'Exil'd From Light': The Darkened Moral Consciousness of Milton's Hero of Faith

Abstract

Disagreements are still liable to arise over the heroic status of Satan in Paradise Lost, but perhaps the most serious division of opinion among readers of Milton for some time to come will be over another questionable heroic figure, his Samson. Most readers still consider that Samson is a tragic hero intended to command admiration and respect, and that Milton presents him as a model for Christian imitation. However, the questions and doubts are increasing. When Anthony Low pictured Samson as a gloriously triumphant Christian hero, 'the image and example of the champion of God' (Low, 117), he dismissed objections to Samson's violence by turning to Milton's prose where force seems to be justified if it is used by the Christian magistrate against God's enemies. Mary Ann Radzinowicz concluded that the destruction of the temple is 'a human imaging of God's might ... an exemplary act which teaches how God gives freedom' (346). Many scholars have turned to typological hermeneutics to explain Samson's behaviour. In typological exegesis, the Old Testament is seen as prefiguring the New Testament, although darkly. There is similitude in dissimilitude. Old Testament heroes such as Adam and Judas Maccabeus are types of Christ, the antitype, although the type can never be quite the same as the perfect antitype. So Samson delivering the Jews from subjection to the Philistines is for Scott-Craig a type of Christ the redeemer, while for Barbara Lewalski the terrible judgment Samson visits on the Philistines typifies Christ in final apocalyptic judgment. Yet Carey, reading the same text, finds in Samson 'no spiritual development, only ... resentment, which has been gnawing inwardly' (139). Readers who find it impossible to accept that Samson is an exemplary Christian have recently received powerful support from J. W. Wittreich, who insists that 'Milton's "martyrplay" is ... less a celebration than a censure of its hero' (326). He draws support from a vein of contemporary Renaissance allusion 'that exhibits a tarnished Samson—a Samson who, nurtured in blood, delights in vengeance and whose enterprise entails the wretched interchange of wrong for wrong' (245).