Monday
My Dante discussion group, which is now discussing Milton’s Paradise Lost, has slowed to a crawl since we’ve had so much to say about the first four books. As we read the passage where Satan, in the form of a cormorant, gazes from his tree hiding place at Adam and Eve, we couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin eyeing Ukraine. “Make sure you write about this in your next blog,” my friends counseled me.
While Ukraine is not the Garden of Eden, it is a democracy, however imperfect. I subscribe to the theory that, as such, it poses an existential threat to the autocracies around it, especially Russia and Belorussia. After all, if word gets out that one of the former Soviet republics is thriving after having slipped the grasp of Russia kleptocrats and their puppets, then the people in other republics (Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia itself) might start getting ideas. Therefore, Putin must pull Ukraine back into the fold, even if that means destroying it utterly.
Satan has similar plans for Adam and Eve. When he first looks down at them, he is struck dumb by their beauty. But because he has forfeited Paradise himself, he is tortured by their happiness and so determines that they will share his misery. First, his envy:
O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold,
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mold, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heav’nly Spirits bright
Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured.
Then, almost like a cartoon villain, he rubs his hands together and promises to bring hell down on their heads. Imagine Putin similarly chuckling when he gave his own troops the order to advance, little envisioning the resistance they would encounter:
Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish and deliver ye to woe,
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
Happy, but for so happy, ill secured
Long to continue…
Satan is no more impressed with Eden’s defenses than Putin was with Ukraine’s, describing Eden as “ill fenced”:
[A]nd this high seat your Heav’n
Ill fenced for Heav’n to keep out such a foe
As now is entered…
Then, sounding like Putin insisting that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, Satan promises a similar friendship with Adam and Eve. Note his gloating sarcasm:
…League with you I seek,
And mutual amity so straight, so close,
That I with you must dwell, or you with me
Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please
Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such
Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it me,
Which I as freely give; Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest Gates.
…[T]here will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring…
For Ukraine, this is like being invited to join the wide expanses of autocratic Russia rather than settle for its (relatively tiny) democracy. In his “invitation,” Satan uses a rationale very much like Putin’s. Putin is eager to restore the vast Russia of the Soviets or the czars, in which imperium Ukraine (especially Kyif and Odessa) has always had a special place. Satan, meanwhile, blames his butchering on the demands of empire. Milton calls this “the tyrant’s plea”: to excuse his actions, Satan must say he’s carrying out his leadership responsibilities. He claims he will hate inflicting misery on the pair but must do so because it’s his duty to enlarge his kingdom, thereby evading personal responsibility:
[Y]et public reason just,
Honor and empire with revenge enlarg’d,
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else though damned I should abhor.So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
Satan’s next move is to figure out which animal he will inhabit in order to start corrupting the pair. Although he will eventually choose a snake, at first he considers lions and tigers, which was Putin’s choice. After all, why use snake-like subtlety when you (or so Putin thought) can just reach out and grab your prey by force?
A Lion now he stalks with fiery glare,
Then as a Tyger, who by chance hath spied
In some purlieu two gentle Fawns at play,
Strait couches close, then rising changes oft
His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground
Whence rushing he might surest seize them both
Gripped in each paw…
Satan’s tigerish ways will win in the short run but lose in the long. That’s because, with Jesus’s resurrection and the promised second coming, Sin and Death will be no more. Likewise, while Ukraine may yet prevail, it will suffer much suffering and heartbreak before the forces of democracy win out.