Revision on first post

This post is a revision of the first post that I made on this blog. If you would like to see the first post you can find it at http://paradisetranslation1011.blogspot.com/2008/08/individual-post-historical_31.html

As a reader of Paradise Lost, I am very troubled by the fact that Satan's supposed followers are not initially united in their thoughts. Without a united front, I find it hard to believe that Satan actually thought that he and his followers stood any chance against such a foe as God.. Satan biggest concern is obviously making sure that he somehow gets revenge against God, which for him means that another battle with Heaven is imminent. Satan did his best to convince his followers that the war in Heaven had not been lost, and he makes this point very clear right from the beginning of the debate that takes place in Pandemonium.

"Powers and Dominions, Deitites of Heav'n,
For since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigour, though opprest and fall'n,
I give not Heav'n for lost." (Book II. 11-14)

The next to speak is the angel Moloch, a fierce warrior. He does share Satan's sentiments in that he is pushing for another war, but his motivations differ from those of Satan. Moloch feels that he and the other angels must go to war with Heaven again because nothing could be worse than Hell.

"What can be worse
Than to dwell here, driv'n out from bliss, condemn'd
In this abhorred deep to utter woe;" (Book II. 85-87)

For me, the most troubling argument comes from the angel Belial, known for his great wisdom and intelligence. Belial takes a very different approach to looking at the situation that these angels find themselves in. Unlike Moloch, Belial does not feel that God has punished them to the extent that he could have, and war is not the solution. Belial is optimistic enough to believe that there is a chance that God may even forgive them someday.

"Shall we then live thus vile, the race of Heav'n
Thus trampl'd, thus expelled to suffer here
Chains and torments? better these than worse
By my advice; since fate inevitable
Subdues us, and Omnipotent Decree,
The Victor's will." (Book II. 194-199)

Overall, without definite agreement between all of the angels involved in the conquest, I see little hope that they could overcome the almighty ruler.

-Sheryl W

In Response to Kelly's post "Good Omen's Quote Confusion"

A reminder of the quote: "You couldn't be a demon and have free will"(23)

I think what this quote is trying to say is that demons are confined to acting a certain way.  As the book progresses Crowley and Aziraphale constantly remind each other that they have to act a certain way because they're a demon or an angel. For example, when they stop and pick up the girl, Anathema, Aziraphale automatically starts to fix the bike, and heal the girl. This was because "Aziraphale couldn't resist an opportunity to do good."(92) Its in his nature, and is what is expected of him. Nowhere is he told that he must fix the girl's bike, but rather it is assumed that he will do an act of good because he is n angel. Therefore his free will is limited. On the other hand Crowley is expected t act in evil ways, because after all he is a demon. For example, when Crowley makes the paintball guns into real guns, Aziraphale is shocked, but to Crowley its just something in his nature. It is expected that he will instigate bad behavior. Crowley's reasoning for all of his actions is "Because its my job."(110) He is not told directly to change the guns, it is just expected of him, therefore limiting his free will.

So how does this connect with Paradise Lost? Well, if you recall Satan gets to earth and starts to second guess himself. He sees all of the wonderful things on earth and begins to regret the rebellion. (the beginning of Book 4) But he convinces himself that"which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell" and "all good to me is lost./Evil, be thou my good" (4.75;109-110) For Satan, the other fallen angels are expecting him to complete his mission. He is now one of them, and their expectation limits his choices and free will. He must conform to the image of himself that he has created. Satan can't just go around in Hell proclaiming revenge, and then not do it because he gets discouraged when he sees earth. For Satan, it is supposed to be in his nature to do bad, and this expectation limits him.

This is simply my take on the subject, feel free to disagree.

Rebecca R.

Good Omens Quote Confusion

"You couldn't be a demon and have free will" (23).

I read this passage, in response to my previous post of the "unanswerable question: Heaven or Hell?", at least five times, making sure I was reading it correctly.  I'm still a little confused.  God grants his angels free will and it it with this power that they are able to sin and be banned to Hell.  Is free will then taken away from them?  Satan is still able to make his own decisions in Paradise Lost, so I do not think this is the case.  And regarding modern day "demons", ie. thieves, murderers, criminals, don't they have the power to choose good or evil?  The narrator is right in saying, "There was no getting out of it" (23) because as I have said before, choosing Heaven or Hell is a grey area.  However, is he correct in stating that demons do not have free will?  Or perhaps he is saying you couldn't possibly be a demon if you had free will.  This is the same as saying you couldn't choose good and evil if you were a demon but in a different way.  Any way I word it, it seems to have the same contradictory meaning.  What do you guys think?

Kellie M.

Response to Rebecca's Crowley Post:

It took me at least three Books of Paradise Lost to begin to understand remotely what John Milton was trying to say.  After that, however, I began to read Paradise Lost in a way unique to such an epic poem and have become accustomed to that style of writing.  As I began reading Good Omens, the same feelings of confusion and frustration from Paradise Lost came rushing back to me.  Good Omens is supposed to be a "much easier read", so I am confident that such confusion is simply a style transition, rather than an inability to understand Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's spinoff of Paradise Lost.

Much like Rebecca, I too was reminded of Paradise Lost and the battle of "which is the lesser of two evils?" when I read the passage on page 23 of Good Omens.  Right before this debate within himself, the narrator describes Crowley thumping the wheel and taking on a sort of "when it rains, it pours" outlook on life.  Apparently things had been going so well for Crowley, and now all of a sudden, the world is apparently ending.  As I read this, I was immediately reminded of my time here at Uconn, only a month ago.  I feel as though we, as college students, can more easily relate to Good Omens in comparison with Paradise Lost because of its satirist irony and ability to mock such a serious topic.  At times we all have felt like we were on top of the world...livin' the dream, and then suddenly we are told that Armageddon is going to happen a week from today.  (I say 'we all' in hopes of reassuring myself that I am not alone on this one...you've got a major psych exam the next morning, you are deciding whether or not to continue something in your life that could potentially change your college career, and your boyfriend comes to break up with you at 11 pm...)

So the question remains; Heaven or Hell: which one is worse?   On a side note, the fact that the authors put in, "You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start" (23), incorporates the idea of making Good Omens something that we can enjoy because of it's laid back style.

In my opinion, the answer to this question is entirely context dependent.  If you have a more rebellious attitude towards life, Heaven of course, is not the place for you.  And on the other hand, if you are one who likes to follow rules and structure, Hell should not be your goal.  Of course, this is not a black-or-white topic.  Most people fall in the middle, making this an unanswerable question...

Kellie M.

Good Omens Character Crowley similar to Satan

As I began reading Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, I was releived that it didn't contain "books" that i would have to read through twice in order to mildly understand. It became a smoother read for me as as i continued through the book I came across a paragraph that seemed strikingly familiar to Paradise Lost:

"no more world. Just endless Heaven, or depending who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn't know which was worse. Well, Hell was worse of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell. But there was no getting out of it." (p.23)

I am not sure if anyone else picked up on this, but the first thing that popped into my head was Satan saying " Better to reign in Hell then serve in Heaven!"(1.263) While Satan had originally looked around him and saw how horrible Hell was, he seemed doomed. But then he trned it around and assumed the position of leader, claiming it was better for him to have power in Hell the to live in servitude in Heaven.

For Crowley, he has mixed emotions. He knows that Hell is supposed to be worse then Heaven, but he can't say that he was completely satisfied in Heaven. And he has been to both extremes, one too boring for him, the other with a bit too much excitement. While he was torn between which one was better- he did have one thing right- for angels there was no in-between, you were either in Heaven or in Hell. Feel free to chose the lesser of two evils.

So the question still remains, and I ask it to you: Is it better to be in Heaven, or Hell? Let me know, because I'm with Crowley on this one- I don't know which one is better.

Rebecca R.

Edited Individual Post 1: Historical Information

I've found my original post and had accidentally replaced it with this early in the semester. I've corrected my mistake, so here is the link to the original post, of which this is the revision of:
http://paradisetranslation1011.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html

Challenging life experiences, in many ways, help shape our thoughts and ideas and how we act around society today. Be it in the tumultuous and bitter parts of an ugly past or from the small traces of happiness from overcoming our obstacles, our experiences contribute to the very mind and soul that represents the best of us.
Great minds seem to be interconnected very strongly with these harsh encounters. To name a few, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, and John Milton seem to be just a some of the many whose works show a very strong correlation, not from what they learned and knew, but with what they went through.

John Milton, more specifically what this blog is all about, endured turbulent times, many which spanned over the course of his lifetime. Milton went through a difficult period of instability in his country, (among a few of the details mentioned in class today). He's endured the turbulent times of politics, war, and religion during the English civil war and the likes of the tyranny of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II's reign, not to mention the deaths of two wives as well as two of his five children. He's found himself blind at the age of 44 with three children to raise, including trying to avoid being captured from Parliament for some time before his name could be cleared. He's lived through the financial distresses of England's economy and the Great Fire of London. (1)

Despite all these challenging experiences, Milton was able to produce such astounding literary works. More specifically, Paradise Lost, perhaps his greatest work of all and written in 1667, was written after the rebellion when Milton worked for Oliver Cromwell. (2) Could it be possible that the failed rebellion caused him to write about Paradise Lost? Could he have seen himself in Satan's shoes when his cause was lost? Perhaps he could have seen his and Cromwell's vision for the future, as some sort of Paradise, that had gone awry?

This connection shows a strong correlation with Milton's mind and his works. This leads me to believe in theory that perhaps matters of a dark substance, be it in life events, force minds to reach deeply into one's soul and procure the very thing of which great ideas may have originated from.

Citations:

(1) Biography was summarized from: Lewalski’, Barbara K., “The Life of John Milton”. London 2000, which can be found in the first few introductory pages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, A Norton Critical Edition, and edited by Gordon Teskey

(2) Campbell, Gordon, ed. A Milton Chronology. New York: Macmillan, 1997

- Marjorie D.

Kenneth Gross: "From Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook"

Before we go any further, Gross points out that reading Milton’s epic requires a critical fideism. (Gross, 421). This fideism, as Gross puts it, is of a “sufficient condition” that provide a means “ for us to try and ground our reading of the poetry on a hypothetical commitment to the polarized terms of the poet’s belief”. (Gross, 421). Gross means to say that in order to follow what is written in Paradise Lost, we must put ourselves in a state that dispels all scientific notions and theories, except those of religious factors that play a key role in the development of this epic.

First things first, Gross’s criticism focuses a great deal on what makes Satan such a compelling character in Paradise Lost. “It is not that I like Satan’s voice, mind, or attitude better than those of other characters in the poem, but rather that Satan, at times, seems to be the only character with a voice, mind, or attitude of his own, or the one who places the stresses of voice, mind, and attitude most clearly” (Gross, 421-422). Gross explains that Satan seems to be the only character in the book, because almost everything that happens in the chapter is about Satan. Books I and II highlight the peak of his height to power; III is about God and His Son talking about the their plan of action as a result of what Satan is doing; IV devotes a great deal of Satan’s thought processes as he witnesses Eve and Adam in Paradise; V relates Eve’s dream about Satan’s temptation as well as Raphael’s discourse of Satan’s revolt against Heaven; Book VI continues to relate the final battle whence Satan fell from Heaven, and VII does not fail to mention again loss of “the envious foe” and his “flaming legions” several times, over the narration of the creation of earth and its inhabitants. (VII, 131-46). Book VIII devotes a few lines of what Raphael saw when he visited Hell. (VIII, 228-47). He tells Adam he hears within “noise other than the sound of dance or song, / Torment and loud lament and furious rage (VIII, 243-44). These lines detail what happens in Book I when Satan and his followers find themselves in Hell. IX focuses on Satan tempting Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which resulted in Eve’s and Adam’s fall from Grace. Book X devotes some of its lines about Satan’s fulfilled mission and what happens when he returns to Pandemonium. (Books XI and XII, I shall recount in a later post, so as to not divert the attention away from what this post is about.) These Books, although they recount of things other than Satan, retells everything as a result of Satan’s rebellion. This is what Gross means when he says that Satan seems to be the only character in the book.

Gross also says that he likes to think about Satan, because how Milton describes Satan’s thought processes parallel how our minds interpret situations when we are under subjectivity, self-consciousness, awkward pressures, and the like. (Gross 422). “The steady awareness of Satan’s conscious and unconscious falsehoods - his lies against himself, his cohorts, his God - the feeling of things lost or evaded, the evidence in his speeches of a mind crossed by longing and pain, the awareness of contexts and unacknowledged truths which press in, threaten, and block: there is a good reason why these also have carried more dramatic weight with readers than the accurate theology of a reasonable God who must have no inside, no underside, no shifts in motivation (indeed, no motivation at all), must in a sense have no mind.” Gross means to say that Satan’s actions and feelings are romantic in a sense, because he is derived from the essence of dramatic plays such as Macbeth and Hamlet. Readers such as myself are more likely to empathize with Satan because he is a character who has faults and who is very much similar to the next human being. Readers like me are less likely to empathize the Son or God because any description that tells any action sprung from these beings carry little dramatic interest, due to them appearing “difficult, spare, authoritative, and their often beautiful utterances may yet appear to us as more unabashedly ‘political’ ”. (Gross, 423). Perfection is boring!!!!!! What exciting thing ever happens from knowing everything? With Satan, its different. We expect drama; we expect conflicts; we expect emotions; we expect chaos erupting from the depths of our soul. With Satan, he appears to be just like us. With Satan - the Romantic Satan - , we liken the battles of frustrations of our daily lives similar to the battles Satan was fighting for as he battles with his own mind. “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (I. 254-55). These lines reflect our own state of mind when we choose to sugar-coat the realities of life. We try to find happiness amidst the chaos resulting from our entropic state, but really, we see things the way we choose our mind to see things. To me, the motivation behind his actions is similar to the depths of our soul, but only constrained by our own superego. This is why I sympathize and empathize Satan and his plight.

- Marjorie D.