing but ruin wheresoe’re they rove/

And all flourishing works of peace destroy,/ Then swell with pride, and must be titl’d Gods”

(Milton 36), and to say that finding peace through destruction is far from Godly. Milton uses

Christ’s rebukes to argue that what men glorify in themselves and others is heretic, and the

only one truly deserving of “Glory from men, from all men good or bad.../ no difference, no

exemption” (Milton 37) is God himself.

Milton effectively illustrates the idolatrous actions of everyone involved in his

country’s rebellion, from the king to even the rebels themselves to an extent. The king was

pompous and sought only for his own glory, and the rebels wanted to dethrone him through

violence. They would no doubt go on to praise themselves and glorify their actions. Though

Milton did oppose the monarchy and support the rebels, Paradise Regained was written to

identify the issue of idolatry wherever it existed and to proceed with caution in rectifying it.

The depiction of Christ in contrast with Satan is used as a focal point for what ruler ship
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should be and that “the office of a King,/ His Honour, Vertue, Merit and chief Praise,/ That

for the Publick all this weight he bears” (Milton 32). Milton does not oppose the idea of a

monarchy, he identifies what is wrong with a specific king, the methods to dethrone him, and

how a true society should operate: as the rulers not seeking to glorify themselves, but to focus

on the needs of their subjects.

Pride is a grave sin of men, mostly due to the idea of self-idolization that exists within

all of mankind. If a person does something, they expect praise for it. The sentiment of

recognition of one's actions may seem justified, but it’s important to be conscious of the

means of one’s successes. The story of Samson Agonistes tells of the hero Samson and his

fall from glory. Samson was once an esteemed warrior, but is arrested by Philistines who had

his hair cut and eyes gouged. Though he eventually triumphs over the Philistines, he dies in

the effort with the blood of innocents on his hands as well. Milton uses allusions,

personification, and irony to argue the idolatrous pride within heroes, and that although they

may fight for righteousness, they are vulnerable to the same temptations as the evils they

vanquish.

To assume glory based on what others have given oneself is a manifestation of pride

addressed in Samson Agonistes. Prior to the events in the poem, Samson was a proud warrior

that was given strength by God in the form of his hair. However, Samson did little in the way

of crediting God for his successes. It’s only after his hair was cut and his strength lost that he

comes to realize that “when [God] gave me strength, to shew withal/ How slight the gift was,

hung it in my Hair” (Milton 8). Coming to the realization of his glory's source and being

given an opportunity for quasi-freedom in the form of performing in a festival, Samson uses

the opportunity to prove himself as a proper champion of God. It is key to note that Samson

receives no divine instruction as to what to do, he simply does what he assumes God wants.

The disconnect from God runs contrast with Milton’s previous work of Paradise Lost and
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Paradise Regained in which God the Father and God the Son were characters with set

intentions and aspirations for mankind. In Samson Agonistes, however, the “drive to define

Milton’s God according to Samson’s strengths or weaknesses reduces God by obscuring his

Spirit’s activity in the poem” (Balla) that effectively illustrates the distance between man and

God. The misinterpretation and distant relationship with God is seen in Milton’s allusion

when the newly blinded Samson says “O first created Beam, and thou great Word,/ Let there

be light, and light was over all;/ Why am I thus bereav’d thy prime decree?” (Milton 9).

Samson’s loss of sight allows him to realize that he’s been dismissive of God’s word, and

motivates him on the path of a religious crusader. Samson uses his brief release from prison

as a way to punish the Philistines for their idolatrous acts by destroying their temple.

However, the destruction of the temple is morally questionable as Samson killed not only the

Philistines and even himself, but a countless amount of innocents as well.

The description of the destruction of the Temple illustrates the result of violent acts of

heroism. Samson is given the power he once held and chooses to destroy the Temple of

Dagon, an epicenter for idolatrous worship. One would assume that the destruction would

result in peace, the event is described in violent terms. The description “presents events as all

too knowable and insists that they are a political, not hermeneutic or epistemological,

problem” (Netzley). The temple's demolishing and it's description is meant to have the reader

question the morality of Samson's act, and that a hero's actions are not always heroic.

Samson’s father and the Chorus refrain from going to the scene in fear of running “into

danger’s mouth./ This evil on the Philistines is fall’n” (Milton 54), the evil being Samson

himself. Milton personifies danger to emphasize the fact that the violence is a product of

man. Though Samson destroyed a home for idolatry, he still killed many innocent people,

including himself in the end. Milton argues that the ends do not justify the means, and that
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simply because something is done with good intentions does not mean the “hero” is exempt

from punishment.

A dire end for a hero is to suffer the same fate as the evil defeated. Such a result can

come by simply repeating the same mistakes that the hero’s opponent committed. Milton uses

irony to illustrate the result of a hero falling into the same sins of their enemy. Samson’s

intentions were righteous in his intent; however, his means of going about them led to his

downfall. However, following his death Samson’s father and the Chorus are optimistic about

the events that transpired. Even while knowing that many innocent people died because of

Samson’s recklessness, his father insists he builds “A Monument, and plant it round with

shade...With all his trophies hung, and Acts enroll’d/ In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric

Song” (Milton 61), being completely unaware of the idolatrous nature behind the gesture.

Such an ironic ending coupled with a symbol of idolatry that contradicts Milton's personal

views offers “various interpretations of [Samson’s] heroic self-sacrifices made in the name of

pietas, a correlative of duty” (Sauer) that suggests the hopeful ending is meant as a red

herring. Erecting a monument to Samson would be an equivalent sin to worshiping a man as

a god, something Milton fought vehemently against. Illustrating the main hero of the poem as

an idolatrous figure symbolizes that no one is exempt from sin.

Milton uses Samson as a metaphorical figure for the rebellion in his time. The reader

is meant to sympathize with Samson as they are introduced to his father, friends, and former

wife. However, one’s perception of Samson is meant to become muddy following his

destruction of the Temple. On the one hand, a hub for idolatrous worship is destroyed. On the

other, innocent people are killed in a rash act of violence. A similar sentiment is applied to

the rebellion: though they are overthrowing an idolatrous king, they glorify themselves in a

similar way he did. As a result, the Commonwealth that was established fell to a similar fate

as Samson in that they rose as heroes, and fell as villains.

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