“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669sponsibilities give the lie to Satan’s disparagement of their life as courtly servility. As
messengers, Raphael and Michael have large liberty to decide how to carry out
their educative and admonitory missions to Adam and Eve. Angels guard the Gar-
den of Eden and its inhabitants against violent attack, though they cannot secure
Adam and Eve against temptation. At God’s command the loyal angels fight coura-
geously against the rebels threatening their society, though they find they cannot
extirpate that evil by their own military might. That fact, as well as the grotesque
scenes of cannon shot and hill-hurling, the near-destruction of Heaven’s lovely
landscape, and Michael’s denunciation (12.688–99) of the Giants who sought glory
in battle and conquest, has suggested to some that Milton has turned pacifist or that
he now repudiates the recent English revolution. But that conclusion is not war-
ranted.^120 These scenes serve rather to demonstrate war’s limitations and its costs:
however good the cause, however noble the warriors, however divinely authorized
and necessary as a response to blatant evil (as Milton always thought the English
revolution had been), it cannot finally eradicate evil. These scenes also undermine
epic aristeia, battle glory, by portraying warfare in its essence and its effects as tragic,
not glorious.
Hell is also a monarchy and its king, Satan, has some claim to that status by
natural law: he is “by merit rais’d / To that bad eminence” (2.5–6), and he readily
assumes “as great a share / Of hazard as of honour” (2.452–3) when, in parody of
the Son’s offer, he volunteers to go as Hell’s emissary to subvert Adam and Eve. But
his superiority over his fellows bears no comparison to that of God over his crea-
tures, and his assumption of kingly, indeed divine, honors and status directly con-
tradicts his republican rhetoric opposing the monarchy of God and the Son.
“Affecting all equality with God” he delivers his temptation of the angels in Heaven
from a splendid “Royal seat” high on a Mount like the one from which Messiah
was pronounced King (5.756–66). He opens the Council in Hell as an oriental
sultan, a figure for the most extreme absolutism, luxury, and tyranny: “High on a
Throne of Royal State, which far / Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, / Or
where the gorgeous East with richest hand / Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and
Gold / Satan exalted sat” (2.1–5). In the uneasy position of defeated military leader
and de facto king, he opens his Council in Hell by summarizing the grounds upon
which his leadership was founded: “just right, and the fixt Laws of Heav’n” (i.e.
God’s appointment); next, their own “free choice” after his debate with Abdiel;
and finally, his proven merit in counsel and in battle (2.18–21). But he concludes
with a piece of rhetorical legerdemain, assuming that these legitimate claims to
leadership also sanction his assumption of kingship. In fact, his claim now to enjoy
a “safe unenvied Throne / Yielded with full consent” (2.23–4) relies on the Hob-
besian principle that a society’s passive acceptance of a sovereign’s power and pro-
tection establishes a binding social contract. In this speech he is a Machiavellian
prince seeking to secure a new throne by manipulating his followers and pursuing
his own goals through force and fraud, “open Warr or covert guile” (2.41).