I wrote the following some 20+ years ago.
******** Milton consistently introduces his characters from nowhere, in isolation from all social relations. By the choices they make they then create new social relations within which their action can take on meaning not inherent in the action itself. The characters, rather, create that meaning through grounding their motive in a principle which operates in abstraction from the visible actuality which it explains or controls. This freedom of characters from prior social relations is the material content of the freedom to choose which the poem endlessly reiterates. This separation (freedom) of an act's meaning from its visible consequences is the precondition for such freedom, and whenever in Paradise Lost characters ascribe meaning (including analogical meaning) to an act's visible consequences or to the act itself, they fall, cutting themselves off from all possible social relations. But when they base their choice on correct principle, in abstraction from all visible or analogical meaning, then their free choice enacts a society in which the coherence of motive and act and of act and result is guaranteed by the Providence to which they have freely submitted themselves.
The compulsion here lies not in the submission of the will to Providence (which is the condition of their freedom) but in the total freedom of choice itself, in the freedom inherent in the separation of action from result which compels the individual to choose freely the action which will embody her motive. In Paradise Lost we can see this compulsory freedom most simply in the episode of Uriel and the cherub, particularly if we view the latter (as Uriel must) as a cherub rather than as Satan in disguise, for the whole dialogue makes clear that there was nothing in the direct "cherubic" experience of the cherub or in his hierarchical place to initiate his action. This cherub has received from most critics the cruelest possible treatment, that of ignoring his very existence. Seeing him only as Satan in the guise of a cherub, they seldom explore the fact that for Uriel he is only a cherub. Milton is as explicit as possible on this point: So spake the false dissembler unperceived; For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy . . . (III. 681-83) If Satan's hypocrisy is perceivable only to God, then the overt narrative, a meeting of two angels, merits consideration in its own right, uncolored by the knowledge that it is Satan who speaks. So considered the scene introduces us to social relations in Milton's heaven, the poem's one example of the everyday life of the unfallen angels. The premise of Satan's ruse, the possibility that all might be as it seems to be, reveals the most radical distinction between Milton's heaven and Dante's to be that in Milton's anything can happen, including an angel on a solitary sight-seeing tour. Both Uriel and the cherub exhibit what Marx called the "dot-like isolation" of the agent in capitalist society, and no sooner does Uriel appear than he is confronted with an imposed free choice under conditions which, in themselves, give no indication of the meaning of that choice.
Carrol Cox, "Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost," Milton Studies 23 (1987), p. 168.
The characters in Milton's poems, emerging suddenly from nowhere, and immediately facing the imposed necessity of a free choice which determines their possible relations, must then confront an unending series of such choices, continuously recreating new social relations which in turn never become fixed or visibly given. This endless recreating of relations as though all relations--all choices--were yet to be made is part of the substance both of the classical novel and of the great romantic poets. Each act and each subsequent set of relations are as new as the responses of the newly-created Adam because the relations formed are never direct; they are never direct because the action which they constitute does not materially embody its own motive. Motive and action are linked, rather, only through forces or principles which are beyond the direct experience of the agents-- and often beyond their possible knowledge. Adam at the moment of his creation becomes the model for all human action, for since no relationships are given the obligation continually to rediscover the principle ("God") which makes relationships possible is also always a new and unaccomplished obligation.
This is only to paraphrase, in abstraction from theology, a repeated perception in criticism of Milton. Stanley Fish remarks near the end of Surprised by Sin:
Since all agents maintain their positions and their identities by virtue of their relation to God, selfhood, too, is preserved through obedience. When an agent "breaks union" (V. 612) he voluntarily cuts himself off from a fixed point of reference and moves from a dependence that preserves his dignity to an independence that destroys it. The responsibility of keeping union belongs to the agent and continuity of character is merely persevering in this holding action. Apart from God there can be no stability and no true, that is internally consistent, self.44
Fish offers here an account of the abstract or separated individual's entrapment in a world of compulsory free choice--choice the agent exercises without knowledge of her act's meaning. And though the Father's phrase is "breaking union," the material content of this is failing to establish union. The phrase is from the Father's decree of the Son's power:
Under his great vicegerent reign abide
United as one individual soul
For ever happy: him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union . . . (V. 609-12)
The abstract individual finds her/himself isolated (without "identity") until by a new choice he or she recreates a new union (or set of social relations). Joseph Summers' comment on an earlier passage applies equally to the dance in Book V:
It is in Heaven that we experience harmonious action, with no perversion and no frustration; and it is in the speech of the Father (III. 80 ff.) that we learn . . .what constitutes the divine ideal: it is the result of a multiplicity of wills and motions, truly free, yet moving either in unison or harmony. There is no necessity (III. 110), for necessity's supposed functions are resolved in spontaneously willed action (cf. III. 370-371). Within such "concord," the question of the immediate origin of the wills, like the question of the origin of the motions of the sun and constellations, is finally irrelevant as well as unknown. . . .45
And Summers quotes the lines on the cosmic dance (III. 579-86). He defines a "society"--a term which does not usefully designate feudal and pre-feudal social orders in which social relations were visible (however fetishized), and the "origin of the wills" was the given place the agent held within those visible social relations.
The origin of the concord was an intuitive recognition of divine will. When the angels lose or repudiate that recognition, concord collapses into chaos, and then (this is the burden of Desmond Hamlet's argument) the mercy of God is expressed in the justice of God. In the world of Paradise Lost order does not depend on anything like Coggin's "set of given political facts" or "authority which dwelt thickset in the fabric of the body politic"--those are Satanic notions. Society, an invisible abstraction, had come into existence when, with the triumph of commodity production and the progressive individuation of all social relations, the consequences of human acts escaped the agent's direct control: "The contrast between the power, based on the personal relations of dominion and servitude, that is conferred by landed property," Marx writes, "and the impersonal power that is given by money, is well expressed by the two French proverbs, 'Nulle terre sans seigneur' and 'L'argent n'a pas de mai^tre.'" A "society" is a social order in which agents are freed from personal relations of dominion and servitude and in which, accordingly, there is no longer "a set of given political facts" in which authority can "dwell."
As Summers implicitly recogizes (even while denying its relevance), the origin of the wills in such a social order is wholly problematic. Coggin describes that new world (though this is hardly his intention) when he describes what he regards as a perversion of Fortescue's political theory by later "Whig" theoreticians: "The integrity-in-separation between power and authority collapses into a fusion, both functions passing to a state with limitless police power and erastian religion." That is, in a society of abstractly free individuals, in which action is separated from its consequences, order can emerge only from the (invisibly) willed adherence of each social monad to some (invisible) principle of harmony. In the unfallen state there is "no necessity" but only "spontaneously willed action"--or so it seems, for among the participants in the angelic dance is that Lucifer who immediately thereafter will launch his rebellion, with as we know extraordinarily violent consequences. In the utopian civil society of Milton's heaven, disruption of harmony comes only from feudal attempts to usurp power. There is even a suggestion that the motive of Eve's fall is to gain something like the independence of a feudal barony: she will achieve status (overcome Adam's "merit") by a usurpation of power paralleling Nimrod's usurpation in Book XII. Abstracting from all particular construals either of the revolt in heaven or of the fall itself, however, in both Milton's fallen and unfallen worlds the guarantee of order is the "limitless police power" (freed from implicit hierarchical restraints) to which Coggin objects.
Though Coggin fetishizes both feudal and capitalist states, he does offer an abstractly accurate account of the relationships of Milton's God to his Creatures. His objections to the modern state are precisely those of John Armstrong to the unfair conditions imposed on Eve at her temptation. She has recourse only to an "absentee landlord" of a God rather than (in Coggin's terms) to a "given set of political facts" as grounds of her choice. The authority of Milton's God neither dwells "thickset in the fabric of the body politic" nor is it in any "separation" from his power--and therefore it had to be justified by its goodness, by having attributed to it a complex of abstract principles not even analogically available to "human sense." Under such conditions of "fair equality, fraternal state" (XII. 26) society exists as the whole web of invisible relations which are continuously created and recreated by the objectively free choices of individuals who are, ideally, prior to the society ("concord") which they create by the continual exercise of their free choice. Such individuals experience themselves as well as others as coming from nowhere, as being able to enter into social relations only through submitting to the necessity of freely choosing among alternatives not dictated by the visible reality of the dance in which they perform. The angelic dance seems "irregular" because each angel acts independently of the visible pattern of the dance, in both ignorance and independence of the intentions of others. It is "regular" because each, independently, incorporates the divine will (or abstract principle) which gives that regularity.
"And the faithful," Malcolm Ross wrote in 1954, offering to summarize Milton's world, "enter this invisible fellowship, if at all, by equally invisible means. The old lines of communication between the visible and the invisible are discarded. The Mystical Body is retained as a thoroughly bodiless concept." Ross and Armstrong (however opposed otherwise) make essentially the same point, and again the proper answer to the complaint is not to deny, with many of of Milton's medievalizing defenders, that he breaks "the lines of communication between the visible and the invisible," but rather to insist that he does indeed discard them, and that that bold divorce constitutes precisely the greatness of the poem. (Ibid., pp.190-93)
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Here is the Angelic Dance referred to above:
So spake th' Omnipotent, and with his words
All seemd well pleas'd, all seem'd, but were not all.
That day, as other solemn dayes, they spent
In song and dance about the sacred Hill,
Mystical dance, which yonder starrie Spheare
Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheeles
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem,
And in thir motions harmonie Divine
So smooths her charming tones, that Gods own ear
Listens delighted. (V. 616-27)