Milton's Aesthetics Of Eating

Denise Gigante

It is not a little curious that, with the exception of Ben Jonson (and he did not speak gravely about it so often), the poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton. He omits none of the pleasures of the palate, great or small. In his Latin poems, when young, he speaks of the pears and chestnuts which he used to roast at the fire with his friend Diodati. Junkets and other "country-messes" are not forgotten in his "Allegro." The simple Temptation in the Wilderness, "Command that these stones be made bread" (which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted "forty days"), is turned, in Paradise Regained, with more poetry than propriety, into the set out of a great feast, containing every delicacy in and out of season. The very "names" of the viands, he says, were "exquisite." And in Paradise Lost, Eve is not only described as being skilful in paradisaical cookery ("tempering dulcet creams"), but the angel Raphael is invited to dinner, and helped by his entertainers to a series of tid-bits and contrasted relishes--
Taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change.

--Leigh Hunt, "Eating Songs"

The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem.

--John Keats, "On 'Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter'"

That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the "taste" of his epic poetry suggests an awareness beyond the anecdotal. For as this essay will show, Milton complicates the category of physiological taste in such a manner as to form the ground for the possibility of aesthetic taste, which emerges as a distinct discourse in the early years of the eighteenth century. This is not to say that Milton is the only source for this dubious meaning-in-transition. But precisely how, prior to the interventions of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and the entire tradition of post-Miltonic theorists of taste, is one to read Adam's darkly sardonic postlapsarian remark: "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste . . . And Palate call judicious" [PL IX.1017-20]? Critics have observed Milton's "ruthless and relentless pressure on 'taste,'" the fact that the word and its variants appear thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone [Ricks 69]. What I would like to suggest is that just as Milton is a seminal figure for the eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupation with the sublime, ¹ he is theoretically situated at the origins of the more generic thing called taste as well. [End Page 88]

Of course Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both "to taste" and "to know." ² The fruit whose "mortal taste" was the source of all our woe did, after all, grow on the tree of knowledge, knowingly described by Satan as "precious of all Trees / In Paradise, of operation blest / To Sapience" [PL I.2, IX.795-97]. So too, when Adam calls Eve "exact of taste," he adds "of Sapience no small part" [PL IX.1018]. Throughout Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton plays with the epistemological connotation of taste, incorporating it even into the 1671 companion piece of the latter, Samson Agonistes, whose blind hero declares, "The way to know were not to see but taste" [1091]. At the time Milton was writing, however, taste was philosophically connected not only to knowledge and pleasure, but to morality as well. At the origins of the British empirical discourse of taste, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, inheriting this link between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, inquires: "Will it not be found . . . that what is beautiful is . . . true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good?" [2: 268-69]. For Milton as for Shaftesbury, the beautiful was the true was the good, and access to these ideals was bound up with the philosophic complexity of taste. And viewed from the broader perspective that includes Milton, taste becomes more than a question of mere subjective discernment; it becomes constitutive of human subjectivity. From the "mortal taste" of the opening lines of Paradise Lost to the final lines of Paradise Regained, in which the Son of God goes on his way "from heavenly feast refreshed" [IV.638], Milton makes taste--figuratively displayed as physiological taste, or eating--a means of establishing subjective particularity. His fictional ontology of eating, in short, becomes a system for the production of tasteful subjects.

Consuming Economies

Taken together, Paradise Lost and Regained comprise what William Kerrigan has called "the great myth of the evil meal" [204]. Such a myth asks us to take seriously the ontological power of eating, and the proposition that, in Paradise Lost, paradise was lost because Eve and then Adam ate. Critics have observed that within the poem Milton reduces the Fall to four highly charged words: "she pluck'd, she eat" [IX.781]. ³ When the Son of God descends to pronounce judgment on the transgressors, he demands: "hast thou eaten of the Tree / Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat?" [X.122-23]. After floundering eloquently enough for a while, Adam admits: "Shee gave me of the Tree, and I did eat" [143]. Also deflecting blame, Eve responds: "The Serpent me beguil'd and I did eat" [162]. In Milton's text, as in Genesis 3, both the question and the [End Page 89] two responses it generates are thus punctuated with the word "eat." ⁴ Visually, it dangles from the end of each line like the forbidden fruit itself, suggesting something sinful about eating, as if paradise were lost because despite whatever else they were doing, Adam and Eve ate.

The objection will be raised that they did not simply eat, but that they ate unlawfully, in disobedience of the Word. As Regina M. Schwartz puts it, "The poem centers on the distinction between forbidden and permitted food. An ur-dietary law governs Paradise" [15]. However, in a dialogue entitled "Eating Well; or the Calculation of the Subject," Derrida has proposed that

The moral question is . . . not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, . . . how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? [115]

Though he does not posit these questions with direct reference to Milton, Derrida's interrogation of the moral implications of eating may shed new and possibly unexpected light on the familiar narrative "To pluck and eat" [VIII.309]; "ye shall not eat" [IX.657]; "she pluck'd, she eat" [IX.781]; and so forth. While his reference to eating as a "metonymy of introjection" refers to the psychological process of incorporating, idealizing, and psychically cannibalizing a lost object of desire, his understanding of it derives from Kant's third Critique: his critique of aesthetic judgment, or taste.

In Derrida's account of Kantian taste, the aesthetically consuming subject processes the world according to a certain economic logic, a cycle of return that takes in through the mouth and gives back in the form of expression. As the place of tasting and consumption, as well as expression, the mouth is "no longer . . . situated in a typology of the body" but instead becomes the os of the system, organizing all sites unto itself ["Economimesis" 16]. What is articulated between the lines of Derrida's account, therefore, is that taste takes place in the mouth. Eating entails a digestive insistence that taste in its pure aesthetic mode does not, and hence a certain digestive surplus. In order to avoid indulging in a cycle of coprophagy, therefore, the figuratively eating (or tasting) subject must inhabit a world that comes pre-purged of all such unseemly excess, or everything that will not cleanly pass through the mouth.

Milton's world is clearly a Christian world, where subjects find their being by partaking of God. Milton writes that "the Father is not only he by whom, but also he from whom, in whom, through whom, and on account of whom all things are" [Prose 6: 302]. The fundamental law of Christian consumption holds that subjects are made by eating the Word of God (in a lapsarian world, the Word made flesh), and for Milton, as for other Protestants, the symbolic nature of that meal is crucial. If flesh is literally eaten, one is transported out of the sacramental and into the superstitious, the irrational sphere of sheer idolatry. Milton's anti-Catholic In quintum novembris, perhaps his most graphic portrayal of episcopal idolatry, describes a pageant in which "the wearer of the Triple Crown, borne on men's shoulders makes a circuit of the whole city, carrying with him hisgods made of bread" [16-17]. Within the context of the poem, these bready gods appear as a type of absurdity. Yet allegorically what they do suggest is the economic nature of the cycle of consumption that defines and propels Christianity. In Milton's day, bread was inscribed in an economic register. One may recall Samson's bitter plea, [End Page 90] "Here rather let me drudge and earn my bread, / Till vermin or the draff of servile food / Consume me" [573-75]. And should one need incentive to connect the "blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled" hero of the Danites to the embattled Milton of 1671, that same year an anonymous reader penned the following words on a copy of his or her Eikonoklastes: "Old, sickly, poor, stark blind, thou writ'st for bread"[qtd. in Parker 1: 621]. In In quintum novembris, Milton's "gods made of bread" circulate through the city like pocket change to be dispersed by the wearer of the Triple Crown: a progress that serves as a parodic allegory of the consumptive economy of Christianity.

Milton's denial of the literal nature of the mandate to accept sacrifice and eat flesh was part of the phenomenon whereby "Reformed theology not only abolished the pageantry of the Roman rite but rejected the sacrificial character of the Eucharist altogether," as Deborah Shuger explains: "The moral inwardness of Protestantism--its ethical rationalism, which drives its antipathy to the spectacular 'magic' of the Mass--also problematizes sacrifice"[163]. But what does it mean to "problematize sacrifice"? To call into question what is, etymologically, sacred making? Georges Bataille, upon whom Derrida relies for his economic understanding of taste, argues that sacrifice entails a fundamental loss at the center of Christianity: "From the very first, it appears that sacred things are constituted by an operation of loss: in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by the value of the theme of the Son of God's ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation" [Visions 119]. Thus, Milton observes that in the Mass "Christ is sacrificed each day by the priest . . . [his body] is supposed to be made out of bread at the moment when the priest murmurs the four words, this is my body, and to be broken as soon as it is made" [Prose 6: 559]. Yet if this sacrifice or "loss" at the core of Christianity is exposed as mere absence--if God is to be allegorically aligned with bread and to operate as mere sign, if he is to circulate economically rather than to remain in his original unity as the Un-exchangeable, the divine Presence sustaining the Christian economy of consumption--does this not destabilize the traditional view that God "gives more than he promises, [that] he submits to no exchange contract, his overabundance generously breaks the circular economy" ["Economimesis" 11]? Does the Protestant rejection of the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, in other words, not set in motion a chain of subjective deferral whereby the would-be subject is always at least one step removed, not only from God, the master-signifier of the consumptive economy, but from his or her own presence as well? If the Christian subject is dependent for subsistence (indeed existence) on flesh, what happens when one instead ingests a vacuity that installs itself at the constitutive center of self, like a gap perpetually craving the real presence of flesh?

Such questions are best approached from within Milton's own theoretical framework, namely de doctrina Christiana, which may be read as a parergonal text to the epic world of his poetry. If the recent controversy over the provenance of Milton's theological treatise has revealed anything at all, it is the fact that the John Milton of de doctrina Christiana is not always (if ever) the John Milton of Paradise Lost and Regained, and it is in the crack between the two that tensions arise which productively complicate Milton's ontology of eating. ⁵ Yet what both treatise and poetry make abundantly clear is that [End Page 91] Milton was, at all times, anti-Catholic. ⁶ He believed in no uncertain terms that "Consubstantiation and particularly transubstantiation . . . or cannibalism are utterly alien to reason, common sense and human behavior" [Prose 6: 554]. While he agrees with Paul that Christians must "partake of that one bread," he denies the "monstrous doctrines" responsible for "turning the Lord's Supper into a cannibal feast" [554]. Of course, there is always a fine line between communion and cannibalism, and in his discussion of the doctrine of transubstantiation Milton insists that "not teeth but faith is needed to eat his flesh":

The Papists hold that it is Christ's actual flesh which is eaten by all in the Mass. But if this were so, even the most wicked of the communicants, not to mention the mice and worms which often eat the eucharist, would attain eternal life by virtue of that heavenly bread. That living bread which, Christ says, is his flesh, and the true drink which, he says, is his blood, can only be the doctrine which teaches us that Christ was made man in order to pour out his blood for us. . . . Whereas if we eat his flesh it will not remain in us, but, to speak candidly, after being digested in the stomach, it will be at length exuded. [553-54]

This nightmare fantasy of "Christ's actual flesh" passing through the Christian subject in so literal a fashion arrives at its logical (though horrible) conclusion: that "after being digested in the stomach, it will be at length exuded." The unspiritual, uncivilized possibility that God can be physically digested and then exuded results in the Protestant defense of excluding him from the Host--extruding him, so to speak, from the extrusion. However, such an exclusion conflicts with Milton's own monist cosmology, whereby God is in all matter.

While there has been much debate over the precise nature of Miltonic matter, and whether it is to be understood as the basis for materialism, such debate is relevant here only insofar as it exposes a fundamental rift between the cosmos of Milton's theological treatise (which is not always consistent in itself) and the world of his fictional cosmology. ⁷ For though the Milton of de doctrina Christiana denies the possibility that God can be literally tasted--hence digested and exuded--in Paradise Lost the archangel Raphael describes how angels concoct, digest, and assimilate real food as part of one divine substance. Whereas Raphael describes the world as "one first matter all, / Indu'd with various forms, various degrees / Of substance" [V.472-74], Milton's theological treatise insists on a gap between God and the kind of bready matter that can be consumed, digested, and exuded in his name. Otherwise, as Werner Hamacher puts it, "Materialized in the Host, God becomes a digested excrementum that is nonetheless indigestible [End Page 92] and inedible; the universe of spirit becomes mouse droppings, its eschatology a scatology" [191]. ⁸ As we shall discover in a moment, Milton negotiates this theoretical divide by means of a primordial expulsion which allows for a world of clean, waste-free circulation.

First, however, let us ask whether there is not a certain "negative pleasure" to be discerned as Milton describes the process of exclusion. ⁹ His observation that the flesh of God, once ingested, would have to be digested and then "exuded" transforms, upon further reflection, into an even more graphic evacuation:

the Mass brings down Christ's holy body from its supreme exaltation at the right hand of God. It drags it back to the earth, though it has suffered every pain and hardship already, to a state of humiliation even more wretched and degrading than before: to be broken once more and crushed and ground, even by the fangs of brutes. Then, when it has been driven through all the stomach's filthy channels, it shoots it out--one shudders even to mention it--into the latrine. [Prose 6: 560]

Milton's disgust for any doctrine that would allow even the "fangs of brutes" access to the corporal body of Christ is metonymic for his more general horror at the literalization of the sign: "not teeth but faith is needed to eat his flesh." It reveals, moreover, the stance of "a certain traditional humanism," whereby brutes cannot qualify as sacrifice nor take part in the sacrificial structure of Christianity [Derrida, "Eating Well" 113]. ¹⁰ The "fangs of brutes" are the very signatures of a capacity to enter an economy of consumption where brutes have no place, where they do not figure, since they lack access to the logos, or the ability to metaphorically speak what they eat. As Arkady Plotnitsky points out, an economy of consumption is, necessarily, a restricted one with an irrepressible desire to exclude [71]. And as Milton's emphasis indicates, it is not the brutes so much as the brutish possibility of exclusion itself that must be repressed from the subject-making circulation of Christianity.

This is a foundational concept of Miltonic creation, and to understand it fully we must be rigorous in drawing a distinction between the "restricted" and the "general" economies, as defined by Bataille and applied by Derrida to the economy of consumption that is taste. In short, a restricted economy is one in which everything circulates, and which thus entails no loss, whereas a general economy produces excesses that by definition cannot be utilized, or inscribed back into a closed cycle of circulation. ¹¹ The general economy, whose logic is not organized according to the typology of the mouth, allows for waste--if at the expense of taste. There is nothing tasteful about the general economy. Like a barbaric exterior, it surrounds and enables the restricted economy, [End Page 93] whose very coherence (or waste-free circulation of meaning) depends upon exclusion. For while a restricted economy entails no loss, it is founded upon an originary loss or expulsion, which once made can never be reclaimed. Whether as organism or as enterprise, the restricted economy defines itself against the embarrassing surplus it cannot contain. ¹² It coheres in itself as a precariously balanced system from which all further exclusion is precluded. There can be no "non-productive expenditure" in a restricted economy, nothing that does not circulate: the "circle of power" (which for Bataille also means the cycle of pleasure) is closed [Visions 121].

This distinction between "restricted" and "general" economies of consumption is key to understanding Milton's ontology of eating as portrayed in Paradise Lost and Regained. In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton portrays the creation itself as a divine expulsion, a cosmic purgation of waste:

         the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital virtue infus'd, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg'd
The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life; [VII.235-39]

What these lines represent is nothing other than the dark obverse of everyday logocentric creation whereby "his word all things produc'd" [PR III.122]. They are, in other words, a version of creation via purgation. One of the central "heresies" of Milton's de doctrina Christiana is its rejection of creatio ex nihilo in favor of a more material view of creation. As John Guillory puts it, Milton's "God creates ex se, drawing out of himself the forms to be imposed on an already teeming universe. This matter too must ultimately be ex se " [113].Milton himself specifically writes that "the world was made out of some sort of matter," which "must either have always existed, independently of God" (as in the Platonic creation narrative) "or else originated from God at some point in time," as in ex deo creation theory [Prose 6: 307]. While the precise nature of that matter is a topic of ongoing debate, scholars have been virtually silent about the astounding fact that in Book VII of Paradise Lost some of it is abjected: the "black tartareous cold Infernal dregs / Adverse to life" are forever purged from the logocentric world. In a gesture that is at once the foundational moment of Milton's Christian cosmology and the repressed rejection that will continue to threaten it from without, Milton's God, in the heat and fury of creation, shoots out his black tartareous dregs--one shudders even to mention it--into the deep, his cosmic latrine.

Half a century ago, A. S. P. Woodhouse speculated (in a footnote) that the primordial purgation of Book VII may be "a relic of some anxious consideration of the problem of evil" [229n]. Yet any suggestion of an evil creative act, even despite Milton's own heterodoxy, would be considered distinctively un-Miltonic. ¹³ Milton himself, speaking of the original substance, claims that "this original matter was not an evil thing, nor to be thought of as worthless: it was good, and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good. . . . It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards God made it [End Page 94] ordered and beautiful" [Prose 6: 308]. His original Latin reads, "Substantia erat . . . indigesta modo et incomposita, quam Deus postea digessit et ornavit," which Charles Sumner, in the original 1825 translation, rendered: "It was a substance . . . though at first confused and formless, being afterwards adorned and digested into order by the hand of God" [Works 15: 22-23]. Although John Carey departs from the digestive metaphor in the revised edition as per above, Milton himself was attuned to the English resonances of Latin words as he was to the reverse, and it would not be inappropriate to conjecture that the notion of God's physiologically "digesting" the cosmos into order is implied in his theological treatise.At the very least, in Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton associates purgation with creation. ¹⁴

Recently, John Rogers has situated this primordial purgation within contemporary scientific debate regarding the process of digestion, and specifically the unassimilable elements of food known as "dregs" or "tartar." The problem, as Rogers rightly identifies it, is that the dregs resist assimilation into Milton's monist universe. ¹⁵ Yet they are accounted for--ejected--by means of a primordial purgation that sets Milton apart from other ex deo models of creation. Rather than being rejected or "downward purged," the dregs of traditional ex deo creation theory form part of one divine substance extending from the innermost essence of God. Macrobius, for instance, writes that "from the Supreme God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe there is one tie, binding at every link and never broken" [qtd. in Hunter, "Milton's Arianism" 37]. The dregs of Miltonic creation, on the other hand, are always already lost, consigned to a more "general" sphere beyond time and space, past the outer shell of the universe that divides the "inferior Orbs, enclos'd / From Chaos and th' inroad of Darkness old" [PL III.420-21]. As Milton makes clear in the argument to Book I, the dregs were expelled before the existence of either Heaven or Earth, cast into "a place of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos."This confusion between "utter darkness," or hell, and chaos in what is otherwise a highly articulated universe suggests that the place--if such a term may be used where no space exists--of the cosmological waste or "dregs" is itself "Abject and lost" [I.312].

Within the cosmology of Paradise Lost, Satan recognizes that he himself is hell ("myself am Hell"), which is to say the unassimilable cosmic matter of the black, tartareous dregs [IV.75]. Similarly, when Adam aligns himself with the other dregs by eating badly, he too must be purged as God commands: "Eject him tainted now, and purge him off / As a distemper, gross to air" [XI.52-53]. Indeed the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve precisely because its wider range of taste (which includes the possibility of bad or wrong taste) would usher in the world of exclusions still circulating in the chaos of a more general economy. In Paradise Regained, Milton portrays the hellish dregs as circling the earth in "midair," inhabiting the outer regions of the restricted world, or "roving still / About the world . . . Within thick Clouds and dark tenfold [End Page 95] involv'd" [I.33-41]. One might say they are "roving still" within a more general sphere from which they threaten a perpetual return. In fact, after more than two thousand lines of being put down and repulsed by the Son of God, Satan "Still will be tempting him who foils him still" [PR IV.13]. Alan Fisher has observed with regard to this line that the "emphasis falls, first and last, upon the adverb still" [199]. And as we shall see in the final section of this essay,Satan's fall at the end of the poem--an Antaeus-like fall as the narrator relates--must be read as merely one more fall. Having been "downward purged" with the other dregs in Paradise Lost, he remains in circulation within a more general economy that includes God at his radical limits; that is, God and the "Infernal dregs" he has had to reject in order to establish a world of tasteful, wastefree circulation.

Taste Deceiv'd

Perhaps the most fundamental point to be made about Milton's fictional ontology of eating is stated by the archangel Raphael in Book V of Paradise Lost. In a luncheon colloquy with Adam, he explains that all created things must, without exception, eat:

        . . . and food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require
As doth your Rational; and both contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn.
For know, whatever was created, needs
To be sustain'd and fed; [V.407-15]

It would be difficult to overestimate the amount of critical energy that has been expended upon these lines or to overemphasize their importance. ¹⁶ Whereas in his theological treatise Milton debunks the sacred meal of communion, here he invests all meals--all eating in general--with new significance. ¹⁷ In a sense, the Protestant problem of ingesting a vacuity in a purely symbolic version of communion is solved, for now one really eats God, or rather God displayed in a monist world of unified taste-objects. One no longer need limit oneself to bread, for the Word opens itself up to include a world of edible matter that is part of one divine substance. Just as all food proceeds from God, all eating leads back up to him, and Raphael suggests that such eating offers a newfound sense of pleasure. He explains that angels (who are here simply a higher form of humans) enjoy partaking with all five senses "whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, / Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate." [End Page 96]

It has been frequently observed that this pleasurable process by which angels physically partake of the materialized substance of God controverts "the common gloss / Of Theologians" [PL V.435-36], a scholastic tradition accustomed to viewing angels as purely spiritual. Harold Bloom sums things up nicely when he says that "Saint Thomas Aquinas can be taken to represent the Scholastic Catholic position that angels are purely spiritual, while the poet John Milton can stand for all those humanists and Protestants who insisted that all actual beings must be embodied.Milton, in the major work of all Western angelology . . . emphasizes that his angels eat and digest human food" [38]. ¹⁸ Yet Milton does not merely challenge tradition by asserting that angels eat; he describes how they eat in a manner that C. S. Lewis for one has found "poetically grotesque" [106]. Lewis insists that Raphael's description of angelic eating was no mere whim on the part of the poet, but poetically necessary because true: "It is inconceivable that Milton should have so emphasized the reality of angelic nourishment (and even angelic excretion) if the bodies he attributed to his angels were merely a poetical device . . . The whole passage becomes intelligible, and much less poetically grotesque, when we realize that Milton put it there simply because he thought it true" [106]. Despite Lewis's insistence on the veracity of the scene, Milton has nothing specific to say about how or what angels eat in de doctrina Christiana, and one might conclude against Lewis that the lack of angelic feeding in his lengthy theological treatise (which asserts quite an opposite point of view when it comes to eating God) shows him to have no particular investment in the "truth" of Raphael's description.

Yet it is important not to miss the key accent of Lewis's defense. What he objects to above all, and to which the details of angelic feeding merely subscribe, is the obvious gust of the passage, the fact that Raphael is not "nice" in his taste [V.433], but rather indulges himself in a moment of physiological pleasure. Here another cue might be taken from Leigh Hunt, who writes that

the great poet shewed so deep a sense of the attention worth bestowing upon his diet, and of the possible dignity, nay, divineness of the pleasure of feeding, that, during the above blissful dinners in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, he enters into an elaborate argument to shew the probability of there being eating and drinking in heaven itself; which is what few persons, we suspect, ever cared to think about, when they hoped to go there--unless it was the poor, hungry Arabs in the desert, to whom Mahomet justly thought it an attraction. [557]

By calling attention to the "pleasure of feeding," Hunt suggests the possibility that Raphael joins a consumptive economy of pleasure. It is certainly pleasure that is at stake later in the poem when the archangel Michael warns Adam: "Judge not what is best / By pleasure" [XI.603-04]. He might have stepped in several books earlier, and he might rather have said, "judge not what is best by pleasure alone," for pleasure in Milton's world is linked to knowledge as it is to the "moral question," and Raphael does not disguise his pleasure when he judges it best to accept Adam's invitation to "sit and taste" [V.369]. As he falls to his food "with keen dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate," his lower faculties are put to work tasting, concocting, digesting, assimilating, and corporeal to incorporeal turning in a systematic process whose telos is the Almighty [V.436-38]. "O Adam," exclaims the happily feasting angel, "one Almighty is, from whom / All things proceed, and up to him return" [V.469-70]. [End Page 97] When Raphael sits and tastes, therefore, his taste is bodily yet restricted, a tasteful cycle of consumption whereby everything passes through the mouth.

Milton's own pleasure in describing how angels eat and digest real food as part of one divine substance would seem to contradict the "negative pleasure" he manifests in de doctrina Christiana, when he describes the digestive reality of the sacrament of transubstantiation. Yet Raphael intends "transubstantiate" in precisely an opposite sense from before: here it means turning the corporeal into the incorporeal. Consequently, the substance of God is not "downward purged" so much as sublimated upward as spirit. Excretion becomes aspiration, as it were, evacuation a form of expression. The scale of nature that Raphael describes as a single substance proceeding from God is thus circular in shape, a looped food chain from which all excremental surplus has already been removed. The dregs have been purged, and their expulsion enables everything under the sun to partake of the consumptive economy, to find its being through eating, or more precisely a kind of eating that stops at the mouth. ¹⁹

The dregs themselves, on the other hand, who have been excluded from the cycle of pleasurable consumption, mimic the condition of subjective possibility by attempting, hopelessly, to eat. In Book X, an illusory tree springs up in hell amidst the fallen angels, who have gathered together to celebrate Satan's victory in paradise. Immediately "parcht with scalding thirst and hunger fierce . . . greedily they pluck'd / The Fruitage fair to sight" [X.556-61]. But just as they have deceived Adam and Eve into eating, the devils in turn are deceived:

        not the touch, but taste
Deceiv'd; they fondly thinking to allay
Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit
Chew'd bitter Ashes, which th' offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assay'd,
Hunger and thirst constraining, drugg'd as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writh'd thir jaws
With soot and cinders fill'd; [X.563-70]

While Milton explicitly claims that "taste" has deceived the devils, taste is in fact the only thing that has not deceived them. The fruit hanging from the phantom tree apparently looks real; it feels real, and, for all we know, smells real, but when the devils bite into it they discover that it is definitely not real fruit. Of course, if we read "deceive" in its Latinate sense of "disappoint," then taste does deceive the devils. But the paradox remains that they are deceived (disappointed) precisely because taste does not deceive them (disappoint in the sense of beguile).

If according to the cycle of consumption that regulates taste there are two means of entering the mouth, taste and distaste, there are also two means of leaving it. As Derrida observes, one would be expressive and emissive; the other, vomitive or emetic ["Economimesis" 16]. Writhing their jaws full of soot and cinders, the devils are blocked at the very point of expression. The creative power they (would) gain from eating the deceptive fruit is contrary to that of the procreative Word, and rather than becoming incorporate unto truth, sustaining themselves via a pleasing "gust," they instead become incorporate unto their own hollow deceptions, their own lies, which are [End Page 98] unincorporable and thus vomited forth "With spattering noise rejected." This self-consuming cycle of destruction is graphically illustrated by Sin, who cannibalizes herself in a grotesquerie of Satanic fabrication. She bemoans "mine own brood, that on my bowels feed" and the "yelling Monsters" who "gnaw / My Bowels, thir repast" [II.863, 795, 799-800]. ²⁰ Like her father "compos'd of lies" [PR I.407], Sin does not creatively fabricate in the sense of fabricare ("to make"), but rather destructively fabricates in the sense of "lie." ²¹ And what those who swerve from the divine Word to their own false fabrications discover is that lies cannot be tasted and expressed so much as spewed forth in a compulsive tautology deprived of all signification.

Milton's rhetorical strategy in his antiprelatical prose tracts likewise suggests that an effective way to demonize someone is to show them not expressing their words so much as vomiting or spewing them forth. The antagonist of the Second Defense of the People of England, for example, whom Milton calls "unmixed filth," "a defiler of holy things" and "a veritable devil," "vomits up . . . all the filthy language of slaves and scoundrels that can be found anywhere . . . croaking like a frog from the hellish swamps in which he swims" and "belch[ing] forth utter nonsense" [Prose 4: 1.637, 594, 633]. One need only recall Linda Blair's performance in The Exorcist to realize how this paradigm of Satanic spewing forth, as a parody of logocentric expression, perpetuates itself. ²² Indeed this may be one reason why Milton reacts so strongly when he is anonymously accused of being "vomited out" of Cambridge [Prose 1: 884]. Striking back at both antagonist and university, he writes: "Of small practize were that Physitian who could not judge by what both she [Cambridge] or her sister [Oxford], hath of long time vomited, that the worser stuffe she strongly keeps in her stomack, but the better she is ever kecking at, and is queasie" [Prose 1: 884-85]. If the emetic, Satanic lie can be considered false fabrication, parodic of the logos, those who vomit are not merely distasteful but demonic. They belong to a general economy of dysfunctional consumption where waste clogs the mouth, blocking the clean cycle of eating and expressing through taste.

Raphael provides another parodic version--or perversion--of the restricted economy of consumption that sustains Miltonic creation earlier in Paradise Lost, when he explains that

        Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind. [VII.126-30] [End Page 99]

In the epistemology of eating that Raphael describes here (based on an understanding of taste as sapere), turning "Nourishment to Wind" can mean tossing knowledge to the wind, that is, turning it into nothing rather than spirit, the expressive end-product of food. Yet it can also be read as a scatological pun whereby turning nourishment to wind would mean turning it into the kind of "subterranean wind" that means flatulence [I.231]. Milton evokes this physiological sense of wind when describing hell, the topos of waste, whose "fuell'd entrails thence conceiving Fire . . . aid the Winds, / And leave a singed bottom all involv'd / With stench and smoke" [I.234-37]. According to this latter signification, the intemperate eater would become aligned with the kind of expressive impotence displayed by the devils in Book X. Such a reading would again posit the mouth, now of "fools," as earlier of "slaves and scoundrels" and "veritable devils," as the Ur-site of emetic "expression"--a parody of logocentric expression and hence not really expression at all.

Milton employs this same use of wind in "Lycidas" when he rails against prelatical "Blind Mouths!" whose unfortunate flock

          are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said; [125-29]

The "grim Wolf" here is the Roman Catholic Church, whom Milton renders elsewhere in Reason of Church Government as a group of "ravenous and savage wolves threatning inrodes and bloody incursions upon the flock of Christ, which they took upon them to feed, but now clame to devour as their prey" [Prose 1: 856-57]. As the prelatical "Blind Mouths" spew forth "wind" and "rank mist" into the mouths of their "hungry Sheep," expression transfigures into a rank wind that fails to signify [125]. Demonically, they devour their own progeny, who in turn do not feed from the parental mouth so much as bloat with the rank and corrosive wind of meaningless expression. Rather than piping the traditional pastoral pipe, moreover, they inharmoniously "Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw" [124]--an act more vomitive than expressive since, as John Aubrey suggests, Milton himself would have pronounced "wretched" as a monosyllable: "retched." ²³ Such representations of demonic "expression" invert, and indeed pervert, the divine logocentric model, suggesting that those who follow Sin in all her varieties, rather than becoming incorporate unto the Word, become incorporate unto Wind, which is to say, "nothing."

In an economy of logocentric consumption, it is important to remember, one becomes incorporate unto what one eats. Augustine's God, for example, proclaims: "I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead you shall be changed into me" [qtd. in Kilgour 51]. Although Augustine's God is not precisely the one worshipped by Milton, his statement illustrates quite clearly the quality of reciprocity that characterizes the world of Christian consumption. In An Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton writes: "I conceav'd my selfe to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded, and whereof I had declar'd openly to be a partaker" [Prose 1: 871].To partake of the "truth" is to partake of the divine substance since, according to Milton, the primary attribute of God is truth: "he is [End Page 100] the TRUE GOD" [Prose 6: 140]. As one partakes of truth, in the sense of "taking part" of that truth, one becomes "a member incorporate into that truth," which is to say that one is eaten. ²⁴ Milton's comment even seems to suggest an excess on the side of being eaten: not only is it true that as one eats one is eaten, but, upon the authority of Milton, we may even venture to assert that one eats in order to be eaten, to become part of a wider cycle of signification. Because Satan's self-devouring egotism will not allow him to eat outward, he instead becomes an unincorporable lump, a dyspeptic "blocking agent," who must be forever repressed from the otherwise integrated system at large, the restricted world of tasteful circulation. ²⁵

Taste Redeemed

In Paradise Regained, Satan's parody of logocentric consumption becomes a compulsive tautology that sustains the four books of the poem. William B. Hunter forewarns us that its structure, as motivated by Satan, "presents one of the most difficult problems in the entire field of Milton interpretation. There is no agreement, for instance, about how many temptations Satan offers Jesus (to say nothing of what they mean)" ["Double Set" 183]. Given this sound proviso, we may nonetheless identify a basic pattern in how the poem has been read. There are those who consider the overall structure of the temptations to be one of intensification until the final climax on the "pinnacle" of Book IV; others believe that there can be no precise structure to the temptations;and still others see the structure as botched. ²⁶ I will depart from this basic schematic by proposing that after his initial defeat in tempting the Son of God to eat, Satan knows he stands no chance with the more "objective" temptations of worldly wealth and glory. ²⁷ His stubborn persistence throughout the remainder of the poem represents the perpetual tension of a world constructed at the expense of waste: its unassimilable elements return as indigestible matter that disturbs the universe.

As the general-economic backdrop against which taste is made possible, the dregs (assuming the shape of Satan) fly in the face of the good, because correct, taste of Christ. Man may have been seasoned by Sin, but Jesus has not, and in him Satan encounters something he cannot or will not consume: the Word incarnate in the shape of man. For despite the biblical characterization of Satan as stalking the Earth indiscriminately "seeking whom he may devour" [I Peter 5: 8], in Paradise Regained Satan reveals his taste to be as discriminating as it is bad. Or to be historically accurate, it is [End Page 101] [Begin Page 103] wrong. In the early years of the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury will assert that "there must of necessity be the foundation of a right and wrong taste" [1: 216]. Hume, similarly, will speak of an "erroneous" taste [147], Burke of a "wrong" or "mad" taste [14], and Kant of "an erroneous judgement of taste"[Critique 57]. In Milton's poem both Satan and Son are thus, ironically, "exact of taste." Yet Satan's erroneous taste, his general-economic inability to tastefully consume, is the very condition of possibility for the aesthetically, morally, and epistemologically correct taste of the Son.

Having succeeded with Eve in Paradise Lost, Satan now wastes no time in challenging the Son to eat:

But if thou be the Son of God, Command
That out of these hard stones be made thee bread;
So shalt thou save thyself and us relieve
With Food, whereof we wretched seldom taste. [I.342-45]

Critics dispute whether these lines represent a temptation to "distrust" [I.355] in God's provenance or a temptation to eat intemperately. Whatever Satan's motives may be, he is asking the Son of God to "save" himself with food--specifically bread--to avoid dropping like a "Carcass, pin'd with hunger and with drought" [I.325]. However indirectly, in other words, Satan is asking Jesus to eat. With a degree of irony, the Son responds:

Think'st thou such force in Bread? is it not written
(For I discern thee other than thou seem'st)
Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word
Proceeding from the mouth of God, who fed
Our Fathers here with Manna? [I.347-51]

As if to a negligent or unwilling pupil, Jesus here recites the basic formula of Christianity and a virtual Protestant mantra, converting everything into spirituality: "Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word / Proceeding from the mouth of God." Yet it is enough to recall the scriptural "man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD" [Deut. 8: 3] to realize that the Son does not speak his own words here.

For Milton, the fallacy of translating Jewish law into Christian terms, or in particular the material bread of Deuteronomy into the "living bread" of the gospel ("I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger" [John 6: 35]), is responsible for the "monstrous" sacrament of communion that he considers a "cannibal feast." As we have seen, in Paradise Lost the eucharistic meal becomes reconceived as a restricted economy of consumption in which all food proceeds from the mouth of God and all eating leads back up to him. At the center of that economy is the Son himself, the materialized logos, who now represents a world of edible matter. For just as Satan is expelled in the constitutive moment of Miltonic creation, the Son (standing in for God's Word) participates in creation by circumscribing the world around himself [PL VII.225-31]. Both are created; both play a role in creation. Both, in fact, sacrifice themselves to creation. Quoting scripture, the Son reveals himself to be something less and yet something more than a man, a type of symbolic castrato or sacrifice to a consumptive economy in which he circulates as "that living Bread which, Christ says, is his flesh" [Prose 6: 553]. The crucial distinction is that while the Son recognizes his status as part of the restricted world--he is "first of created things" and "firstborn of all creation" [Prose 6: 206, 419]--his antagonist regards himself as "self-begot." ²⁸ This fatal self-delusion on [End Page 103] the part of Satan necessitates his exclusion from the world of logocentric circulation.

After his first rebuff by the Son, Satan returns to the other dregs, who are still circulating somewhere in the "middle region of thick air," and reports that he has "found him, view'd him, tasted him, but find[s] / Far other labor to be undergone" [II.131-32]. How exactly are we to understand that Jesus has been "tasted" here? He has certainly been "tested," but given Milton's pressure on physiological "taste" in Paradise Lost, it is worth considering that the Son has been literally "tasted" by an antagonist who finds him to be something he cannot consume. Satan is Satan, after all, by virtue of his refusal to partake of a cycle of consumption founded on the "living bread." The other dregs, however, who are unable to recognize what Satan in his deepest heart knows, and what his attitude indicates here (the futility of "other labor"), propose to "Set women in his eye and in his walk" [II.153].Satan betrays a suspicion that Jesus hungers for nothing he could possibly offer when he rejects the idea out of hand and proclaims: "with manlier objects we must try / His constancy" [II.225-26]. Gregory W. Bredbeck argues convincingly that these "manlier objects" are figured homoerotically in the banquet of Book II, showing that Satan ultimately takes--and perverts--their suggestion despite his own knowledge of its futility. His meaningless, nonproductive efforts to get the Son to eat make no sense in a restricted world, but they are natural to a general-economic universe governed by waste, one where tasting is not the making of selfhood but the unravelling of all identity. Against all odds, and his own better judgment, therefore, Satan still feels that he still "must try."

It is not until the second book of the poem that the Son expresses any explicit desire to eat, and Barbara K. Lewalski takes him to mean that he "does not actually experience hunger until Book II" [202]. Although he has been fasting for forty days, Jesus claims that he is "Now hung'ring first" [II.245]:

But now I feel I hunger, which declares
Nature hath need of what she asks; yet God
Can satisfy that need some other way,
Though hunger still remain: so it remain
Without this body's wasting, I content me,
And from the sting of Famine fear no harm,
Nor mind it, fed with better thoughts that feed
Mee hung'ring more to do my Father's will. [II.252-59]

Note that Jesus does not say, "I hunger." Instead, he assumes a critical distance from the "I" that hungers and observes, somewhat intellectually for a starving person, "I feel I [End Page 104] [Begin Page 106] hunger." And just as he distances himself from the hungering "I," he does so from bodily need. It is not Jesus himself who needs, we are led to believe, but the more abstracted Nature: "Nature hath need of what she asks." But if hunger is, as Satan calls it, "life's enemy" [II.372], can there really be hunger without bodily need, without the visceral fear of death? The Son's "hunger" seems a mere empty signifier for a more primal hunger that can be heard in the very sound of the word: hunger, itself a cry reverberating back through the Old English hungor, the Old Saxon hungar, the Germanic hunger, Old Teutonic huhru, from pre-Teutonic kukru, akin to the Lithuanian kankra ("torment"), or kenkti, "to ache" [OED]. There is very little torment or aching, I would argue, in this highly rational, disinterested soliloquy on the Son of God's "hunger." Even when he dreams of food in biblical tradition, Jesus himself does not dream, but "appetite" dreams "as appetite is wont to dream, / Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet" [II.264-65]. Yet if Nature needs, and appetite dreams, where is the "I" who says "I feel"?

Satan himself wonders. After having offered textual precedent for giving into hunger, citing in legalistic fashion the cases of Nebaioth, Elijah, and the emigrating Jews from Exodus (omitting the fact that their food was not Satanic), Satan meets with the following reply: "What conclud'st thou hence? / They all had need, I as thou seest have none" [II.317-18]. Quite naturally wondering how, if Jesus has no need, it can be possible for him to hunger, Satan demands: "How hast thou hunger then?" [II.319]. Unfortunately, he does not press the question or even pause for an answer. Instead, in his self-destructive dash to perform the impossible, to get Jesus to eat, he quickly continues: "Tell me, if Food were now before thee set, / Would'st thou not eat? Thereafter as I like / The giver, answer'd Jesus"[II.320-22]. This exchange is highly nebulous if not equivocal. While Jesus's response is usually interpreted to mean that he will eat inasmuch as he likes the giver, it also implies that if he eats, he will become like the giver, or a part of what he part(t)akes. ²⁹ Satan himself seems to intuit some overlap, for his foredoomed effort to get Jesus to partake--to like/be like him or in plain terms to "sit and eat"--becomes increasingly desperate. His courteous invitation, "only deign to sit and eat," shortly transforms into the more testy "What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?" [II.336, 368]. Finally, a mere nine lines later, he loses all patience and commands: "What doubt'st thou Son of God? sit down and eat" [II.377]. This repeated overture to "sit and eat" may serve as a Satanic perversion of Adam's invitation to "sit and taste" in the fifth book of Paradise Lost. However, Satan's offerings are not part of the divine substance so much as stuff of Satanic fabrication that exceeds the bounds of tasteful consumption.

Considering the ill success of his first attempt to get Jesus to eat, ought one to agree with Hunter that "having failed in the former, Satan is a simpleton to propose the latter" ["Double Set" 184]? Why does he try again, conjuring up an elaborate feast in the desert? Is he a simpleton, a fool, a proverbial dog returning to its vomit? As we know from Book X of Paradise Lost, the devils do repeat their folly in a kind of mock-creative gesture that is tautological as it is self-destructive. Yet like most things in this problematic poem, whether Satan does in fact repeat himself in the banquet of Book II remains unclear. Critics divide over whether the feast should be regarded as part of the second temptation to worldly wealth and glory, or an awkward repetition of the first [End Page 106] temptation to eat. Whether it is intended to appeal to Jesus's hunger for the first or the second time, the meal is certainly sumptuously extreme, discordant with the kind of wants that one would expect of a simple desert itinerant:

A Table richly spread, in regal mode,
With dishes pil'd, and meats of noblest sort
And savor, Beasts of chase, or Fowl of game,
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boil'd,
Grisamber stream'd; all Fish from Sea or Shore . . .
Alas how simple, to these Cates compar'd,
Was the crude Apple that diverted Eve! [II.440-49]

Charles Lamb interprets the above banquet as "The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits": "The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves?" [2: 93-94]. While Lamb's essay can itself be read as a satire on taste, his point is well taken: has the "subtle Fiend" lost all subtlety?

One contemporary meaning of subtle, which may be applied to the serpent in Genesis [3: 1], is "ethereal or nonmaterial." And when Satan describes the illusory nymphs and stripling youths who minister to his feast ("All these are Spirits of Air, and Woods, and Springs, / Thy gentle Ministers, who come to pay / Thee homage, and acknowledge thee thir Lord" [II.374-76]), his words seem to come directly from the mouth of Prospero. In fact, could Jesus detect the Shakespearean resonances in Satan's speech, he might discover something he already knew, namely that the banquet is an elaborate fabrication. When Satan invites him to partake of various kinds of flesh "In pastry built," he refers to the highly ornate, sugary "subtleties," such as the "pasty royal," that adorned the tables of Renaissance banquets. Prospero uses this same trope in The Tempest when he observes to his spellbound guests: "You do yet taste / Some subtleties o' th' isle, that will [not] let you / Believe things certain" [V.i.123-25]. Whether or not we can relate Prospero's light, fanciful confections to Satan's fabricated pastries, we can certainly derive the subtle fiend's subtleties from the more generic category of airy fabrication. For surely enough, once the Son declines to partake, "Both Table and Provision vanish'd quite / With sound of Harpies' wings and Talons heard" [II.402-03]--just as they do in Act III of The Tempest.

Although Satan has tried every means and failed to get Jesus to "sit and eat," he does not cease in his effort to get him to swallow what he has to say. There is in fact a long scriptural tradition of seeing text itself as food. Ezekiel is told, "eat this roll . . . cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with the roll that I give thee," which to him tasted as sweet as honey [Ezek. 3: 1-3]. Similarly, in the Book of Revelation, John is given a little scroll by an angel, who commands: "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth as sweet as honey" [Rev. 10: 9-10]. Milton recognizes this tradition of textual consumption in Areopagitica, where he writes that "books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance . . . best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction" [Prose 2: 512]. Yet for such textual eating to qualify as aesthetic eating--or taste--pleasure must be involved. Otherwise, despite its epistemological significance, it would merely constitute what Shaftesbury will later call "a sort of task-reading, in which a taste is not permitted" [1: 221]. [End Page 107]

But to be precise, Satan does not spend the remainder of the poem tempting Jesus with the pleasures of text per se, so much as a seemingly endless stream of spoken verbiage--his own honeyed words. Satan's lies are false food, fabrications opposed to the Word, for as the Son of God tells him in Book I, "[It] was thy chosen task, / To be a liar in four hundred mouths; / For lying is thy sustenance, thy food" [I.427-29]. And the fact that discourse, like text, may be consumed as food we know from Paradise Lost, where Adam tells Raphael: "sweeter thy discourse is to my ear / Than Fruits of Palm-tree pleasantest to thirst" [VIII.211-12]. Fisher suggests that for Milton, speech is text: "Milton did not think his readers would be detached listeners. Speechmaking implies the same attention he described as the 'ingesting' of books--indeed, a book, for Milton, is an oration in print" [199].Given his several decades of experience with prose oration, we might accept this point of view and consider the temptations following the banquet of Book II as Satanic offerings of food in the form of speech-text. While readers often complain that Paradise Regained is devoid of action and almost wholly composed of speeches, these post-banquet harangues are part of Milton's point: they are manifestations of Satan's excessive nature, his status as "non-productive expenditure." Indeed the legacy of readerly distaste with his speech registers the efficacy of his powers as "blocking agent," his tartar-like indigestibility.

Satan himself recognizes the surplus nature of his speech, the fact that having failed to convince the Son to "sit and eat" the sensually resplendent subtleties of the banquet (with all the "fragrant smell diffus'd" that "the crude Apple that diverted Eve" could not even muster), he can hardly expect to get him to partake of intellectual food, which must appeal to him on a more objective level. Nevertheless, we are told that "Satan, whom repulse upon repulse / Met ever . . . gives not o'er though desperate of success" [IV.21-23]. It is in his nature to persist, and though "desperate of success," he continues to heap his sugary fabrications upon his temperate foe. The Son, for his part, yields to an impulse to taunt Satan by mocking his style of speech. After the longwinded fiend has done his best to arouse his appetite for the glories of the Roman empire, the Son in turn instructs him, "thou should'st add to tell / Thir sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts / On Citron tables or Atlantic stone . . ." [IV.113-15]. By mimicking Satan's style of temptation here, Jesus proves himself capable of fabrication, though presumably not the kind "compos'd of lies." Joining in the rhetorical game, he demystifies it, stripping his opponent of all power of illusion: he sees through his "subtleties," which consequently melt into air.

Finally, after nearly two thousand lines of Satanic frustration, of failing to get Jesus to "sit and eat" either literally or figuratively, Satan sets him on the highest pinnacle of the holy city of Jerusalem and demands: "There stand, if thou wilt stand" [IV.551]. This pinnacle scene has a proliferating literature of its own, but the two critical points at issue remain: "(1) whether or not this scene is a part of the temptation proper or is a 'climactic epilogue' to an action already complete, and (2) whether this confrontation is decisive in a way that its predecessors were not" [Fish 87]. Unlike the previous temptations, in which the via negativa of resistance was simply the best way for Jesus to proceed, here it is (so to speak) impossible to resist. Should he choose to save himself by resorting to divine intervention, he would give up his human status, and so give into Satan. If, on the other hand, he allows himself to fall, he would be giving in to presumption, self-destruction, and consequently, Sin and Satan. One might agree with Fisher that "[t]he situation is Satan's masterpiece"[211]. However, if we set Satan's command to "stand" against his repeated challenge to "sit and eat," then it becomes a clever maneuver to undermine Jesus's via negativa of resistance, his stance of refusing to sit. If Satan cannot get him to voluntarily sit and eat, in other words, he ingeniously takes away the possibility that he can remain standing. [End Page 108]

Nevertheless, as literary history tells us, "he said and stood." Presumably through some force of will or muscular agility, Jesus stands his ground and proclaims: "Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood. / But Satan smitten with amazement fell . . ." [IV.561-62]. While the consecutive line endings "stood" and "fell" are meant to contrast one another as alternate modes of conduct,it is significant that the latter line is enjambed.Satan does not merely fall. He falls like Antaeus, as we learn in line 563, and Antaeus famously gains renewed strength with every fall. Like Antaeus, Satan is perpetually falling, perpetually eating his own words, and perpetually being expelled. As Raphael makes clear, "whatever was created, needs / To be sustained and fed," and eating one's own words as a created thing is lying and self-consuming. Within the confines of the poem, therefore, Satan self-destructs in fulfillment of the prophetic words that "evil on itself shall back recoil": "Gather'd like scum, and settl'd to itself, . . . It shall be in eternal restless change / Self-fed and self-consum'd" [A Mask 593-97]. Satanic consumption leads not to expression, but to emission, fabrication, waste: his is not self-making but unmaking through taste.

Yet paradoxically in the end are Satan and Son not reflections of each other in a wider general-economic universe? Maggie Kilgour proposes that "[a]t the end of Paradise Regained the antithetical brothers stand together on the temple of their father--giving Milton a choice opportunity to knock one down" [137].In a similar manner, James Nohrnberg writes that the Son's "filial identity is the birthright Satan as twin has deeded over to his other" [88]. Who is Milton's Savior-hero? The one whose sacrifice posits him at the center of an economy of consumption founded on "That living bread which, Christ says, is his flesh" [Prose 6: 553]?Or the one whose sacrifice--expulsion, purgation--enables the creation of the consumptive economy in the first place? Such questions prompt us to take seriously Satan's proposition that

The Son of God . . . bears no single sense;
The Son of God I also am, or was,
And if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are Sons of God; [IV.517-20]

From his own perspective, it would seem that Satan is supplemental to the Son. In the sense that we have come to understand this term from Derrida, he would be "a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. . . . But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void" [Of Grammatology 144-45]. Satan supplements by filling in the potentiality of what the Son could be, extending him to his radical limits. Yet in doing so, he insinuates himself "in-the-place-of." As the Satanic school of Milton's Romantic readers will attest, the supplemental Son has a dangerously seductive appeal. Maintaining himself in the chaos of waste that surrounds Miltonic creation, Satan offers an alternative (albeit emetic) discourse, a supplemental fecundity in the form of lies.

However, Milton's particular genius is in proscribing his supplement to an outside that prohibits true supplementarity. Satan cannot operate in the same realm as the Son, for his supplementarity takes the form of that very excess which the restricted world of Miltonic creation cannot contain. As the abjected dregs of creation, he remains an indigestible, unassimilable irritant within the system at large. Yet where Satan and (legitimate) Son do theoretically converge is the ground of their mutual restriction: Jesus refusing to eat the false food, speeches, lies of Satan, and Satan refusing to swallow the Word that is Christ. In the obstinacy of their resistance, they define themselves--as what they will not eat, what they will not be, their not-to-consume forming the condition [End Page 109] of possibility for taste. Ultimately, one is led to suspect that the discrimination of Miltonic taste finally resounds in the depths of despair, the bottomless sarcasm of Adam's "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste. . . . And Palate call judicious." A more poignant claim to the subject-making capacity of taste--its ability to delimit and hence define the self--may not anywhere be found.

For help with earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank Erik Gray, Mark Hansen, Timothy Morton, Joanna Picciotto, Christopher Rovee, Nigel Smith, Abe Stoll, Joseph Wittreich, and Michael Wood.

Denise Gigante is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. She is working on a book on aesthetics and appetite from Milton to Keats.

Notes

1. The twelve-book Paradise Lost appeared in 1674, the same year as Boileau's French translation of Peri Hypsous, marking the beginning of the sublime tradition in England. As Lucy Newlyn explains, "The concept of the sublime is inseparable from Milton's influence on eighteenth-century theorists: Addison, Johnson, Burke, Blaire all turn to Paradise Lost for their prime examples of sublimity of language; so that by the end of the eighteenth century, Milton and the sublime have come to be regarded as practically synonymous" [3].

2. The link between knowledge and pleasure reaches back to Aristotelian poetics; Derrida argues that Kant's third Critique is the place where pleasure finally detaches itself from knowledge ["Economimesis" 10]; cf. Truth in Painting [113]. Although others place the dissociation later, in the nineteenth century, the link between knowledge and pleasure is generally assumed throughout the Century of Taste.

3. When Eve foresees her own transgressive eating in a dream influenced by the serpent, however, she reflects, "He pluckt, he tasted" [V.65]. It is precisely this ambiguity between eating and taste--the physiological and the philosophical--that must be kept in mind throughout the evil meal.

4. The 1611 King James translation of Genesis [3: 11-13] gives Milton his archaic past-tense "eat." Although certain later translations use "ate," its grammatical placement is always the same.

5. The tradition of reading de doctrina Christiana as a gloss on Paradise Lost effectively begins with Maurice Kelley's This Great Argument (1941). The relation between treatise and poetry has been a concern in Milton scholarship since 1991, however, when William B. Hunter challenged Milton's authorship of the treatise. After a series of articles and rebuttals, a final committee report on "The Provenance of de doctrina Christiana" appeared in Milton Quarterly 31.3 (1997), affirming Milton's authorship but warning: "The relationship of de doctrina Christiana to the Milton oeuvre must remain uncertain, since in the case of a work of revision that has halted before completion we cannot know what other changes, especially what deletions of doctrines to which he did not subscribe, Milton would have made in completing his task" [Campbell et al. 110]. Cf. Hunter's full-length study, Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of de doctrina Christiana (1998).

6. The title of Milton's final pamphlet, Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, and What Best Means May be Us'd against the Growth of Popery (1673) testifies to the lifelong nature of his anti-Catholicism; while he expresses extensive tolerance toward Arians, Socinians, and other Protestant sects, he shows virtually none toward Catholics.

7. Critical concern with Milton's monism can be traced to Denis Saurat's Milton: Man and Thinker (1925); however, its widespread acceptance is owing to J. H. Adamson's "Milton and the Creation" (1961), which made it possible to understand Milton's monism in a way that does not presume a material, hence esoteric, God. Adamson points out that Milton himself is careful to avoid attributing corporality to God, for according to Milton, the substance of God contains a "bodily force," but not necessarily a body [Prose 6: 309]. Stephen M. Fallon provides a critical overview of this topic in his study of Milton's "animist materialism" [4-6].

8. Hamacher is speaking with reference to Hegel's critique of the Catholic sacrament of communion, an extension of the metaphysical qualms of Milton.

9. The term "negative pleasure" (borrowed from Derrida) stems from the experience of Kantian sublimity in which "the mind is not merely attracted by the object but is ever being alternately repelled" [qtd. from Critique §23 in "Economimesis" 21].

10. In his effort to rethink the kind of traditional humanisms that take the flesh-eating male as its subjective unit, Derrida invokes discourses as disparate as Levinasian ethics and Heidegger's revisionary metaphysics in "Eating Well." David L. Clark explains that for Derrida the point is to think critically about how these discourses and regimes "(i) 'install the virile figure at the determinative center of the subject'; (ii) abject those (others) who are deemed not to have the same brawny 'appetites' as 'men' . . . and (iii) sacrifice animals in such a way that their being put to death is not considered killing" [176-77].

11. The Accursed Share is Bataille's major work on general economy, though the concept informs "The Notion of Expenditure" and other essays in Visions of Excess.

12. "Vomit or excrement, for example, overflows any project of containment or circumscription, and such excess is responsible for defying the restricted economy of mimetic representation" [Richman 148].

13. John P. Rumrich has recently asserted (in another footnote) that the fact that the "black tartareous cold infernal dregs," which he associates with "God's material potency," can be actualized as dregs "does not mean that evil is latent in chaos, any more than evil is latent in the God who establishes hell . . . God's material potency must include the possibility of matter with which to create such a place as hell" ["Milton's God" 1045n].

14. What would be endlessly suggestive, though perhaps futile to dispute, is whether Milton viewed his own digestive processes as responsible for his poetic creation. In a letter to Leonard Philaras he writes, "It is ten years, I think, more or less, since I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim, and at the same time my spleen and all my viscera burdened and shaken with flatulence" [Prose 4: 2, 869]. Kerrigan argues convincingly that, in accord with contemporary physiology, Milton believed his blindness to be caused by indigestion [202 ff.]. Viewed in this light, the paradigm of "blindness and insight" would become, for Milton, one of "blindness and indigestion"--as in the invocation to Book III of Paradise Lost, where the poet asks divine aid to "Purge and disperse" all inward mist (foul digestive vapors) so that he may create [III.54].

15. Rogers reads this problem in political terms. Noting Woodhouse's speculation that the primordial purgation may be "a relic of some anxious consideration of the problem of evil," he argues that such anxiety, rather than remaining a strictly theological question, reflects the political worries of Milton's late writings [130-43].

16. For the most part, scholars have focused on scriptural sources for the meal and on other analogous scenes of eating. John E. Parish, for instance, compares the scene to angelic meals shared with Abraham and Tobit and to classical meals shared by gods and mortals in Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. John F. Huntley compares it to the meal Sin prepares for Death, and to the one Satan offers Christ in Paradise Regained. Anthony Low focuses on the vegetarian nature of the meal as a typological prefiguration of the Puritan communion service. Marshall Grossman refers back to Parish and Low in interpreting the meal as a prelapsarian communion associated with a Protestant understanding of the sacrament. Jack Goldman questions the distinction between prelapsarian vegetarianism and postlapsarian carnivorousness.

17. Along similar lines, see Kerrigan [222-23].

18. On the theological and philosophical background for Miltonic angelology, see Robert H. West [164-69]; Lewis [108-15]; Kerrigan [193-262], among others.

19. Indeed the sun itself does not escape the pervasive need of all of creation to eat: "The Sun that light imparts to all, receives / From all his alimental recompense / In humid exhalations, and at Even / Sups with the Ocean" [V.423-26]. And one need only recall Satan's speech on Mount Niphates [IV.32-39] to recognize the Son in the sun, the fact that he too must eat (with a view, moreover, to being eaten).

20. This portrait of Sin finds a precursor in Spenser's allegorical figure of Errour, who "bred / A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, / Sucking upon her poisonous dugs . . . Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone" [Fairie Queene I.i.15]. Similarly, in Milton's early poem "On Time," Time is urged to "glut thyself with what thy womb devours" [4]. Here "womb" can mean both stomach and bowels, as well as uterus [OED]; cf. PL II.657.

21. The distinction is one Kant notes as well: "To fabricate is consciously representing the false as true. . . . Fiction propagated as truth, however, is a lie"--in illustration whereof, he quotes Horace, "Turpiter atrum desinit in piscem mulier formosa supern [The woman, well shaped on top, ends below ugly in a black fish"] [Anthropology 150n]. This Horatian portrait of false fabrication clearly prefigures Sin, who "seemed woman to the waist, and fair, / But ended foul in many a scaly fold" [PL II.650-51], or of Dagon "upward Man / And downward Fish" [I.462-63], or any of the other devils, "monstrous shapes" [I.479] in various forms of fleshly disfigurement.

22. In William Friedkin's 1973 theological horror film, Blair's Satanically possessed character spits out foul, fragmented language along with projectile vomit.

23. According to Aubrey, Milton, when being satirical, "pronounced [the] letter R very hard . . . A certaine sign of a Satyricall Witt" [qtd. in Darbishire 1023].

24. If this sounds like an Althusserian mode of establishing subjectivity--that is, losing oneself at the moment of becoming a subject--I am bound to concur. Orthodox Marxism notoriously draws its representational devices from Christianity, and, as Plotnitsky suggests, the notion of circular, economic return may be theoretically inescapable [71].

25. Bloom reminds us that in the Hebrew Bible "Satan" is not a proper name; in the Book of Job he is called ha-Satan ("the Satan"), which means something like "blocking agent" [67].

26. On Paradise Regained as a series of mounting temptations see, for example, Elizabeth Marie Pope and Barbara K. Lewalski, who read it in relation to the gospel tradition of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The randomness of the temptations is usually considered Stanley Fish's argument: "one cannot say this or that moment is crucial, because every moment is crucial (every moment offers an opportunity to be either faithful or idolatrous)" [77]. However, Alan Fisher argues to similar effect in an article that appeared slightly before Fish's, reading the poem as an endurance test that tempts the reader to fall through inattention. Hunter himself sees the structure as botched ["Double Set" 191].

27. Kant opposes the "objective" senses of hearing, sight, and touch to the more "subjective" senses of taste and smell: "The first three senses are those of perception (of the surface), while the other two are senses of pleasure (of innermost sensation)" [Anthropology 44-45].

28. Milton's view of the Son as "first of created things" constitutes one of the central "heresies" of de doctrina Christiana in denying the doctrine of equality of Father and Son. He ridicules "the bizarre and senseless idea that the Son, although personally and numerically distinct, was nevertheless essentially one with the Father" and remarks: "It would have been a waste of time for God to thunder forth so repeatedly that first commandment which said that he was the one and only God, if it could nevertheless be maintained that another God existed as well, who ought himself to be thought of as the only God" [Prose 6: 212]. Cf. God's pronouncement in Paradise Lost: "This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son" [V.603-04]. However, the precise nature of Milton's Son remains a highly vexed topic among Milton scholars. Focal points in the debate include Kelley's situation of him in relation to the complex tradition of Arianism [84-106] and Hunter's trinitarian rebuttal in "Milton's Arianism Reconsidered" [9-35]; cf. J. H. Adamson's "Milton's 'Arianism'" and C. A. Patrides's "Milton and Arianism," published along with Hunter in Bright Essence [53-61 and 63-77, respectively]. Bauman provides a detailed reassessment of Milton's Arianism, and Rumrich discusses its significance in twentieth-century reception history ["Milton's Arianism: Why It Matters" 75-92].

29. Critics have discovered biblical precedent for the former reading in Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's Table, and of the table of devils" [I Cor. 10: 21]. Lee Sheridan Cox builds a persuasive argument around this idea, andMilton himself suggests a similar notion in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, where the Lady declares: "I would not taste thy treasonous offer; none / But such as are good men can give good things, / And that which is not good, is not delicious / To a well-govern'd and wise appetite" [702-05].

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