ENL 10A: Samson’s Captivity: A Reawakening of Purpose

Jolene Patricia Brown

ENL 10A: English Lit to 1700

19 November 2009

Samson’s Captivity: A Reawakening of Purpose

Milton explores the captivity of man in Samson Agonistes as more than the jail and slave labor that Samson must endure at the hands of the Philistines. Captivity is the fallen condition of man, Milton argues, as man is born with obstacles that must be overcome before he can reach his full potential as a servant of God, which turns out to be another form of captivity. The example of Samson, from the biblical book of Judges, allows Milton to write make this argument from the perspective of a man who was born with gifts bestowed on no other man by God. This is an important perspective from which to write because if a great man can be held captive by his own imperfection, then all men can. It is only through recognition of man’s potential failings that one can reach their full potential despite their post-lapsarian condition.

Samson is captive to the Philistines because he is chained, and forced to do slave labor. This is his most obvious form of captivity: forced physical labor. Samson is forced to slave for those people he was born to destroy, and by doing so is also forced to consider all his failings: “From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm / Of Hornets arm’d… / rush upon me thronging, and present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now” (19-22). For Samson, it is not the physical labor that is the worst part of the slavery. With nothing to do but work, he is forced to consider all his failings by his “restless thoughts” and he dissects his own fall from grace, which makes the physical work a form of “ease” from his thoughts (18). He comes to an important conclusion: that strength, though useful, is not immune to failure unless there is wisdom.

But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom, vast, unwieldy, burdensome,
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall…
God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair. (53-55, 58-59)

Even his great gift of strength is a form of captivity for Samson because he did not have the wisdom to guard it properly. God endowed the strength with an inherent weakness by placing it in Samson’s hair thereby rendering Samson strong but not invincible. The captivity, therefore, is Samson’s false sense of security brought on by his lack of wisdom and overabundant strength which he does not realize until it is too late and he is physically captive to the Philistines: “Immeasurable strength they might behold / In me, of wisdom nothing more then mean; / This with the other should, at least, have paird, / These two proportion’d ill drove me transverse” (206-209).

The Philistines have also blinded him, depriving him of the light of the world and the light of God:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse then chains…
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull’d, which might in part my grief have eas’d… (67-68, 70-72)

His blindness is a sensual captivity as Samson finds himself not only a slave to those he was intended to slay, but also without the guidance of his sight. It is sight that guides man in his daily life, without which one would wander hopelessly lost; without his sight Samson cannot make his way alone in the world. His blindness also implies he is without his God—another form of sight—as it is God who has, until now, guided Samson through his exploits against the Philistines. The sight that Samson has lost is multi-faceted: it is the physical sight in the world that allows him mobility and success in his battles against his enemies, but also the sight of God who has guided him in those battles. The loss of sight is a double-tragedy because he is deprived of a sensual pleasure and a spiritual pleasure, both of which are unbearable to Samson.

Before his captivity by the Philistines, Samson was captive to his passions as a man by allowing himself to be weakened by the love of a woman who is loyal to his enemy. Samson realizes he had fallen into service to woman, instead of in service to God when he states:

The base degree to which I am now fall’n,
these rags, this grinding, is not yet so base
As was my former servitude, ignoble,
Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,
True slavery, and that blindness worse then this,
That saw not how degenerately I serv’d. (414-419)

Both the physical captivity and the sensual captivity that he faces now in service to the Philistines is, he claims, better than his service to woman he paid before his fall. It is this captivity to woman that is another captivity that Samson is subject to, and another that he does not realize until he is already taken prisoner, betrayed by the woman he loved.

Though he ultimately takes responsibility for his own fall in admitting that “She [Delila] was not the prime cause” (234), he still laments his failing to identify her as a “specious Monster” and his “accomplisht snare” (230). The description of Delila as a “specious Monster” is especially telling, as the word specious, according to the OED, means “Having a fair or attractive appearance or character, calculated to make a favourable impression on the mind, but in reality devoid of the qualities apparently possessed” and “Of falsehood, bad qualities.” Samson is captive to her appearance, and his weakness for Delila echoes that of Adam’s for Eve in the garden of Paradise Lost, as both men allow women to have power over them. In Paradise Lost God was forced to remind Adam of the original hierarchy of subjection after the fall:

Was she [Eve] thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice, or was she made they guide,
Superior, or but equal, that to her
Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee
And for thee, whose perfection far excelled
Hers in all real dignity: adorned
She was indeed, and lovely to attract
They love, not thy subjection… (X.145-153)

Like Adam, Samson’s perfection “far excelled” that of Delila’s, for she not only was an idolater according to the Hebrew people, but she was also a woman, and therefore inherently imperfect and subject to man. The Chorus recognizes this shortcoming of woman as well: “Is it for that such outward ornament / Was lavish’t on thir Sex, that inward gifts / Were left for haste unfinish’t, judgment scant, / Capacity not raise’d to apprehend / Or value what is best / In choice, but oftest to affect the wrong (1025-1030)? Further, like Adam, Samson became enchanted by a woman and allowed himself to become subject to her, overturning the hierarchy of power that should be God over man, man over woman.

Samson is also captive of God, and God’s plans. Samson was a gift to his parents, who could not conceive a child on their own, in order to free the Hebrew people from the Philistines. Samson’s responsibility is to his people and to his God and by allowing himself to be overthrown and taken prisoner by those he is supposed to slay, he has shirked his duties. This is his final captivity, and one that he must embrace and accept before death, though this captivity is one of service to God and not of to man, be it the Philistines or to women. Samson reawakens to his calling, slowly, through the visitations of his father, his wife, and a giant who refuses his challenge:

But come what will, my deadliest foe will prove
My speediest friend, by death to rid me hence,
The worst that he can give, to me the best.
Yet so it may fall out, because thir end
Is hate, not help to me, it may with mine
Draw thir own ruin who attempt the deed. (1262-1267)

At the end of the poem Samson accepts that to be a man in the fallen world is a life of captivity be it captivity to sin, women, slavery, senses or captivity in service to God. It is, however, within man’s power to decide what they will be captive to, and that is when Samson reaffirms his service to God, killing the Philistinian Lords:

Be of good courage, I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts…
If there be aught of presage in the mind,
This day will be remarkable in my life
By some great act, or of my days the last. (1381-1383, 1387-1389)

Captivity in this post-lapsarian world is can be chosen, and what man chooses to be captive to determines his end, be it in shame or in heroism. Samson, because he chose ultimately to be captive to God, became a hero and is remembered to this day for his feats in saving the Hebrew people. Though captivity can deprive man of his gifts, it can also give him strength, depending on the captivity he chooses.