Law as Metaphor and Morality in Milton's Samson Agonistes

Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 2, pp. 440-469, 2006

31 Pages Posted: 16 Jan 2002 Last revised: 21 Oct 2022

See all articles by Jonathan Yovel

Jonathan Yovel

University of Haifa - Faculty of Law; NYU School of Law - Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice; Yale Law School

Abstract

Milton's last, and most personally passionate work Samson Agonistes subtly uses legal conceptualization in framing various phases of its protagonist's life-experience. The same can be said of its use of law as a secularized order of obligations on different levels of metaphor. Legal concepts inform Samson's relation to God (the drama's invisible character), to the power that was entrusted to him, to his captives, his people, the women in his life, and to himself as a special form of other. These are not openly invoked: in each of the poem's major parts some legal construction is introduced metaphorically in such a way as to render coherence, meaning and unity to its central argument, while generally avoiding legal terminology and nomenclature. Metaphorical opacity notwithstanding, there is a sense here of the source of normative obligation being transformed from divine command (or grace) to a secularized paradigm of legality. Through their distinctive and developing voices, characters reveal their relations as framed by mutual expectations grounded in reciprocal rights and duties conveniently conforming to the form of legal relations. Likewise, claims of transgressions - Dalila betraying her husband and her wedlock-bands, Samson violating God's trust - are arranged and presented in recognizable social-normative forms, i.e., along legal lines of English (rather than merely biblical) family law, property law, and the law of trusts and bonds, respectively. Thus Samson regards himself alternately as a person indebted to God who must repay a debt, and as a trustee who has defaulted on his trust and must be subjected not just to a sanction, but to a remedy as well. As for the conjugal, familial relationship between Samson and Dalila - wedded love - that is Milton's invention and at that one of focal importance not merely for the interpretation of the poem offered here, but to any attempt of interpretation. The biblical story says nothing to the extent that Samson and Dalila were wedded or married, a fact especially significant in contrast to the explicit report concerning Samson's first (and unnamed) wife, to whom he was married, and who was also a Philistine. Also because, in fact, nowhere does it say that Dalila was a Philistine at all. Framing their relationship in a recognized social-legal (but not, of course, religious) institution, namely family, allows Milton to invoke the specific duties and obligations that matrimony entails. In the Bible, the story of Samson and Dalila is about passion, love, struggle, power, remorse, treachery, and play. Milton shifted all that to a normative framework underlined by a clear legal foundation that was the basis for his own turbulant marriage (to a monarchist philistine), as well. Thus Samson and Dalila share wedded love rather than an unqualified version, a natural love, or companionship, or lust, or merely cohabitation.

Even a person's legal-political affiliation and ensuing obligation to her nation (e.g., Dalila's duties to Philistia) are presented in legalized argument - one that can run with competing arguments - rather than in the simpler form (is it simpler?) of tribal loyalty. Indeed, so prevalent and basic are these legal notions to the way in which Milton constructs the poem that they are, a) quite essential to any adequate interpretation of the work (in a particular sense discussed below), and b) shed additional light on the centrality of the concepts of law and legal order in Milton's later thought, and in that of English reformation and late renaissance (that is to say, early modernity) in general. In particular, Milton's free usage of distinctly secular (or secularized) legal conceptions - although Biblical law does figures in the work - draws away, if not its fundamental Puritan religiosity, nonetheless a significant measure of its religious fervor (in particular of the Calvinist brand).

Of course, the point of secularized language should not be over-stretched. Milton uses the chorus in Samson to condemn atheists, who think not God at all and thus walk obscure, and battles against the emerging secular, rationalistic philosophy of transcendentalism and immanence, echoing Descartes' fiercest opponents. But like a true Protestant his true arrows he keeps for religious, Christian, rather than secular heretics: those do not deny god but who doubt his ways not just and give the reins to wandering thought. Yet even here Milton form and traces obligation - even when it is toward God - along legalistic, rather than purely religious lines. These lines grant Samson and other characters the freedom of advocacy and argument that law does generally, as well as lends at times them a moral and prudential rather than strictly religious tone. Even the classical form of the drama - a sequence of dialogues interrupted by the chorus' comments and depictions of peripheral action - is used in conformity with the model of advocacy, of exchange of arguments, indictment and defense, examination and counter-examination (this is especially true of Samson's charged dialogue with Dalila.) In this respect Samson anticipates modernity's infusion with an independent notion of legality and should not be read within the interpretative dogma of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, as a predominantly religious expression of man's position in the universe and his relation to God.

This essay will examine how law figures in Samson Agonistes and attempt to bear out the general claim in its components. Such an effort is particularly challenged by Miltonian language's nontransparency to its metaphorical devices. Law looms in Samson, but it is not always apparent. This itself is a subtle meta-claim: that persons may be, and mostly are, unaware of law's actual prevalence in how they construct, interpret and narrate their lives. This does not mean merely that persons as social agents are subject to legal stipulations and norms of which they generally take no notice - a true if banal observation. In its more meaningful sense, law's structures and notions inform the ways in which we interpret, shape, and act in non-legal contexts, or at least in such contexts where law is not considered the salient framework of meaning for relations and experience (or, to use Habermas' comprehensive term, the interpretative and performative aspects of life-world). As WH Auden writes in a poem that for some has become almost a litany, Law Like Love, law can be elusive, intimate, and tricky to locate: Like love we don't know where or why: clearly not the distinct social institution that positivistic jurisprudence by and large takes law to be. Auden was not the first to use this metaphorical net: Milton himself presented the reverse metaphorical order in Paradise Lost: Hail wedded love, mysterious law! Such is the power of metaphor that in carrying both conceptual and representational content across contexts it perpetually pervades new domains; and at least as to where and why - concerning law as a framework of relations and as a distinct kind of order in Samson - a few conjectures will be offered here. This will then serve also for a few comments about metaphor and its role in law and in legally-informed - although not necessarily aware - language.

Keywords: metaphor, modernity, secularism, Milton, Law & literature, law & language

Suggested Citation

Yovel, Jonathan, Law as Metaphor and Morality in Milton's Samson Agonistes. Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 2, pp. 440-469, 2006, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=281707

Jonathan Yovel (Contact Author)

University of Haifa - Faculty of Law ( email )

Mount Carmel
Haifa, 31905
Israel

NYU School of Law - Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice ( email )

New York
United States

Yale Law School ( email )

P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520-8215
United States
203.435.5911 (Phone)

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