Milton with Aristotle:
Some Guidelines for Future Inquiries
A. Introduction: The Aristotelian Milton
In 1978, it was noted in A Milton Encyclopedia that no book-length studies devoted to the topic of “Milton and Aristotle” had yet appeared in the perennially busy annals of the “Milton Industry,”[1] despite the philosopher’s presence – at times hidden, at times overt – throughout Milton’s writings, at the very least as a frequent vital point of reference and as a respected ancient intellectual (albeit pre-Christian) compeer, and despite the existence in the scholarly literature of at least two such monographs on “Milton and Plato” (or vice versa) – a companionship that seems perhaps somewhat less obvious than the former pair if for no other reason than the relative infrequency with which direct references to the intellectual framework of Aristotle’s teacher appear throughout Milton’s corpus. This latter point, perhaps, is arguable; the conscious or unconscious influence of Plato in Milton’s poetry and prose is as demonstrable as it invariably is with respect to any writer cherishing a claim to pride of place within a literary heritage rooted substantially and fundamentally in the Christian worldview. That is, an editor of Paradise Lost hardly need remind the general reader[2] of the Platonic etiology of certain well-known concepts (although, to be sure, we are often grateful for such reminders, particularly when reading such a complex and allusive writer as Milton; likely, they help make us feel competent both as readers of Milton and as students of European literature). Nor should it be necessary to inform us (Hughes doesn’t) that the Lady’s harsh indictment of “gay Rhetoric” in Comus cannot be fully appreciated without reference to Plato’s critique of the Sophists in Gorgias and other dialogues. Milton’s debt to Aristotle, on the other hand, is simultaneously less obvious and more specific: less obvious, as general readers are (again, arguably) not as likely to recognize, say, Milton’s utilization of ideas central to Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos, topos, etc.) as they are to identify Platonic motifs such as those just mentioned; more specific, as the extensive terminological baggage associated with Aristotle, as I will show, obliges the student of Milton interested in such inquiries to experiment with the use of Aristotelian terms and concepts as tools in a line-by-line, sentence-by-sentence engagement with selected passages.
While references to Aristotle, to be sure, are by no means infrequent in Milton studies, and while there have been numerous shorter publications on various aspects of Aristotle deemed relevant to the reading of Milton, I would suggest that scholars have shunned more ambitious studies simply due to the daunting nature of the task. Aristotle is both forbiddingly technical and forbiddingly comprehensive[3] in a way that Plato, generally speaking, is not. In order to comprehend the full extent of Milton’s debt to Aristotle, the reader presumably would have to read as extensively in Aristotle as did Milton himself, and a cursory glance at the footnotes of any contemporary edition of Milton’s writings will assure the reader that Milton was not only acquainted with those works ostensibly most relevant to the task of writing epic poetry and polemical tracts (Rhetoric, Poetics, Nicomachean Ethics, perhaps one or two others), but with the Aristotelian corpus in its entirety – a body of thought that has been rendered increasingly inoperable (not to say unreadable) since the Renaissance, at least in a number of its remoter extents.[4]
While, at least at this point, I am no more inclined than any typical reader of Milton to commit myself – my time and my energy as a reader of books – to such a task, I would like to share with whoever may be interested in the topic some insights of a preliminary nature that several months devoted to the activity of reading “Milton with Aristotle” have occasioned. It is my hope that such reflections, however cursory, may at least prove useful in suggesting the nature and extent of the topic, in demarcating its boundaries, and in hinting at the sort of work that may be conducted within them – in providing, in short, a springboard for lengthier and more substantial future inquiries.
B. The Miltonic Aristotle
(Or, Which Books of Aristotle Are Most Relevant to the Study of Milton, and Why?)
The short answer to the “which” portion of my parenthetical question is bipartite and reads as follows: a) Rhetoric, and b) those books to which Rhetoric immediately refers the reader (either explicitly or implicitly) through the ternary schema of persuasion as ethos, pathos and logos. The long answer would begin with the short answer and would branch out from b) into the virtual entirety of Aristotle, inasmuch as the works to which Rhetoric refers us refer in turn to the remaining (extant and non-extant) works in the Aristotelian corpus.
And the “why”? As posterity has remembered Milton primarily not as a prose polemicist, logician, grammarian or theologian (he was all of these, of course) but as a poet, one might reasonably assume that the best place to establish a foothold with respect to Milton as a reader of Aristotle would be in Poetics. As is well known, however, the extant portion of Poetics pertains principally to dramatic works to be performed before an audience. Milton’s Samson Agonistes (and Comus, to a lesser extent) certainly cannot be fully appreciated without some acquaintance with the theory of tragedy preserved in Poetics. But it is Milton’s longest epic poem that is universally regarded as his most significant work (certainly it is his most frequently read), and, although the various theories presented in Poetics are not without relevance to Paradise Lost, they are arguably of peripheral importance in comparison with the theories which comprise Rhetoric and which, moreover, helpfully refer the reader to those passages in Poetics (some of which, again, are not extant) most crucial to the student of Rhetoric.[5]
Another inroad might be suggested via cosmological and quasi-theological themes and conceptions – those, especially, associated with Metaphysics, such as the four-fold view of causality that famously appears throughout Paradise Lost. As I will argue below, however, Milton’s recourse to Aristotelian conceptions such as causality via an alternative, indirect route (in this case beginning in Rhetoric, passing through Topics, and pointing, finally, to an endpoint in Metaphysics) is persuasive, if for no other reason than the fact that so much else in Paradise Lost seems to make sense through an initial inspection of Rhetoric leading into subsequent inspections of other books (all of them?) in the Aristotelian canon.
C. Ethos, Pathos, Logos
I’ll begin this brief look at Rhetoric and at the roads that lead from it into the vast sprawl of Aristotle’s other writings with a pair of theses that have guided me over the course of my recent investigations: first, that a central challenge in undertaking an Aristotelian reading of Milton pertains to the terminological variations Aristotle introduces in Rhetoric with respect to the central concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos – variations that cause them to differ subtly but significantly from the original conceptions as formulated in other treatises;[6] second, that, because of Milton’s thorough, demonstrated acquaintance with all of Aristotle’s writings, it is necessary, in considering his relation to Aristotle (the extent of his debt, the possible extent of his departure, etc.), to be aware of the full range of meanings available within the Aristotelian corpus with respect to these three key terms.[7]
The versatility (polyvalence?) of these three key terms is clearly related to the rather ambiguous status of rhetoric as an art (technē). For Aristotle, any intellectual activity may be classified under one or more of the following four branches: a) the theoretical sciences (mathematics and physics, for example), b) the practical arts (which include politics and ethics), c) the productive arts (medicine, the fine arts, etc.), and d) method or tools (organa) that are “applicable to all study but [possess] no distinct subject matter of their own” (Aristotle 1991, 12-13). For Aristotle, the art of rhetoric pertains or belongs in some way to all four branches: to the theoretical sciences, in that it grants theoretical insight into the ways and means of persuasion; to the practical arts, in that it derives from politics and ethics; to the productive arts, in that it allows us to “produce” speeches, persuasive documents, and so forth; and to organa, in that the tools of rhetoric do not have a particular subject matter to which they exclusively apply. Due to this “mixed” status of rhetoric, Aristotle’s treatise often reads like an abridgement and synopsis of terms treated more extensively in his other works – not dissimilar, perhaps, to the handbooks and primers that exist in our contemporary world, conceived as introductions to hybrid and newly created disciplines and consisting largely of explanations of terms and concepts derived from other fields and prepared for specific or technical use within the newly delimited contexts of the discipline in question.
We’ll begin with Aristotle’s very succinct definitions of several terms central to this art/science/toolkit known as rhetoric. The key, definitional passage in the second chapter of Book 1 may be summarized as follows: Rhetoric, first, is “an ability to see, in each case, the available means of persuasion” (36). “Means of persuasion” translates pistis; pisteis are either entechnic or atechnic. The entechnic (or “artistic”) pisteis are those means of persuasion which the speaker provides, in contrast to the atechnic (“nonartistic”) pisteis, which preexist the speaker and include the testimony of witnesses and testimony exacted under torture (Rhetoric, it goes without saying, is concerned primarily with entechnic pisteis). The pisteis provided by the speaker are to be found in a) the character (ēthos) of the speaker, b) the dispositions or emotions (pathos) that the speaker evokes in his or her audience, and c) the argument (logos) by which something is shown (or seems to be shown) to the audience (36-37).
We should not avoid mentioning at the outset the fact, as should be obvious from the foregoing paragraph, that the conventional understanding of rhetoric as 1/3 ethos, 1/3 pathos and 1/3 logos is something that has been “teased” out of Aristotle’s treatise more as a matter of linguistic convenience than in keeping with terminological designations strictly adhered to by Aristotle himself. [8] Thus, by extracting from Aristotle’s text words used not as terminological labels but set down in the context of describing the three sorts of entechnic pistis, we arrive at the conventional, threefold manner of discussing Aristotle’s rhetorical theory outside of his native Greek, in which the speaker may produce persuasion in three ways: through ethos, by “making the speaker worthy of credence”; through pathos, by making the speaker’s hearers feel emotion; and through logos, by “showing the truth or the apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case” (39).
Having summarized Aristotle’s famous overview of the three entechnic pisteis and commented on the manner in which readers in modern languages have extracted from Aristotle’s text the terms for which Rhetoric is perhaps most famous, we may survey the paths cut by ethos, pathos and logos through Rhetoric and through the texts to which it is most closely related:
1. Ethos: Rhetoric vs. Nicomachean Ethics
With respect to ethos, it is necessary to distinguish between ethos as a pistis, as discussed above, and ethical concerns that are to be found among the topics (topoi) – the “places” or “locations” or “spaces” where a speaker may look for his or her pisteis, which belong more properly to logos (i.e. to those pisteis classified as “arguments”) than to ethos. The amount of space that Aristotle devotes to what we might refer to as “ethos proper” is small; although Aristotle emphasizes, in opposition to the views of previous theorists, that “character is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor in persuasion”, and informs us that “we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others] on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt” (38), he does little to flesh out his theory further or to provide practical suggestions for speakers, other than by making brief and sketchy comments concerning wisdom, virtue and good will as three key character elements that the speaker should attempt to convey to his audience.
Ethics (ethiké), defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation,” is, of course, founded on the root word ēthos, which, as we have seen, means “character” (it can also mean “custom”). Thus, the discussion of the ethical topoi in Rhetoric relates, on the one hand, closely to that of rhetorical ethos as defined above and, on the other, to the book-length presentation of ethics in Nicomachean Ethics, providing, perhaps, something like a fulcrum between the two (unhelpfully, Aristotle himself does not discuss the obvious etymological relation of ethics to ēthos and its implications – including any divergences that might exist between the two – for the art/science of persuasion). As George A. Kennedy suggests, the sections in Rhetoric focusing on ethics likely represent “a more popular, and probably earlier, version of philosophical discussions of happiness and virtue found in [Aristotle’s] ethical treatises” (56). These sections, amounting to around ten pages of print in comparison with the much longer Nicomachean Ethics, certainly read like a condensation, summary or redaction of several key sections of the longer work, including those books devoted to happiness, goodness, virtue and friendship. The connection of ethics to ethos should be obvious merely on the basis of a brief consideration of these four ideas; for not only must one be able to find and argue from them as “topics” or “places,” one must also convey happiness, goodness and virtue as qualities of one’s own character, along with the friendly feelings and kind motives which have occasioned one to approach one’s hearers so as to persuade them to assent to or disagree with a particular idea or set of ideas or to engage in or shun a particular action or set of actions.
2. Pathos: Rhetoric vs. Poetics
Aristotle devotes about four times as much space in Rhetoric to pathos as he does to ethos and, as Kennedy notes, the ten chapters devoted to seven pairs of emotions (anger and calmness, friendliness and enmity, fear and confidence, etc.) are generally considered “the earliest systematic discussion of human psychology” (122). Kennedy also notes that Aristotle does not couch his discussion of these fourteen emotions in obviously rhetorical terms; his goal seems to be simply to encourage awareness of the emotions so as to render oneself, as a prospective speaker, more readily able to invoke in one’s hearers positive emotions toward oneself and negative emotions toward one’s opponents.
Interestingly, Aristotle discusses each of the emotions in a threefold manner that seems to reflect the ethos/pathos/logos structure in miniature. First, he claims that the speaker must understand the state of mind of people when they are feeling a particular emotion; we might say (Aristotle doesn’t) that we must know how a person’s character (i.e. ethos) changes, for instance, when he is feeling angry. Second, he asserts that we must know to whom a person’s emotion is directed; this consideration would seem to run parallel to pathos, insofar as it concerns a party serving as “other” to the party central to the first, “ethical” consideration. Finally, according to Aristotle, we must understand the reasons in accordance with (conditions under which?) a certain emotion may be evoked; this, obviously, corresponds to logos. Thus, the emotional pistis seems to repeat in its “pathetic” nutshell the threefold distribution that distinguishes the art of rhetoric as a whole, and we could display this parallelism as follows:
Rhetoric Pathos
speaker’s character (ethos) “subject’s” state of mind
auditor’s emotion (pathos) identity of the subject’s “other”
speaker’s arguments (logos) reasons behind the subject’s state of mind
The emphasis placed on pathos in Poetics, of course, is somewhat different. On the one hand, discussion is limited to pity and fear – those emotions most relevant to tragedy.[9] On the other hand, the context that drama provides for pathos is entirely different from the persuasive contexts of oratory; emotions are aroused in drama for the sake of imparting to the audience a certain form of pleasure. The implications for our understanding of pathos, of course, are further complicated in Poetics by the concepts of imitation (mimesis) and purification (katharsis). As I will suggest below, however, it is necessary to take both the rhetorical and “poetic” modes of pathos into account in discussing a narrative poem such as Paradise Lost, in which Satan (and various other speakers) attempt to persuade other parties, partly through the emotions he seeks to invoke in them, at the same time as Milton ostensibly is attempting to invoke various sorts of emotions in his readers.
3. Logos: Rhetoric vs. Topics, etc.
Logos is decidedly the most difficult, the most involved, the most “widespread” of the three sorts of pistis central to the art of rhetoric and to Aristotle’s treatise. For, in addition to the portion of Rhetoric dealing specifically with logic, which is roughly as long as the portion dealing with the emotions, the sections of Book 1 devoted to the three species of rhetoric (deliberative, epideictic and judicial) are organized according to “topic” (topos) – a term that, in the Aristotelian conception, belongs fundamentally to logic.[10] Further, the elaborate and frequently “technical” chapters in Book 2 devoted to the forms of logical argument lead directly into the thick of the Organon – the conventional designation for Aristotle’s six, interrelated treatises on logic (Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations). As these six books vary widely in content, and as all of them seem relevant in some way to the chapters on logical argument in Rhetoric, a brief overview of them is in order, with emphasis placed on those aspects that seem most pertinent to Aristotle’s purposes in Rhetoric:
a. Topics
Topics (conventionally numbered the fifth book of the six that comprise the Organon) is by far the most crucial of Aristotle’s books on logic to an appreciation of rhetorical logos. For one thing, it relates most closely to Rhetoric in that it deals more centrally than the other books in the Organon with dialectic – rhetoric’s sister art. Topics is not a particularly easy text to follow, to say the least; Aristotle takes for granted that his readers are fully aware of what goes on in dialectical argument or debate, and modern scholars are still at pains to learn how the contests that Topics ambiguously refers to actually worked (Barnes 57-62). In essence, Topics seems to have been conceived as a sort of practical compendium of topics (topoi) – “places” or “locations” at which may be found both the various types of conclusions that participants in dialectical contests strive to come to, as well as the “reputable opinions” from which, in the form of premises, such conclusions may be derived. Syllogism (or deduction – its Latinate synonym) is the name for such a derivation, and it is as central to dialectic as the enthymeme is to rhetoric. An enthymeme is a sort of “relaxed syllogism” – one that has been arranged or modified for the purposes of oratorical persuasion, in which the speaker is not expected to employ argumentation that is as rigorously “logical” as in dialectic. Neither in Topics nor in Rhetoric does Aristotle go into the technicalities of how conclusions are to be derived from premises – a topic which he reserves for his major treatise on syllogism (Prior Analytics, discussed below). Instead, in both books he is concerned with organizing the materials out of which arguments and the more complex sets of arguments known as syllogisms and enthymemes are made. Whereas in Topics, however, these are arranged under the broadest possible categories (attribute, property, genus, definition, sameness and difference), in Rhetoric the arrangement is, on the one hand, reduced and simplified for the relaxed logical contexts of oratory and, on the other hand, rendered more complicated, in that Aristotle offers two entirely different arrangements of the topoi in Books 1 and 2, but with frequent overlapping between them. In Book 1, as mentioned above, topics are grouped according to their utility in the three species of rhetoric. The latter chapters of Book 2, in contrast, treat of various items relevant to the use of topics, such as examples, maxims, enthymemes, and “propositions common to all species of rhetoric”. Included in this portion of Rhetoric is the lengthy Chapter 23, which consists of the famous list of twenty-eight “common topics”; this chapter in turn relates somewhat ambiguously to the other stretches of Rhetoric pertaining to the topoi and reads as a hodge-podge of disparately related examples derived rather haphazardly from Topics, to which Aristotle occasionally refers the reader. In any case, as the portions of Rhetoric concerning the topics seem to have been derived more or less directly from the logical treatise, it would seem incumbent on the student of rhetorical logos to acquire at least some familiarity with the more rigorous arrangement in Topics.
b. Sophistical Refutations
Sophistical Refutations (the sixth and final book of the Organon), which deals with logical fallacies and how to counter them in dialectical debate, is generally considered a lengthy appendix to Topics; thus, what has already been said of Topics in relation to Rhetoric applies here as well. Chapter 24 of Book 2 on fallacious (or “spurious”) enthymemes relates to Sophistical Refutations as Chapter 23 (discussed above) relates to Topics. Students of Milton will, arguably, want to pay yet closer attention to this book than to Topics, as so much of Satan’s logic is fallacious and as much less of Sophistical Refutations enters into Rhetoric relative to the work to which it serves as an appendix.
c. Prior Analytics
Prior Analytics, the third book of the Organon, is Aristotle’s famously exhaustive treatise on syllogism or deduction, defined as “a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so” (Aristotle 1994, 40). As already noted, an enthymeme is to rhetoric what a syllogism is to dialectic and to deductive reasoning and may be considered an adaptation of the latter for the practical purposes of oratory. While the tremendous technical apparatus of Prior Analytics is largely excluded from Rhetoric, Aristotle seems to assume that his readers are familiar enough with syllogism so as not to require step-by-step instruction in the ways and means of its enthymemic derivative. As suggested above, however, with respect to Topics and Sophistical Refutations, I would argue that passing familiarity with Aristotle’s foundational work of deductive reasoning is requisite to a thorough understanding of how enthymemes work in the numerous speeches that comprise such a large portion of Paradise Lost.
d. Posterior Analytics
Posterior Analytics is the sequel to Prior Analytics and deals with demonstration – a type of deduction which leads to “epistemic” (true, scientific, etc.) knowledge; thus, whereas Prior Analytics concerns merely the logical form of thought and debate, this latter work is devoted to argumentation and deduction insofar as they pertain directly to whatever matters external to logic they may take up (including natural-world entities as well as mental constructs such as the propositions of arithmetic and geometry). In Rhetoric, Aristotle refers the reader to either of the Analytics with far less frequency than to Topics; the “mixed,” “relaxed” nature of rhetorical logos and of the enthymeme central to it seems to be such that Aristotle rarely if ever in Rhetoric deems it necessary to discuss a “purely” logical construct with no reference to the external world at hand. This, however, is not to suggest that the demonstrative certainties showcased in Posterior Analytics are not without relevance to Miltonic rhetoric; while much of Satan’s logic seems to pertain to the less-than-certain reasonings of Topics (and, of course, to the outright fallacious reasonings of Sophistical Refutations), there is a good bit of logic in Paradise Lost that is ostensibly erected on ideas that for Milton and his first readers were ontological, cosmological, and theological certainties (I’m thinking in particular of much that comes up in the conversations that take place between God and the Son, Raphael and Adam, and Michael and Adam). For this reason, many of the speeches in Paradise Lost seem to fall out of the purview of Rhetoric for the most part if not altogether; here, clearly, the question concerning Milton’s familiarity with Aristotle’s logical works spills over into the larger issue of Milton’s utilization of the entirety of the Aristotelian intellectual apparatus, including his physical, metaphysical, cosmological and theological conceptions.
e. Categories and De Interpretatione
These two shorter works (the first and second works of the Organon, respectively) serve as preliminary works to the remaining four logical treatises and are foundational to other aspects of Aristotelian thought as well (his metaphysics, most notably). Categories lists the ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, etc.) to which all subjects and predicates belong that comprise the propositions and arguments treated in the other logical treatises – those entities, that is, which serve as the building blocks of thought and of language. De Interpretatione defines some of the key terms for which familiarity on the part of the reader is assumed in Prior Analytics (name, verb, sentence, affirmation, negation, etc.). Knowledge of both of these shorter works is as crucial to an understanding of rhetorical logos as it is to a wider appreciation of Aristotelian thought as a whole and to Milton’s utilization of it. In particular, Satan, Adam and the narrator frequently refer in their various speculations quite directly to the categories, again bridging Aristotelian logic with extra-logical conceptions.
D. The Rhetorical Satan
Having thus surveyed the complicated relation of ethos, pathos and logos as set down in Rhetoric to their counterparts in other works by Aristotle, I would now like to suggest an “Aristotelian reading” of Milton centered on one of the most rhetorically pregnant speeches of Paradise Lost: Satan’s speech to the fallen angels in Book One (lines 622-662). In each of the three sections that follow, I will first conduct a basic rhetorical analysis; then I will speculate on the extent to which a foray into relevant passages from Aristotle’s other treatises may shed additional light on the ethos, pathos and logos of Milton’s most celebrated character.
1. The Ethical Satan
Analysis: The ethical strain in this speech is relatively simple and straightforward. Following from the import of his first, brief speech to the fallen at lines 310-330, where Satan had scolded the millions of fallen angels still rolling in the fiery waves from which he and Beelzebub had already removed themselves, Satan presents himself in lines 622-662 as the only one who (with Beelzebub, whom he doesn’t mention) has extricated himself from the humiliating nullity of inaction and who has readied himself for a renewed attack. He also attempts to demonstrate that he is the one with superior force of argument (see below under Logos).[11]
Commentary: The definitive statement on ethos is to be found in Book 1, Chapter 1 of Rhetoric:
[There is persuasion] through character [ethos] whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others] on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. (38)
The crucial term in this passage is “credence” rather than “fair-mindedness,” which Aristotle uses here as an example (his point, of course, is not so much that “we believe fair-minded people” as that “we lend credence to people who appear to us as fair-minded”). This passage brings to mind a central element of Satan’s rhetoric: the fact that the fallen angels are not in possession of “exact knowledge” and are in a considerable state of doubt (as to the Almighty’s intentions, as to the mystery behind his unfathomably greater power, etc.). Indeed, it seems to me a testimony of Milton’s very thorough appropriation of Aristotelian rhetoric that he makes so thematic the element of doubt and uncertainty which more than any other distinguishes rhetoric and dialectic from demonstration and true (epistemic) knowledge.
A more thorough treatment of Satanic ethos would delve into concerns raised by the sections in Rhetoric devoted to “ethical topics” and by the various books of Nicomachean Ethics to which the former are related. Of particular interest are Aristotle’s interrelated conceptions of the good and happiness. Aristotle defines the good as that end “for the sake of which we want all other ends” (Aristotle 2004, 4) – i.e. that which we desire for its own sake, which is approximate to what human beings call happiness. But what are we, as Aristotelians, to make of an angelic being whose “good,” whose “happiness,” is simply to frustrate whatever is deemed good by the one being placed higher than himself in the order of being? It is in light of such considerations, I believe, that our continued interest in and fascination with Milton’s chief character resides and that Milton continues to intrigue us as we wend our way into ever newer, ever “later” reaches of a modernity that seems to pride itself on placing into question the meanings on which our civilization is said to rest, such as those included in Aristotle’s ethical definitions.
2. The Pathetic Satan
Analysis: In his speech to the fallen, Satan attempts to arouse in his comrades feelings of self-worth (“O Powers/Matchless, but with th' Almighty”), self-forgiveness (“what power of mind… could have fear'd,/How such united force of Gods…could ever know repulse?”), confidence (“who can yet believe…That all these puissant Legions…shall faile to re-ascend…and repossess their native seat[?]”), modesty (“Henceforth his might we know, and know our own/So as not either to provoke, or dread/New warr, provok't”), enthusiasm (“whereof so rife/There went a fame in Heav'n that he ere long/Intended to create, and therein plant/A generation, whom his choice regard/Should favour equal to the Sons of Heaven:/Thither, if but to prie, shall be perhaps/Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere”), and a sense of hope based on reasonable expectations (“our better part remains/To work in close design, by fraud or guile/What force effected not”). This is in contrast to Satan’s initial speech at lines 310-330, in which he attempted to inspire shame and fear in the fallen (“[I]n this abject posture have ye sworn/To adore the Conqueror? who now beholds/Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood…till anon/His swift pursuers from Heav’n gates discern/Th’ advantage,” etc.).
Commentary: “[There is persuasion] through the hearers when they are led to feel emotions [pathos] by the speech; for we do not give the same judgment when grieved and rejoicing or when being friendly and hostile” (Aristotle 1991, 38). The contrast between Satan’s first, short speech at lines 315-330 and the lengthier address of lines 622-662 shows that, while constancy may be maintained from one speech to another with respect to one sort of pistis (here, ethos), another may vary widely, as in the “pathetic about-face” that occurs between Satan’s initial harsh words to the fallen and the loftier feelings he attempts to induce (and, we assume, succeeds in doing so) several hundred lines later upon completion of the catalogue of the fallen. Indeed, it would be interesting to examine more extensively the way in which ethos and pathos work in conjunction with each other throughout Paradise Lost; it would be possible, for instance, to find much in common at the level of pathos between Satan’s speeches to the fallen and his advice to Eve in Book IX (the attempt, for instance, to incite feelings of self-worth and enthusiasm/excitement for an act of uncertain outcome), while at the same time to note a sharp divergence at the level of ethos (Satan makes no attempt, for instance, to convince Eve of his superiority to her; if anything, he is likely at pains to dissimulate his inferiority as a being that occupies a rung several steps down on the ladder of Creation).
A more thorough examination of Satan’s pathos would have to take into account “poetic” pathos and its convergences with and divergences from rhetorical pathos. For certainly, just as Satan inspires in his fallen comrades such feelings that receive attention in Rhetoric as friendliness and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, Satan (or his author, rather) inspires in us, his readers, the feeling of pity central to Aristotle’s conceptions of tragedy and tragic catharsis (a feeling that reaches its height, perhaps, in the monologue at the outset of Book IV). Indeed, I would suggest that there is a certain intriguing disequilibrium or misalignment between rhetorical pathos and poetic pathos which runs throughout Paradise Lost and which creates a tension that helps maintain our interest. In it, the two “pathetic vectors” at times converge (we share Satan’s disgust with his fallen comrades for succumbing to the Lethean properties of the lake into which they have been plunged; our pity for Satan in Book IV converges with his self-pity, etc.) and at times diverge (in Book X, the unintentional “booing” on the part of the fallen follows upon their applause in the exact measure as our applause for Satan’s deserved downdressing follows upon our indignation at the initial applause on the part of the fallen).
3. The Logical Satan
Analysis: I should confess at the outset that this third, “logical” foray is somewhat sketchier, somewhat more tentative than my experiments with ethos and pathos outlined above. This is necessarily so due to the extraordinary complexities associated with Aristotelian logic. As a new reader of Aristotle’s logical works who previously had relied on summaries for my understanding of this branch of his thought, I am not yet well enough equipped with the necessary conceptual apparatus, not yet as thoroughly steeped in the chapter and verse of the Organon, to be able to undertake the sort of analysis of Paradise Lost that I think could (and should) be done at the logical level.
With this caveat in mind, the key arguments in Satan’s speech to the fallen may be tentatively enumerated as follows: [1] You, the fallen, are superior in might to all but the Almighty himself (622-623). [2] Although the place in which we now find ourselves is undesirable, the struggle which caused us to be placed here was not altogether inglorious (623-625). [3] We could not have known that we would be repulsed to such an extent (626-630). [4] It is impossible for us to believe that we will never again regain our seat in Heaven (631-634). [5] The Almighty’s throne has been upheld either a) by reputation, b) by consent, or c) by custom (637-640). [6] We were duped into thinking we could overthrow him because he concealed the full extent of his power from us; therefore, we are not to be blamed (640-641). [7] Now we know better than to provoke war with Heaven (643-645). [8] We will achieve our goal through fraud or guile rather than by force (645-647). [9] “…this Infernal Pit shall never hold/Caelestial Spirits in Bondage” (657-658). [10] We must deliberate first before deciding (659-660). [11] It is impossible for us to think submission (660-661).
Analysis: A few tentative and preliminary glosses on several of the eleven arguments I have thus identified: [4] is a fallacious (or “spurious”) enthymeme, and Satan is arguing impossibility from mere improbability; that is, if you merely believe that something is impossible but don’t have any real proof of impossibility, then you are in the realm of probability. Regaining their seat in Heaven, in short, is only more or less likely to happen, at least insofar as the angels know at present. [6] seems to be an amalgamation of two spurious enthymemes. The reasoning may be recast as two syllogisms along the following lines: 1a) Those who are strongest have the right to rule (i.e. “might = right”). b) He is strongest. c) Therefore, he has the right to rule. 2a) Those who are fooled are not to be blamed for their actions. b) We were fooled. c) Therefore, we are not to be blamed for our actions. [8] is based on another pair of spurious enthymemes/hidden assumptions – namely, that “we have all agreed exactly upon what our goal is, and it is in essence unchanged from what it was before.” This, of course, is nonsense; the fallen angels’ former goal was overthrow, and Satan has implicitly conceded that this is impossible. Apparently, his goal has changed. [9] conceals another spurious enthymeme: a) Celestial Spirits may not under any circumstances permanently be held in bondage. b) We are celestial Spirits. c) Thus, there’s a way out of here. Spurious, because it is very possible that under certain circumstances Celestial Spirits may in fact be held in bondage. [10] conceals the false assumption that “we haven’t already decided what we’re going to do”; Satan, obviously, has. [11] is based on yet another spurious enthymeme: a) Celestial spirits do not submit to others. b) We are celestial spirits. c) Therefore, we will not submit. Spurious again, because maybe under certain circumstances celestial spirits DO submit to others.
Many of Satan’s spurious enthymemes are of the sort identified by Aristotle in which something is asserted of the parts in relation to each other that in fact is only true of the general whole.[12] For example, while it is true that spirits in general do not submit to other sorts of (non-spiritual) beings, it is not true that certain spirits (i.e. such as those that have been created) may not under certain circumstances enter into relations of submission to other spirits (i.e. to the single uncreated spirit…God). As suggested above, however, a fuller analysis would seek to relate Satan’s propositions to the various classifications in Topics and Sophistical Refutations; it would also consider the extent to which examinations of Satan’s spurious and non-spurious enthymemes in terms of the more stringent deductive processes central to Prior Analytics is relevant to such “Aristotelian forays” into Milton’s epic.[13]
Coda to the Logical Satan: “Children Gathering Pebbles”
“So fares it when with truth falsehood contends” (Paradise Regained, IV:443). In certain respects, Paradise Regained, through its relative brevity and its more transparent narrative structure as, in essence, an annotated dialogue in several scenes between the Son and Satan, seems to provide a more suitable initial springboard than Paradise Lost for an examination of Miltonic logos and what it owes to the central works of Aristotelian logic. Very generally, I would suggest that, in both of Milton’s epic poems, the discourse of the non-fallen celestial beings seems to point to the demonstrative logic (and to the truths and certainties it takes up as its material) of Posterior Analytics as a central point of reference, while, at the other end of the spectrum, attempts should be made to align Satan’s discourse to the fallacious (or spurious) logic that is the object of Sophistical Refutations. Finally, the discourses of the non-celestial beings (Adam, Eve, the narrator), predicated as they are on repeated protestations of (non-fallacious) doubt and uncertainty, represent a midway point between (Godly) truth and (Satanic) falsehood and thus suggest, to the reader wishing to delve further into such matters, Topics – Aristotle’s treatise on dialectical logic.
Interestingly, Satan’s discourse is the most rhetorically various; although it is primarily sophistical/fallacious/spurious, it does include demonstrative elements (Satan, as a former angel, does indeed know quite a lot about the universe that those fundamentally dialectical beings known as humans do not know), as well as dialectical elements (there is also quite a bit, after all, that Satan does not quite grasp – God’s plans, his reasons, the extent of his power, the nature and history of his Creation, etc.). This uncertainty central to Satan in his “dialectical” mode is epitomized in lines 514-522 of Paradise Regained, Book IV, in which Satan reveals his bafflement at what it means for the Savior to be the “Son of God”; after all, he reasons, we all in a sense are “Sons of God.” Satan’s frustration (not to mention his humor) is that he comes up time and time again against the adamantine barrier of Truth and demonstrative logic, against which dialectic, in both its honest and spurious varieties, is helpless.
In the end, however, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the uses to which Milton puts ethos, pathos and logos as the three means of persuasion are fundamentally poetic (in the common, non-Aristotelian sense). Unlike Areopagitica or De doctrina christiana, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are poems, after all – things created, certainly, for “judicious ears,” but also just as certainly for “true musical delight[,] which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” In a sense, despite my sincere though admittedly plodding attempts to wrest syllogisms out of the enthymemic web of just one of the great speeches of Paradise Lost, all of the arguments in Milton’s epic poetry, whether voiced by Satan or God, Raphael or Adam, Eve or the Son, are ultimately enthymemes rather than syllogisms, more aptly suited than the latter for the relaxed intellection requisite to the composition (and, to be sure, the judicious reading) of verse, just as its author, along with his Edenic creations, his alteregoic narrator, and his 21st-century readers, are uncertain and doubtful, dialectical and human – all of us, whether there are or aren’t somewhere in Creation beings of intellect fashioned otherwise, mere “children gathering pebbles on the shore.”
[1] Phrase borrowed from Dustin Griffon’s article on “Milton’s Literary Influence” in The Cambridge Campanion to Milton (258).
[2] As does Merritt Hughes in a footnote to line 592 of Book VIII, which states that “heav’nly Love is the divine love of Plato’s Symposium as it had been Christianized by poets from Dante to Spenser…” (Milton 1957, 376).
[3] Need we add, “forbiddingly dry and subliterary”?
[4] Most obviously, though by no means exclusively, the works on natural philosophy.
[5] On the surface, indeed, Paradise Lost seems to be more generally rhetorical than poetic, provided that one restricts one’s understanding of poetics to such concepts for which the extant fragment of Poetics is famous (pathos, catharsis, etc.) – concepts that are more immediately germane to the genre of tragedy than to epic.
[6] It should be stated that the view I have implied here of Rhetoric as derivative from other works is highly problematic, considering the difficulties involving issues of basic textual status in virtually all of Aristotle’s works, including those of dating and chronology. George A. Kennedy provides a thorough summary of these issues in the notes to his translation (Aristotle 1991). Suffice it to say that Rhetoric is derivative from other texts, at the technical if not at the chronological level, due to the “mixed” nature of the art from which it takes its name. More on this in the paragraph that immediately follows.
[7] I should also mention that I am leaving Book 3 on Style and Arrangement out of consideration altogether. This is not because I believe that Aristotle’s thoughts on Style and Arrangement are entirely irrelevant to Milton; it does seem to me, however, that the conceptions of ethos, pathos and logos are somewhat less dependent on, somewhat more “universalizable” beyond the local linguistic context of Greek than the later sections on Style and Arrangement which, of course, fed into the formulations of Latin and English rhetoricians that, it is assumed, had greater immediacy for Milton as first a student and then a writer of Latin and of English.
[8] As Kennedy writes in a footnote to this passage, “The shorthand ethos-pathos-logos to describe the modes of persuasion is a convenience but does not represent Aristotle’s own usage” (38).
[9] In addition to pity and fear, Aristotle briefly touches on the arousal of laughter in comedy.
[10] To complicate matters further, Aristotle seems to implicitly subordinate ethos to logos by devoting the bulk of the chapters on deliberative rhetoric to ethical concerns, including the sections on happiness and goodness which, as mentioned above, are repeated in (or perhaps derived from) Nicomachean Ethics; ethos, in other words, is rendered structurally subordinate to logos via the ethical topoi.
[11] Walter J. Ong’s comments on Milton’s use of logic for rhetorical purposes seem to underscore the interweaving of logos and ethos that is already implicit in the various structural confusions that Aristotle’s treatise poses: “The self-conscious logic that Milton’s prose often advertises does not mean that his prose is always in fact tightly reasoned. Logical terms and concepts can themselves be used for rhetorical purposes – to show one’s intellectual muscle or to cow one’s opponents, and even to distract from the real issues – and Milton, like many of his contemporaries, often so uses the available logical equipment” (Milton 1982, 199-200).
[12] This is the second of eleven fallacious enthymemes listed in Rhetoric, Book 2, Chapter 24 on “Real and Apparent, or Fallacious, Enthymemes.” Kennedy’s highly literal translation does not speak of confusing “parts” and “wholes,” but rather of spuriously combining divisions and dividing combinations (206). I have also consulted the older translation by W. Rhys Roberts (Aristotle 2004, 110).
[13] A final note: I have omitted as beyond the scope of the present inquiry the very interesting question as to the role that Milton’s own work as a Ramist logician plays in his epic poetry. His Art of Logic was written approximately two decades before the publication of Paradise Lost, and it is entirely possible that Milton after the 1640’s abandoned the peculiar hierarchical arrangement of traditional logical terms and categories that Ramus had introduced, in favor of the terms and categories themselves, which Ramus by and large had left untouched. My present view is that Milton’s Ramism is subordinate to his Aristotelianism – both in terms of logic and in terms of his intellectual orientation on the whole. For a concise yet thorough discussion of this issue, see Walter J. Ong’s introduction to his translation of the Art of Logic, especially p. 197-205 (Milton 1982).
Works Cited
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson. Rev. ed. London, etc.: Penguin Books, 1976.
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. London, etc.: Penguin Books, 1996.
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004.
“Aristotle and Milton.” A Milton Encyclopedia. Ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. Vol. 1. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1978.
Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Danielson, Dennis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Poems. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis, IN: The Odyssey Press, 1957.
Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. VIII. Ed. Maurice Kelley. New York and London: Yale University Press, 1982.