Milton and the Uses of Stupidity

Abstract

abstract:When we call someone or something "stupid," it is an insult. So, when Milton's narrator in Paradise Lost says Satan is momentarily rendered "stupidly good" at the sight of Eve, we read it the same way: the devil's brief redemption is downplayed while his stupidity is emphasized. This essay argues that privileging rational human agency and virtuous freedom over more aesthetic and potentially "stupid" forms of wonder makes it hard to recognize the unsettling relation between Satan's experience and the intellectual innocence that was prized by experimentalists such as Francis Bacon. It also suggests that Milton's reflections on stupidity offer a helpful way to think about literary criticism; far from being a bad thing, Satan's stupidity is a form of innocence that emerges from skepticism and critique—a kind of astonishment that brings us face to face with our own limits, not only as readers and students, but also as scholars and teachers.