¹ “Pathos and Katharsis in Samson Agonistes,” in Critical Essays on Milton from ELH (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 242–43. Rpt. from ELH, 31 (1964), 156–74. Research for this essay was done with the help of a grant from the Henry E. Huntington Library.

² William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 181–202, and Irene Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph Witt-reich, Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1971), pp. 235–57.

³ F. Michael Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949), surveys the Renaissance traditions that parallel Samson with Christ. The typological dimension is explored further with different approaches and emphases by Madsen and by Arthur Barker, “Structural and Doctrinal Pattern in Milton's Later Poems,” in Essays in English Literature … Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and Frank W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 169–79.

⁴ Hawkins, “Samson's Catharsis,” in Milton Studies, 2 (1970), 227; Cirillo, “Time, Light, and the Phoenix: The Design of Samson Agonistes” in Calm of Mind, ed. Witt-reich, pp. 209–10.

⁵ Joan Webber argues that the setting of Paradise Regained is the fallen world where good is not self-evident and doubt is a universal experience and that Christ's “resistance to temptation is largely resistance to doubt” (“The Son of God and Power of Life in Three Poems by Milton,” ELH, 37, 1970, 175–94). I disagree with Webber only in emphasis. Christ's life is not that of “any man so in touch with himself that the world's distractions cannot betray him” (p. 194). He is the only man so perfect in his faith and self-knowledge; Samson experiences the universal human problem of dealing with internal doubt.

⁶ William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience in The Workes of… Mr. William Perkins, I (London, 1612), 536, 550. Hereafter cited as Perkins.

⁷ Quotations from Milton's poetry are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957).

⁸ Similarly, in Christian Doctrine Milton argues that the divine decree of predestination is conditional on the human response, but that this condition does not “attribute mutability, either to God or his decrees.” The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Paterson et. al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931–38), xiv, 107. All citations of Milton's prose are from this edition.

⁹ Casuists differ in their descriptions of how men know God's will, but they agree that it is sufficiently revealed for men to have the knowledge necessary to avoid sin. See Perkins, i, 519, and William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (n.p., 1639), Bk. iii, p. 92. In Christian Doctrine, Milton speaks of the conscience as the “judgment of the mind respecting its own actions, formed according to the light which we have received either from nature or from grace” (Works, xvii, 41).

¹⁰ Titles like the following are common : The Wounded Conscience Cured, the Weak One Strengthened and the Doubting Satisfied (London, 1642); Thomas Fuller, Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience (London, 1647). See also Thomas Pickering's prefatory letter to Perkins' The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, in Workes, ii (London, 1613); Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory: Or, A Summ of Practical Divinity (London, 1673), Bk. iv, p. 13.

¹¹ See, e.g., Sanderson's “The Case of Marrying with a Recusant,” The Works of Robert Sanderson, ed. William Jacobson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1854), v, 75–80.

¹² George Mosse argues that the casuistical concept of intention becomes a means of justifying evil actions by good intentions and thus prepares the way for the assimilation of Machiavellian “policy” into English thought. The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), pp. 55–57, 86, 135–36, et passim. But it is important to note that in theory the concept of equity is based on the intention of the law as well as the intention of the agent, however the two may have been conflated in practice.

¹³ Milton “was convinced that even the will of God himself could not make an unlawful act lawful or a lawful unlawful.” Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1942), p. 169.

¹⁴ Samson's description echoes the comparison of the wounded conscience with physical disease which is pervasive in casuistry. Perkins, for example, describes a guilty conscience as “a worme that never dieth, but alwaies lies gnawing and grabbling, and pulling at the heart of man, Mark 9.44. and causeth more paine and anguish, then any disease in the world can doe” (i, 536). Milton uses this image in his Commonplace Book: “The cause of valour [is] a good conscience, for an evil conscience, as an English author noteth well, will otherwise knaw at the roots of valour like a worm and undermine all resolutions” (Works, xviii, 135).

¹⁵ Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 107–08.

¹⁶ All Antigone quotations are from Three Theban Plays, trans. Theodore Howard Banks (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956).

¹⁷ The maxim salus populi suprema lex was invoked variously in Henry Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (n.p., 1642); Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (London, 1644); John Goodwin, Right and Might Well Met (London, 1648); Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649); and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Robert Sanderson devotes 2 of his 10 lectures on casuistry to explaining it (Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures, trans. Robert Codrington, London, 1660).

¹⁸ On Milton and “the public good” see Barker, Puritan Dilemma, pp. 109–10, 163–65, 281–82, 300–03.

¹⁹ In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton accepted this distinction: “to do justice on a lawless king is to a private man unlawful, to an inferior magistrate lawful.” Cf. Parker, Observations. Cited in Barker, Puritan Dilemma, pp. 159, 145.

²⁰ Barbara Lewalski has shown that in the Protestant typology Milton draws on in Samson Agonistes, Samson and other Israelite judges are types of the Christian elect, both in their suffering in this life and their participation with Christ as judges of the world at the Apocalypse. Israelite judges and Christian magistrates are correlative types whose vocation to deliver God's people from oppression and to wreak vengeance on His enemies is fulfilled by the antitype, the Last Judgment. While 17th-century Puritans usually associated Samson as judge specifically with their own magistrates, the main force of the typological reverberations of the judge figure, which Lewalski examines, supports the emphasis on individual conscience instead of official position. In Milton's mature view the Millennial Kingdom and the rule of Saints is achieved only at the end of time; until then the kingdom of the elect is internal and spiritual rather than outward and political. See Barbara K. Lewalski, “Samson Agonistes and the ‘Tragedy’ of the Apocalypse,” PMLA, 85 (1970), 1050–62.

²¹ Cf. Perkins' treatment of the case of conscience, “Whether it be lawfull for a man being urged, to go toe idol service … so as he keepe his heart to God?” (ii, 87). See also Ames, Bk. iv, pp. 7–8.

²² By Mason Tung, “Samson Impatiens: A Reinterpreta-tion of Milton's Samson Agonistes,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 9 (1968), 489.

²³ Barker, “Structural and Doctrinal Pattern in Milton's Later Poems”; Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton's Samson and the Jewish Tradition,” Milton Studies, 3 (1971), 185–200, corroborates Barker's thesis. Stollman's account of the abrogation of the Old Law and internalization of divine law is valuable but does not discuss the process by which Samson discovers his liberty. Lynn Veach Sadler suggests that the appropriate term is “ ‘prophetic liberty,’ the Old Testament equivalent of'Christian Liberty.’ ” “Typological Imagery in Samson Agonistes: Noon and the Dragon,” ELH, 37 (1970), 196.

²⁴ Works, xvii, 303. Cf. Ames, Bk. v, pp. 192, 269–77; Baxter, Bk. i, pp. 421–30; Perkins, ii, 116–17.

²⁵ See Paul R. Sellin, “Milton's Epithet Agonistes,” Studies in English Literature, 4 (1964), 137–62.

²⁶ E.g., Ames: “For subjection in common, respects the authority, and power of the Superiour; but obedience respects the precept, or command which proceeds from the power. Hence … there may bee subjection, where there is not obedience, as in the humble denying of obedience, when that which is commanded by the Superiour, is manifestly unlawfull” (Bk. v, p. 155).

²⁷ Sellin demonstrates this point, pp. 153–54.

²⁸ Ames, Bk. v, pp. 180–81 (mispaged 186–87); Perkins, ii, 336. Cf. D. C. Allen, The Harmonious Vision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1954), pp. 83–84, and Krouse, pp. 74–75.

²⁹ Sellin discusses the appropriateness of the serpent image in relation to Samson's feigning, p. 159.

³⁰ See Jeremy Taylor, Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber (London: C. and J. Rivington, T. Cadell et al., 1828), vi, 95; George Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 191; Mosse, pp. 132–33. Milton's “ev'ning Dragon” who is also eagle and phoenix is most reminiscent of Donne's Serpens exaltatus: “So, if he who is Serpens serpens humi, the Serpent condemned to creep upon the ground, dos transforme himselfe into a flying Serpent, and attempt our noble faculties, there is Serpens exaltatus, a Serpent lifted up in the wildernesse to recover all them that are stung, and feel that they are stung with this Serpent, this flying Serpent, that is, these high and continued sinnes. The creeping Serpent, the groveling Serpent, is Craft; the exalted Serpent, the crucified Serpent, is Wisdome. All your worldly cares, all your crafty bar-gaines, … savour of the earth, and of the craft of that Serpent, that creeps upon the earth: But crucifie this craft of yours, bring all your worldly subtilty under the Crosse of Christ Jesus, … and then you have changed the Serpent, from the Serpent of perdition creeping upon the earth, to the Serpent of salvation exalted in the wildernesse.” Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953–62), x, No. 8, 189–90, as cited by Evelyn M. Simpson, “Two Notes on Donne,” Review of English Studies, N.S. 16 (1965), 140–50.

³¹ A Case of Conscience, the Greatest That Ever Was: How a Man May Know Whether He Be the Child of God, or No, in Workes, i. Thomas F. Merrill points out that the effort to combat despair is not confined to this work but permeates Perkins' casuistry and is the most distinctive feature of Puritan casuistry as a whole. William Perkins 1558–1602: English Puritanist, His Pioneer Works on Casuistry, ed. Merrill (Nieuwkoop: DeGraaf, 1966), pp. xiv-xv.

³² On the form of the case of conscience, see my essay “Ingenious Piety: Anglican Casuistry of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Theological Review, 63 (1970), 409–32.

³³ Henry Robert McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), pp. 85–87.

³⁴ Heroic Knowledge (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1957), pp. 138–39.