Splurge.
I’ve begun to suspect all of this week’s letters are just part of your clever plan to get people to subscribe to your wonderful reading of Paradise Lost. The ugliness and sterility of the current anti-Christian movement is exactly what John Milton’s epic poem on the fall of man would have predicted. You discuss this in your List entry on the work, but it’s worth revisiting.
Milton was a Puritan and sided with the Parliamentarians — the Roundheads — during the English Civil War of the mid 1600’s. After the Roundhead victory, he served in Oliver Cromwell’s government, and wrote a treatise that approved the beheading of the defeated King Charles I. As a result, he had to run for his life when the monarchy was restored.
When he came out of hiding, he was faced with a difficult philosophical conundrum. Why was it right for him to rebel against the divinely appointed king of England, but wrong for Satan to rebel against the king of Heaven? His answer was simple: to rebel against God is to rebel against goodness itself.
Milton’s Satan is Nietzsche’s superman to the life. In order to trans-value all values, he has to crown himself the author of values. “The mind is its own place,” he says, “and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” It’s the ultimate post-modern declaration. There is no truth, there is no beauty, only narratives of power, which we can overturn with narratives of our own.
Satan, however, discovers that there’s a small flaw in this philosophy: it isn’t true. Instead of transforming Hell into Heaven, the mind, rejecting God, becomes the instrument of damnation. “Me miserable!” Satan ultimately cries. “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
Isn’t the pure, relentless ugliness of anti-Christian art, if not a proof of Christianity, a hint, at least, that Christ might be who he says he is?
Consider this. As I mentioned in my own last essay, Nietzsche’s most influential disciple was the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault sought to destroy all the structures that narratives of power instilled in him. To do this, he went on a sadomasochistic spree that continued even after he was diagnosed with AIDS. The disease ultimately killed him, and likely others infected by him.
For academics to follow such a death-worshipping leader is the strangest thing, isn’t it? Like lonely hearts taking relationship advice from a man living in Mom’s basement. Likewise, to continue to make ugly, empty art and declare it witty or important because it denies the creator of beauty — it’s like drinking yourself to death to get revenge on your teetotal father.
Your wonderful essay explains why we can’t go back to paganism. But it also stipulates that Christianity refines and includes the pagan good. If I’m right, and the issue is the troubling gap between man’s nature and his morality, what are the pagan-Christian constants that might serve as a guide into the transhuman future?
Just wondering,
Dad
Would you consider putting these letters into booklet form, so that we could have a hard copy to refer back to?
Currently listening to Dominion by Tom Holland about how the west became Christian. Nothing to do with this post. But it is good.