A Poem to the Unknown God: Samson Agonistes and Negative Theology

Abstract

Samson Agonistes is a dark, painful, and difficult work. Among its highlights are a character who kills with astonishing efficiency, and others who defend that killing as the will of God while celebrating the terrifying deaths of the enemies. In a day and age in which God is once again invoked to justify war and its accompanying horrific episodes of brutality, vengeance, and devastation, can a work which includes the killing of those described as “Infidel[s]” (221) 1 be read with anything like sympathy? How can we understand Milton’s portrayal of Samson’s violence and justifications for violence? Each of Milton’s works can and should be read in relation to the entire body of his work; however, in the case of Samson Agonistes, contextual reading becomes even more important. Considered in terms of the date of first publication and the order of printing, Samson is the last of the great works. As such, Samson Agonistes, to be properly understood, needs to be considered in the light of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.The three works form a literary triptych, a three-paneled painting of God, or more properly ideas of God, in which the two shorter works continually reference and comment on each other as well as on the great epic. As I have recently argued, Paradise Lost presents its image of God as an object of criticism, while Paradise Regained presents the Son as both a new positive image, and as a negation and rejection of the Father’s image (Bryson, passim). Samson Agonistes also functions as a negation, though it does not present any image of deity whatsoever. That refusal (not failure) to present an image of God in Samson Agonistes is the primary source of the work’s power, and the center of its critique of those whose religious certitude enables them to engage in and/or excuse violence of the most brutal and horrific nature. Milton creates a portrait of what results from acting with the appearance of certainty, but without its actual presence or substance. In other words, Milton’s Samson does not present an occasion for celebration, but an occasion for doubt, reflection, and the realization that we may not truly know what we think we know, especially if what we think we know is the mind and will of an absent, unnamable, and unknowable God. According to Joseph Wittreich, “the Samson story functions as a warning prophecy, an oracular threat, that would avert the disaster it announces and contravene the situation it seems to court” (Interpreting xii). Milton, after crafting the Son’s rejection of politics and violence in Paradise Regained, is not presenting us with a Samson whose primary talent is killing people