Response to Prof. Ogden's latest post; Part 1

[Edit Pending...]

In the spirit of the dialectical and polemical discourse that we’re propounding in discussion, here’s my impression of/response to Prof. Ogden’s latest post on his blog regarding Milton’s Satan and the “atheist fallacy”.

Prof. Ogden introduces David Renaker’s problematization of Paradise Lost in terms of how: 1) “Satan in books I & II, is magnificent” and 2) “God, judging man in Book III, is detestable. “

My prima facia response to these two claims is that, while the first claim as to Satan’s magnificence, cannot in good reason be rejected, the second, as to God’s detestability as a character in Bk III is problematic and requires much more exploration because of conceptual incoherencies that arise when we treat God as a regular character in Paradise Lost. Given god’s omniscience, omnipotence, and immanence throughout the action of the epic, making any cogent claim as to his laudability is not only problematic, but is in effect an inherently bankrupt enterprise because, as the architect of the story, its metaphysics, and the semiotics of its composite wills, God as character personified in Bk III is himself the only source of normativity. In this light, to call him either commendable or detestable would be incoherent, or at very least totally meaningless, because he himself provides the normative ground on which either term is defined or articulated. However, having tentatively thrown out, or at least suspended, the second claim, the first (Satan’s magnificence) still poses a serious problem for any historically referential reading of Paradise Lost that attempts to connect its representations to held beliefs about the author’s intent.

As I’ve said, and as I maintain – I wouldn’t of my own accord ever really go there. Our understanding of the author’s intent, and our historical sense of the milieu in which it was composed is itself something that is tainted by historicity. As such, it is not simply difficult, but rather – impossible, to remove ourselves and our interpretative bias along with our historical gaze and vantage point from supposedly objective claims about an author’s intent or historical setting. Making reference again to Roland Barthes’ maxim, with the death of the author (as a source of any objective insight into a text’s signification), we are left with the text alone; a text which may give any number of synchronous or divergent readings, and it is with the text alone that we must work

Renaker then continues and classifies two possible articulations of a solution or explanation of this phenomenon in terms of the critic as either “poet-sacrificer” or “poem-sacrificer”. The former explains the appeal of Satan Vs. the repugnance of God, in terms of a poetic failure in Milton as author, whereas the latter insists that the observations 1 & 2 amount to a failure of judgment in the critical reader. Renaker goes on to describe the latter group as “…[giving] up the poem, twisting and wrenching it unmercifully to throw a veneer of justice on God and of viciousness on Satan, Adam, and Eve…”.

Ogden posits that this description amounts to “mere partisanship” because “the only poem that is given up is Renaker’s anti-theistic reading”. Ogden then answers Dr. Renaker’s anti-theistic reading by offering his own postulate, Ogden’s Balm, that “the greater the quality of artistic genius, the greater the likelihood that accusations are failures of critical perception.” However, for reasons I will demonstrate, this postulate comes dangerously close to begging the question, Although, if the possibility of the second catergory is to be defended, Renaker's own binary catergorization is itself unpersuasive.


My impression here is that, in the first case of the poet-sacrificer who concedes Milton’s failure as a poet, the explanation falls flat. Even if we were to do away with Milton altogether and look at the text alone, we would still encounter a text whose thematic content is consistent with what one would expect to be a defense of Christian theology, with a justification of “the ways of god to man”, and that this on its own sufficiently problematizes the incontrovertible depiction of Satan as the poem’s epic hero . To account for Satan’s problematic glorification in terms of Milton’s inattention would comprise an insufficient answer because in forming its explanation, it departs from the text itself and makes reference to insubstantible claims outside the domain of textual continuity or a truly objective basis of verification.

In the later case, which Prof. Ogden problematizes, the case of the “poem-sacrificer”, I find myself much more inclined to agree, at least in part, with Dr. Renaker’s articulation of the position. While Prof. Ogden is quite right to point out that, as Renaker describes it, the poem-sacrificer is only sacrificing one possible reading of the poem, it is my feeling that the particular reading which is being sacrificed (which I maintain need not necessarily be reduced to an anti-theistic reading), is far and above the most supportable reading of the poem in its genre.

Satan’s depiction in PL is unequivocally and uniformly consistent with the trope of the epic hero. In referencing again to our dialectical basis of discussion, drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, which did much to articulate the qualities of the epic genre as well as those of tragic and comic drama (its central subject), Satan satisfies the qualia of both the epic and tragic hero on the following grounds:

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1. He is, as a former second-rank under God, of noble background and birth, of a lofty origin, which serves to inspire sympathy and ennobling sentiment in his loss and fall.

2. He displays an incredible strength of will in the face of incredible, even impossible adversity.

3. He clearly portrays the requisite hamartia or tragic flaw, which despite his general admirability serves as the basis of his doom. In attic tragedy, and in the Homeric epic – the hamartia in most instances is typically that of excessive pride. Ditto with Satan.

4. In reference to his hamartia, he also displays hubris or an excessive over pouring of hauty self-righteous sentiment, injured merit, wrathful pride etc.

5. Satan also qualifies under the primary and most oft-quoted qualification of Aristotle’s definition of the megalopsuchia, or “Great-Souled Man” as described in sec. II. (??) of the Nicomachean Ethics as one who “claims much (in his attempted usurpation of heaven) , and deserves much (in his noble origin, unmatched by all save God – who as mentioned above we may not be able unproblematically afford the status of a cogent character in PL, and perhaps the Son – if he can be fairly conceived of as meaningful separate from God)”.

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My point is, that when one looks at the text by itself, one is without doubt faced with a heroic and highly ennobled depiction of Satan. To entertain a reading of the poem which denies Satan his position as the tragi-epic hero, though I happily admit and emphasize that such readings are quite possible, amounts to sacrificing the poem insofar as such readings refuse dogmatically to recognize a fundamental component of the poem and its genre: namely, the epic hero – who is beautifully, even archetypally embodied in Satan. We might say then, that in refusing to recognize the poem’s obvious epic hero, once sacrifices the poem insofar as one is conceding a massive, and beautifully presented, component of the poem’s poetic genre as it occurs in the poem. Such readings are quite possible, but they dislocate a very substantial, perhaps primary, piece of the poem’s poetics.

Alternately, and more briefly, for reasons already mentioned viz. indeterminacy of intent and impossibility of objective historical gaze in speculation… readings that attempt to explain the disparity in terms of Milton’s alleged attempt to trick the reader or test him/her through a favorable depiction of Satan, are also unappealingly simple and amount to critical deus ex machina. However, I would have to concede that a reading which affords Satan the role of epic hero, and which recognizes and affirms the obvious ethical devices of the poem, but which answers the problematic conflict between a heroic Satan and the "justification of the ways of God to man" through some other means would have to be taken seriously. Also, if Milton is using the devices of the Epic Genre and his epic portrayal of Satan as a test or temptation for the reader, then one would have to trace what can be infered that such a temptation is saying about the values that underlie the Epic tradition. In this sense, such a reading would indentify a discord between Judeo-Christian and Classical Helenic values and moral traditions latent in the text.

In response to Ogden’s Balm, as postulated by Prof. Ogden, that “the greater the quality of the artistic genius, the greater the likelihood that accusations are failures of critical perception”, the proposed Balm seems problematic to me. Moreover, the shortcoming of the Balm emphasizes precisely the point I was making in terms of difficulties associated with historicity in historio-critical evaluations of the biographical author as a presence in a text. Namely, Ogden’s Balm is problematic because, while its claim may in fact be inductively true, it is precisely in virtue of the contents of critical perception that the quality of artistic genius is evaluated.

That is, the identification of artistic genius, and the assessment of its quality is intrinsically a process of critical perception. With this in mind, we can rephrase Ogden’s Balm as “the greater the critical acclaim of a text, the more likely that its detraction is explainable in the failure of the detracting criticism” . This postulate however, while it is prima facia a truism, falls short of comprising a sound argument, because the presupposition or assumption on which the argument is built (ie: the greatness of the text), depends on the correctness or truth-state of argument it is trying to make (ie: detracting criticism is fallacious). That is, in order for the text to be great, there is already an implication that the detracting criticism must be fallacious. In this sense, Ogden’s Balm amounts to a logical fallacy in begging the question.

To clarify, another way of phrasing it would be to think of the Balm as stipulating that “the better X is, the more probable it is that those who detract from it are wrong”. It follows from this that in order for X to be so damn good – it is already foreconcluded and implied that those who detract from it are wrong. Although in the case of Ogden’s Balm as it is posited, the logical postulate is of a quantificational nature in admitting of degrees (of critical acclaim vs. fallacious detraction) the problem identified in the Boolean or binary conception of its propositional logic is still pervasive.

To illustrate with another example of why/how begging the question is logically problematic, another very clear example of question begging would be in the following sentence: “Biblical decree is valid, because it says so in the bible”. As with Ogden’s Balm, the exemplary sentence is problematic because its argument presupposes the validity of its claim. If the claim or postulate is to come into question, or if we are not to presuppose its final claim, then the argument that justifies that claim falls apart.

[To Be Continued… ]


Addendum: It's come to my attention that a couple of my points need some clearing up, I will try to do this later today.