In this account of the matter, “civilization” and “evidence” go together and dictate our chief responsibility as readers—which is, Empson says, “to use our judgment about the characters.” It is also the obligation of the characters in the story, and the fact that they perform it differently is what gives the plot its energy: The loyalist Abdiel, Empson observes, tells Satan and his rebel followers “that God should be obeyed because he is good, and they deny that he is good,” and as far as Empson is concerned, they have good reason to do so. Actually the scene Empson is remembering is somewhat more complex. When Abdiel rises, “Among the faithless, faithful only he” (V, 897), what he says is not that God is good (which would imply a conclusion reached by submitting God’s actions to the judgment of independent criteria). Rather he says that God is God, which implies that even to put God to such an evidentiary test would be a category mistake—how can you give a grade to the agent whose person defines and embodies value?—that would constitute the gravest of sins, whether one calls it impiety (“Cease . . . this impious rage”), self-worship, or simply pride.
What Abdiel says is: “Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute / With him the points of liberty, who made / Thee what thou art?” (V, 822–24a) Earlier Satan had justified his rebellion by invoking freedom and liberty; Abdiel now points out that these terms have no weight when the agent from whom you would be free made and sustains you. Satan in turn finds this argument preposterous and replies to it with a classic statement of rational empiricism:
That we were form’d . . . say’st thou?
. . . strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d.
[/ (V, 853, 855–60) /]
This is the philosophy of the man from Missouri: Show me, seeing is believing, and since no one, including you, has seen the moment of his creation, I don’t believe in it. There is nothing in the present scene or in my experience that leads me inescapably to the conclusion you urge. Where did you ever get this absurd notion? What’s your proof? (“Doctrine which we would know whence learnt?”) I must have made myself.
Satan’s way of thinking is contrasted directly in the poem with Adam’s. Recalling the moment not of his creation, but just after his creation, Adam reports “Myself I . . . perused . . . limb by limb” and found that I could speak and name, “But who I was, or where, or from what cause / Knew not” (VIII, 267, 270–71). Like Satan, Adam knows no time before he was what he now is, but he gives a quite different answer to the question he immediately poses: “How came I thus, how here? / Not of myself, by some great maker then / In goodness and in power preeminent” (VIII, 277b-79). The goodness and power for which Satan seeks independent evidence is here assumed by Adam; and once the assumption is in place it generates a program for action and a life-project: “How may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live?” (VIII, 280–1)
It might seem that in presenting these two moments in Paradise Lost, I am placing in opposition two ways of knowing, one by evidence and reason, the other by faith. But in fact on the level of epistemology both are the same. Satan and Adam begin alike from a point of ignorance—they know nothing prior to (the precise word is “before”) the perspective they currently occupy; and the direction each then takes from this acknowledged limitation follows with equal logic or illogic. Adam reasons, since I don’t remember how I got here, I must have been made by someone. Satan reasons, since I don’t know how I got here, I must have made myself, or as we might say today, I must have just emerged from the primeval slime.
In neither case does the conclusion follow necessarily from the observed fact of imperfect knowledge. In both cases something is missing, a first premise, and in both cases reasoning can’t get started until a first premise is put in place. What’s more, since the first premise is what is missing, it cannot be derived from anything in the visible scene; it is what must be imported—on no evidentiary basis whatsoever—so that the visible scene, the things of this world, can acquire the meaning and significance they will now have. There is no opposition here between knowledge by reason and knowledge by faith because Satan and Adam are committed to both simultaneously. Each performs an act of faith—the one in God and the other in materialism—and then each begins to reason in ways dictated by the content of his faith.
