A guest post by J.M.M. Wahl.
I once knew a doctor who, in his mid-50’s, was at the height of his career. He was nationally acclaimed, and in his particular field of practice, was a highly besought physician in the state of Colorado. He was also a faithful and devout Catholic.
It so happened that this doctor at one point had a medical assistant working in his office, who was a year or two out of college. One day as a number of the employees were hanging out and talking in the office, somebody asked this kid about a sticker he had on his water bottle, which featured a pentagram and maybe a goat’s head or something – obviously imagery which is drawing from dark sources, but may have been simply a logo for a metal band or something. Not so in this case. As it turned out, this kid in his early 20’s admitted that he was a member of a local Satanic temple.
Some weeks later, the topic came up again, as the doctor and this medical assistant were talking one-on-one. As the topic came up, the doctor asked some questions about it, and the kid made the interesting statement, that he didn’t truly believe in Satan or anything supernatural, but his membership was rather meant to signify that “he believes in Science”. Now I don’t know how the conversation went exactly, but I can imagine that this was a profoundly ironic, and even ignorant, statement to make in the context of talking to renowned medical doctor – especially since he was known in the office to be a man of faith.
As the conversation continued, the MA opened up and said that he was first convinced to be an atheist in an English literature class in either high school or college. It was while they were reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, that this kid supposedly realized that Christianity must be false.
Now obviously, this story is just one isolated case, and it might be rash to draw too many conclusions from the one story. But there is actually a long literary history going back centuries, of people viewing Milton’s Satan as not merely a sympathetic antagonist, but even seeing the character as a tragic hero of the tale – some have even proposed that Satan is the only likeable character in the epic.
Of course, they are largely missing the intended context in the story. Likely, Satan was supposed to be of a similar type to Nietzsche or Shakespeare’s Richard III – he is supposed to be a weak, deformed, and incompetent character who idealizes strength and valor because he hasn’t got them. At least this is what I gather from a limited commentary I saw Jordan Peterson give on Paradise Lost – I’ve never actually read the epic myself.
But it is the way in which Milton does this, and especially how it was inspired by his own Puritanical philosophy, which makes the legacy of the book particularly troublesome. In many ways, Milton (like Dante, or so many other writers before and after), was largely inspired by the epic poems of Pagan mythology, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Given Milton’s Puritan religion, however, he wanted to set up Paradise Lost against the Pagan myths, and so he used imagery derived from some of these, to equate his character of Satan with the Pagan heroes. He supposedly did this to try and exemplify the idea that “humility and meekness are the only worthy Christian virtues”, and so he was trying to show that the Pagan virtues, such as bravery and valor and grandiosity, these are always just symptoms of Pride. And so he used imagery to equate Satan with the Pagan heroes, to attack the idea of the Pagan virtues. A notable example is the way Satan crosses the long and empty abyss between Hell and Earth, which is apparently stylistically similar to the way Odysseus plunges his ship into the vast grey sea.
In an analysis I watched once from Jonathan Pageau about the rise of the occult over recent centuries, he noted how in the Bible the idea of “Hell” is never even strictly put forward – it is called Hades, or Gehenna, or referred to as an abyss, but even in the early Church, there was hardly any “room” given to the idea of what Hell or the devils were or what they were like. Much of our modern notions of these things have their first origins in the Medieval ages. There are fiction stories, such as Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which greatly contributed to our modern notions of these things. There were also manuals which were used in medieval witch trials, which described new and previously un-beknownst ways in which devils could supposedly interact with humans. And all of this medieval literature put forward new ideas and notions which, sometimes for the first time, gave a real presence and quality to evil, which had previously been unthought of in Christian history. And the tragic consequence of this, was that people were able to take up an interest in this evil, now that it had been given a corpus, a body, imagery. Much of the practices of modern witchcraft are actually derived largely from these manuals which Christians wrote while they were hunting for witches. While they were hunting for witches, they also largely invented the idea of witchcraft, or at least defined it in a clear and concrete way in which had never been thought of before.
The rise of occultism in the West seems to really trace its origins to the Enlightenment. It is interesting, and certainly not what most people would expect, that as society was growing surely more secular, we would see a rise in the occult. And this trend continues to this day – at the same time while religious belief and even belief in a god is at historic lows in the United States, belief in (and even interest or obsession with) ghosts and the supernatural is going stronger than ever. Those who are chiefly skeptical of organized religion, profess a sincere belief in unscientific “fortune telling” practices like horoscope readings, tarot cards, etc. To me this is all just evidence that humans naturally have a deep-seated instinct to search for something spiritual. C. S. Lewis once said, “When you stop believing in God, you don’t believe in science – you don’t even believe in nothing – you start believing in anything.”
Speaking of C. S. Lewis, when he wrote his book, The Great Divorce, it was largely supposed to be his response to an even earlier work called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. William Blake had intended to show how Heaven and Hell were really just two sides of the same coin, and so C. S. Lewis took this idea and tried to show how they were not. Really, I think The Great Divorce lays out a touching image of what I said earlier, about how the early Christians understood hell, and even evil itself, to be so insignificant and unsubstantial, and to be largely just the absence of Good where we should hope to find it – as opposed to the more modern notion of Evil and Hell as being a real and tangible existence which can stand against Good.
So who was William Blake? To describe him in a word, he was haunted. To use modern language, he very likely was crazy. He was an esoteric mystic, a quasi-Christian and quasi-Gnostic visionary, who believed he had daily encounters and conversations with angels and demons, who gave him secret knowledge. He seems to have written fiction in an attempt to re-define Biblical stories according to his own mystical, esoteric worldview. He drew pictures of the spiritual beings that he believed would walk through the open doors into his living room – one of these was apparently in the form of a giant flea, walking on its rear pairs of legs. But one of his chief inspirations in his personal philosophy, seems to have been John Milton and Paradise Lost – he even liked to refer to himself as the “spiritual son of Milton”.
William Blake was not the only one to originally refer to Milton’s Satan as a tragic hero. This actually seems to have been a common interpretation of the poem during the French Revolution, when the Republican armies saw themselves as brave, noble revolutionaries who were tearing down a corrupt and unjust theocracy, and often openly attacked the Church; burning churches, executing clergy, etc. Some contemporary writers in the day apparently drew parallels between these brave rebels and Milton’s character of Satan, in order to paint them in a sympathetic light.
In The Marriage, Blake supposedly shows Heaven as being reserved for the innocent and the pure – the meek and obedient souls which one might come to imagine from Milton’s ideal of the Puritan virtues. Hell, then, as Blake proposes it, is where the hardier souls must go – the magnanimous, strong spirits dwell ultimately in Hell. And as the narrator is walking around Hell and contemplating that “it’s really not that bad”, he suddenly has a further vision, where the whole illusion of a divide between Heaven and Hell melts away, and he suddenly finds that Hell is essentially the “flip-side of the coin” – it is made from the same stuff as which Heaven was made from.
In a lot of ways, it is very shocking that so much corruption can spring out of a well-meaning, even well-beloved Christian work of art. And quite surely, John Milton would be rolling over in his grave to see this side of his legacy. How can we understand this tragedy?
“Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstruous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. … Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas. … Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge mistakes would be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe; a slip in the definitions might stop all the dances. … The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. … It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. … To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to avoid them all has been one whirling adventure.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Christianity
As a Catholic, I have the luxury of not having to fret about whether it is rash to call certain things heresy, or whether there is an authentic debate to be had. And as a Catholic, I have no trouble calling John Milton a heretic. First let’s just take a look at his own theological tradition. He was a Calvinist and a Puritan.
Now Calvinism has the peculiar honor, unusual to most Protestant denominations, of being explicitly condemned by our Church as a heresy. The primary reason for this is their doctrine of “double Predestination”, which means that God necessarily has destined some people to damnation in Hell from before the foundations of the world. Related to this, the theology of Calvin has also been condemned for their denial of the idea of Free Will in humans. But stemming from this is a whole theological understanding which is simply flawed in many other aspects. I recently met a Calvinist at a party, who was pondering whether God himself is bound by Predestination. I told him the question probably makes no sense outside of strict linguistic definitions.
One thing that is interesting today, is that many Calvinists are receptive and even sympathetic to Thomas Aquinas’ definitions on Predestination. They are not wrong to uphold Predestination; they are wrong to deny that we have Free Will in conjunction with this. Chesterton once defined a heretic as “a man who clings to his one Truth, to the exclusion of all other men’s Truths.”
Puritanism, likewise, I feel no conflict in calling a heresy. First of all, it seems that the theology of the Puritans is rooted in Calvinism. Puritanism was technically a faction which arose within the Anglican Church, and the primary rallying cry for this movement, was to fight against “Catholic-like influences”. They were clamoring for the “purity” of the Reformation within the Church of England, which was not a church originally rooted in the Reformation – rather, the Anglicans had retained much of their “Catholic-ness” after splintering away from Rome. So Puritanism as a historical movement, was originally a reactionary ideology trying to tear down much of what they associated with the label of “Catholic”.
But John Milton may have been a clear Christian heretic, even against his own Puritan tradition and Calvinist church – he was a deep thinker, who was sometimes too willing to invent his own new ideas on theology. In fact, for the last several years of his life, he seems to have lived in exile from any church, and had ceased to attend any religious services.
Around the time of his public career as a statesman and apologist for the Republican and Puritan parties in both the Church and State of England, John Milton may have experimented with a vision of the world based on Monism or Animism, which is the idea that everything in existence shares one common substance, from rocks and trees to angels and even God. This may have influenced his treatment of angels in Paradise Lost. In his work De Doctrina Cristiana (On Christian Doctrine), he argues against the dual body-spirit nature of humanity. He also has been accused of professing an Arian faith (which denies the Trinity, believing that God the Father created the Son). And while this slander is up for debate, he was officially licensed to assist with the publication of the Racovian Catechism, which put forward a Creed not based on the Trinity. Paradise Lost also supposedly demonstrates a belief in Mortalism, or the idea that the soul merely lies dormant after the body dies, and denies the immortality of the soul.
So what are we to make of all of this? Is Paradise Lost utterly without merit? To propose this might seem a bit hypocritical, since my first objection to his philosophy was his attack on Pagan works of literature. To borrow an idea from C. S. Lewis when talking about Christians and other religions; Catholics do not need to believe that other faiths are wholly wrong about everything; they simply need to believe that, where they differ, the other faiths are in error. And a crucial first step in this, is acknowledging the disagreements. Far too often, in America especially (since we live in a primarily Protestant culture), Catholics are very affected by Protestant theology without even knowing how it differs from their own traditions.
And speaking of C. S. Lewis, his entire conversion story really came to a head over one particular objection he had: As an atheist, or perhaps at this point he was more of an agnostic, he saw much good in other religions and traditions, especially in Pagan mythology. As he put it to his close friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, myths were “all lies, even though lies breathed through silver”, and he failed to see how the “myth” of Christ was any different from the Pagan myths. Tolkien had a brilliant response, which was the direct catalyst of Lewis’ conversion: Christianity was not wholly different from all myths. Rather, all myths were visions of truth which were capable of revealing profound mysteries. The primary difference of Christianity was not that it was a totally different kind of mythology than Pagan myths; it was that Christ was a real historical figure, while Thor or Hercules were not. And what is Paradise Lost, except another epic myth, truly in the tradition of countless others stretching back to the Pagan myths.
But that is not to say that it is without dangers, as all false religions have some danger, but Christian heresies most especially can prey on Christians. Something that I find so sad in our modern era, which some of our wisest bishops today have described as the “Post-Christian Era”, is how many people have strongly rejected Christianity and fight against the Church, despite the fact that many of them have never encountered an authentic vision of what I might call the “romantic orthodoxy” of traditional Christianity.
Chesterton once described America in this way; the Founding Fathers had a brilliant and idyllic vision for the new land, but America very quickly became a dumping ground for all the failed philosophic experiments in Europe. The foundation of America is largely rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, Calvinism, and Puritanism; all three of which, in Europe, were understood to have a context of reaction against the Catholic Church. But in Europe, all of these were planted without that context of Catholicism, and so in many ways American ideology, but especially American religion, has always had a foundation which is in reaction against Catholic truth. And very often, secular society seeks to rebel against some of the worse tendencies of a Puritan religion, without ever having understood that religion could exist without this overbearing Puritan morality.
Christopher West demonstrates this very clearly in tracing the history of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of pornography. One of the early pioneers of these movements was Hugh Hefner. Mr. Hefner was raised in a strict religious home and community, where supposedly his parents were never even allowed to hug their children. Apparently after he founded the Playboy Empire, Hugh often directly linked his strict family upbringing to his life’s legacy, even telling his mother that, “the things you were never allowed to do, are why I became what I am”.
So all in all, Catholics are not strictly bound to reject every popular and historic work of art which is grounded in purported heresy. This is evident from the fact that some of the best Catholic writers, from Dante to Tolkien, have drawn heavy inspiration and even incorporated characters or archetypes from Pagan mythology into their works. In fact, many of the early Church father drew inspiration from earlier writers such as Origen, who it turns out had put forward ideas later called heretical. Even the Letters of Paul cite Apocryphal books which are now (almost) universally excluded from the Old Testament, such as the Book of Enoch. And yet, there is a trend in the Church towards orthodoxy even when you draw from corrupt and imperfect sources which came before you – for as Jesus prophecies, “The gates of Hell shall never triumph against you.”
However, we do need to remain on guard against heresy, because it can very often have huge consequences for those who come after us. And like Chesterton put it, Christian orthodoxy is like a delicate balancing act – to insist on one thing out of proportion may cause the structure to come crashing down in the opposite direction. And while the delicate balancing act will continue in the authentic Church after we have all passed on, that doesn’t mean individual men or communities can’t fall into immense error, and when you choose to believe falsehoods, you may lead those after you into unimaginable tragic consequences. The word heresy, after all, is technically Greek for “choice”. The definition of a heresy, therefore, is generally that you should have known better, and usually that you rejected the correction of the Church authority or tradition, but you still willingly chose to follow in your false beliefs.