The Devil's Pleasure Palace. Michael Walsh
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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:
They, therefore, as to right belonged
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if Predestination overruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge. They themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
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 to frame the moral argument for the political argument that is to come. I make no apologies for the explicitly Christian context of my analysis; as a Catholic, I would be foolish to try to tackle the subject from any other perspective. Nevertheless, I am not relying on the fine points of dogma or any particular set of teachings (other than right = good, wrong = bad). The moral principles from which I shall proceed are found across all cultural divides. Make no mistake: The crisis in which the United States of America currently finds itself enmeshed is a moral crisis, which has engendered a crisis of cultural confidence, which in turn has begotten a fiscal crisis that threatens—no, guarantees—the destruction of the nation should we fail to address it.
Third, I focus on Milton because the archetypal biblical characters limned first in Genesis and expanded upon by Milton—we call them “God,” “Satan,” “Adam,” “Eve,” and the “Son” (Jesus)—are fundamental to the ur-Narrative and have served as templates and models for countless subsequent characters in the literature and drama that followed. Call them what you will: the stern father, the rebellious son and the good son, the hapless but oddly empowered bystanders caught up in the primal conflict of the first family. What, after all, is Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle but (as the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau famously described it) a “family tragedy” in which Wotan’s greed and arrogance force him to beget a morally uncompromised son (Siegfried) to wash away both Wotan’s sins and the entire ancien régime, redeeming humanity into the bargain.
This is, I hope, a helpful and even novel way of looking at politics. Left to the wonks, political discussions are almost entirely program-and-process, the realm of lawyers, MBAs, and the parasite journalist class that feeds on both of them. It’s the reason that congressional bills and their attendant regulations now run to thousands of pages, as opposed to the terse, 4,543-word U.S. Constitution, whose meaning was plainly evident to an average literate citizen of the late eighteenth century. Contrast that with the inaptly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, whose word count, with regulations, is nearly twelve million and counting, with new regulations being added along the way. When it comes to lawmaking, brevity may be the soul of wit, but complexity is the very essence of “trickeration.”
Who is to say which makes for the best political analysis? Rather than getting down in the weeds with the increasingly specialized schools of government (whose mission effectively is to churn out more policy wonks), perhaps it is better to pull back and look at our political history for what it really is: a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is yet to come. It may at times be a tale told by an idiot; as passions sweep away reason, bad laws are enacted and dire consequences ensue. At other times, it may be a story told by a master craftsman, with twists and turns and reversals and plot points that surprise, delight, enthrall, and appall.
Most of all, it is a story with heroes and villains. And this brings us back full circle, to the foundational myth of our polity—Satan’s rebellion, which led to the Fall of Man, and to the Devil’s Pleasure Palace erected to seduce and beguile humanity while the war against God, as ever, continues, and with no material help from the Deity apparently in sight.
What is The Godfather about? Ask almost anyone and he or she will tell you it’s the story of a Mafia don, Vito Corleone, and his three sons who are battling other Italian crime families for control of the rackets in post–WWII New York. But that is not what The Godfather is about. And therein lies the crucial distinction between plot and what screenwriters call story. Plot is the surface, story is the reality. Plot is the ordering of events: This happens and then that happens, and the next thing happens, and on to the end. Plot is what we tell each other when we describe what the movie or novel is about. Plot is what hangs on the narrative framework. Plot . . . doesn’t matter.
What matters is story—the deeper, underlying significance of the events of the plot. This happens and then, because of that, something else happens; and because of that, the next thing happens: the force of destiny. Thus, The Godfather is about a man who loves his family so much and tries so hard to protect it that he ultimately destroys it.
There are many plots, but few stories. Earlier I touched on what Joseph Campbell described as “the hero’s journey,” but here I should note that that journey need be neither successfully completed nor happily ended. Don Corleone’s all-American tale is the rise of a monster whose true face remains hidden until his very last moments, when he stuffs a piece of an orange (a symbol of imminent death) in his mouth and grimaces at his grandson, terrifying the boy with the sudden revelation of his grandfather’s true nature.
Still, we might tell the same story—about a man who loves his family so much that he destroys it—in many different ways and in many different times and places. In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, goes on a monomaniacal mission to rescue his niece who has been abducted by Comanches and turned into a squaw. He aims not to bring her home (most of her family was murdered by the Indians) but to kill her, though in the end he does not kill her but returns her to her remaining relatives. The movie’s last image—the cabin door slowly swinging shut on Ethan, condemning him to a lifetime of bitter loneliness—was later borrowed by Coppola