Tragic Freedom in Samson Agonistes

Abstract

In his preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton cites “the ancients” and especially Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as his models in a tragedy “after the Greek manner.” In this preface, Milton interprets Aristotelian catharsis in medical terms as a restoration of balance or “just measure.” The final lines of Samson Agonistes, beginning with the words “All is best,” are an attempt at closure, suggesting that the storms of passion should give way to a healthy, serene calmness. But the mass slaughter near the end of the poem makes these closing moments deeply disturbing and problematical. Unlike the heroes of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes, and unlike the Samson of the Book of Judges, Milton's Samson is presented throughout the poem as a free moral agent. Rather than being the plaything of a remote and cruel deity, Milton's Samson accepts his responsibility for his own downfall. His conviction that he is God's “nurseling,” set aside from early childhood as “a person separate to God, / Designed for great exploits,” that he has failed in his responsibilities and has been brought low by his own weaknesses is consistent with Milton's sometimes heterodox theology as set forth in De Doctrina Christiana. At the heart of Milton's tragedy is the paradox of tragic freedom, the hidden presence of a deity, who with divine foreknowledge, allows his creatures freedom on the condition that, if they fail to obey his exacting demands, they must bear the terrible consequences.

Notes

A shorter version of this essay was presented at the British Milton Seminar in Birmingham, on 19 March 2011. I am grateful to Thomas N. Corns for inviting me to give the paper, and to the participants in the seminar for their helpful comments.

1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 2007), 355–56; for poems included in this edition, hereafter page numbers or line numbers are cited in the text. See John M. Steadman, “‘Passions Well Imitated’: Rhetoric and Poetics in the Preface to Samson Agonistes,” in Calm of Mind, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve Press, 1971), 175–207.

2. On parallels from Italian Renaissance theorists, see Steadman, “‘Passions Well Imitated’,” 185–91, 196–99. Aristotle's definition of tragedy, in the Bywater translation, associates catharsis with unity of plot: “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions” (Aristotle's Poetics, ed. Ingram Bywater [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909], 6, 17). In a later passage, discussing “the tragic effect,” Aristotle says that in “the finest form of Tragedy, the Plot . . . must imitate actions arousing fear and pity, since that is the distinctive function of this kind of imitation” (Poetics, 13, 35).

3. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.8, in Basic Works, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1968), 1396; Poetics, 13, 35.

4. Milton, The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), 1.816–17; subsequent references to CPW. On catharsis in Milton's preface and poem as suggesting “not ‘purging’ so much as ‘purifying’,” giving the term a religious dimension, see John K. Hale, Milton's Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 186–89.

5. See Irene Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy,” in Calm of Mind, 235–57; and Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For the opposing view that the poem is “exemplary of the acquisition of true knowledge,” a “mimesis of the government of the passions by reason,” see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 106, 251.

6. Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 29; cf. Poetics, 11, 31 (on peripeteia and anagnorisis in Oedipus Tyrannus) and Poetics, 14, 39.

7. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 4 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 2.1224–48.

8. Judges 14.19, 15.8, 16.22–23 (Authorised King James Version), quoted in David Grossman, Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson, trans. Stuart Schoffman (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), xix, xxi, xxviii.

9. Judges 16.28, 30, in Grossman, Lion's Honey, xxix. Among the critics who comment on Milton's omission of Samson's prayer to God at this central moment in the story are Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes, 73–76; Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 418–21, 447–55; and John Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism?” TLS, 6 September 2002, 15–16.

10. Grossman, Lion's Honey, 66, 87–88, 124.

11. Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 662–64. In A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) Milton distinguishes between civil and religious obligations. On the relevance of this passage to the situation of Dissenters persecuted by the authorities in Restoration England, see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138–44.

12. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.32–33. In his commentary on this passage, Fish argues that Samson's final position here is one of “radical uncertainty,” an action which, rather than assuming “heavenly authorization,” “has no final warrant except what he himself thinks best to do” (How Milton Works, 458–65). Victoria Kahn in Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), argues that Samson Agonistes “explores the tragic dilemma of the individual compelled to judge and act in the absence of cognitive certainty” (254).

13. It has been argued that Milton's position, here and elsewhere, is antinomian—a radical belief that, to God's chosen saints, all things are permitted, and the restrictions of civil and religious law no longer apply: see Norman Burns, “‘Then stood up Phineas’: Milton's Antinomianism, and Samson's,” Milton Studies 33 (1997): 27–46. In De Doctrina Christiana, as in a number of his polemical prose writings, Milton argues the unorthodox view that under the Gospel, the entire moral law of the Old Testament has been abrogated, replaced by a covenant of grace “written in the hearts of believers”: Christian Doctrine, 1.26 and 27, in CPW, 6.517–35.

14. Michael Lieb, “‘Our Living Dread’: The God of Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 33 (1997): 3–25, esp. 20. For a similar view of “unsearchable providence” and a “God of terror” in Milton and his contemporaries, see David Loewenstein, “The Revenge of the Saint: Radical Religion and Politics in Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 33 (1997): 159–80.

15. Radzinowicz points out the echo of Psalm 79, a lament for the destruction of Jerusalem, in this passage (Toward Samson Agonistes, 211–12). John Carey in his note to lines 693–94 finds an allusion to the desecration of the bodies of Cromwell and other regicides after the Restoration (Complete Shorter Poems, 381). On the relevance of the passage to “the experience of defeat,” see Blair Worden, “Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 122–29.

16. Maurice Kelley, introduction to Christian Doctrine, in CPW, 6.84; Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, 339. See Christian Doctrine, 1.3 and 4, in CPW, 6.152–202.

17. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton's Peculiar Grace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 192–95; Christian Doctrine, 1.27 and 29, in CPW, 6.455, 570.

18. See Barbara Lewalski, “Samson and the ‘New Acquist of True (Political) Experience’,” Milton Studies 24 (1988): 237–38, 248.

19. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 139 (16 July 1751), in Works, ed. Arthur Murphy, 12 vols. (London, 1806), 5.436; Sir Richard Jebb, “Samson Agonistes and the Hellenic Drama,” Proceedings of the British Academy 3 (1907–8): 341–48.

20. See William Riley Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), 16–17; Jebb, “Samson Agonistes and the Hellenic Drama,” 341–42; and Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, 13–14.

21. Joseph H. Summers, “The Movements of the Drama,” in The Lyric and Dramatic Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 153–75. For other accounts of the successive confrontations as trials or temptations, see Ann Gossman, “Milton's Samson as the Tragic Hero Purified by Trial,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61 (1962): 528–41; and Anthony Low, The Blaze of Noon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 64–66, 168–71.

22. Milton, Christian Doctrine, 1.8, in CPW, 6.338. This passage is cited by several critics who see Samson as a “hero of faith” whose “spiritual rebirth” is enacted in the poem. See John M. Steadman, “‘Faithful Champion’: The Theological Basis of Milton's Hero of Faith,” Anglia 77 (1959): 12–28; and cf. Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, 232–37; and Low, The Blaze of Noon, 171.

23. Steadman, “Faithful Champion’: The Theological Basis of Milton's Hero of Faith,” 13.

24. See Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, 335, 339–47. The Arminian theology is even more explicit in an extended passage in Paradise Lost, bk. 3, in which God defines “offer’d grace”: “To prayer, repentance, and obedience due, / Though but endeavour’d with sincere intent, / Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut” (PL 3.187, 191–93).

25. Paradise Lost, 2.219, 226; 4.389, 393–94. See Fowler's note on PL. 4.389.

26. Regina Schwartz, “Samson Agonistes: The Force of Justice and the Violence of Idolatry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 635–36. For commentary on this speech by Dalila, see also Sharon Achinstein's essay in A Companion to John Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 422–23.

27. On Harapha as representative of “false heroism” and “parodic double” of Samson, see Low, The Blaze of Noon, 49, 162–63; and Achinstein, in Corns, Companion to John Milton, 426.

28. Paradise Lost, 9.28–33; 12.569–70, 575–76; Paradise Regained, 3.387, 401–2. On Milton's general preference for “the flourishing works of peace” (Paradise Regained, 3.80) over war, see Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy,” 236–38.

29. Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism?” 15–16. Carey is attacking Stanley Fish's claim that there is “no other standard for evaluating” Samson's act other than as a “praiseworthy” submission to the divine will (Fish, How Milton Works, 426, 428), arguing that such a viewpoint is “a license for any fanatic to commit atrocity.”

30. Loewenstein, “The Revenge of the Saint,” 168–72, quoting the Quaker Thomas Ellwood (1662). Cf. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England, 89–93, 152–53; and Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129–51.