“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669garden and their own sometimes wayward impulses and passions; to work out their
relationship to God and to each other; and to deal with ever-new challenges relat-
ing to work, education, love and sex, intellectual curiosity, the duties pertaining to
their places in a hierarchical universe, and temptations from Satan. All of these
challenges are presented in Milton’s poem as components of an ideal human life in
innocence, and as preparation for a more exalted state. Milton does not conceive of
ideality as static perfection but always associates it with challenge, choice, and growth.
In his representation of Hell and Heaven Milton dramatizes issues long impor-
tant to him – monarchy, tyranny, idolatry, rebellion, liberty, republicanism – and
forcefully reiterates the antimonarchical politics of his treatises.^115 However, by rep-
resenting both Satan and God as monarchs, and portraying Satan as a self-styled
grand rebel marshaling Milton’s own republican rhetoric against what he calls the
“tyranny of heaven,” Milton’s poem has seemed to some acute critics to carry
ambiguous and seriously unsettling political messages. For Blair Worden, Satan’s
rhetoric of republicanism signals Milton’s profound disillusion with his own party
and with political discourse generally, as he “withdraws from politics into faith.”^116
For David Norbrook, the representation of heaven as an absolute monarchy re-
mains disconcerting, as does the absence of a heavenly public sphere; Milton’s de-
nial of analogy between heavenly and earthly kingship does not, he thinks, entirely
disrupt that analogy.^117 For Sharon Achinstein, Milton deliberately confronts read-
ers with images and tropes – notably the Parliament of Hell – that are susceptible of
multiple and misleading interpretations, to force them to eschew easy allegories and
thereby become “fit readers,” able to negotiate political rhetoric and propaganda.^118
He surely offers such a challenge with Satan’s rhetoric, but I think Milton makes
quite clear his evaluation of monarchy. By demonstrating that there can be no
possible parallel between earthly kings and divine kingship he flatly denies the fa-
miliar royalist analogies: God and King Charles, Satan and the Puritan rebels. And
by associating the imagery and accoutrements of absolute kingship with God, as
proper to him alone, he would have readers recognize that the appropriation of
them by any earthly monarch is idolatrous.
When the Son is proclamed king over the angels Satan tempts his followers to
revolt by using the rhetoric of republican virtue and the rights of a free citizenry
that Milton himself used in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:
Will ye submit your necks, and chuse to bend
The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know your selves
Natives and Sons of Heav’n...Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchie over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedome equal? or can introduce