Hope, land ownership, and Milton's "Paradise within"

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2003 by Mary C. Fenton

This study examines Milton's ontology of hope in Paradise Lost and argues that Milton's hopefulness about the future after the Restoration hinges crucially on contemporary domestic land issues and changes in land law that Milton contextualizes within the larger discourse of hope. The epic shows that Satan materializes hope, basing his hopes to gain power on the acquisition of land. The epic also demonstrates that while land may be a source of powers and liberty, real hope comes from Pauline and Augustinian notions of spiritual hope and faithful stewardship of land.

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If Milton was concerned with new worlds, with notions of empire and imperialism, then he was at least as deeply concerned with the concept of nation, for if the nation is the individual "writ large," any vision of empire must be grounded in the individuals of the nation. Before a nation can build an empire, each individual must have the capacity to build his own "empire." (1) Empire begins at home. And while Milton critics have shown that Milton places his hope for the future of England in the international territories of the colonies, they have overlooked the contemporary endeavors to reconfigure England's own soil. (2) Mid-seventeenth-century England witnessed unprecedented renegotiation and renovation of domestic land laws and land markets, and, as laws redefined property, they redefined concepts of individual liberty. Milton's hopefulness about the future after the Restoration hinges crucially on the laws of the land, and Paradise Lost resonates with the discourse of domestic land issues dealing with dema rcation and stewardship, which Milton contextualizes within the larger discourse of hope: real hope based in Pauline and Augustinian theology in opposition to illusions of hope based in acquisitive materialism and self-centered gratification.

This study examines how Satan's version of hope impels his actions throughout the epic, determining his strategy of revenge against God by establishing property claims first in Hell and then on earth, with the hope of dividing God's empire and undermining his omnipotence. For Satan, hope is a form of power rather than a form of spirituality, and thus he materializes hope, basing his hopes to regain, power on the acquisition of land. By the end of book 2, Satan's strategy for using hope becomes clear: he who has the land has the power, and books 11 and 12 instruct that hope can be found in the paradox of modern individualism: land is a source of power and liberty, yet the epic also insists that reducing hope to self-serving, acquisitive materialism leads both to despair and destitution. It is through Satan's ontology of hope in Paradise Lost that Milton engages in the ongoing land debates in England, and reveals his attitudes both about the failures of the Revolution and his hopes for post-Cromwellian England.

That Milton places hope materialized in the form of land ownership in Satan's hands serves thematic and political purposes. In Old Testament history, beginning with the Abrahamic covenant, hope for the future is deeply involved with the promise of physical territory, and thus Milton shows that historically land ownership and land management have been central to individual liberty, and to religious and political reform. Yet in the epic, Satan degrades the notion of "the great Cov'nant" ("Upon the Circumcision," line 20) so that the original acquisition and accumulation of land loses its integrity and function, and he demonstrates what happens when faithful stewardship is not the guiding principle of ownership, when hope becomes detached from faith and charity. (3) Through Satan, the epic ultimately shows the failings of self-centered and not God-centered hope, hope that is productive but ultimately destructive. Milton thus uses Satan's dependence on false and illusory hope to articulate a definition of real ho pe that is possible only when the material is infused with the spiritual, when hope is combined with faith and charity, when the "promis'd Land" is extended to and located in the "Promis'd Seed" (PL, 12.172, 623).

The story itself of Paradise Lost reveals Milton's hope for England: the recapitulation and revisioning of the history of hope arising from possible despair after the loss of a world--for God, the loss of an integral empire; for Satan, the loss of power and place in Heaven; for Adam and Eve, the loss of Paradise; for England, the loss of the Commonwealth. Paradise Lost is a nationalist epic in the deepest sense, guiding its citizens toward a future of hopeful individualism and purposeful stewardship, while clearly exposing the defects of amoral materialism and the world toward which it leads.

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While historians vary widely in their interpretations of why and when England moved from feudalism to capitalism, (4) the issue of one's relationship with the land, and its bearing on an individual's sense of liberty, power, and hope, is elemental to Milton's hope for England. In his study on the formation and identity of early modern nationhood, Richard Helgerson observes that "Not only does the emergence of the land parallel the emergence of the individual authorial self, the one enforces and perhaps depends on the other," (5) a notion which can also be underscored by the fact that domestic land law had long been at the center of British society: it defined social status and was the glue of social order. Land ownership became, naturally, central to the debates about liberty during the Revolution, and for Milton, land, as it was being reconceptualized in seventeenth-century contemporary law and political debates, was the material manifestation of individual liberty, an ideal that consistently informs his wri ting, from Areopagitica in 1644 to The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Commonwealth in 1660. (6) In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Milton uncompromisingly insists on land rights as integral to hopes for individual freedom, equating the freedom of a nation to determine its government with the freedom of an individual to distribute and govern his own property. A nation, he says, has only "ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz'n babies," if "wanting that power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv'n them, as Maisters of Family in thir own house and free inheritance. Without which natural and essential power of a free Nation, though bearing high thir heads, they can in due esteem be thought no better then slaves and vassals born, in the tenure and occupation of another inheriting Lord." (7)