Well Done, Servant of God

By Anthony Esolen There is a scene in Milton's Paradise Lost that affirms my resolve to fight against bad ideas and the unrealities they assume or help to spread, like a contagion. The seraph Abdiel, whose name means "Servant of God," has refuted Satan on each point the tempter has made to his followers - for Satan is stirring them up to rebellion against the Son of God. Abdiel has done so with a combination of precise reasoning and zealous passion. But Satan rejects the truth, mocking both it and its messenger. Rather than concede a single point, he commits himself more deeply to falsehood, going so far as to deny that he is any kind of creature at all. "We know no time when we were not as now," he boasts, "Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power." He tells Abdiel to go and deliver the tidings to the Son of God, that war is on the move, and he ends with a threat. "And fly," he says, "lest evil intercept thy flight." Abdiel is not cowed. Thousands and thousands of rebels are encompassed around him, deaf to his words and dismissive of his zeal, which they judge as "out of season," or "singular and rash." But one soul devoted to the truth is mightier than thousands of liars and fools. The rebels have completed their break with truth, and now, says Abdiel to Satan, "Other decrees / Against thee are gone forth without recall." He leaves their camp alone, scorned by all: So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found, Among the faithless, faithful only he; Among innumerable false, unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified; His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal, Nor number nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind Though single. From amidst them forth he passed Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained Superior, nor of violence feared aught, But with retorted scorn his back he turned On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed. Milton, no doubt, thought of himself as an Abdiel, so deeply committed to what he saw as theological truth, that he could not find it in him to join any particular church; it is this individualism that marks him as the first of the moderns, though in most other ways he is better seen as the last man of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. But that biographical wrinkle is not pertinent to the scene and its drama, since Abdiel is not going off to be by himself, nor has he come up with any peculiar doctrine of his own. He leaves Satan's camp to join the camp of the eternal God, and thus can the Catholic reader in our time see in Abdiel a model for a fuller devotion to the Church as the repository of truth. But how do you commit yourself to the truth? We have the Scriptures, the Catechism, and magisterial teachings from the Church's very beginning. Yet it is not always clear how these teachings apply in a current controversy, and people argue about their scope and significance, and human words are powerless to deliver ultimate realities. Thus are we often in a muddle not entirely of our own making. And then the psychological pressure to go along with everyone near you is intense, and going along involves both assenting to a proposition and taking part in an action, whether actively or permissively. Action and vision in man are inextricable: we act according to what we see or think we see, and we see, or think we see, according to what we do. We have no direct apprehension of reality apart from ideas, and we have no ideas unaffected by what we do. This being so, we can perceive that sin and falsehood are intervolved, and thence we may posit several reliable signs to direct us at least away from the quicksand. Whatever I have come up with on my own is probably false, because it is likely to be partial in both senses of the word: I see only in part, and I am partial to my ideas and to the deeds they will justify. Whatever depends upon the passions of the hour is probably false, because truth is everlasting and...