Correspondence

Dear Mr Colman,

I would like to make some comments on your article ‘After the Fall’ in  Free Associations, no. 13. I like the comparisons you make between the angels' fall and the paranoid-schizoid state and man's fall and the depressive state. But I do not agree with your interpretation of the lines:

For never can true reconcilement grow

Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep … (IV, 98-99)

(It is a pity you do not mention from which parts in the poem your quotations are taken and that you leave out some important lines (100-8) towards the end of your long quotation from Book IV.)

You say: ‘… it should be noted that there is to be no redemption for the fallen angels. On both sides the wounds are so great that there is only the lust for revenge.’ So you conclude that Milton's God is a God of Wrath. I am afraid that you have been ‘seduced’ here by Satan's self-deception. He himself blocks the way to repentance by saying that God would not forgive him. He has no evidence of that. The main reason why he cannot repent is that he knows that back in heaven his envy for God would return. So he is deceiving himself by talking about repentance when he means just saying ‘sorry’ to regain his loss. Surely, true repentance would relieve him of his envy.

Satan knows that God knows that he cannot truly repent: ‘This knows my Punisher, therefore as far/From granting he, as I from begging peace’ (IV, 103-4). Why did you have to leave those lines out?

I believe it is out of envy for God, too, that he would not be able to accept his forgiveness. It would mean submission to someone greater than himself.