Milton On Diabolical Empiricism

How John Milton's "Paradise Lost" demonstrates the subversive, diabolic character of Empiricism.

I.

I’ve read John Milton’s Paradise Lost from beginning to end twice and I’m already planning on reading it for a third time. It’s an incredible book, and, unlike most, I actually think that the fact that this book has shaped how we view The Fall of The Devil and The Fall of Man in Western Culture is a very positive development.

In fact, I’d take that much farther - I believe without a hint of irony or compromise that John Milton is one among a very small amount of Christian Poets who was divinely inspired in a subtle and private manner when he wrote his works, along with Dante Aligheri. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno are epic poems of such a high calibre of aesthetic beauty and spiritual insight that to me they are akin to scriptures. The authors of these masterpieces that are precious jewels in the tapestry of The West’s literary tradition likely knew that they were divinely inspired but kept their inspiration secret lest they be persecuted by what was at the time the mainstream of Christianity. When The Golden Age returns, it will be more understood that each human being is more than capable of receiving divine revelation and of rendering this revelation in a beautiful work. But for now, the truth that Paradise Lost is divinely inspired is for to the few.

This essay is a sequel of sorts to my two-part Our Eternal Spirits series of essays. In the second part of that series, I discussed at great length much of the esoteric meaning of the third chapter of the Book of Genesis which details the Fall of Man by looking at it through the lens of The Aryan Dharma. In this essay you are presently reading, I will be discussing things about The Fall of our eternal spirits into this material world that are better understood by looking at it through Milton’s rendition of these events in Paradise Lost rather than Moses’ rendition in The Book of Genesis. Throughout this essay direct quotations from Paradise Lost are rendered in quotes and italics.

II.

Milton argues throughout Paradise Lost that we ought to obey precepts based on reason and on faith rather than discern our decisions off of experiential knowledge. While it may seem harmless to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t directly (as though our lives were a scientific experiment), when we do this we radically disorient the entire human experience which is meant to be oriented towards invisible goods (i.e God) which are followed by precept, reason, and faith. The argument will begin by showing how the Edenic set-up is very logical. Then it will proceed to show how The Fall happens primarily because Eve adopts an empirical worldview after being goaded into it by Satan who manipulates her into this through appealing to her vanity and desire for knowledge and godhood. This is a quite severe indictment of empiricism and has implications for how we think about modernity.

Discussions of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil tend to revolve around whether or not it is ever okay to gate-keep information to preserve innocence. Should we talk about sex with children and say the F-word around them? Should we tell them Santa Claus isn’t real? But such conversations fail to truly reach what Milton is getting at. After all, it is the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s a forbidden sensuous experience outside of God’s ordained limits that dooms the human race, not a censored word or a forbidden piece of information as one might find in a book. But we shouldn’t think that Milton is saying that sensuous experiences are bad in and of themselves. Quite the contrary, Eden is an amazingly sensual place: In its “Enclosure Green”¹ there are “(..) Fairest fruits, gold blossoms, fair evening cloud”² and nothing less than “All delight of human sense”³. Not only does Eden abound in pleasure, it actually abounds in more pleasure than humanity can even experience post-Fall⁴. But the prelapsarian couple are oriented towards the goods of the senses and of the body in the proper way, as the totality of all Edenic earthly delights are only a means of celebration and communion with God, and with each other, wherein is found their ultimate teleological happiness. 

Their primordial harmony is in “[their] power left free to will (..) his will though free yet mutable”⁵. The bliss of Adam and Eve is dependent on and advances from faith and obedience, a “pledge” maintained by shunning the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil⁶. The tree that Adam and Eve cannot eat from is fair⁷, a sign that even in this world of epic beauty we should not be deceived by appearances. If it were not there, there would be no sign at all for our primordial pair that there is any separation at all between things that seem good and things that are good [and thus they could give their senses free reign as animals do, but the existence right at the very beginning of a tree in the garden that seems good but isn’t necessitates the use of Reason, as the primary use of this faculty is to distinguish between what seems good and what is good. Without its existence they could not be rational or philosophical and would simply trust their senses fully and be led along by them like animals which is precisely what would prevent them from having an appreciation for finer goods of the soul and thus render them unhappy. Its presence in Paradise alarms them that even in the midst of the totality of wholesome earthly pleasures it is invisible goods like moral precepts, faith, and of course God Himself who are our true end and authority. This makes us distinct from the animals, who share the ability to enjoy sensual pleasures with us. Given that it is actually the case that real lasting happiness is not found not in gorging ourselves off goods of the body, without The Forbidden Tree the Edenic paradise would not then be paradise. The purpose of forbidding something is really to highlight those other things which are not forbidden and to direct us towards them. If we are left totally open-ended we are dizzied by our own freedom and can make terrible mistakes, and then, again, paradise is not paradise. So Paradise must have rules. Limits actually make us happy and to pursue good requires that we have them. Thus in paradise limits are required just as much as anywhere else, but of course paradise is not like any other place, thus there is only one limit. To obey the precept not to consume that fruit is a sign of obedience to God and there is no other way that a sign of obedience could be present at all in a paradise besides this. After all, what is paradise but a world of pleasure? In such a liberating world of pleasure, how could loyalty to the maker of this world be maintained by something other than not partaking of a forbidden pleasure? If the sign of obedience were something other than a forbidden pleasure, it would be something painful, and then paradise would not be paradise. In a world of pleasure the only exit is through a forbidden pleasure, in a world of happiness the only exit is through a false happiness. If all God really wants from them is freely-willed loving loyalty and gratitude, and the only way that they could really not demonstrate this in a paradise is by caring about the creations more than the creator, then how else to give them the opportunity to be truly free than by forbidding a pleasure? Thus we see the whole set-up in the Garden is actually quite logical and not arbitrary at all as is often said, and the Tree of Knowledge’s presence in the Garden is actually an essential element of the prelapsarian bliss they relish and not an accident. In fact they couldn’t even have their bliss at all without it - insofar as it is present but shunned, of course. It is precisely in such a situation as Adam and Eve find themselves in where they can enjoy everything imaginable but one singular thing that an attitude of empirical experimentation is lethal, in fact it is the most catastrophically dangerous attitude they could possibly adopt. To live by the empirical worldview in Eden ensures exile from Eden. But precisely because they are as yet un-fallen humans, they wouldn’t eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil merely because they are tired of all the pleasures they already have and want another one. Rather, their entire value-system of faith and obedience which makes them rightly ordered in regards to God, the world, and each other to begin with must be unravelled. A fallen human could be goaded into partaking of a forbidden pleasure through simple seduction, as one of the main characteristics of fallen humans is that our passions control our reasoning abilities. But for an un-fallen human, their passions are subordinate to reason. It’s the reasoning faculties that have to be subverted first.

We get a subtle foreshadowing that this primordial bliss won’t last when Eve is caught up in her vanity in Book Four of Paradise Lost. In Milton’s rendition , Eve is placed somewhere in the Garden of Eden far away from Adam after being formed out of his rib. She wanders the terrestrial paradise of Eden solitarily for a while, sees her own reflection, and then gets guided to the location of Adam by the Voice of God. She actually struggles with her vanity throughout the poem and flattery is one of the weapons Satan uses to overcome her. In this remarkable scene⁸ she is captured by her senses and her vanity, but then a Voice (God’s) tells her to turn away because her good is found in serving other people, namely Adam and the children she will have by him⁹. She has zero empirical evidence that the claim of this voice is accurate, as she does not yet have children and has not yet met Adam, but she simply has Faith in the voice and thus overcomes her captivity to her experience of the senses as well as her fixation on herself. Eve’s fulfilment in Adam is founded upon this moment where she has Faith in God and demonstrates that she believes there is something greater out there than what she is experiencing with her senses as well as an end other than her own momentary happiness in herself¹⁰. Thus through faith and obedience, she makes a movement in her soul away from appearances and selfishness and towards truth and service. Eve’s initial action of perfect obedience is a foreshadowing of the rebellion she will do later on by obeying a quite different voice that sets her on a course of doing the exact opposite movement within her soul. But given that she’s already demonstrated that she can do the right thing, we ought to examine how Satan unravels her.

Satan must be very intuitive to know that to tempt Eve he must appeal to her vanity given that he has never met her before their first encounter in Book Five of Paradise Lost. He says to her, “Heavn’n wakes with all his eyes/Whom to behold but thee, Nature’s desire, In whose sight all things joy with ravishment, Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.¹¹” He speaks in a similar manner during their fatal second encounter: “No fair to thine equivalent or second.”¹² He is trying to argue that because she is the most beautiful of all created things that it is she who is the teleological end of things (“Nature’s desire”) and that her attention ought to be towards herself, if not as it was in the pool of water in Book Four than at least within her heart. She is told by The Devil that the fruit will make her more godlike¹³, which she is more likely to desire if she thinks highly of herself. Satan’s claim about her is false, of course, because her position of beauty in the Garden is tertiary as she is inferior to Adam who is secondary and to God who is primary. Eve’s beauty is a beauty of appearances, but this beauty is inferior to the beauty of reason and of the inward parts of the soul which Adam has in superiority over Eve, and even this inner beauty of Man’s soul is of course inferior to the divine beauty of God. But experiential knowledge and the eyes of empiricism looks strictly at the appearances of things, and within such a strictly empirical worldview the whole Edenic hierarchy is subverted: Eve would then be most beautiful, Adam second, and God would not even be present at all because He is invisible. In a strictly empirical worldview, the logical conclusion is actually that beautiful women are the pinnacle of existence because they are the most beautiful physical thing and the most captivating to the senses. Empiricism always presents itself as something that arises from a cool objectivity but it is really driven by passion and a slavery to the things of the senses (food, sex, vanity etc.). It is passion that wants to look strictly at appearances and reason which wishes to see beyond them. For Satan to trick Eve into eating a fruit that seems good but is not good, he must first get her to accept a worldview wherein such distinctions do not exist, where seeming goods are the only goods. He does this by appealing to her vanity, for she herself seems more beautiful than Adam but isn’t in truth. 

Satan also has to unravel her faith by bombarding her with doubts, which Eve continually responds to by repeating what God commanded¹⁴. This kind of repetition is what “Faith-in-Action” looks like. We show our fealty to the things we have faith in by repeating, in a mantra-esque way, the articles of our belief to ourselves and others. In his final speech to Eve, Satan questions whether this whole world was even created at all or if it did not just proceed from natural causes: The foundation-stone of the empirical worldview. He says, “The gods are first and that advantage us on our belief that all from them proceeds. I question it, for this fair earth I see warmed by the sun producing every kind, them nothing.”¹⁵ If the world exists randomly and not from the will of “gods”¹⁶ then His commands are of no value. Of course, Satan backs up this claim by relying on the fact that Eve has never seen God create the universe and that she relies on Faith to have access to that truth. Notice also how he steers her attention towards things she actually can see, like the sun. 

Satan, in his serpentine disguise¹⁷, then tries another tactic: appealing to her desire for knowledge. It gives one the ability to “discern things in their causes, trace the ways of highest agents deemed however wise”¹⁸. Eve in her sinless state still has a powerful natural desire for knowledge that exceeds her desire for sense gratification, and so it is only in this manner that she could be tricked into partaking of a dangerous pleasure. The fruit is presented not as something that ought to be partaken of because it is pleasant smelling and fair to look upon (which makes it tempting enough already) but because it enlightens the mind; an effective persuasive tactic to use on someone who still understands that the goods of the soul are better than those of the body. For someone who is rightly ordered internally and thus understands that soul-goods are superior than body-goods the only way to convince them to engage in a new body-good at all is to say that it is actually a soul-good. The pleasure of the forbidden fruit is intense: she “Greedily [engorges] without restraint and knew not eating death. Satiate at length and heightened as with wine, jocund and boon.”¹⁹ There are pleasures out there so intense that they, by their very nature, disorder our soul, because an intense pleasure is hard to act reasonably about. The fruit is an experience like this because she falls into a lack of self-control immediately upon eating it. God designed the fruit, though, not Satan. He made it so that it is disorderingly pleasurable as a sign that whoever eats it values the wrong things already and as proof that God’s limits ought to be obeyed at one’s own peril. By thinking that we can discern what not to do by experimentation with the objects of the senses we end up ensnaring ourselves in our out of control desire for those sensual objects. 

Eve falls not because of a simple lack of self-control or even because of a sense of spirited rebelliousness²⁰ but because she accepts a worldview based upon premises the logical conclusions of which are to make one lose their ability to control themselves and to do the right thing according to rational consideration, moral precept, and Faith. Milton lived in a world where empiricism was on the rise as a popular philosophical belief, and he condemns it in the harshest imaginable terms by saying that this new outlook on life is not only “opposed to Christianity” but that it is actually nothing less than the origin of all human suffering. The tree of knowledge of Good and Evil is itself the “Mother of Science.”²¹ Satan conquered the Earth through the rhetorical trick that is empiricism. Modernity is of course defined by its obsession with discarding all traditional value-systems in favour of empirical experimentation which results in technology which results in the acquisition of material power such that humans can apocalyptically destroy the world for selfish reasons, a power hitherto only in the possession of justly angry deities. If Christianity is an attempt to reclaim the fallen world for God’s side, is empiricism a counter-attack of the Devil? Far and away from arising out of a position of cool objectivity, empiricism is always the result of out-of-control passions trying to gain the upper hand over reason and faith by presenting themselves as something other than what they are. If we refuse to accept precepts based upon true faith and right reasoning in favour of experimentation to discover for ourselves what is right and what is wrong then we will hurt ourselves by becoming ensnared by pleasures that ought to be forbidden and discover why they are forbidden the hard way, in short we shall “know good by evil”. Someone who really loves us would not encourage us to experiment in this way but would rather encourage us to obey the precepts. But someone who wished to gain power over us by ensnaring us to our appetites would argue for this.  This kind of experimentation can also give us knowledge that yields power over nature and over fellow human beings which can have disastrous effects if wielded unwisely.  Given that we only attained unto such knowledge in the first place by not following the right precepts it is almost inevitable that such power will be misused. An empirical desire for knowledge is a noble but thin disguise for a simple desire for power and pleasure, as the reptilian disguise was effective for deceiving the first man and woman. A naive person or one who is weak in morals and in faith will be deceived by empiricism, and Milton’s aim is to warns us of this. Empiricism is not an invitation to abandon the superstitions of the past for the sake of enlightenment and progress but a dangerous and incorrect way of thinking that would lead not to the common betterment of mankind but the further subjugation of mankind to the flesh, this world, death, sin, and the devil because not only will those things be strengthened over us but we will not even trust the means by which we can be saved from them anymore. The false promise of empiricism that leads mankind out of the traditional world and into the modern one is the very same false promise that led mankind out of the Edenic world and into the fallen one. What are we modern men then, but men doubly fallen?

III.

Radical Empiricism is not a bold, new, radical idea that was only introduced during The Enlightenment²². It is, rather, the “default setting” of the mind of Fallen Man. It is Fallen Man at his worst, stripped of all the sophistication given to him by the philosophy that God subtly whispered into the ears of the Greeks and the faith that God dramatically revealed to the eyes of the Israelites. As discussed before in our two-part Our Eternal Spirits series of articles, especially in the second part, we ourselves consumed the Garden of Eden’s forbidden fruit in our past lives and have been reincarnating in this fallen world as fallen men ever since as a consequence. The obstacle to overcome is our tendency to believe in the empirical worldview that The Dark Powers deceived us into by having faith in Divine Revelation such as is contained in the scriptures of the Indo-Aryans like The Mahabharata and the scriptures of the Israelites in The Holy Bible.

Paradise Lost depicts two falls - first the fall of the demons and then the fall of man. The Demons fell more willfully than humans did, as the latter only fell because the demons deceived them into falling. The element of deception in the fall of man means that there is still the possibility of redemption for us, whereas the demons are cursed by God forevermore.

John Milton was a Christian, an Abrahamist, and the truth of reincarnation was not revealed to him or others within the Christian mainstream as that was not a part of God’s plan. Nonetheless, our condition of having fallen into illusion, this fall of man, is characterized by our having been deceived. The Demons will reincarnate and have a chance to try freely choosing the right path again, but only after countless epochs of such excruciating torment that it could never make their act of rebellion worth it. In addition, they will have to spend many lifetimes as the lowest forms of life, making their way back up to their high former position in the hierarchy of being starting from the very bottom.

Understanding the dramatic events that lead to our illusioned condition, our fallenness, helps us to walk back to the path of truth. As mentioned, the fruit of knowledge of good and evil is not an idea - it’s a sensual experience. Eve was lied to, and told she would receive godhood and knowledge, which are things she can’t help but crave because God made us to desire godhood and knowledge and we are indeed meant to receive those things but by obeying God and not by rebelling against Him. But she didn’t receive godhood and knowledge - she received a physical pleasure so madly intense it lead to the severe disordering and disorientating of her entire being. It was that maddening pleasure which did her in. The false promise of godhood and knowledge is the bait, and crazed pleasure is the trap. This is key to understanding our state of illusion.

Before The Fall, we knew pure good in-and-of-itself, and now we have knowledge of “good and evil” - but as discussed before, evil does not exist in and of itself. So to have knowledge of “good and evil” is just to know good by what it is not. We went from knowing pure good in itself to knowing good and evil, to knowing good and its deprivation. God will show us the goodness of good through His redemptive suffering for us, and we will know the evilness of evil by experiencing it firsthand. But we didn’t necessarily need this empirical knowledge. Truths which before could have been known on a strictly theoretical basis by reflecting upon divine revelation become explicit to us through our first-hand experience. God was always willing to love us so much that He would die for us as He does not change, but now we will know this empirically through Christ suffering for us. Evil was always only ever the absence of good, but now we will know this directly through our experience of suffering in this world. Consumption of The Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil didn’t change anything about God or the underlying metaphysical structure of the universe, it only changed our consciousness by making us mostly ignorant of things we knew before. The Adam and Eve story demonstrates the goodness of actually being ignorant of direct empirical experience of forbidden things for the sake of having a pure faith. The worldview of radical empiricism cannot accept this, but some types of knowledge actually exclude other types of knowledge by their very nature. A person can know what it is like to directly experience the heights of serene super-consciousness as a grand master of silent meditation does or they can directly experience brain-wrecking drugs like heroin: you really can’t do both, as the latter damages your brain which must be in the finest condition possible to experience higher consciousness. Some types of empirical knowledge make you ignorant. Everyone knows that heroin is addicting and bad for you ultimately, but those who have no idea what it is like to do heroin have an easier time resisting the temptation to do it than those who have done it. So it is also with many other temptations, and the most enlightened are the most pure. Those who are the most ignorant of much direct empirical knowledge of what God has forbidden have a greater chance of reaching the summits of direct experiential knowledge of the divine. Thus, the greatest knowledge of all is more easily attained by those who are ignorant of what God has forbidden, and those who are wise in earthly things through their direct experimentation are the most ignorant of salvific knowledge. God puts limits on the knowledge we can have to prepare us for more knowledge if we abide within those limits, and obeying God makes us like Him: through obedience to God we become as gods. If Eve had’ve obeyed, she would have had in great abundance the knowledge and godhood she (and we) couldn’t help but crave.

Modernity of course is predicated upon directly experiencing as many things as possible. Modernity is a feast of forbidden fruits, and modern man has been inwardly exiled from a thousand Edens.

In this low material plane, there is a difference between things which appear to be good and things which are actually good, and in a sense the wise man sees this whole world as a labyrinthine obstacle course wherein their ability to discern between true goods and false goods is tested. The fact that there even is a distinction between things which only seem to be good and things which are actually good means the stakes for knowledge acquisition is high²³. To be born as a philosophical seeker of God as a result of one’s inborn temperament in this world is to be forced into playing the highest stakes game possible. Innumerable spiritual beings see you trying, sometimes epically succeeding and sometimes utterly failing, to discern between truth and falsehood. The Dark Powers try to deceive you as they did in Eden, and all the angels, saints, and sages try to guide you on the path of the truth. God Himself will judge you and hold you accountable for what you discovered, or failed to discover, at the end of your days. The end of this epic quest for Truth, this grand spiritual war, is spiritual enlightenment: The direct beatific vision of God. Yes, in this low world there is an apparent but not real separation between beauty and truth, but in The Divine Realm there is total reconciliation between beauty and truth which culminates in our direct experience of The Transcendent God who is beyond all sense perception, beyond all rational consideration, beyond even all of our wildest imaginations.

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1.  Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Book 4. Page 133.

2.  ibid book 4. 147-160

3. ibid book 4. 205

4. This deprivation and the suffering that results from it is a kind of mercy. When our souls become disoriented and we value the goods of the body over the goods of the soul, pain helps us to understand that the goods of the body are not our proper end and helps push us towards the more proper goods of the soul.

5.  ibid book 5.235-236

6.  ibid book 5.324-326

7.  ibid book 5.51-53

8. In Milton’s Paradise Lost , Eve is placed somewhere in the Garden of Eden far away from Adam after being formed out of his rib. She wanders the terrestrial paradise of Eden solitarily for a while, sees her own reflection, and then gets guided to the location of Adam by the Voice of God.

9.  ibid book 4.467-475

10.  ibid book 4.465-470

11. ibid book 5.44-47

12.  ibid book 9.607-709

13. ibid book 5.70-72

14. ibid book 9.645-665

15.  ibid book 9.718-722

16.  Satan makes a very subtle obfuscation by speaking of “gods” rather than God. While referring to “Gods” rather than “God” could be a reference to the Holy Trinity, it is more likely an attempt at establishing a kind of polytheism and a moral relativism. If the deity who has forbidden them the fruit is only one among many then His opinion is of less value. I don’t personally think that polytheism is intrinsically bad in and of itself however, and true polytheism and mature monotheism both fit harmoniously within a panentheistic worldview. For more on this, you can read my three-part series “Primeval Panentheism”

17.  It is worth mentioning that Eve never once considers that the serpent is not who he says he is and the extent to which the whole Fall is dependent upon her being deceived by this disguise. Even Adam falls at least partially because he thinks the fruit causes something other than what God says because he can see as well as Eve can that the talking snake is not dead. They are too naive to consider the idea of lying because of their sinlessness and are thus partially, though not fully, not to blame for their Fall - thus the possibility of redemption. 

18.  ibid book 9.682-683

19.  ibid book 9.790-793

20.  Though these are factors at play, they are not primary. 

21.  ibid book 9.680

22. The Enlightenment is the most ironically named time-period, because it is where all of the worst ideas ever come from. If Historians were wise they would call that time The Endarkenment, or perhaps even The Retardation.

23. A “FREE” Thinker cannot be someone who is enslaved to their passions. Separating seeming-goods from actual-goods help us to distinguish real beauty from false beauty, extent of being able to do this is what makes us intellectually and spiritually advanced.