We uncover God in Book III chilling in the mother of all armchairs with Jesus, the first-born, on God’s right wing, both spectators of the Big Match of Hell as if engrossed in a football match on a giant wide-screen television:
Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversarie, whom no bounds
Prescrib’d, no barrs of Hell, nor all the chains
Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desperat revenge, that shall redound
Upon his rebellious head. (III:80-86)
God finds no fault with His own fatherless lack of refereeing skills:
... whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall (III:96-99)
But a reasonable parent does not sit idly by while an offspring’s spat turns into a cannon-shoot with engines of war. And a child makes an informed decision when properly educated and supervised. The cuddly Manson Family were a soft-hearted bunch of flower-power charmers by comparison:
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;
As if Predestination over-rul’d
Thir will, dispos’d by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault (III:112-118)
A reasonable parent does not hoof the third part of his children into the long grass of Hell and relegate the loyal rest to a not-fit-for-purpose nightmare of a planet the far side of the universe.
If Life were the Jeremy Kyle show we’d be grilling God on stage as the abusive parent.
They trespass, Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formed them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves. (III:122-125)
The victims of this bonfire of the innocents, the mass loss of innocence, will welcome the relief of the crumbs and the drippings from an indolent God’s high table, but the giving of grace is severely rationed:
Men therefore shall find grace,
The other none ...
But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine. (III:131-132 &134)
Was War in Heaven a prerequisite of God’s holy masterplan? Is God comfortable with the creation of Hell?
The reader discovers in a private moment with God the reason for having been farm-raised like the pods from the film Alien:
What thinkst thou then of mee, and this my State,
Seem I to thee sufficiently possest
Of happiness, or not? who am alone
From all Eternitie, for none I know
Second to mee or like, equal much less.
How have I then with whom to hold converse
Save with the Creatures which I made, and those
To me inferior (VIII:403-410)
Has God massacred the miscreant branches of a dysfunctional family tree, or has God committed them to the asylum of Highbury Fields? Is God claiming to be sole surviving victor of evolution? Verily, even the Addams Family is seeded by an evolutionary common ancestor.
Where is our Heavenly mother? Has mother gone AWOL against God’s domestic violence? Is God’s bad brood bound to germinate into heavy-metal head-bangers? And why is God so dead-keen to get shot of His family?
Meanwhile, downtown at the heavy-metal head-bangers’ drum, the band leader Satan leads the Great Escape from Hell. The ‘fatal key’ has been entrusted by God to the ‘Snakie Sorceress that sat/ Fast by Hell Gate’ (II:724-725). Satan the action man, hot barium meal of courage coursing his veins, faces one small step to hunt man, one giant leap for Satan-kind:
Th’ unfounded deep, & through the void immense
To search with wandring quest a place foretold (II:829-830)
Space the final frontier: these are the voyages of the star-tripper Satan, to fly or not to fly a fiendish errand, to boldly fleece the fresh-faced human race, and ‘to gorge the flesh of Lambs or yeanling Kids’ (III:434), upon the ‘firm opacous Globe’ (III:418):
Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
O then at last relent: is there no place
Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?
None left by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the spirits beneath, whom I seduc’d
With other promises and other vaunts
Then to submit, boasting I could subdue
Th’ Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vaine,
Under what torments inwardly I groane ...
The lower still I fall, onely Supream
In miserie (IV:73-88 & 91-92)
Satan’s grand tour on ‘A violent cross wind’ (III:487) of Earth’s highlights include of course the Spurs’ temple at White Hart Lane and the training ground at the Garden of Eden:
Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse
With easie intercourse pass to and fro
To tempt or punish mortals, except whom
God and good Angels guard by special grace (II:1030-1033)
The full-blooded exploits of Satan are for ever fuelled with the throbbing, pumping fast food of pain:
But pain is perfect miserie, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturnes
All patience. (VI:462-464)
The terrible temptation of McDonald’s — the lowest point of human existence — is irresistible to Satan and his ravenous brood of Arsenal fans:
My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth
Which mans polluting Sin with taint hath shed
On what was pure, till cramm’d and gorg’d, nigh burst
With suckt and glutted offal, at one sling
Of thy victorious Arm. (X:630-634)