Читать книгу 3 books to know The Devil - Джон Мильтон - Страница 14

WHAT BECAME OF THE Devil, and his host of fallen spirits, after their being expelled from heaven, and his wandering condition till the creation; with some more of Mr. Milton’s absurdities on that subject.

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HAVING THUS BROUGHT the Devil and his innumerable legions to the edge of the bottomless pit, it remains, before I bring them to action, that some inquiry should be made into the posture of their affairs immediately after their precipitate fall, and into the place of their immediate residence; for this will appear to be very necessary to Satan’s history, and, indeed, so as that, without it, all the farther account we have to give of him, will be inconsistent and imperfect.

And first, I take upon me to lay down some fundamentals, which I believe I shall be able to make out historically, though, perhaps, not so geographically as some have pretended to do.

1. That Satan was not immediately, nor is yet, locked down in the abyss of a local hell, such as is supposed by some, and such as he shall be at last; or that,

2. If he was, he has certain liberties allowed him for excursions into the regions of this air, and certain spheres of action, in which he can and does move, to do. like a very devil as he is, all the mischief he can. and of which we see so many examples both about us and in us; in the inquiry after which, I shall take occasion to examine whether the Devil is not in most, of us sometimes, if not in all of us one time or other.

3. That Satan has no particular residence in this globe or earth where we live; that he rambles about among us, and marches over and over our whole country, he and his devils, in camps volant; but that he pitches his grand army, or chief encampment, in our adjacencies or frontiers, which the philosophers call atmosphere; and whence he is called the prince of the power of that element or part of the world we call air; from whence he sends out his spies, his agents and emissaries, to get intelligence, and to carry his commissions to his trusty and well-beloved cousins and counsellors on earth, by which his business is done, and his affairs carried on, in the world.

Here, again, I meet Mr. Milton, full in my face, who will have it that the Devil, immediately at his expulsion, rolled down directly into hell proper and local; nay, he measures the very distance, at least gives the length of the journey by the time they were passing or falling, which, he says, was nine days; a good poetical flight, but neither founded on scripture or philosophy. He might every jot as well have brought hell up to the walls of heaven, advanced to receive them; or he ought to have considered the space which is to be allowed to any locality, let him take what part of infinite distance between heaven and created hell he pleases.

But let that be as Mr. Milton’s extraordinary genius pleases to place it; the passage, it seems, is just nine days betwixt heaven and hell; well might Dives then see father Abraham, and talk to him too; but then the great gulf, which Abraham tells him was fixed between them, does not seem to be so large, as, according to 6

Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Halley, Mr. Whiston, and the rest of our men of science, we take it to be.

But suppose the passage to he nine days, according to Mr. Milton, what followed? Why, hell gaped wide, opened its frightful mouth, and received them all at once; millions and thousands of millions as they were, it received them all at a gulp, as we call it; they had no difficulty to go in, no, none at all.

“Facilis descensus Averni:

Sed revocare gradum

Hoc opus, hie labor est.” — Virg.

All this, as poetical, we may receive, but not at all as historical; for then come difficulties insuperable in our way; some of which may be as follow: 1. Hell is here supposed to be a place; nay, a place created for the punishment of angels and men, and likewise created long before those had fallen, or these had being: this makes me say, Mr. Milton was a good poet, but a bad historian: Tophet was prepared of old, indeed; but it was for the king, that is to say, it was prepared for those whose lot it should be to come thither; but this does not at all suppose it was prepared before it was resolved whether there should be subjects for it, or no; else we must suppose both men and angels were made by the glorious and upright Maker of all things, on purpose for destruction, which would be incongruous and absurd.

But there is worse yet to come: in the next place he adds, that hell having received them, closed upon them; that is to say, took them in, closed or shut its mouth; and in a word, they were locked in, as it was said in another place, they were locked in, and the key is carried up to heaven, and kept there; for we know the angel came down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit; but first, see Mr. Milton:

“Nine days they fell: confounded chaos roared,

And felt tenfold confusion in their fall:

Hell at last

Yawning received them whole, and on them closed;

Down from the verge of heaven, eternal wrath

Burnt after them Unquenchable.”

This scheme is certainly deficient, if not absurd; and I think is more so than any other he has laid: it is evident, neither Satan, or his host of devils, are, no not any of them, yet, even now, confined in the eternal prison, where, the scripture says, he shall be reserved in chains of darkness. They must have mean thoughts of hell, as a prison, a local confinement, that can suppose the Devil able to break gaol, knock off his fetters, and come abroad, if he had been once locked in there, as Mr. Milton says he was: now we know, that he is abroad again; he presented himself before God, among his neighbors, when Job’s case came to be discoursed of; and, more than that, it is plain he was a prisoner at large, by his answer to God’s question, which was, Whence comest thou? to which he answered, From going to and fro through the earth, &c. This, I say, is plain; and if it be as certain, that hell closed upon them, I demand then, how got he out? And why was there not a proclamation for apprehending him, as there usually is, after such rogues as break prison?

In short, the true account of the Devil’s circumstances, since his fall from heaven, is much more likely to be thus: That he is more of a vagrant than a prisoner; that he is a wanderer in the wild unbounded waste, where he and his legions, like the hordes of Tartary, who, in the wild countries of Karakathay, the deserts of Barkan, Kassan, and Astracan, live up and down where they find proper; so Satan and his innumerable legions rove about hie et ubique, pitching their camps (being beasts of prey) where they find the most spoil; watching over this world (and all the other worlds, for aught we know, and if there are any such;) I say watching and seeking whom they may devour, that is, whom they may deceive and delude, and so destroy, for devour they cannot.

Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste of air; yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is continually hovering over this inhabited globe of earth; swelling with the rage of envy at the felicity of his rival man; and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him; but extremely limited in power, to his unspeakable mortification: this is his present state, without any fixed abode, place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

From his expulsion, I take his first view of horror to be that of looking back towards the heaven which he had lost; there to see the chasm or opening made up, out at which, as at a breach in the wall of the holy place, he was thrust headlong by the power which expelled him; I say, to see the breach repaired, the mounds built up, the walls garrisoned with millions of angels, and armed with thunders; and above all, made terrible by that glory from whose presence they were expelled, as is poetically hinted at before.

Upon this sight, it is no wonder (if there was such a place) that they fled till the darkness might cover them, and that they might be out of the view of so hated a sight.

Wherever they found it, you may be sure they pitched their first camp; and began, after many a sour reflection upon what was passed, to consider arid think a little upon what was to come.

If I had as much personal acquaintance with the Devil, as would admit it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the first question I would ask him, should be, what measures they resolved on at their first assembly? And the next should be, how they were employed in all that space of time, between their so flying the face of their almighty Conqueror, and the creation of man? As for the length of the time, which, according to the learned, was twenty thousand years, and, according to the more learned, not half a quarter so much, I would not concern my curiosity much about it; it is most certain, there was a considerable time between; but of that immediately: first let me inquire what they were doing all that time.

The Devil and his host being thus, I say, cast out of heaven, and not yet confined strictly to hell, it is plain they must be somewhere; Satan and all his legions did not lose their existence, no, nor the existence of devils neither; God was so far from annihilating him, that he still preserved his being; and this not Mr. Milton only, but God himself, has made known to us, having left his history so far upon record: several expressions in scripture also make it evident, as particularly the story of Job, mentioned before; the like in our Saviour’s time, and several others.

If hell did not immediately engulf them, as Milton suggests, it is certain, I say, that they fled somewhere, from the anger of Heaven, from the face of the Avenger; and his absence, and their own guilt, wonder not at it, would make hell enough for them, wherever they went.

Nor need we fly to the dreams of our astronomers, who took a great deal of pains to fill up the vast spaces of the starry heavens with innumerable habitable worlds: allowing as many solar systems as there are fixed stars, and that not only in the known constellations, but even in the galaxy itself; who to every such system allow a certain number of planets, and to every one of those planets so many satellites or moons, and all these planets or moons to be worlds; solid, dark, opaque bodies, habitable, and (as they would have us believe) inhabited by the like animals and rational creatures as on this earth; so that they may, at this rate, find room enough for the Devil and all his angels, without making an hell on purpose; nay, they may, for aught I know, find a world for every devil in all the Devil’s host; and so every one may be a monarch or master-devil, separately in his own sphere or world, and play the devil there by himself.

And even if this were so, it cannot be denied but that one devil in a place would be enough for a whole systemary world, and be able, if not restrained, to do mischief enough there too, and even to ruin and overthrow the whole body of people contained in it,

But, I say, we need not fly to these shifts, or consult the astronomers in the decision of this point; for wherever Satan and his defeated host went, at their expulsion from heaven, we think we are certain none of all these beautiful worlds, or be they worlds or no, I mean the fixed stars, planets, &c. had then any existence; for the beginning, as the scripture calls it, was not yet begun.

But to speak a little by the rules of philosophy, that is to say, so as to be understood by others, even when we speak of things we cannot fully understand ourselves: though in the beginning of time, all this glorious creation was formed, the earth, the starry heavens, and all the furniture thereof, and there was a time when they were not; yet we cannot say so of the void, or that nameless nowhere, as I called it before, which now appears to be a somewhere, in which these glorious bodies are placed. That immense space which those take up, and which they move in at this time, must be supposed, before they had being, to be placed there; as God himself was, and existed, before all being, time, or place; so the heaven of heavens, or the place where the thrones and dominions of his kingdom then existed, inconceivable and ineffable, had an existence before the glorious seraphs, the innumerable company of angels which attended about the throne of God, existed; these all had a being long before, as the eternal creator of them all had before them.

Into this void or abyss of nothing, however im measurable, infinite, and even to those spirits themselves inconceivable, they certainly launched from the bright precipice which they fell from, and here they shifted as well as they could.

Here expanding those wings which fear and horror at their defeat furnished them, as I hinted before, they hurried away to the utmost distance possible, from the face of God their conqueror, and then most dreaded enemy; formerly their joy and glory.

Be this utmost removed distance where it will, here, certainly, Satan and all his gang of devils, his numberless, though routed armies, retired. Here Milton might, with some good ground, have formed his pandemonium, and have brought them in, consulting what was next to be done, and whether there was any room left to renew the war, or to carry on the rebellion; but had they been cast immediately into hell, closed up there, the bottomless pit locked upon them, and the key carried up to heaven, to be kept there, as Mr. Milton himself in part confesses, and the scripture affirms; I say, had this been so, the Devil himself could not have been so ignorant as to think of any future steps to be taken, to retrieve his affairs; and therefore a pandemonium, or divan in hell, to consult of it, was ridiculous.

All Mr. Milton’s scheme of Satan’s future conduct, and all the scripture expressions about the Devil and his numerous attendants, and of his actings since that time, make it not reasonable to suggest, that the devils were confined to their eternal prison, at their expulsion out of heaven; but that they were in a state of liberty to act, though limited in acting, of which I shall also speak in its place.