Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Plato — John Shaqi
Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Plato · en
The honesty of this confession is not impugned by Christ, although he
exposes the hollow insincerity of the rest of Satan’s speech in which
these lines occur.
And Satan lives up to his confession. The power of moral goodness to
hold his mind’s thought by its beauty is seen in his behavior in the
Garden of Eden. He had reached this place in pursuit of his revenge to
ruin the happy pair. As he gazes upon the beauties of the garden,
“where the Fiend
Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living creatures, new to sight and strange,”—
(IV. 285–287.)
he at last catches sight of Adam and Eve, in whom
“The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure.”
(IV. 292–293.)
On these he stands gazing until evening, and at last breaks out into an
expression of the love which this vision of their beauty has aroused in
him:
“the sun,
Declined, was hasting now with prone career
To the Ocean Isles, and in the ascending scale
Of Heaven the stars that usher evening rose:
When Satan, still in gaze, as first he stood,
Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad:—
‘O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mould—Earth-born perhaps,
Not spirits, yet to Heavenly 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.’”
(IV. 352–365.)
At another time Satan is occupied in contemplating beauty, but it is the
beauty he sees in Eve alone. Milton’s treatment of the episode is
characteristic of that wavering of his mind between the two impulses—one
to worship beauty, and the other to teach that woman is the inferior of
man. The later conviction is expressed in Adam’s words to Raphael:
“For well I understand in the prime end
Of Nature her the inferior, in the mind
And inward faculties, which most excel;
In outward also her resembling less
His image who made both, and less expressing
The character of that dominion given
O’er other creatures.”
(VIII. 540–546.)
Thus Eve confesses that in Adam’s beauty, and not in the image of her
own soft feminine grace, does she
“see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.”
(IV. 489–491.)
Yet in the presence of Eve’s beauty Satan stands lost in contemplation,
made for one moment good.