《失乐园》中的政治、虔敬与诗学.pdf

文艺复兴研究/71 失乐园中的政治、虔敬与诗学*戴维斯科特卡斯顿 内容提要：本文标题中“政治”“虔敬”“诗学”这三个押头韵的名词是弥尔顿史诗最根本的关注点。这些关注点在诗人最伟大的诗歌失乐园（也可算是最伟大的英语诗歌）里表现得最为明显和紧迫。然而，这首诗也提出了政治、虔敬和诗学如何结合的问题。它们是彼此一致、互相合作，还是相互抵制和竞争？它们之间复杂的关系能说明什么？对于 17 世纪晚期的读者而言，这首诗意味着什么？也许更重要的是，它对今天的读者来说有什么意义，为什么重要？关键词：弥尔顿；失乐园；政治；虔敬；诗歌 作者简介：戴维斯科特卡斯顿现为美国耶鲁大学乔治M.博德曼英文讲座荣休教授，此前多年先后任教于达特茅斯学院和哥伦比亚大学，曾任中国、丹麦、埃及、英国、德国、匈牙利等国大学的访问教授，2016 年以来担任浙江大学外国语学院中世纪与文艺复兴研究中心首席国际顾问。卡斯顿教授著述颇丰，专著理论之后的莎士比亚 莎士比亚与书 谈颜论色等都被译为了中文。他担任阿登版莎士比亚系列的总主编、矮脚鸡版莎士比亚系列的联合主编、巴恩斯和诺博版莎士比亚系列主编，出版了莎士比亚 亨利四世上篇、弥尔顿失乐园、马洛浮士德博士的悲剧等作品的重要学术版本。目前他正在撰写关于莎士比亚与伦勃朗的著作。2016 年，耶鲁大学出版社出版了论文集历史中的书、作为历史的书物质文本的新交点：向戴维斯科特卡斯顿致敬。本文是国家社科基金重大项目“弥尔 *I am very grateful to the organizers of the conference“Texts,Methods,and Directions:International Symposium on Poetry Studies in the New Era”(November 46,2022,Zhejiang University)for the invitation to present this work as a keynote lecture,and grateful also for the interesting questions and conversations that followed,which have allowed me to clarify and sharpen my argument.72/中世纪与文艺复兴研究（九）顿作品集整理、翻译与研究”（19ZDA298）的阶段性成果。Title:Politics,Piety,and Poetry in Paradise Lost Abstract:The alliterative nouns of my title identify fundamental concerns of Miltons poetry,nowhere more obviously and urgently than in his greatest poem(arguably the greatest poem ever written in English),Paradise Lost.The question,however,raised by the poem is how politics,piety,and poetry might align.Do they coincide and cooperate?Or do they collide and compete?What does their fraught relationship tell us about what this poem might have meant to its readers in the late 17th century or,perhaps,more importantly,about how and why the poem might matter to us today?Key words:John Milton,Paradise Lost,politics,piety,poetry Author:David Scott Kastan is the George M.Bodman Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University,having previously taught at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College.He has visited universities in China,Denmark,Egypt,Germany,Hungary,and the U.K.,among others,and has been the chief International Consultant for the CMRS,Zhejiang University since 2016.He is the author of many books,including Shakespeare after Theory,Shakespeare and the Book,and On Color,all of which have been translated into Chinese.He has been a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare,the co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare and the series editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare.He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeares Henry IV,Part One,Miltons Paradise Lost,and Marlowes Dr.Faustus.Presently he is working on a book on Shakespeare and Rembrandt.The Book in History,the Book as History:New Intersections of the Material Text:Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan(Yale University Press,2016)was edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel,Jesse M.Lander,and Zachary Lesser.Email:david.kastanyale.edu It might well come as a surprise to many that two of the most original and important works of English criticism of Miltons Paradise Lost were conceived of and partially written while their authors were teaching in China:William Empsons Miltons God,published in 1961;and John Rumrichs 文艺复兴研究/73 Milton Unbound published in 1996.Empson taught in China first in the late 1930s,and then returned to teach at Peking University from 1947 until 1953.Rumrich came to China first as a visiting professor at Peking University in 19861987,and has continued to visit China regularly,now serving on the international advisory board of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Zhejiang University.Before I settled on“Politics,Piety,and Poetry in Paradise Lost”as the title of this paper,I thought of calling it“Milton in China,”which was appealing to me not least because of the way it could then be seen to honor Professor Haos remarkable work on the reception history of Milton in China.My essay,however,is not about when and how Milton was read by Chinese readers,but,rather,is designed to think about“Milton in China,”one might say,from the opposite direction:assessing what role teaching in China played in determining how these two western scholars came to read Milton.The more I thought about their provocative work and their Chinese experiences,the less I thought that the two were only accidentally related.Teaching in China seemed to me to be a significant condition of what made their subsequent publications so consequential,as each scholar undid a set of critical orthodoxies about the poem.Empson would eventually write a book rescuing Paradise Lost from its presumed piety;and Rumrich wrote one rescuing the poem from Stanley Fish.Both these rescue efforts,it should be said,were necessary to save Milton studies from itself.No doubt both Professors arrived in China with their own well-formed ideas about the poem,but my sense is that teaching Chinese students productively forced them to think differently about Miltons poem than they would have,or maybe could have,while teaching in Great Britain or the United States.The focus of almost all Anglo-American scholarship on the poem could be said to be aimed at demonstrating either a reassuring alignment On Empsons teaching of Milton in China,see Hao,2021:88-90.For recent accounts of Miltons reception in China,see Shen,2014:96-109;Hao,2016,570-572;Hao,2020.74/中世纪与文艺复兴研究（九）or the unsettling disjunction of the three alliterative nouns of my actual title todayPolitics,Piety,and Poetry.Do they cohere or conflict?Is Milton a Christian,even if,as is increasingly obvious,a somewhat unorthodox one and a political liberal;or is he.what?Sacrilegious?Treasonous?Diabolical?Or maybe Milton is just confusing and contradictory,which has recently come to seem a willed epistemological position.Still the issue seems to be what the poem does with the critical ideas and ideologies that swirled around in the world outside of Miltons poem.The most obvious question,and perhaps the one most easily answered,is how do Miltons own revolutionary politics,his own well-articulated radical opposition to the absolutism of the Stuart monarchy,relate to poems presentation of an Absolutist God?Or,put differently,why does Miltons revolutionary rhetoric published in the 1640s and 1650s reappear in Paradise Lost in the mouths of Satan and his followers?Satans argument for the overthrow of God are exactly the arguments that Milton made to justify the overthrow of the monarchy,a fact which has often been noted and has led many readers to think,as William Blake famously said,that Milton was himself“of the Devils party.”Certainly,Milton was of the party of the revolutionary parliamentarians in England,but not,I would say,of the party of the Devil.What party he did belong to is another question,but I suspect Milton didnt much like parties,in either of the senses of that word.What Milton opposed was not Gods absolutism,but the absolutism of the Stuart King.Milton seems a somewhat heterodox Christian,but he was card-carrying anti-monarchist.And the two positions are not in any conflict.For Milton,Gods absolutism is infinite and definitional,logically deserved and demanded.He is the creator of everything,according to the poem.Satan,however,like the angels,like Adam and Eve,like all human beings who have descended from them,even the English King,is Gods creature.There is an unbridgeable ontological difference between God and Satan,See,for example,Herman,2005.文艺复兴研究/75 measured by the incommensurability of Creator with his creation(Silver,2001:passim)and if there were not this fundamental distinction between God and Satan,if,that is,they were of the same order of being,alternative if opposed principles of creation(as some religions do hold),then the choice of good over evil would merely be an a-rational ethical preference rather than a rational moral obligation.One might,of course,ask if this is a fact of the world,or just a fact of the poem.My answer for the time being is:“Well come back to that later.”If it were true,as Satan asserts in the poem,that it is only Gods power that gives him pre-eminence over Satan“Whom reason hath equaled,force hath made supreme/Above his equals”(Paradise Lost,1.248249)then Miltons God is a tyrant,and Satans revolt is reasonable and just.But it is not true(at least it is not true in the poem),as even Satan admits:“He deserved no such return/From me,whom he created what I was/In that bright eminence”(4.4244).The Stuart monarchs,however,adopted the language of divine authority,asserting not that they were Gods equal but that they were superior to the rest of mankind;that is,that they were Kings chosen and anointed by God,established on earth as“a little GOD,”as James I said,serving as Gods lieutenant(a word which literally means“place holder”)on earth(James I,1918:12).The love and obedience owed to God derives from his creative goodness;the opposition to an earthly king was,for Milton,demanded precisely by the Stuart monarchs mystification and misrepresentation of worldly power,and its abuse.The King was a tyrant,not different in kind but only in degree from those he ruled over.He is the one whom“force hath made supreme/above his equals”(1.248249).Miltons politics and piety in Paradise Lost do not conflict here but fit neatly together,even as they pointedly fail as analogues of one another,disrupting the analogical political theology that had underwritten European monarchy since the European Middle Ages,as it insisted on the fundamental“mystery of the Kings power”in its derivation from the Divine(James I,1918:332).76/中世纪与文艺复兴研究（九）Although Blake was wrong about his assertion that Milton was“of the Devils party,”Blake was right about what he says immediately before his now well-known judgment about Miltons politics.What Blake wrote(though inevitably only the second half of his sentence is quoted)was that“Milton was a true poet,and therefore of the Devils party without knowing it.”Being“a true poet”seemed,to Blake anyhow,the condition of Miltons revolutionary politics.Why does Blake think that as Milton was a true poet he would“therefore”be“of the Devils party without knowing it?”What does it even mean to be“a true poet?”That is what I really want to talk about today.And what does any of this have to do with the fact that William Empson and John Rumrich taught Paradise Lost in China?So let me start again with that question,“yet once more”(Lycidas,l.1),as Milton says,and,as always,give a round-about answer.John Milton is,arguably(or maybe it is not arguable)one of the two or three greatest writers in English,along with Shakespeare,of course,and perhaps Jane Austen.And yet Milton is undoubtedly the most difficult to read.Paradise Lost is Miltons greatest poem,but it is,as everyone who has tried to read it knows,even native English speakers,it is extraordinarily hard to follow its meaning from line to line,and there are a lot of lines to follow:10,565 to be exact.Miltons learning is daunting,and his language often seems,as the great 18th-century critic,Samuel Johnson not unreasonably said,“perverse and pedantic.”Nonetheless,as Johnson goes on to say,“The reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler mind.”That is,of course,assuming that there is a reader,which Johnson also admits as a problem:Paradise Lost is one of those books which the reader admires and lays down,and forgets to take up again.None ever wished it longer than it is.Its perusal William Blake,“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,”plate 6:22,in Blake,1978:1:80,italics mine.Samuel Johnson,“Life of Milton”(1779)in Johnson,2010:1:202.文艺复兴研究/77 is a duty rather than a pleasure.We read Milton for instruction,retire harassed and overburdened,and look elsewhere for recreation.(Johnson,2010:1:196)And yet,somehow,we do take it up againand again.Its greatness keeps calling to us,calling us back to it.Certainly,that is exactly what Milton had hoped for.In 1637,he wrote in a letter to his closest friend Charles Diodati:“You ask what I am thinking of?So may the good Deity help me,of Immortality.”And five years later,he wrote,only a little less ambitiously,of his hope that he“might leave something so written to aftertimes,as they should not willingly let it die.”Happily the“aftertimes”have not let Paradise Lost die.But why exactly have they not let it die as the poem is so deeply embedded in the theological and political controversies of his own time and his own country?As early as 1900,a major English literary critic famously called the poem“a monument to dead ideas”(Raleigh,1900:88).In China,perhaps it might be said that the poem stands as a monument to ideas that had never lived at all.Nonetheless,the extraordinary personal and literary ambitions of Paradise Lost are unavoidable.Miltons poem reimagines and rewrites the biblical story of creation from Genesis to write a complete poetic history of the world from its“beginning,”when“the heavens and earth/Rose out of chaos”(1.910)to the end of time,when“one greater man”will“Restore us”(1.45).He writes an epic poem of universal history and one that might also serve as a theodicy that,as he says,will“assert eternal providence/And justify the ways of God to men”(1.2526).Yet however great the poems ambition and imaginationand one might well ask who Milton thinks he is to“assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men,”especially as the poem seems to say that the end of Miltons letter to Diodati,September 3,1637,in French,1949:1:348.Milton,The Reason of Church-Government Urgd against Prelaty(1641),in Milton,1953:810.It is worth remembering that Raleigh ends by saying:“Paradise Lost is no less an eternal monument because it is a monument to dead ideas.”78/中世纪与文艺复兴研究（九）human wisdom is to“be lowly wise”(8.173)there is something oddly but unmistakably parochial about Paradise Lost even as it gives cosmic shape and stature to the theological and political debates of the mid-17th-century England that determine so much of the poems power and urgency.For all its own assumptions about its scope and consequence,it was a poem,as Milton declared,specifically written to be“doctrinal and exemplary to a nation”(Milton,1953:815).Exactly what that doctrine might have been has been energetically debated by scholars,as well as what example the poem might have been intended to provide;but what is undeniable is that the poem was written to the English“nation”at the most radical moment in its history as its most fundamental values were being fiercely contested.And if Milton hoped(or,since we are talking about Milton,“assumed”is probably the better word)that his poem would be read“aftertimes,”those times would still be part of English history.But,while teaching in China,Professors Empson and Rumrich must have understood that neither the doctrine nor the example would likely have been of much immediate interest to their students.Neither could assume that the poems most fundamental ideas about religion and politics were shared or likely even known.For example,the anti-trinitarian implications of the poem that have so exercised Milton scholars could hardly be expected to an