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Near the middle of Milton's Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael describes for Adam—who has not yet fallen, not yet disobeyed—the War in Heaven between Satan's rebellious angels and those who have remained faithful to God. Throughout this portion of the poem a major figure is a loyal angel named Abdiel. It is his task, or privilege, to cast the first blow against Satan himself: his "noble stroke" causes Satan to stagger backwards and fall to one knee, which terrifies and enrages the great rebel's followers. This happens as Abdiel expected; he's not afraid of Satan, and knows that even the king of the rebels cannot match his strength, since rebellion has already sapped some of the greatness and power of the one once known as Lucifer.

But what if the combat hadn't gone as expected? What if Satan had been unhurt by Abdiel's blow, or had himself wounded the faithful angel? In that case, says one Milton scholar, John Rumrich, "God would by rights have some explaining to do." What right would God have to send Abdiel into a struggle where he could be wounded or destroyed? To Rumrich's claim that most eminent of Miltonists, Stanley Fish, replies: Every right. God's actions are not subject to our judgment, because he's God—a point which, Fish often reminds us, modern literary critics seem unable to grasp.

Moreover, Fish notes, Abdiel himself doesn't think that God owes him success, or indeed owes him anything at all. In Abdiel's understanding of what it means to be a creature, all the owing is on his side; all the rights are on God's. As it happens, there are moments in the story when things don't go as Abdiel expects, where his efforts seem futile or pointless—or seem so to us. Yet this doesn't bother him at all. Why not? Because in each case he did what he was made to do: he obeyed. Obedience is the creature's calling; the ultimate outcome and disposition of events belongs to God, and only to God. God does not need to adjust events to meet our expectations, nor must he offer us an explanation when our expectations are thwarted. And if we focus on our own obedience we will not ask such things of God.

In the long and brilliant preface that Fish wrote for the second edition of his landmark book Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost, he calls Abdiel's attitude "the politics of long joy," and sees Milton as a passionate advocate for that politics. Milton himself strove to live by it: having made an impassioned case for freedom of the press in his tract "Areopagitica," he pauses to say that his argument "will be a certain testimony, if not a Trophy." That is, whether his argument succeeded or not (and in fact it didn't), he wrote it simply in order to testify to his convictions. It was within his power to make such a testimony; it was not within his power to control the minds of the members of Parliament.

"The politics of long joy" is an odd phrase, but a rich one. Fish derives it from another moment in Paradise Lost, when the archangel Michael reveals to Adam a vision of "Just men" who "all their study bent / To worship God aright," who then are approached by a "bevy of fair women" and determine to marry them. Adam likes this vision; two earlier ones had shown pain and death, but this one seems to Adam to portend "peaceful days," harmony among peoples. But Michael immediately corrects him. This is in fact a vision of the events described in Genesis 6, in which, after the "sons of God" become enamored with the "daughters of man," God discerns that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." "Judge not what is best / By pleasure," Michael warns Adam, "though to nature seeming meet." Instead, Adam should judge according to the "nobler end" for which he was created: "conformity divine," that is, obedience to God. And when Adam hears this rebuke Milton tells us that he was "of short joy bereft." Of short joy bereft: for the joy which comes from judging according to appearances and immediate circumstances, according to what we now like to call "outcomes," is always short. Only the joy of conforming our will to God's is long.

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