The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Read Free Book Online

song in order to resist it, and who must at least briefly contemplate or perhaps even embrace it before rejecting and destroying it. “Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified”—what better description of a true hero can there be?
    As readers have often remarked, Milton’s God—“Heaven’s awful Monarch”—is a morally complex character, more akin to the stern God of the Israelites in the Old Testament than to the loving God in the New; “Messiah,” his Son, is the Hero-to-Come. Love does not seem to be one of the prime attributes of Milton’s God. Indeed, one way to interpret his actions during the Fall of Man—given his omnipotence and omnipresence—is that he foresaw and willed the fate of Adam and Eve, created (or allowed) the test he at least knew they could fail, and issued the demand for obedience with the absolute knowledge that they would fail through his poisoned gift of free will.
    â€œThe reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad,” writes the English literary critic William Empson in Milton’s God . “[Milton] is struggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at the start, and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one, though, after all, owing to his loyalty to the sacred text and the penetration with which he makes its story real to us, his modern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badly wrong about it all. That his searching goes on in Paradise Lost , I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy.”
    For Abdiel, there is no Paradise to be lost, since he eventually returns to the side of God. He had a choice, and he made it. But humanity’s choice never ends. At multiple moments in our lives, we are forced to choose between good and evil—indeed, we are forced to define, or provisionally redefine, both terms, and then choose. But what are we to do with an example such as God? God frees Satan from his chains at the bottom of the Lake of Fire, God allows Satan’s unholy issue, Sin and Death, to emerge, and then he gives Sin the key to the gates of Hell. God stands idly by as Satan flings himself toward Earth, bent on humanity’s seduction and destruction. Does God therefore require evil for the working out of his plan? Small wonder that a third of God’s angels, as the story begins, hate him already and are very willing to heed Lucifer’s call to take up arms against him.
    In Milton, God seems to deny his own complicity. Of the first couple’s disobedience, God says in Book Three:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  They, therefore, as to right belonged
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  So were created, nor can justly accuse
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  As if Predestination overruled
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Their will, disposed by absolute decree
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Or high foreknowledge. They themselves decreed
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
    Easy for him to say, one might observe, since he’s God—opening up the awful possibility that the buck stops nowhere.
    I have spent some time on the first few books of Milton’s great poem—books focused on Satan and his revenge plot—for several reasons. The first is the work’s cultural influence. Hard as it may be to believe in our post-literate age, Paradise Lost was once a fixture of the American household, not only a work of art but also a volume of moral instruction to be kept alongside the Bible as clarification, explication, and inspiration. Many could quote from it by heart, as they could from scripture and the works of Shakespeare.
    The second reason is