Moral Dilemma and Tragic Affect in Samson Agonistes

Abstract

The article makes an intervention in recent critical debates about the meaning of Samson Agonistes, in the light of the phenomenon of religious suicide-bombing and informed by insights from the psychotherapeutic movement. It traces Milton’s subtle development of the issues in the play and focuses on the ending as tragic catharsis. It also assumes some familiarity with traditional interpretations of the play in an ongoing commentary on subtextual elements which subvert a tribal revenge-ethic in favour of a Christ-like gospel of reconciliation. To this end, Samson’s fatal last day is contrasted with Jesus’ final evening in the Garden of Gethsemane. This reading inherently emphasises that Samson Agonistes is a tragedy rather than a morality play; that Samson is a hubristic antitype to a revolutionary, pacifistic Christ; and that psychological catharsis leaves the reader with an existential choice of alternative moralities rather than a model of divine retribution. THE TRADITIONAL understanding of Milton’s ‘Dramatic Poem’ is called into question by the contemporary phenomenon of suicide-‘martyrdom’—which Samson Agonistes might appear to recommend as heroic. We must now read the play in the light of the horrific destruction and mass-murder involved in the attack on New York’s ‘Twin Towers’ of 11 September 2001. And since then, in particular, suicide attacks, fuelled by a deep resentment at odds with the core of ‘Islam’ (surrender to God and self-control) but buoyed up by a perverted Islamist theology of recent origins, have become almost commonplace—Bali, Madrid, Baghdad (repeatedly), Israel, Afghanistan, Istanbul, Egypt and, closer to home, London: with two attacks in July 2005. The dire self-righteousness which underpins such highly planned assaults might be summed up in the words of a preparatory prayer found in the mislaid suitcase of one of the 9/11 hijackers: ‘I pray God to forgive me all my sins . . . permit me to glorify you in every possibly way’. Is a ‘Christian’ version of such religious revenge promoted by Milton’s drama of 1665–67? Literature & Theology # The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org In his introduction to the play, John Carey summarises the traditional reading of the play as one which sees: ‘Samson as a hero who undergoes spiritual regeneration . . .whose ‘‘rousing motions’’ come from God.’ Such a reading necessarily accepts that the terrible destruction which Samson wreaks on the Philistines and himself is divinely justified—a view Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants clearly hold from a rather different religious perspective. In the light of recent international events, we might well want to query whether this traditional reading of Samson is, in fact, the only possible one. And Carey has helped remind readers that both Stanley Fish and Joseph Wittreich, especially, have strongly contested that view. This article seeks to contribute to such ‘postmodern’ challenge by examining aspects of the play’s subtext and underlining the horrific nature of its climax. In stressing the shock-affect of the ending, it will urge that the traditional interpretation collapses the moral implications of Samson into the reader’s visceral (and irrational) satisfaction with the hero’s attainment of revenge, and misses the ironic clues which point to a more ‘Christ-like’ understanding. One implication of such an approach is that the play is, indeed, a tragedy, with all the complexity one expects of the genre—and not, for instance, a tract. Milton’s prefatory description of the tragic genre emphasises the centrality of Aristotelian catharsis in resolving the dramatic action: . . . by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions imitated. (Complete Shorter Poems, p. 355) Although Aristotelian theory has often been invoked to justify aesthetic formalism (and Milton briefly comments on such matters as the unities and ‘measure of verse’), the essence of the discussion, and the part Milton stresses, concerns emotional affect. Aristotle, we might say, is the father of ‘Reader Response’ criticism, and Milton, following him, makes the passions stirred up in the reader the central tragic factor. Here, contemporary psychotherapeutic insights can make an important contribution, concentrating on issues which traditional readings have tended to neglect. In particular, this view of tragedy emphasises the quasi-medical experience of ‘purging’: . . . for so in physic things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours.