The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers
Steven Marx
[Studies in English Literature 1500-1800 Winter 1992]
". . . all armed prophets
were victorious and the unarmed came to ruin."1
The question of war or peace troubled
sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe as much as it troubles our own time.
Organized violence--the systematic infliction of irrevocable harm upon one group
of human beings by another--was the activity by which the modern nation-state
originated, defined itself, rose and fell. During those centuries, most Europeans
affirmed, or at least accepted war as the final arbiter of what happened in
history. But a significant minority, whether because of inner illumination,
abstract reasoning or the outcome of experience, disputed the primacy of war,
maintaining that organized violence was intrinsically evil and that its purposed
benefits rarely outweighed its costs. This debate between war and peace influenced
the policies of princes, the exhortations of divines, the speculations of philosophers
as well as the daily thoughts of citizens. It also shaped the imaginative productions
of artists and writers throughout the early modern period.
During the sixteenth century, the
dispute between militarists and pacifists took place in a largely secular context
epitomized by the competing humanisms of Machiavelli and Erasmus. In a recent
study, I have shown how Shakespeare dramatized that secular debate about war
and peace in individual plays and in his own shift of authorial perspective
from hawk to dove when the pacifist King James ascended to the throne in 1603.2
In the present essay, I will examine the pro and anti- war debate in the religious
context within which warfare was conducted and represented during the later
seventeenth century. Rather than worldly contests over wealth, territory or
succession, during this period wars throughout Europe were fought as holy crusades
on behalf of God and against Satan. Milton, the prime English poet of this age,
chose not to depict the civil wars of England or of Rome but rather the War
in Heaven; chose as his source not Holinshed or Plutarch but rather the Holy
Scriptures. I will argue that the war and peace debate in Milton's time governs
the structure of two of his major works and reveals a dramatic shift in the
poet's point of view over time from a militarist to a pacifist outlook. I will
further contend that Milton's views on war and peace closely parallel and eventually
converge with those of the Quakers, whose "peace testimony" emerges and defines
itself in the course of his career.3
Two kinds of objections offset
this thesis, one from the right, the other from the left. Many historians and
literary scholars insist that there was no significant anti-war sentiment in
earlier periods of European culture; that to find any is simply anachronism,
a reading of twentieth-century liberal shibboleths into the past. Thus, for
example, in Captain or Colonel: The Soldier in Milton's Life and Art
(1984), Robert Thomas Fallon attacks earlier claims that Milton criticizes warfare
in Paradise Lost:
. . . in the absence of historical
evidence I had to question the
assumption that the sensibilities
of the 1650s resembled so
closely those of the 1960s and
that a seventeenth-century
Puritan like Milton, whose causes
prospered through the force of
arms and who was the loyal servant
of a military regime for a
decade, would share the sentiments
of twentieth-century pacifist
thought.4
Fallon can dismiss two book-length
studies--Stella Purce Revard's The War in Heaven "Paradise Lost "and the
Traditions of Satan's Rebellion (1980)5
and James A. Freeman's Milton and the Martial Muse: "Paradise Lost" and
the European Traditions of War(1980)6--because
neither Revard nor Freeman produces extra-textual evidence of anti-war attitudes
in Milton's environment. One purpose of this essay is to bring such evidence
to bear on an interpretation of Milton's life and work.
On the other hand, Christopher
Hill, whose Milton and the English Revolution (c1977) taught me to think
about the relation of seventeenth-century religious politics to Milton's poetry,
acknowledges the presence of Quakers and of pacifism in Milton's political world,
but refuses to allow any link between the latter two:
I do not intend to suggest that
Milton belonged to any of
these groups, that he was a Leveller,
a Ranter, a Muggletonian or
an early [i.e. pre-pacifist] Quaker.
But . . . .their ideas illuminate
his and may well have influenced
him, both positively and
negatively.
By 1660 Milton would have criticized
. . . Quakers, on these
grounds: they ignored the world
as it really is, in all its
brutality: they were fundamentally
unserious, as self-
regarding as a modern hippie.
The picture of Milton subsiding
into a genial and pacifist old age,
in which all conflicts are mental
only, is a piece of twentieth-
century sentimentalism which the
seventeenth century texts do
not justify.7
Though I hesitate to challenge
Hill's prodigious scholarship, I hope the material I present here will counter
some assumptions about Quakers and pacifists that make for inconsistencies in
his readings of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
James Stuart's efforts to act as
blessed peacemaker8 were
not popular among the subjects he sought to alert to the horrors of war, particularly
not among the Puritans. James's perceived "appeasement" of the Spanish power
that had sent the Armada and that was carrying out atrocities in the Netherlands
stoked the fires fueled by Puritan preachers.9
They demanded not only a more aggressive policy against the Papist enemy, but
also a revival of "the dignity of chivalry" to elevate the"extraordinarily low
esteem into which soldiers had fallen "in the early seventeenth century.10
The militancy of the puritan preachers
presented itself more as religious than political: "Above all creatures God
loves soldiers . . . the condition of the child of God. . . is military in this
life." 11 This was a radical
change from the orthodox Christian doctrine of the "just war" going back to
St. Augustine. Whereas the medieval church and even Luther had seen the purpose
of warfare and of the state which conducted it merely as maintenance of order
and restoration of the peace, Calvinists believed that war had a positive purpose,
and that it did not require the sanction of a duly constituted authority for
legitimacy.12 Abandoning
the just war theory in favor of what Roland Bainton has categorized as the outlook
of holy war or crusade, they believed battle was the essential condition of
both the inner and the outer life of the true Christian: "The Saints receive
their commission from the great King, King of Kings, to have a two edged sword
in their hands, to execute judgment upon the Heathen, and punishment upon the
people; To binde their Kings with chaines, and their Nobles with fetters of
iron . . ."13 And the most
militant of Old Testatment battle cries were repeatedly invoked: "Cursed he
that keepeth backe his hand from sheding of blood."14
The metaphysics of Puritans emphasized
not the harmony of God's creation, but original sin and the continuing eschatological
battle between the forces of good and evil: "The world is the great field of
God, in which Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and his angels."15
One source of the crusading spirit was the Reformers' emphasis on the Scripture,
where in the Hebrew Bible they read of a Lord of Hosts (or armies) rejecting
Saul for his failure to exterminate His enemies and rewarding David with military
victories over the Philistines, and where in the Christian Bible, they read
of the triumph of the armies of the saved before the last judgment. Throughout
the century, Biblical histories and prophecies were conflated with events on
the battlefields of Europe by propagandists who turned their opponents, whether
King or Pope, to Goliath or Antichrist. Another doctrinal source of military
fervor was the ancient metaphorical identification of the conscientious individual
as an embattled knight struggling against evil in the world and in the self.
Although in the previous century, Erasmus had defined the "militis christiani"
as a fighter of the spirit not the flesh, Puritans reliteralized the metaphor
of Christian soldier.
The Calvinists' adoption of the
crusading approach to war had major military consequences. Starting on the continent
during the Thirty Years War, the protestant generals, Maurice of Nassau and
Gustavus Adolphus, introduced the regimentation and austerity of the Reformed
churches directly into the army, turning it from an assemblage of individual
fighters into a disciplined, uniformed, highly drilled war machine, able to
do battle in winter as well as summer, restrained from vices like pillage, rape,
smoking, drinking and masturbation, and dedicated to the common cause by the
conviction of their own salvation, whether they won or lost.16
The general of the English Parliamentary forces, Oliver Cromwell, employed the
crusaders' approach to the organization and strategy of his New Model Army to
defeat the poorly organized and less motivated Cavalier troops of King Charles
I and to bring about a Revolution of the Saints maintained by the instruments
of martial law and secret police.
However, some small Reforming sects
refused to go along with the military crusade of the English revolution from
the beginning. They included Familists, Anabaptists and Mennonites, whose reading
of the Bible convinced them that nonviolence itself was one of the signs of
election, that the rest of the world--"the kingdom of the sword"-- was irredeemably
fallen, and that participation in any form of government of a nation-state was
impermissible. But as the revolution proceeded, a new form of pacifism emerged
from one the most militant of Puritan sects, a pacifism which combined a rejection
of violence with a commitment to political involvement and social reform. This
was the "peace testimony" of the Quakers.17
Quakerism received its name from
the physical trembling that manifested the visitations of the spirit in its
early adherents, followers of George Fox, a Leicestershire shoemaker whose personal
experience of Inward Light spurred him to begin preaching the radical Puritan
message of the sufficiency of Scripture and conscience. Like John Lilliburne
and John Winstanley, leaders of the Levellers and Diggers who themselves eventually
became Quakers, Fox had no more use for the rituals of class and gender hierarchy
than for those of organized religion. The Quakers refused to doff hats or use
respectful modes of address to their social superiors. Organized largely by
peasants and laborers, The Society of Friends, as they referred to themselves,
spread throughout Britain and North America and reached a membership of about
35,000 by 1660.18
Many early Quakers came from the
ranks of Cromwell's New Model Army, and, according to Alan Cole, "shared the
radical Puritan conviction that it had once been an instrument for the establishment
of righteousness on earth. While that army continued to exist, Friends never
completely abandoned the hope that it might resume its old role as a 'battle-axe
in the hand of the Lord.'"19
But in 1650, when offered a commission as a captain in Cromwell's militia, Fox's
conscience balked: ". . . I told them . . . I knew from whence all wars did
rise, from the lust, according to James's doctrine . . . I told them I was come
into the covenant of peace, which was before wars and strifes were . . ." 20
When conscripted by authorities as a common soldier a few weeks later, he refused
induction and instead went to jail:
Justice Bennet sent the constables
to press me for a soldier,
seeing I would not accept of a
command. I told them I was
brought off from outward wars.
They came down again to give
me press-money but I would take
none. . . . After a while at
night the constables fetched me
up again and brought me before
the Commissioners, and they said
I should go for a soldier, but I
told them that I was dead to it.
They said I was alive. I told
them, "Where envy and hatred are
there is confusion." They
offered me money twice, but I would
not take it. Then they
were wroth, and I was committed
close prisoner without bailor
mainprize."21
At first Fox's objection to the
use of "carnal weapons" was only intuitive and personal; he made no attempt
to persuade his followers to give up the sword and no appeal to argument or
Scripture. But in the course of the 1650s, his and other Quakers' experiences
gradually crystallized into the doctrine that those at peace with themselves
belonged to a "royal" community which had no use for coercion or physical force.22
They started preaching non-violence, particularly to soldiers and sailors, and
were often beaten and imprisoned. In 1654 Fox wrote to Cromwell, "My weapons
are not carnal but spiritual and 'my kingdom is not of this world', therefore
with a carnal weapon I do not fight, but am from those things dead."23And
Edward Burrow declared to his fellow soldiers: "Your work hath been and may
be honorable in its day and season, but he hath a work more honorable to work
after you; that is to destroy the kingdom of the devil and the ground of wars."24
Quaker pacifism emerged not only
from the experience of the Inner Light, however, but also from political disillusionment
with the course of the English revolution. After founding a theocratic commonwealth
of the saints and beheading the king in 1649, Cromwell discovered that he could
govern the nation for whose liberty he'd fought only by a military rule which
limited the very spiritual and political freedoms for which the saints had gone
to war. Quakers like John Audland were outraged: "Force and compusion may make
some men conform to that outwardly, which otherwise they would not do, but that
is nothing of weight, their hearts are never the better, but are rather worse,
and more hypocrites than before . . . for it is God alone by His powerful word
of life operating in the hearts of people that changeth them . . . ."25
Nevertheless, the emergent peace testimony was nearly abandoned in 1659, when,
after Cromwell's death, reformers again hoped to purify church and state under
a revived Parliamentary rule. At first, Fox looked with favor on this government's
request for military support from the Quakers. For ten weeks, he remained silent
and could not reply to Friends who wanted to join the Bristol militia and wrote
him for guidance. Finally, he emerged from what he called his "time of darkness"
with an unqualified rejection of the outward sword, and from then on he forbade
all Quakers to serve in the military.26
It is not clear, however, whether his decision was based on absolute principle
or upon his fear that this latest regime suffered from the same defects as the
previous one. An analogous fear, in the following year, motivated Parliament
itself to call back Charles II and reinstall the Stuarts on the throne.
The Restoration eliminated whatever
remaining appeal military pursuits may have held for the Quakers. Charles II
prosecuted the regicides and persecuted all those who publicly maintained radical
opinions. After an aborted violent attempt by apocalyptic zealots known as the
Fifth Monarchy Men to revive the rule of the Saints, repression of the Quakers
was intensified. It was then for the first time, that they condemned all use
of violence under any circumstances. Fox presented the official Quaker position
to King Charles on January 21, 1661 in a pamphlet entitled: "A Declaration from
the Harmless and Innocent People of God called Quakers, against all Sedition,
Plotters and Fighters in the World: for removing the Ground of Jealousy and
Suspicion from Magistrates and People concerning Wars and Fightings."27
"The royal army," wrote the Quaker William Smith in 1661, "have put up their
swords and would have all men saved." "The bloody or Lion's war" was ended
and "the Lamb's war" had begun.28
But in distancing themselves from
the militant radicals by maintaining their loyalty and nonviolence, the Quakers
could not avoid Royalist persecution. Unlike other sects, they refused either
to go underground or to make their doctrines of primacy of conscience, economic,
racial and gender equality, and political democracy conform to the reinstituted
regulations of the monarchy. Instead, persecution strengthened their commitment
and their organization as they adopted suffering itself as the chief weapon
in "the Lamb's War." Preaching a philosophy of toleration as both a protection
for themselves and as an expression of respect for their opponents, they attracted
members of all classes and parties, and directed their teachings not only to
their own sectarian brethren but to the world at large:
Upon every slender pretext such
as their own small discontents,
or that they judge the present
peace they have with their
neighbours cannot suit with their
grandeur and worldly glory,
they sheath their swords in one
another's bowels; ruin, waste
and destroy whole countries; expose
to the greatest misery many
thousand families; make thousands
of widows and ten thousands
of orphans; cause the banks to
overflow with the blood of those
for whom the Lord Jesus shed his
precious blood; and spend and
destroy many of the good creatures
of God. And all this while
they pretend to be followers of
the lamb-like Jesus, who came
not to destroy men's lives but
to save them . . . not to kill,
murder and destroy men; not to
hire poor men to run upon and
murder one another, merely to satisfy
the lust and ambition of
great men; they being often times
ignorant of the ground of the
quarrel, and not having the least
occasion of evil or prejudice
against those their fellow Christians
whom they thus kill;
amongst whom not one of a thousand
perhaps ever saw one
another before.29
In tracts like these, during the
years following the Restoration, under the leadership of people like Robert
Barclay and William Penn, Quakers developed the practice of "speaking truth
to power." While they retained faith in the spiritual guidance of the Inner
Light, they promoted a secular pacifism that recalls the language of Renaissance
Christian humanists like More and Erasmus and anticipates the pragmatic critiques
of war formulated by Enlightenment philosophes.
This chronology of the emergence
of Quaker pacifism suggests interesting parallels with "the curve of Milton's
career."30 Plotting that
curve on the axes of inner belief and external experience, one finds that like
many Quakers, Milton began as a soldier in the Lion's war and ended as a partisan
in the Lamb's. Both Milton and the Quakers forged their visions through time
in a sequence of enthusiastic victories and disillusioned defeats, a pattern
of reversals, redefinitions and revaluations.
In 1643, as Milton planned his
unfinished "Arthuriad" celebrating the British nation as the heroic embodiment
of Christian chivalry, he personified the Revolution as Samson awakening: "Methinks
I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man
after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks." 31
And in 1649, while Burrow and Dewsbury crusaded against the King, Milton as
Cromwell's chief propagandist, sang the praises of
those faithful and courageous Barons,
who lost their lives in the
Field, making glorious Warr against
Tyrants for the common
Liberty . . . But now, with a besotted
and degenerate baseness of
spirit . . . the rest, imbastardiz'd
from the ancient nobleness of
thir Ancestors, are ready to fall
flatt and give adoration to the
Image and Memory of this Man [Charles
I].32
By 1652, when Fox himself would
no longer take up the sword, though would not yet dissuade others, Milton showed
similar ambivalence:
Cromwell, our cheife of men, who
. . .
on the neck of crowned Fortune
proud
Hast rear'd God's Trophies . .
.
While Darwen stream with blood
of Scots imbru'd
And Dunbar field resounds
thy praises loud
. . . yet much remains
To conquer still; peace hath her
victories
No less renown'd than war, new
foes arise
Threat'ning to bind our souls with
secular chains . . .33
Ambivalence turned to regret
during the later years of the Protectorate. After the revolution of the Saints
split up into rival factions and Cromwell dissolved Parliament to have himself
crowned in a regal ceremony, and while the Quakers objected to the Lord Protector's
suppression of Nonconformists, Milton began working on Paradise Lost.
As its title suggests, the poem chronicles a series of defeats and disillusionments.
Perhaps the most prominent of all of its losses is faith in a military-heroic
ethos.
The work opens with the failure
of Satan's armed rebellion. Nevertheless, in books 1 and 2, the fallen angel
appears as a courageous general who gains more of the readers' sympathies than
do his royal opponents, God and the Son. His epic virtues--Achillean strength
and Ulyssean guile-- are glorified in a setting where war is the ruling principle,
both in the governing process of the Great Consult and in the ground of being:
. . . a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length,
breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where
eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of
Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion
stand.
For hot, cold, moist and dry, four
Champions fierce,
Strive here for Maistry, and to
Battle bring
Thir embryon Atoms; they around
the flag
Of each his Faction, in their several
Clans
Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth,
swift or slow,
Swarm populous . . .
(2:891-903)
And yet though Satan seems to
embody the heroic glory of "Cromwell our chief of men," the suspicious reader
notices that he has a tendency to lie whenever he speaks.
The account of the war in heaven,
which concludes the first half of Paradise Lost, begins with the expression
of martial enthusiasm on both sides. Satan rallies his troops with the traditional
hero's vaunt of self-creation in battle:
We know no time when we were not
as now;
Know none before us, self-begot,
self-rais'd
By our own quick'ning power . .
.
Our puissance is our own; our own
right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by
proof to try
Who is our equal.
(5:859-866)
And God sends out his troops
with the assurance that their deeds on the field will make righteousness triumphant:
. . . subdue
By force, who reason for thir Law
refuse
. . . lead forth my armed Saints
By Thousands and by Millions rang'd
for fight . . .
. . . them with Fire and hostile
Arms
Fearless assault, and to the brow
of Heav'n
Pursuing drive them out . . .
(6:40-52)
In the heat of battle, before
striking his opponent on the head, Abdiel repeats the claim that arms can
make reason triumph:
. . .nor is it aught but just
That he who in debate of Truth
hath won,
Should win in Arms, in both disputes
alike
Victor; though brutish that contest
and foul,
When Reason hath to deal with force,
yet so
Most reason is that Reason overcome.
(6:121-26)
But despite these justifications
for fighting and despite the fact that God's forces enjoy the benefit of New
Model Army discipline--"the inviolable saints / In cubic phalanx firm advanced
entire / Invulnerable, impenetrably armed / Such high advantages thir innocence
/ gave them above thir foes."(398-402)--neither army achieves its objective,
and after two days the holy war turns into a chaotic melee that threatens
to turn heaven itself into a no-man's land. And though Satan's defeat might
still be read as a resounding victory of the saints, it is not achieved by
the highly disciplined miltary tactics or the innovative armaments mobilized
on both sides, but rather by the Son's sole deployment of a superweapon beyond
the reach of the forces of evil or of good.
After 1658, Milton's veiled regret
about Cromwell shifts to guarded hostility. During the brief interlude of
republican rule following the Protector's death and his heir's abdication,
Milton addressed the revived Rump Parliament as "recoverers of our liberty.
. . after a short but scandalous night of interruption."34
And after Book 6, Satan loses his attractiveness altogether and turns from
a hero into a sadistic burglar, a voyeuristic toad, and a lounge-lizardlike
serpent. As Fox arrives at a conclusive rejection of the Lion's War, in the
second half of Paradise Lost, Milton fully repudiates military heroics--not
only those of classical epic and medieval romance but also those of the earlier
books of the poem:
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only Argument
Heroic deem'd, chief maistry to
dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl'd
Knights
In Battles feign'd . . .
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd
Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and
Steeds,
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgeous
knights
At joust and tournament; . . .,
Not that . . . justly gives Heroic
name
To Person or to Poem. Mee of these
Nor skill'd nor studious . . .
.
(9:27-42)
In Books 11 and 12, while revealing
the future of his descendants to an Adam chastened by sin and death, Raphael
delivers a sermon condemning the martial values of the heroic age:
For in those days Might only shall
be admir'd,
And Valor and Heroic Virtue call'd;
To overcome in Battle, and subdue
Nations, and bring home spoils
with infinite
Man-slaughter, shall be held the
highest pitch
Of human Glory . . .
Thus Fame shall be achiev'd, renown
on Earth
And what most merits fame in silence
hid.
(11:689-699)
And later, Raphael refuses to
celebrate the military victories of the Lord of Hosts and His generals from
Moses to Solomon:". . .and at length they come, / Conducted by his Angel,
to the land / Promised to Abraham and his seed--the rest / Were long to tell:
how many battles fought / How many kings destroyed, and kingdoms won"(12:258-63).
From the perspective of the second half of Paradise Lost, the glories of triumph
celebrated in the Old Testament are themselves reduced to temptations, "the
fair appearing good."
After the Restoration of the monarchy
in 1660, the weight of Milton's disillusionment and regret was, like Adam's,
increased with external punishment. Blind, bereaved of his second wife, estranged
from his daughters, the former Commonwealth Latin Secretary was stripped of
his status and his stipend, forced into hiding, arrested and imprisoned for
a month, and then released to continue writing his poem:
. . .I Sing with mortal voice,
unchang'd
To hoarse or mute, though falln
on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and
evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed
round
And solitude . . .........................................(7:24-28)
For the Society of Friends, Charles
II's regime also brought on affliction. Friends were beaten, jailed and prevented
from attending the Inns of Court and university. For this reason, in 1662,
the young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, took on the responsibilities of reader to
the blind John Milton in return for tutorials in Latin.35
The blind poet and young student,
who would later become a leader of the Society of Friends and edit Fox's Journals,
were drawn to one another. In 1667 Milton needed to leave the city of London
with his family to escape the plague, and Ellwood found him a cottage near his
own lodgings in the suburb of Chalfont St. Giles. According to the often quoted
passage in his autobiography, when the Quaker ended his latest stint in prison,
he visited Milton "to welcome him into the country":
After some common discourses had
passed between us, he called
for a manuscript of his; which
being brought he delivered to me,
bidding me take it home with me,
and read it at my leisure; and
when I had done so, return it to
him with my judgement
thereupon. When I came home, and
set myself to read it, I
found it was that excellent poem
which he entitled, Paradise
Lost. After I had, with
the best attention read it through, I made
him another visit, and returned
him his book, with due
acknowledgement of the favour he
had done me in
communicating it to me. He asked
me how I liked it and what I
thought of it, which I modestly
but freely told him, and after
some discourse about it, I pleasantly
said to him, "thou hast said
much here of Paradise Lost, but
what hast thou to say of
Paradise Found?" He made no answer,
but sat some time in a
muse; then brake off that discourse
and fell upon another
subject.36
After the plague passed, Milton
returned to London. Ellwood continues:
And when afterwards I went to wait
on him there, which I
seldom failed of doing whenever
my occasions drew me to
London, he showed me his second
poem, called "Paradise
Regained," and in a pleasant tone
said to me, "this is owing to
you, for you put it into my head
by the question you put to me
at Chalfont, which before I had
not thought of."37
Whether or not, as Ellwood claims,
it was his influence that stimulated Milton to write Paradise Regained,
the curve of pacifist thought that Milton shared with the Quakers reached
its terminus in this final work.38
Paradise Regained is something
of a revision of Paradise Lost. The disastrous temptation of the earlier
poem is here successfully resisted; its military conflict is here metamorphosed
into a conflict of ideas; and Christ's victory in "debelling" (4:605) or pacifying
Satan after the war in heaven, is here repeated as the gentler, more spiritualized
victory of the Lamb's war over the Lion's:
. . . straight a fiery Globe
Of Angels on full sail of wing
flew nigh,
Who on their plumy Vans receivd
him soft . . .
. . . Angelic choirs
Sung Heavenly Anthems of his victory
Over temptation and the Tempter
proud."
(4:581-595)
The poem begins with God's redefinition
of heroism and warfare as spiritual and intellectual rather than physical:
By humiliation and strong Sufferance:
His weakness shall o'ercome Satanic
strength. . .
Victory and Triumph to the Son
of God
Now ent'ring his great duel, not
of arms,
But to vanquish by wisdom hellish
wiles.
(1:160-161;173-75)
And Christ repudiates his former
plan for holy war as a childhood dream:
. . . victorious deeds
Flam'd in my heart, heroic acts;
one while
To rescue Israel from the
Roman yoke
Then to subdue and quell o'er all
the earth
Brute violence and proud Tyrannic
pow'r,
Till truth were freed, and equity
restor'd:
Yet held it more humane, more heavenly,
first
By winning words to conquer willing
hearts,
And make persuasion do the work
of fear;
At least to try, and teach the
erring soul
Not wilfully misdoing, but unware
Misled. . .
(1:215-26)
Book 3 relates Satan's effort
to tempt the Son with various attractions of military activity. Christ debunks
the appeals to physical prowess, wealth, and fame in a series of anti-war
homilies. And after he rebuts Satan's telling point that the Lord of Hosts
himself cherishes martial glory, the tempter shifts ground to an appeal to
duty as a reason for taking up the sword. With clear references to the Army
of Saints, he urges Jesus to throw off Tiberius's sacrilegious occupation
government of Palestine using the guerrilla war tactics of the Maccabees,
who, like the Son, "retir'd unto the Desert, but with arms"(166):
If Kingdom move thee not, let move
thee zeal
And Duty; Zeal and Duty are not
slow,
But on Occasions's forelock watchful
wait.
They themselves rather are occasion
best,
Zeal of thy Father's house, Duty
to free
Thy Country from her Heathen servitude.
(171-176)
Satan persists with a loving
description of the "martial equipage" of the Parthian army and with a detailed
plan for diplomatic treachery that the Son could mobilize to rout the Romans,
both of them resembling the aggressive foreign policy options that Milton
was privy to as Cromwell's Latin Secretary. This offer provides yet another
occasion for rejecting force and fraud:
Much ostentation vain of fleshly
arm
And fragile arms, much instrument
of war
Long in preparing, soon to nothing
brought
Before mine eyes thou hast set;
and in my ear
Vented much policy . . .
. . . that cumbersome
Luggage of war there shown me,
argument
Of human weakness rather than of
strength.
(387-391; 400-402)
It is particularly germane to the
issue of war and peace that Milton chose the Gospel story of the temptation
in the wilderness upon which to base his last poem. Religious politics in first
century Israel had much in common with those of seventeenth-century England.
There was a strong tradition that the coming Messiah would be a military leader
who would break the nations with a rod of iron, the lion of Judah who would
destroy the power of Rome. The Zealots, who included among their ranks the disciple
Simon and quite possibly Judas Iscariot, expected Jesus to raise their flag.
When "Jesus took five thousand men into the countryside; it looked like the
beginning of a military-political operation, but he gave them a lesson in practical
community and sent them away again."39
Paradise Regained 's affirmation
of Quaker pacifist principles seems unmistakeable, especially in contrast to
the ambiguous politics of the earlier poems.40
Rather than an epic or a drama, it reads like a philosophical debate or a platonic
dialogue; indeed the identification of truth and virtue is one of its lessons,
and Socrates is one of its spokespersons. The poem's hero is a young man in
the process of constructing the vision he will leave to the future by confronting
and rejecting the wrong choices offered to him by Satan. Unlike the Satan of
Paradise Lost, the devil's advocate of this poem is neither malicious,
nor cruel. I read in him a projection of the human errors that the old Milton
fears he might have made, in particular the error that armed prophets are victorious
and the unarmed come to ruin.
Footnotes
1. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella
and Mark Musa (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 22.
2. Steven Marx, "Shakespeare's Pacifism," Ren Q, in press.
3. A significant connection between Milton and the Quakers has been proposed
elsewhere, but to my knowledge, never in terms of pacifist politics. Alden Sampson,
Studies in Milton (1913; rpt. edn., New York: AMS Press, 1970) devotes
a lengthy chapter (pp. 167-239) to parallels between Milton's views on iconoclasm,
humanism and the "Inner Light" and those of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism.
4. (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press),p. 2.
5. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press).
6. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press).
7. (New York: Viking Press,1978), pp. 8-9, 413, 477.
8. By uniting Scotland and England, by making a treaty between the "natural
enemies " of Britain and Spain, and by negotiating an end to hostilities between
Sweden and the Hapsburgs.
9. Louis B. Wright, "Propaganda against James I's 'Appeasement' of Spain,"
HLQ 6(1942): 149-171.
10. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins
of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp 285, 287.
11. Thomas Taylor, Christ's Combat and Conquest (London 1618)
qtd. by Walzer, p. 279.
12. Walzer, p. 269.
13. John Redingstone, Plain English (London, 1649), p. 3, cited
by Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace (New York:
Abingdon Press, 1960), p. 149.
14. A Warning-Peece to Warre (London, 1642), cited by Bainton,
p. 150.
15. Thomas Taylor, Christ's Combat and Conquest (London 1618)
qtd. by Walzer, p. 278.
16. This is the argument of Michael Roberts' The Military Revolution,
1500-1660 (Belfast, Ireland: Queens University Press, 1956). See also James
A. Aho, Religious Mythology and the Art of War: Comparative Religious Symbolisms
of Military Violence (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 194-217.
17. Bainton, p.157.
18. Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 256-57).
19. "The Quakers and the English Revolution," Past and Present
10 (November 1956): 39-54. The details of the development of the early peace
testimony is complex and somewhat vexed among Quaker historians. Cole's account
is based on primary sources and is quoted by Brock on p. 262.
20. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox , edited by John L.
Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), p. 65.
21. Fox, p. 67.
22. Brock, pp. 260-61.
23. Fox, p. 198.
24. Qtd. by Bainton, p. 158.
25. Qtd. by William Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism second
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961), p. 484.
26. Brock, p. 268.
27. Brock, p. 269.
28. Hugh Barbour,The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1964), pp. 40, 226.
29. Robt. Barclay, An Epistle of Love and Friendly Advice , to the
Ambassadors of the Several Princes of Europe (1679), qtd. by Brock, p. 274.
30. Christopher Hill, p. 112, observes, "The curve of M.'s career quite
surprisingly follows that of the Quakers: his support for Cromwell in 1649 and
1653, his growing disillusion under the Protectorate, his rejection of all organized
churches, the traumatic effect on him of the Restoration, leading to apparent
political quietism and withdrawal from politics whilst still hoping for ultimate
divine revenge." The last part of the analogy seems misplaced in reference to
the Quakers and depends on the controversial assumption that we take Samson
Agonistes as Milton's last poem. It typifies Hill's ideological dismissal
of pacifism and his refusal to associate it either with the early Quakers or
with Milton. In his many references to connections between Milton and the Quakers,
Hill invariably qualifies as "pre-pacifist Quakers." The date of Samson Agonistes
is indeterminate-- the years 1642, 1647-53, 1660, and 1666-70 have all been
proposed by reputable Miltonists--and for that reason, I do not consider the
play here. My evidence for Milton's shift from a militaristic to a pacifistic
outlook supports a pre-Restoration date for Samson, given the tragedy's
Deuteronomic emphasis on Jehovah as a god of warriors whose very existence is
questioned by Israelite defeat and whose power is vindicated in the destruction
of the Philistine enemy. (For discussions of the date of Samson, see
Merritt Y. Hughes, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose [New York:
Odyssey Press, 1957], pp. 537-42 [all subsequent references to the texts of
Milton's poetry are to this edition. Parenthetical references to Paradise
Lost and Paradise Regained refer to book and line numbers.]; William
Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography 2 vol (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1968), pp. 903-17; and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward "Samson Agonistes": The
Growth of Milton's Mind (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 387-407.
31. "Areopagitica," ed. Ernest Sirluck, in Complete Prose Works of
John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1953-82), 2: 557-58.
32. Eikonoklastes , ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, in Complete Prose
Works of John Milton , 3: 343- 44.
33. "To the Lord General Cromwell," p.160.
34. "Considerations Touching the Likeliest means to remove Hirelings
Out of the Church," ed. Robert W. Ayers, in Complete Prose Works of John
Milton , 7: 274. On the interpretation of this phrase as evidence of Milton's
repudiation of Cromwell, see Austin Woolrych, "Milton and Cromwell: 'A Short
but Scandalous night of Interruption,'" in Achievements of the Left Hand:
Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross
(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), pp. 185-219.
35. Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood
(London: Methuen, 1900), p. 90.
36. Ellwood, p. 145.
37 Ellwood, p. 145
38. Parker comments (p. 597): "What the humourless young Quaker failed
to realize, in his eager excursion into literary criticism, is that Paradise
Lost (at least in its printed version) has a number of very pointed and
eloquent things to say of 'paradise found'. We may conjecture, therefore, that
the poet's silence was compounded of disappointment and moody self-criticism."
It is also possible, however, that Ellwood understood the poem's concluding
references to a "paradise within" and sensed that Milton had more to say on
the subject.
39. John Ferguson, War and Peace in the World's Religions (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. 101.
40. See Hughes's note, Complete Poems, p. 478-79: ". . .the Christ of
Paradise Regained. . .is a figure less like St. Anthony than he is like
Ghandi [sic]...Milton's declaration of the power of 'the Church of God' to rise
triumphant over violence ...Christ's resistance is only in words; and if any
supernatural power is used against Satan, it is only the power of truth."
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