Samson's Ransom

Abstract

Milton’s worldly, prosaic Manoa has won few admirers, and his plot to ransom Samson in Samson Agonistes often elicits puzzlement. This essay situates Manoa in relation to the soteriological anxieties that Milton’s tragedy explores. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalytic account of monotheism, I suggest that Manoa’s presence clarifies the paternal substitution realized in Samson’s elevation by God, but also threatens to unsettle it. Whereas Yahweh chooses Samson, Manoa’s love is fundamentally choiceless—an expression of an absolute bond. Reading Samson against two other Judges tragedies—Buchanan’s and Vondel’s plays about Jephthah’s sacrifice—I argue that Milton’s play reveals both the allure of chosenness and its psychological impasses. Manoa’s unconditional love offers a release from the drama of election. But Samson’s tragedy is that he can only reject it: to accept a love that demands nothing, that needs no choice, would mean giving up his most cherished wish—the wish to be chosen.

Main research questions

1.) What explains Milton's invention of a role for Manoa, in a work that otherwise hews closely to his biblical source? 
2.) What position does Milton take in Samson Agonistes in relation to Protestant debates about salvation and predestination? 
3.) What are the psychological implications of Milton's representation of fathers and sons?

What the research builds on

Milton's tragedy has occasioned a huge amount of commentary, but most of it dismissive of Manoa, who strikes critics as prosaic and worldly, unable to grasp Samson's higher, divine calling.

What the research add to the discussion

The essay shows how Manoa's bid to ransom his son emphasizes the difference between his paternal love--which is unchosen and unconditional--and the love offered by the substitute father, God, who first chooses and distinguishes Samson and then abandons him. Recognizing this opposition permits us to see how the tragedy subtly valorizes Manoa, and how that valorization articulates Milton's simultaneous discomfort with and attraction to the idea of divine election.