Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason is But Choosing” 9780820705811

Citation preview

Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics

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Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies

General Editor: Rebecca Totaro Editorial Board: Judith H. Anderson Diana Treviño Benet William C. Carroll Donald Cheney Ann Baynes Coiro Mary T. Crane Stephen B. Dobranski Wendy Furman-Adams A. C. Hamilton Hannibal Hamlin Margaret P. Hannay

Jonathan Gil Harris Margaret Healy Ken Hiltner Arthur F. Kinney David Loewenstein Robert W. Maslen Thomas P. Roche Jr. Mary Beth Rose Mihoko Suzuki Humphrey Tonkin Susanne Woods

Originally titled the Duquesne Studies: Philological Series (and later renamed the Language & Literature Series), the Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies Series has been published by Duquesne University Press since 1960. This publishing endeavor seeks to promote the study of late medieval, Renaissance and seventeenth century English literature by presenting scholarly and critical monographs, collections of essays, editions and compilations. The series encourages a broad range of interpretation, including the relationship of literature and its cultural contexts, close textual analysis, and the use of contemporary critical methodologies.

Foster Provost EDITOR, 1960–1984

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Albert C. Labriola EDITOR, 1985–2009

Richard J. DuRocher EDITOR, 2010

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Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics “Reason Is But Choosing”

Edited by Richard J. DuRocher & Margaret Olofson Thickstun

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Copyright © 2012 Duquesne University Press All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS 600 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner or form whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Milton’s rival hermeneutics : reason is but choosing / edited by Richard J. DuRocher and Margaret Olofson Thickstun. p. cm. — (Medieval & renaissance literary studies) Summary: “As these 11 essays demonstrate, Milton’s own acts of interpretation in his major works compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find there, but also to reflect on their own hermeneutic principles and choices — an interpretive complexity that is integral to the enduring appeal of Milton’s poetry” — Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8207-0450-0 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hermeneutics. I. DuRocher, Richard J. II. Thickstun, Margaret Olofson, 1956– PR3588.M536 2012 821’.4 — dc23 2011051800 ∞ Printed on acid-free paper.

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Contents

A Tribute to Richard J. DuRocher, 1955–2010 vii Introduction xv

Part One: Reading Violence 1. Inviting Rival Hermeneutics: Milton’s Language of Violence and the Invitation to Freedom Susanne Woods 2. “A Table Richly Spread”: Nature, Place, and Choice in Milton’s Nativity Ode Diane McColley

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3. Dead Shepherd: Milton’s Lycidas Gordon Teskey

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4. Toward Latinitas: Revising the Defensio Hugh Jenkins

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Part Two: Reading Paradise Lost

5. Interpreting God’s Word — and Words — in Paradise Lost Barbara K. Lewalski 6. Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost: Scenes of Instruction, Lessons in Interpretation Joseph Wittreich

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7. Narrative, Judgment, and Justice in Paradise Lost William Flesch

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Part Three: Reading Cruxes in Milton’s Major Poems

8. Rethinking “shee for God in him”: Paradise Lost and Milton’s Quaker Contemporaries Teresa Feroli 9. Fame, Shame, and the Importance of Community in Samson Agonistes Margaret Olofson Thickstun 10. Satan in Paradise Regained: The Quest for Identity Stella P. Revard 11. Hermes’s Blessed Retreat: Rival Views of Learning in Paradise Regained Richard J. DuRocher Notes About the Contributors Index

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A Tribute to Richard J. DuRocher, 1955–2010 I believe that Richard James DuRocher was an exceptional Milton scholar in two respects. What he wrote was faithful to Milton’s poetry, and how he lived and comported himself was faithful to Milton’s standards. His responsiveness and integrity will be shown fully in his new book on Milton and the passions. — Mary Ann Radzinowicz

Like all the great Renaissance humanists, Rich DuRocher was deeply grounded in Christian faith and in classical authors. These two arenas of lifetime commitment came together in his passionate engagement with Milton. His early studies at Loyola University in physics and electrical engineering inspired a fascination with how things work and how things are connected. This curiosity about the interconnectedness of physical properties carried over at Cornell University in his later studies of conceptual interrelations in different periods of literature and culture. Rich’s Milton scholarship embodies his faithful pursuit of understanding. He wished to discover how parts relate to a whole, how the complexities of the intellect, spirit, and heart comprise a whole human self,

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and how Milton’s poetry can teach us to think, feel, believe, and live. All of Rich’s colleagues, students, friends, and family have experienced the truth of Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s tribute. Rich DuRocher, a scholar — “faithful to Milton’s poetry” — cannot be separated from Rich DuRocher the man — “faithful to Milton’s standards.” Rich’s contribution to Milton studies cannot be measured by his scholarly publications alone, but must take into account the depth of his collegial inspiration and warmth, and his devoted teaching. At St. Olaf College, where Rich taught for 24 years, he was known as an enthusiastic and encouraging (as well as exacting) professor steeped in knowledge of Latin language and literature and in Milton’s poetry and prose. In 2006, in his delivery of the college’s prestigious Melby Lecture, he spoke about Milton’s continued relevance in our world and what Milton can teach us about “discriminating freedom,” “the rhetoric of heroism,” and the search “for wisdom and beauty.” More than a decade earlier, in his article “Dante, Milton, and the Art of Visual Speech,” he had argued that “Paradise Lost remains at its close profoundly committed to the solitary struggle for liberating choice in the world below” (168). Always true to his own insights and words, Rich lived what he taught, and both his pedagogy and his scholarship present an honest account of his own intellectual and spiritual search for the choices that truly liberate in this world. Rich’s Milton publications evolved through three major phases, all united by his engagement with the classical Roman authors who influenced Milton’s writings. Rich’s two monographs, Milton and Ovid (1985), and Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum (2001) remain influential studies of the ways in which Milton’s ideas were informed by the classics. The second development in Rich’s scholarship includes essays that seminally influenced ecocritical Milton scholarship. The

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A Tribute to Richard J. DuRocher ix

third focuses primarily on Milton and the emotions, the subject of his monograph Passionate Milton, which he worked on until very shortly before he died. Twenty-five years after its publication, Milton and Ovid remains essential for any scholar considering Milton and the classics. In addition to considering how allusions to Ovidian characters and rhetoric may have shaped Milton’s own characters, Milton and Ovid extends its inquiry toward what such poetic devices might reveal more broadly about the concept of change, the construction of poetic genres, and the role of authorial presence. Expanding on the subject in Milton Among the Romans, Rich turns his attention specifically toward the curriculum of Latin authors that Milton studied and taught to pupils under his private tutelage from 1640 to 1646, and Rich explores how this set of scientific, historical, and architectural texts contributed to Milton’s poetic style, especially in Paradise Lost. Milton Among the Romans, in addition to calling attention to the civic and spiritual aims of Milton’s pedagogy, also examines how the kind of education Milton espoused continues to address human needs. By investigating Milton’s curriculum both for its own sake and for what it reveals about reading, learning, and constructing a life based in public and moral service, Milton Among the Romans has influenced not only scholars interested in Milton and the classics but also educators generally. Milton Among the Romans includes three reprinted essays about the natural and “built” worlds of Milton’s epic. Like all of Rich’s scholarship, these essays are grounded in his love of the classics and his fascination with the interconnectedness of art, beauty, and spirituality. “Careful Plowing: Culture and Agriculture in Paradise Lost” argues for the epic’s insistence on the core values of cultivation, stewardship, and “matchless Fortitude” established by Milton’s “emphatic arrangement” of “Fruit” and “Seed,” along with book 4’s epic simile of the “careful Plowman.” Turning from ideas about creation

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and destruction to ideas about construction and the practical science of building, Rich explores what this might reveal about spiritual, moral, and political principles. “Building Pandemonium: Vitruvian Architecture in Paradise Lost” demonstrates how Milton understood and taught Vitruvius’s De architectura and describes the essential principles Milton drew on to describe the building of Pandemonium in book 1 of Paradise Lost. In a “daring narrative strategy,” Rich argues, Milton invites readers to “marvel at demonic echoes of the architectural achievements of the high Renaissance” and, by turns, at both the positive and negative potential of any construct — a temple or a commonwealth — designed to manifest the relation between humans and God. Another essay, “The Wounded Earth in Paradise Lost,” shaped the first generation of ecocritical scholars and continues to be cited repeatedly by scholars dealing with Milton and the natural world. This essay examines how Roman writers, especially Lucretius and Virgil, influenced Milton’s depiction of Eden and earth and claims that “through anthropomorphic imagery of childbirth, Milton shows that during the Fall the Earth reverses the process of Creation” (94). Perhaps most striking is the essay’s contention that Milton depicts the earth as a “sentient, responsive being” (101) affected by human and divine actions. Rich observes that, though Milton’s personification of the earth in Paradise Lost has fascinating classical precedents, he goes beyond them in evoking the dire immediate and lasting ecological consequences of human sin and human decisions. Even as he faced profound personal sorrows — foremost the illness and loss of his beloved daughter Helen — Rich’s search for wisdom and beauty did not wane, but over time it did change. After Helen’s death in 2002, Rich’s scholarship began to focus on Milton and the emotions. Initially, he was concerned that some colleagues might take him and his

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work on this subject less seriously than when he was known as “Milton and the classics DuRocher.” But because he was an honest scholar, his scholarship could be no less than an honest part of the whole of what he was: a grieving father endeavoring to turn his anguish into an understanding of the mysteries that control our lives. Thus, he searched for what Milton and other writers could teach us about suffering, anger, hope, healing, and regeneration. His essay “‘Cropt by th’ Almighties hand’: Allegory as Theodicy in Anne Bradstreet’s Poems on Her Grandchildren” (2007) unapologetically looks to poetry for consolation and illumination. In Bradstreet’s poems, he finds “quiet but resonant hope of restoration” (220) after otherwise inexplicable losses. This essay’s astute and poignant meditation on the idea of Eden and the “rich biblical tradition of God’s providential care for his suffering people” (220) resonates further in Rich’s subsequent book project, Passionate Milton. In this manuscript, Rich argues that in Paradise Lost, Milton, perhaps influenced by his own life sorrows, was “advancing” a “new anthropology, one in which the passions — no longer seen simply as Plato’s dark horse that an independent reason must restrain — play an integral and pivotal role in human flourishing” (7). Neither in his early poetry and prose nor in his mature work does Milton avoid, downplay, or explain away passions; he deliberately accentuates them. Rich proposes new readings about how Paradise Lost’s narrator “displays authorial passion rhetorically to encourage readers to respond appropriately” and how the epic’s stylistic and structural features, such as heightened diction and chains of epic similes, create additional stimuli for emotional reaction. In this way the poem can model “proper passionate response for the audience” (5). Passions are integral to theodicy — indeed integral to the nature of God — so Milton’s texts model passions, even negative ones, as inevitable,

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necessary, and desirable, though they must be “rightly tempered” if an individual is to achieve spiritual awareness and sustenance. Although Rich was not able to see all of Passionate Milton through to publication before his death, he did share pieces of it with the Milton community. “‘Tears such as Angels weep’: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost,” derived from the first chapter, was the title of Rich’s memorable keynote address at the 2007 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This speech became a Milton Studies article in 2009, and it was also revised and reprinted as the lead article in the conference volume, Their Maker’s Image (2011). Rich contends that Milton’s God is capable of demonstrative, recognizable emotions and that he and the Son in Paradise Lost ultimately “direct their passion, even their hate, toward the work of justice” (142), a claim he bases on the epic’s allusions to Virgil’s impassioned gods and to Lactantius’s treatise, The Wrath of God. Other chapters in Passionate Milton argue that the passions model positive responses and outcomes that one may choose. Adam and Eve, for example, return from despair and suicidal thoughts to rebuild the human community; the Son’s instances of “perfect controlled patience” in Paradise Regained form a pattern “above heroic” that “less than divine agents can only hope to emulate,” and Samson’s passions show how readers might be “led to experience the tragic emotions of pity, fear, and terror in order to achieve catharsis and spiritual insight via the tragedy” (6). Two other published articles of Rich’s last years show his sustained interest in the mingling of corporeality and spirituality in all created beings. His essay “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles II” (2007) focuses on how dress and clothing rather cunningly align Charles II with Satan so that the characterization might provide “exactly the right blend of suggestiveness, doubt, illumination” (122). “Tradition and the Budding Individual Talent:

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Milton’s Paraphrase of Psalm 114” (2009) revisits Rich’s lasting concern about Milton’s sense of liberty and the possibility of “radical human transformation through divine power” (36). It is fitting that Rich’s last published article opens with a reference to Radzinowicz’s Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, as it affirms yet once more the abiding role of her friendship and support in Rich’s scholarly vocation. In 2008, Rich conceived of and designed Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics to honor Mary Ann Radzinowicz, whom he deeply respected and loved — his teacher, mentor, and friend. Mary C. Fenton

Selected Chronological Bibliography of Richard J. DuRocher “The Wealth and Blood of Milton’s Sonnet XI.” Milton Quarterly 17.1 (March 1983): 15–17. “Arthur’s Gift, Aristotle’s Magnificence, and Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of The Faerie Queene, 1.9.19.” Modern Philology 82 (1984): 185–90. Milton and Ovid. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. “Dante, Milton, and the Art of Visual Speech.” Comparative Literature Studies 27 (1990): 157–71. “Guiding the Glance: Spenser, Milton, and ‘Venus Looking Glass.’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (1993): 325–41. “Careful Plowing: Culture and Agriculture in Paradise Lost.” In Milton Studies, vol. 31, ed. Albert C. Labriola, 146–81. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. “The Wounded Earth in Paradise Lost.” Studies in Philology 93.1 (1996): 93–115. “Building Pandemonium: Vitruvian Architecture in Paradise Lost.” In “All in All”: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, 138–55. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1999.

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xiv A Tribute to Richard J. DuRocher Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles II.” In “Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books”: Essays on the 1667 First Edition, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, 97–122. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007. “‘Cropt by th’ Almighties hand’: Allegory as Theodicy in Anne Bradstreet’s Poems on her Grandchildren.” In Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, ed. Ken Hiltner, 217–28. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. “Tradition and the Budding Individual Talent: Milton’s Paraphrase of Psalm 114.” Cithara: Essays in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition 49 (2009): 35–44. “‘Tears such as Angels weep’: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost.” In Milton Studies, vol. 49, ed. Albert C. Labriola, 124–45. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Revised and reprinted in Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton, ed. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz, 23–45. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2011. Passionate Milton. Manuscript. 189 pages.

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Introduction

John Milton’s works include interpretations of texts ranging from classical myths to biblical narratives regarded in his day as authoritative. In approaching these authoritative texts, Milton can be seen to be both faithfully rehearsing these culturally revered precursors and freely reinterpreting, even altering, them for his own purposes. For example, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, while based on the story of Samson in the book of Judges, radically departs from the biblical narrative in several ways. In one such departure, in his tragedy Milton casts Dalila as the wife, not the concubine of Samson as in the Bible, thus allowing Milton to explore further his ideas about marriage. Likewise, Milton recalls but revalues classical literary forms, for example, converting the Ovidian erotic dream vision into his elegy for the Bishop of Winchester, or reshaping Odysseus’s heroic wanderings in the Odyssey into Satan’s cosmic journey to seduce humankind in Paradise Lost. While creating space for Milton’s own beliefs and artistic representations, Milton’s habit of creatively reinterpreting texts, particularly texts found in sacred Scripture, raises questions about his fidelity to those texts and about his relationship to Hebraic, Christian, and Hellenic traditions generally. Milton’s acts of interpretation compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find within

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his works but also on their own hermeneutic principles and choices. The contributors to this volume explore a variety of Milton’s works that illustrate and call for the deployment of rival hermeneutics. A number of critics describe Milton’s works, particularly Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion. Claiming inspiration by the brilliant contrarian spirit of William Empson’s Milton’s God, these critics, among them Michael Bryson, Peter C. Herman, and Christopher D’Addario, argue that Milton’s masterworks embody radical contradiction or incertitude in a variety of areas. For example, Bryson, in The Tyranny of Heaven: The Rejection of God as King, reads Milton’s portrayal of God in Paradise Lost not as the benevolent supreme being in the universe but rather as a warning to readers against tyranny. Herman, in Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude, finds uncertainty in Milton’s syntax, emphasizing the disjunctive word “or” that appears between various alternatives, as well as in allusions that invite double, even opposite readings. Overall, Herman argues for a Milton who is “productively confused.” D’Addario, in Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature, finds Milton’s epic not only uncertain but also detached from its Restoration context, given Milton’s ambiguous situation as what D’Addario calls an “interior exile” in London after 1660.1 These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton’s poetry, while his works themselves actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics responds to this critical challenge. While the heralds of incertitude have done well to highlight tensions and issues too often ignored in Milton criticism, we believe both their diagnosis and response to these issues have been too sweeping and dogmatic. With eyes

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open to the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, the contributors to Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics offer a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton’s texts. Each of the essays in this volume explores the problem of how to interpret: some contributors are interested in Milton’s own engagement with Scripture, some in the ways in which Milton represents the process of interpretation in his narrative poems, still others in the ways that Milton’s works challenge the reader’s own interpretive skills. Repeatedly the contributors argue that because Milton believed that “no person or institution is authorized to interpret God’s word to another” (Lewalski 81), he understood the search for truth as “a process both necessarily incomplete and necessary” (Woods 7). He intentionally destabilized meaning in order to encourage “an openness to emergent truth” (Lewalski 81). Pointing out that “the interpretive options” Milton offers “often force interpretive choices” (Wittreich 102), these critics show how Milton challenges readers to avoid accepting “an improved interpretation . . . for the final truth” in favor of “unfolding revelation” (Wittreich 103, 108). By isolating and discussing competing hermeneutics as integral to Milton’s poetry, the essays in this collection show a writer unwilling to present formulae or neat packages of doctrine, instead envisioning writing as a means to search after truth and reading as a process in which the reader must do her own choosing.2 Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics is divided into three sections: the first on violence, the second on hermeneutic theories, and the third on specific hermeneutic cruxes within Milton’s works. In the opening section, the four contributors address the problem of violence both within and around Milton’s texts. Susanne Woods explores how Milton’s “abiding interest in liberty” paradoxically finds expression in “the language of violence” (4) — the dismembered bodies of Lycidas in the pastoral elegy and then the body of Truth in Areopagitica, as

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well as the threats of dismemberment in Samson Agonistes. Woods argues that Milton draws upon “the disruptive power [of such figures] to capture attention and provoke . . . radical rethinking” as readers are forced themselves to piece up truth to truth (4). Placing Samson Agonistes in the context of Lycidas and Areopagitica, Woods contends that hotly contested critical claims about radical ambiguity in Samson might better be seen as an ethical project supported by the hermeneutic activity envisioned by Mary Ann Radzinowicz, in which “the reader or audience must make its own judgments, fill in the gaps of information, see the examples provided in the play, weigh them, and as it were, reconstitute the body of meaning” (11). Samson, in particular, becomes a site where the reader must take responsibility for interpretation, just as Samson struggles to understand his own agency. Woods’s overt celebration of her indebtedness to the work of Mary Ann Radzinowicz echoes throughout many of the essays in this collection, by the way, which had its origin in the contributors’ desire to recognize and honor that distinguished scholar’s signature contributions to Milton studies. In particular, the contextual approach to Milton embodied in Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind, underlies many essays in this volume, as it does countless studies conceived since that groundbreaking book’s appearance.3 Numerous other essays by Radzinowicz contain the germ of and provide support for our central focus on rival hermeneutics. Several of the contributors to this volume began their careers as Mary Ann’s students; the others know her well as a friend and colleague. While Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics is meant to stand on its own as an cohesive and independent collection, its genesis as a tribute to Mary Ann Radzinowicz gives it an additional raison d’etre and, we hope, an additional justification. Where Woods shows how Milton crafts his poems to resist fixed readings, Diane McColley draws on her knowledge of

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sacred art and music to raise her own questions about how a reader’s cultural location might influence her response to and interpretation of Milton’s poems. McColley opens her discussion of the Nativity ode by considering the violent, disturbing close of Psalm 137: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” How, she asks, does cultural and religious identity influence a reader’s response to the violent impulses expressed in such poetry? She enumerates what in the ode is conventional and, for the most part, what is not: “the mixture of instruments of war and music” wielded by the heavenly host, the presence of shepherds, the absence of the wise men and their gifts (popular with Renaissance painters) and of the ox and ass, coming at last to the exorcism of the pagan gods, each associated with a particular place and with tribal loyalties and violence. Shepherds may remind readers that the newborn God is the Lamb of God who will undergo a violent self-sacrifice, but McColley suggests that Milton’s focus on shepherds, on nomads who move from place to place to graze their flocks, may also combine with the unnamed pastoral landscape of the ode to suggest that Milton’s “newborn heir is not the god of a particular flock or territory, but a savior for all people and for all places” (19) and for all creatures who abide in them. As Woods observes, “typically, Milton leaves room for the reader to respond to the questions his rhetoric raises, such as the value of poetry in the face of death or how the natural world reveals its limits” (6). Gordon Teskey approaches Lycidas, Milton’s elegy on the early death of Edward King, as a place to think about what it means to be human and what role art plays in creating that meaning as he explores the changes in taste and in belief that have affected readers’ responses to this complex pastoral elegy. Like McColley, he raises questions that arise from living in the twenty-first century. Addressing changing attitudes toward the poem’s classicism and toward its Christian consolation, Teskey makes a

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case for the poem’s continued appeal: no longer valued for its allusiveness, its amplification, and its erudition, Lycidas may now be appreciated for “its spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is improvised with ‘eager thoughts,’ coaxed out of unwilling muses (‘Hence with denial vain and coy excuse!’) and often interrupted in its course by unexpected voices” (47). And it addresses the most serious of all questions — “how do we use art to make life worth it, since we die?” (42). Its excessiveness, Teskey argues, may be compared to the Neanderthal practice of placing flowers on the dead, a profoundly human act because of “its futility, its frivolity” (56), and one that does not so much close off grief, interposing a little ease, as open us to the experience of “oceanic loss” (55). Hugh Jenkins considers not violence within Milton’s works but the effects of political violence on Milton’s understanding of English identity and nationhood. Jenkins argues that in Milton’s Latin Defenses of 1651 and 1654, and particularly in his 1658 revision of the first of these, we see a “double dialectic,” with Milton not merely responding to the republic’s external enemies epitomized by Salmasius but also rethinking his internal sense of the English people and the republican experiment. Asserting that Milton considered the Defenses not simply political pamphleteering but “personal and artistic” achievements, Jenkins demonstrates how Milton did not polish his Latin simply to elevate its artistry and correctness: “the elegance of the Latin becomes part of the ethical proof of the argument” (60). Jenkins interweaves subtle, internal evidence from Milton’s Latin phrasing and rhetoric in the prose works with an informed contextualizing of the political pressures surrounding the Defenses in this charged moment in history. The revisions of the 1658 version reveal Milton struggling with the question of what it means to be “a people” in the absence of a king and in the presence of political factions.

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The second section of Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics contains a trio of essays dealing globally, and magisterially, with hermeneutic issues across Milton’s works. Barbara Lewalski addresses the hermeneutic challenge Milton himself faces in his representation of biblical events and of divine will in Paradise Lost. She identifies scenes that present God in dialogue with others — the Son, Adam — which reinforce the sense that God is reasonable and intends the good of his creatures, as well as scenes of apparently arbitrary pronouncements, where God tests his creatures’ ability to recognize on their own that reasonableness and good will. Through analysis of De doctrina Christiana, Lewalski identifies principles by which Milton believes individuals ought to interpret Scripture and that enable him to avoid the trap of literalism: accepting both the indwelling Spirit and Reason as necessary guides to right interpretation, recognizing that God accommodates himself through Scripture, acknowledging charity to be “the sum of the Law and the Prophets” (83), and remaining open to one’s experience, either personal or collective, of God’s benevolence. As her essay illustrates, the characters in Paradise Lost “draw on some or all of these principles as they seek to interpret the meaning of, and the intent of God’s words” (85). In the instances when characters interpret erroneously — Satan’s response to the elevation of the Son, Eve’s response to Satan’s suggestions about God’s motives in forbidding humans access to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — Lewalski shows how the application of these principles might and ought to have led the characters to better choices. Joseph Wittreich’s essay focuses on the conversation between Raphael and Adam about the Creation — what are now books 7 and 8 of Paradise Lost — and the conflicting ideas about cosmologies, the sequencing of events, and even the reasons for events that their competing narratives present.

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Wittreich approaches Milton not as “a conservative thinker” but “an adventurous inquirer” who offers multiple perspectives and multiple “authoritative” voices in order to remind readers that “truth is processive, hence always partial” (112), and that they are responsible for assisting in the discovery of “emerging truth” (131). Rather than attempt to reconcile these perspectives and narratives, or to explain them away as deriving from different sources in Genesis or as representing the differing perspectives of angel and human, Wittreich constantly asks, “who is the reliable narrator, translator, mediator of God’s word?” (120) as he explores the narrator’s, Raphael’s, and Adam’s accounts of the creation of humans and the relations between the sexes, as well as the tensions between that theorizing and the narrative itself. William Flesch continues such broad-scale reflection on Milton’s hermeneutics by offering a theory inextricably linking justice and narrative that has wide-ranging consequences for how to read Milton. Flesch places Samson Agonistes and then Paradise Lost in the context of a theory of plot as a narrative of vindication in order to consider the epic’s claim “to justify the ways of God to men.” As Flesch explains, to understand God’s ways as just requires that humans see the consequences of original sin as appropriate punishment rather than vindictiveness. Flesch demonstrates how the narrator’s interest in justification modulates in the poem, so that the voice that called for revenge is chastened over the course of the narrative as it shifts its focus from holding Satan accountable for human suffering to recognizing the justice (and compassion) of God’s treatment of humans. Flesch argues that “this simultaneous consideration of justice and of narrative . . . leads to Milton’s deepest thinking on human subjectivity” (145) and that Paradise Lost becomes “a tutorial in narrative judgment” (150) aimed at deepening the reader’s understanding of justice.

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In this collection’s third and final section, each of the four contributors takes on a specific issue or crux focusing on a case of rival hermeneutics in Milton’s poetry. Like Lewalski, Teresa Feroli engages De doctrina Christiana in order to interpret Paradise Lost, addressing the vexed question of how to interpret the line “he for God only, shee for God in him.” But Feroli also reads Milton’s ideas about what it means for humans to be made in God’s image in light of works by his contemporaries, both the more conservative Puritan divines Jean Calvin and William Perkins and the radical Quaker women Martha Simmonds and Margaret Fell. Reading the middle books of Paradise Lost in this context, Feroli argues that Milton presents Adam’s divine image as much through his actions as through his ontology. It is through conversation — requesting a companion, articulating his understanding of his place in the world and of himself in relation to God — that Adam most clearly demonstrates that he is made in God’s “Image, not imparted to the Brute” (PL 8.441). In this sense, Feroli sees “Adam’s possession of God’s image as intrinsically bound up with his desire for Eve” (174–75). Even more interestingly, like the Quaker women, Milton presents a special spiritual role for Eve and for women, as “woman’s role in providential history requires that Eve possess direct access to God and the capacity to participate in the divine image” (178). Although Milton’s narrative insists that Eve is spiritually subordinate to Adam, it also demonstrates that “his Adam requires her existence in order to realize the ‘God in him’” (177) and that his Eve also expresses an independent imago Dei. Margaret Olofson Thickstun’s essay addresses the striking contradictions in Milton’s works about the place of public opinion and the role of communal praise or blame in influencing a person’s moral choices. Focusing on Samson Agonistes, Thickstun argues that, “in Milton’s dramatization of the

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fallen world, a person’s relationship with God is mediated through other human beings and a person’s understanding of God’s will is developed in community” (184). She deploys Saint Paul’s distinction between worldly sorrow and godly guilt to explore the social functions of shame and fame, demonstrating how Samson’s desire to reclaim his reputation — to justify himself to his countrymen — forces him to reevaluate his understanding of his role in God’s plan for delivering Israel. In conversation with his countrymen, his father, and his wife, he confronts images of himself that clash with his self-conception and learns to define himself within the godly community, rather than outside it or against it. Only through experiencing shame and seeking to regain the respect of his tribe does Samson learn to relinquish his pride — a pride that has led him to imagine that because God had raised him up rules do not apply to him — and successfully subordinate himself to God’s will so that he can deliver Israel. Continuing the theme of learning through conversation, Stella Revard’s essay addresses the “extended dialogue of Satan with the Son in which Satan not only strives to make Jesus disclose exactly who he is but also mounts an impassioned defense of himself” (205). Examining the significant additions and alterations Milton makes in his brief epic to the biblical accounts of Satan’s temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, she argues that Milton’s reworking of the scriptural material shifts the focus from Jesus’ being tempted (which he is not) to Satan’s attempts to “fix” Jesus’ identity and, in opposition, his own. In the process, Revard investigates the disjunctions in Milton’s characterization of Satan between Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, identifying in the brief epic a Satan whose voice contains “a certain plaintiveness and regret” not expressed in the longer epic, as he is forced to reflect on his original sin and its ultimate consequences. She explores Satan’s apparent attempt to secure the Son’s compassion in relation to George Rust’s 1661 publication

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A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, suggesting that in the later poem Milton flirts with the idea of apocastasis, which he appears to have dismissed in Paradise Lost. Like Revard, Richard J. DuRocher takes as his focus the conversation between Satan and the Son in Paradise Regained in order to deal with a long-standing crux in the poem: the Son’s sharp rejection of all worldly learning other than what is found in the Hebrew Scriptures. How are readers to take that rejection? To what extent is the Son’s rejection of worldly learning meant to be prescriptive? Does it amount to a personal repudiation of Milton’s own classical learning akin to Lucy Hutchinson’s? Placing these questions and this conversation in the context of Milton’s seventh Prolusion and his “Ode to John Rouse,” DuRocher argues that Milton celebrates learning “as valuable not merely instrumentally but intrinsically” (228). DuRocher also demonstrates the subtle ways in which Milton in Paradise Regained has the Son deploy classical learning in confuting Satan. DuRocher cautions that readers not confuse the Son’s rejection of Satan’s temptation through worldly learning with a rejection of learning itself, pointing to evidence within Paradise Regained that the Son delights in serious reading. It is in judicious reading, after all, that individuals develop their habits of interpretation and discrimination, becoming the fit audience Milton admires and desires.

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Part One: Reading Violence

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D Inviting Rival Hermeneutics Milton’s Language of Violence and the Invitation to Freedom Susanne Woods

Milton’s biblical hermeneutics direct his own composition, as Mary Ann Radzinowicz has ably and amply illustrated in her magisterial books, Toward “Samson Agonistes” and Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms. She summarizes the point in her pedagogical essay, “How Milton Read the Bible: The Case of Paradise Regained”: “What Milton uniquely did among the seventeenth century’s great religious poets was to become as far as possible a biblical poet himself, not reproducing the language but reconstituting the themes, genres, and stylistic figures of Scripture within his own religious poetry.”1 Milton therefore necessarily offered his own poetry up for hermeneutic interpretation, inviting us to read his work as he in turn read the Bible, with simultaneous attention to what theme, genre, and style all reveal, and with appreciation of its multivocality, an important feature of his biblical

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reading.2 Further, he challenged orthodox biblical hermeneutics, directly in his polemics and indirectly by recasting biblical materials in his poetry, and he developed in both prose and poetry an invitational style consistent with advocating an active liberty engaged in the thoughtful choices about meaning that he himself sought to exemplify. Liberty is perhaps the chief theme Milton traces in the Bible and re-presents in his own work, whatever the genres and stylistic figures he takes and redeploys. In this essay I want to look at how that abiding interest in liberty is sometimes expressed in the language of violence and dismemberment or disfigurement, jarring moments for which the Bible offers plentiful models. In recreating a biblical poetics, Milton uses such figures as part of his own invitational poetics by taking advantage of their disruptive power to capture attention and provoke often radical rethinking. I am not here concerned whether or not Milton saw violence as a means to liberation (a glance at the prose concordance suggests that the term itself is almost always used in negative contexts), but rather how he uses images and stories of violence to push his reader out of complacency and toward more complex interpretations of the classical and biblical materials from which he draws. By demanding interpretation, I would argue, Milton is also demanding that the reader see and make choices, a process at the heart of Milton’s many depictions of liberty. In pressing his reader to make choices, Milton not uncommonly uses images of dismemberment or monstrosity. “Custome,” for example, which prevents the informed and thoughtful behavior that is true freedom, is a “meer face” that “accorporats” with “error . . . a blind and serpentine body without a head.”3 Similarly, Lycidas uses the dismemberment of Orpheus to lead into a rethinking of the biblical pastoral and the “blind mouths” (119) that abuse it. Violence is literally central to Paradise Lost. It characterizes the war in heaven and is the consequence of sin. There is even some

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dismemberment, as Michael’s sword cuts Satan “in half,” though his “Ethereal substance” closes quickly, but Michael’s later conversation with Adam offers more serious images of destruction and bondage, presenting fallen man as subject to “violent Lords” who “undeservedly enthral / His outward freedom.”4 The first of these examples may be comic, but the second is tragic, and both images (of angelic and human violence) invite consideration of the consequences of postlapsarian evil. Milton’s most coherent interweaving of a biblical hermeneutic of violence with issues of integrity, choice, and freedom resides, of course, in Samson Agonistes, as it retells the biblical story of a Hebrew leader who uses violence to fulfill his understanding of God’s will for his people. I want to pause over Lycidas and Samson, and also look at his most poetical polemic, Areopagitica, to illustrate a few ways in which Milton invites and complicates interpretation through images of violence, at the same time encouraging the thoughtful choices that are the basis of individual liberty. Lycidas, Milton’s early (1637) meditation on untimely death and aborted vocation, recalls Ovid’s description of enraged maenads dismembering Orpheus, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.5

The lines allude obliquely to the resurrection of poetry through Sappho, on “the Lesbian shore,” implying that this violent destruction is a call to reforge what was lost, to make poetry in the face of death and out of the dismembered remains of the past. This poets generally do and Milton specifically does, notably in his use of genres, stories, and topics inherited through the classical humanist tradition as well as through his reading of the Bible, with Lycidas itself famously a reconstitution from both classical and biblical

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pastoral. Yet the combination comes with questions: “Where were ye nymphs?” (50) when Lycidas was drowned; “Had ye been there — for what could that have done?” (57) and, most despairing: “What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore / The Muse herself for her enchanting son” (58–59) do as his body was torn and sent on its journey? The answer will not be found in the classical pastoral, though the poet will continue to use its figures to the end of the poem. The very hopelessness, the gap between what the poet fondly dreams and the reality in the natural world, becomes the place where biblical answers begin to emerge and supersede the classical. Typically, Milton leaves room for the reader to respond to the questions his rhetoric raises, such as the value of poetry in the face of death or how the natural world reveals its limits, and to complete or interpret the gaps and ambiguities the poet creates. Lycidas is also formally disfigured, not only in its freely flowing, canzone-like verse with its occasional rhyme, but as an incomplete version of the framed pastoral monody. It begins with the voice of the “uncouth swain” but ends with a conventional narrative frame. As the death is untimely and Lycidas’s vocation incomplete, so the poem is abrupt and deformed at the beginning. The narrative frame at the end is a formal ambiguity: the tight ottava rime stanza can be read as an epigram that concludes and accomplishes the task of consolation which the pastoral elegy seeks, or it can be read as an epic stanza returning us to the beginning of the poem and reintroducing the cycle of life and death. As an epigram the poem can help us rise to the next thing, like the sun, Lycidas, and the swain (“Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new”). As an epic stanza it can thrust us forward, or rather back to the poem’s opening and the impermanence of things of this world, “yet once more.” The form provides either elegant closure or a disturbing sense of things constantly shaken and disturbed, a reminder of the biblical

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source of the poem’s beginning in Hebrews 12:26–27: “now [God] has promised, saying ‘yet once more I shake not only the earth but also heaven.’ Now this ‘yet once more’ indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.” Like the dismembered Orpheus, the half-framed pastoral monody asks us to reconstruct what has been shaken, or transcend it, or both. Lycidas becomes an early part of Milton’s exploration of “the heroic idea that human suffering is purposive and educative,” as Radzinowicz says of the poet’s reading of the Psalms.6 Areopagitica, containing many of Milton’s best-known images of violence and dismemberment, points toward ways in which he uses such images to complicate a text and require the attentive reader to make exegetical choices. The work’s central premise is that each individual must be part of the process of re-membering truth, the virgin hewn “into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d . . . to the four winds” until “her Masters second coming” when “he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of loveliness and perfection” (YP 2:549). This is a process both necessarily incomplete and necessary; hence, Milton’s argument against prior censorship: “Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint” (YP 2:549–50). For those who would complain against the tearing apart of the church, the “schisms and sects” that might thereby get a hearing, Milton responds that repressive orthodoxy is, rather, the danger: “They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissever’d peeces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth” (YP 2:550–51). Stanley Fish argues that Areopagitica is not about free speech or a free press at all, but rather about a struggle that

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reveals moral being, for which books are ultimately irrelevant. Fish claims that the moral of Areopagitica “is not ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ but ‘Seek and ye shall become,’” and that both books and free speech “are subordinate to the process they make possible, the process of endless and proliferating interpretations whose goal is not the clarification of truth, but the making us into the members of her incorporate body.”7 This is an interesting reading but, I think, not quite right. What Fish sees as a rejection of books and argument except as a means of asserting the virtuous self, I see as an invitation to choose toward the virtuous self. The process of choosing contributes to virtue but does not entirely define it. Truth and virtue exist transcendentally for Milton, even as his language here and elsewhere suggests that one can partially incorporate them by being “ingrafted” in Christ. The gift of that ingrafting is the freedom to choose toward truth and, in that sense, reconstitute it.8 By 1644 when he published Areopagitica, Milton’s theology of salvation already had an Arminian tinge, making free will and the exercise of reason and choice fundamental to maintaining the faith that confirms election and leads to salvation.9 A free press allows for the process of self-formation, to be sure, but not without consideration and discernment. The purpose is not to become the truth — that will only happen with the return of the Christ — but to know the truth sufficiently in order to be free. It is not possible to “incorporate” into the body of truth without the coming of Christ, precisely because that body is dismembered, but it is possible to make choices that free the spirit toward Christian liberty, the “filial freedom” that replaces slavery to Old Testament rules and to established dogmas of all kinds. One of Areopagitica’s most famous passages illustrates the constellation of techniques that convey Milton’s invitation to interpretive and personal freedom. Separately these rhetorical techniques are familiar and unexceptional — negative constructions, rhetorical questions, metaphor, and

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the language of surmise — but in concert they destabilize meaning, demand interpretation, and allow opportunities for the reader to question authorial statement. In the first part of the passage Milton undermines an apparently direct pronouncement: “Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out of the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World.” We may “know,” but then how fully can we know, since good and evil are so intertwined? Milton’s conditional language, negative constructions, and rhetorical questions underscore the point: And perhaps this is that doom that Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare, without the knowledge of evill? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. (YP 2:514–15)

Instead of a simple simile — good and evil are as intermixed as Psyche’s famous seeds — we have those seeds “not more intermixt” than good and evil. Instead of our race for truth being run with dust and heat, it is run “not without dust and heat.” The effect is to invite the reader to consider both the

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statement and its opposite.10 Similarly, rhetorical questions invite assent or dissent: “what wisdom can there be?” “what continence?” The language of surmise invites the reader’s imagination and deliberation: “perhaps . . . that is to say,” “it seems,” “bin counted,” “as they suppos’d.” Even so direct an assertion as “I cannot praise,” since it implies that some might praise, offers the reader the opposing option. Milton’s image of dismembered truth sets up an invitation to his readers to exercise liberty by freely searching for meaning in the hesitations of his text, notwithstanding the orthodoxies of his time. In another image of dis-ease, Milton claims, “we have lookt so long on the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beacon’d up to us, that we are stark blind.” He would have his readers willing to look away from that received truth, that “custom,” no matter how well established or compatible with one’s own long-held beliefs, recalling in the same essay that “a man may be a heretick in the truth” if he does not continually seek out truth for himself (YP 2:543). Milton’s language of dismemberment is intended to shock the reader into a revolutionary confrontation with his own freedom and responsibility for re-membering Truth. If truth is scattered, Milton everywhere affirms, we cannot expect to find one truth on earth, much less rest in orthodox dogma, but are called to exercise choice and judgment as we read others’ efforts and as we let conscience lead reason to find God’s truth for ourselves. Milton’s project for the individual is also a project for his nation, as the body politic takes from this exercise of free inquiry the message of rejuvenation. Such lively intellectual interaction, such lively search for truth, “betok’ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again” (YP 2:557). The condition of dismembered truth is a project that asks us “to repair the ruins of our first parents” in our own lives and the body politic (“Of Education,” YP 2:366–67).

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Just as Areopagitica provides an early example of Milton using images of maiming and violence to provoke interpretation, and therefore the exercise of free choice, Samson Agonistes provides a late one. In Samson, however, the theme of freedom is problematic. At the end of his tragedy Samson is not only destroyed along with the Philistine aristocrats he has been asked to entertain, but there is no evidence that the Danites have learned any lesson of liberation, personal or political, from this destruction. The violent conclusion, and to some extent Samson’s whole violent calling against the Philistines, is at the heart of controversy over whether Samson is a hero called by God to fulfill God’s purposes, however inscrutable they may sometimes seem, or whether he is simply a hubristic man acting on his passions, a model of the flawed postlapsarian heroic.11 Radzinowicz sees in the project a particularly difficult “ethical task . . . to elicit from his mimesis of biblical fable” a rule for living in a postlapsarian world, and “to elicit that rule in such a way as to enable man to follow it.”12 Critics have tended to see that task as perturbed or incomplete. Michael Lieb, for example, describes Milton’s drama as a “manifestation of Godhead in its most archaic form,” with Samson “empowered to be triumphantly destructive in God’s cause,” while Joseph Wittreich sees the play as “less an exaltation of a hero than a problematizing of a received notion of heroism.”13 The ambiguities of Samson seem to me, rather, to support Radzinowicz, if only indirectly, and, like Areopagitica, to point to Milton’s larger project: the reader or audience must make its own judgments, fill in the gaps of information, see the examples provided by the play, weigh them, and reconstitute the body of meaning. The play both illustrates and requires the thoughtful choices that make up the ethical task of the postlapsarian world. As the drama begins with Samson in blindness and despair — a broken Samson, “dead more than half” (SA 79) — one interpretive question is how Milton uses brokenness, and

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the violence Samson inflicts and has inflicted upon him, to model and invite some form of liberty. Samson, who at first defines himself “in power of others, never in my own,” comes to a renewed sense of personal agency through his encounters with the Chorus of Danites, his father Manoa, Dalila, the Philistine giant Harapha, and the officer sent to bring Samson to entertain the Philistines. The efficient cause of his initial impotence is Samson’s famous shearing, the loss of his hair and maiming of his power, leaving him “despoiled, / Shav’n, and disarmed among [his] enemies” (SA 539–40). Despite his successful vow to take no strong drink, his “temperance” was “not complete,” his uxoriousness leaving him “effeminately vanquished” (SA 558, 562). Long before Freud, Milton understood that Samson has lost his generative power along with his locks. The process of the poem recalls Samson to his manhood, even as his hair grows out sufficiently for the Philistines to think to make a show of his returning strength, but debate continues over whether it also calls him to a share of wisdom. This process of recalling is by no means a direct line of increased understanding. Whether or not readers agree with his analyses of Samson’s flaws, Wittreich has amply succeeded in honoring Radzinowicz’s vision of a complicated Samson and Samson.14 As Wittreich notes, “In Samson Agonistes, meaning is lodged within proliferating contradictions, including a simultaneous toleration of violence and revulsion in the face of it.”15 I would add that images of violence illustrate that simultaneous toleration and revulsion, and help to signal Samson’s developing (if incomplete) self-understanding, even as they invite the reader to judge Samson’s words and actions. So when Dalila’s persuasions fail and she seeks to use the erotic power of her touch to reclaim Samson (“Let me approach at least, and touch thy hand” [SA 951]), he warns her back: “Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake / My sudden rage to tear thee joint

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by joint. / At distance I forgive thee, go with that” (SA 952– 54), Again, when Harapha reveals his cowardice by avoiding direct combat with an increasingly determined Samson, the blind hero sends a final challenge to the retreating giant: Go, baffl’d coward, lest I run upon thee, Though in these chains, bulk without spirit vast, And with one buffet lay thy structure low, Or swing thee in the Air, then dash thee down To the hazard of thy brains and shatter’d sides. (SA 1237–41)

The impulses to violence in both instances come in the context of much larger arguments that frame a nuanced picture of Samson’s motives and weaknesses, and of his call to be God’s and the Israelites’ hero. They go well beyond simple rage or the desperate longing for self-annihilation that begins the play. Samson’s self-understanding may be muddied, but we are invited to measure it in terms of what he does as much as what he says. He would dismember Dalila, but warns her away, pushing her with his certainty that she will be remembered as the model for “Matrimoniall treason” (959). Words rather than actions end his encounter. The impulse to fight Harapha, and his certainty that he would shatter the brains and break the body of the Philistine champion, move away from words and back to action, but only after answering the verbal challenge of his adversary. These reversed responses, toward words with Dalila and toward action with Harapha, both suggest some increasing “share of wisdom.” Samson recognizes past mistakes and looks forward, however hazily, to being God’s champion again. Both images shock, but they also suggest that he is making choices that liberate his mind. Milton’s images of maimed or incomplete figures represent opportunities to heal and complete, to reconstruct what has been deconstructed. As a torn Orpheus may reinvigorate Greek and then ultimately Milton’s English poetry, and

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dismembered Truth may demand active inquiry by the energetic faithful, so a blind and deformed Samson may struggle toward a new exercise of freedom. He begins to understand his renewed ability to make choices, at first in defiance of the Philistines (“If I obey them, / I do it freely” [SA 1372–73]), and then through “some rousing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts” (SA 1382–83). He concludes that he will freely go with the Philistine officer to Dagon’s feast, and although he will do nothing to dishonor himself or God, “This day will be remarkable in my life / By some great act, or of my days the last” (SA 1388–89). The reader knows to convert the “or” to “and” in this famous passage, and that this “great act” will complete both Samson’s mission and his life. The rest is familiar to the reader of the Bible, though recast with Milton’s particular subtlety: soon after Samson leaves, his father returns with hope of buying his son’s freedom, and imagines a sentimental picture of blind Samson by the household hearth, perhaps with God restoring his sight with his strength for yet more great deeds. Sounds of violence break through this hope, as a “hideous noise” and “universal groan” interrupt Manoa’s conversation with the Danites. Soon a messenger lets all know that Samson has literally pulled the roof down on the Philistines and “inevitably / Pulled down the same destruction on himself” (SA 1657–58). Samson’s sense of agency and vocation, recast over the course of his encounters in the drama, exercises its freedom in an act of spectacular violence. The Chorus, in praising this “dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious” (SA 1660), attributes Samson’s self-destruction not to his own will, but to his being “tangled in the fold / Of dire Necessity” (SA 1665–66). Whether one interprets Samson as heroic or merely violent, God’s chosen avenger or a deluded strongman, his act of self-chosen liberation is not “dire Necessity” but a way of changing his own story. When he first meets with the Danite Chorus, he asks, “Am I

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not sung and proverbd for a fool / In every street?” (SA 204– 05). Samson will, like the earth shaken “yet once more,” find himself re-formed and translated like the Phoenix who, “though her body die, her fame survives” (SA 1706). His act of violence may change the way he is remembered, from a “proverbd . . . fool” into, as Manoa hopes, the subject of “copious legend, or sweet lyric song” (SA 1737). Yet Milton embodies his story in neither of these, but rather in tragedy, “the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems.”16 It is up to the audience to see this spectacle with the eyes of imagination, replacing Samson’s blindness and Manoa’s sentimentality with its own various understandings of what this story means. Despite the maxim-spouting Danite Chorus, there is no settled assurance that Samson, they, or we can confront such a violent calling with “calm of mind, all passion spent.” We may, however, “temper and reduce . . . to just measure” the “pity and fear, or terror” that the violence of this poem arouses.17 Each of these works — Lycidas, Areopagitica, and Samson Agonistes — illustrates something of Milton’s larger project of dislocating and re-forming language.18 Put very briefly, in Lycidas, Milton’s partial pastoral frame asks his reader to make decisions about the open or closed direction of the poem or to accommodate both possibilities. In Areopagitica, Milton invites his readers to challenge dogmatic teaching by their own individual search for truth. In Samson, a drama about agency and choice, the reader is challenged to judge the source and consequences of Samson’s choices. In each text, violent dismemberment — of Orpheus, of Truth, of Samson shorn and blind — is a central image. The first is an allusion to Ovidian metamorphosis, the second a personification, and the third a dramatic embodiment, but each is metaphorical in the broadest sense. Winifred Nowottny describes metaphor and other devices of comparison as “speaking of X as though it were Y,” with the reader finding the Z, or basis

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for comparison. For metaphor to be successful, “there has to be a similarity between two things sufficient to hold them together and a disparity between them sufficient to make their comparison exciting.”19 In this sense, metaphor itself is a disjoining that invites the reader to rejoin, actively to supply what is missing. Milton’s project is not simply to invite his reader to complete what is incomplete, but rather to engage metaphor to reconstitute self and society. As Stanley Levin points out, metaphor is a way of deviating language from its common denotations in order to change our approach to the world: “instead of attempting to construe the expression, i.e. make it conform to a sentence that has a truth value in this world, we as it were construe the world — into one in which the deviant position is no longer deviant.”20 Or, as Earl MacCormac puts it, “viewed internally, metaphors operate as cognitive processes that produce new insights and new hypotheses. Viewed externally, metaphors operate as mediators between the human mind and culture.”21 Milton’s affinity for the metaphor of dismemberment acknowledges the power of metaphor itself for enabling us to see the world differently, which he vigorously invites us to do throughout his oeuvre. Just as he “cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d” (YP 2:515), he cannot tolerate an inactive reader. Metaphors require the reader to dislocate the terms in which we describe reality. In his language of violence and dismemberment, Milton sets his readers in search of the connecting links that will transform the way they see the world, asking them at the same time to choose among possible meanings and therefore enact the rational choosing crucial to his vision of freedom.

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D “A Table Richly Spread” Nature, Place, and Choice in Milton’s Nativity Ode Diane McColley

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (Psalm 137, KJV)

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Does it matter, reading this psalm, what one’s religious heritage may be, or whether one is male or female, royalist or revolutionary, for or against or reconciled to wars in which children may be killed or maimed? Would opinion vary among members of the same groups? Or does each reader respond in a different way, or several ways? Can we interpret such impassioned poetry without bias? “Zion’s Song[s],” the Hebrew Psalms so richly interpreted by Mary Ann Radzinowicz and shared in many languages by Christians of various sects and nationalities, evoked conflicting responses in the early seventeenth century. Thomas Campion’s version of 1613 intensifies the final verse: Cursed Babel’s seed! for Salem’s sake Just ruin yet for thee remains! Blest shall they be thy babes that take And ’gainst the stones dash out their brains.1

Thomas Carew’s adaptation of Psalm 137, on the other hand, does not include the violent conclusion of the psalm, but ends Holy Salem, if thy love Fall from my forgetful heart, May the skill by which I move Strings of music tun’d by art, From my wither’d hand depart.2

Set by Milton’s collaborator Henry Lawes as “Sitting by the Streams of Babylon,” Carew’s sacrificial paraphrase of “let my right hand forget her cunning” turns the psalm into an oath of loyalty without vengeance. The Gospel according to Matthew, the most Hebraic of the four Gospels, makes the Babylonian exile that this psalm commemorates the central historical landmark in the genealogy of Jesus Christ: “from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying

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away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations” (Matt. 1:17). Of the four canonical Gospels, only Matthew and Luke provide material about Jesus’ birth. It is in Matthew that the wise men from the East consult with Herod, placing the infant’s life in danger and requiring the sudden flight to Egypt. An angel appears to Joseph twice, first to ensure that he accept Mary so that the child will be born within the house of David, then again to warn him to flee Herod’s jealous rage. But in Luke, addressed to a more general audience, the angel who announces the birth appears first to the mother herself, and then to shepherds, who come to worship a baby who is in no danger. He sleeps peacefully in the manger; the family’s return to Nazareth is uneventful. It is easy to see the interpretive choices that a poet must make in translating Psalm 137. The hermeneutic choices Milton makes in his representation of the Nativity in “On the morning of CHRISTS Nativity. Compos’d 1629” are more subtle, but no less significant. Milton chooses to focus not on Matthew’s tale of enemies and danger, but on Luke’s account of the announcement to the shepherds “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8) and the music of the “multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (Luke 2:13), and Milton pays particular attention to the (unscriptural) response of Nature to both. Milton draws from Luke, the apostle to the Gentiles, rather than Matthew, the apostle to the Jews, in order to explore how the birth of this infant god will “with his Father work us a perpetual peace.”3 In Milton’s poem, the newborn heir is not the god of a particular flock or territory, but a savior for all people and for all places, too.

BIBLICAL PLACE, PASTORAL PLACE The places connected with Jesus’ early life are fleeting: the stable in Bethlehem, the sojourn in Egypt, the carpenter’s

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shop in Nazareth. Visual artists in the Renaissance delighted in the opportunity for rich pageantry provided by Matthew’s account of the Nativity — the sumptuous gifts and garments of the wise men from the East. Representations of the shepherds with their flocks are comparatively rare: exceptions are Gerard David’s Nativity (Flemish, ca. 1484), in which sheep and shepherds are seen approaching through the window of the inn’s stone stable; Nicolaes Berchem’s The Annunciation to the Shepherds (Dutch, 1649) in which a white-robed archangel delivers the announcement with “a multitude of the heavenly host” above and “the glory of the Lord” shining “round about them” (Luke 2:8–14), to the amazement of the shepherds and some of their animals; and Francesco Bassano’s “The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds” (sixteenth century Venetian school). The emphasis in the Nativity ode on the “simple shepherds” to whom the angels bring their musical message suggests that Milton may have been influenced by the Bassano painting, which he is likely to have seen: it is the altarpiece in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. The angel in this painting is a gray-winged cherub; the shepherds, who have no shelter and are keeping warm by proximity with their animals, including bovines, are barefoot and loosely, not very warmly clothed. They are, in fact, a family, including a woman and young boys, “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks” (Luke 2:8); “abiding” can suggest both dwelling and “waiting in expectation” (OED). These shepherds are not bound by place but move with their sheep on grasslands far from even the simplest comforts of civilization. Nothing in the painting places these shepherds in a particular geographical location. As with the Bassano painting, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” describes a sacred event in a pastoral landscape but does not identify the place by its name. In the hymn itself, there is a “rude manger” (3) in which “the Virgin blest” (237)

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may settle her infant, and the child’s power does radiate from “Juda’s land” (221), but Milton does not mention “Bethlehem, in the land of Judea” (Matt. 2:6). In the proem, Milton places the event in a time and place that resists such specific locations: “This is the Month, and this the happy morn” (my italics) conflates December 1629 with the year of Jesus’ birth; the child’s “new abode” is “a darksome House of mortal Clay” that he shares with “us,” not a stable in Bethlehem or a house in Nazareth. What does identify in some measure the place of Jesus’ birth is the richly allusive and metaphorical pastoral setting with the shepherds and their flock, a landscape and a kind of economy that could be found throughout the temperate world. In the Nativity ode the shepherds sit “on the Lawn” (85), “simply chatting in a rustic row” (87). It is not yet morning, and the pasture is presumably covered with snow. But lawn and snow, mentioned 40 lines earlier, are the only local descriptions of landscape that the poem offers. Between the mention of snow and the introduction of the shepherds the stanzas offer a panoramic vision of the heavens and the earth suspended in a stasis of amazement: Peace has struck “a universall Peace through Sea and Land” (52); “Kings sate still with awfull eye” (58); “Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave” (68); the stars refuse to leave the sky, and the sun refuses to rise. When the narrative attention focuses in on the shepherds, it shifts from cosmic to close-up too swiftly to mention local geographic features. Rather than ask his readers to visualize a particular historical or scriptural landscape, Milton asks them to think empathetically of these particular shepherds. They are explicitly not Hebrew shepherds: in imagining what they might not be anticipating, the speaker suggests that their name for God would be not “Yahweh” but “Pan” — “full little thought they than, / That the mighty Pan / Was kindly com to live with them below” (88–90). Milton presents them

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as both the keepers of a flock and the first flock of the new dispensation. He introduces them in the moment before the announcement wholly unconscious of the great event that is occurring and wholly focused on their ordinary concerns: “perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, / Were all that did their silly thoughts so busie keep” (91–92). “Silly,” the OED tells us, means “deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy” or “helpless, defenseless,” and is often used for sheep themselves. The presence of shepherds and sheep may remind us of the Lamb of God, who is also the Good Shepherd, and who is eventually to be sacrificed, but these shepherds’ “silly thoughts” both simple and blessed prevent us from merely iconizing or metaphorizing them. Perhaps John Amner (1579–1641) had this dual definition of “silly” in mind when he composed his spectacular yet empathetic verse anthem for six viols, solo voices, and six-part chorus, “O Ye Little Flock,” an anthem about these particular shepherds and sheep that the young Milton may have heard in Cambridge or at nearby Ely Cathedral where Amner was organist. Peter le Huray finds it in several preRestoration sets of part-books and remarks on “the exuberance of the instrumental writing.”4 Like the Nativity ode, Amner’s anthem takes its text from the Gospel of Luke: The shepherds were a watching their flocks by night, and behold an angel And the glory of the Lord Shone round about them, And they all quaked for fear.

Surprisingly, though, a solo voice opens the anthem by addressing the sheep first: O Ye Little Flock O ye faithful shepherds, O ye hosts of heav’n, give ear, give ear, give ear unto my Song.5

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By including the sheep themselves among the participants in the original event, the singer in this verse acknowledges them as meaningful witnesses to the Incarnation. Other Nativity anthems involving animals that Milton may have known, such as Tomas Luis de Victoria’s and Jacob Handl’s settings of “O magnum mysterium,” also ask their listeners to ponder the great mystery that animals should have been admitted to see and worship the new-born Lord: “et admirabile sacramentum, / ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, / Jacentum in praesepio!”6 Milton does not explicitly include the sheep among the auditors of the annunciation, although they are clearly present, but he does explicitly expand the audience from the one that Luke depicts. Unlike the Gospel, the ode imagines the response of Nature to this birth; and rather than dichotomizing the natural and the spiritual, as at first appears, the young Milton shows how they can be drawn together in peace. Having earlier personified Nature as a woman attempting “to hide her guilty front with Innocent Snow” (39), he now asserts that Nature understands the significance of the angels’ announcement. She hears and responds to the angelic chorus: she “knew such harmony alone / Could hold all Heav’n and Earth in happier union” (107–08). The promise of redemption applies to the natural world as well as to humans. Milton depicts Nature as fallen but redeemed, and as sympathetic to her infant redeemer; and this personification begins the theme of the redemption of Nature and the responsibilities of the human race for her regeneration. But other parts of the natural world respond to this advent less happily and in extrabiblical ways. The poem records the shrieks, sighs, and moans of the displaced pagan gods as well as the “weeping,” “loud lament,” and general mourning of their human worshipers as the parting genii, or spirits of place, the Lars and Lemures, or household gods and familial spirits, and the pagan gods all flee. In her discussion

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of Renaissance paintings, Joan Blythe locates the folk tradition about the baby Jesus’ toppling the statues of the pagan idols firmly within the iconography of the flight into Egypt.7 Milton dissociates the exorcism of the pagan gods from its usual place in folk and artistic tradition and from the more explicit conflict between Judaism and other Mesopotamian religions that ground the Hebraic perspective of the Gospel of Matthew. In the ode, the Christ Child dispossesses the false deities not by moving physically through their spaces but by the simple fact of his birth: “Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true, / Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew” (227–28). Milton does, however, keep with tradition in locating the genii and pagan gods in particular places: “from haunted spring, and dale / Edg’ed with poplar pale / the parting Genius is with sighing sent” (184–86); “in consecrated Earth / And on the holy Hearth / The Lars and Lemures moan” (189–91); Osiris forsakes “the Memphian Grove” (214). In the first book of Paradise Lost, he will identify these “gods” as the rebel angels who fell with Satan and “among the sons of Eve / Got them new Names” (PL 1:364–65). In that naming he is careful to associate each god with a particular place or tribe. These include Moloch “worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain, / in Argob and in Basan, in Hinnom” (PL 1:397–98); then Chemos, associated with cities in Amon, now Jordan; Astoreth, revered by the Phoenicians and to whom Solomon built a temple on the Mount of Olives; Thammuz, worshipped in Lebanon; Dagon, sacred to “Palestine,” “Gath and Ascalon / And Accaron and Gaza’s frontier bounds” (PL 1:465–66); and Rimmon, adored in Damascus (1.437–69). As in the epic, in the Nativity ode the pagan gods are recognized as supernatural beings, associated with specific families or tribes, and bound by particular geographical locations: “each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat” (196; my italics). Because he

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is the savior of all places, the newborn king evicts the unredeemed geniuses or presiding spirits of particular places. Milton rejoices in the Creator’s arrival on the earth in incarnate form because he will redeem these disparate places and “hold all Heaven and Earth in happier union” (107–08). In Prolusion 7, “Delivered in the College Chapel in Defence of Learning and Oration,” the young Milton declares, “What a thing it is . . . to know the hidden virtues of plants and metals and understand the nature and the feelings if that may be of every living creature” (my italics).8 The latter seems to me a remarkable thing to be imagining at the beginnings of modern science. Faced with a choice between nature and Scripture, Milton chooses both. He does not, as Wordsworth will, attempt to repopulate the natural world with ministering spirits,9 but to an extent Milton will restore the spirits of place in his later poems through his vitalist monism: all living things being made of the substance of God and infused with spirit.10 The temptation to place-based religion occurs again near the end of Paradise Lost, when Adam responds to the Archangel Michael’s news of the expulsion: “This most afflicts me, that departing hence, / As from his face I shall be hid, deprived / His blessed count’nance” (11.315–17). Adam understands, rightly, that his physical banishment embodies his spiritual alienation from God. But he assumes wrongly that the physical removal creates that distance. He laments a future in which he might have sustained himself by acts of worship at particular spots where God had manifested himself: “On this Mount he appeerd, under this Tree / Stood visible, among these Pines his voice / I heard, here with him at this Fountain talk’d” (11.320–22; my italics). Adam articulates a belief not only that God is confined to particular places but also that God has withdrawn from the world. Given these assumptions, he naturally faces the prospect

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of banishment from Eden with intense anxiety: “In yonder nether World where shall I seek / His bright appearances, or footstep trace?” (11.328–29). His anticipated devotional life and his proposed instruction to his offspring would have been commemorative and tied to specific locations: “here I could frequent / With worship, place by place where he voutsaf’d / Presence Divine” (11.317–19). In lamenting this lost intimacy and sketching out an imagined ceremonial practice, Adam seems poised to create a religion that idolizes place. To prevent such idolatry, Michael must correct Adam’s misattribution of sanctity to place. In discussing the destruction of Eden during the Flood, Michael will argue that “God attributes to place / No sanctitie, if none be thither brought / By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell” (11.836–38). At this point, though, Michael is more concerned to rectify Adam’s understanding of divine nature as he declares the integration of God’s power with and throughout the natural world: Adam, thou know’st Heav’n his, and all the Earth, Not this Rock onely; his Omnipresence fills Land, Sea, and Air, and every kinde that lives Fomented by his virtual power and warm’d. (PL 11:335–38)

God is everywhere. The creatures are not only capable of feeling and worthy of empathy; they are filled with God. This summary statement of Milton’s monist materialism declares the sanctity of all beings in all places who have not fallen into the crimes of Belial, Moloch, Mammon, and the other dark powers which the child who will be called the Good Shepherd comes to displace.

ANNUNCIATIONS Michael’s description of God’s omnipresence filling land, sea, and air evokes the Sanctus from Isaiah 6:3: “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” As

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I have discussed elsewhere,11 Amner appends a paraphrase of the Sanctus to the annunciatory message in “O Ye Little Flock,” which ends And they cry one to another, holy, holy, holy holy is the Lord of hosts; All the World is full of his glory, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: all the world is full of his glory. Alleluia.12

The Nativity ode also invokes the Sanctus, both in the proem, where the speaker alludes to the “hallow’d fire” (28) out of which an angel selects the live coal that will purify the prophet’s lips, and later in the quality of the music that Milton describes the shepherds hearing: When such musick sweet Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortall finger strook, Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blisfull rapture took.

(93–98)

This music not only captivates the shepherds but enraptures the very air around them: “The Air such pleasure loth to lose, / With thousand echo’s still prolongs each heav’nly close” (99–100), and Nature herself “was almost won / To think her part was don” (104–05). The Gospel of Luke does not identify the annunciatory angel or describe the heavenly host who respond by invoking glory to God and peace on earth. Milton describes them militarily as “The helmed Cherubim / And sworded Seraphim” (112–13) in “glittering ranks with wings displayed / Harping in loud and solemn quire, / With inexpressive notes to Heav’ns new-born Heir” (114–16). The angels have both harps with “stringed sounds” and swords. This mixture of instruments of war and music is unusual: the angels of the annunciations to the Virgin and to the shepherds in the plenitude of these topoi in European Renaissance paintings (which Milton at 21

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had not yet visited) are armed only with harps and sometimes pipes or tambourines. Normally, Renaissance artists represent only Michael as helmed and sworded, as he is when he appears in Paradise Lost to lead the battle against the fallen angels and to expel the fallen Adam and Eve from paradise. In the Nativity ode Milton connects the angelic choir and its music at the annuciation to the angelic witnesses at the Creation — “the sons of morning” (119) — and to the angelic rejoicing that will fill heaven and earth at the end of time, when “Heav’n as at som festival / Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall” (147–48). It is the music to which God worked as he “his constellations set, / And the well-balanc’t world on hinges hung, / And cast the dark foundations deep” (121–23). It is music that resonates with the music of the spheres. This music helped to establish the world and embodies the harmony of a world that is filled with God’s glory. The speaker’s prophetic vision of the power of music suggests that in time heaven and earth will become one place — presumably with all kinds of life — and recognizes, if not precisely genii, the inner lives of all creatures and places. By the time of the publication in 1645 of the Nativity ode, the appropriation of Zion’s songs and the silencing of music would have local relevance for Milton: le Huray reports what had become the state of music at Ely in 1640, when Milton was 32 and Oliver Cromwell threatened the dean and chapter, “lest the soldiers should in any tumultuous or disorderly way attempt the reformation of your cathedral church I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so annoying and offensive.”13 Throughout the 1640s, parliamentary troops interrupted choral services, destroyed part-books, and smashed organs; church musicians were, figuratively speaking, required to hang up their harps by the parliamentary government that Milton in principle supported. The purging of idols is an activity that appears to be of a piece with other antiaesthetic activities of the Reformation:

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the suppression of relics, pilgrimages, music, and visual representations of religious scenes, either in paint, glass, or stone. The young Milton is clear in the Nativity ode and Il Penseroso about his opinion of sacred music: “There” — that is, under the “storied Windows richly dight” of, probably, St. Paul’s — he commends, let the pealing Organ blow, To the full voic’d Quire below, In Service high, and Anthems cleer, As may with sweetnes, through mine ear Dissolve me into exstasies, And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.

(161–66)

The “thousand echo’s” that “prolong each heav’nly close” in the Nativity ode may suggest that Milton heard Amner’s anthem, with its lightly dancing polyphonic “alleluia” and imitative polyphonic extensions on “holy, holy, holy,” in the extraordinary resonance of Ely Cathedral. The ode’s angelic choir illustrates both what had been heard in Milton’s youth and what was to be forbidden during his middle age. Much could be found in Scripture for the warring religious camps of the era to argue about, and although Milton is a biblical literalist he does not hesitate to take sides — to choose Luke over Matthew, to emphasize angelic music over prophecy, to embody in the artistic virtuosity of his poem the value of art to worship. In 1629 in composing the Nativity ode, he celebrates the newborn child who “Our great Redemption from above did bring. . . . And with his father work[s] us a perpetual peace,” by bringing all the resources of his poetic art to bear on the subject. In his 1645 Poems, despite a political environment hostile to high art, he placed that ode first in the volume. In book 4 of Paradise Regained, Milton will have the Son of God resist Satan’s temptation to classical culture, not by rejecting art, but by claiming aesthetic beauty as his own heritage:

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if I would delight my private hours With Music or with Poem, where so soon As in our native Language can I find That solace? All our Law and Story strew’d With Hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscrib’d Our Hebrew Songs and Harps in Babylon, That pleas’d so well the Victors ear, declare That rather Greece from us these Arts deriv’d. (PR 4.331–38)

Could the toleration Milton teaches both with his words and with his actions help the children of Israel and the children of Babylon to harp in harmony? What better than an angel’s message, surrounded by heavenly music, and given to simple shepherds and their sheep and lambs — icons of Christian pastors and the sacrificial Lamb himself — could a young scholar produce?

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D Dead Shepherd Milton’s Lycidas Gordon Teskey

Since the nineteenth century, when Mark Pattison, suiting the image to the thing, called this stream-filled poem “the high-water mark of English Poesy,” Milton’s Lycidas has had more votes than any other as the greatest short poem in English — or, at 193 lines, the greatest shorter poem in English. At least among Miltonists, the high estimation of Lycidas survives today. Although Barbara Lewalski begins her analysis with more moderate language than Pattison’s, she calls Lycidas “a stunning fusion of intense feeling and consummate art,” and she affirms that no previous or subsequent funeral poem “has the scope, dimension, poignancy and power of Lycidas.”1 Each word of this statement bears reflecting on — “scope,” “dimension,” “poignancy,” and “power”: Lycidas is more wide-ranging in scope — in cultural as well as in geographical scope — than any other funeral poem, or indeed, than any other poem of its length. Its sources lead us back to, and then take us forward from the Mediterranean world of Greco-Roman antiquity — the sea lanes on which

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Theocritus traveled between Syracuse, Alexandria, and Cos; the mountains of Arcadia and Sicily; and, under the Alps, the broad valley of the Po, into which Virgil’s Mincius flows. We pass on to Renaissance Florence, Urbino, and Naples, and then to the political and religious, which is to say cultural landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant England. But we have scarcely arrived there when we are whirled unexpectedly outward to the Celtic fringe of the British archipelago, with its druidical rites and wizard streams, a culture of immemorial antiquity faintly glimpsed through North Atlantic fogs. Following the song lines from Magna Graecia to the North Sea, Lycidas is the poem of Europe, not only in space but also in time. It enfolds several temporal dimensions, each one representing a strand of thought in the European mind: natural time and work time, with the alternating rhythm of day and night, of sun and star; tenacious, persisting demonic time, the time of cursed ships, gaping shears, and grimly patient wolves; retrospective, or memorial time, belonging to the rite of burial and to ceremonies of remembrance, but also to art, the muses being the daughters of Memory, that is, of funeral; historical or progressive time, which is linked with institutions such as the church, well or badly run; prehistoric or magical time, with its haunted mountains, its sacred groves, its desert caves and prescient streams; prophetic and apocalyptic time, which is captured from the Bible and replayed through the liturgical year; and underlying these times, like a rope bridge slung over an abyss, performative time, time as it is experienced in the interior of song. Because the performance itself staggers and halts and must be started up again several times, we seem to look through the ropes of the bridge into the abyss underneath us. This cubist juxtaposition of asynchronous time frames accounts for the difficulty of Lycidas: we seem to see too many surfaces at once. There is too much information for

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any single point of view to prevail and to arrange the others in due proportion with one another. Who is singing and to whom, and by what or by whom is the song inspired? Are we present at a song, at a funeral, a series of hallucinations, a vision, or a coroner’s inquest? Who or what exactly are we mourning under the name “Lycidas,” and how many of them are there? Is he a shepherd, a divinity student, the author John Milton, “man in his creative capacity, as Christian humanist poet-priest,” as David Daiches says; or is he in his archetype the god Adonis, though Adonis is not mentioned in the poem; is he all of us or only the creative among us, or is he no one, is he anonymous, or nearly so, a collocation of voices or something more disorderly and loud, like the ingens clamor of Ovid’s bacchantes audaciously rendered by Milton as a “roar.”2 What other mourning poem ends by so fragmenting its object as to place it — that is, him, though he is both a thing and a person, a corpse and a soul — in three different locations representing three different time frames: in the sea, in heaven, on the shore; in the present, in the future, and in the dreamtime of a mythic past? Lycidas moves us to pity and fear, both of which emotions are highly aestheticized in it and yet only more intense for this beauty. There is the pathos of the memory of songs shared under the opening eyelids of the morn and under the fresh dews of night; there is the pathos of the stilled leaves of the hazel copses and of the abject, weeping willows. There is gorgeous pathos in the cascade of flowers strewn on the bier from the hands of those vestigially personified valleys; and there is a thrilling poignancy in the vision of the dolphins on a smooth sea, making an arch with their backs (“tergo delphina recurvo”) and bearing a body to land. As to the terror in Lycidas, it grows in intensity as the poem goes forward, from the disturbing image of the taint-worm in the herds, putting us in mind of the worms that will devour us from within, to the shock of a bloody face streaming past under

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water — and then the menace of the Fury’s fatal shears. The terror returns with the nightmare vision of a ship rigged with curses and “built in the eclipse”; and it returns again at the sight of human bones cast against a rocky shore by “sounding” — that is, booming seas. (The “two-handed engine at the door” perplexes more than frightens, unless you happen to be a Laudian bishop, though that “grim wolf” is alarming enough.) As to Lycidas’s violent power, its sublimity, its overwhelming of our capacity to imagine, it is a power that builds to a climax in the evocation of oceanic magnitude in two directions, the vertical and the horizontal. These are the depth of the ocean — extending from storm-tossed surface to “the bottom of the monstrous world” — and the expanse of the ocean. Only a small portion of that expanse stretches from the distant coast of northwest Spain to the neararctic, Hebrides islands. Also sublime is the vision of heaven that follows, sublime but familiar, for this heaven is at once transcendentally other and the same, opening for Lycidas on “other groves and other streams” not unlike the ones he has left, but enrapturing him with a music no shepherd of Arcady ever made or heard, the song from the fourteenth chapter of Revelation, “a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters” (Rev. 14:2). Yet at the end of Lycidas (for sublimity must round on its sources, if possible, unexpectedly, and reduce them to one), the source of this vision appears before our eyes for the first time: a Wordsworthian “uncouth swain” in a blue cloak, singing in a burring, rustic dialect of Greek. In an earthly recuperation of those “other groves and other streams,” the singer rises at evening intending to depart tomorrow — that qualification, “tomorrow,” is important for the closure of Lycidas — for fresh woods and pastures new and, we may suppose, other streams. What will he do until then? Sleep, or listen to the owls.

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It is not surprising that for these reasons — its vast scope, its dimensional complexity, its poignancy and power; and, to add another factor to its magic, its irregular but virtuosic technique — Lycidas was long regarded as the work against which anyone seeking to make a mark on the criticism of English poetry must come to terms, impossible as it is to do so. It is impossible for the reason I mentioned: the poem gives us too much information for one explanation to encompass them all, and it delivers this information through too many impossible-to-coordinate dimensions of time. But suddenly, and not long after what one critic called, with only some exaggeration, “an explosion of scholarship,”3 the obsession with Lycidas stopped, as critical attention migrated to the Romantics, leaving Milton’s great elegy abandoned and forgotten, like a wreck on the shore. Nowadays, it is not much loved, however much it is coldly admired. Contemporary poets I have spoken to regard Lycidas with distaste as artificial, confused and confusing, and too Christian — too Christian above all. This is not just anti-Christian feeling, though it is that, and anticlassical feeling, too, both of which are of concern in this essay. For they reflect a deeper change in literary taste, seen against the most unchanging preoccupations of the literary imagination: eros, death, and history. In our time, even for the religious believer, doctrinal religion and poetry cannot live together. What an astounding development! We suppose a religion that takes the questions and the answers for granted is inimical to poetry, when in the past it was all but essential. Whatever poetry is for us now, we expect it to open new questions, not to answer old ones. Lycidas may still appear, as it has appeared, to open questions as it unfolds on its uncertain, interrupted, wandering, and passionate course. Or at least Lycidas appears to be finding new ways of asking the old question about death: what is life worth, since we die? How should we live our lives, since we die? What

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compensation or “meed” is attainable in life, since we die? Does the natural world care for us — and especially for poets, the creators of art — more than it does for anything else living in the natural world, since we die? Finally, a question peculiar to Lycidas for the intensity with which it is asked, what significance, what treatment, what care should be given to the dead human body, and what is the point, since we all die? The Christian apotheosis of Lycidas appears to silence these questions at once. And the classicism of the poem appears to reduce all serious questions to an elaborate, competitive game. I see no palliative to the urgency of these questions except reciting the poem over and over again, which is called for in its opening words, “Yet once more.” The last question I mentioned — why should we care for the dead human body? — is shockingly introduced with the first of the poem’s unexpected and difficult images: “He must not float upon his watery bier / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind / Without the meed of some melodious tear.”4 A watery bier? Exact information about saltwater drowning is deployed in this startling, composite image, which yokes a funeral bier — an image that elevates and dignifies the body, stabilizing it for contemplation — to the restless violence of the sea, rolling the body over wave crests and down into troughs. Only after it has been submerged some days, having absorbed seawater and become bloated with gases from decomposition, does the drowned body become buoyant enough to float on the surface, weltering or rolling in the waves (OE weltan, “to roll”). It is in this condition that drowned bodies sometimes come ashore in the surf, as those who know Synge’s Riders to the Sea or Edward Bond’s The Sea will recall, and as people who live near the sea know. Milton’s shocking image of the body “welter[ing] to the parching wind” is joined by violence — so Johnson describes the technique of metaphysical poetry — to what is heterogeneous to it: the image of a body on a funeral bier, as in

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pastoral poetry, beside which, instead of howling winds, mourners eulogize the departed and weep for their loss. The eulogizers at the bier will appear later in this poem, among them (for we are to suppose there are more) the river Cam and “the pilot of the Galilean lake,” and so will the flowers to strew that “laureate hearse”: the “rathe primrose,” the “tufted crow-toe,” the “white pink,” the “pansy freaked with jet,” the “glowing violet,” the “musk-rose,” the “wellattired woodbine,” cowslips, amaranthus, daffodils — this last a distortion of Greek asphodelos, common in the southern Mediterranean, that is, in ancient Magna Graecia, and as Theocritus tells us, put into mattresses to aid sleeping. But according to Homer it is also the flower the dead have in their pockets and that grows in the Elysian fields. I cannot read this passage without thinking of Neanderthal burial sites where the dead have been interred with, it is alleged, flowers strewn over them. I like to think they are asphodels. The placing of flowers on the dead human body is one of the first recognizably human acts, and it is recognizable as human because it is futile — like art. We now know animals — at least the higher mammals — are not merely survival machines: they engage to some extent in social play, aesthetic communication, and mourning. But if knowledge of death is the beginning of culture, strewing the dead with flowers is the sign of that knowledge and of that beginning; and the strewing is futile, from the point of view of survival. To beautify the dead body, not the living one, is the purest statement of our defiance of the natural and inevitable truth of our death. It is a lost cause from the outset, and yet for some reason worth it. So is seeing the ruffled waves of the ocean as a funeral bier. We try to force the image to work in our minds, calming the waters a little and hushing the winds. But we fail, and try once again, until we read on, only to find more disturbances like this one. It comes upon us that the aesthetic force of the poem — may we call it its pleasure? — is in these

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disturbances and the effort they demand, not in any resolution beyond them, though the poem pretends to give one at last. It is most likely this rhythm of trying and failing that is behind the reluctance of the muses to sing, their “denial vain and coy excuse.” Culture is hard work for little or no gain, and the muses need coaxing. We know that however much care we show for the body, however much we dignify and beautify the body, it will in the end lie in the grave — or roll in the sea — and undergo hideous transformation until the bones are bare. In fact, skeletization, as it is called in the religious world of shamanism, is a condition to be wished for — as we see in the Mexican Day of the Dead — because it represents the end of decay. We cannot look at a body on a funeral bier, or in a funeral home, washed and dressed, embalmed, adorned or surrounded with flowers, without there being also in our minds, juxtaposed to the scene before us, the faintest transparency of what this body will become. The poet has a reason to afford us the briefest image of another poet’s disarticulated bones (“where’er thy bones are hurled”): there is grim comfort in the thought that they are at last bare. The forced compositeness of the image of the watery bier — it is two images pressed together like flower and fly in a book, one of them pressed into the other — may be psychologically interpreted as the speaker’s inability to accept the un-Arcadian circumstances of the shepherd’s death. Lycidas should be on a bier in the Arcadia of “high lawns” and soaring peaks, and shepherds should be standing by that bier, weeping and singing. He should not be floating on the sea. It hurts to think that whatever care and respect we may show a dead body, all care in the end fails. At least in the end that is nature, which is the only end we know. Perhaps then every form of bodily care, caring for the sick, for example, and for the poor, is futile. Still, the question remains: why do we care

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for dead bodies, knowing what we do? What point can there be in “interposing” (“For so to interpose a little ease / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise”) care and respect for the dead human body? That is the question of Lycidas, and the key to it is in the word “human.” But the key proves as elusive as that lost, drowned poet’s body, which the singer (I shall return to this matter of singing) imagines being “hurled” to uncertain destinations, as the “whether . . . whether” construction suggests, its answer depending on conditions of “weather.” The singer cannot tell if the body has been swept far to the north, to the “stormy Hebrides,” or southward to Saint Michael’s Mount and the great rocks of the Cornish coast, or still farther south, into the open sea, toward the distant shores of Spain and France, “Namancos and Bayona’s hold.” As with this elusively floating body, so with the question of the human in Lycidas: it is swept away and lost. I suggested that the wealth of unhappy questioning in Lycidas is dismissed at its peroration, its Christian consolatio, which begins with the words “Weep no more.” But perhaps this too is an unsuccessful effort, like the watery bier, such that the early image teaches us how to read the consolation, as a trying, an effort, an essai. In any event, its opening words, “weep no more,” give good advice: weeping has to have a period. “Equis erit modus?” (Will there be any end to this?) asks the god Pan in Virgil’s Eclogues (10.28), impatient with his shepherds’ incessant weeping. But this hard, necessary truth — you have to move on — is complicated by the statement in the following line: “Lycidas . . . is not dead.” Yes, he is, we object. If the poem is not to be merely paradoxical — “Lycidas is dead . . . Lycidas . . . is not dead” — there has to be a different sense in which the second statement is true, or a different meaning of the predicate, dead, splitting its subject into two parts, one part physically dead, the other part spiritually alive. Or, as it happens, dead, but resurrected

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from death later, at the end of time: dead now, alive later. The strain of this futile strewing of hope is betrayed — I would argue, deliberately so — by the most facile of analogies. As the sun (for that is what he means by “the day-star”) sinks in the western ocean but rises again in the east, so Lycidas’s body has sunk “beneath the wat’ry floor” but has risen again in another place: So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed And yet anon repairs his drooping head And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high.

(168–72)

We might suppose the analogy is justified, however, as an imperfect premonition of the truth in the line immediately following. It is the first openly Christian statement after the turn to consolation that occurs with the words, “weep no more”: “Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.” What part of Lycidas rose up by the might of him that walked the waves, his soul or his body? And when exactly did he rise? A great question of Christianity is what happens to the souls of those who are “fallen asleep” until the Last Judgment, when there is to be the bodily resurrection of the dead in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. Do the souls in the meantime go to purgatory, which Protestants must condemn as an invention of what Claudio in Measure for Measure calls “lawless and incertain thought”?5 Do they rest in the obscure “bosom of Abraham”? That question is avoided by the vision of an apocalyptic heaven, the heaven of the book of Revelation, to which the dead shepherd is raised. Lycidas joins the elite troupe of those who died virgins and are married to the Lamb, singing the “unexpressive,” that is, inexpressibly beautiful, unspeakable “nuptial song”:

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There entertain him all the saints above In solemn troops and sweet societies That sing and singing in their glory move And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.

(178–81)

The presence of the “saints” (that is, of all who are admitted to heaven at the Last Judgment), of the mystic nuptial song of the Lamb, of our glorified bodies, mentioned by Saint Paul (for that is the meaning of “singing in their glory”), and of the wiping of tears from the eyes, make it clear that this is the heaven at the end of history, not any heaven that might be thought to exist now, concurrently with the time of our mourning. Of course, eternity and the end of time, where we see eternity at last, are not quite the same thing, but the end of time is for us the only gateway to eternity. This means that the vision of Lycidas in heaven is a prophecy of the future, not a vision of what has happened already to Lycidas’s body, which we must understand as still being lost in the sea, despite the past tense (“So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high”). Milton has left us with a religious question: if the dead are not raised until the end of time, in that general resurrection Paul describes in great fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, what happens to the soul immediately after death? From a purely cerebral standpoint, this is a most interesting question for us, a philological puzzle. But it was a question of visceral urgency to Milton’s audience, especially to the grieving family of the poet’s “learned friend,” Edward King. We can hear his mother’s anguished questions: Where is he? Where is my son now? Where does my Christian faith tell me my son is, since nobody around me knows? Milton shows considerable artistic courage in not providing one of the anodyne solutions to be found in the elegies preceding Lycidas in Obsequies to the Memory of Mr. Edward King, some of them unintentionally funny. But for us the visceral question — how do we use

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art to make life worth it, since we die? — comes earlier in the poem. The theological question, what happens to the soul after death but before the Last Judgment, feels like an avoidance of this more urgent one of how art may justify life in the face of death.

D So much for the problem of the Christianity of Lycidas, which we have seen does not so much give an easy answer to the old questions of death and life as it circumvents the old questions with what seems to us a theological technicality. But let us return now to the poem’s allusive, learned style, which I have referred to as its classicism. Contemporary students feel much the same way as do contemporary poets about Lycidas, with the exception of those who have studied themselves into a liking for such encrypted strings as, “O fountain Arethuse and thou honored flood / Smooth-sliding Mincius crowned with vocal reeds,” or “the meed of some melodious tear,” in which “meed” is already an antiquated word and “melodious tear” is an affected way of saying “poetical song,” which is also affected. We do not think of poetry as song. We may think of poetry as voice or as text, but not song. It is worse if the song is sung by a shepherd: “Thus sang the uncouth swain.” Nightingales may sing to poets — or to Sweeney — but poets should not sing, and they should not be shepherds. When did shepherds ever sing like this? Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due, For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas?

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(1–10)

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Who would? The question is compelling only because we are supposed to have heard it before, in a classical poet — “neget quis carmina Gallo” (who would deny a song to Gallus?) (Eclogues 10.3). The first definite statement comes in the eighth line: “Lycidas is dead.” The rest seems like learned nonsense with nothing real in it, although if you have harvested grapes in a bad year, or too early, as the poet is harvesting too early here, when there is more leaf than fruit, you know what it means to shatter leaves, and cut your hands. Even so, this harvest of laurel and myrtle berries is just one more of the learned allusions stacked against one another from the outset of this poem. They do transport us into another place, but that place turns out to be merely the workshop of learned poets’ inchoate materials, strewn with clichés. The opening of Lycidas reads like something earlier than a first draft, the noise that starts to echo in your head and that you write down automatically as a prelude to writing well, but which is not writing well, and is discarded. These opening lines are not inspired, or are cunningly meant to seem uninspired. They read like a necessary evacuation, not an intake of breath. Learning has been marshaled, but the muses have not come. Yet I love these verses dearly and always have, from the first time I read them as a teenager (on shipboard, as it happened, approaching the Gulf of Corinth, after a rough crossing of the Adriatic Sea) and was entirely enchanted, perhaps just because of these apparent but cunning faults, and the feeling of being taken somewhere strange. I love their messy and erratic finding of their way toward their subject; and even more than this I love how they effect what Wallace Stevens calls “transport.” It is transport into a world of learned poets’ inchoate materials, strewn with clichés, but there is magic in this very disorder, these beautiful, half-formed, half-faked things caught between scenes and moving toward something that is clearer in outline — but still cheap, as if those laurel and myrtle leaves were Christmas decorations, or Ezra Pound’s

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tin wreath of laurels. The poet is calling to the sources of classical poetry in the clichés of the schoolroom, and those flashy materials, gaudily anticipating the “dark materials” of the Chaos of Paradise Lost, are now, at the poem’s outset, calling to us. They do so not with the prophetic gravity of the Epistle to the Hebrews but like an exhausted child who still wants to keep playing: “Encore! Encore!” We can answer the call or turn away because we like our poetry finished and naturalistically real. We do not like it mechanically repetitive. Dr. Johnson turned in disgust. His well-known strictures against Lycidas (anyone who has heard an undergraduate lecture on the poem knows the phrase, “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting”) are directed at the falseness and artificiality of the pastoral conventions — and their “irreverend combinations” with “awful and sacred truths” — under cover of which Milton’s lack of feeling is concealed.6 Critics have labored long to show why Johnson was wrong, but perhaps time and modern taste have borne him out. Already in November 1637, when Milton composed Lycidas, Arcadian shepherds with their flocks and pipes had been around for some 1,800 years — ever since Theocritus introduced them into poetry, and with them the name Lycidas, Λυκίδας. Or he was the first, as the scholiast Artemidorus said, to unite the formerly scattered bucolic muses into one troop. After three centuries of especially hard use in Renaissance neoLatin verse, which Johnson knew well from an early age, the tedious lamentations of swains could no longer give pleasure, which is what Johnson means by “disgusting,” and also what he means by “vulgar.” Even the diction of Lycidas is for him “easy.” Virgil’s Eclogues begin with two singsong verses, which were among the first hexameters learned in school — “Tityre tu patulae recumbans sub tegmine fagi / silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena” (Tityrus, as you lie under the shade of a spreading beech tree, with your slender reed you coax and practice the woodland muse). Milton is

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faithful to the good old cause of schoolroom cliché when he takes up the deponent verb meditor, meaning, “to reflect on by practice”: “what boots it with uncessant care / To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade / And strictly meditate the thankless muse?” Used transitively without a preposition (“upon”), thus preserving the passive form with active meaning in Latin deponents, Milton’s “meditate” might sound to us powerfully compressed, or affected: it sounded easy and vulgar to Johnson. Johnson also thinks Lycidas defiles the most awful sacred truths with the decorative machinery of pagan religion. Though its motivation is different, Johnson’s objection boils down to much the same objection held by modern readers: distaste for conspicuous learning. Lycidas is a narrow valley of echoes in which almost every line alludes to at least one other from Greek, Latin, and Italian poems, which the ideal reader should detect, or at least feel. This resulting acoustic composite, a collage made out of timeworn poetic phrases from other languages, gives the poem resonance, as if what it says has been reverberating down the ages and now finds complete expression here. That at least is the intention. We live in the shadow of Wordsworth and believe poetry is an affair of passion, of direct experience of nature and of life, and of personal memory, not something shifted together with books. In Lycidas we may feel too much that smells of the lamp and the library, as befits a university volume of the kind in which the poem first appeared. I would go farther and say that there is in this difficultywithout-solution an implicit spiritual claim, which is linked to shamanism. Since Milton’s day we have passed over insensibly from authority to authenticity, that is, from a poetry of erudition, at the center of which is the figure of the doctus poeta, the learned poet, to a poetry of interrogation, at the center of which is the figure of the poet as the transmitter of rare insight into a world without answers. Poets are to discover new questions, not, as before, to give the old answers

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to the old questions. We are supposed to laugh in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame when Hamm says, “Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them.” Instead of delivering an experience to us, as an authority, the poet undergoes an experience on our behalf, transmitting a part of it to us. The poet suffers the making of art — another point of contact with the shamanistic praxis of ecstasy. The center of the creative process has thus shifted from ethos to pathos, from the poet as an authority, a philosopher, a wizard — like Virgil in the Middle Ages, the archetypal figure of the poet as an authority — to the poet as a suffering shaman, mediating voices and powers beyond the poet’s own voice and power, and undergoing transformation into them. Instead of being crowned with laurels, as Petrarch was in Rome, the modern poet dons a series of masks, like the personae of Pound and of Yeats — masks of animal as well as human forms, as when Yeats assumes the mask of a swan, and also of a girl. The poet does not soar, as Milton soared above the wheeling poles. The poet descends from the empyrean into the forms of the world, passing through those Yeatsean circus animals into the murky, formless substance beneath them, of which Parmenides spoke. Baudelaire resigns his celestial aureole to the mud of the Paris street in order to become anonymous, like “simple mortals.” But he reappears as a panicked swan escaped its market cage, trailing its white plumes over the uneven pavement. Is that what Lycidas looks like to us now, a swan out of water? For a long time Lycidas retained its importance in the English literary tradition, however, because it satisfied the old requirements of erudite authority while adapting itself to this new, interrogative aesthetic emerging with romanticism, unleashing a remarkable series of portentous masks. The romantic pathos of art-making as a struggle in which the artist does not have full control is enacted in the wild career of this poem, its spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

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It is improvised with “eager thought,” coaxed out of unwilling muses (“Hence with denial vain and coy excuse!”) and often interrupted in its course by unexpected voices, when it is not interrupted by the singer himself, who seems to throw it down and take it up at will, as his mood changes. We feel the emotional drama of the making of the poem as it unfolds: “Begin!”; “Alas!”; “now my oat proceeds”; “Return”; “Ay me!” The poem’s stance is one of continual, uncertain, and perilous questioning. Even its rhetorical questions have an air of mystery about them, as if a further, harder question waits behind each: “Who would not sing for Lycidas?” “Where were ye nymphs?” “Alas, what boots it?” “Were it not better done, as others use?” “What hard mishap hath doomed this gentle swain?” “Ah, who hath reft . . . my dearest pledge?” “What recks it them? What need they?” We catch the interrogative contagion. Should “our frail thoughts dally with false surmise”? Where is Lycidas now, in the ocean or in heaven? Exactly how will Lycidas be “good / To all that wander in that perilous flood”? And while we’re asking, what are those “fresh woods and pastures new” to which the mind of the singer is to be released on the morrow? Primarily, Lycidas questions the experience of death, as we should expect, but also, more than has been supposed, of sexual desire, of eros, especially in the floral catalog, though more directly, if less deeply, when we hear the young man regretting his squandered sexual opportunities (he is perhaps overconfident that that is what they were), of sporting with Amaryllis in the shade and with the tangles of Neaera’s hair. The poem questions the natural and the supernatural, and on the latter it questions both divinity in nature and divinity beyond nature, since the two divinities cannot coincide, as death and desire cannot coincide. Nor does this questioning proceed from a single, interrogative voice. Lycidas is like a séance, in which different voices keep breaking in, other voices are implored, and it is

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not always clear who is speaking, or to whom. To this extent, Stanley Fish is surely right: the poem is intended to lose its single singer and be taken up by many voices at once, or by the pure spirit of song. Only at the end is everything unexpectedly attributed to an “uncouth swain,” whose voice is supposed to have contained and quoted theirs. Unexpectedly and unconvincingly: we still feel haunted by the many voices we have heard, and by their questions. As to the imagery, it is intensely strange and often menacing, though it is hard to say why. Dark sentinels are ranged along the path of this song: the “watery bier,” the “destined urn,” the “wizard stream,” “the blind Fury with th’abhorrèd shears,” the god Apollo reaching out of the sky to touch the singer’s trembling ear, the streams of Arcadia flowing into the earth and then through the currents of the sea, magically retaining their freshness, the “fatal and perfidious bark,” the “sanguine flower inscribed with woe,” the “blind mouths,” the “two-handed engine,” “the dread voice,” the valleys as nymphs bearing flowers in their arms, the phantom hearse, the obscure bottom “of the monstrous world,” and a mountain rising from the ocean waves: “the great vision of the guarded mount.” On its summit, we may suppose, an angel’s wings are spread against the sky, like a victory. Finally, when we are not at the end of the text, though it feels as if we are at the end of the poem, we see a dead body being borne on the waves by dolphins, homeward. Surely those dolphins are weeping. These images seem to have come down into the poem from outer space, not from the mind of its author. They stand before us as mysterious portents, like black monoliths, or the paintings of Pierre Soulages, reflecting light off their surfaces but totally mysterious themselves: outrenoir, as Soulages calls them, “beyond black.”7 Everything in Lycidas seems to lead away from where we are, on the west coast of England, Cornwall, and Wales, to far distant places and even

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other worlds and other times: to druidical groves; to polar islands shrouded in mists; to the “high lawns” of Arcadia in Archaic Greece and the mountain valleys of Sicily in the Hellenistic age, where flowers are protected from the blaze of the sun; to the throne of Jove on Parnassus across the Gulf of Corinth from Arcadia, or on nearby Helicon, with the stream of the muses beneath it; to a nightmare ship from a gothic hell of torments and curses; to the world-destroying terrors of the apocalypse; and to a heaven where angels wipe the tears from our eyes — and the seawater from our hair. All these divergent places and times seem to have nothing to do with one another. Lycidas is a crowded aggregation of traffic signs pointing away from it to far distant shores. It seems pointless, therefore, to try to make these energetic portents converge on one meaning, for they insistently diverge. Moreover, each on its own seems dark with excessive brightness, as if its meaning were being sucked back into a superdense hole — the “beyond black” of outrenoir. We feel as if, were we to pass over the horizon of this darkness into the interior of one of these images, we would find ourselves in a different place and time — especially our own. Even that final bodily image of Lycidas in the sea, after we have caught sight of his bones “hurled” along the ocean floor or thrown against the rocky coastline, comes to us as the expression of a request, the mood of which is interrogative: “And O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.” It is important we understand Lycidas’s body wafted by dolphins is not something that is reported in the poem as actually taking place. It is not an assertion: that nature, finally, cares for us. It is a question, which might be expressed in the following terms: is there catharsis, if not salvation, in nature? The image of the drowned shepherd wafted by dolphins, at least as it forms in my mind, is like a question mark floating on the surface of the sea, a portent heading to land. Might dolphins possibly do this for the lost body of Lycidas, as they did for Arion

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(alive) and Palaemon (dead), and as they are portrayed doing on ancient Roman funerary monuments, conveying souls to the afterlife?8 Can we find even provisional comfort in what nature may afford us to the making of verse, the comfort of only a moment, a moment lasting as long as an image lasts in the mind? We see a body in the sea carried by dolphins, and then the image dissolves and is gone. Was it ever there? At just that charged moment we are exhorted to forget about the dolphins and think of heaven: “For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead.” (The line is unpunctuated and could be misread, but “for” means “because,” and “your sorrow” is in apposition to Lycidas, as in Latin, vester dolor, “the object of your sorrow.”)9 Regardless how one views Christianity, one could certainly argue, though I will not myself, that this poem would have been improved had Milton cut out the vision of Lycidas in heaven and not asked us to dismiss that miraculous line, “And O ye dolphins waft the hapless youth.” We might have passed directly from the dolphins to the genius of the shore, which is what the drowned shepherd becomes: a protective god of the headland, warding passing ships from the rocks. He would also symbolize obscurely (obscurest is best) a higher salvation: Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more. Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood.

(182–85)

It was noted that the strange imagery of Lycidas effects a transport to autumn. But it is the autumn of the prophet Jeremiah (8:20): “the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Now, perhaps, we are. In the circumstances, however, which we cannot altogether dismiss, Milton would have been little inclined to remove his drowned shepherd “from the blest kingdoms meek, of joy and love.” The other poems in the collection of obsequies

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where Lycidas first appeared do a remarkably poor job of giving Christian consolation, and in this last poem Milton succeeds where they fail. Much as one might have liked him to do so, Milton would not have abandoned Lycidas on the shore of the sea as a dead body, to which funeral rites are due, or even as a benevolent god of the headland. Yet we are not wrong to ask whether it would not have been better had Milton spared us the drowned shepherd’s supine apotheosis and given us a different and more ambivalent consolation, ending with a tenderness of dolphins — or the fading view of a headland in the sea. Doing so would also mean cutting the final stanza in ottava rima, that strange, one-ended framing device by which we are lifted out the poem to look upon its singer from above, the “uncouth swain.” It is a tactic of projection Milton seems to enjoy, as we have seen in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and in “The Passion,” and as we will see in “Mansus” too, at its conclusion. We have been given no hint before of the swain’s existence, and the beauty of the lines, which have a filmic effect — giving another distancing shot, and a fade — is considerable: Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills While the still morn went out with sandals grey. He touched the tender stops of various quills With eager thought warbling his Doric lay. And now the sun had stretched out all the hills And now was sunk into the western bay. At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

(186–93)

We are invited to watch the singer of Lycidas seated on a hillside, composing with “eager thought,” that is, spontaneously, the elegy that we have just heard. We watch this Hellenized ancestor of Housman’s west-country lads as the morning light passes him by in “sandals grey,” in overcast

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weather. We watch the swain as the light lengthens on the hills in the late afternoon, still touching those “tender stops of various quills” as he sings. We watch the swain as the sun goes down into the western bay — the Irish sea, as seen from Wales, the land which, as we hear in Comus, “fronts the falling sun” (30). We watch the swain in the obscure evening light, still meditating his song. We watch the swain as he rises abruptly, shrugging off the experience he has just had, and which he has just put us through: “At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” The cameo is so good we can hardly wish the stanza away. But perhaps it is affected and unnecessary, and perhaps a modern poet — or a modern poet’s editor, imitating film — would have cut it and let the poem end with dolphins and a headland, with the fading sound of waves, and a lingering sea-spray. This is another point of aesthetic difference between Milton’s time and ours. In an age of information saturation, we value economy of movement and purity of affect. We like our poetry stripped down and hard-hitting. Milton could write like that, especially in the sonnets, but the aesthetic of the Renaissance, and not just of its baroque epilogue, favored amplification and fullness: the more the better, if what is more is also good. Economy of means and singularity of affect is for epigrams and short lyrics, like Jonson’s, not for the longer exercises of funerary organ music. Yet the appeal to a taste for amplification will not in the end fully excuse these things. To mark differences of taste in different times is not to justify taste in any time, as being merely relative, so that there really is no such thing as good taste; there is only behavior, and fashion. To justify Lycidas, even if only to interpose aesthetic ease, we need something more — or we do not. But we should at least try to show that the poem, or this part of it, is not a codpiece or a bustle. In this spirit I would venture the hypothesis that both the vision of

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Lycidas in heaven and the unexpected picture of the swain on the hillside do have a purpose in the unusual plan of Milton’s poem. The purpose harks back to the temporal perspectivism of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “The Passion,” and “On the Circumcision.” We return to what I said was the source of the problems of understanding Lycidas: its juxtaposition of ill-fitting temporal frames. The purpose of the vision of Lycidas in heaven and the unexpected sight of the Doric swain is to represent a boundary region between the pagan world and the Christian, when a new historical epoch is coming into view and an old one is fading away, but fading away slowly. These visions, or pictures, succeed one another like memories through which the older ones still can be seen, each new one being “interposed,” like the cascade of flowers interposed between us and the truth. It is a view of history that would inform Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. We are radically historical, so Milton believes, because each of us lives at one time in history and not in another, and what period you live in historically to some extent determines and limits what you know, what you can believe, and even who you are — and above all, so thinks the revolutionary Christian, whether you are saved. The Christian term for this terrible limitation of our freedom by our very identity, which is temporal, is providence — our blind guide. For example, if we live, as the swain who sings Lycidas does, before the coming of Christ, we are determinate and inalterable pagans. But the drama of the conclusion of the poem is in its fleeting, prophetic vision of other possibilities. A precedent for Milton would be Virgil’s fourth, or “messianic” eclogue, which was viewed throughout the Middle Ages as a prophetic vision of Christian truth accorded to a pagan poet, and therefore as being only clear in part. This is a Pauline thought: now we know in part (1 Cor. 13:12). The swain finally presented to us as having sung Lycidas

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is a development of those “shepherds on the lawn” in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” of whom it is said “full little thought they then / That the mighty Pan / Was kindly come to live with them below” (88–90). They speak more truly than they know, for this god is kindly because he is of the same kind as us, having become human. Those shepherds do not use the names Jesus or Christ because they are not, for Milton, what they are in the Bible: Jews in the area around Bethlehem, who would know Hebrew Yeshua and would have heard Greek Χρίστος (Christos) as the Septuagint translation of Hebrew “messiah.” But Milton’s shepherds are not Jews; they are classical pagans, which is to say, indices of a historical epoch coming to a close, and intelligences to whom a new one is proclaimed. The only term they have to refer to what is now coming down into history is “mighty Pan,” whose service is perfect freedom. The irony is that mighty Pan himself, like the oracles later in the poem, will soon be purged by the very one to whom his name refers. The mighty Pan too will feel “from Judah’s land / The dreaded infant’s hand” (85–90, 221–22). This inhabiting by Milton of a historically specific boundary region, signified by the classical imagery of pastoral, with Christian imagery emerging through it from below, or gently settling on it from above — like that “saintly veil” (42) of falling snow in the Nativity ode — is what I refer to as Milton’s “primitive art.” Such an art may have more in common with the uses of primitivism or “first peoples arts” than it does with the ahistorical and idealizing conventions of the pastoral elegy. The primitive is not an objective quality of any work of art, unless we mean art that is produced outside the context of teaching, something that certainly cannot be said of Lycidas. It took many years of humanist and Christian instruction, and many more years of self-instruction, to build the poet who could “build [this] lofty rhyme.” It also takes some years of primary instruction just to be able to read this

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poem and understand it superficially, and years, stretching to decades, of meditation (in the Latin sense Milton uses the word: repetitive practice, memorization), that may be needed to feel confident to write about it. In Lycidas, as elsewhere, the aesthetics of the primitive — the crude “rural ditties” and the satyrs’ masks worn by university students and dons (“Rough satyrs danced and fauns with cloven heel / From the glad song would not be absent long, / And old Damoetus loved to hear our song” [34– 36]) — are used to represent the essentially human in time, but an essential humanity that is in the end exposed as an illusion — exposed by history, by historical change — as it would be at the Cambridge University represented here. Yet the essentially human is there, underneath all the masks. For Milton, this humanity is something ethical — freedom, or liberty, as he calls it — and this essence he will try to extract in the long, winding tube of sound that is Paradise Lost: a righteousness truly existing in Adam and Eve before the fall into history. The fall into history obscures Milton’s essential human thing, freedom, and loses it in a chain of false substitutions, of tin wreaths, pastoral songs, and erotic liberties, those products of Virgilian otium, or leisure, which prove to be a mere vacancy within which there resonates an impotent, classical song. Like the funeral bier of this poem, which interposes temporary ease but proves to be an illusion, these images of our freedom are “frail thoughts” and “false surmise.” “Since thy original lapse true liberty / Is lost,” Michael says to Adam at the end of Paradise Lost, “which always with right reason dwells” (12.83–84). That is what Milton does not want to say in this poem because he wants us to feel the oceanic loss of the truth in the complexities of historical change. But perhaps, at the end, we may venture to disagree with Milton on this matter of the question of the human, the question, as I said, which, like the body of Lycidas, seems

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washed far away and lost. Perhaps the essence of the human is not that noble thing, freedom, but frivolity, of which freedom may be only one part, frivolity plus courage. The Neanderthals who placed flowers on the bodies of those whom they loved — or perhaps only liked, and in some cases disliked — and were now burying in caves were not practicing sympathetic magic, as in The Golden Bough, to effect a resurrection in the spring. They knew they were doing something useless to their survival or to the survival of the deceased or to any of the practical purposes of life that they could identify. Useless as art. They were doing it because it felt good to do so, in defiance of the natural circumstances to which they were bound. They were doing something purely beautiful, and they were doing it to defy what strikes us as most disgusting in our nature: death and physical decay. We recognize and greet them as humans, like ourselves, because of this act, because of its futility, its frivolity. Strewing flowers or, for that matter, laboring in the garden to tend them, or even bending down to pick them, and certainly offering them — think of Picasso’s child’s hand gripping them in a fist, but in offering — is extravagant, in the older and original sense of that word, as wandering excessively far from what is necessary for mere survival, from what is practical. We may say the same of Lycidas, that splendid anthology, that wasteful and extravagant performance, that collocation out of dead languages of the dried flowers of song, which seem to come to life in it as often as we are willing to say it over again. Its survival is a sign to its future, and to ours, its meaningless beauty crying out to us, “Yet once more! yet once more!” We continue to comply with that request, taking it, as Nietzsche says, “Da capo!”

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4

D Toward Latinitas Revising the Defensio Hugh Jenkins

My title alludes, obviously, to Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s magisterial Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind. Radzinowicz’s central premise is that Milton’s mind and art developed dialectically, that the same concerns that inform his Commonplace Book and early, tentative public utterances as a poet are thought out, rethought, and move toward synthesis in his subsequent prose tracts and poetic masterpieces. Radzinowicz defines Milton’s dialectical approach as a move toward “liberation,” “not from change into fixity but through change into growth,” a constant tension leading toward a synthesis in reason and art. And for Milton, both reason and art served “the public good”; he viewed himself as an artist and an educator, and “whenever Milton thought about education, there was present to him the idea that the mind can be tempered and harmonized only through debate and dialectic.”1 But according to Radzinowicz, a deeper dialectic informs Milton’s work, particularly the great poetic works he completed after the Restoration. That dialectic is tragic and based 57

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on the ruination of Milton’s personal and political dreams. The result was that “Milton experienced a profound discrepancy between the world he lived in (reality) and the world he wished to live in (dream)” (3). The obvious analogy here is to Samson, the hero of Milton’s last great work. Radzinowicz views Samson as the tragic synthesis of Milton’s oeuvre as it enacts what Christopher Hill calls “the experience of defeat,” the recognition of “the collapse of the system of ideas which had previously sustained action and attempting to discover new explanations, new perspectives.”2 It is a tribute to Milton’s courage and integrity that the “new explanations and perspectives” of his last poetic works should speak so boldly and so in tune (though perhaps modulated to a minor key) with the ideals of his youth and his desires of the 1640s. He remained, as Radzinowicz argues and as has been so forcefully seconded of late by Nigel Smith and Sharon Achinstein (among others), a revolutionary to the end.3 Yet when exactly this sense of defeat became concrete for Milton is debatable. Hill, in another work, cites the “slow sapping of Milton’s faith in the Revolution he had made his own” during the 1650s; Barbara Lewalski agrees that Milton remained at best pragmatically ambivalent about the course of the republic during this time.4 Such disagreement suggests the possibility of another, earlier synthetic moment for Milton: the moment when dream and reality, hope and fear came forcefully in conflict and demanded some kind of resolution. That moment, I would argue, is initiated in his Defenses of the English people of 1651 and 1654 and moves toward (if not quite achieving) resolution in Milton’s revision of his first Defensio in 1658.5 In all of these works we see a double dialectic: an external one, with Milton confronting his own and the republic’s external enemies, but also an internal one, as that confrontation forces Milton continually to rethink his own views on the English people and the republican experiment they have undertaken. The real problem for

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Milton is that resolving the first of these dialectic struggles tends to work against a resolution of the second, leaving both works in a state of ideological tension. Milton’s 1658 revisions of the Defensio encapsulate both of these movements but work toward a promised synthesis. The dialectical problem Milton’s revision seeks to answer is whether he is in fact defending a unified people or, in the absence of a unifying monarch, just a loose collection of competing factions and interests — in essence, not really a “people” at all. Milton would devote much effort in 1658 to polishing the latinitas, the “Latinity” or artistic quality of the Defensio, but that effort in turn closely relates to this problem, the essential nature of the English people.

D Recently Jonathan Bate has taken historicist and “revisionist” approaches to Milton to task for “writing so richly about the polemical prose and saying so little about the literary art.”6 Radzinowicz too notes, “polemical prose often declares less of what a man thinks than of what he prudently or impatiently finds it expedient to argue” (xiv). Certainly both editions of The Readie and Easie Way, for example, written almost on the very eve of the Restoration, are products of their occasions. But his earlier Defenses are very different matters. Though each had its shaping occasion, both were intimately personal and artistic as well as political and polemical works for Milton. He considered each a major achievement, capstones not only to his work for his country but also to his own prose oeuvre. When he writes in 1651 at the end of the first edition of the Defensio that “it now appears that, with God’s help, I have completed the task which I had set for myself at the start, which was to defend at home and abroad the great works of my fellow citizens,” he refers specifically to his assigned task of rebutting Salmasius’s Defensio regia, countering the “madness of this raving sophist,” but

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in a larger sense to his entire polemical career as well (YP 4.1:535; CM 7:550).7 He makes the case more forcefully in the peroration of the Second Defense, arguing that “I might almost say I have erected a monument that will not soon pass away” (YP 4.1:685) and subsequently compares his achievement to those of Homer and Virgil in celebrating “at least one heroic achievement of my countrymen” (YP 4.1:685; CM 8:252). Milton clearly believed that with the Defenses he had achieved a kind of literary transcendence. Many of his contemporaries agreed; Milton was widely praised both by friends and foes in his time for the artistry of his Latin defenses.8 One senses the care Milton took with his Latin prose by looking at how he emended the first edition, written “in haste” due to reasons of state (YP 4.1:536), for republication in 1658.9 While Milton did make some substantive emendations by adding or expanding on classical, biblical, and patristic proof-texts (particularly in chapters 2, 3, and 4), most of the emendations are relatively minor.10 Still, they show that Milton was conscious of the opening he had left for his enemies in having savagely attacked Salmasius for his own “barbarisms” and “solecisms.” Consequently he combed carefully through his text, correcting what were probably printing mistakes, making slight changes in diction, and emending tense and mood to fit the new circumstances (or cover solecisms of his own) (see YP 4.2:1179). For Milton, the artistry of the defense had to be worthy of the cause defended. Latinitas, the correctness and elegance of the style, is a key distinction between him and his opponent: his Latin embodies it; Salmasius’s lacks it, is that of a mere “grammarian.” So Salmasius’s account is both factually “confused” and stylistically “tasteless” (YP 4.1:512), and, as Radzinowicz notes citing this passage, Milton’s task is both to be more truthful, clear, and “tasteful” or artful (80). Latinitas links Milton and his subject, as the elegance of Latin becomes part of the ethical proof of the argument.11

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The ethos of the argument relates to two more substantive and crucial revisions Milton made in 1658. The longest and most obvious is the postscript he appended, to which I will return. The second is smaller, the only sizeable deletion, but one closely related to the longer postscript. It comes in chapter 4 of the Defensio, as Milton spars with his opponent over the biblical and early Christian treatment of kings. Salmasius ridicules the supposedly divine “impulse” that prompted the English to depose and execute Charles. Milton quotes him directly: “This crew of English brigands, you say, alleges that they were led to the undertaking of this crime by a supposed voice from heaven” (Allegat, inquis, Anglicani latrocinii factio, se ad id scelus, quod tam nefarie suscepit, nescio qua voce coelitus missa impulsos fuisse) (YP 4.1:406; CM 7:230).12 Milton’s response is twofold. He disputes the facts, saying that the English claim of a “divine impulse” is “but one of your countless lying fictions.” This line of attack is an odd one, given that Milton had begun the defense proclaiming that the deeds of the English people “send forth a voice and bear witness to the presence of God in every place” (YP 4.1.305), but nonetheless Milton leaves this passage unchanged in 1658 — though, as we shall see, he will return to this charge later. In 1651 he primarily attacks Salmasius’s mental state and consequently his lack of latinitas: “Primum delirasse te cum haec scriberes plane video, neque mentis neque latinitatis compotem satis fuisse” (First off, when you write this I clearly see that you are mad, incompetent both in mind and latinitas) (CM 7:575).13 Yet this is the only substantive passage Milton removes in his 1658 revisions. Why? The removal is all the more puzzling because Milton has Salmasius here: it is bad Latin, both inelegant and grammatically suspect. Salmasius uses factio as a singular noun (factio . . . suscepit) and a collective plural (factio . . . impulsos, perhaps mistakenly referring to the Anglicani latrocinii; impulsam would be correct); moreover, the subjunctive

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(susceperit) would be proper and more elegant for the verb. There could be many reasons that Milton removed the passage; Robert W. Ayers argues that it is part of a “soften[ing]” of his attacks on Salmasius, though Milton left untouched many similar attacks (YP 4.2:1129).14 The real problem here is that Salmasius’s grammatical mishaps, which should score Milton points, actually reinforce one of his most damaging attacks against the English republic. By making factio both singular and plural, Salmasius ineptly but tellingly illustrates divisions in the new republic: there is not just a faction of “brigands” (latrocinii) among the people of England, but the people are, in fact, broken by the loss of the king into many factions, hit by different impulses: Presbyterians demanding a state church, Independents opposing it; remnants of radical groups like the Levellers and Diggers demanding forms of political democracy, Cromwell and the Grandees opposing them; those wishing for centralized power, even the return of monarchy, and those supporting a more decentralized republic; and so on. In 1651, such factional disputes may have seemed quieted by military strength and the Council of State representing what would now be deemed “the vital center”; in late 1658, after Oliver Cromwell’s death, their decibels were once again increasing.15 Salmasius’s grammatical ineptitude ironically illustrates that the populus Anglicanus Milton purports to defend may not exist as a unified entity, or at all. In this case, drawing attention to Salmasius’s solecism reveals the fears that underlie it; thus, Milton removes one of his more telling attacks on Salmasius’s artistry, his latinitas, for the sake of his (Milton’s) subject, the populus. Ideology seems to trump artistry, and expedience to outweigh ethos. This may seem to put a lot of weight on a minor grammatical quibble, but it illustrates a broader problem Milton faced in both his Defenses. Salmasius, perhaps at times a poor Latinist but no fool, returned to it over and over again in his Defensio regia; at one point he insists that the English

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republicans “must explain . . . what we mean by people” (chap. 7; YP 4.1:471, cited by Milton himself). The demand clearly puts Milton on the defensive — and throughout both Defenses Milton seems much more comfortable in attack than actual defense. In response to Salmasius’s direct question, Milton dodges the issue with some fancy Latin footwork, eliding the “people” (populi) with the more technical “all citizens” (omnis ordinis cuiuscunque cives), represented in a unified “assembly of the people” or parliament (populi curiam supremam) (YP 4.1:471; CM 7:390).16 Uncomfortable with the charge and his answer, Milton quickly returns to the attack, undoing his broad definition of the people but scoring points off Salmasius by linking him with the infima plebe (“mob,” or “dregs of the populace” [YP 4.1:471; CM 7:392]), saying, in effect, it takes one to know one. In this case, unlike the passage Milton would excise in 1658, the demands of ad hominem trump (or mitigate) those of ideology and dialectics. But taken together, these passages illustrate that his external dialectical battle with Salmasius over the Defensio regia forces Milton into an internal dialectical battle with himself over the nature of the “people” he claims to defend, a battle in which Milton’s own arguments seem to be broken into competing factions. Milton seems much more comfortable — and dialectically sharp — answering Salmasius’s next claim in chapter 7 that those “who won their kingdoms with the sword cannot recognize the people as the source of their power.” This argument shifts the emphasis from the governed to the governors and allows Milton to deploy his own formidable learning, citing Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Justinus, and the Bible in rebuttal. Milton redirects Salmasius’s potentially damaging question about “the people” and, like any good wrestler (or dialectician), uses its force to upset his opponent. Milton links Salmasius’s attack on the “people” as the source of legitimate power with his (Salmasius’s) “frequent attempts

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to ascribe to kings the ancient rights of a pater familias, that you may draw from thence ‘an example of the absolute power of kings’” (YP 4.1:472). Salmasius’s Defensio is built upon such premises, and they were anathema to Milton, akin to idolatry, as his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and in particular Eikonoklastes had made clear. In the very first chapter of his Defensio, Milton sarcastically rejects the equation of patriarchy and monarchy, pointing out to Salmasius that the metaphor pater patriae is hardly a persuasive case for the equation: “By calling kings fathers of their country [reges Patriae Patres nominaveris], you think this metaphor has forced me to apply right off to kings whatever I might admit of fathers. Fathers and kings are very different things: Our fathers begot us, but our kings did not, and it is we [nos], rather, who created the king. It is nature which gave the people [ populo] fathers, and the people who gave themselves a king; the people therefore do not exist for the king, but the king for the people” (YP 4.1:326–27; CM 7:44). The metaphor Milton ridicules in this passage is central to the external dialectics of the Defenses. Not just Salmasius, but royalist apologists and opponents of republicanism from Lord Capel on the scaffold to the Westminster Assembly in the pulpit had used the notion of the ruler’s paternal power to justify their actions and positions throughout the civil war and its aftermath. Absolutist political thought was built with the fifth commandment — honor thy father and mother, with an emphasis on the former — as its foundation.17 Thus, Filmer, whose Observations concerning the Originall of Government would directly take on Milton’s Defensio, argues, “I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents.” All other rights and powers are superseded by this one, which flows in a direct line from Adam and Moses to those who now “govern in the place and stead of supreme fathers.” As long as even a reputed line to divinely ordained patriarchal

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power can be established, even a child “hath the right of a father over many a grey–haired multitude, and hath the title of pater patriae.”18 When Milton challenges patriarchal power as embodied in the king, he thus fights opponents on a dangerous discursive battlefield. He and other republicans had to be careful to divorce political authority from the familial and its seemingly divine, patriarchal sanction in the decalogue. Milton benefits rhetorically by uniting the “people” (“we,” nos) against patriarchal power. But he was also susceptible to the charge of turning the world upside down, with subverting established social and political hierarchies and the word of God itself. Their opponents were alert to this difficulty; Salmasius was quick to attack the regicides as not just promoting faction, but also by linking them with the lower classes and religious sectaries. This is why Milton redirects the force of Salmasius’s charges against the English people into his own — and the “people’s” — charges against their erstwhile king, making the king the cause rather than the cure of faction. The issue comes to a head in the crucial, penultimate eleventh chapter of the Defensio. One of Salmasius’s most serious charges against the new republic is that it was in fact the army — another factio — and not Parliament or the people that led the revolution and pushed for the execution of the king. Milton accepts Salmasius’s charge but turns it upside down by redefining “the army.” Who did all these things? “You say yourself ‘the English Army’; that is, not foreigners but the bravest and stoutest citizens.” Milton goes on to contrast the army and its “stout citizens” with the “London hucksters and artisans together with the most partisan ministers” (that is, the Presbyterians); only the former could “keep our freedom and save the state” (YP 4.1:511). The contrast is more forceful in Latin: on the one side is the army composed of fortissimorum et fidissimorum civium (“the

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most valiant and [most] faithful citizens”) contrasted to the Londinensium plerique institores atque opifices (“London hucksters and handicraftsmen).” The distinction lies not just in the superlatives: by equating the army with the citizenry (cives) he seems to delegate the bulk of the population to the “mob” (opifices often being used disparagingly in this way by Roman orators and historians).19 This distinction too seems to settle the technical questions of Milton’s earlier definition of “the people,” with the more restrictive cives now standing in for the broader populus. The oft-noted irony of the Defenses is that Milton seems to spend much of his “defense” attacking or berating or, ironically, dividing into “factions” the very people he purportedly champions. Again, the internal dialectic of the Defensio concerns precisely this conundrum. The issue is shown even more forcefully later in the same chapter when Milton defends the Rump, the parliamentary allies of the army in the establishment of the republic. Milton initially argues that the “whole people” (populus universus) had put their faith in the Rump’s “loyalty, wisdom, and courage” to defend the state. But the “people” are no longer “whole”: one part (populi magna pars) “desired peace and slavery with inaction and comfort upon any terms; but still the other part [pars altera] longed for liberty, and for none but a secure and sincere peace” (YP 4.1:518; CM 7:510). Here, at least, he acknowledges the political fact that he will seek to obviate by excising his attack on Salmasius’s latinitas in 1658. Factio is rife in the nascent republic, and acknowledging this seems to be as central to its defense as it is to its detractors. The stakes are very high at this point. In chapter 11, Milton is defending the legal and moral justifications of tyrannicide. Salmasius had acutely noted that the Rump and the army had appointed the judges who tried the king, but that together they are only a fraction or factio of the “people.” Consequently the trial and execution of a “tyrant” was accomplished by

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force and not by justice — that it was, in fact, tyrannical itself by the republic’s own standards.20 To respond, Milton begins his final chapter by defining a tyrant: “a tyrant is one who considers his own interests only, not those of the people” (non populi utilitatem) (YP 4.1:521; CM 7:516). One does not need to be trained in formal dialectics to see the problem here, as Milton has just acknowledged Salmasius’s persistent criticism that the people remain divided about just what the populi utilitas might be. Nor is it difficult to see the danger Salmasius’s question poses: answer it too broadly and he risks radicalizing the revolution beyond even the claims of the Levellers; answer it too narrowly and he risks making the revolution overtly hypocritical. The issue of factio again places Milton in a tight dialectical bind. Milton returns to this issue over and over in the Defensio, offering at times the example of the Dutch and appeals to “natural law” as answers to Salmasius’s charges.21 In what is in effect the peroration of the Defensio Milton returns yet once more to the problem. He turns from addressing his opponent to addressing the English people, seeking to unite ethos and populus through latinitas: “I have completed the task which I had set for myself at the start, which was to defend at home and abroad the great works of my fellow citizens [meorum civium facta egregia] against the jealous rage and madness of this raving sophist” (YP 4.1:535; CM 7:550). John K. Hale argues that this is part of a general shift in mode and genre, from dialectic debate in the body of the Defensio to the “Ciceronian patriotic phillipic” of its conclusion, in which ethos links with the subject (the people) and “argumentation and patriotic honour combine.”22 Attention to Milton’s Latin bears this out, at least in part: facta here puns on factio,23 the “deeds” of the English answering the charge of “faction” just as Milton’s great deed and elegant Latin counter the “madness” of Salmasius. Still, Milton’s impassioned address to the English people — vos quoque, O cives

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(YP 4.1:535; CM 7:550) — continues to imply separation; the vos contrasts sharply with the nos Milton had used earlier to counter Salmasius’s patriarchal claims (see YP 4.1:326–27; CM 7:44, cited above), as Milton admonishes the English people to continue to prove themselves worthy of their deeds: “The bravery displayed in your fight against slavery must be equaled by your justice, restraint, and moderation in preserving your freedom. By such arguments and evidence alone can you [vos] show that you do not deserve the names with which this man libels you: ‘traitors, brigands, assassins, murderers, and madmen’ ” (YP 4.1:535; CM 7:552).24 As the last sentence shows, countering one key argument (that of patriarchalism) still leaves Milton exposed on another (faction), which puns alone cannot put to rest. I have argued elsewhere that the peroration of the Second Defense (1654) revisits and revises this issue and crafts a more effective answer if not a complete resolution. There, Milton reverses the dialectical poles of the argument above: he directs his admonishment as much against Cromwell and his incipient patriarchal powers as against the English people; in fact, Milton posits the people and their native love of liberty as England’s best defense against the return of absolutist power in Cromwell or anyone else. Hence Milton mixes his praise of Cromwell with that of “a great many other citizens of pre-eminent merits” (aliosque permultos eximiis meritis cives) (YP 4.1:677; CM 8:234) dedicated to the cause of liberty and pleads — or demands — that he restore liberty to a broadly conceived “us” (nobis) since “you cannot be free without us” (YP 4.1:673–74; CM 8:226–28).25 Only then does he move to the true subject of his peroration with his address to his “fellow countrymen” (vos, o cives) (YP 4.1:680; CM 8:238), praising and warning them in the same manner as he had done for Cromwell. This returns us at last to the second substantive emendation Milton made to his Defensio, the postscript he attached

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in 1658. Milton adds a sizeable paragraph to what is in effect the peroration of that document. He had in 1651 essentially written in miniature what he would flesh out in 1654: he addresses his fellow citizens in the same manner (“you, my fellow citizens” [vos quoque, o Cives]) and insists on the same virtues (resistance to “tyranny and superstition”) in order to deserve and maintain their new liberty (YP 4.1:535– 36; CM 7:550–52). Missing is only the emphasis on virtue in the rulers (or ruler) as well. The 1658 addition addresses this omission and makes the address more fully that of the “Ciceronian patriotic philippic,” as Milton now links himself and his task with that of the great Roman orator and consul: “As the great Roman consul, when retiring from office, swore in the assembly of the people that by his efforts alone he had saved the state and the city, so I too . . . may venture this assertion at least, calling on God and men as my witness” (YP 4.1:536). Placing the laurel upon his own head may seem typical Miltonic egotism, but certainly the reference to Cicero and the deeds that earned him the title of pater patriae and saved the republic has a more profound purpose in late 1658, with Oliver Cromwell dead and his son Richard uneasily in his place. Factio was again rife, with republican and monarchist sentiments reemergent and revivified.26 The emendations to the Defensio anticipate Milton’s own reemergence as a pamphleteer — and ardent republican and supporter of the Good Old Cause — in early 1659. By in effect shifting the title of pater patriae from the ruler to the writer, orator, and citizen, Milton moves his Defensio more strongly into the republican camp and, as in those two later pamphlets, “urge[s] a return to the more radical ideals of the Commonwealth.”27 A new irony emerges: rather than (as in 1651) berating “the people” Milton purportedly celebrates, the emendations with their even stronger identification with the Ciceronian latinitas Milton cherished aligns him more closely with the “people” — most of whom could not have understood a word of what he wrote.

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As if anticipating this problem, the second major emendation Milton makes in 1658 cements Milton’s identification with the “people” and the Good Old Cause for his Latin audience. If rethinking the idea of pater patriae addresses the threat of “tyranny,” rethinking the idea of divine inspiration addresses the other potential evil of faction, particularly religious faction. Milton writes, “If, then, we believe that a deed [the establishment of the republic] so lofty and noble was not successfully undertaken and completed without divine inspiration, there is good reason for us to suppose that the same assistance and guidance led to its being recorded and defended by my words of praise” (YP 4.1:536). The translation here cannot do justice to what is the essential point of the passage: the Latin reveals that Milton is still answering Salmasius’s charge of factio from the Defensio regia. Recall that earlier Milton had deleted his attack on Salmasius’s latinitas in response to the same charge of whether the English were led by “divine inspiration” (nescio qua voce coelitus missa impulsos fuisse) (YP 4.1:406; CM 7:230). Milton now demonstrates his latinitas with a fine distinction: the first deed, the foundation of the republic, was accomplished “not without God’s prompting” (non sine divino instinctu), while Milton’s Defensio is the result of the same “Might and Inspiration” (eadem ope atque impulsu) (CM 7:556–57).28 The people are driven with direct and divine “enthusiasm”; Milton with a secondary impulse, the result of God’s actions in the world through the deeds of the people.29 Just as with the implied reference to pater patriae, there is more to the latinitas than just demonstrating Salmasius’s own lack thereof. It is surely no accident that here Milton returns to the same word that Salmasius had mocked the English “brigands” with before. Milton had removed his attack on Salmasius’s poor Latin in his use of impulsos for fear of drawing attention to the idea of factio, the divisions within the English. Here Milton both subtly reinstates the division (the people driven by one force,

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their defenders by another) while simultaneously undoing it: both forces come from the same divine source. That is, building on his Second Defense of 1654 and anticipating his pamphlets of early 1659, Milton in 1658 achieves a kind of dialectical transcendence if not synthesis by an appeal not to the authority of logic or of authority itself, but to the highest authority, demonstrating his still fervent belief in the divine mission and guidance of the English people. The vox populi Anglicani may be cacophonous, but in a sense, and in this instance of Milton’s latinitas at least, it remains the vox Dei as well.

D Of course the irony remains that such fine Latin and such fine distinctions are the preserve of what Milton calls the “best citizens of my own and foreign lands” who “voice . . . their approval of my belief” (YP 4.1:537), and that the very same people Milton voiced such hopes in would turn on his republican ideals — and Milton would turn on the very same people in his most authoritarian pamphlets, the two editions of The Readie and Easie Way — in just a few short months. Latinitas proved a poor bulwark against such historical tides; a different dialectic prevailed there, and the Miltonic dialectic would, as Radzinowicz demonstrates, turn to the literary and tragic as its favored modes. Factio in a political sense ultimately prevailed. But one should not forget that equally throughout his life, and especially in his prose, Milton defended factio in another sense, in the search for divine truth and the instinctus he at least through 1658 still believed — or hoped — guided the people and their republican experiment. Milton’s spirited defense of religious “heresy” and “schism” in Areopagitica and particularly in the pamphlets of early 1659, Of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means, depends to a large degree on his faith in the people’s reason and voice, often over and against those of “the best citizens” to whom his latinitas

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appealed. The stripped down, simple English prose of these last two tracts addresses the “people” directly to make that point: “those theological disputations there [i.e., at the universities] held by Professors and graduates are such as tend least of all to the edification or capacitie of the people . . . they [the people] all have equal access to any ministerial function whenever calld by thir own abilities and the church, though they never came neer commencement or universitie” (CM 7:317, 320). Latinitas or even Latin are not prerequisites for divine inspiration, for Milton the true source of governance of self and state. Of course, it remained a constant struggle, an unending dialectic, for Milton to reconcile his faith in the people in a religious sense and his frequent despair of their actions in a political sense. It is actually to his great credit that he never fully resolved this dialectic, at least in his published work; the English people in his mind would forever remain a work in progress. But it is telling that the final words of the postscript he added to the Defensio promise that he is “earnestly seeking how best I may show not only my own country . . . but men of every land . . . still greater things” (YP 4.1:537). The reference is usually taken to be to his De doctrina Christiana, Milton’s boldest, most libertarian, most heretical work, hidden from public view for over 150 years. Echoing the selection from The Likeliest Means cited above and the implications of his emendations to the Defensio this essay is built upon, De doctrina boldly and to many minds heretically attempts to synthesize factio with God’s word through divine instinctus, arguing that “every believer is entitled to interpret the scriptures” and that the “internal scripture of the Holy Spirit” is the “pre-eminent and supreme authority” (CM 6:583, 587). Replacing latinitas with instinctus links Milton with the great radicals, the sectaries and “heretics” of the age like Gerrard Winstanley. Radzinowicz’s conclusions thus seem apt, whether applied to the revisions of the Defensio or to

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the great poetic works: “The heresies, rather than the orthodoxies, enable readers to measure Milton’s capacity to move forward. . . . Milton’s heresies hold that all men are meant to be redeemed . . . that all share the same mark of humanity. . . . Every one of Milton’s heresies, then, asserts the brotherhood of man, the community, the equality, and the godlike potentiality of man” (315).

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5

D Interpreting God’s Word — and Words — in Paradise Lost Barbara K. Lewalski

Milton’s major poems are all based on biblical texts, requiring him to interpret and present the essential meaning of those texts and the stories they narrate. He treats those texts with remarkable freedom, considering the anxieties of his Protestant contemporaries about adding to or otherwise profaning God’s revealed Word. Registering such anxieties, Andrew Marvell voiced a fear (happily unfounded, he discovered) that Milton in Paradise Lost would “ruine (for I saw him strong) / The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song.”1 Not only does Milton as bard take on fraught hermeneutic issues in writing his poems,2 he also devises scenes and situations in which the central characters have to make choices grounded upon better or worse interpretations of God’s pronouncements, of divine revelation. In Paradise Regained, as Mary Ann Radzinowicz argues, the debate between Jesus and Satan is a poem-long “hermeneutic combat”; the fundamental issue for interpretation is, as Satan formulates it, “In what degree

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or meaning thou art call’d / The Son of God, which bears no single sense” (PR 4.516–17).3 In Samson Agonistes the issue is how Samson should understand and respond to a divine calling to liberate his people.4 In Paradise Lost, my central concern here, many characters have to interpret and respond to God’s various pronouncements, exploring their meaning and ramifications. The divine texts to be interpreted are the Father’s pronouncement in the dialogue with the Son in heaven that humankind will deserve damnation for disobedience; God’s statement in his dialogue with Adam directing him to enjoy the pleasures of the garden without a mate; God’s proclamation declaring his Son king of the angels; God’s prohibition to Adam and Eve against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and God’s decree at the judgment of Adam, Eve, and the serpent that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. Milton devises several intensely dramatic scenes in which the meaning of these divine words is explored. He also devises an episode (book 7) in which Raphael narrates the Genesis Creation story, with much elaboration, to Adam and Eve. Milton’s study and writing for more than two decades prepared him for this hermeneutic challenge. Like all his English contemporaries, Milton throughout his polemic career had to argue his positions on a variety of issues — in his case the abolition of bishops, divorce for incompatibility, a free press and intellectual freedom, regicide, republicanism, religious liberty, church disestablishment, and more — by citing biblical texts that were assumed to bear on those matters. In doing so he worked out principles for interpreting Scripture texts that allowed for his then radical positions and that later liberated his poetic imagination when he undertook an epic based on biblical materials. Those same principles, rightly or wrongly invoked, are also seen to inform the ways the archetypal characters of his great epic engage with God’s word.

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From the early 1640s through the l660s Milton worked, in stages, on his theological treatise, De doctrina Christiana, which shares many hermeneutic principles basic to English Puritanism: the divine inspiration of the Bible; its sole sufficiency as an arbiter of faith; its complete clarity even to the unlearned in all matters pertaining to salvation; the single, literal sense of every biblical text — which, however, often includes typological reference; the right and responsibility of every Christian to read and interpret Scripture for himself or herself. Such precepts provided the ground for the Protestant challenge to papal authority and for the Puritan challenge to the Laudian church, but in England as elsewhere their radical potential was largely tamed by the interpretative authority over the biblical text claimed and exercised by ministers and civil magistrates. That radical potential did emerge in some English sectaries — Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians, and others — whose claims to individual prophecy were sometimes characterized by enthusiasm, antinomian practices, millenarian fervor, and civil anarchy.5 Milton did not take these directions. Instead, both in prose tracts and poems he combined a view of the Bible as a document that can only be understood by each individual through the illumination of the Spirit with a constant appeal to rational argument, textual evidence, and common human experience as normative touchstones for such illumination. In his introductory epistle to De doctrina Christiana (probably composed sometime in the 1660s as Milton thought about publication abroad),6 he formally offers himself as a model of the right use of Scripture: he has undertaken to “puzzle out a religious creed for myself” based only on Scripture and looking to no outside authority; and he advises his reader not to accept his arguments on his authority, but to “withhold his consent . . . until the evidence of the Bible convinces his reason to assent and to believe” (YP 6:122–23). He points to the most evident fact about his method, that he has crammed

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his pages “even to overflowing with quotations drawn from all parts of the Bible,” so his readers may weigh and consider all this evidence for themselves. In his chapter “Of the Holy Scripture” he endorses the often-cited Augustinian requisites for sound textual analysis — “linguistic ability, knowledge of the original sources, consideration of the overall intent, distinction between figurative and literal language, examination of the causes and circumstances, and of what comes before and after the passage in question, and comparison of one text with another,” as well as attention to “the anomalies of syntax” (YP 6.582–83). But he also argues the need to look beyond the literal text, emphasizing the “analogy of faith,” whereby any given text is to be brought into harmony with other texts and thereby with essential scriptural teaching. He also points to the corruptions of the Bible, speculating that God may have allowed the written text to be corrupted to convince us that “all things are eventually to be referred to the Spirit, and the unwritten word engraved upon the hearts of believers, which cannot be corrupted” (YP 6:587–90). From the time of the divorce tracts (1643–45) Milton decisively repudiated biblical literalism. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he scornfully denounced the “crabbed textuists” (YP 2:235) who constantly cited Matthew 19:3–9 as prohibiting divorce save for adultery, as resting “in the meere element of the Text” with an “obstinate literality” and an “alphabeticall servility” (YP 2:236, 279–80). Over time he developed several principles for determining how particular biblical texts should be read, looking to the essence of Scripture, the particular historical circumstances, and the illumination of the Spirit. 1. The priority of the indwelling Spirit of God in every believer over the literal text of the Bible. In De doctrina Milton affirms that the indwellling Spirit is not only a necessary guide to right interpretation but takes priority over Scripture itself in authorizing faith and revealing truth. He

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grounds that precept on the Gospel promise that all the Lord’s people are become prophets: “We have, particularly under the gospel, a double scripture. There is the external scripture of the written word, and the internal scripture of the Holy Spirit. . . . The pre-eminent and supreme authority, however, is the authority of the Spirit, which is internal, and the individual possession of each man” (YP 6:587). This principle necessitates toleration, since, as Milton asserts in Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), Scripture is “not possible to be understood without this divine illumination,” which affords understandings that are “warrantable only to our selves and to such whose consciences we can so persuade.” Moreover, “no man can know [this illumination of the Spirit] at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other” (YP 7:242). Accordingly, no person or institution is authorized to interpret God’s word to another, and anyone’s judgment of another’s religious beliefs — or even of his or her own as a matter of final determination — is impossible. As these texts indicate, Milton does not expect the internal prophetic Spirit to manifest itself in enthusiastic testimony, but rather in reasoned argument that might carry conviction to others. Such an appeal to the indwelling Spirit encourages openness to emergent truth, most clearly enunciated in Areopagitica and its defense of unfettered intellectual inquiry as the precondition for the advancement of knowledge and truth in religion as in other matters: “The light which we have gain’d, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. . . . Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” (YP 2:550, 560). 2. Reason. Another basic hermeneutic principle for Milton is that nothing in God’s revelation will flatly contradict reason and that in moral and political matters reason, the law of nature, and revelation will agree: “The hidden wayes of his

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providence we adore & search not; but the law is his reveled wil . . . herein he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters into cov’nant with us, swears to keep it, binds himself like a just lawgiver to his own prescriptions, gives himself to be understood by men, judges and is judg’d, measures and is commensurat to right reason” (YP 2:292). He holds the biblical texts on divorce up to this rational standard: God cannot contradict himself in his two covenants, the Hebrew Bible permitting divorce, the Gospel forbidding it, since “God hath not two wills, but one will, much lesse two contrary.” Scripture and reason also agree in an explication of Romans 13:1 which does not, as in the usual explication, forbid rebellion against even tyrannous rulers, but instead defines the law as the highest power, to which monarchs themselves are subject: on this point, “the teachings of the Gospel accord with reason and with the laws of nations” (YP 4.1:383). And they agree in affording warrant for revolution, popular sovereignty and republican government: “This, though it cannot but stand with plain reason, shall be made good also by Scripture” (YP 3:198, 206). As for theological doctrines derived from the Bible, Milton asserts in De doctrina Christiana that they are beyond the domain of reason but yet do not contradict or violate its principles, an assumption that undergirds his several heterodox doctrines — monism, mortalism, creation ex Deo, Arminianism, and especially Arianism.7 He defends that last position vigorously and at length, arguing both the lack of biblical support for Trinitarianism, and the idea that God cannot defy the laws of logic, obfuscating the ordinary meaning of oneness: “The numerical significance of ‘one’ and of ‘two’ must be unalterable and the same for God as for man. . . . If you were to ascribe two subsistences or two persons to one essence, it would be a contradiction in terms. . . . If my opponents had paid attention to God’s own words . . . they would not have found it necessary to fly in the

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face of reason or, indeed, of so much glaring scriptural evidence” (YP 6:212–13). 3. Accommodation. Another governing principle is that the Bible, where it treats of God’s nature and works, is a radically accommodated text, a vast metaphor for what is unknowable. Milton’s idea of accommodation provided him a way of reading biblical texts about God that avoids literalism entirely. God “as he really is” is utterly beyond a creature’s conception or imagination (YP 6:133), so that all representations of him are necessarily metaphoric: “God is always described or outlined not as he really is but in such a way as will make him conceivable to us.” That is true also for the angels and even the Son. Nevertheless, “we ought to form just such a mental image of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits of our understanding, wishes us to form.” We should think of him as he represents himself in the Scripture texts — all of them — without explaining away passages that seem “unworthy” of God or that describe him anthropomorphically, such as references to his wrath, anger, regret, or other passions (YP 6:133–35). This concept honors God’s transcendence by insisting on the necessarily fragmentary and metaphoric nature of all representations of the divine in the biblical texts, and encouraging the recognition that each account is presented from a single, limited perspective. It also frees Milton as epic poet to make imaginative use of multiple reflections of God and his works, as seen by various characters from their several vantage points. 4. Charity. With Jesus and Augustine, Milton insists that charity is the sum of the Law and the prophets, and in text after text he equates that principle with the assumption that God intends and acts to accomplish the good of his creatures: “the divine and softening breath of charity . . . turns and windes the dictat of every positive command and shapes it to the good of mankind” (YP 2:604–05). Rather than “resting

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in the meere element of the Text” (2:236), we must make “charitie the interpreter and guide of our faith,” rejecting the enslaving letter of biblical texts that patently cause harm, such as Christ’s apparent categorical prohibition of divorce in Matthew 19:3–9. Seeking other meanings, Milton argues for divorce due to incompatibility by developing an exegesis of Genesis 2:18 that defines the primary purpose of marriage as companionship rather than procreation. He also works out a philological criticism in which, according to the original Hebrew, the “uncleanness” cited as cause for divorce in Deuteronomy 24 is said to refer to unfitness of any kind rather than primarily to adultery or other physical fault. But he also appeals directly to the spirit of the Gospel (charity) over the letter: “Who so preferrs either Matrimony, or other Ordinance before the good of man and the plain exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better then a Pharise, and understands not the Gospel. . . . Charity is the high governesse of our belief, and . . . wee cannot safely assent to any precept writt’n in the bible, but as charity commends it to us” (YP 2:340). That emphasis on charity as God’s intent to promote human good grounds his definition of Christian liberty in De doctrina: “CHRISTIAN LIBERTY means that CHRIST OUR LIBERATOR FREES US FROM THE SLAVERY OF SIN AND THUS FROM THE RULE OF THE LAW AND OF MEN, AS IF WE WERE EMANCIPATED SLAVES. HE DOES THIS SO THAT, BEING MADE SONS INSTEAD OF SERVANTS AND GROWN MEN INSTEAD OF BOYS, WE MAY SERVE GOD IN CHARITY THROUGH THE GUIDANCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH”

(YP 6:537). This concept of Christ as liberator undergirds Milton’s arguments denying to ministers or magistrates any power to enforce creeds, Sabbathkeeping, tithes, laws against heresy, or any other doctrine or practice infringing a Christian’s “free, elective, and rational worship” (YP 7:260). It also grounds his frequent association of monarchy with Gentilism, and commonwealth government with the Gospel’s spirit of liberty.8

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5. Experience. Though not always reliable, experience is also taken to be one guide to interpretation, in that it can indicate what serves human good and what accords with human nature. The term may encompass the experience of a people codified in history and cultural tradition: in The Readie and Easie Way Milton invites readers to make “seasonable use of gravest autorities, experiences, examples” as they judge the evils of monarchy (YP 7:448), though he also inveighs often against the dead hand of custom that inhibits change. Milton’s divorce tracts appeal continually and poignantly to his own and others’ psychological experience, to what “lamented experience daily teaches” about the loneliness and desperate unhappiness of being linked without recourse to a mate who is not a soulmate and companion. Such enforced unions may threaten health, faith, and even life itself, causing men to give way to that “melancholy despair which we see in many wedded persons” (YP 2:254), disabling them for public or private employment. That condition even brings on “a daily trouble and paine of losse to some degree like that which Reprobates feel” (YP 2:312). Accordingly, charity, understood as human good, must dictate an understanding of Scripture that relieves such distress. In Paradise Lost characters draw on some or all of these principles as they seek to interpret the meaning of, and the intent of, God’s words. A paradigm for right interpretation and choice based on such criteria is the dialogue in heaven (3.56–343) between God and the subordinate Son9 — who in Milton’s Arian theology and poetic representation does not share God’s omniscience. In this episode God harshly convicts humans who are about to fall, as he articulates the doctrines of free will, sufficient grace, and full human responsibility for sinful disobedience. The Father’s first speech seems to imply the hopelessness of the situation: he says nothing about his providential plan for man’s salvation though he ends with an ambiguous reference to grace and mercy. The

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Son, through challenge and dialogue, probes the ambiguities in God’s pronouncement, beginning from his own experience of God’s goodness, which leads him to conclude that God cannot intend the destruction of humankind that his words might seem to imply. Echoing (or rather anticipating) Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom if righteous men can be found there (Gen. 18:23–25), the Son even suggests, by rational argument, that were God to damn and destroy humankind utterly, his action could find no defense before the court of opinion: For should Man finally be lost, should Man Thy creature late so lov’d, thy youngest Son Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd With his own folly? that be from thee farr, That farr be from thee, Father, who art Judg Of all things made, and judgest onely right. . . . or wilt thou thy self Abolish thy Creation, and unmake, For him, what for thy glorie thou hast made? So should thy goodness and thy greatness both Be questiond and blasphem’d without defence. (PL 3.150–66)

That intervention elicits from God a more complete explanation of his intent to offer salvation to humankind, though he then voices a formidable obstacle — “He with his whole posteritie must dye, / Dye hee or Justice must; unless for him / Som other able, and as willing, pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death” (3.209–12) — challenging the Son to discover that his own sacrifice must be the means by which humans can obtain grace, and to choose freely to implement the divine plan. This dialogue indicates that full import of God’s words may be obscure, so an auditor may, and often must, make a genuine contribution to the interpretation or implementation of the divine purposes — always working from the assumption that God intends good to his creatures. Here, the

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Father promotes a dialogue that engages the Son to share in and assume such responsibility. God’s dialogue with Adam over his request for a mate poses a similar but in some ways even more challenging problem of interpretation. Adam recounts to Raphael (PL 8.295–451) how God took him to the garden and brought all the creatures before him to pay homage and receive names from him, after which he expressed gratitude for God’s goodness but immediately declared that he could not enjoy all this alone: So amply, and with hands so liberal Thou hast provided all things: but with mee I see not who partakes. In solitude What happiness, who can enjoy alone, Or all enjoying, what contentment find?

(PL 8.362–66)

God, however, directs him to the creatures for society: “with these / Find pastime, and beare rule; thy Realm is large” (8.374–75), and Adam thought that God “seem’d / So ordering” (8.376–77). Nevertheless, he persists, confident both of the needs of his own nature and of God’s beneficent intent toward him. Adam argues his case on rational grounds, that he needs the fellowship of an equal, “fit to participate / All rational delight” (8.390–91) and also cites as evidence for his case that God made all the animals in pairs. God answers, “not displeas’d” but yet with some irony, “A nice and suttle happiness I see / Thou to thyself proposest, in the choice / Of thy Associates” (8.398–401), and asks Adam to consider whether he (God) is happy “who am alone / From all Eternitie” with none “Second to mee or like” (8.405–07). Adam responds with a rational analysis of the difference between God’s perfection and human “single imperfection” (8.423), which requires remedy by number, and God commends him, declaring that he has rightly known himself, and that he has “Good reason” for his argument (8.443). God then declares that he had always intended to meet the need Adam

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voiced — “I, ere thou spak’st, / Knew it not good for Man to be alone” — and promises him the mate he seeks, “Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish exactly to thy hearts desire” (8.444–51). In this case an argument based on reason and projected human experience is required to elicit the true meaning and intent of divine words, which seem at first to carry a far different meaning. Again, the foundation of that argument is charity — Adam’s belief that God’s words and actions intend the good of man. Another issue of interpretation is presented as Raphael, at Adam’s request, narrates the Creation story out of Genesis, but prevents a literal reading of that account by foregrounding the principle of accommodation. That principle receives further emphasis by the presence of two Creation accounts in the poem, underscoring the limitations of even angelic reporters who can describe only what they partly perceive from their own vantage points. Uriel, the angel in the sun, presents the first account to Satan, disguised as a “stripling Cherube” (PL 3.636). Uriel first praises the supposed cherub’s expressed wish to know more about the works of God so as to glorify him, then points to his own and all creatures’ inevitable limitation in attaining such knowledge: “But what created mind can comprehend / Thir number, or the wisdom infinite / That brought them forth, but hid thir causes deep” (3.705–07). Uriel reports what he himself witnessed from his vantage point in the heavens — saying nothing whatever about Creation on earth: I saw when at his Word the formless Mass, This worlds material mould, came to a heap: Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar Stood rul’d, stood vast infinitude confin’d; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shon, and order from disorder sprung. Swift to thir several Quarters hasted then The cumbrous Elements, Earth, Flood, Aire, Fire,

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And this Ethereal quintessence of Heav’n Flew upward, spirited with various forms, That rowled orbicular, and turned to Starrs Numberless, as thou seest.

(3.708–19)

Similarly, Raphael first commends Adam’s expressed motive for asking about Creation — to magnify God’s works — but he also begins with a caveat about his own insufficiencies as narrator of this subject and Adam’s deficiencies as human auditor: “to recount Almightie works / What words or tongue of Seraph can suffice, / Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?” (7.112–14). He proceeds to describe a six-day Creation, but first insists that this account is metaphoric, an accommodation to human understanding: Immediate are the Acts of God, more swift Then time or motion, but to human ears Cannot without process of speech be told. So told as earthly notion can receave.

(7.176–79)

On some occasions God is seen to pronounce arbitrary commands that serve as a test of obedience and understanding. For angels, such a command was God’s proclamation of his Son as king of the angels, challenging them to right interpretation and choice. Milton stages the scene as a solemn, sudden, aweinspiring declaration (echoing Ps. 2:6–7), which is delivered on a day of joyous festival, replete with song, dance, parades, feasting, courtly ceremonies, and pastoral delights: Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light, Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers, Hear my Decree, which unrevok’d shall stand. This day I have begot whom I declare My onely Son, and on this holy Hill Him have anointed, whom ye now behold At my right hand; your Head I him appoint; And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord:

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Under his great Vice-gerent Reign abide United as one individual Soule For ever happie: him who disobeyes Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place Ordaind without redemption, without end.

(5.600–15)

The literal text is perfectly clear, but its deeper meaning and implications are ambiguous: the angels do not yet know the Son, or why he is suddenly elevated, or what his elevation will mean for their lives and their society. In a highly dramatic debate in book 5, unique among literary treatments of the war in heaven, Satan provokes his legions to revolt by his perverse reasoning about those questions, while Abdiel counters with interpretations founded upon sounder reasoning and a right use of experience. Satan’s basic assumption is that the Son’s elevation (as in a zero-sum game) must bring with it the angels’ demotion — especially his own. Addressing them as God had done by their honorific titles — “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers” (5.772) — he intimates that the newly appointed King will eclipse those titles and powers. His first speech (5.772–802) develops a reasoned argument based on the law of nature, that monarchy violates the freedom that heaven’s denizens ought to enjoy: since they are substantially equal and are perfectly good without law, they ought by right “to govern, not to serve.” Here, misapplied, are time-honored republican arguments concerning the rights of a free citizenry, which were also Milton’s arguments about the bases of human government and political liberty in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Abdiel breaks in at this point, moved to furious denunciation — “O argument blasphemous, false, and proud!” — but he counters Satan’s argument on its own rational terms by correcting his political theory in the light of heaven’s special circumstances (PL 5.809–48). He first agrees with the antimonarchical principle as it pertains to equals, but then, through

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a barrage of insistent, probing questions, challenges Satan’s false premise that the angels as creatures are equal to God their Creator or to his Son, the agent of that creation: But to grant it thee unjust, That equal over equals Monarch Reigne: Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count, Or all Angelic Nature joind in one, Equal to him begotten Son, by whom As by his Word the mighty Father made All things, ev’n thee, and all the Spirits of Heav’n By him created in thir bright degrees. (5.831–38)

Recognition of the immeasurable divide between Creator and creature disposes of Satan’s challenge to the divine monarchy from the premise of equality but does not speak to what grounds that challenge, Satan’s assumption that the Son’s elevation must inevitably degrade the angels. Abdiel counters that assumption with an appeal to the angels’ past experience of God’s beneficence (inviting them to remember the pleasures and festivities just enjoyed). From that ground he offers a reading of the new proclamation as a kind of “incarnation” honoring the angels: Yet by experience taught we know how good, And of our good, and of our dignitie How provident he is, how farr from thought To make us less, bent rather to exalt Our happie state under one Head more neer United. ........ nor by his Reign obscur’d, But more illustrious made, since he the Head One of our number thus reduc’t becomes, His Laws our Laws, all honour to him done Returns our own. (5.826–31, 841–45)

Abdiel’s concluding appeal to Satan and his forces to reverse course “While Pardon may be found in time besought” (5.848)

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rather surprisingly suggests that even egregious misreadings of God’s text and irrational mistakes about heavenly polity are not necessarily damnable, if the errant seek pardon. Satan counters, however, with a yet more flagrant claim, based on a specious appeal to experience: who saw When this creation was? rememberst thou Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d By our own quick’ning power.

(5.856–61)

Satan here calls for empirical evidence in a case where none can exist, since no one can “remember” his or her originary moment — as Adam recognizes when he can look back only to his awakening to consciousness: “for who himself beginning knew?” (8.251). Still less can this inevitable ignorance be a basis to disavow all derivation, to devise an originary story of self-creation. Satan’s troops, Adam and Eve (the immediate audience for Raphael’s narrative), and Milton’s readers are offered in this debate an example of sound and erroneous uses of reason and experience in interpreting the texts of revelation. Satan’s followers, heretofore entirely passive, greet his argument with resounding applause and thereby commit themselves to his monomania, while Abdiel chooses to rejoin the much larger cohort of faithful angels. For Adam and Eve, the arbitrary pronouncement and test is the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, also a command quite clear as to its literal meaning. It is alluded to throughout the poem, and paraphrased by Eve in book 9, when Satan embodied in the serpent brings her unawares to the forbidden tree. Her exposition of this crucial text indicates that she understands its literal meaning perfectly, and also understands it to be a

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direct command of God, distinct from the law of reason that governs all other prelapsarian behavior: Serpent, we might have spar’d our coming hither, Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess, The credit of whose vertue rest with thee, Wondrous indeed, if cause of such effects. But of this Tree we may not taste nor touch; God so commanded, and left that Command Sole Daughter of his voice; the rest, we live Law to our selves, our Reason is our Law. ........ But of the Fruit of this fair Tree amidst The Garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eate Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, least ye die.

(PL 9.647–63)

Eve has stated quite precisely the difference between positive law and the law of reason, and need only hold fast to her knowledge that this prohibition is outside the domain of reason to withstand the barrage of rational arguments that Satan proceeds to adduce. But Satan’s challenge to the text of prohibition raises the question of its deeper meaning for human life: What is the significance of the name, tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why did God forbid it? Does it bring access to special knowledge or special powers? And if so, is it reasonable to obey such a prohibition that seems to make against human good? Once these questions are raised Eve cannot ignore them — nor should she, given the Miltonic precept that God’s laws are always to be interpreted in the light of charity and human good, and that if they are beyond reason they will nonetheless accord with it. In Milton’s presentation of the Eden story, as of the Abdiel-Satan debate, experience, rightly construed, can provide the basis for right understanding of this text. Satan urges his temptation of Eve with a plethora of reasons against the prohibition, but his most effective argument

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is a report of personal experience, an autobiographical narrative in which he voices for the serpent a false story of gaining speech and reason by eating apples from the forbidden tree. From this report he concludes that Eve might reasonably expect from the same act a proportional elevation in the scale of being: “That ye should be as Gods, since I as Man, / Internal Man, is but proportion meet, / I of brute human, yee of human Gods” (PL 9.710–12). That conclusion leads on to a rival reading of the text of prohibition. If God is just and means Eve well he will not punish her for seeking such advancement (as he has not punished the serpent); therefore, the death threatened must in fact mean translation to higher status. Or, if God does envy the advancement of humankind his prohibition does not deserve to be obeyed. In this situation Eve, like Abdiel, is called upon to construe a divine text in the light of her own experience of God’s ways, to interpret its as yet unknown implications by what she does know, the joy and happiness of her present life. Her fall arises in large part from her readiness to accept the terms supplied by the supposed snake’s reported experience rather than to judge by her own experience of God’s beneficence to humankind; she might also have recalled Raphael’s projection of Adam and Eve’s gradual transformation to something like angelic state. Raphael’s stories have offered Adam and Eve, as literary narratives can, much vicarious imaginative experience both of good and of evil: they heard graphic accounts of the temptation of the angels and Abdiel’s moral heroism, of the battle in heaven and its fearsome consequences for the rebels, and of the wondrous processes of Creation, through which all beings are infused with and participate in God’s vitality, goodness, and prolific creativity. Also, in love lyrics and dialogues with Adam, Eve has affirmed in very personal terms how “sweet” her life is in Eden and with him (PL 4.641–56).

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Eve fails because she does not rely on this rich fund of personal experience. Had she done so, she might have read and responded to the text of prohibition in Abdiel’s terms: “Yet by experience taught we know how good, / And of our good, and of our dignitie / How provident he is” (PL 5.826–28). But learning rightly from experience is fraught with difficulty. Eve allows Satan’s lying narrative of the serpent’s experience to supplant her own story, and (like the rebel angels) she accepts his interpretation of a divine command as an injury — a withholding from humans of the knowledge signified by the tree’s name. Later, Adam is so overwhelmed by grief and despair upon beholding Eve fallen that he cannot think beyond that emotional turmoil to imagine any course of action but to fall with her. After eating the fruit greedily, Eve praises “Experience” as her “Best guide; not following thee, I had remain’d / In ignorance, thou op’nst Wisdoms way, / And giv’st access, though secret she retire” (9.807–10). Adam and Eve soon find, however, that the true meaning of the text of prohibition is expounded to them through the experience of evil itself in its manifold psychological and spiritual forms — lust, anger, guilt, shame, fear, jealousy, hatred, discord, despair, spiritual death: “our Eyes / Op’nd we find indeed, and find we know / Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got” (9.1070–72). Another divine text requiring interpretation is the so-called protevangelium, the messianic promise of redemption that the metaphorical terms of God’s judgment on the serpent (Gen. 3:15) were understood to signify. This text is given a first ambiguous formulation by the Son when he judges Adam, Eve, and the serpent: “Between Thee and the Woman I will put / Enmitie, and between thine and her Seed; / Her Seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel” (PL 10.179–81). Satan, reporting his success with Adam and Eve to his cohort in hell, interprets the words of judgment quite literally, as is his wont:

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that which to mee belongs, Is enmity, which he will put between Mee and Mankinde; I am to bruise his heel; His Seed, when is not set, shall bruise my head: A World who would not purchase with a bruise, Or much more grievous pain? (10.496–501)

Adam and Eve cannot begin to consider the meaning of that text for them, or even to remember it, until Eve’s repentance breaks through the cycle of angry recriminations to restore love and harmony between them. Then Adam recalls the text, but understands only that it promises some future good, which they should not relinquish by following Eve’s first proposal of childlessness or suicide. This text also requires the exegesis of experience — in Adam’s case historical experience spanning the entire period from Fall to Apocalypse.10 The angelic messenger Michael mediates that history to Adam in visions and narratives, teaching him to find in it episodes displaying again and again the ravages and proliferation of the evil he has unleashed upon the world. He also learns to read biblical history typologically, as a movement “From shadowie Types to Truth” (PL 12.303), in which the meaning of the messianic promise becomes ever clearer as the New Covenant is progressively revealed and understood. But this history is not simply presented: it must be proved on Adam’s pulses. He takes an active role in interpreting the prophetic scenes and narratives, learning through a strenuous dialogic process of faulty formulation and painful correction just what sin and death will mean in human experience, and just what crushing the serpent must entail in the Messiah’s Passion and death. In that long process of interpretation, Adam usually gets it wrong before he gets it right, and as he struggles to understand he identifies so closely with his progeny that he seems to experience their trials, their pain, and their eventual triumph. At last he finds God’s good will toward humankind confirmed in history, despite its misery and grief:

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O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Then that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!

(12.469–73)

This joyful experience of the messianic promise as redemption history leads Adam to Abdiel’s perspective on God’s ways, providing him with a pattern for his own life choices as he applies the text of promise to himself, acknowledging Christ “my Redeemer ever blest” (12.573). For Eve also, understanding and acceptance of the text of promise is founded on experience — in her case mediated through dream. Eve was made to sleep during Adam’s encounter with history, yet through prophetic dreams she experiences directly what is essential in that history — its adumbration of divine goodness — and so is able to claim her own central agency in realizing the messianic promise: God is also in sleep, and Dreams advise, Which he hath sent propitious, some great good Presaging. ........ This further consolation yet secure I carry hence; though all by mee is lost, Such favour I unworthie am voutsaft, By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore.

(PL 12.611–23)

The Miltonic bard also must engage with biblical revelation —all of it — in writing his great epic. He indicates the difficult challenges attending that engagement in the proems to books 1, 3, 7, and 9, in which he implores the Spirit of God to help him understand the essence of the biblical story he is to tell: “Instruct me, for Thou know’st” (1.19). He also invokes the heavenly muse of divine poetry, Urania, to bring the poetic resources he needs for his sacred epic. In the last proem he declares with confidence that his poem is founded upon dreamlike imaginative experiences (like Eve’s?):11 the

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heavenly muse, he reports, “deignes / Her nightly visitation unimplor’d, / And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires / Easie my unpremeditated Verse” (9.21–24). She evidently prompts him to envision imaginatively what the Spirit reveals, the essential meaning rather than the literal details of the biblical story, freeing him to devise scenes in his poetic universe that have no biblical warrant, as well as representations that conflict with generally received traditions of commentary — in this quite unlike conservative hexameral poets of the period, Du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson. Rejecting the dualism common to most Christians in the period, Milton works out in his epic many implications of the monist ontology he shares with a few other advanced thinkers, presenting an animist materialist universe in which all beings are composed of “one first matter,” and are more or less “spiritous, and pure, / As neerer to him [God] plac’t or neerer tending” (5.472–76). Accordingly, Milton portrays angels and humans as differing only in degree — “of kind the same” (5.490) — so his angels eat real food, fight wars, and have some kind of sex in heaven. And all intelligent beings are imagined able to become more refined — as was initially intended for Adam and Eve “under long obedience tri’d” (7.159) — or, like Satan and the fallen angels, to suffer increasing degradation to grosser corporeality. All the places and persons in Milton’s universe are in process, not stasis — neither heaven nor prelapsarian Eden are fixed, as is usual, in static perfection, but are shown to be advancing toward greater perfection. Adam and Eve’s ideal human life in innocence is not serene and sexless, uncomplicated by labor, knowledge, and passion, but instead involves continual cultivation and pruning — of their burgeoning garden that would otherwise revert to wild, and of their own sometimes wayward impulses and passions. While living for some unspecified period of time in the state of innocence they are expected to work out their relationship to God and

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to each other, meeting ever new challenges: the emotions attending love and sex, the intellectual curiosity that is both stimulated and assuaged by the lengthy education Raphael supplies, the problems arising from gender hierarchy within companionate marriage, the tension between interdependence and independent moral responsibility, and the subtle temptations presented by Satan in dream and in serpent disguise. The interpretative challenges Milton presents for his imagined characters do not promote simple, unthinking obedience grounded upon literal interpretations of divine pronouncements, but instead portray intelligent creatures necessarily engaging with and probing the essential meaning of God’s words and ways. They do so with impunity, and even commendation, so long as they hold fast to the sometimes difficult belief that the divine dictates conform to the norms of reason and charity, making for their good. On that understanding also, the Miltonic bard is free to imagine a poetic universe in process, in which God’s ways can be justified because they encourage liberty, intellectual growth, challenging moral choices, and love, human and divine.

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6

D Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost Scenes of Instruction, Lessons in Interpretation Joseph Wittreich Making the future different from the past is Milton’s creative territory. That is the reason Milton is firmly aligned with the scientific revolution beginning in the seventeenth century and Shakespeare is indifferent to it. — Gordon Teskey

Milton’s poems are a provocation to repeated readings, with their deepening complexity becoming strikingly evident, as William Hayley attests, in “how ingeniously the great poet adopted the most opposite interpretations of Scripture.”1 Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are rife with rival hermeneutics, sometimes encoded, typically colliding. At the center of Paradise Lost, for example, secrets are hidden, meanings encrypted, within books 5 and 6 and their story of the celestial battle, while in books 7 and 8 (originally one book) alternative accounts of the Creation story jostle: 101

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Genesis 1 with 2 and both with Genesis 5 and these, in their turn, with Pauline interpretations of these much earlier narratives. Folded between these accounts are competing cosmologies, Ptolemaic and Copernican, prompting questions of whether Milton remains indifferent toward them or insinuates a preference for one over the other. In Milton’s last poems generally, but especially in Paradise Lost, rival hermeneutics clash like armies in the night even as they coalesce within what Mary Ann Radzinowicz describes as “progressive revelation,” often in carefully marked “stages of enlightenment.”2 What we observe in both Milton’s epics, but especially in Paradise Lost, are scenes of instruction in which impaired vision is improved and expanded and in which sight is refined into insight. As Radzinowicz has shown so compellingly, competing interpretations are aspects of the intellectual debate at the core of Milton’s epics, of their multivocality, multiperspectivism, and counterpointing — and evidence, too, of spiritual dueling within situations where interpretations, once compounded, are arrayed, then interpreted and reinterpreted, but not coercively and not (as Stephen Fallon would have it) as “dueling certainties” to which Milton is unflaggingly committed.3 Interpretive options often force interpretive choices, which, paradoxically, as they bring us closer to the truth, lead us into ever deepening quagmires of uncertainty by teasing us into thinking with Edward Ericson that in Paradise Lost we become witnesses to “Milton’s recognition of the equal status of . . . alternative exegetical strategies,” or into believing, as does Harry Blamires, that in Paradise Lost “Raphael seems to treat the rival Ptolemaic and Copernican theories equivalently.”4 Such convenient truths become inconveniences in Milton’s last poems, where uncertainty is an aspect of both their experimental exegesis and experimentalist poetics, with Milton, as Joanna Picciotto goes on to explain, engaging himself and his readers in ways that “make uncertainty productive, and therefore redemptive.”5

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In Paradise Lost, Milton’s representations of Adam and Eve, when read whole rather than taken piecemeal, point toward interpretations the opposite of those usually presumed — by readers of both Genesis and Milton’s poem. The effect of Milton’s authorial maneuverings is to problematize both Scripture and its interpretive traditions, as well as Milton’s poem. What we can say — now only provisionally — is that Milton means to remind us that his entire poem is the product of fallen, though not necessarily false consciousness; that what always seems to falsify consciousness, especially fallen consciousness, is its propensity for taking the part for the whole, an improved interpretation (Copernicus’s over Ptolemy’s, let us say) for the final truth. Indeed, this centering of cosmological theory and dispute in Paradise Lost is one of many signals that this poem is partly about what it relates: competing interpretations, the status that should be accorded each of them, their respective truth-claims and truth-values. Paradise Lost is a poem in which a sun-centered cosmology upholds a Christocentric (son-centered) theology — a poem that out of such interdependency creates what one theologian will call a “science of salvation” wherein Jesus, as both “the true center of the world and . . . the sun of our souls,” subtends a heliocentric astronomy and a Christocentric religion.6 Milton’s exceptional education included, as Toni Morrison says of William Dunbar, “the latest thought on theology and science” with a poem like Paradise Lost representing Milton’s effort, again like Dunbar’s, to make theology and science “mutually accountable, to make one support the other.”7 Milton’s poem avows what Samuel Taylor Coleridge later avers: “Nothing can be more absurd than this belief of the necessary opposition of poetry to science. In all great poets,” in Milton to be sure, “the reverse is manifest.”8 Milton’s foregrounding of contending cosmological theories is, in fact, doubly interesting inasmuch as this discourse is wedged between two competing Genesis accounts of

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Creation in what (if now two books) were in the first edition of Paradise Lost one book, and in such a way that the lessons drawn from cosmological discourse may be applied to the Creation myth and its interpretive traditions: competing interpretations complicate truth, thereby illustrating the deconstructionist proposition (even as they reject its underlying skepticism) that “there is a way of thinking about truth which is more adventurous, risky. At that point, truth, which is without end, abyssal, is the very movement of the drift. There is a way of thinking about truth which is not reassuring, . . . bring[ing] us into a discourse about the truth of truth . . . ; the field is open”9 — perhaps more in matters of cosmology than in human affairs. In Paradise Lost, the one discourse sits in irresolution while the other moves toward resolution, thus reminding us that in the last 60 years, between the times of Kester Svendsen and Joanna Picciotto, the trajectory of Milton criticism has shifted from the traditionalist to the experimentalist, from Milton as a conservative thinker to Milton as a bold and adventurous inquirer. Milton criticism is bent, it seems, on returning to its origins — now, however, embracing what earlier was, and what by some is still, resisted: the very idea, in Stanley Fish’s chastizing words, that Milton’s poetry can be seen as “conflicted or tragic or inconclusive or polysemous or paradoxical”; the idea that Milton’s universe is anything but “a homogeneous structure of nested boxes.”10 The radical disruptions, the contending voices, within Milton’s nested narratives suggest otherwise. As far as the Raphael books are concerned, in the twentieth century Kester Svendsen misleads the way. Inasmuch as Milton is, as with all else, in “his science . . . traditional and conventional,” his preference, “despite his spectacular allusions to Galileo,” is for the old science. Milton’s commitment, Svendsen continues, is to “conventional mate-

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rial in its conventional associations.” Hence, with Raphael as “his spokesman,” it is unimaginable that “Milton was especially concerned about conflicting cosmological theories” and inconceivable “that he favored the Copernican” over the Ptolemaic system.11 According to Svendsen, even if Paradise Lost is a poem of “dualities, alternatives, options,” it is, finally, a poem of apparent contradictions and conflicts as is evident, emphatically so, in “Raphael’s sketch and dismissal of cosmological alternatives,” in Milton’s subduing of “a hypothetical choice, one . . . does not have to make” within his poem’s larger “harmonious vision.”12 What seemed true of Milton’s handling of scientific matters seemed to pertain equally to his negotiations with Scripture. Despite his introduction of Christ into the Genesis story and his making of that story, therefore, into one of recovery and redemption; despite Milton’s Arminianism and the Geneva Bible’s Calvinism; and apparently despite Milton’s mocking of “the common gloss[es] / Of Theologians” in Paradise Lost (5.435–36)13 — despite all this, Milton’s epic, like the Geneva Bible, is described as “commonplace and conventional,” “the essence of [and not a transgression from] Protestant interpretation of Scripture,” these conclusions coming to us from a critic who would restore Paradise Lost to its rightful place at the center of Christian tradition.14 Moreover, despite some inroads that effect the erosion of such thinking, it persists into the last decade of the twentieth century, in the contentions of Harinder Singh Marjara, for example, that “Milton rejects heliocentricism”; that “geocentricism” defines his cosmology; and that Raphael himself, though seemingly “biased towards Copernicanism,” does not argue for its truth, but only for its “viability.”15 Indeed, such a reading is still too much with us in the twenty-first century as Joad Raymond continues to argue that “it would go too far to claim that Milton had a positive relationship with the new science.”16

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Thomas N. Corns is more nearly right in his recognition that “the Miltonic consciousness synthesises the older perceptions with the explicitness of the newer climate of scientificity” (a compromising position), even if this synthesis (no easy amalgamation of Ptolemaic and Copernican thinking) looks more like an awkward, difficult reconciliation anticipated some decades before by Walter Clyde Curry in his observation that “whether the world’s physical structure be considered heliocentric or geocentric, the magnetic center and ruler of the universe is the lordly Sun.”17 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski is more forward looking still in her realization that, if Raphael “associate[s] the follies of the Ptolemaic apologetics with Adam’s progeny,” “his [own] perspective is as clearly Copernican as Galileo’s,”18 as much as (she might have gone on to say) Adam’s and later Satan’s perspectives are Ptolemaic. It is Lewalski, then, who opens the way for the critical breakthroughs accomplished by Karen Edwards, Angus Fletcher, and Joanna Picciotto. Acknowledging that Paradise Lost is a poem in which “the discourses of the old and new philosophies mingle and cohabit,” Edwards allows that, by assuming Milton’s allusions to the old philosophy constitute “a bland endorsement of it, Svendsen promulgates a thin reading.” Edwards, in turn, propounds these propositions as tenets for a new criticism of Paradise Lost: first, Raphael mounts an implicit critique of the Ptolemaic system; second, that critique, far from substantiating the view that “Milton did not know whether the Copernican or the Ptolemaic system was correct,” declares itself to be on the side of readings at once “open-ended and richly indeterminate”; that critique values interpretations not for their “conclusive answers” but for their “openness to constant reading and reviewing,” and third, according to Edwards, embedded within Raphael’s critique is a lesson for biblical exegetes as well.19 Science and religion are mutually supportive and illuminating, but in unexpected ways.

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That is, as Edwards goes on to suggest, even if Scripture advances one “sense” at a time, it sponsors indeterminacy of reading, Milton thereby establishing a closer alliance between hermeneutics, secular and sacred, scientific and biblical, than is often supposed: “In this mature stage of his hermeneutical development, while holding that conferring places can ‘tease out secrets that have long been buried in scriptural texts,’ Milton acknowledged that the process of interpreting is continual and so accepts without anxiety genuine ambiguity in the Bible.”20 Indeed, Milton’s texts are as strange as those of Scripture, with the laws of narrative often forcing events that occur simultaneously into a chronological sequence and chronological sequences themselves often disrupted as visionary moments are postponed; with different versions of the same event presented in contradictory formulations and single senses of Scripture confounded by the conflation of historical and typological meanings; and especially in the New Testament Gospel accounts, Scripture doubling into external and internal forms, with the Word itself lapsing into obscurity, even liable to corruption, owing to the fallen state of language. Thus, Milton invites us to suspend normal interpretive procedures as he enlists us to read not only Scripture but his own biblical poems experimentally and to interpret them provisionally, in this way resisting “absolute interpretive certainty,”21 as well as expected rebukes of his poems for being what Fish claims they cannot be: poems of “conflict, ambivalence, and open-endedness” — poems of “plural meanings.”22 On the contrary, doubling of senses, as well as pluralization of meanings, is part and parcel of a poetics in which perspectives are not fixed but fluctuating and in which, as Margaret Olofson Thickstun shows so persuasively, perspectives rather than prescribed are provisional.23 A new Milton criticism is now upending the platitudes by which the salient features of Milton’s poetry have been suppressed and ruling out paradigms of thought of which his

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poetry has seemed both a prop and a proponent; and it does so by creating poems that are lenses, the “literary equivalent” of Galileo’s telescope and, as Picciotto also remarks, poems that, experimental in their perspectivism, are as much “a perceptual medium” as either God’s book or the book of nature.24 While a new criticism of Raphael’s books may concede to Lewalski that “Raphael’s angle of vision is . . . itself limited,” that Adam’s vision is limited enough that he must be distrustful of his own “naïve sense impressions,”25 it does not follow, as some would have it, that Raphael’s arguments are tilted away from Copernicanism nor resistant to its theories. Indeed, as Dennis Danielson argues, “Milton . . . is robustly Copernican,” “reflect[ing] creatively, even audaciously, on the significance of the new cosmology.”26 In the understanding, then, that Paradise Lost allows for a march of intellect, it follows that Copernicus represents an advance upon Ptolemy even if, finally, he embodies a part — not the whole — of truth, full knowledge of which is deferred until the end of time. Angus Fletcher gets it exactly right as he claims that, in Paradise Lost, “it is as if the poem superadded Copernicus to Ptolemy and then let the newer vision dominate the larger cosmic effect of the poem’s vision.” So nearly allied are Milton and Galileo that it is as if in the figure of Galileo, again in Fletcher’s striking perception, Milton’s “Poem Meets Its Second Author.”27

D Books 7 and 8 of Paradise Lost are a lesson, like the poem itself, in how “truth” is processive, in how “resolution” is achieved through gradually unfolding revelation. In Milton’s poem no less than in its sourcebook, different accounts of Creation complete but also compete with one another, and the point is reinforced by the further analogy that what comes first in chronological sequence both in the Bible and in Milton’s

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poem, through narrative scrambling, actually appears last. Thus, Jonathan Richardson and his son accurately remark, in annotating book 8.478, that “Here is the First of Eve’s History, which is Completed by what she says to Adam” in book 4.28 Completed, yes, but also complicated. And the complications invariably derive from Milton’s artistic strategy, so ably described by Richard Corum, of “writing all these narratives simultaneously” and of writing them in such a way that he “leave[s] out not only large segments of each of them but also temporal, spatial, and generic markers which would allow us to separate them into distinct stories.”29 That is, what may seem separate, discreet panels of narrative continually elide with one another and thus become interdependent elements in interpretation. Still, some narrative panels conciliate, while others collide. The accounts of Creation by Uriel and Raphael exhibit an easy concord whereas those by Raphael and Adam are in conspicuous contest with each other. Indeed, like Raphael, as Danielson urges, “Uriel . . . offers an authoritative response that is thoroughly Copernican, indeed Galilean.”30 Nevertheless, Uriel’s account is from memory and Raphael’s, as we will eventually learn, from inspiration. Correspondingly, as J. B. Broadbent perceives, the huge contest in the Raphael books of Paradise Lost, figured by Adam and the angel respectively, pits the Ptolemaic against Copernican cosmology and the “mortal voice” against the “Omnific Word.”31 Memory and Inspiration compete with each other in a poem whose logic requires that Inspiration prevail — a point that is reinforced by Raphael’s and Adam’s competing accounts of Creation but also by Uriel’s account, which, like Adam’s, purports to be a first-hand report of what he saw but within a context in which Uriel is also deceived by what he sees, thus rendering his own Creation account suspect. As much as the competing accounts of Creation according to Raphael and Adam, those

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by Uriel and Raphael, in the crisp formulation of Balachandra Rajan, drive home the point that “Paradise Lost is deeply self-contesting.”32 For a poet who can imagine a “bottomless deep” (as Milton does in Paradise Regained, 1.361, having in Paradise Lost already created an unfathomable one), the very notions of “truth” and “resolution” are likely to be problematical. A poem that everywhere champions moral and political freedom emblematizes both, if we can borrow Stanley Rosen’s reasoning, in “the freedom to choose or to reject the Copernican revolution,” a main consequence of which, as Milton seems to have understood, was “to transform science into a fiction in the literal sense: something not simply arranged but formed by human intelligence” whose “truth” therefore is contingent, perspectival.33 A poem inset with analogies, and in its middle repeatedly testing the divine analogy — whether things on earth correspond with things as they are in heaven — Paradise Lost focuses this matter in books 7 and 8 by running scientific debate between discrepant accounts of Creation, thus analogizing science and religion and thereupon collapsing both into fictions. Milton is making the point that cosmological theory is, as Rosen remarks of another intellectual revolution, “a radicalized version of the theological problem of the proliferation of sects”; as if to say, as Rosen does, that “where there may be one comprehensive truth, there is no single interpretation of the truth,”34 although some interpretations (Copernicus’s) are closer approximations of the truth than others (Ptolemy’s, let us say). Or correspondingly, Raphael’s account of Creation, hewing to the line of Genesis 1, may here be privileged over Adam’s account according to Genesis 2. Witness these various formulations of an interpretive problem attendant upon the divine analogy in Paradise Lost, each new formulation modifying the other: “what if Earth / Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein / Each t’

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other like, more then on earth is thought?” (5.574–76); “who, though with the tongue / Of Angels, can relate, or to what things / Liken on Earth conspicuous, that may lift / Human imagination to such highth / Of Godlike Power”? (6.297–301); “measuring things in Heav’n by things on Earth / . . . that thou mayst [know]” the one by the other (6.893–94), if indeed one can know the other at all; “O Earth, how like to Heav’n, if not preferr’d / More justly, Seat worthier of Gods, as built / With second thoughts, reforming what was old! / For what God after better worse would build?” (9.99–102). Questions about whether one can know enough about heaven to make the divine analogy at all meaningful modulate into surmises about whether heaven or earth is the privileged term in the comparison, with Raphael, Milton’s narrator, and finally Satan addressing the same issues but reaching decidedly different conclusions about them. Not always discrepant, though, the voices of Raphael, the narrator, Adam, and Satan sometimes sound strikingly alike and yet distinctly unlike the voices of God and Eve, thus raising the still nagging question: whose is the authoritative voice in this poem? As Curry says of the voices of Uriel and Raphael, their different accounts of the same episode in Paradise Lost are “respectively fragmentary, sometimes hazy, and . . . incomplete,” each one lacking “something in the way of completeness, order, and clarity,”35 the two accounts together indicating both the complexities and complications of Milton’s commitments and the vexing nature of various choices. Milton’s own views, spelled out as early as Areopagitica, are deeply engraved in Paradise Lost: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then strait arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Ægyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth,

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hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not found them all, . . . nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.

“We boast our light,” Milton concludes, “but if we look not wisely on the Sun it self, it smites us into darknes” (YP 2:549–50). It may be a union of he/she (author and “Virgin Truth”) that allows for the reconstitution of truth here, but the same kind of union — and reconstitution — is sought in Paradise Lost by a poet (masculine) who hopes to be joined by “Eternal wisdom” (feminine) so that his song may be more than an “empty dream” (PL 7.9, 39). In the very process, the poet must separate the true from the false feminine, eternal wisdom from empty dream, in books where we are forced to look upon the Sun/Son, albeit “wisely,” and where, finally, inspiration, not memory, is prioritized. The radical implications of such a view — that truth is processive, hence always partial — are objectified in cosmological debate but also dramatized within Scripture by the poetics of prophecy, as well as by the warring hermeneutics encamped around Genesis 1 and 2 and within Paradise Lost by the competing versions of Creation proffered by Raphael and Adam. Interestingly, those implications show up only to be suppressed in early commentary on Paradise Lost. In a poem that hides so much contemporary history within its master-myth, it is remarkable, only because such instances are so rare, that conspicuous allusions to Galileo (PL 1.287– 89, 5.261–62) and Copernicus (8.110–30) should roughly balance one another in the two halves of Milton’s epic. It is also ironic that two figures experiencing and thus emblematizing

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censorship should then become occasions for a censorship of sorts within critical commentary right up to the present day where, despite Galileo’s reputation as an experimentalist and freethinker, Milton criticism continues to be perplexed when it comes to assessing “what impact [Galileo] had on Milton,” even to the point that he is judged to have “made little or no difference to Milton’s cosmology.”36 On the contrary, Galileo matters hugely in both Milton’s cosmology and poetics. The irony is compounded when we remember that, in the prologue to book 7, Milton comes closest to addressing his own fears of censorship openly — “fall’n on evil dayes, / . . . and evil tongues; / . . . with dangers compast round” (PL 7.25– 27), even as he now identifies his muse as “Urania” (1), who had given her name to a work by Lady Wroth that perhaps only coincidentally had been caught up in a scandal of censorship. Patrick Hume’s annotation is curt: “Copernicus his Opinion, tho first broach’d by Pythagorus and Aristarchus.”37 Jonathan Richardson and his son are more expansive, but then their elaboration is all the more curious because it is situated within the context of an open acknowledgment that Milton labors under the “Secret History” of censorship. Indeed, their elaboration is doubly curious inasmuch as it forces the Richardsons to surrender one of their principal critical strategies, that of eradicating contradictions on the surface of Milton’s poem by privileging this or that speaker therein, Raphael over Adam let us say. In order to keep Paradise Lost remote from its contemporary scene, from any notion of processive truth or philosophical irresolution, the Richardsons declare flatly that Milton’s poem is geocentric even if this theory is voiced by Adam and later Satan while its heliocentric counterpart is formulated by Raphael. The Richardsons are emphatic: Raphael, despite the fact that he is the mouthpiece for Copernican theory, is an ancient, not a modern, and certainly no Sir Isaac Newton. That, they

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say, “would have been Ridiculous”: what is new in cosmology, though not forgotten in Milton’s poem, “could not be a part of its System.”38 Svendsen replicates this argument in the twentieth century — an argument that is so tendentious that it constitutes a tear in the text of such commentary and is, one supposes, intended to hide something: not just that Milton’s system is conflicted, not just its philosophic irresolution, but the very uses to which Milton puts such knowledge by deploying a theory of science to gloss the Creation story of religion, even to subtend the poem’s Christocentric theology, and to mediate, at the same time, another problem of the “modern” world, the relationship between the sexes.

D It is odd that Milton makes no mention of Tycho Brahe. It is so odd that one wonders if it is not just this mediatorial role, assumed by Brahe in the world of science, that Milton here assumes in matters of religion where he must mediate between two conflicting Genesis accounts, the second probably preceding the first in order of time. One wonders, too, if Brahe does not provide Milton with the hidden logic by which he will eventually privilege Genesis 1 over 2. Brahe had been used to maintain the validity of both Ptolemaic and Copernican theory by arguing that the former pertains to the world before the Fall, the latter to the world afterwards. The same sort of logic had been used by biblical commentators to ratify the competing accounts of Creation in Genesis: Genesis 1, coming first in the order of narrative but last in the order of time, depicts the equality of the sexes before the Fall but lost when paradise is lost; and Genesis 2, the subjection of woman that pertains to fallen existence. Milton’s accommodation of the two texts is altogether more slippery and, with reference to each text, is perspectival: how things were and how they should have been, how things are now and how they will be — or ought to be. Genesis 1,

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encapsulating an idealism, envisions a mutuality of the sexes under the paternal rule of God; and Genesis 2, displaying the sad reality, explains the relationship of the sexes as owing to Adam’s psychology and Satan’s pathology. Genesis 2 reflects the unequal relationship of the sexes, woman under man’s subjection, that has pertained in fallen history, and Genesis 1 replicates the realized equality of the sexes just before humankind’s expulsion from the garden and the equality to be achieved before the kingdom of God can commence in history. Milton makes the point adroitly when he speaks of “Hesperian Fables true, / If true, here only” (PL 4.250–51), thus insisting upon the contingency of truth, repeatedly reinforced, as Richard DuRocher demonstrates in another context, by coalescing perspectives.39 Milton’s compromise solution, that is, can best be understood in analogy with that of Brahe: both change the state of knowledge and alter interpretation by posing problems that, challenging conventional solutions (sometimes only obliquely), effect a break with tradition. Milton’s commitment to ongoing revelation makes space for mutating thought and evolving explanations — for the correction of error, incrementally, through the refinement of observation. In his mapping of gender discourses, Milton the theorist seems always to outrun and overrule the traditions and the traditional explanations he contemplates, in the process appropriating innovations (not always his own) and through them casting such discourses into distinctly modern form. Milton does not claim to have presented through his concatenated discourses the truth but does imply that, because they are reliable, his observations, along with the interpretations founded upon them, provide readier access to the complete truth. Competing accounts of Creation (and of much else) in Paradise Lost are thus indicators of different states and stages of consciousness — fallen and unfallen, villainous and visionary. They are engaged in a process, described in the

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Argument to book 10, of “more and more perceiving” (PL 10.451). It matters that in book 4 Adam intuits the Genesis 1 account, which later, in discursive argument, gets displaced by his own distorting elaboration of Genesis 2. Initially, they share in the interdiction (“for well thou knowst / God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree” [4.426–27]) as “Dominion” is “Conferr’d” upon both (“Dominion giv’n / Over all other Creation” [4.430–31]). Later, however, Adam suggests that God “Sternly . . . pronounc’d / The rigid interdiction” to him alone, and men alone are made “Lords” of earth (8.323–34, 339). Not only is there “imperfection,” “unitie defective” (8.423, 425) in man’s creation, but defect too in the creation of woman, she “inferior, in the mind / And inward faculties” (8:541–42) and “less expressing / The character of that Dominion giv’n / O’re other Creatures” (8.544–46). This displacement occurs, a new fiction is invented, in just that moment when it behooves Adam to be self-serving. Correspondingly, it matters, again in book 4, that Satan stumbles into “the truth” of the Genesis 1 account but, more usually, occupies the interpretive space and spouts the interpretive commonplaces of Genesis 2: that Adam is “rais’d / From dust” (PL 9.177–78) and that Eve is the lesser, Adam the “higher” intelligence and “Heroic” figure (9.483, 485). Or, to be more delicate still: Milton revises existing explanations, both of cosmology and Creation, while holding all such speculation within the realm of hypothesis, thus keeping certain forms of truth tentative. In this poem, with its plentitude of speculation and so replete with theorization, Milton fixes limits on both as he allows for, even urges, concern over conditions and degrees not in other worlds but in this one. The appropriate end of Adam’s questioning (and of ours), as he himself perceives, is not the searching of God’s “secrets” but an acquist of knowledge, “the more / To magnifie his works, the more we know” (7.95–97). Where there is — or should be — rejoicing on Adam’s part is in this world, this paradise, and in his fair Eve.

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Some contradictions may achieve resolution in Paradise Lost, but not all do, as is befitting a poetic universe that is large, that contains multitudes; that through contradictions subverts all claims to dogmatic certitude both in religion and science; that, as in De doctrina Christiana, values ongoing revelation and multiple possible interpretations over a reading that is certifiably correct. Books 7 and 8 treat contending scientific theories, conflicting religious myths as fictions to contemplate, and, if not certifying this one rather than that one, nevertheless privilege one over another; and what often gets privileged in this poem are those revelations that come later, if not in order of narrative, certainly in order of time. Contradictions and inconsistencies may effect alarming dislocation in theological but not in poetic systems where the possibilities are completely open, where an utterance may be true or false relatively. The Richardsons understood that “Milton is writing a Poem, not a System of Divinity or Philosophy,”40 but also expected an analogous consistency from which, alas, the poet was now breaking free. What the Richardsons did not understand, as Terry Eagleton informs us in a more generalized context, is that in a poem like Paradise Lost, “coherence . . . [may be] nothing less than . . . systematic contradiction.”41 The poet’s job, like that of Blake’s Los, is not to create new systems but to deliver us from existing ones. The account of Creation in book 7 leaves the impression that Raphael is an eyewitness, here relating to Adam what Raphael heard God say and watched God do. Book 8 revises this impression — “I that Day was absent . . . / Bound on a voyage uncouth . . . / Farr on excursion toward the Gates of Hell” (PL 7.229–31) — as Raphael confides that God has indeed bestowed gifts upon humankind, the chief of which is his own image: God “pour’d / Inward and outward both, his image fair” (220–21). That is, as the Richardsons were probably the first to point out, this admission in book 8 makes clear that Raphael’s earlier account, at least of the sixth day of Creation,

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derives from “Hear-say, or Inspiration,” presumably the latter as Adam insinuates.42 The balancing of their separate stories, Raphael’s at the end of book 7 and Adam’s near the end of book 8, pits inspiration against memory, divine revelation against human interpretation: Raphael’s inspired story (with “Grace Divine / Imbu’d” [8.215–16]) against Adam’s human dialect, which here articulates a story hard — perhaps impossible — for man to tell since “who himself beginning knew?” (8.251). Having mediated God’s account of Creation, God’s story, Raphael now hears from Adam man’s story: “now hear mee relate / My Storie, which perhaps thou hast not heard” (204–05). “Divine instructer,” “Divine interpreter,” “Divine / Hystorian” (5.546, 7.72, 8.6–7), Raphael listens as Adam poses his against God’s story, some words of which are attributed to God himself. In the process, woman, who was created with the man (according to Raphael), is now, as Margaret Homans observes, “recreated, by Adam’s imagination, as a derivative of the man.”43 Paradise Lost may not evade the patriarchal and oftentimes misogynous notion that the female contributes the matter, the male the form and spirit, of creation; but — and indeed this perspective falls outside the boundaries of Homan’s feminist reading — Milton’s use of such commonplaces becomes sufficiently slippery in this poem that by the time Adam relates his version of the story, and then once we witness his response to Eve’s creation, the patriarchal underpinnings of the Genesis 2 account are eroded through inversion as Adam, now contributing the matter for Eve’s creation, in his initial response to her implies that she, not he, is the perfect form and spirit, the sum and quintessence of Creation: Under his forming hands a Creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now . . . in her summ’d up, in her containd. (PL 8.470–73)

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Through this pairing of Raphael’s and Adam’s Creation stories, while simultaneously aligning the former with Genesis 1, the latter with Genesis 2, Milton implies a movement from God’s word to Adam’s fictions and on then to culture’s mythic fabrications. That is, if Raphael’s story derives from divine revelation, Adam’s emerges from human fancy, a mental faculty that is, in Milton’s system, less than reason, as well as a faculty distorting reality. When Eve confides that she prefers Adam to Raphael as a storyteller, she is valuing Adam’s poetry over Raphael’s theology, a valuation in which we ourselves are implicated every time we close De doctrina Christiana to open Paradise Lost. In this regard, William B. Hunter is so much Eve’s minion that he doesn’t even want to credit Milton as the author of this theological treatise.44 Moreover, if there is privileging in Milton’s poem, in the juxtaposition of Raphael’s and Adam’s different accounts of Creation, it is a privileging of Genesis 1 over Genesis 2, of angelic over human report, of inspiration over memory. Generally in agreement with each other, the supplementary and corroborating accounts by Uriel and Raphael relate to each other as report to revelation. Uriel witnesses what Raphael knows only by hearsay — or through revelation: “I saw when at his Word the formless Mass, / This worlds material mould, came to a heap” (PL 3.708–09). Similarly so when it comes to valuing Adam’s versus Raphael’s accounts. In either case, inspiration would seem to trump memory, angelic or human. In his poem called Milton, William Blake writes that, in a new age, “Inspired Men will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters of memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration,”45 thus echoing Milton’s insistence in Reason of Church-Government that his great work will not “be obtain’d by the invocation of Dame Memory . . . but by devout prayer to that eternall Spirit” (YP 1:820–21); that it will stream forth not from memory but

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from inspiration. Paradise Lost reaffirms Milton’s investment in a “Heav’nlie” muse (PL 7.39), coupling it with his worry over whether this poem can really matter “if all be mine, / Not Hers” (9.46–47). Written in an interrogative mode, books 7 and 8, organized around Adam’s own interrogations, thrust interpretive questions at the reader: Who is the reliable narrator, translator, mediator of God’s word? Is the fact that Adam’s (and later Satan’s) view of cosmology is Ptolemaic and Raphael’s Copernican a hint? As Adam thinks that all things in the heavens “rowl” so as “meerly to officiate light / Round this opacous Earth,” this “sedentarie Earth” (PL 8.19, 22–23, 32), Raphael wonders, “What if the Sun / Be Center to the World, and other Starrs / By his attractive vertue and thir own / Incited, dance about him various rounds?” (8.122–25). In turn, Satan imagines that all things in the firmament dance round the new “Terrestrial Heav’n,” the new center, with man himself now constituting the center of this center, “all summ’d up” in him (9.103, 113). Is the fact that one cosmology is earth-centered (or as Satan expounds it, not just human-centered but ego-centered) and the other sun- (or as Raphael relates it) Son-centered a further clue? Are we to make anything at all of the correspondence between God’s physical universe (which is sun-centered) and Milton’s poetic universe (which is Son-centered)? Is this strategy sly testimony to — and confirmation of — the proposition that only God and the poet are creators? And does the perception that Raphael’s story, broadly speaking, accords with Genesis 1 and Adam’s with Genesis 2 affect the veracity and value of their separate narratives or, alternatively, of the different scriptural subtexts informing their narratives? Both Raphael’s and Adam’s accounts entail supplementation; but whereas Raphael’s supplement is scriptural (the few splicings from Genesis 2 are God’s words), Adam’s is experiential. The authority is Adam’s word — or Eve’s, whose earlier words

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are here abridged and sometimes censored, or briefly God’s “reported” words contradicting what otherwise God says in the poem, yet according perfectly with Eve’s perception of her own inferior condition in relation to Adam who is said to enjoy God-like preeminence. The different accounts of Creation according to Raphael and Adam foreground questions of authoritative voice and privileged text, but also focus the problem exhibited by Adam whether he is defining his place in the cosmos or his relationship to Eve: he is prone to all sorts of contrivances in order “To save appeerances” (PL 8.82), with the consequence that he fails repeatedly to value rightly. Their separate narratives are an example of what Mieke Bal calls “a fracturing interpretation, an interpretation that will bring out into the open the contradictions within a text attributable to a gendered plurality of voices or focalizations.”46 Indeed, their respective narratives are evidence of Milton’s moving toward such fracturing interpretations, which, focusing contradictions, capitalize on coexisting meanings but which also, by reversing the customary privileging of Genesis 2 over 1, have the effect of opening up instead of closing down interpretive possibilities. The sixth day of Creation yet remains, says Raphael: “There wanted yet the Master work, the end / Of all yet don” (PL 7.505–06), whose correspondence will be with heaven, not, as Satan had hoped, with hell. In words reminiscent of the narrator’s description of Adam in book 4, Raphael describes this new creation as “not prone / . . . but endu’d / With Sanctitie of Reason” that he “might erect / His stature, and upright with Front serene / Govern the rest . . . and from thence / Magnanimous to correspond with Heav’n” (7.506–11). Yet if the reference here seems to be to gender-specific man, the male portion of Creation, through the intervention of God’s voice, this false surmise is checked with God addressing the Son and, in his plain talk, stripping away all ambiguity from

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Genesis 1: “Let us make now Man in our image, Man / In our similitude, and let them rule” (7.519–20). By God’s account as mediated by Raphael, generic man named Adam is now created: in his own Image hee Created thee, in the image of God Express . . . Male he created thee, but thy consort Female for Race; then bless’d Mankind, and said, Be fruitful, multiplie, and fill the Earth, Subdue it, and throughout Dominion hold ........ Here finish’t hee, and all that he had made View’d, and behold all was entirely good. (7.526–32, 548–49)

Rather, as Genesis 5 reconfirms the perspective of Genesis 1, in song the angels reiterate that generic Man (“men”) is now “Created in his Image, there to dwell / . . . and in reward to rule” (7.625, 627–28). It is right that we recognize in this account of Creation “the intricately plotted relations of the ‘P’ and ‘J’ accounts”; that in “this splicing . . . two heterogeneous accounts [become] a single one that is both intellectually and aesthetically coherent,” though not necessarily (as this critic thinks) ideologically troubling, especially from a feminist perspective.47 Man, generic man, is made in God’s “own image” and given “rule” over the rest of creation. The animals are created first with emmet and bee singled out as “Pattern[s] of just equalitie” and emblems of “Commonaltie,” mutuality (PL 7.487, 489). If there is any rupture in Milton’s story at this point, it is created by the emblematic movement from emmet to bee — with the bee, as Thomas Newton was quick to recognize, being actually an image of “Feminine Monarchie.”48 Then, in the order of Creation comes Man, who is given dominion over the rest of creation, as well as the interdiction concerning

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the tree of knowledge. That is the chief appropriation from Genesis 2: it was commonly used to uphold that man, genderspecific man, is created, then the animals; man is empowered to name them and thereupon given the interdiction. Man is empowered with language, thought, intellect — that is why the interdiction is given to him, not Eve, who only later is created. To revise the sequence is to revise this argument. To resituate the interdiction episode within the context of Genesis 1 — “Here finish’d hee, and all that he had made / View’d, and behold all was entirely good” (PL 8.548–49) — is to displace an argument for inequality with one for equality. Raphael’s account of Creation accentuates men/them. Alternatively, Adam’s account emphasizes I and my: “My Tongue obey’d and readily could name / What e’er I saw” (8.272–73): “I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood / Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu’d / My sudden apprehension” (8.52–54). In a modest parenthesis, we learn from Eve that, similarly gifted, she names the flowers: “O flowers, . . . / which I bred up with tender hand / . . . and gave ye Names” (11.273–77). There is “radical privileging”49 here: Raphael’s voice, God’s words, over Adam’s voice and human articulations. Only in the upside-down world of fallen human consciousness does man’s word take precedence over God’s, Milton seems to be saying in this poem where there is a carefully orchestrated hierarchy of voices, where God’s plot does not always agree with man’s stories and where those stories are themselves riddled with contradictions. To turn from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2, from Raphael’s voice to Adam’s, is to turn from fact to fiction — to a fiction so selfaggrandizing that Adam loses stature, not Eve. That Adam’s story is here viewed as a fiction is made evident by three details: he has God denying the equality of the Son that elsewhere God, the angels, and Milton’s narrator assert; he edits Eve’s earlier account of Creation, and censors it, in a way that advantages the self by diminishing the other. He does

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this, in part, by claiming that the interdiction is given to him before Eve’s Creation whereas the rest of the poem implies that both are made privy to the interdiction by God himself (see PL 4.426–27; 5.51–52; 7.45–47; 9.651–53, 750–54, 863–65, 902–04). In short, Adam denies the equality of his mate for which he asks and of which he has been assured. In a parallel move, Adam has God deny the equality of his Son that earlier God had asserted with Adam, in this way, raising doubts about his own reliability as a narrator. As Adam recounts an earlier conversation with God, Adam has him saying, in contrast to what he has said previously, I see Thou to thyself proposest, in the choice Of thy Associates, Adam, and wilt taste No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitarie. What thinkest thou then of mee, and this my State, Seem I to thee sufficiently possest Of happiness, or not? who am alone From all Eternitie; for none I know Second to me or like, equal much less. (PL 8.399–407; my italics)

Thereupon God acknowledges that He “Knew it not good for Man to be alone” (8.444), hence will provide him with his “likeness,” “fit help,” and “other self, / Thy wish exactly to thy hearts desire” (8.450–51). That is, God will multiply man’s “Image, . . . / . . . which requires / Collateral love, and deerest amitie” (8.424–26); he will give Adam what he asks for, an equal, exactly to his heart’s desire, even as Eve, frustrated by what she overhears to the contrary, from both Adam and Raphael, will aspire to be “more equal, and perhaps, / . . . sometime / Superior; for inferior who is free?” (9.823–25) Most tellingly, what Adam has God telling us about his relationship with his Son here in book 8 is contrary to what God, and Milton’s narrator, have told us previously where

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the Son, embosomed in his Father, will eventually leave him (PL 3.238–39): “I spare / Thee from my bosom” (3.278–79). In book 3, the Son sits with his Father, “on his right / The radiant image of his Glory” (3.62–63): “in him all his Father shon / Substantially express’d” (3.139–40). Indeed, the Son is here described as “Thron’d in highest bliss / Equal to God, and equally enjoying / God-like fruition” (3.305–07), as sitting “Second to thee” (3.409). If the language Adam attributes to God in book 8 has any counterpart in this poem, it is to be found a book later, in book 9, where Satan can find no one “Fair” to Eve, “Equivalent or second” (609–10). In this same book, before the Fall, Adam will come to share in the Father’s wisdom, that “solitude sometimes is best society” (9.249), even as, a book later, God in the Son will chide Adam, subsequent to his fall, “I miss thee here, / Not pleas’d, thus entertaind with solitude” (10.104–05). Sometimes the narrator’s (as distinct from Milton’s) voice, but more often Adam’s, is responsible for bleaching Eve’s history. That is, Adam hears Raphael’s story (Genesis 1) and uses it in the same way he uses Ptolemaic theory: to center himself, to exalt his own position in Creation. Eve may have stooped to her own self-image when she awakens from her creation; but Adam, by his own account, “Strait toward Heav’n my wondring Eyes I turnd” (PL 8.257), then “My self . . . perus’d, and Limb by Limb / Survey’d” (267–68). Thereupon Adam is approached by “methought, of shape Divine” (295) and is raised over “Fields and Waters” (301), then “led . . . up / A woodie Mountain” (302–03) where he sees fruit laden trees “Tempting . . . in me sudden appetite / To pluck and eat” (308–09). Adam’s dream is an oracle of temptation: his own and later Jesus’ atop the mountain. It is also an example of the unusually thick layering, as well as steady convergence, of multiple interpretive traditions within Paradise Lost, these lines recalling the Boehmean claim that “Adam was (before his Eve) forty dayes

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in Paradise, in the Temptation,” along with the fact that the second Adam goes into the wilderness for 40 days, and there stands in “Adams stead before the Devill and Gods Anger” but also concludes his “forty houres . . . in the Grace . . . [by awakening] Adam out of his sleep.”50 In Paradise Lost, when Adam awakens, he falls submissive before the “Presence Divine” from which he hears, in accordance with Genesis 2, the “rigid interdiction,” and then is given with his race rule over creation — the birds and beasts that he proceeds to name. Yet Adam’s first impressions are of their inferiority. With them he can have no society such as exists in heaven: “Among unequals what societie / Can sort, what harmonie or true delight” (PL 8.383–84). For the first time — and in contradiction of everything we have heard previously (from God, from the angels) — we hear, by Adam’s report of God-talk, that “none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (8.406–07; compare 3.306–07). Adam then reports God’s perfection and man’s imperfection: “In unitie defective” (8.425). Allowing that he has been trying Adam who is “My Image” (441), God creates Eve and leads her to Adam: “Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye, / In every gesture dignitie and love” (488–89). Adam is now in possession of the fairest of all God’s gifts, which is grace, he learned earlier, but which here he objectifies as Eve: “my Bone, . . . my Flesh, my Self / . . . one Flesh, one Heart, one Soul” (495–99). Adam does not say so, but here he seems precariously close to thinking that Eve, who is created from him, is created by him, hence naturally inferior to him according to the logic that the creator is superior to and thus rules his or her creation. Repeatedly, as Diane McColley observes, “Adam is more inclined than Eve to stress human superiority and might [even] incline to arrogance,”51 yet an arrogance that by the end of book 8 is tamed. Even so, as Feisal G. Mohamed attests, “misunderstandings and errors in the Raphael books [are] more grave and numerous than [our Sire’s] insights,”

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even as Mohamed acknowledges that “critics are reluctant to voice this conclusion.” But as Mohamed argues that “the angelology embodied in Paradise Lost is audacious, original, and still unique,” he hints at another conclusion, which Milton’s critics have been equally reluctant to embrace.52 Especially in Raphael’s reflections on Eve and then on the relationship of the sexes, the angel exhibits his own blunders and pedagogical slips in pronouncements that are, as Mohamed might say, “dubiously true.”53 Mohamed notices Milton’s particular audacity in “re-organiz[ing] . . . the celestial hierarchy,” in attributing a special sense of election associated with celestial insight more often to Michael than to Raphael (“nowhere in Paradise Lost . . . a member of God’s innermost circle”),54 while still, of course, crediting a measure of it to Raphael, whose own account of Creation is with divine grace imbued. No less than Adam, Raphael exhibits failures of vision while still maintaining powers of insight superior to Adam’s. This in itself should force us to revise any argument that would view Adam’s Creation story as a “reinscription” of the Raphael story in parallel with the way in which Genesis 2 is a reinscription of Genesis 1, as it was in Tetrachordon, as well as a prioritizing of Genesis 2 over Genesis 1, as was also the case in Tetrachordon.55 Whereas others have read Paradise Lost as an awakening, an enlargement of consciousness, “a process of ascent” in Michael Lieb’s words, the better reading is the darker one of J. Martin Evans, which sees in Adam’s story of Creation “something rather more sinister: an unsettling prologue to the temptation and fall . . . the beginning of the Fall, if not the Fall itself.”56 Rather than reading into Adam’s story (as does Lieb) “a process of ascent to ever higher consciousness,” Evans extrapolates, specifically from Adam’s story of Eve’s creation, “a gross misunderstanding of what really happened,”57 as well as an index to a mind not dilating but contracting in its understandings and in their articulation. Eve,

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in her version of this part of the story, now turns from Adam but is brought back by his pleading. But Adam here censors her account in a way that promotes self over other and that suggests submission is woman’s natural condition — as natural to her as his submission to the angels is to him (compare PL 4.497–99, 5.358–60) and never so loathsome an attitude to either as it clearly is to Satan (4.80–81). However, like Satan’s in book 4, Adam’s perspective shifts: Eve, who had seemed inferior, now seems superior. And Adam proceeds to accuse God of taking “More then enough,” of having “bestow’d [on Eve] / Too much of Ornament” (PL 8.537–38). She is too elaborate in “outward shew” and less exact in “inward Faculties”; she is “th’ inferiour,” Adam concludes, “resembling less / His Image who made both, and less expressing / The Character of all that Dominion giv’n / O’re other Creatures” (8.538–46). Adam’s account here does not match well with Raphael’s in book 7 and, indeed, in its wildly vacillating impressions of Eve, has the effect of throwing into disarray all his previously held opinions concerning the relationship of the sexes. If in book 4 Satan had checked his own faulty perceptions, here in book 8, in an enormously complicated, immensely confusing speech, Raphael attempts, without immediate success, to check Adam’s possible misconceptions. Indeed, Raphael is without success precisely because now he challenges, and then condones, Adam’s assumptions. Here he reproves Adam for faulting nature and there approves his demeaning of woman. Raphael does so without ever really testing Adam’s assumptions and thereby exposing them as presumptions; without acknowledging that Adam’s suggestion, as well as his own opinions concerning woman’s inferiority, originates within the fluctuating satanic perspectives of book 4, some of which are on mark and others as off base as the famous assertion, “For contemplation hee and valour formd, / For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, / Hee

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for God only, shee for God in him” (PL 4.297–99). What is so insidious about this passage is that, through calculated echo, it binds Milton’s Eve to Satan’s Sin: “I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won / The most averse” (2.762–63), while implying that the wicked men of history who eventually name the devils are Eve’s sons, not Adam’s (1.364). Adam’s view of female inferiority in book 8, seemingly submitted to by Raphael, is emphatically an attitude originating in hell, fomented by the devils, and then promoted — and powerfully propounded — by Satan just before his temptation of Eve commences: The Woman opportune to all attempts, Her husband . . . not nigh, Whose higher intellectual more I shun, ........ The way which to her ruin now I tend.

(9.481–83, 93)

Still, the very fact that Raphael here participates in, even formulates, a discourse of sometimes overlapping, other times competing, occasionally even self-canceling points of view, raises the possibility of poetic calculation (some would even say intention). Almost gamesomely, Raphael accepts as a given Adam’s intellectual superiority to Eve. He does so within a speech, which allows, first of all, that the more Adam knows the more he will be so credited by Eve and, second, that Eve just revealed herself through action to be wiser than her husband, whose fervent wish is that Eve acknowledge him as her guide and head. Perhaps better than any others in the poem, Raphael’s words here figure the “divine heritage,” the “inherent contradictions” of a tradition that impinges upon Milton’s poem and that his poem steadily gathers into focus, authenticates, often intensifies, and then brings to climax. Rather, it is the accumulated experience of the poem that allows Adam to get it right (and finally us to get it right) as he acknowledges,

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Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions mixt with Love . . . which declare unfeign’d Union of Mind, or in us both one Soul.

(8.601–04)

With these words, Adam acknowledges their interdependence, equivalence, and equality. Various images of Eve have floated through his mind; and he is free, as he displays here, to choose and approve the best: I to thee disclose What inward thence I feel, not therefore foild, Who meet with various objects, from the sense Variously representing; yet still free Approve the best, and follow what I approve.

(8.607–11)

What Adam has chosen — and here approves — is made abundantly evident when, in book 9, he says that by Eve, owing to her “influence,” he is given “Access in every Vertue” and simultaneously, when in her presence, is made “More wise, more watchful, stronger” (309–11). Satan’s exaltation of Eve over Adam as the higher spiritual principle and superior intelligence may smack of gnosticism (yet another heresy he embraces within Milton’s poem). On the other hand, “there is nothing peculiarly ‘gnostic’ in an exegetical tradition,” such as is here invoked, that acknowledges Eve “to be a principle of Wisdom and spiritual enlightenment for humanity. This view,” as Pheme Perkins proposes, “may go back to the origins of the Genesis material itself” and has the effect, finally, of corroborating Eve and Adam as co-images of deity.58 If in the end there is still ambiguity, it is an aspect of Raphael’s own narrative, which is subject to restraints and limitations; for when it comes to recounting “Almighty works / What words or tongue of Seraph can suffice, / Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?” (PL 7.112–14). Raphael, we have said, is no eyewitness to Man’s creation for which, however, there were eyewitnesses: “him all his Train / Follow’d

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in bright procession to behold / Creation” (7.221–23). Raphael’s narrative, therefore, must rely upon report from another or from God with Adam himself, just before relating the Genesis 2 version of Creation, attesting to the latter possibility: “thy words with Grace Divine / Imbu’d” (8.215–16). In turn, Raphael emphasizes that God’s “gifts” have been poured equally on humankind: “Inward and outward both, his image fair” (8.220–21). Raphael’s is a narrative that, if privileging Genesis 1, nevertheless takes splicings from Genesis 2 and 5 — a narrative where, as in cosmology, “three different Motions move” (8.130) and where, ultimately, authority derives not from memory but from inspiration. Milton’s epics are poems of surprises, one of which derives from the discovery, emerging less awkwardly from them than from Lycidas, that the voice of the narrator, so often confused with Milton’s voice, may not be Milton’s voice at all; that the teller (Milton’s Pauline narrator) and his tale pull oppositely, the one toward determinacy and the other toward indeterminacy of meaning. The narrator’s allegations and the narrative’s demonstrations are at odds, deliberately so. Adam and Eve may be surprised by sin, but we as readers are, in turn, surprised by subversion in a narrative that, orchestrated by Milton, collides with suppositions intoned by the narrator. Thus, interpretations enforced by the narrative may undermine those enunciated by the narrator (like his insistence that Eve, not Adam, falls deceived by Satan), especially in those moments when an often-proclaimed truth is challenged by emerging truth or when an assumed interpretation is countered by alternative possibilities for interpretation. The narrator repeatedly states his belief that Eve falls “deceiv’d” (PL 1.35–36, 9.404) in contrast with Adam who, “not deceav’d,” is “fondly overcome by Femal charm” (9.998–99). However, God argues differently — “Man falls deceiv’d” (3.130) — as does Satan here: “Man I deceav’d” (10.496) and then again in Paradise Regained: “Adam and his facil consort Eve / Lost

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Paradise deceiv’d by me” (1.51–52). Eve allows the same, that by her Adam has been “Unhappilie deceav’d” (10.917), in the face of Adam’s own admission: “Fool’d and beguil’d, by him thou, I by thee” (10.880). With these voices arrayed against that of the narrator, the narrative, with its chorus of voices overruling that of the narrator, intones its deep truth: that the task for criticism is not to declare a poem’s meaning but to deliver its fluctuating, “(sliding) meanings”59 — is not to fix interpretation but instead, reflecting upon truth as plural, not singular, to open new interpretive possibilities. Instead of instantiating Pauline clichés (“and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became the transgressor” [1 Tim. 2:14]), Milton here, and again in books 11 and 12 (“Let a woman learn in silence” [1 Tim. 2:11]) roots them out. As such, Milton’s epics, in their harmonizing of science and religion, are founding texts for the myths of modern culture. They stand in dialogic rather than monologic relation to hermeneutic traditions and thus are repositories for overlapping, incongruent discourses, as well as sites from which to observe not so much a received myth and dominant ideology (the then common glosses of its scientists and theologians) as the crevices and contradictions in both. Repeatedly, Milton’s epics swerve from cultural norms in order to defeat them decisively and, in this way, make Milton the great harbinger of the modern world. Milton’s epics, finally, attest to the notion that within the grounds of uncertainty that cover the disciplines of science and religion, that characterize the books of nature and of God, is the shared understanding that each book, “a perceptual medium,”60 in unexpected ways reinforces the other with a sense of uncertainty rather than settling calm. Yet even within this prevailing sense of uncertainty are checks and balances so that “uncertainty” does not become “an equally partial image to the Milton of ‘certainty,’” in William

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Kolbrener’s words, “a paradoxical certain form of ‘incertitude.’” The yield, as Kolbrener goes on to explain, is a Milton “not reduced to caricature, or philosophical singularity,” “not a Milton mired in contradictions” but rather one who continues to “confound our expectations.”61 The yield is a criticism newly sensitized to, not anesthetized by, tensions and conflicts in Milton’s poetry; a criticism of wider circumference, expanded and remapped borders, and new audacity; a criticism of Radzinowiczean audacity where altering eyes and refined, as well as reinflected, voices blaze the way for an emerging critical discourse alert to fault lines, awakening and awaiting controversy, even as it refits Milton to a twenty-first century less taken with certainties, or uncertainties, than with mental enlargement and advancement of learning, not to mention new opportunities for advancing Milton studies wherein Milton is no ancient and less a modern than a postmodern, and no longer a traditionalist but now a risk-taker who, making waves, beckons us to make new ones.

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D Narrative, Judgment, and Justice in Paradise Lost William Flesch

The most basic template for every interesting narrative situation is a template of expected vindication.1 Someone is misunderstood and expects, often with desperate wishfulness, those who misunderstand her to come to see and to acknowledge that misunderstanding. If that happens she achieves narrative resolution, turns an event into something that has the shape of narrative and that offers itself for narration, to herself and others. The narration to others (by herself or by a third person) is part of the acknowledgment, part of the vindication. The situation is moderately complicated: the recounted narrative begins the process of vindication with the fact that its hearers are already invested in it and want to see her vindicated, already expect her vindication vicariously. The idea of vindication and the idea of vicarious experience, which is so essential to narrative, are two sides of the same coin. The audience wants to see her vindicated, and she also wants the audience’s desire to see her vindicated vindicated in its turn.

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Such acknowledgment has something of the force of reparation, so that vindication, even in tragedy, remains true to its root meaning: the victory of justice. Hamlet dies but Horatio will tell his story, and in the meantime Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius are variously brought to acknowledge their own failures of judgment — failures to have taken the measure of Hamlet’s deeper perspective and insight: deeper because he is a deeper character than they knew. Narrative therefore organizes both plot and character through the twin concepts of judgment and vindication. Characters whose judgment we most want to see vindicated will be the heroes (in the technical but also in the colloquial sense). Their judgments may deepen and change over time, but the way they judge others, the values that their judgments imply from the start, makes them the focus not only of our interest but also of our concern. Their vindication means not just the triumph but also the just triumph of their characters. We want to see this happen, and narrative anxiety is an anxiety about whether and how those characters will be vindicated. The question whether and how those characters will be vindicated, and the (often changing) ways that we expect such vindication to come, provide the motive and the structure of plot. We can compress still further the nature of our interest in plot: plots all appeal to the pleasures of anticipated gratification: “you’ll see.” There are, of course, various basic plots, but they can be distinguished one from another more or less through the different characters and people referred to by the “you” in “you’ll see.” There are several reasons to think that all the kinds of figures before whom Hamlet will eventually be vindicated, kin and kind, are of more or less the same importance in the dynamics of vindication: Claudius, the villain; Laertes, the failed friend; Gertrude, the desperately concerned but overly skeptical mother; Horatio, the skeptical but lucid friend; the mutes and audiences to the act, whether

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their attitude has conformed to Osric’s toadying or to the love that most people bear to Hamlet; Fortinbras, the intuitively accurate judge whom Horatio’s narrative will bring up to speed; and our fellow audience members, the other real people in the real theater who are watching the play (at least as I conceive them), before whom my hero’s judgment, and therefore my own rash gamble on his vindication, will also be vindicated. It is also important to see those before whom Hamlet is not finally vindicated, though even with them he attempts and often succeeds at partial vindicatory moments: the minions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (confuted after the Mousetrap, but not decisively); Polonius (dead but without any sense of what was wrong with his own meddling); the ghost (who finds Hamlet apt, but who disappears from the play with Polonius); and of course Ophelia and her grave-diggers. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go to it, and like the others they die or disappear without feeling that Hamlet has been proved right, without feeling that the justice of his cause and of his attitudes has been proved. But they are not near Hamlet’s heart: he needs no vindication from them. Polonius and Ophelia represent Hamlet’s failure to be fully vindicated, or perhaps the failure even of full vindication to achieve true justice (which is perhaps why Hamlet, or King Lear, has to be a tragedy, and why The Winter’s Tale has to end in melancholy). The ghost may go further still, representing the failure even of true justice to be truly just (this too would be a lesson repeated in The Winter’s Tale); and those figures who count, those figures who are near to Hamlet’s heart, but in whose minds Hamlet is not vindicated may be summed up by the grave-digger who knows but does not care whether Hamlet is vindicated or not; or even by Yorick, who might have cared but (unlike the ghost whom he replaces in act 5) can never know. The point of this taxonomy is to show that very complex structures of character and plot can derive from the idea of

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vindication, and this is to say nothing of the other characters in Hamlet who seek vindication as well, characters whose own narratives show them as partial successes in these desires: the ghost (who wants vindication from Hamlet); Polonius (who seeks it from Claudius and Gertrude); Ophelia (before Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes); Claudius (when he stands up to Laertes); Laertes (in confronting first Claudius and then Hamlet). Those who do not seek vindication — the dispassionate Horatio and the still more dispassionate gravedigger — are ultimately placed in the position of judges who measure how far vindication is possible, and how important possible vindication finally is. I start out with this brief account of Hamlet because I think it is a digest of universal narrative expectations and motives for interest, and so it provides a helpful way to see, through contrast, some of the deepest, most powerful, most thematically important innovations of Paradise Lost. Let us turn to that hoariest of chestnuts, the parsing of Milton’s declared intention in writing Paradise Lost: “to justify the ways of God to men” (1.26). We know, more or less, that the primary meaning of the line is glossed by the Chorus’s similar declaration in Samson Agonistes: “Just are the ways of God / And justifiable to men” (293–94).2 That is, all of God’s ways are just, and men can be brought to see this universal fact. This reading is confirmed by the fact that Milton alludes to Psalm 145 and the use Revelation makes of it. Here are the Geneva Bible versions: “The Lord is righteous in all his wayes, and holy in all his workes” (Ps. 145:17); “And they sung the song of Moses the seruant of God, & the song of the Lambe, saying, Great and marueilous are thy workes, Lord God almightie: iust and true are thy wayes, King of Saints” (Rev. 15:3). In Psalms the voice is human, still, but in Revelation it is the seven angels who are singing, and they are not particularly focusing on the ways of God to men but on God’s works and ways in general. Nevertheless, one cannot quite rule out the

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other reading: that what Milton intends to justify are the ways of God that concern his treatment of men. Raphael’s warning to Adam about not worrying about the possible inhabitants of other worlds fits with this second interpretation: “Of other Creatures, as him pleases best, / Wherever plac’t, let him dispose” (PL 8.169–70). And even in Samson this possibility can be seen in the Chorus’s further argument against trying to confine th’interminable And tie him to his own prescript, Who made our Laws to bind us, not himself, And hath full right to exempt Whom so it pleases him by choice.

(306–10)

God has an axiomatic “right” to treat us as he does, or to lift certain of the duties his laws have imposed upon us; and that right is all we need to understand for us to know that we cannot bind him by his own prescript either, that we cannot set ourselves up to judge whether he acts according to some independent standard of justice by which all his ways could be justified. At issue here is a version of what has come to be called the Euthyphro dilemma, after Euthyphro 10a where Socrates asks whether the gods love the pious (roughly speaking: divinely ratified good) because it is independently worth loving, or whether what makes it worth loving is that the gods love it. (This question is easily mapped onto debates about Calvinist predetermination.) Justifying all the ways of God requires some independent idea of justice to which God conforms, with the question of this conformity amenable to independent judgment by human judges. Justifying the ways God treats men does not imply any independent judgment of the way he treats other creatures in the universe: for the Chorus the justice of his treatment of the rest of the universe is tautological. God has a right to act in conformity with whatever he wills, since justice is his own creation and simply means conformity with his will, no matter what he wills.

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His precepts are the expression of his will, and if they do not bind him that is because whatever he does is equally and by definition the omnipotent expression of his will. The justice of his treatment of us is also tautological, but that tautology is a complex one since it includes the possibility of its own justification. By expressing his will about the doings of us humans in the form of precepts we may freely obey — precepts that morally require us, but do not force us, to do certain things — he makes justice, consisting as it does in conformity to whatever he wills, accessible to us by allowing us to accede to his will. His will is just by definition, but that is a cold comfort. But he goes farther: he makes that justice something in which our own wills can share because he has placed us in a position where we may achieve conformity with the self-defining justice of his ways. Because we are able to subordinate ourselves to his will, we are not merely the passive objects of his tautologously just ways, but partakers and collaborators in that justice. This is what makes justice feel just to us, and not feel like the purely arbitrary thing it could no doubt still justly be: we are able to love the just, to feel that it is just, according to our lights. To us it does not feel arbitrary, and it should not: after all, God has willed it. And so we may be brought to feel that he treats us justly because he gives us the freedom to choose justice, which he has very justly constituted so as to include our own freedom. Raphael’s point is that since we are (or will be) in the dock, we feel most urgently the question of God’s justice toward us, not toward the rest of the universe. That urgency is itself a strand of our intuition of what it would mean for God to be just to us, and what it would mean therefore to justify the way he treats us. He would first of all have to treat us as though the urgency of the question mattered, as though it mattered that justice matters to us. We can call this component of our intuition of what is necessary to justice “respect.” Since I just quoted Raphael on God’s right to “dispose” of his creatures as pleases God best, let me say a little more

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about that complex word, since Milton uses the word as a way of linking judgment and narrative.3 In the lines just quoted Raphael is hedging the dilemma: what pleases God best may indicate his right to sheer arbitrary decision, or it may mean that what is independently just will always be what pleases him best. But we are not to know — or at least unfallen humans who have no need or interest in vindication are not to know. We are not privy to that story. Once we have fallen, God’s disposals become the template, frame, or structure of narrative, so that Milton uses the word in Samson to mean both judgment and plot. “What th’ unsearcheable dispose / Of highest wisdom brings about” (1745–46) is the conclusion of the story. The Chorus’s word “unsearchable” echoes the earlier characterization of God as “the interminable,” that is, that no bonds bind God because there are no bounds to God. Here “unsearchable” means “baffling at the start,” so that we do not begin in a position to judge what God is doing; but we end in such a position, not only seeing that “All is best,” but being able to judge that it is best, being able to find it so: what God brings about is “ever best found at the close,” when God “unexpectedly” (1750) arranges a glorious resolution (1745–48). Of course, the whole point of Samson is to show how these divine events can conform to tragic structure, and so the “divine disposal” (210) or “heavenly disposition” (373) of the quandary in which Samson finds himself echoes Milton’s Aristotelian definition in the preface of plot as the “disposition of the fable.” In the end the audience of men, the Chorus, and Milton’s readers, will find that plot vindicates both God and Samson. Their supporters, those who trust in them, are likewise vindicated: the more trust they show the greater their vindication. The Chorus and Samson begin with what look like different ideas of divine disposal, but in the end the two ideas merge. The Chorus asks Samson not to “tax . . . divine disposal” because God has his reasons for having allowed it to be the case that even “wisest Men / Have err’d” (210–11).

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The Chorus rightly sees Samson’s error as fitting with some providential plan. (There is no implication that Samson is predestined to err, only that as in other cases God did not intervene to stop him through prevenient grace.) Nevertheless, the Chorus is too quick to exempt Samson from the task of judgment, a task he himself insists on 150 lines later when he corrects his father’s complaint: “Appoint not heavenly disposition, Father, / Nothing of all these evils hath befall’n me / But justly; I my self have brought them on” (373–75). The poem’s consistent analysis of the idea of disposition suggests that a significant part of God’s plan, of the way he disposes the narrative, addresses itself to our judgment and not only to our wonder or submission. God’s arrangement of the story encourages human judgment to reach the point where it deserves the vindication that it now knows to seek and to expect. Let us return to the invocation to book 1 of Paradise Lost. It should be obvious by now that I do not mean to claim that these are two incompatible readings of the phrase “justify the ways of God to men”; I do not wish to identify Paradise Lost 1.26 as presenting a dilemma or paradox. Rather, I think that the combination of the two readings is the point: the question of justice is a central and consistent issue for human beings in a way that it is not for any other intelligent creatures in Milton’s universe. From the perspective of the universe God can treat us as he treats anything at all, by virtue of his own interminable and unbounded transcendence of all prescript. But from our own perspective, we demand a sense that God is just according to our own judgments, and our demand is a just one. By saying that our demand is just, I mean that what it means to be human, or to be fallen humans, includes a legitimate demand for an explanation of our punishment. To achieve salvation we need to understand our situation, and to understand it we need to be guided by something other than

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arbitrary prescript. The two readings of line 26 — (1) humans are capable of understanding the justice of all God’s ways; (2) it is possible to justify to any rational intelligence the justice of the way God treats human beings — combine to suggest that if all of God’s ways are just, the particular justice that the case of human beings requires is such that God’s ways toward them must be justified to them. This may sound like a long way of saying that humans are entitled to judge the ways that God treats humans, but I have wanted to point out that the way God treats humans is not a parochial question but goes to the very heart of the question we humans have as to whether God is just; and if he is just what that justice demands with respect to our own capacities to judge God. Justice in Milton (as in Christian theology generally) is always associated with punishment: the ways of God that require justification in Milton are God’s ways with punishment. Indeed, Laurence Tomson (who did the annotations to the Geneva Bible) annotates the verse from Psalm 145 that Milton has in mind by saying of David that “He prayseth God, not onely for that he is beneficiall to al his creatures, but also in that that [sic] he iustly punisheth the wicked.” In Psalms and in Revelation, just punishment is not thought to require explanation. It is a principle of the universe, not a principle of argument. But I am interested in (and I think Milton is interested in) the motives for the claim that it is a principle of the universe. A way of putting this is to ask what the relation is between vindication and punishment. Obviously if vindication means the triumph of justice, as a principle of the universe, and if justice requires the punishment of the wicked (“Die he or justice must”), then vindication will require punishment. But the experience of vindication is a subjective one: hence the wishfulness that I mentioned in my first paragraph. The subjective experience of anticipated vindication that I

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anticipate is one in which I feel that the punishment of my unjust adversary is a conclusive sign of his injustice. When we seek or anticipate vindication through punishment, the punishment is less an end in itself than an instrument of irrefutable demonstration to the evildoer that what he has done is evil: “Perhaps now you will see how depraved you are!” The psychology here seems to conform to the following syllogism: Punishment is just; you are being punished; you therefore must conclude that you are unjust. Such a syllogism stands or falls on the truth of its two premises, and we will tend to contest that syllogism when we are the objects of another’s fantasies or procedures of vindication. We will call it vindictiveness instead. But vindictiveness or spite is just the name we give to actions that we do not regard as just or deserved punishment. It is false vindication, or at least that is what its objects will tend to think. That thought is what provokes Satan to fantasies of his own vindication: he sees God as spiteful and vindictive; hence, the rebel angels’ complaint “that Fate / Free Vertue should enthrall to Force or Chance” (PL 2.550–51). No rational beings (Milton would agree with Plato) would seek to battle against justice; fantasies of revenge are always fantasies that the justice of the fantasizer’s cause will be demonstrated: just punishment completes the demonstration. We do not tend to think much about whether punishment (as retribution) as such is just;4 the issue in the contention and mutual finger-pointing and cycle of revenge that run so deep in human culture is whether the defeated person sees what has happened to him or her as oppression or as punishment. To agree that you have been punished, rather than oppressed or wrongly injured, is to agree that justice has prevailed, whether you like it or not; to deny that the injury you have experienced is punishment is to anticipate or wish for or fantasize about being vindicated, through the (just) punishment of the injustice you see yourself as experiencing.

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Now it is peculiarly difficult to represent or stage a plausibly satisfying moment of vindication between two antagonists. We anticipate the moment when our oppressor will be sorry and will be brought to see his or her depravity. But when we see that antagonism has turned to regret, or at least to remorse, it is much harder to feel the satisfaction we have anticipated. We want our oppressor simultaneously to be the depraved evildoer and the remorseful acknowledger of his or her own depravity, but if the oppressor acknowledges it he or she is not really so depraved any longer, and if it is not acknowledged, we feel cheated of the satisfaction we have promised ourselves. The fantasy of the oppressor’s remorse is a future-tense fantasy that is hard to bring into the present. Vindication in a binary relationship is relished in anticipation far more than in actuality. To insist on the depravity of the person who fully acknowledges remorse, as you have wished, begins to look like vindictiveness. If narrative appeals to the anticipation of vindication, it also has to find a way around this inconsistency when it is time for the promised vindication. In thinking simultaneously about justice and about narrative, Milton confronts this issue throughout his works (in his prose invectives, too, of course). The simultaneous consideration of justice and of narrative that structures it leads to Milton’s deepest thinking on human subjectivity, thinking that comes to see (or to claim) as one of the most important elements of human subjectivity its aptness to be changed and deepened by just such thinking. God’s ways to men are justified through the way their justification to men leads men to a deeper concept of justice. And that deeper concept, I would say, is one that sees that justice toward souls who are real is what matters. It is God’s ways to men that matter.5 A quick way to see this is to notice the chastening of the narrator in Paradise Lost, a chastening that leads him away from a vindictive or vengeful perspective (recall Bacon’s

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definition of revenge: wild justice). This is a particularly deep version of one effective though subtle and difficult narrative technique for managing vindicatory expectation: the person who promises herself vindication changes her goals as the story proceeds. The audience’s goals change accordingly. Another, more common technique is to split into two groups the incredulous whom we wish to see acknowledge the justice of our hero’s cause: those who perversely maintain their depraved refusal to see true justice, and those who come to acknowledge it and therefore reject their former allies in the first group. We can have it both ways, but only if there are degrees of villainy and if some of the villains change sides and begin approving the good or at least disapproving evil. These ideas combine, in Milton preeminently and in many other narratives as well, with the converse fact that in wanting vindication from one’s enemy one is showing that enemy the respect due to another person. Just to want vindication is to acknowledge the humanity of the person you resent for (you think) not acknowledging your own. The split between those who do come to acknowledge your humanity and those who you imagine never do6 brings out how much it is essential to what we want from vindication that there be an audience, how much vindication is a relationship among three points of view, because it is impossible between just two. The desire for justification and for vindication includes a desire for an audience that will see the justice of our cause. It is a desire that couches itself in narrative terms, with justice as the narrative’s outcome.7 The requirement for an audience means that the narratives in which we seek to be seen as deserving human and humane treatment are narratives that also acknowledge the humanity of those whose acknowledgment we desire. Our discrimination between savable and depraved antagonists, a discrimination essential to the success of narrative, is what makes us human and what turns our desire for justice into a willingness to do justice to those who come to share our desire.

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Narrative must discriminate, not only between good guys and bad guys, but also between the redeemable and the irredeemable. Narrative satisfaction needs both. And the redeemable bad guys are those who have judged wrongly but will change their minds at the end and judge rightly. Narrative satisfaction requires the correction of judgment. It also requires a sense that those whose judgments (and the actions they issue in) are incorrigible deserve punishment. These general — I believe universal — points are particularly important to Milton’s thinking and not just his technique. The structure of justice is a literary structure, and Milton is overtly and consciously concerned with this, so for him literature can give us insight into justice (hence, the preface to Samson) for the same reasons that I am claiming that our deep intuitions about justice can give us insight into literature.8 Let me explicate these ideas, briefly, in Milton’s major work. When Satan stands “stupidly good” in book 9 at the sight of Eve, he is “abstracted . . . From his own evil” (PL 9.465, 463–64). It cannot be otherwise: the moment when his malice is overawed is a moment when he can no longer be Satan. He is abstracted from his own character. He does not manifest some saving moment of judgment here. Rather, he loses all judgment, and in doing so loses all moral status. To be human9 is to feel susceptible to other humans’ demands and to their judgments of one’s humanity. This in turn means one makes such demands and judgments about other humans as well, knowing that one will be judged on how well one makes them. To be human, then, requires judgment. But Satan is not judging: he is paralyzed by the power of goodness, albeit paralyzed at a moment of pure perception. He loses contact with himself — with his will, which is for Milton the true faculty of judgment (“Reason also is choice” [PL 3.108]), choosing between the options offered by the more philosophically standard faculty of technical or calculating judgment. When he returns to himself he returns to the pleasures of narrative anticipation: “Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts /

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Of mischief, gratulating,. . . excites” (9, 471–72). He takes pleasure in the revenge he foresees, and indeed understands that pleasure as the only joy left to him. The pleasure he takes is vindictive; that is, it is a debased form of a desire for vindication, as we have known from the start. He wishes God to see that he has failed to stop Satan, failed to make him feel chastened or chastised or justly punished, and he aims to make God aware of his own misjudgment, and so to correct God’s failure to acknowledge what Satan believes himself to be. This is what animates Satan’s planned vengeance, which intends that God “At length from us may find, who overcomes / By force, hath overcome but half his foe” (PL 1.648–49). The point of vengeance is always to prove that point — and the fantasy of vengeance, as here, is to prove a point to the person who is the object of vengeance. God at first seems to be saying something similar in book 3 when he foretells how Satan’s desire for “desperate revenge . . . shall redound / Upon his own rebellious head (3.84–86); but God is indifferent to whether Satan experiences this lesson. For him the punishment is in conformity with a nonhuman version of justice, one that does not need to prove to the punished person why he deserves punishment, nor to seek acknowledgment from him that he does. Divine justice is not communication by other means, as it is for human justice. (Satan, of course, acknowledges deserving punishment in the book 4 soliloquy of self-castigation, but far from that soliloquy’s satisfying its angelic observers, it is made instead into a plot device, alerting them with some anxiety to Satan’s presence on earth.) God has no need to have his justice acknowledged, perhaps because, like the Chorus in Samson, he takes the strongly voluntaristic line that he defines justice rather than being defined by it.10 Satan’s view of justice, alas, will end in a similarly aloof attitude, in his book 4 meditation on the innocent Adam and Eve. “Public reason just” (PL 4.389) requires him to take revenge on them who wrong him not: but revenge on the

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innocent is the shocking and antipodal opposite of the communication that we have been treating as a mark of respect even within anger and resentment. God’s indifference to Satan is a sign of his absolute withdrawal of respect, which Satan may deserve; but Satan’s indifference to Adam and Eve’s innocence, indifference which they do not deserve, means that he is almost without any communicative intent toward them, even when he imagines addressing them in book 4. He makes them pawns, not persons: they are his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. God, too, is as indifferent to the human understanding of the requirements of justice as Satan is (he does not care whether he is justified to men), but that indifference is part of our deserved punishment, whereas Satan’s indifference to us is not. It is in this context that the Son’s judgment of Adam and Eve is at once condemning and saving. He does treat humans as worthy of being made to understand our own failing, as beings who can acknowledge our injustice. The crucial characterization of the Son’s judgment confirms the way he treats us as fully human: “So judg’d he Man, both Judge and Saviour sent,. . . / And thought not much to cloath his Enemies” (PL 10.209–19). Notice that by this point, the narrative of vindication that we have relished from the start — the desperate revenge that will redound on the rebellious head of the malefactor — has been reversed. We are no longer those who seek the acknowledgment of those who have wronged us but those who acknowledge the wrong we have done. Refuting Satan is no longer the goal that the narrative of Paradise Lost proposes to us. Milton will, of course, make this refutation the stake of Paradise Regained, but there, too, the Son is above anxiety for proof and reproof so decisively that Satan will admit the truth of his own depravity and the Son’s transcendent goodness. The Son knows the lesson that Adam and Eve must learn: that Satan is not the point. Truth is.

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What this means is that Paradise Lost offers a tutorial in narrative judgment — which is to say (I have been arguing), judgment tout court. Here too it is like Hamlet, which also has fate or circumstance or the unfolding of event (story) tutoring both its main character and its audience. Just as the Hamlet of act 5 no longer seeks the revenge, the assignment of which by the ghost he had so euphorically relished, neither do we humans, represented as we are by Adam and Eve, seek revenge at the end of Paradise Lost. The work can be seen as developing a sequence of ideas about the subtle and difficult balance between vindictiveness and vindication. Satan’s study of revenge treats God seriously as a person, though mistakenly, both in imagining that God cares (caring is a human attitude — which is why the Son cares — not a divine one), and in imagining that God will entertain the possibility that he has misjudged Satan when he sees that Satan is not entirely defeated. God’s joke to the Son about how Satan is unstoppable (PL 3.80–84) is a crude and vicious dramatization of derision. But it is the still-developing narrator who writes this scene for a still-naïve readership. It is the narrator’s early attempt to split God’s judgment of Satan from God’s desire to make Satan feel and know that he deserves this judgment. God jeers at Satan, but not so that Satan hears it: this is serene contempt, expressed only to the Son, and not (like most expressions of contempt) one mode of soliciting the jeered-at to acknowledge their inferiority. I am not arguing that God’s character changes in the course of the poem: his characterization does. The more subtle the narrator becomes, the more his narrative diverges from Raphael’s. Raphael (like the fallen angels) has never learned the human lesson about judgment and justice that the poem teaches Adam and Eve, and teaches the narrator, and teaches us. I have argued elsewhere that God does not appear in the poem, only his caricature, constructed for the shallow judgments of the angels.11 I back up this claim partly

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through citing the passage in De doctrina Christiana where Milton appeals to 1 Timothy 6:16. There Paul says that God “dwelleth in the light yt none can attaine vnto [lucem habitans inaccessam], whom neuer man sawe, neither can see, vnto whome bee honour and power euerlasting,” a verse Milton partially translates in the invocation to book 3 (“never but in unapproached light / Dwelt from Eternitie” (PL 3.4–5). In De doctrina he interprets this passage as well as some others to mean: “Qui igitur auditus quique visus fuit, sequitur Deum non fuisse” (It follows therefore that whoever was heard or seen was not God).12 This means that it is always erroneous for the humans or the vindictive fallen angels or the triumphant loyal angels to look to God for the kind of pleasurable judgment that narrative anticipates. Abdiel is rewarded, vindicated we might say, but he does not act in view of vindication. God is a judge, but not one for whom things come out one way or another:13 his judgment is neither vindicated nor does it vindicate others, as a more primitive or magical view of God would believe. God is not the audience of a story that he then will judge, his judgment ratifying our position (so we hope) once he hears it all. The anthropology of monotheism involves a development of “you’ll see” impulses into “God will see” (the moment of narrative triumph) “and then he’ll make you see.” But Milton’s God has moved beyond that. He may have moved beyond it, but the poem’s task is to show humans how to do so. One way to see the features in which Milton’s conception of judgment exceeds that of the angels is to look at God’s final speeches — in Paradise Lost and in Milton. Despite the narrator’s claim (in the invocation to book 7) that the second half of Paradise Lost will all occur on earth, we return to heaven, privileged, perhaps, to observe this last scene from and because of the Son’s human perspective, a perspective we did not have in book 3 (let alone in Raphael’s narration). Here God sounds very different from the contemptuously derisive figure in books 3 and 5

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(PL 5.719–37): he tells the Son his judgment and explains that death is not penalty and punishment but man’s “final remedie” (11.62). All earlier accounts of death have seen it as the simultaneous punishment and sign I have been analyzing, the idea that part of punishment is the very fact that it is denounced (to use Adam’s word at 9.695) or proclaimed, and not only the experience that the proclamation points to. Being mortal proves you are wrong. But this is not what God is saying here: punishment is also a remedy for and not just a badge of human depravity. Thus, we should not lay too much emphasis on the more priggish speech he then delivers to the Synod of the Blest to whom he announces the judgment he has just told the Son about. There he speaks in the narrative mode appropriate to their complacent expectation of eternal vindication, and again denounces (PL 11.106) the punishment of Adam and Eve, despite the fact that they may “boast” (11.86) of their new knowledge. What sort of boasting would this be? The boasting of the victor, as in Satan’s triumphant speech about their fall, which ends in the hisses he least expects. Those hisses represent Satan’s comeuppance; but Adam and Eve are far from boasting and no view of this “sad Sentence” (11.109) — where death, as I have said, is a remedy, not a punishment — can see it as comeuppance. No view, except perhaps that of the angels, who do not have human depth of judgment. It is this very fact that can be seen in Raphael’s account of God in book 5, so like the narrator’s in book 1 in aiming to make punishment a conclusive demonstration of the superiority of the punisher, riding the Chariot of Paternal Deity, to those who fail to punish effectively, despite their goodwill, as well as to those who are punished. This is the might-makesright doctrine that the rebel angels rightly reject. We can summarize briefly the developing sense of judgment in Paradise Lost in order to point out how it parallels the poem’s deepening of human subjectivity by showing how the narrative, and the narrator, alter their sense of what it

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would look like to wish for justice. Some important milestones would be: 1. Satan’s desire for revenge. 2. God’s derision of Satan for thinking that revenge will have any efficacy. 3. God’s description of the innocent Adam and Eve already as ingrates, as though he wants to teach them a lesson that they do not yet have any occasion to learn. 4. Satan’s own inherently unstable self-judgment in book 4, which shows the limits of narrative’s paradoxical goal of combining depravity with our desired experience of seeing punishment acknowledged as deserved, our impossible desire to see the depraved evildoer willingly vindicate his punisher. 5. His depraved view that he can justly punish Adam and Eve for what has been done to him: for us this means that he does not treat them as humans who will both suffer his punishment and acknowledge its appropriateness, thus fully vindicating the punisher, as Satan had almost done (see 4). 6. The scorn traded between Gabriel and Satan, each jeering at the other, and Satan’s shock that he is not recognized, that is that he is becoming a figure to whom the unfallen angels are personally indifferent. 7. Raphael’s view that God would jeer at Satan, despite our own increasing understanding that judgment and jeering are not the same thing. 8. Abdiel’s willingness to tell Satan the truth, whether Satan believes it or not. 9. The judgment Adam pronounces on Eve to himself, before his fall, but still a judgment where he has entered so deeply into human subjectivity that he reacts not with a desire for vindication or a sense of superiority, but with grief.

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10. The Fall as regression from the understanding manifested by Adam in (9), that understanding being what now has to be won again. 11. The Son’s attention to the two narratives of Adam and Eve, and his judgment of them in a way that neither vindicates them nor treats them vindictively; and their similar attitudes toward each other, tutored in humanity by the greatest of humans, the Greater Man. 12. The self-trivialization of Satan, his regression from all human respect, both when he is stupidly good and when he is hissed in hell. 13. God’s judgment in book 11, and the way it shows how human understanding exceeds angelic understanding. 14. The narrator’s, and our own, far deeper understanding of judgment without vindication or vindictiveness by the end of the poem. Satan’s greatness and depth measure the nature of the paradox described in point 4. It is here that the poem begins taking the experience of being truly punished as its subject instead of the experience of desiring to punish. In attempting to think through his own situation Satan shows what thought looks like when it is not self-justifying. He cannot sustain this way of thinking, but this episode transposes the key of the poem. It is at this point that Paradise Lost starts reworking the most fundamental relationships among subjectivity, narrative, and justification. We begin judging God, but in the end we judge the significance of the fact that we are able to judge at all. This is of course a central and obvious theme in Paradise Lost: “I will place within them as a guide / My Umpire Conscience” (3.194–95). Its moral from God’s point of view might be this: that for God the punishment of humans includes human understanding of why we are

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punished (the beginning of correction); whereas he is indifferent to the rebels’ failure to understand the justice of their own punishment. I think it is important to note here what makes this fact significant, from our perspective, and what makes it worth a narrative poem that aspires to heroic name: it is that human judgment is by its nature narrative, and therefore by its nature always has others in view. I do not mean that judgment is self-dramatizing (though of course it may be). I mean that we judge human interiority, which means we plumb the depths of that interiority in order to judge; and we judge on the basis of human interiority, which means that the very act of judging, oneself or another, is an act that acknowledges the reality and depth of the other. We judge because we care about the subjective existence of other human beings, about the story of their interior lives. We judge God’s ways toward humans because those humans are the only beings in the universe who can care about their fellows deeply enough to be able to judge God’s ways. The desire for vindication is the uniquely human starting point of acknowledging the subjective existence of others. But the end point, at least in Paradise Lost, is the deep and chastened achievement of an acknowledgment of their existence even when the dramas of vindication and vindictiveness — those rejected subjects listed in the invocation to book 9 — have been left behind.14

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8

D Rethinking “shee for God in him” Paradise Lost and Milton’s Quaker Contemporaries Teresa Feroli

The meaning of gendered hierarchies in Paradise Lost has long stood as a contentious issue in Milton criticism. In particular, the line “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” has prompted a wide range of responses from critics.1 Some have suggested that it does not represent Milton’s but Satan’s view of sexual difference, while others have argued that the line sums up the poet’s conception of woman’s “mediated” relationship with the divine.2 Rather than coming down on one side or the other of the hierarchical divide, I shall consider this line, and particularly the words “shee for God in him,” in terms of the discourse of humankind as the imago Dei. One of the hallmarks of seventeenth century English Reformed theology, the belief in the immanence of the divine in the human originates in the Genesis account of man’s creation, “Let us make man in our image,” and is repeatedly portrayed as the state of perfection to which believers aspire to return 159

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(Gen. 1:26). In the words of William Ames, “Sanctification is a reall change of man from the filthinesse of sin, to the purity of Gods Image.”3 Although Milton’s line clearly places women at a remove from the divine image, two of his Quaker contemporaries, Martha Simmonds and Margaret Fell, effectively illustrate the latent potential for female authority of “shee for God in him.” Ultimately, these women call attention to the manifold ways, to borrow from Milton, that “The Spirit of God, promis’d alike and giv’n / To all Believers” (PL 12.519–20) disrupts traditional gender hierarchies and even that of “Hee for God only, shee for God in him.” As a statement about the immanence of the divine in the individual believer, Milton’s line presents a gendered interpretation of the more sexually egalitarian Priestly account of Creation found in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” As Mary Nyquist argues, Milton genders the Priestly account masculine by fusing it with the Yahwist narrative of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib. Milton’s synthesis of the two Creation accounts not only asserts man’s closer identity with Godhead but also does not attribute to woman a direct connection to the divine image. This is a significant departure from Reformed biblical commentators, who “always claim that woman is in some sense made in the image of God.”4 Addressing Genesis 1:26, John Calvin, for instance, wonders why “Paul should deny the woman to be the image of God, when Moses honours both, indiscriminately, with this title.” He resolves this discrepancy by claiming that Paul “restricts the image of God to government, in which the man has superiority over the wife.” According to Calvin, Paul regards men as “superiour in the degree of honour” but nevertheless agrees with Moses that women share in the “glory of God which peculiarly shines forth in human nature, where the mind, the will, and all the senses, represent the Divine Order.” William Perkins similarly views the attribution of the image of God to man as an

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“outward” distinction when he responds to the query “why the man is called the image of God, and not the woman”: “He is so called not because holinesse and righteousnesse is peculiar to him which is common to both: but because God hath placed more outward excellencie and dignitie in the person of a man then of a woman.”5 For his part, Milton not only posits that man, on a political or external level, more fully articulates the image of God but also attributes God-like creative powers to man that eliminate the possibility of woman’s direct connection to God. He does this most strikingly in Christian Doctrine as part of a meditation on the theory of traduction (the idea that men, and not God, propagate souls)6 in which he suggests Adam as the progenitor of Eve’s soul: But in fact the force of the divine blessing, that each creature should reproduce in its own likeness, is as fully applicable to man as it is to all other animals; Gen.i, 21,28. So God made the mother of all things living out of a simple rib, without having to breathe the breath of life a second time, Gen. ii.22; and Adam himself begot his son in his own image and likeness, Gen.v.3. 1Cor.xv.49, as we have borne the image of the earthly, and this means not only in the body but in the soul, just as it was chiefly with reference to his soul that Adam was made in God’s image.7

Milton takes a biblical passage in which Adam is a passive participant in Eve’s creation and transforms him into the agent of her creation through a series of associations, namely, God’s blessing “that each creature should reproduce in its own likeness” and Adam’s actual begetting “his son in his own image and likeness.” Further, Adam actively contributes to Eve’s creation, in Milton’s view, by sparing God, through his rib, from “having to breathe the breath of life a second time.”8 The upshot of Milton’s exegesis is a God who creates man in his image and thus endows him with the authority to create woman in his (man’s) image.9 For Milton, the Yahwist account

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of Creation effectively fleshes out the Priestly: man is in the image of God, and so he plays a role in creating woman. While, on its own terms, it is difficult to separate Milton’s vision of man as imago Dei from questions of gender difference, it is easier to see the broader implications of his theology for the understanding of human nature in contradistinction to that of orthodox Calvinist thought. Here, what sets Milton apart is not his view of man’s perfection before the Fall, but his claim that even fallen man retains “traces” of divinity: “some traces of the divine image still remain in us, which are not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death.” In particular, he continues, these “traces remain in our intellect” (YP 6:396).10 Calvin too asserts that fallen man possesses “some obscure lineaments of that image,” but he concludes they are “so vitiated and maimed, that they may truly be said to be destroyed.”11 Milton maintains, with Calvin, that we are corrupted by original sin and certainly agrees with Perkins that we “become the deformed children of wrath.”12 The difference is that Milton views fallen man as possessed of more traces of his divine father and as possessed of innate qualities that enable him to pursue his own regeneration. Milton’s greater appreciation for fallen man’s potential derives from his rejection of predestination as incommensurate with divine justice: “But if he turns man’s will to moral good or evil just as he likes, and then rewards the good and punishes the wicked, it will cause an outcry against divine justice from all sides.” Hence, regeneration is “not the work of God alone” and “religious matters” must be “to some extent within our power and choice.” In Milton’s words, “we shape ourselves to Christ’s image” and “the mind and will of the natural man are partially renewed and are divinely moved towards knowledge of God” (Christian Doctrine, YP 6:397, 398, 451, 457). For Milton, believers are not endowed with the image of God solely by virtue of Creation, but they have the capacity to develop this image, as Hugh MacCallum

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puts it, through “self-knowledge and knowledge of God and nature.”13 While Milton believes that man grows into the imago Dei through the fusion of human will and intellect with divine providence, the Quakers maintain that humans gain access to the divine only through the agency of God in the form of the “Seed” or “inner light.” More than Milton, Quakers believe that fallen man is absolutely fallen and retains no “traces” of the maker’s image. According to James Nayler, fallen man loses “the measure of God . . . in which he stood above the creation” and becomes “brutish in his understanding.”14 For Quakers, the way back to God and to freedom from sin is through the “seed” God plants in all people to illuminate their depraved condition. As John Whitehead describes his experience of regeneration, the seed reveals to him his sinfulness: “and except the Lord had left a seed, I had been as Sodom: which seed sometimes disquieted the earthly spirit, and brought me in some measure into a sence of my condition, and did let me see that I was separate from Christ.”15 Over time, through the agency of God, the believer comes to cast off the old self and embrace a new life in Christ. Nayler portrays this process as one in which the believer’s “mind is stayed in the light from hearkening to the earthly, so that seed which lies in death comes to hear the voice of the Son of God, and to receive life and strength from the word, whereby it is raised out of the grave and appears above the earth, to receive from the Father the dew of heaven.”16 What sets Quakers apart from orthodox Calvinists and from Milton is the extent to which they believe regenerate human beings live in Christ. In the words of Edward Burrough, “we believe that the saints upon earth . . . may be perfectly freed from the body of sin and death, and in Christ may be perfect and without sin . . . and we believe, they that wait for it shall obtain it, and shall be presented without sin in the Image of the Father.”17 Perhaps, more than any other, this belief that individuals “in

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Christ may be perfect and without sin” raised the hackles of seventeenth century English Puritans and spurred them to condemn the Quakers as blasphemous.18 As compared with Milton, then, the Quakers conceived of humankind’s possession of the imago Dei in absolute terms: utterly absent in the fallen and completely present in the regenerate. This antinomy between the fallen and the regenerate typifies the determinate nature of Quaker spirituality. As distinct from Milton, the Quakers do not refer to progressive growth in the spirit, particularly “once the first decisive struggle was past,” because, in Hugh Barbour’s words, they assumed “that the Spirit [as it dwelled within them] was infallible and that perfect Christianity was simply perfect obedience.”19 Thus, John Whitehead speaks with great certainty when he declares his spiritual journey to be complete: “Thus was I led through the world to the end of it, who am not of it; for no more I live, but Christ liveth in me.”20 The sense of possession Whitehead articulates here is anathema to Milton, who repeatedly asserts the integrity of individual persons and personalities. When, for instance, he assesses Christ’s words, in John 14:1, “the Father who dwells in me,” Milton asserts, “this does not mean that their essence is one, only that their communion is extremely close” (Christian Doctrine, YP 6:220). For Milton, divine inspiration comes when the self achieves “communion” with God and not when the self is obliterated by the divine presence. Quakers held to the latter view, and this derives from what the Quaker historian Edward Grubb deems their “defective psychology”21 and what Barbour faults as their inability “to take seriously . . . any personality as a whole.”22 The emphasis for Quakers, as “indicated by such terms as ‘entering,’ ‘inhabiting,’ ‘clothing itself with,’ and the like,” was on “the saving experience of the life of God in the soul, transforming the character [of the believer] into the character of Jesus Christ.”23 This experience of the indwelling Christ

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was definitive and enabled Whitehead to make the striking claim: “for no more I live, but Christ liveth in me.” As part and parcel of their belief in the Spirit’s capacity to erase earthly distinctions, the Quakers asserted that the Spirit neutralizes gender distinctions. They predicated this belief on Paul’s claim in Galatians that “there is neither male nor female . . . in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). They further maintained that because women are men’s spiritual equals, they are as likely as men to be called by God to preach. For this, their favorite proof-text was Joel’s prophecy quoted in Acts: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). Indeed, no less a figure than George Fox wrote treatises defending women’s right to preach. In his Concerning Sons and Daughters, he counters Paul’s claim that women who teach usurp authority over the men by observing that union with Christ transcends gender: “for the speaking as moved of the Lord in the obedience to the power & spirit which does not bring to usurpe over the man . . . which he [Christ] in the male and in the female may speak.”24 Although they wrote tracts supporting women as preachers, Fox and other leaders of the sect “felt the need, in print, to reiterate accepted scriptural views about the proper relations between husbands and wives.” These early Quaker leaders feared, in Kate Peters’s words, that “women could do very real damage” to the sect, and so they supported the radical notion that women could preach in public all the while seeking to limit and reign in these women.25 Writing within the context of a movement that saw them as the spiritual, though not the political, equals of men, Martha Simmonds and Margaret Fell challenged their sect’s bifurcated view of women. They knew what the leaders of their sect sought to deny, that their embrace of the discourse of human perfection had the power to change everything, even the political status of women. Simmonds celebrated

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the Christ in Nayler when she sang hosannas as he rode into Bristol in 1656 in imitation of the historical Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. She appears in this instance to play a subordinate female role, in deference, Milton might say, to the “God in him.” Her writings, however, testify to her collaboration with Nayler that effectively reconstitutes “male and female” as politically as well as spiritually interchangeable beings. For her part, Fell establishes women’s authority to preach in Womens Speaking Justified in terms of a Christ who responds in masculine and human ways to woman — he is moved by her physical weakness and beauty. Fell constitutes a “she for the he in God,” and it is this “she” who, in the pointedly offhand postscript to her 1667 edition of Womens Speaking Justified, may be called upon, in the words of Paul, “to usurp authority over the man” (1 Tim. 2:12).26 The work of Fell and Simmonds illustrates that, despite the wishes of the early Quaker leaders, professions of spiritual equality do not readily coexist with the dictates of gender hierarchies. Perhaps more than in any other episode of the revolutionary period, the phrase “shee for God in him” is most nearly literally enacted by Martha Simmonds in the Nayler controversy of 1656. In a striking spectacle, the Quaker leader James Nayler entered Bristol on horseback accompanied by four male and three female followers. Nayler’s procession was meant to recall Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, and his female followers, including Simmonds, contributed to this aura by singing “Holy, holy, holy, Hosannah” and by laying their garments before him. Not surprisingly, Nayler’s actions caused him to be arrested, tried and convicted of blasphemy, and cruelly punished. When he was brought to the pillory in late 1656, Simmonds and two other women continued to play supporting roles in Nayler’s performance of Christ. As one unsympathetic observer reported, they attempted to recreate the scene of Christ’s Crucifixion by seating themselves around him “in imitation of Mary Magdalen and Mary the

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Mother of Jesus, and Mary the Mother of Cleophas . . . thereby to witnesse their still blasphemous and presumptious and heretical adoration of him.”27 While Simmonds, no doubt, would have disagreed with Milton that woman was created for the God in man, she certainly was willing to go to great lengths to testify to the divine in Nayler. During his trial, she was asked why she worshipped Nayler on her knees, and she replied, “He is the Son of Righteousnesse; and the new man wrought up in him is the everlasting Son of Righteousnesse.” Although the governing authorities determined that Nayler was guilty of blasphemy for daring “to personate our Lord and Saviour,” neither he nor Simmonds viewed his entry into Bristol in that way.28 Both saw it as a sign of the Christ within. In the multiply authored O England; thy time is come, likely written at the time of Nayler’s trial, Simmonds and Nayler collaborate to produce a carefully orchestrated justification of the events at Bristol in which she assumes the voice of male historical authority, and he takes on the more effeminate role of the lamblike and suffering Christ.29 While Nayler opens the tract with a brief and epigraphic call to repent — “with speed prepare to meet the Lord in Judgment, lest thou be cut off” — Simmonds follows with a warning to the “foolish, foolish Children” of England that is the longest sustained meditation in the piece. The focal point of her message is her claim that God has sent a figure of his son, alternately identified as a “Leader,” “Captain,” “King,” or “Prophet,” to guide them. She never explicitly identifies this figure as Nayler, but her meditation clearly seeks to cast Nayler in this role. Although, as she announces, this is the time of their “visitation,” the people of England have lamentably rejected God’s messenger: “Now the light is risen, how art thou found slaying the Lamb of God?” Worse yet, they have contemplated doing the unthinkable: “How cruelly have they beaten thy prophets, and now thy Son is come they

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conspire to kill him?” She further underscores the resemblance between Nayler, whose tribulations were legion, and the messianic figure she describes when she insists that God “hath . . . now fitted a bodie for himself who hath conquered death and hell.” This “body” is so “perfect” that “he can lay down his life for his enemies, not opening his mouth to defend himself.” Indeed, “this Vessel is as precious to . . . [her] as that which was tortured at Jerusalem.” And finally Simmonds places this charismatic “Captain” in a broad historical context while insisting that he walks among them: “Now I beseech you, is not this the manner of the reign of Christ, to purifie the bodies of his Saints to make them Temples for himself, and quicken them by his Spirit? and he that leads the way is the Captain, King, or Prophet, which in all ages the people loved and honoured.”30 Simmonds explicates the significance of the figure of the Captain in terms of both biblical and apocalyptic history, while Nayler demonstrates that his is, in Simmonds’s words, the body God has “fitted . . . for himself.” Within the context of this multivocal tract, hers emerges as the big picture, theoretical voice as compared with that of Nayler.31 His four short prose meditations and his poem do touch on apocalyptic themes but they more compellingly document the ways in which God has shaped and fashioned Nayler. Indeed, Nayler claims that he has been so thoroughly remade by God that he does not recognize himself: “Yea, how often hast thou changed me, so that I had not been known to my self?” No longer the James Nayler of old, he is clay in the hands of God: “Thus have I been as clay in thy hands, and durst not ask thee an account of thy doings.” In manifold and eloquent ways, Nayler tells his reader that God has “made” him, “proved” him in the fire, “melted” him, and “bent” him.32 But it is Simmonds’s theorizing voice that allows Nayler’s reader to see that he has been “made,” “proved,” “melted,” and “bent” in the image of Christ. While the closing sections

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of O England, authored by Nayler, evoke the private world of John Donne’s Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”), they gain public and historical significance through Simmonds’s words. O England presents a unique collaboration between a man and a woman in which she assumes the role of namer: God remakes Nayler, and Simmonds tells her reader who he is — the “Captain” who will lead. She tells his story and gives it meaning so that he can literally embody the figure of the meek and suffering Christ. And while her voice dominates, their roles within the text are completely interdependent. More than any other Quaker leader or religious radical, Nayler had shown throughout his career a willingness to relinquish signs of male authority. According to Phyllis Mack, he appears to have been the only male Quaker writer to permit women to write prefaces for his tracts.33 Moreover, when Nayler invokes the Genesis creation account in his 1653 “A Call . . . to Repentance,” he explicitly identifies women as equal heirs to the divine image: “O man and woman, how art thou fallen from thy maker and from the estate wherein thou was created?”34 Simmonds and Nayler sought in the spectacle at Bristol to portray the extent to which he possessed the spirit of Christ and in the process they created two distinct voices — those of the authoritative narrator and the passive martyr — that undermine the fixed nature of conventional gender distinctions. While Martha Simmonds subverts the derogatory implications for women of “shee for God in him” by dramatizing, within the scope of her published text, how this line might instantiate fluid gender roles, Margaret Fell more pointedly challenges those who, like Milton, embrace the Pauline texts that deny women the authority to preach and prophesy. In Womens Speaking Justified (first published in 1666 and then reissued with an important postscript in 1667), Fell announces that she intends to correct the “Clergy . . . Ministers, and

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others” who denounce “Womens speaking in the Church” based on what she deems to be their misreading of Paul on female preaching in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12.35 She does this, in large measure, by reassessing Paul through the lens of Genesis 3:15 and “the woman . . . and her seed.” Fell uses what she and her fellow sectarians deem a prophecy of Christ’s birth to produce a reading of the Bible that emphasizes woman’s particular relationship to Christ’s humanity and even to his masculinity. In so doing, she produces a vision of women’s inspired speech that does not rely exclusively on the typical Quaker images of spiritual indwelling but that portrays an affinity between Christ and women bordering on romance.36 Fell circumnavigates the Pauline injunction to female silence with a “she for the he in God” who is pivotal to the narrative of salvation and thus must absolutely be permitted to speak publicly. Fell invokes Genesis to instantiate her gender’s authority to preach and prophesy just as Milton uses Genesis to assert his gender’s spiritual and political supremacy. Her narrative of events, however, is more expansive and extends from what for Milton is the defining moment of gender difference — the account of Adam and Eve’s creation to the curse on the serpent that prophesies woman’s role as the mother of Christ. She opens with the Priestly account of Adam and Eve’s creation and comments, “Here God joyns them together in his own Image, and makes no such distinctions and differences as men do” (3). Clearly, unlike Milton, she sees “in the Image of God created he them” as a statement of men’s and women’s equality in the moment of their creation by God. Despite the divine mandate for equality, men continue to make “distinctions and differences.” She, however, appears to ratify such “distinctions” when she quickly proceeds to underscore a difference between men and women: “for though they be weak, he is strong; and as he said to the Apostle, His Grace is sufficient, and his strength is made manifest in weakness.

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2. Cor. 12. 9” (3). Although men and women are equal in the eyes of God, women are weak, but this does not delimit their authority because God manifests his power “in weakness.” The equality God intends in Genesis is not limited to spiritual equality because, according to Fell, God fully compensates women for any differences that might render them less in a hierarchical sense. Fell continues to retell Genesis in a way that emphasizes God’s special attention to women’s difference when she recasts Eve’s role in the Fall as precipitating woman’s role as the mother of Christ. She admits that the serpent tempted Eve because he discerned “her to be more inclinable to hearken to him” (3). She does not deny Eve’s feminine weakness here, but rather illustrates that it does not diminish her integrity when God confronts Adam and Eve about their failure to obey his one command. Adam tries to blame Eve for his fall, while Eve directly admits her fault: “The Serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (4).37 Fell views their different responses as a sign of Eve’s integrity and implies that God rewards her honesty with the sacred role given to her gender through his curse on the serpent: “Here the Woman spoke the truth unto the Lord: See what the Lord saith, vers. 15. after he had pronounced Sentence on the Serpent; I will put enmity between thee and the Woman, and between thy Seed and her Seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Gen. 3.” (4). Fell insists that women’s prophetic authority originates in a particular dialogic moment between God and woman in which, after succumbing to feminine weakness and the serpent’s temptation, woman proves that she can still speak “the truth unto the Lord.” Rather than predicating women’s prophetic authority in terms of her creation “in the Image of God,” Fell elects to establish female visionary legitimacy in a moment in which God vests woman with a powerful role that is unique to her gender. She underscores the significance of this moment for

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her case for women’s speaking when she expounds upon the Genesis prophecy of the “Seed”: “Let this Word of the Lord, which was from the beginning, stop the mouths of all that oppose Womens Speaking in the Power of the Lord; for he hath put enmity between the Woman and the Serpent; and if the Seed of the Woman speak not, the Seed of the Serpent speaks; for God hath put enmity between the two Seeds, and it is manifest that those that speak against the Woman and her Seeds Speaking, speak out of the enmity of the old Serpents Seed” (4). Fell presents a striking interpretation of God’s curse on the serpent that strongly identifies the vehicle of redemption — the woman — with the Redeemer (the Woman’s Seed). For Fell, the woman is no mere vessel through which historical change, in the person of Christ, enters the world but, rather, woman is intimately linked with the production of history. Without the woman, there would be no Christ, and should she be forbidden to speak, “the enmity of the old Serpents Seed” would rule. Moreover, she concludes her discussion of woman’s close identity with the prophesied Redeemer by moving forward in time to herald the fulfillment of the promise through the words of Paul himself: “When the fulness of time was come, he hath sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of Sons, Gal. 4.4, 5.” (4). In the course of the opening paragraphs of her tract, Fell reveals herself to be a shrewd polemicist who appropriates the very figure — Paul — upon whom those who demand female silence predicate their beliefs and reveals him to affirm with Fell and more importantly with God himself woman’s central role in the life of Christ: “he hath sent forth his Son, made of a woman.” The dialogue between God and Eve that results in God sending “forth his Son, made of a woman” engenders both a Christ who is particularly responsive to women and women who are strikingly attuned to him. For instance, Fell observes

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that when Christ revealed himself as the Messiah to the Samaritan woman at the well, he revealed more of himself than he had previously: “This is more than ever he said in plain words to Man or Woman (that we read of) before he suffered” (5). She presents the conversation that precipitates this message, moreover, as one in which the woman’s statements prompt Christ to reveal himself: “and when the Woman said unto him, I know that when the Messiah cometh . . . when he cometh, he will tell us all things; Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he” (5). Like Eve, the Samaritan woman demonstrates her knowledge of the truth — “he will tell us all things” — and so Christ conveys to her the truth of his existence. Christ, she demonstrates further, rewards not only insightful women but also faithful women, as in the case of Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. Christ first appears to them after his resurrection and confers on them the “Message” of the “Redemption of the whole Body of Mankind” (7) because, unlike Christ’s male disciples, they did not leave Christ, even when his body had been entombed: “their hearts . . . so united and knit unto him in love that they could not depart as the men did, but sat watching, and waiting, and weeping about the Sepulchre untill the time of his: Resurrection, and so were ready to carry his Message” (7). In short, the women were so devoted to Christ that quite literally “they could not depart.” Elsewhere, she ascribes the women’s fidelity to the buried Christ to their “tenderness and bowels of love” (7). The image here is of a distinctly visceral bond that develops from a longstanding and deeply felt affinity between women and Christ. The relationship between Christ and women that emerges in Womens Speaking Justified is one of mutual devotion and intimacy in which Christ not only rewards his loyal female disciples but also proves sensitive to women’s experience. Fell demonstrates this in her account of Christ’s response, as recorded in Matthew, to the Pharisees’ query regarding

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divorce. She frames this episode as an example of how the Son, like the Father, shows that he “alwayes out of his Mercy and loving kindness, had regard unto the weak” (5). Thus, she refashions the episode as one in which Christ comes to the aid of women to assert the primacy of God’s authority over that of men. The Pharisees ask, “if it were lawful for a man to put away his Wife” (5). Christ responds that men have no such power because God institutes marriage to make “one flesh” out of “Male and Female” and so, “What therefore God hath joyned together, let no man put asunder” (5). Christ, she implies, illustrates his “regard unto the weak” by proclaiming that only God, and not man, has the authority to dispose of woman. Beyond his awareness of the trials of women’s lived experience, Christ, in Fell’s view, is possessed of a great appreciation for female beauty. She underscores a number of instances in which Christ responds to his bride, the church, as though she were a beautiful woman: “And also King Solomon in his Song, where he speaks of Christ and his Church, where she is complaining and calling for Christ, he saith, If thou knowest not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way by the footsteps of the Flock, Cant. 1.8.c.5.9” (4).38 Here, female beauty becomes a way of expressing the joy that attends the union of Christ with his church. The language of Christ, Fell suggests, is shaped at its very core by his appreciation for women and the pitfalls and pleasures of their gendered difference. In essence, Fell’s text seeks to celebrate the “distinctions and differences” that link women to Christ while dismantling the hierarchical “distinctions and differences” between the sexes that men make. And in so doing, she creates a relationship between Christ and women in which he is particularly attentive to, even perhaps attracted by, women’s physical difference.39 Like Fell and Martha Simmonds, who constitute the presence of the divine through a relationship between a man and a woman, Milton establishes Adam’s possession of God’s

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image as intrinsically bound up with his desire for Eve. Adam’s union with the divine appears most profound in his retelling of his conversation with God that precipitates Eve’s creation. That episode begins with Adam quite literally taking the words out of God’s mouth. In Genesis, God determines that “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). But in Paradise Lost, Adam initiates a request for fellowship by lamenting his solitary state: “but with mee / I see not who partakes. In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find” (8.363–66). Of course, God will announce at the end of their conversation that he had intended to provide Adam with a mate all along: “I, ere thou speak’st, / Knew it not good for Man to be alone” (8.444–45). But by allowing Adam to introduce the topic, Milton grants him a measure of divinity. Further, Milton reinforces the idea that Adam has aspired to and indeed even achieved to some degree the divine likeness when God, at the end of their conversation, enthusiastically commends Adam’s desire for a “human consort”: Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d, And find thee knowing not of Beasts alone, Which thou hast rightly nam’d, but of thyself, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My Image, not imparted to the Brute, Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike, And be so minded still. (PL 8.437–44)

In his desire for “society” “fit to participate all rational delight,” Adam freely and independently testifies that he is in the divine “Image.” Within the context of Paradise Lost, these words represent the only time God commends Adam’s independent actions as attesting to his being in the divine “Image.” In preceding instances, when Adam is described as being in God’s image, the motivating factor shades toward ontology. From Raphael’s account of Adam’s creation, we

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learn that he was created in God’s image: “Let us make now Man in our image” and again: “in his own Image hee / Created thee, in the Image of God / Express” (8.519, 526–28). The second time Adam is described as being in the image of God, Raphael responds to Adam’s compliment about the pleasures of conversing with divine beings by asserting that Adam, in his very nature, also partakes of divinity: “for God on thee / Abundantly his gifts hath also pour’d / Inward and outward both, his image fair” (8.219–21). Adam has the capacity for divinely inspired eloquence because he is made in God’s image.40 Although possessed of these “gifts” from the moment of his creation, Adam reveals them most fully only when he asks God for a fellow human being. Why does God deem this to be such a compelling moment in Adam’s development? God sees his own image in Adam because he has shown himself possessed of profound selfknowledge: “And find thee knowing not of Beasts alone, / but of thyself.” Adam’s self-knowledge participates in the divine nature because it perfectly reconciles the claims of human desire and the divinely ordained order. Indeed, Adam wonders how God can refuse a request that so perfectly conforms with the cosmic plan: Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, And these inferior far beneath me set? Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony or true delight?

(PL 8.381–84)

Adam insists that to be human is to be superior to the “Brute” and yet not so perfect that solitude is a suitable option: in thee Is no deficience found; not so is Man, But in degree, the cause of his desire By conversation with his like to help, Or solace his defects.

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(8.415–19)

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While to be human is to desire conversation with his like, it is through this very human desire that Adam partakes of God’s image. Adam’s desire reveals his divine nature because it is perfectly consistent with God’s cosmological scheme. As God puts it, “My Image, not imparted to the Brute, / Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee / Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike” (8.441–43). In diverging from the Genesis narrative, Milton does not present just an Adam who takes the Word out of God’s mouth but one who identifies so closely with the divine plan that he bears the image of God. At the core of the moment in the poem when Adam most fully realizes God’s image in himself is the desire of a man for a woman. We are back in the terrain of Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified in which the terms of heterosexual desire spur the union of human and divine. Of course, in this case it is a man’s desire for a “human consort,” a “Lioness” to his “Lion,” that reveals his possession of divinity, whereas in Fell it is Christ’s particular affinity for woman that engenders her divine inspiration (PL 8.392, 393). Nevertheless, the presence of God in the individual in both texts proves inextricably tied to the language of love and desire. And while Milton’s “shee for God in him” underscores Eve’s spiritually subordinate role, his Adam requires her existence in order to realize the “God in him.” This same sense of Eve as the catalyst for Adam’s spiritual development emerges when Raphael warns him about the proper love for Eve. Adam tells the angel that although he knows her to be less expressive of God’s image, he is so enamored of her that “All higher knowledge in her presence falls” (8.551). Concerned that Adam has become rather too preoccupied with an “outside,” Raphael advises, “What higher in her society thou find’st / Attractive, human, rational, love still” (8.586–87). And it is through this rational love that he may ascend to “heav’nly Love” (8.592). Again, although not as strongly as God had, the divine voice

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of Raphael suggests that she inspires the “God in him.” “Hee for God only, shee for God in him,” it turns out, may describe not only gender hierarchy but also Adam’s dependence on Eve as a means to realizing his capacity for divinity.41 The poem, however, ascribes to Eve’s spirituality a role that goes beyond enabling Adam to realize the “God in him.” She, though more circuitously, will demonstrate that she too possesses the divine image. To assert this is to counter the poem’s explicit claims for the mediated nature of Eve’s spirituality: she, for instance, prefers Adam as her “Relater” over Raphael and celebrates her spiritually subordinate role: “My Author and Disposer, what thou bidd’st / Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains, / God is thy Law, thou mine” (PL 4.635–37). Yet I think the circumstances of postlapsarian life and, in particular, the prophecy that Eve’s “Seed” will bruise the serpent’s head compel Milton, in a manner not unlike that of Fell, to view Eve as capable of a direct relationship with God. For Fell, the promise of the woman’s seed means that woman is literally bound to Christ and that her prophetic authority follows accordingly. For Milton, on the other hand, woman’s role in providential history requires that Eve possess direct access to God and the capacity to participate in the divine image. It is not enough, by way of Christian Doctrine, for the Spirit to “dwell” in her but rather she must achieve her own “extremely close” “communion” with God. And while Milton does not view, as Fell does, the gift of prophecy to be integral to the nature of woman’s being, he nevertheless constitutes Eve’s participation in God’s image as a moment of intellectual growth comparable to that when Adam seeks her creation. It is no coincidence then that Eve does not speak of the “Promis’d Seed” until, in her final speech in the poem, she reveals herself to be possessed of the same sort of transcendent self-knowledge Adam articulates when he desires her creation. While, after Tetrachordon, the content of her selfknowledge is very much “in reference to the man,” the way

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in which she achieves it is not (YP 2:589). This, however, is not immediately apparent when of the two consolations that have reconciled her to leaving Eden — her life with Adam and her role in conveying the “Promis’d Seed” — she emphasizes the former: but now lead on; In mee is no delay; with thee to go, Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee Art all things under Heav’n, all places thou, Who for my wilful crime art banisht hence.

(PL 12.614–19)

What is striking about this passage and relevant to the issue of her access to the divine image is that it echoes the “With thee conversing” speech of book 4.42 That speech appears to operate on two different registers, with the claims of hierarchy (“My Author and Disposer, what thou bidd’st / Unargu’d I obey”) forming the first part of the speech and the claims of desire the second (“But neither breath of Morn . . . / . . . nor rising Sun / . . . / Or glittering Star-light without thee is sweet” [4.650, 651, 656]). In Eve’s final speech, on the other hand, the claims of the divinely ordered hierarchy, of the divine mandate, are naturalized with the claims of human love. The claims of hierarchy, of God’s will, need not be enumerated but are implied (“now lead on,” “thou to mee / Art all things under Heav’n”). Careful delineation of her place in the cosmos is no longer necessary because she has so thoroughly internalized it. This naturalizing of the divine mandate with human desire is precisely the pattern of Adam’s possession of divinity. Thus, I would argue that when Eve urges Adam to “lead on,” she does indeed reveal herself to be made for “God in him” but at the same time she reveals the “God in her.” Moreover, her possession of God’s image is not a reflection of the “God in him” but rather the product of her own transcendent self-knowledge.

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When Eve turns from her “postlapsarian love song” to her discussion of her role in salvation history, her words diminish in emotional fervor and demonstrate instead the certainty of knowledge gained through suffering and loss: This further consolation yet secure I carry hence; though all by mee is lost, Such favor I unworthy am voutsaf’t, By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore.

(PL 12.620–23)

Although her role as the bearer of the “Promis’d Seed” appears to inspire less enthusiasm in Eve than does her role as Adam’s wife, both “consolations” are of a piece in the sense that, for Milton, she cannot claim her place in salvation history until she internalizes the fact that, in Barbara Lewalski’s words, “Adam is her true Eden.”43 For Eve, God’s promise is a “further consolation”; it is in addition to her chief consolation, which is her life with Adam. We might stop here to say that Milton makes rehearsing her devotion to Adam a precondition for her role as a conduit of God’s word. This, however, would be to render Eve insufficient to the task of articulating the divine within her that, for Milton, is inextricably linked to her role in salvation history. Eve cannot serve as the vehicle for the restoration of the human race until she demonstrates that she, like Adam, participates in the divine image. It is not enough for her to learn of her role in salvation history through her dream, but she must animate her relationship to the “Promis’d Seed” by voicing the God in her.44 While her last speech initially appears to uphold the hierarchical strictures of “Hee for God only, shee for God in him,” the intellectual means through which she comes to articulate the two consolations that enable her to leave Eden reveal an unmediated relationship with the divine that challenges the notion of female spiritual subordination implied in “shee for God in him.”

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In constituting Eve’s capacity for direct access to God through an expression of transcendent self-knowledge in which she proclaims her devotion to Adam, Milton attempts to reconcile his insistence on the individual’s unimpeded relationship with God (“The Spirit of God, promis’d alike and giv’n / To all Believers” [PL 12.519–20]) with his insistence on traditional gendered roles. Milton nearly accomplishes this feat in Eve’s last speech, yet he cannot conceal the hairline fissure in the hierarchical structure that “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” endorses. Indeed, it seems fitting then that this line should represent the observation of Satan. In his plot to wreak havoc on God’s creation and thus God himself, Satan proves incapable of imagining the possibility of redemption: “and him [man] destroy’d, / Or won to what may work his utter loss, / For whom all this was made” (9.130–32). As a result, he simply cannot envision a universe in which Eve’s possession — in the fully conscious sense of the word — of the divine image might be essential. In some senses, Milton, like Satan, views “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” as self-evidently true, yet because he bears witness to woman’s central role in salvation history he knows that this does not fully represent woman’s spirituality.45 If only in theory then, Milton would have to agree with Margaret Fell that “those that speak against the Woman and her Seeds Speaking, speak out of the enmity of the old Serpents Seed.”

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9

D Fame, Shame, and the Importance of Community in Samson Agonistes Margaret Olofson Thickstun

As a young man, Milton desired recognition and understood the social benefits of publicity, offering fame now and in the future as incentive to study hard (Prolusion 7), to refrain from destroying a poet’s house (“Captain or Colonel”), and to support a young poet in his years of expensive preparation (Ad Patrem). The more mature Milton understands clearly the dangers of fame and spells out explicitly the potential devastation of overvaluing public opinion. In Paradise Lost, desire for fame and fear of shame — concerns about how others perceive you — are bad motivations for action. Satan is strongly motivated by a desire for fame and, later, by fear of shame, a social emotion that hardens him in his sin. Once Eve has eaten from the tree of knowledge, she becomes acutely aware of herself as someone being perceived by others and of her need to control her self-presentation; this self-consciousness leads her into further sinning. In Samson Agonistes, Samson’s delight in 183

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fame has led him to his catastrophic humiliation and infamy, which Dalila’s concern for others’ opinions and desire for her own fame have helped to bring about. In Paradise Regained, the Son expresses no interest in public recognition, categorically rejecting fame and power. Such a quick overview of Milton’s work might lead one to conclude that he learned to resist the desire for human recognition and to repudiate the social emotions — pride and shame — connected to it.1 This essay will offer an alternative reading of the roles that Milton imagines the desire for fame and status within a community can play in a person’s spiritual development. Even as a young man, Milton understood the dangers of desiring fame and the importance of developing a sense of self independent from those around him, what Richard Strier calls “proper pride”;2 even in the last years of his life, Milton valued recognition and engaged in public debate. The reality of this fallen world may be that consideration of reputation, of how others will see us, tends to lead toward worldly rather than godly decisions. The Miltonic ideal may be that a person should not think about anything other than pleasing God by doing what is right in his eyes. But Milton’s fiction and his life suggest a continued belief that the social emotions rightly tempered can reinforce virtue. It is through their renewed companionship that Adam and Eve move beyond fruitless recriminations toward healthful and saving repentance; it is through interaction with community that Samson moves from self-pity and despair to a clearer understanding of his responsibilities as “a person raised” to free his people. In Samson Agonistes as in Paradise Lost, the desire to restore human community — to look good in the eyes of those whose opinion you value — initiates the restoration of the protagonist’s relationship with God. In Milton’s dramatization of the fallen world, a person’s relationship with God is mediated through other human beings and a person’s understanding of God’s will is developed in community.

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Just as there are competing reasons to desire fame, there are competing sources of shame. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul distinguishes between guilt, which he calls “godly sorrow,” and something he calls “the sorrow of the world” (2 Cor. 10). Worldly sorrow, as I have discussed in relation to the fallen angels, encourages inaction by focusing a person’s attention on nostalgia for the past and fostering self-pity rather than self-blame.3 Because it allows an individual to avoid self-examination, worldly sorrow seems closely related to the kind of shame that makes a person excuse and cover up past misbehavior. A person experiencing shame of this kind tries to hide, like Adam and Eve after the Fall, to blend into a larger group, like the rebel angels, or to explain why what he did was not really a bad thing, like Satan. But godly sorrow, as Paul explains, leads to repentance because it provokes a desire “to be clear in this matter” (2 Cor. 7:11). Although desire for glory and fear of shame often lead individuals into wrong actions, the discomfort of shame, experienced within a loving relationship, can force an individual toward moral growth. In response to Paul’s earlier criticisms, the church at Corinth experienced a variety of strong feelings: indignation, fear, vehement desire, zeal, even a desire for revenge. These emotions prompted them to defend themselves from Paul’s charges and to restore themselves to his good opinion. In Samson Agonistes, Milton presents Samson engaging with other human beings in conversations that trigger strong emotions and force Samson to reevaluate his past and present attitudes. His self-defense is not seamless or wholly successful: Samson may be able to clear himself in the eyes of the Danites and his father, but he also discovers some uncomfortable truths about himself in the process. If honor is what you know about yourself and reputation is what others think of you,4 then some of what you learn about yourself you discover from confronting your reputation.

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The Samson Milton imagines is a man who cares about reputation and is highly sensitive to how he appears in the world. When the play opens, Samson is embarrassed, ashamed, and humiliated not only by how he has behaved with Dalila but also by the publicity of it all. Chained in a prison yard, he is exposed to the abuse of “enemies who come to stare / At my affliction, and perhaps to insult” (SA 112),5 but also to the questions and disappointment of friends. As Laura Knoppers points out, “Samson’s body appears to be the public sign of Philistine power.”6 Unlike Satan, he cannot pretend to be unfazed by his defeat. Instead, he engages all comers: his kinsmen, his father, his wife, even an enemy bully. These conversations, not one of which has any basis in Scripture, force him to confront not only his shame but also his reputation, and the discontinuity between how he thinks about himself and how others perceive him. For Samson, as for Adam, it is conversation that helps him to move from shame and self-pity to accountability that transforms his worldly sorrow into godly guilt. Milton organizes the opening conversations in Samson Agonistes so that they connect issues of identity to status. By himself, Samson questions his identity — “Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed[?]” (SA 30) — and expresses bitterness over his plight: Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great deliverer now and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

(38–41)

No longer able to define himself as a hero, having only ever thought about himself in relation to his superhuman actions, Samson finds himself unable to “name” himself in any way other than as an object of others’ contempt — “the scorn and gaze” (34) of his enemies. When his tribesmen arrive, Samson exclaims, “had I sight, confused with shame, / How could I

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once look up[?]” (196–97) and asks bitterly, “Am I not sung and proverbed for a fool / In every street, do they not say, ‘How well / are come upon him his deserts?’” (203–05). Just as Samson harps upon his public humiliation, both the Chorus and Manoa respond to his present situation by first recalling his former glory. Upon entering, the Chorus wonders, “Can this be he, / That heroic, that renowned, / Irresistible Samson?” (124–26). Manoa takes up the lament with “Is this the man, / That invincible Samson, far renowned, / The dread of Israel’s foes” (340–43); he imagines among the worst of Samson’s sufferings “thy foes’ derision” (366). These observers, like Samson himself, focus on his past fame and his present humiliation. Samson’s desire to reestablish his reputation compels him to converse with the Chorus. Although he is embarrassed to be seen in his present condition by his friends, he is also angry at how the Danites have misinterpreted and misunderstood his previous actions. When the Chorus rebukes him for having broken the taboo against marrying outside the tribe and still having failed to liberate Israel, Samson tries to deflect the blame onto them: they were cowardly and ungrateful; the tribal leaders failed to respond properly to “those great acts which God had done / Singly by me against their conquerors” (SA 243–44). But these are friends offering “salve to thy sores” (184); their concern and interest cannot be easily dismissed. In the course of the conversation, Samson is provoked to examine (perhaps for the first time) exactly the relationship between his own activities and God’s will. He acknowledges that he chose Dalila not only against his parents’ objections but also without divine prompting: “I thought it lawful from my former act” (231). Rather than working with the community to interpret and enact God’s will, rather than exercising the “flexible politics” that Mary Ann Radzinowicz defines in Toward Samson Agonistes — waiting on God’s “occasions” in order to secure “a consensual social future”7 — Samson

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has set himself up as someone above the law, “a deliverer” (274). Rather than wait for God’s next “impulsion,” Samson decided to plot on his own. Samson wants to see himself in a particular way — as a hero, as a victim — but he needs to come to see himself as a prideful, guilty fool. He needs to realize, as Joan Bennett observes, that he has been “a tremendous military hero but not an effective leader”;8 he needs to realize that he has not only humiliated himself, but also failed his people and his God. Throughout the conversation with his father, Samson comes to recognize this deeper significance of his failure, as shame — that worldly sorrow leading to self-pity — modulates into guilt — the godly sorrow that leads to repentance (2 Cor. 7:10). In response to Manoa’s inappropriate lament about Samson’s suffering — “whom God hath chosen once / To worthiest deeds, if he through frailty err, / He should not so o’erwhelm” (SA 368–70) — Samson takes responsibility for his situation: “Nothing of all these evils hath befall’n me / But justly; I myself have brought them on, / Sole author I, sole cause” (374–76). But when Samson condemns himself, he uses the language of social status — “servitude” and “slavery” — to evaluate his moral situation and the language of fame — “base,” “ignominious,” and “infamous” — to express judgment, and he focuses on his relationship with Dalila rather than on his relationship to his people or to God. By using this language of social status and fame in a wider context, Manoa presses Samson toward a more accurate assessment of the consequences of his failure: So Dagon shall be magnified, and God, Besides whom is no God, compared with idols, Disglorified, blasphemed, and had in scorn By th’idolatrous rout amidst their wine; Which to have come to pass by means of thee, Samson, of all thy sufferings think the heaviest, Of all reproach the most with shame that ever Could have befall’n thee and thy father’s house. (SA 440–47)

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In this speech Manoa shifts the locus of infamy and shame from Samson personally to his family and his God: it is not just Samson but the house of Manoa that experiences shame and reproach and God himself who is “disglorified” and “had in scorn.” Samson, of course, must know this: the play opens with his announcement that he has the day off because the Philistines have set it aside as “a solemn feast” for Dagon. But in that exposition, he does not connect that celebration to his actions. It is left to his father to make explicit that uncomfortable truth and its moral implications. In taking responsibility for this situation, Samson not only admits that he “To God have brought / Dishonor, obloquy” (451–52) and “scandal / to Israel” (453–54), but expresses concern that his failure may lead weaker Israelites “to waver, or fall off and join with idols” (456). That is and should be “my chief affliction, shame, and sorrow” (457). Although his earlier heroics had been, allegedly, “for the community” — to try to free them, to create occasions for them to free themselves — he had been more concerned with his own fame and glory than with their needs. He saw his actions, and his glory, as the end, when it was simply a means. In Milton’s treatment of the story, Samson’s sin is not uxoriousness, but pride — a pride that is intimately connected to his desire for fame. It is not his weakness for Dalila that has brought about his downfall, but his belief that, as God’s chosen one, he is above the law. He interpreted God’s setting aside the law against unclean marriages in the case of the woman of Timna as license for Samson himself to set aside the law in marrying Dalila. In other words, he believed that God set aside the law for him because he was special, rather than that God set aside the law in a certain circumstance so that God could use Samson to accomplish his ends. Samson has come to think of himself as chosen because he was worthy, rather than as worthy because he was chosen. Such an attitude alone explains why a man who knows from repeated experience “how openly, and with what impudence / [my

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wife] purposed to betray me” (SA 398–99) would then tell her his secret. Although Milton’s Samson does not describe the moments before his blinding, the Judges account is quite clear that even without his hair Samson expected to be able to break his bonds. Samson may have known that “God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal / How slight the gift was, hung it in my Hair” (58–59), but he didn’t really believe it. As he did in Paradise Lost, Milton here represents moral growth as occurring through conversation, as fallen human beings grope their way toward mutual understanding. Like Adam in book 10, Samson now sees the significance of what he has done and the justice of God’s wrath, but he can imagine no way forward: “This only hope relieves me, that the strife / With me hath end; all the contest is now / ’Twixt God and Dagon” (SA 460–62). Fortunately for Adam, Eve approaches him offering some suggestions about how they might ameliorate their situation: they could try abstinence; they could try suicide. Although he has been mulling over both options, this conversation prompts Adam not only to reject these methods but also to think creatively about the Son’s prophecy about the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Similarly, Manoa’s attempt to ameliorate Samson’s present suffering — to pay a ransom and take him home — helps Samson to clarify his situation, as his later conversations with Dalila and Harapha will help him take control of it. As we know with hindsight — or think we know — Manoa’s plan is wrongheaded: to remove Samson from the prison would prevent him from destroying the Philistine temple, which is how the story ends. But Manoa’s desire for Samson to come home is no more wrongheaded than Samson’s desire to keep slaving at the mill. Samson argues that being at home would not prevent him from being “to visitants a gaze, / Or pitied object” (SA 467–68) and resists such a clear admission of worthlessness:

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To what can I be useful, wherein serve My nation, and the work from Heav’n imposed, But to sit idle on the household hearth, A burdenous drone.

(564–67)

At least at the mill he can “earn” his “bread” through honest labor (573). He is concerned about his fame and about his honor, preferring an early death through drudgery to “a contemptible old age” (572). But Manoa objects to both the social and spiritual implications of Samson’s remaining in jail: Wilt thou then serve the Philistines with that gift Which was expressly given thee to annoy them? Better at home lie bed-rid, not only idle, Inglorious, unemployed, with age outworn.

(577–80)

Having framed Samson’s humiliation as reflecting on his family, tribe, and God, Manoa sees Samson’s desire to serve out his punishment as both self-serving — “argues over-just and self-displeased / For self-offense, more than for God offended” (514–15) — and as blasphemous. In this view, Samson labors at the mill, serving the Philistines rather than sitting idle at home, to prop up his sense of his own self-worth, not to honor God. Here, as in Paradise Lost, emotional conversation enables creative response to the divine plan. Shocked by the idea that Samson might willingly live out his life as a symbol of Philistine triumph but recognizing the justice of his distress about sitting idle at home, Manoa is moved to imagine other possible futures than these two tableaux of defeat. Contemplating the prophecies, God’s past interventions, and Samson’s returning strength, Manoa tries to read God’s will and to respond to it: “His might continues in thee not for naught, / Nor shall his wondrous gifts be frustrate thus” (SA 588–89). Whereas Samson claims that he no longer counts — “my race of glory run, and race of shame” (597) — Manoa models being open to God’s will: what is the

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meaning of Samson’s strength returning with his hair? The deeper issue is not whether Samson wants to return home or stay in the prison, but what God wants Samson to do. Where is he best positioned to respond to God’s will? Staying at the prison for the wrong reason — the self-punishment that Manoa warns about — would be as bad as going home with Manoa out of despair. Which decision Samson makes is a thing indifferent — what matters is why he makes that decision. These conversations with his relatives have forced Samson to reevaluate himself and the motivation for his past behavior, shifting his focus from self-pity to self-judgment. The unshorn Samson was a rogue agent. He ignored his parents’ opinions about his marriage choices; he ignored the opinions of his tribe, whom he blames for having failed to follow up on his “occasions.” He took it upon himself to anticipate — in fact to preempt — God’s plans, and he revealed the “secret” of his strength because he no longer believed it himself: he was, he thought, invulnerable. His enemies would call him “infamous” rather than “famous” or “admirable”; even his countrymen found his heroics distressing. He now can visualize himself as others saw him: Fearless of danger, like a petty god I walked about admired of all and dreaded On hostile ground, none daring my affront. Then swoll’n with pride, into the snare I fell Of fair fallacious looks.

(SA 528–33)

He recognizes that he himself, not Dalila, had displaced God in his life: he had become his own god, his own idol. Because Samson lives in a postlapsarian world and is “liable” to fall (SA 55) rather than “sufficient to have stood” (PL 3:99), it requires more than one conversation to effect a complete and accurate evaluation of his guilt and demonstration of his penitence. Despite his father’s intervention,

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Samson still shares qualities with Adam before Eve’s offer of reconciliation: he accepts the justice of his situation, but sees no way forward, no resolution to his despair other than death. Upon his father’s departure, Samson experiences “faintings, swoonings of despair; / And sense of Heav’ns desertion” (SA 631–32). The lament beginning “I was his nursling once” (633) swiftly degenerates to blaming God, who “now has cast me off as never known” (641), exposing him to enemies’ “scorn” (647). Manoa has opened the possibility that God may yet find a use for Samson, but it has not taken root in Samson’s mind: he declares, “Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless” (648). His encounters with Dalila, Harapha, and the Philistine officer provide the provocation necessary to move him forward. In Samson’s encounter with Dalila, the moral discomfort of shame develops not out of loving community but out of the bitterness of shameful intimacy. What could be more painful than confronting a person who has betrayed you, who is the source of your physical suffering and public humiliation, but whose presence reminds you most acutely of your own failure, of your own worst self? If the Chorus and Manoa encourage Samson to recall his heroic past, Dalila offers a reflection of Samson that is painful and educative in its accuracy: she presents to Samson a mirror in which to see clearly what he was, as she addresses the Samson whom she knew, the unshorn and swaggering Samson, the Samson who would have been vulnerable to her seductions and who would have excused his uxoriousness because of his specialness. Shame at being confronted with this accurate image of his past self leads Samson to extreme moral discomfort that, in turn, issues in a desire to “clear” himself not to Dalila, as he had desired with the Chorus and with his father, but in his relation to her. The Samson Dalila knew valued her for her body, not her heart or mind; like her, he believed that “love” is about sexual

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satisfaction and relationships are arenas for control. Dalila’s opening admission of weakness is not, as John Ulreich argues, “an ill-judged attempt to appeal to Samson’s ‘better,’ public self,”9 but a savvy appeal to Samson’s worst, earlier self, and she uses it because it has worked for her in the past. Dalila characterizes their interactions according to gender stereotypes: women are curious, “inquisitive, importune / Of secrets” (SA 775–76), and unable to keep them; men are stronger and responsible for keeping women in control. He should have known not to trust “to woman’s frailty” (783). She knew not only that he was the more powerful member of the partnership, but also that he was “mutable of fancy” (793) and so sought a way to control him, wheedling out of him his secret. What could be more natural than to attempt to “get into my power / Thy key of strength” (798–99) in order to “still enjoy thee day and night / Mine and love’s prisoner” (807–08)? Recognizing “that liberty / Would draw thee forth to perilous enterprises” (803–04), and being a foolish woman, she accepted assurances “that nothing was designed / Against [her husband] but safe custody, and hold” (801–02). Nothing she did was something that ought to have surprised Samson, as the superior party in the relationship. In fact, as he admitted earlier to his father, he not only expected it, but played her game, “turn[ing] to sport / Her importunity” (396– 97). Dalila’s portrait of their interactions dovetails painfully with Samson’s earlier account. Other statements by Samson confirm that he shared Dalila’s focus on sex and power. Although Samson claims that he chose Dalila “before all the daughters of my tribe / And of my nation” (SA 876–77) out of love, he earlier told the Chorus that he had picked her out of policy: his marriage with the woman of Timna had been successful in accomplishing his end, “still watching to oppress Israel’s oppressors” (232– 33). Piecing this contradiction together with the way Samson describes his feelings for Dalila — “loved thee, too well thou

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knew’st” (878) — it is reasonable to conclude that Samson wanted her because the relationship offered lust intensified by danger and transgression; she, in turn, married him because he was famous and physically powerful, similar aphrodisiacs. When he condemns Dalila, he condemns himself: But love constrained thee; call it furious rage To satisfy thy lust: love seeks to have love; My love how couldst thou hope, who took’st the way To raise in me inexpiable hate[?]” (SA 836–39)

What, exactly, constrained Samson to marry Dalila? How can he claim he expected love from her when he also took the way to raise in her inexpiable hate? It would be easy to use Dalila’s explanation of how she decided to betray her husband as an object lesson in the dangers of looking to the group rather than to conscience for one’s moral guidance. Her description of her situation highlights social status — “the magistrates / And princes of my country came in person” (SA 850–51) — and moral pressure: these visitors “Solicited, commanded, threatened, urged, / Adjured” (852–53) and “pressed” (854) her. They invoked not only “the bonds of civil duty / And of religion” (853–54), but offered the inducement of fame, urging “how honorable, how glorious to entrap / A common enemy” (855–56). But Dalila’s husband is a danger to society; he is randomly murdering her people. What, she asks helplessly, “had I / To oppose against such powerful arguments?” (861–62), and all she found was “my love of thee” (863). Given the fragility of this couple’s mutual commitment, her decision to side with her people is understandable. But even if she had married Samson in good faith, to accept his religious positions simply because of his say-so would be to fall back on implicit faith. In this context, Dalila’s appeal to her religious and civic duties highlights Samson’s failings in his. Her talk of piety exposes his impiety. True, she knew he was her “country’s

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foe professed” (SA 884) before she married him: that fact complicates her claim about her religious and civic responsibilities, but it does not demolish them. Dalila argues that she made a moral choice because she felt the force of “truth” and “duty.” Dalila’s choice raises explicitly the question of whether a person can marry “outside” the religious group. Samson did not enter this marriage in good faith, either to Dalila or to God: he expected Dalila to give up her familial, tribal, and religious allegiances for him, but did not intend to cleave unto her — he married to create “some occasion.” He holds her to a standard that he himself violates: she must honor his people and his faith because she married him, but he would not refrain from marrying her in order to honor his parents, his country, and his God. Her understanding of what she ultimately did — “entrap / A common enemy” — mirrors what Samson has done — entrapped her into marriage in order to triumph over his enemies — and further undermines any sense of Samson’s moral superiority. Samson’s sleeping with Dalila would not — did not in Judges — compromise his commitment to God, would not raise these questions of will, but his having married her does. By presenting Dalila as Samson’s wife, rather than as a casual sexual partner, Milton emphasizes Samson’s apostasy. In trying to distinguish his own actions from Dalila’s, Samson argues that “gods unable / To acquit themselves and prosecute their foes / But by ungodly deeds, the contradiction / Of their own deity, gods cannot be” (SA 896–99). But what of Samson’s own actions and, by extension, his earlier understanding of his own God? Although Samson directs his criticism at Dalila, he again convicts himself. Samson has tried to argue that God has moved him to wreak the violence he has been inflicting on the Philistines, but he has confessed to his relatives and to his father that this was not so. He has not waited on divine impulse; he has not sought counsel in determining the divine will; he has taken it upon himself to create

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occasions and make plans. Samson’s strength and prowess are explicit gifts from God to be used for God’s glory, not for Samson’s benefit and fame. From this perspective, all of his past victories are in fact sinful — are ungodly — because he did them for his own glory rather than “unto the Lord” (Rom. 14:8). The true God must be able “to prosecute” his foes in a godly fashion. All the past bloodshed and Samson’s current mutilation are the direct consequence of Samson’s desire for fame and should be laid at Samson’s door alone. Samson’s disgust at Dalila’s offer to take him home demonstrates his repudiation not only of Dalila, but of the person Dalila wants to take home — the person Samson had become at the time of his fall. Her offer is not a “temptation” in the way that Manoa’s effort might be: the future she proposes holds no attraction to the reformed Samson. On a visceral level, Samson reacts against the humiliation of dependence on a person who has betrayed him: he anticipates the shame that he would feel, treated “as a child / Helpless, thence easily contemned, and scorned” (SA 942–43). But on a spiritual level he understands that going home with Dalila would embody complete moral and spiritual degradation. In discussing this scene, Achsah Guibbory argues that “the godly must permanently separate from all idolatry.”10 Dalila embodies Samson’s idolatry, not because she is “unclean,” but because Samson’s choosing marriage to Dalila was itself idolatry. Samson was “a person raised” (SA 1211) to do God’s will; instead, in choosing Dalila he “raised” himself to the status of “a petty god,” a person who could thumb his nose at God’s guidance and God’s law. Separating from her is a necessary step in his subordination of his own will to God’s. Dalila’s final boasting, rather than betraying “her true motive for betraying her husband,”11 is a completely believable, vengeful thing for her to say in her frustration and hurt to a person whom she knows intimately. The Samson Dalila knew cared most about status and fame: what better way to

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hurt him back than to triumph in her future fame and his infamy? In claiming that fame is “double-mouthed” (SA 971), Dalila calls into question the value of Samson’s own fame: just as she “may stand defamed” in Israel, Samson — even the successful, unshorn Samson — was defamed among the Philistines (Samson called their attitude “dread”). The “public marks of honor and reward” (992) that she knows Samson so valued will now be hers, not his. She will be praised as one who “to save / Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose / Above the faith of wedlock-bands” (984–86); he will be defamed in both Philistia and Israel as one who sacrificed his country for lust. The Samson whom Dalila knew would have found his infamy in Philistia as painful as his infamy in Israel. In resisting Dalila’s bait, Samson demonstrates that he has learned to distinguish between reputation and integrity and to discriminate among audiences. He does not attempt to defend himself, either to her or to the Chorus upon her departure. Nor does he attempt to defend his reputation to Harapha. Harapha’s understanding of fame and shame are as shallow as Samson’s used to be. He seeks out Samson because of his reputation for “prodigious might and feats performed” (SA 1083) and wishes he could have encountered him when he still had his sight. In response to Samson’s suggestion that he prove himself now, Harapha recoils, for Samson has no status, is “no worthy match” (1164), and defeating a blind prisoner would gain Harapha no acclaim. Samson’s responses to the giant’s insults and taunts are brief. He accepts Harapha’s verbal abuse, like Dalila’s, as divinely imposed and richly deserved (999, 1170). Prepared by previous emotional conversations to see his former values embodied in Harapha, Samson is able to remain calm and to articulate his new understanding of why he fights and what his victories mean: “My trust is in the living God” (1140); the outcome will prove not which man is stronger, but “whose god is strongest, thine or mine” (1155), will in fact “decide whose god is God” (1176).

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In other words, he understands that not simply the outcome, but the “honor” of it, lies in the intention of the combatants, in Samson’s intent to do God’s will. A healthy desire to do God’s will and deserve God’s approval governs Samson’s decision about whether to answer the officer’s summons to Dagon’s feast. Milton has him refuse the summons three times before he complies, demonstrating his unwillingness to violate religious principles and his determination to remain in good standing with God. He informs the officer, “I am an Hebrew . . . our law forbids at their religious rites / My presence” (SA 1319–21). He says he “cannot” and then that he “will not come” (1321, 1332). He no longer views his feats of strength, which would be (and are in the end) demonstrations of “incredible, stupendious force” (1627) as in themselves the performance of heroism. But Samson still cares about reputation, about how he appears in human eyes: he objects to the social implications of joining other entertainers, “antics, mummers, and mimics” (1325), asking, “can they think me so broken, so debased” (1335) as to become “their fool and jester” (1338). Although his concerns are now about how his actions fit with his sense of his internal self rather than how his actions fit with his earthly reputation, Samson still uses the language of shame and fame: “to play before their god” would be both the deepest betrayal and “the worst of all indignities” (1340–41). Samson also cares about the approval of his tribe, discussing his decision to refuse this summons in conversation with them after the officer’s departure. Although he rejects the Chorus’s suggestion that he should cooperate to avoid fueling the Philistines’ anger, their intervention enables Samson to clarify the issues that he faces and the implications, for himself and for others, of his choice. He recognizes his strength as a “consecrated gift” (SA 1354) — to use it to entertain at the feast would violate his religious duties, “prostituting holy things to idols” (1358). In response to the Chorus’s

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observation that he uses that strength to grind at the mill, Samson distinguishes between obedience to “civil power” and cooperation in idol worship: the former may be degrading, but the latter would be not only “vile, contemptible, [and] ridiculous” but “unclean, profane” (1361–62), an expression both of cowardice and pride, “vaunting my strength in honor to their Dagon” (1360). When the Chorus reasons that “where the heart joins not, outward acts defile not” (1368), Samson objects “who constrains me to the temple of Dagon, / Not dragging?” (1370–71). He recognizes that “if I obey them, / I do it freely; venturing to displease / God for fear of man” (1372–74). His responses help to educate them about their religious responsibilities, even as their questions help him to define his own. Again, as in the discussions between Eve and Adam in book 10 and between Samson and Manoa earlier in this play, Milton represents conversation as the soil in which creative response to God’s will takes root. Suddenly Samson declares a change of mind: “I begin to feel / Some rousing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts. / I with this messenger will go along” (1381–84). In the previous paragraph, I have presented the Chorus’s part of this conversation as if it were dispassionate and disinterested. That is, of course, not the case. The Chorus is frightened. They frame their advice with concern about their own political situation: “matters now are strained / Up to the highth” (1348–49). They offer rationalizations for Samson’s cooperating with the summons. Although they focus on Samson’s future, they are clearly frightened for their own as well. In responding to their distress, Samson concedes that God “may dispense with me or thee / Present in temples at idolatrous rites / For some important cause” (1377–79). Their anguished response, “how wilt thou here come off surmounts my reach” (SA 1380), prompts Samson to open himself to God’s

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“rousing motions.” The intensity of their distress reminds Samson that it is not their job, or his, to plan. Samson’s parting words reveal that he has learned to define himself within his community, not outside it or against it. Although Samson might justifiably chastise his tribe for their moral weakness, something that he was certainly ready to do earlier in his dealings with them, he does not do so here. His final speech to the Chorus focuses on reassurance: “be of good courage” (SA 1381), he urges them. Although the nature of his concern has changed, he still cares about how he appears in the eyes of his tribe: “Of me expect to hear / Nothing dishonorable, impure, unworthy / Our God, our law, my nation, or myself” (1423–25). He no longer sees himself as someone set apart from the group, the benefactor upon whom all depends and who therefore can get away with anything he pleases, bending and breaking rules that apply to others. He wants to deserve their respect, rather than provoke their wonder. He now recognizes that as “a person raised” he is held to higher standards than a “private person” would be because in his actions he represents God to Israel and to the larger world. To fulfill that goal Samson’s expression of faith must be enacted in public on behalf of the community. As Milton frames the struggle, Samson faces the constant temptation to give up, embodied in the possibility of “going home.” When he returns with the hopeful news that certain Philistian lords seem open to accepting ransom, Manoa imagines Samson sitting among the trophies of his youth, “enobled / With all those high exploits by him achieved” (SA 1491–92), like an aging athlete. But even Manoa recognizes that that plan has no honor — “to sit idle with so great a gift / Useless, and thence ridiculous about him” (1500–01) — is, in fact, blasphemous. He anticipates a more glorious future in which God will use Samson “in some great service” (1499). The Chorus’s final blessing clarifies what is at stake:

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Go, and the Holy One Of Israel be thy guide To what may serve his glory best, and spread his name Great among the heathen round. (1427–30)

Only in death can Samson go “home to his father’s house” (1733) with honor, the genuine honor of having remained true to his calling. In order to fulfill his role as Israel’s “great deliverer” (SA 40), Samson had to learn to care about his tribesmen not as mirrors who reflect back his glory, but as companions in his search to do God’s will. Milton has constructed his tragedy to show Samson working out the true source of his fame — examining what it means to be “a person raised” and learning to care more about fulfilling God’s will than promoting his own glory. A desire for fame landed Samson at the mill in Gaza, but he has learned to value integrity more than reputation precisely because he feels shame in the face of his tribe. Like Adam and Eve, Samson comes to accept responsibility for his sin, to repent, and to become responsive again to God’s will because he is willing to engage other human beings — because he works to regain their approval. With his final act, Samson redeems his fame: destroying the Philistine temple and aristocracy restores his status as a Hebrew hero. The Chorus declares his actions “glorious” (SA 1660); his father boasts that Samson “To Israel / Honor hath left . . . , / To himself and father’s house eternal fame” (1714–15, 1717). The failure of the Danites to “lay hold on this occasion” (1716) does not negate his accomplishment. To the end, Milton’s work suggests that it is not only natural but also necessary for human beings to live and work in community. Neither Samson nor Milton desired “the approval of God alone”12 because each man understood his “part from Heav’n assigned” (SA 1217) as a public responsibility; successful accomplishment of public duties ought to lead to acclaim. Like Samson, Milton considered himself

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“a person raised,” although he found less violent ways to “serve his glory best.” Like Samson, Milton did not allow frustration and apparent defeat to force him into solitude and retreat. Far from repudiating his youthful desire for fame, Milton included Prolusion 7, with its vision of the scholar as an oracle to many nations and his home a shrine, in his 1674 Epistolae familiarum, themselves a record of his having achieved at least some of the retrospective immortality he had always desired. Although that neo-Latin correspondence may address “his ideal constituency, his ‘fit audience,’”13 Milton worked for his entire life to engage a wider audience, publishing his major works in the vernacular, revising and reissuing his earlier Poems, and reengaging in political debate with the pamphlet Of True Religion (1673). In that pamphlet, Milton asks, “How shall we prove all things, which includes all opinions at least founded on Scripture, unless we not only tolerate them, but patiently hear them, and seriously read them? . . . is it a fair course to assert truth by arrogating to himself the only freedome of speech, and stopping the mouths of others equally gifted?” (YP 8:436–37). Having enlarged his acquaintance not only through correspondence with the learned of Europe but also at home with members of dissenting and Quaker communities, Milton continued to value conversation in community as the means for “closing up truth to truth” (Areopagitica, YP 2:551). In this final pamphlet, as in Samson Agonistes, Milton emphasizes that interpretation is best done with humility and in community.

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10

D Satan in Paradise Regained The Quest for Identity Stella P. Revard

Although Paradise Regained is based on the accounts told briefly in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke of Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Milton both enlarges and elaborates on the temptations and adds new material. Much more happens in Paradise Regained than Satan’s tempting and the Son’s refusing. Interspersed between the biblical temptations is an extended dialogue of Satan with the Son in which Satan not only strives to make Jesus disclose exactly who he is but also mounts an impassioned defense of himself — his person and his own goals. Satan’s interrogative of Jesus — “Who are you?” — is balanced by his own assertion — “Who I am.” Paradise Regained is often read as a quest on Satan’s and the reader’s part to define Jesus’ nature as human or divine or both. As Mary Ann Radzinowicz asserts, it is a mistake to make “the divinity of the Son the assumption and not the discovery of the poem.” Certainly, as Jesus acknowledges in

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his soliloquy in book 1, Jesus knows he is Messiah, but, as Radzinowicz and John Rogers both argue, there is no reason to suppose that he remembers his superhuman Sonship in heaven.1 It is only at the conclusion of the poem that the angels confirm in their hymn that the human and divine Son are one. However, what Jesus accomplishes in rejecting Satan’s temptations — despite Satan’s urging that he use his superhuman powers — he accomplishes by human means alone. Meanwhile, as Satan endeavors to discover Jesus’ identity, he himself is involved in a separate quest of his own in which he defines himself as the Son’s adversary. No one to my knowledge has named Satan the hero of Paradise Regained, but in the brief epic Satan functions in a broad way as an agonistic figure to the Son, engaging the reader’s attention to a parallel and almost equal degree. The usual verdict on Satan in Milton’s later epic is that he is much diminished in almost every way from the Satan of Paradise Lost — a mere shadow of his former self — if we may even regard the two Satans as the same character. Thus, it is necessary to judge the later Satan by a different yardstick of interpretation, for in tempting the Son, he is moved by different motives and engages in a different type of temptation from that in Paradise Lost, where he is motivated both by envy and pride. At the Son’s elevation to kingship Satan is fraught With envy against the Son of God, that day Honor’d by his great Father, and proclaim’d Messiah King anointed, could not bear Through pride that sight.

(PL 5.661–65)

After his fall he is “full fraught with mischievous revenge” (PL 2.1054) and determines to tempt Adam and Eve.2 The Satan of Paradise Regained is spurred by different motives and aims. Although he was “with envy fraught and rage” (PR 1.38) upon witnessing Jesus proclaimed at his

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baptism as Son of God, he tempts Jesus basically through plain necessity and self-defense. Mindful of the prophecy that the seed of woman will bruise his head, Satan seeks to learn whether the child born of a virgin and proclaimed at his baptism Son of God is indeed that promised seed and whether he might somehow circumvent that prophecy by tempting Jesus to sin or by making him beholden to him and not God for the kingdom that he is prophesied to possess.3 Satan convenes a council of his followers, telling them that they must defend their kingdom against potential overthrow: And now too soon for us the circling hours This dreaded time have compast, wherein we Must bide the stroke of that long threat’n’d wound, At least if so we can, and by the head Broken be not intended all our power To be infring’d, our freedom and our being In this fair Empire won of Earth and Air. (PR 1.57–63)

In some sense Satan seems, at least at the beginning, to have no personal animus against Jesus, only a practical need to bring him down in order to preserve himself and his own lordship over the world. This is not to say, however, that his attitude toward the socalled Son of God is simple. Satan must seek to understand Jesus in order to undo him. Accordingly, he must determine in what sense Jesus is God’s “beloved Son,” so proclaimed by the Father’s voice from heaven (PR 1.32). Is he the son whom Satan knew in heaven and whose estate he envied, the son who drove him and his angels into the abyss? Or is he some other son, yet unknown, whose nature he must determine before he can defeat him? His first-begot we know, and sore have felt, When his fierce thunder drove us to the deep; Who this is we must learn, for man he seems In all his lineaments, though in his face The glimpses of his Father’s glory shine.

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(PR 1.89–93)

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While Satan is cognizant of the prophecy that a seed of woman will dispossess him of his kingdom, he does not know whether the prophesied seed is a human son or the same son, now incarnate, whom he encountered in heaven. He does know, however, that immediate action is required in order to prevent Jesus’ assumption of supreme kingship over earth; Ye see our danger on the utmost edge Of hazard, which admits no long debate, But must with something sudden be oppos’d Not force, but well-couch’t fraud, well woven snares, Ere in the head of Nations he appear Their King, their Leader, and Supreme on Earth. (PR 1.94–99)

Every encounter of Satan with the Son is motivated by two objectives: to tempt Jesus to stumble and also to make him disclose exactly who he is. Interestingly, in his first encounter with Jesus, Satan tries to hide his own identity, clothing himself in rural weeds and pretending when he approaches Jesus in the wilderness to be a shepherd in search of a stray ewe or a hermit gathering sticks. While disguising himself, he tries with his very first words to Jesus to interrogate Jesus’ intentions and his identity. He asks first what has brought Jesus to the wilderness and, receiving no straightforward response, inquires whether Jesus is the one recently honored at Jordan by John, that is, the one proclaimed Son of God. Consistently throughout their encounters Satan calls Jesus Son of God, as if testing him to verify his identity. But Jesus, in contrast, never, when so addressed by Satan, claims the name.4 He has, of course, heard the Father’s voice from heaven proclaim him publicly “beloved Son”; and even before that his mother has told him he is “no Son of mortal man” (PR 1.234), an identity he himself verifies through search of the Scriptures (PR 1.259–63). It is Satan who attaches to his first test of the Son a query concerning his identity and thereby a test of his divinity: “If

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thou be the Son of God, Command / That . . . stones be made thee bread” (1.342–43). Although the Son refuses, as he does throughout his encounters with Satan, to name himself Son of God or to make use of divine power, he indirectly discloses his divinity by using the key biblical phrase, “I am,” by which God in Exodus and Jesus in the Gospels had affirmed their divinity. Moreover, at the same time he indirectly proclaims his divine status, he makes known that he knows who the disguised Satan is: “Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?” (1.356). Of course, the paradox here is that Satan does not know, but is desperate to learn, exactly who Jesus is. Satan’s rejoinder is peculiarly defensive. He avoids assigning to himself the name Satan or Adversary; instead, he assumes the tragic demeanor of an unfortunate spirit who has been forced from heavenly bliss: ’Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate, Who, leagu’d with millions more in rash revolt, Kept not my happy Station, but was driv’n With them from bliss to the bottomless deep. (PR 1.358–61)

What follows may be either an extended attempt to win Jesus’ confidence — as prologue to the ensuing temptations — or simply an extended defense of self. At any rate, it is unlike anything we encounter in Paradise Lost. Satan is offering an apology for self in which he describes his position in the fallen world vis-à-vis God and humanity. He does not challenge God but pleads that though fallen and no longer loved by God, he is serviceable to him and in fact does his will. He even asserts that he is not even entirely excluded from heaven, but when God decided to test Job he came into heaven among the sons of God “To prove [Job], and illustrate his high worth (PR 1.370). Thus, he asserts, he served God in this instance by testing Job and in other instances, as, for example, when he drew King Ahab into fraud. Satan even

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goes so far as to assert that though not virtuous himself he appreciates such virtue as he sees in the Son and wishes to admire him close at hand. It is not difficult to see that these are either ploys to win the Son’s favor or half-lies by which he designs to delude the Son, deceptions that the Son easily sees through and just as easily denounces. But there is something in this Satan that we never find in the Satan of Paradise Lost — a certain plaintiveness and regret, mixed with anger and disdain. He acknowledges the Son’s manifest virtue, but is distressed at the Son’s stern rejection and how easily the Son has uncovered his lies and evasions. When Satan attempts to plead that misery justified his doings, he is not entirely insincere. For he is, as the Son characterizes him, “a poor miserable captive thrall,” who, when he returns to heaven among the sons of God, comes where he once sat in splendor, but is “now depos’d, / Ejected, emptied, gaz’d, unpitied, shunn’d, / A spectacle of ruin and of scorn” (PR 1.411, 413–15). It is not simply that in this first extended colloquy with the Son Satan fails to win the Son’s compassion or his favor, but that Satan must endure from the Son, as from a superior lord, contempt and sharp rebukes. Checked and reproved by the Son, Satan is “glad to scape so quit” (PR 1.477). Some readers may even feel some sympathy for Satan at his abject humiliation at the hands of the Son. Throughout the brief epic, Satan’s dialogues with the Son exist beside failed temptations. For example, at the beginning of book 3, a dialogue on the subject of glory follows Satan’s failure to make the Son aspire to glory comparable to that of the great conquerors Alexander and Caesar. In response to the Son’s rejection of earthly glory, Satan does not simply back off, but grumbles, “Think not so slight of glory: therein least / Resembling thy great Father; he seeks glory” (PR 3.109–10). Satan’s accusation of God both provokes the Son’s defense of God’s glory and touches on an issue that involves Satan himself — his own aspiration to glory. For after pointing out

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that God’s glory is essentially different from man’s, the Son convicts man of ingratitude. God uses his glory to “impart / His good communicable to every soul / freely” (PR 3.124–26). The only acceptable return for God’s “good,” the Son insists, is “glory and benediction, that is thanks, / The slightest, easiest, readiest recompense” (PR 3.127–28). This charge touches Satan intimately, of course. In Paradise Lost Satan had complained that the debt of gratitude he owes to God is far from easy and ready, but “burdensome, still paying, still to owe” (PL 4.53). While he acknowledges in his soliloquy on Niphates that “a grateful mind / By owing owes not” (PL 4.55–56), he cannot bring himself to grant gratitude to God or confess guilt for not so doing. However, in the exchange with the Son in Paradise Regained, something is stirred up in Satan. Although he does not reply to the Son’s rebuke, he stands “struck / With guilt of his own sin, for he himself / Insatiable of glory had lost all” (PR 3.146–48). “Guilt” is a word applied to Satan only once in Paradise Lost, when seeing the Son descending to impose judgment on Adam and Eve, Satan flees, “fearing guilty what his wrath / Might suddenly inflict” (PL 10.340–41). However, in Paradise Lost Satan’s guilt refers to his seduction of Eve, not to his original revolt or his failure to be grateful to God. Thus, Paradise Regained offers us a unique moment. The Son’s passionate denunciation of glory-seeking in man has convicted Satan of the same sin. Standing beside the god-man who refuses to seek his own glory, Satan acknowledges, if only to himself, the sin of his own glory-seeking. Throughout Paradise Regained there are several other key moments when the Son’s passionate responses provoke selfreflection in Satan concerning his original sin or his present and future punishment. When Satan urges the Son to take on his prophesied kingdom at the present time and not later, the Son reminds Satan that on his assumption of his kingdom Satan will fall:

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But what concerns it thee when I begin My everlasting Kingdom? Why art thou Solicitous? What moves thy inquisition? Know’st thou not that my rising is thy fall, And my promotion will be thy destruction?

(PR 3.198–202)

Milton is here referring to the prediction in Revelation 20:1–3 that at the inception of the Son’s thousand-year reign on earth — the millennium — Satan will be bound and cast into the pit. At this allusion to his future binding and destruction, Satan seems for a moment to let down his guard and confess his feelings of hopelessness: Let that come when it comes; all hope is lost Of my reception into grace; what worse? For where no hope is left, is left no fear; If there be worse, the expectation more Of worse torments me than the feeling can. I would be at the worst; worst is my Port, My harbor, and my ultimate repose, The end I would attain, my final good.

(PR 3.204–11)

On the one hand, this apparent confession seems to echo sentiments that the Satan of Paradise Lost had expressed in his Niphates soliloquy: “So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, / Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost” (PL 4.108–09). On the other hand, there are crucial differences between Satan’s valediction in Paradise Lost and his valediction here. Following his dismissal in Paradise Regained of hope and fear, Satan does not embrace evil as his good, as he does in Paradise Lost, but curiously resigns himself to a fatal end for himself that will be some kind of “final good” (PR 3.211).5 Yet we must be cautious: Satan in Paradise Regained is speaking not to himself, but to the Son. Therefore, we cannot dismiss entirely the possibility that Satan’s apparent candor is designed simply to tempt the Son to anticipate his kingdom:

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My error was my error, and my crime My crime; whatever, for itself condemn’d, And will alike be punish’d, whether thou Reign or reign not.

213

(PR 3.212–15)

Orthodox Christianity maintains that Satan is excluded from the grace offered to human beings. Milton apparently agrees with this view when in book 3 of Paradise Lost the Father proclaims, “Man therefore shall find grace, / The other none” (PL 3.131–32). The grace the Father offers to man in book 3 is, of course, conditional upon the Son accepting the office of Redeemer — and man in turn accepting the Son as Redeemer. The Satan of Paradise Regained had earlier confessed to the Son chagrin that he and his angels have been excluded from the grace offered man: “This wounds me most (what can it less?) that Man, / Man fall’n, shall be restor’d, I never more” (PR 1.404–05). The Satan of Paradise Lost had proudly sworn never to sue for grace: “That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power” (PL 1.110–12). Satan’s appeal to the Son in Paradise Regained is not exactly a recantation of his earlier position. Nonetheless, following his confession of crime, Satan seems almost to plead if not for grace, yet for protection from that very wrath he had contemned in Paradise Lost: though to that gentle brow Willingly I could fly, and hope thy reign, From that placid aspect and meek regard, Rather than aggravate my evil state, Would stand between me and thy Father’s ire (Whose ire I dread more than the fire of Hell) A shelter and a kind of shading cool Interposition, as a summer’s cloud.

(PR 3.215–22)

There was a tradition in the early church, called apocatastasis, one particularly associated with the church father

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Origen, that Satan might not be wholly excluded from grace, but through God’s all-embracing and irresistible love would be restored with all the reprobate at the end of time, when God would become “All in All.” In Paradise Lost Milton’s God predicts that in the final resolution, “God shall be All in All” (PL 3.341), but makes no allusion to Satan being included within that “All.” Indeed, a few verses previous God had declared that “Hell, her numbers full, / Thenceforth shall be for ever shut” (PL 3.332–33), presumably with the unrepentant Satan and his associates inside. Paradise Lost, then, would appear to deny the possibility of the very clemency that Satan seems to seek, however, not through the allembracing love of God, but through the Son’s compassion. In 1661 in England there was a revival of the doctrine of apocatastasis, which since the time of Augustine had been condemned by Catholics and at the Reformation also by Protestants. George Rust in A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the chief of his Opinions argues that God is the embodiment of Love and not relentless justice and wrath, indeed a love that could embrace even Satan. It seems likely, as C. A. Patrides argues, that Milton knew Rust’s work and the controversy surrounding it, even if, as Patrides goes on, he did not follow him in affirming Origen’s views on Satan’s ultimate salvation.6 Nevertheless, Milton’s position on Satan is complex. He permits Satan in Paradise Regained obliquely to seek for the very grace that his God in Paradise Lost seems to have denied, either through absolute decree or through foreknowledge that Satan will not repent, which is a necessary condition for grace. Yet Satan’s repentance is that very possibility that Paradise Regained for a moment entertains. While Satan does not exactly seek the mercy denied him by the Father, he does appeal to the Son for a shielding compassion. Despite his declaration that all hope is lost (PR 3.204), he expresses

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hope that through the Son he might obtain some protection from the Father’s wrath. Milton has left Satan’s motivations here open to our speculations. On the one hand, Satan’s ready confession and plea for compassion could imply that he hopes that he may at the end of time attain a kind of grace or remission from punishment. On the other hand, his confession may only be a ploy to tempt the Son to anticipate his kingdom, for, after his apparent confession, Satan once more urges, If I then to the worst that can be haste, Why move thy feet so slow to what is best, Happiest both to thyself and all the world, That thou who worthiest art shouldst be thir King? (3.223–26)

At best, Satan’s position here is paradoxical: he seems to urge on that which he should most put off — the coming of the Son’s kingdom and his own fall. Even so, if Satan’s plea to the Son seems to open the door to Satan’s eventual salvation, his subsequent demand — that the Son serve him and not he the Son — seems forever to shut it. Throughout the epic Satan’s manner toward the Son varies from obsequiousness to challenge. Although Satan at first admits the Son’s lordship over him, yet when he offers the Son the respective kingdoms, he seeks to make the Son beholden to him as lord. In a stunning reversal, dropping any pretense of deference, Satan even demands that the Son “worship [him] as [his] superior lord” (PR 4.167). To this offer the Son sternly rejoins, “It is written . . . Thou shalt worship / The Lord thy God, and only him shalt thou serve” (PR 4.175–77). Milton here directly echoes Jesus’ response to Satan in Matthew and Luke, but he differs from the Gospels in placing first the biblical citation and adding later Jesus’ dismissal of Satan himself. Matthew’s initial words are “Get thee hence, Satan”; Luke’s “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Matt. 4:10; Luke 4:8).7 Milton delays the dismissal, “Get thee behind me,” only then

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adding “plain thou now appear’st / That Evil one, Satan,” and only lastly the phrase “for ever damn’d” (PR 4.193–94). It is a significant addition. Perhaps Milton is implying that Satan’s attempt to place himself as lord above the Son is the blasphemy that seals Satan’s damnation. Or perhaps the Son here responds finally to Satan’s specious plea for mercy by closing the door decisively and pronouncing Satan’s damnation. Significantly also, after this, Satan no longer pleads for the Son’s compassion. If Milton had followed Matthew’s sequence of temptations, he might have reached the climax here, with the Son’s dismissal of Satan. But in following Luke, he gives Satan still another chance to determine the Son’s true identity by the trial on the pinnacle. As prologue to this final temptation, Satan has attempted to terrify the Son with a storm. As critics have often commented, both the storm and the ensuing test on the pinnacle look forward to Christ’s trial at his Passion.8 Having failed to shake the Son’s composure, Satan begins by greeting him the next morning with his customary salutation, “Son of God,” only shortly afterward (“swoln with rage”) to dispute the name: “Then hear, O Son of David, Virgin-born; / For Son of God to me is yet in doubt” (PR 4.500–01). Satan allows that Jesus might be the Messiah: “Of the Messiah I have heard foretold” (4.502). “Messiah” is the designation of the anointed one, the king of the Jews foretold by the prophets. However, “Messiah” is also the title given to the Son in Paradise Lost after his elevation to kingship. Implicitly, Satan is questioning Jesus’ right to the second title by recalling the divine Son’s elevation as Messiah. Three things have stirred Satan to action: the biblical prophesies concerning the Messiah, the proclamations by the angels at Jesus’ birth, and finally the naming of Jesus as “beloved Son” at his baptism (PR 4.512–13). Now, however, Satan has shifted his focus — he is less interested in whether Jesus is the earthly Messiah than whether he is the divine

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Son, the Messiah, who had once before bested him and cast him out of heaven: Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view And narrower Scrutiny, that I might learn In what degree or meaning thou art call’d The Son of God, which bears no single sense. (PR 4.514–17)

At this point Satan not only disputes Jesus’ entitlement to the name Son of God, but also claims for himself the very name he has consistently applied to Jesus: “The Son of God I also am, or was, / And if I was, I am; relation stands” (PR 4.518–19). What is striking is not so much the claim that he is or was “Son of God,” for Satan goes on to state (correctly) that “All men are Sons of God” (PR 4.520). Indeed, the name “sons of God” is used throughout the bible for human beings and angels alike, and was applied particularly to Satan in the book of Job, as Satan had noted earlier (PR 1.268–69).9 However, in affirming his sonship, Satan twice uses the crucial term “I am,” which Jesus in his very first encounter with Satan had applied to himself (PR 1.356). Moreover, it was at the point during the long soliloquy in book 1, when he first determined his own relationship to God that Jesus first used the term “I am.” He describes the process: I again revolv’d The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am. (1.259–63)

“I am” is, of course, the term by which God identifies himself as God in Exodus 3:14. In the Gospels Jesus also twice adopts the divine designation for himself: at John 8:58 when he declares, “Before Abraham was, I am” and at Mark 14:61– 62, when responding to the priests who ask him if he is the Christ, he says, “I am.” His use of the term “I am” in these instances affirms Jesus’ divinity. Hence, it is shocking that

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Satan here adopts the term connected with God and the Son and uses it for himself at the very moment he is probing whether Jesus is Son of God in a special sense. Yet that is not the only significant term Satan uses. As he seeks to discover Jesus’ true identity, he tells how he has watched him and followed him into the wilderness because by all best conjectures I collect Thou art to be my fatal enemy. Good reason then, if I beforehand seek To understand my Adversary, who And what he is; his wisdom, power, intent.

(PR 4.524–28)

Here Satan not only designates Jesus as the enemy foretold but also uses the term “Adversary,” transferring to the Son the very name Adversary — that is, “Satan” — by which he himself is known. At his very first appearance in Paradise Regained when he witnesses Jesus’ baptism, Satan is designated by the name Adversary: “That heard the Adversary, who roving still / About the world . . . th’ exalted man . . . a while survey’d / With wonder, then with envy fraught and rage” (PR 1.33–38). Moreover, Jesus has used the name Satan, that is “adversary,” for the first and only time in the epic, when only shortly before he rejects Satan’s offer of empire: “Get thee behind me . . . Satan” (4.193–94). The Son’s rejection of the kingdoms and his naming of Satan as opponent have brought Satan to a desperate moment. He now admits that he has failed to shake Jesus’ confidence: “By parle, or composition, truce, or league / To win him, or win from him what I can” (4.529–30). Therefore, he reverses their positions vis-à-vis each other, claiming the title of son for himself and according Jesus the title of adversary. At the same time, he strips Jesus of his divinity, naming him no longer the Son of God but no more than a human son, hence “th’utmost of mere man” (4.535). If “what more thou art than man, / Worth

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naming Son of God by voice from Heav’n” (4.538–39), he now must use, he confesses, more drastic methods to discover, hence the trial on the pinnacle. When Satan challenges the Son on the pinnacle to stand, he once more, as he had with the first temptation, makes it a test of divinity.10 In the King James and Geneva translations of the accounts in Matthew and Luke Satan uses the same words to tempt Jesus as he had in the first temptation, “If thou be the Son of God” (Matt. 4:3, 6; Luke 4:3, 9). Milton follows these translations in the first temptation when Satan tempts Jesus to turn the stones to bread — “if thou be the Son of God” (PR 1.342).11 In the final temptation, however, Milton follows the original Greek and drops the definite article, “if Son of God” (4.555). Thus, in challenging Jesus to make clear his identity, Satan demands whether he is a son of God or the Son of God. By omitting the definite article that would designate the Son’s uniqueness Satan leaves indefinite the Son’s identity, leaving it to Jesus to assert his divinity, if he will. The final temptation on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem is as much a test for Satan as for the Son. The question is not merely whether the Son will stand or fall but also whether Satan in the act of testing the Son will himself stand or fall.12 The Gospel accounts say nothing of Satan’s falling — nor indeed of Jesus’ standing. Replying to Satan’s challenge, Jesus merely states here as in the Gospels, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” I do not take it, as some do, that the Son is referring here, even ambiguously, to himself as “the Lord thy God.”13 In citing Scripture and naming God, he is deferring, as in the other temptations, the ultimate authority to God. At the same time, however, it is clear that Satan has set the Son on the pinnacle to tempt the Son to claim God’s authority for himself. Hence, Satan is testing the Son’s divinity by pushing to the utmost his prideful dismissal of the Son as lord. When Satan falls, Milton succinctly comments, “So after many a foil the Tempter proud, / Renewing fresh assaults,

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amidst his pride / Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall” (PR 4.569–71). Milton makes Satan’s fall here, as in Paradise Lost, the consequence of his attempt to assert himself pridefully over the Son. Throughout Paradise Regained Milton repeatedly alludes to Satan’s pride, summing up how Satan “durst proudly tempt the Son of God” (4.580). Pride, of course, was Satan’s traditional first motive, which Milton in Paradise Lost links with his envy of the Son: [Satan] fraught With envy against the Son of God, that day Honor’d by his great Father . . . [. . . could not bear Through pride that sight.

(PL 5.661–65)

Implicitly, then, Milton has connected the Son’s exaltation on earth with his exaltation in heaven. In heaven the Son is exalted when God proclaims him “begotten Son” to whom the angels owe obedience and once more at the end of the war in heaven, when on defeating Satan he is again exalted as king anointed. On earth the Son is exalted both at his baptism and as he stands on the pinnacle of the temple. John Rogers finds a further connection between these scenes in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, for Satan is amazed or thunderstruck on all these occasions of the Son’s exaltation.14 Similarly, on seeing the Son exalted at his baptism Satan is fraught with envy as he was in heaven; on the pinnacle both pride and envy spur him on. Satan’s fall from the pinnacle reminds us of his failure to gain ascendance over the Son in heaven and his first fall thence. The two similes that follow clarify what has taken place in the previous scene by investigating through mythical analogies the implications of the Son’s standing and Satan’s falling. The first simile compares Jesus to the god-man, Hercules, the son of Jove, who also grappled with an opponent in the air and defeated him:

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As when Earth’s Son Antæus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Jove’s Alcides and oft foil’d still rose, Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple join’d, Throttl’d at length in th’ Air, expir’d and fell.

(PR 563–68)

The prideful giant Antaeus owes his strength not to god, but to Mother Earth, and can only be defeated when Hercules lifts him into the air, away from the source of his strength, whereupon, throttled there, he falls. Interestingly, Milton refers to Hercules by the patronymic Alcides that designates his earthly father, just as the son of Joseph would designate Jesus’ earthly lineage. In specifying “Jove’s Alcides” he tells us that like Jesus Hercules was both human and divine. As William Kerrigan reminds us, Hercules, who derives his strength from his father, is triumphant over a champion, who owes his strength to his mother.15 In winning his victory through deferring to his divine father, the Son manifests his own divinity. As Kerrigan also points out, there is a curious chiasmus in the simile (90). Satan has lifted the Son into the air with intentions to defeat him, but he is there defeated by the Son, who, like Hercules, metaphorically throttles him and causes him to fall. Air was, of course, Satan’s usurped element, and it is ironic that he is there conquered.16 In the second simile Jesus is implicitly likened to Oedipus, who in answering the Sphinx’s riddle causes her fall: And as that Theban Monster that propos’d Her riddle, and him, who solv’d it not, devour’d; That once found out and solv’d, for grief and spight Cast herself headlong from th’ Ismenian steep. ( 4.572–75)

Curiously, the simile focuses not upon Oedipus, but on his tempter, the “Theban Monster,” who, like Satan, proposes the riddle and casts herself headlong in grief and spite when it is answered. In both cases Milton emphasizes the fall of the

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hero’s adversaries who thought to defeat him — Antaeus who “expir’d and fell,” the Sphinx who “cast herself headlong” from the steep. Perforce, Satan has been riddling the identity of the Son, questioning whether he is human or divine. Like Oedipus, the Son defeats a superhuman adversary by using human intelligence. As was well known, the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle was “man,” and it is the Son, who through his manhood triumphs over Satan, refusing to call upon that divinity that his standing implicitly illustrates.17 In none of the biblical accounts of the temptation on the pinnacle does Satan fall; in Luke, for example, “when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him” (Luke 4:12–13). But Milton has several reasons for making Satan’s defeat here a fall. He is looking at the final temptation as a resolution of the contest between the Satan and the Son that harks back to the Son’s defeat of Satan at the conclusion of the war in heaven and also looks forward to Jesus’ defeat of Satan in his ministry on earth, and finally to Satan’s defeat at the end of time.18 The angels who rescue the Son from his uneasy perch and refresh him with a heavenly banquet sing an anthem in which they both rehearse the Son’s past achievements and look forward to future conquests. They celebrate the Son in his double nature — enthroned in bliss or in fleshly tabernacle — for in both manifestations he defeats Satan. It is not until the Son hears the anthem of the angels, as several critics urge, that he understand his past life before the Incarnation.19 In heaven he first made Satan fall: “with Godlike force endu’d / Against th’ Attempter of thy Father’s Throne / . . . him long of old / Thou didst debel, and down from Heav’n cast / With all his Army” (PR 4.602–06). But the angels also look forward to another fall: But thou, Infernal Serpent, shalt not long Rule in the Clouds; like an Autumnal Star Or Lightning thou shalt fall from Heav’n trod down Under his feet. (4.618–21)

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In Luke 10:18 Jesus testifies, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” It was a verse often connected as a proof-text of Satan’s fall with Isaiah 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer.”20 Moreover, the angels look forward to still another event in Jesus’ ministry when Satan and his cohorts fall. They chide Satan for his “bold attempt” against Jesus and foretell how Jesus will cast devils into a herd of swine, which in turn hurl themselves over an abyss: hereafter learn with awe To dread the Son of God; hee all unarm’d Shall chase thee with the terror of his voice From thy Demoniac holds, possession foul Thee and thy Legions; yelling they shall fly, And beg to hide them in a herd of Swine, Lest he command them down into the deep, Bound, and to torment sent before thir time.

(PR 4.625–32)

With this allusion to a herd Milton both looks forward and backward, for at the conclusion of the war in heaven Satan and his defeated angels hurl themselves over the edge of heaven into the abyss. As they do so, Milton likens their fall to the fall of a herd or flock, urged on by the Son of God: The overthrown he rais’d, and as a Herd Of Goats or timorous flock together throng’d, Drove them before him Thunder-struck, pursu’d With terrors and with furies to the bounds And Crystal wall of Heav’n, which op’ning wide, Roll’d inward, and a spacious Gap disclos’d Into the wasteful Deep; the monstrous sight Struck them with horror backward, but far worse Urg’d them behind; headlong themselves they threw Down from the verge of Heav’n. (PL 6.856–65)

At the end of Paradise Regained, Milton is recalling how the Son and Satan had once before met face to face in heaven,

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on which occasion the Son had stood and Satan had fallen. On earth Satan’s fall is three times replicated — on the temple’s pinnacle, at the lightning crash, and in the plunge of the Gadarene swine into the deep (Matt. 8:28–33). Yet another and more deadly fall still awaits Satan, the fall alluded to by both Satan and the Son (PR 3.201–02), when upon the Son’s assumption of his millennial kingdom Satan will be cast into the pit. Satan’s fall from the pinnacle, as Russell Hillier comments, fulfills Jesus’ prophecy, “my rising is thy fall.”21 It also looks forward to Satan’s final defeat. Milton has elaborated the biblical account of Satan’s temptation of the Son in the wilderness into an extended account of the interaction between the two that takes us back to their first meeting in heaven and forward to their final confrontation. Included within this examination is even an allusion to the enmity between the two being resolved and Satan being included in the final salvation, a possibility that Milton had never entertained in the earlier epic, Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained invites us to a richer range of interpretive thought than its predecessor as it re-orchestrates the meeting between the old adversaries and opens a dialogue between the two that reconfigures the relationship of Satan and the Son of God.

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11

D Hermes’s Blessed Retreat Rival Views of Learning in Paradise Regained Richard J. DuRocher

Milton often designs his poems’ plots around clashes over differing interpretations of the same event, phenomenon, or issue. We might describe such clashes as cases of rival hermeneutics. For example, in Paradise Lost, when the faithful angel Abdiel upbraids Satan for fomenting the war in heaven, calling it “vain” and “evil,” Satan replies, “The strife which thou call’st evil, . . . we style / The strife of Glory.”1 Given these opposing and apparently irreconcilable interpretations, the only way to resolve them, one quickly realizes, is by a show of force.2 This the Son’s appearance in the “Chariot of Paternal Deity” (PL 6.750) supplies, deciding the war in heaven. This essay explores a notorious case of such rival hermeneutics in book 4 of Paradise Regained. In this scene, Satan and the Son spar over the value of knowledge. Having displayed before the Son all the kingdoms of the world, culminating 225

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in what Satan calls “great and glorious Rome, Queen of the Earth” (PR 4.45), only to have this offer rejected, Satan shifts his approach and proceeds to invite the Son to acquire worldly knowledge. His shift is shrewd. For as the devil reads the Son’s character with some accuracy, “thou thyself seem’st otherwise inclin’d / Than to a worldly Crown, addicted more / To contemplation and profound dispute” (4.212–14). Satan deduces this estimate from his observation of the 12-yearold Christ’s being found by his parents in the temple, sitting and discussing matters with the doctors there, as described in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 2:46). Mindful of this youthful Jesus, Satan now offers the mature Son not worldly empire but worldly wisdom: Be famous then By wisdom; as thy Empire must extend, So let extend thy mind o’er all the world, In knowledge, all things in it comprehend. All knowledge is not couch’t in Moses’ Law, The Pentateuch or what the Prophets wrote; The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach To admiration, led by Nature’s light; And with the Gentiles much thou must converse, Ruling them by persuasion as thou mean’st, Without thir learning how wilt thou with them, Or they with thee hold conversation meet? (PR 4.221–32)

Satan offers worldly knowledge as the means by which the Son can achieve a kind of mental empire over the globe.3 Through Satan’s offer, Milton brings into play the Renaissance debate among the three ways of life, the active, amorous, and contemplative, options summarized in the allegorical interpretation of the so-called Judgment of Paris. Satan’s final phrase about the need for Jesus to have “conversation meet” with the Gentiles parodically alludes to Milton’s own depiction of the amorous life, for in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton had argued that “a meet

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and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage.”4 Likewise, in book 8 of Paradise Lost Adam expresses to God his need for “conversation with his like to help, / Or solace his defects” (8.418–19), which precedes God’s fabrication of Eve from Adam’s rib. As for the active life, the Son in Paradise Regained displays no interest in martial or political conquest. Logically, then, Satan takes the Son to be a contemplative, and Satan accordingly proceeds to offer him enticing means toward fully achieving that way of life.5 From their mountain perch, Satan points out the city of Athens below, and specifically the “Grove of Academe, / Plato’s retirement” (PR 4.244–45), as the center of worldly learning that can enable Jesus, as it did Alexander, “to subdue the world” (252). In his reply, the Son clearly rejects Satan’s offer of worldly knowledge, and with it Satan’s second temptation. After this exchange, Satan is described as being “quite at a loss, for all his darts were spent” (PR 4.366). Exasperated and baffled, he puts to the Son the exquisite, existential question: “What dost thou in this World?” (4.372). It is a question many readers, baffled by the Son’s demonstrated indifference to all of Satan’s offers, may well share. At the same time, Satan’s question reveals that he has not fathomed who the Son truly is; thus, it is fitting that Satan fails in his ultimate attempt to undo the Son on the pinnacle. Before that climactic event, however, Milton’s narrative has raised and seemingly left in doubt two vital questions: First, what is the Son’s attitude toward knowledge, particularly toward the intellectual knowledge embodied in Athens? Second, assuming that the Son does reject the need for worldly knowledge for himself, to what extent should readers follow the Son in likewise rejecting pagan or classical learning for them? The clash between Satan and the Son over the value of classical learning recalls a sequence of Miltonic discussions of this question in his earlier works. Milton’s chief

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writings on this topic include the following: first, the debate in Prolusion 7 over whether learning makes men happier than does ignorance; second, the analysis in Areopagitica of what is to be thought of books and of reading generally; and third, the celebration of learning in Milton’s “Ode to John Rouse,” the Oxford librarian. This essay will concentrate on the ode to Rouse, as the work from among those closest in chronology to Paradise Regained. Put briefly, all three works celebrate and venerate learning, regarding it as valuable not merely instrumentally but intrinsically, that is, for its own sake as well as for its value in the search for truth. In Paradise Regained, however, it is Satan who seems to champion this view of learning, whereas the Son appears at best indifferent or at worst hostile to it, rejecting Satan’s offer of human knowledge as “false, or little else but dreams” (PR 4.291). Thus, we need to reexamine the Son’s attitude toward worldly learning, specifically of Greco-Roman thought, in Paradise Regained. How can we understand this apparent contradiction or reversal on Milton’s part? In particular, how are we to understand the Son’s apparent rejection of Milton’s own belief, expressed repeatedly, in the value of learning?6 What the Son is rejecting, I argue in what follows, is first and foremost Satan’s temptation itself. In tempting the Son with knowledge, Satan is not offering the Son knowledge itself; instead, the fallen angel casts knowledge as a political tool rather than a means to genuine enlightenment. In rejecting such a reduction, even an abuse of learning, the Son is not bound to reject all learning, as readers sometimes broadly assume. Ryan Netzley argues that the Son “does not merely disdain Greco-Roman learning. He also points up the irrelevance of all reading, including the reading of the Hebrew prophets that he later praises.”7 Netzley bases this sweeping claim on a literal reading of the Son’s statement to Satan that “many books / Wise men have said are wearisome” (PR 4.321–22). Yet the Son’s citation of this proverb

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to Satan in the midst of this temptation needs to be read in the context of the Son’s own reading practices, not simply his pouring over the prophets but his use of pagan literature throughout the poem. Recall first of all that, in his opening “meditations” or soliloquy, the Son, in speaking to himself, tells us how he truthfully regards reading. “The Law of God I read,” he says, “and found it sweet, / Made it my whole delight” (1.207–08). Then, having listened to his mother’s testimonial about his birth, the Son says he “again revolv’d / The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ / Concerning the Messiah” (1.259–61). When, in speaking with Satan, the Son mentions the proverb that “many books . . . are wearisome,” he is actually citing the book of Ecclesiastes, which says, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh (Eccles. 12:12, KJV). The verse from Ecclesiastes, like the Son’s redaction of it, advises against excessive and interminable writing and reading of books. Rather than rejecting reading entirely, the Son hereby shows that he has been reading selectively, and doing so appropriately and profitably. Rather than preaching the irrelevance of reading, the Son thus shows the value of judicious reading. In his own way, the Son practices the positive yet paradoxical attitude toward knowledge that the angel Raphael had urged upon Adam in Paradise Lost through his oxymoronic maxim: “Be lowly wise.” The Son also recommends such humility, using a kernel of pagan literature to deliver the message. Second, the Son’s initial profession of indifference to learning in his retort to Satan develops into a more nuanced view, as he carefully discriminates between vain or empty forms of knowledge and genuine wisdom, which, he insists, is truly valuable. Reading, as Netzley points out, is a crucial part of the process of discrimination. In that process, the Son covertly yet demonstrably uses pagan learning. The Son’s very phrase describing knowledge as “false, or little else but

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dreams,” contains, I will show, an allusion to Greco-Roman myth. Thus, the Son’s stance, while appropriately guarded against satanic misprision, is consistent with the more celebratory view of learning articulated in Milton’s poem to Rouse: namely, that books properly used, including both those of the ancients and the poet’s own that he hoped would stand beside them in the Bodleian Library, play a unique role in the search for truth. The books of the ancients and the libraries that contain them constitute, in the ode’s mythopoetically suggestive phrase, “Hermes’s blessed retreats.” That is, they are divinely ordained sanctuaries, not only indicating divine protection of learning but also demanding of readers acts of discriminating interpretation. Let us look, first, at precisely how the Son responds to Satan’s temptation. He says he does not need the kind of knowledge Satan is offering; then he challenges the truthfulness and wisdom such knowledge contains. He concludes by comparing Greek learning, unfavorably, with that of the Hebraic tradition. But he begins by equivocating over whether he knows “these things” that Satan is offering him or not: To whom our Savior sagely thus replied. Think not but that I know these things; or think I know them not; not therefore am I short Of knowing what I ought: he who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true. (PR 4.285–90)

The Son’s opening equivocation, inviting Satan either to think the Son knows “these things” or does not know them, may initially seem more clever than “sage.” Indeed, some critics have found Jesus’ reply proof of his duplicity toward Satan.8 Certainly this reply gives Satan no handle, no purchase on whether the Son possesses or is indebted to this knowledge, and thus the Son blocks any attempt on Satan’s part to entrap him by means of the Son’s commitment to

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worldly philosophy. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan argue that the Son’s language shows that he has conversed with Greek-speaking Palestinians, and that he in effect is masking his admiration for Greek philosophy in order to perplex Satan.9 Quite apart from the question of whether the Son possesses knowledge of Greek philosophy, however, the next sentence in the poem insists that in any case he knows what he “ought” or truly needs to know, having received “Light from above, from the fountain of light.” The Son’s point is that he has sufficient knowledge, as doing without the learning of the Greeks leaves him in no way deprived or at a disadvantage; in short, he does not depend upon pagan learning for his life or mission. Satan had implied that the Son needed “thir learning” if he planned to “hold conversation with” and ultimately rule the “Gentiles” (4.230–32). Satan takes a narrowly instrumental view of learning, regarding it as a tool rather than a part of one’s character. In appealing to the spiritual source of the “fountain of light,” the Son rejects Satan’s implication that he needs non-Jewish learning as such a tool in order to come to terms with the Gentiles. Later in his response the Son confirms his stance that he does not need Greek learning by arguing that the Greeks derived their arts from the Hebrews, pointing out archly that in most cases they did so rather badly (4.334–42). Following his opening equivocation, the Son more sharply critiques Greek learning as generally false, conjectural, and lacking in “true wisdom.” On the one hand, the Son criticizes Socrates by taking literally his humble confession “that he nothing knew” (PR 4.294); on the other hand, he faults the Stoics and anyone who vainly “to themselves / All glory arrogate, to God give none” (4.314–15). The Son’s criticism of Socrates is surprising: if humility is the proper attitude Jesus recommends, then why should Socrates be blamed for demonstrating it?10 Nonetheless, unlike Socrates, the Son proceeds to make an imminent proposition, a positive statement

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of his own, namely, that the Greek authors do not lead an individual to “True wisdom” (319), which the Son certainly values and upholds. Most significant, I maintain, is the way Milton phrases this proposition of the Son’s: Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud.

(PR 4.318–21)

The first and essential point the Son is making is that anyone and everyone should be committed to seeking “true wisdom” and avoiding her “false resemblances” or pretenders. The indefinite relative subject clause that Milton constructs assures the generality of this point: “who therefore seeks in these / True wisdom, finds her not.” While replying directly to Satan, the Son’s larger audience includes all readers of Milton’s poem, all, that is, who seek “true wisdom.” Left open is the question of where true wisdom may be found, and whether pagan learning can help one who is committed to that search. On that question, the second point that Milton’s lines make is revealing. As Merritt Hughes notes, the lines contain an allusion to Jove’s deception of Ixion with a cloudy image of Juno, on which he begot the centaurs (Hughes 522). The story goes back at least to Pindar.11 In Ovid’s version of the story in book 12 of the Metamorphoses, Nestor describes the Centaurs as “natus nubigenas” (12.210– 11), or “cloud born.” During the battle with the Centaurs, Nestor recalls that one of the Centaurs, Monychus, cries: “nec nos matre dea, nec nos Ixione natos / esse reor, qui Tantus erat, Iunonis ut altae / spem caperet: nos semimari superamur ab hoste!”12 (“I doubt if we are sons of any goddess, / Nor yet Ixion’s sons. He was great enough / To hope to mate with Juno, and we are conquered / By half a man!”).13 George Sandys, in his 1633 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, commenting on Ixion’s begetting of the Centaurs on a cloud

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mistaken for Juno, writes that his story represents “the vaine pursute of imaginary glory, attempted by unlawful meanes; and the prodigious conceptions of Ambition.”14 From this allusion contained in the Son’s reference to “an empty cloud,” Milton shows that the Son is certainly aware of pagan literature. The allusion embodies Milton’s use of pagan learning to illuminate, if not the positive goal of “true wisdom,” at least its “false resemblance” as depicted in the story of Ixion and the cloud.15 The Son completes his response to Satan’s offer by making two cogent arguments about reading in general. First, the Son introduces the notion that the spirit a reader brings to the task is crucial to avoid shallowness or childishness despite deep learning. Failure to approach books with that “spirit and judgment equal or superior” (PR 4.324) leaves the reader “deep verst in books and shallow in himself” (327). Such shallow readers Milton famously compares to “Children gathering pebbles on the shore” (330). Second and finally, the Son tells Satan that he finds Hebrew poets and prophets aesthetically superior to their Greek counterparts, and better able to teach the specific business of what may “best form a King” (364), which Satan has so officiously been urging upon the Son. If we combine the Son’s allusion to a classical myth in this episode in Paradise Regained with his insistence on bringing a “spirit and judgment equal or superior” to what one reads, both moves calculated to distinguish the proper way of seeking “true wisdom,” then one finds an apt precursor and fit counterpart to the Son’s words in a poem ostensibly quite different from the testing dialogue of Paradise Regained, namely, Milton’s “Ode to John Rouse,” the Oxford librarian. In contrast with the childish collectors of pebbles the Son repudiates in Paradise Regained, John Rouse is celebrated in the ode as the ideal book collector, one responsible for assembling and maintaining a sacred collection. In the ode, first published in 1673 — which significantly is two years after

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the volume containing Paradise Regained — Milton, using an apostrophe, directly addresses a specific book, a copy of his 1645 Poems: Both English and Latin, that had been stolen and thus prevented from inclusion in the Bodleian Library. In the ode’s second antistrophe, Milton tells the book to rejoice, for you are fortunate (“Laetare felix” [43]). In the following strophe, Milton explains why: Nam te Rousium sui Optat peculi, numeroque iusto Sibi polliticum queritur abesse, Rogatque venias ille, cuius inclyta Sunt data virum monumenta curae; Teque adytis etiam sacris Voluit reponi, quibus et ipse praesidet Aeternorum operum custos fidelis. (Hughes 147–48, lines 47–54) [For Rouse — to whose keeping are Entrusted the glorious monuments of heroes — covets you as part of his treasure, complains that you are missing from the just number promised, and requests that you may come to him. He has desired that you may be placed in those sacred sanctuaries where he himself presides, a faithful warden of immortal works.]

When such a “faithful warden” looks after the books in his collection, we may be sure that he brings a “spirit and judgment equal or superior” to what he reads. The ode ends with “thanks to Rouse” (“Roüsio favente” [87]) for enabling “a sane posterity” to know “what my deserts are.” Together with John Rouse, Milton ascribes the protection from harm and the enduring afterlife of his book to posterity to another figure, the Greek god of learning, Hermes. In the ode’s final strophe, its “Epodos,” Milton bids his book quiet rest in the “blessed retreats” provided by Hermes and Rouse:

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Iam sero placidam sperare iubeo Perfunctam invidia requiem, sedesque beatas Quas bonus Hermes Et tutela dabit solers Rousi, Quo neque lingua procax vulgi penetrabit, atque longe Turba legentum prava facesset. (Hughes 148, lines 75–80) [Now at last I bid you look forward to quiet rest, after you have outlived envy, in the blessed retreats provided by kind Hermes and the alert protection of Rouse, where the insolent noise of the crowd never shall enter and the vulgar mob of readers shall forever be excluded.]

In the talk of excluding vulgar readers, Milton may be remembering that in December 1645 Rouse famously refused to allow Charles I to borrow a copy of the Histoire universelle du sieur d’Aubigné from the Bodleian, on the grounds that it is not a lending library.16 Along with keeping out unworthy readers, the library serves to preserve intact and provide a safe haven for books, including this one of Milton’s. Hence, Milton describes libraries such as the Bodleian as beatus sedes, “blessed retreats,” or, literally, the “blessed seats” that Hermes and Rouse have provided for this and other books. While the concept of a library as a retreat is fairly commonplace, Milton, I suggest, would also have endorsed the conviction articulated by Louis Althusser that literature itself is a kind of retreat from the dominant ideology of one’s culture. Althusser writes that literary art, occupying a different kind of discursive space from functionally determined public discourses, “presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation” from the ideology that generates it.17 As a retreat from both the vulgar mob and the determinism posed by Marxist ideology, the sanctuary offered by Rouse and Hermes to literature is one Milton relies upon, even celebrates, for his book of poems. Given this celebration of Hermes, Rouse, and the monument to learning that the Greek god and the

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English librarian preside over, I cannot accept the claim that the Son’s comments in Paradise Regained mean to dismiss pagan learning as inappropriate either to himself, Milton, or the reader. A final etymological link between Hermes and Milton may prove illuminating in this context. In the ode to Rouse, Milton casts Hermes as the god of learning, under whose aegis libraries should flourish. But Hermes, we know, enjoys another identity as messenger between the gods and human beings and, in that occupation, serves as the figure for interpretation. When Milton digressed from his argument about the best order for the church in The Reason of ChurchGovernment (1642) to offer autobiographical speculations about his “highest hope” for his literary ambitions, he defined himself in terms that make him a kind of English Hermes: “I apply’d my selfe to that resolution which Ariosto follow’d against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toylsom vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect” (YP 1:811–12). The “interpreter & relater” who gave us Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes never, I submit, abandoned that heroic resolution or its attendant hermeneutic labor. We can be quite sure, then, that John Milton did not share the Son’s rejection of Satan’s temptation to widespread learning, and particularly the kind of humane learning that reading and interpretation make possible. Nor are readers of Paradise Regained, alert to Milton’s own hermeneutic labors and use of both biblical and pagan literature in the work, called to share that rejection. The Son, we are specifically and carefully told, does not “need” these things, and while we less than divine persons do not strictly need them either, there seems no judgment or penalty incumbent on those of us who

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read Hesiod, or Ovid, or any books in the Bodleian or other libraries. What the Son’s stance shows us is a kind of higher, absolute standard of depending solely on the word of God, a stance that is consistent with all of his rebuttals — including the final one — to Satan’s temptations throughout the poem. To be able to depend solely on God’s word, as the Son does, enables him to stand on the pinnacle — to the amazement of Satan — as the only Son of God.

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Notes NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: The Rejection of God as King (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 185; Christopher D’Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6. 2. Page numbers refer to the authors’ essays in this volume. 3. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

NOTES TO WOODS, “INVITING RIVAL HERMENEUTICS” 1. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and “How Milton Read the Bible: The Case of Paradise Regained,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 205. 2. Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics, 4. 3. John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:223; Complete Prose Works is hereafter cited as YP. 4. John Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 6.325, 331; 12.93–95. 5. Lycidas, 60–63, in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); all poetry citations except Paradise Lost will be from this text and will be cited in the text. 239

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6. Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics, 5. 7. Stanley Fish, “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica,” in Re-Membering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1988). 8. Throughout Milton’s work, “truth” is associated with God’s gift of knowledge to humankind, principally through the model of Christ, as in Areopagitica’s “Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master” (YP 2:549). Milton early sees himself as “incorporating” truth to the extent any Christian participates in understanding and communicating that revelation, as in Apology: “But when I discern’d [the ‘Confuter’ of Smectymnuus’s] intent was not so much to smite at me, as through me to render odious the truth that I had written . . . I conceav’d my selfe to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded.” Compare with the Book of Common Prayer’s postcommunion language, which Milton certainly knew despite his antagonism toward prayer-book religion: “we are very members incorporate in the mysticall body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithfull people” (1638, N5v). A key passage is in Christian Doctrine, “Ingrafting in Christ. . . . is the process by which God the Father plants believers in Christ. That is to say, he makes them sharers in Christ, and makes them fit to join, eventually, in one body with Christ. . . . In the new spiritual life the intellect is to a very large extent restored to its former state of enlightenment and the will is restored, in Christ, to its former freedom” (YP 6:477, 478). 9. For example, in the just completed divorce pamphlets, Milton had cited the Arminian Hugo Grotius often and approvingly, principally to reinforce Milton’s own biblical readings. Thomas Fulton goes further, arguing for Areopagitica’s place in a developing line of liberal rationalism, in “Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology,” ELR 34 (2004): 42–82. 10. Milton’s negative constructions are ubiquitous in both his prose and poetry. For a review of this habit of mind as part of Milton’s “psychological impulses and . . . world view,” see Annabel Patterson, “Milton’s Negativity,” in Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism, ed. Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 81. 11. For the first, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”; for the second, John Carey, John Milton (New York: Arco, 1970), and Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting “Samson Agonistes” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting “Samson Agonistes” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002). For a critique of various views, see Feisel G. Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” PMLA

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Notes to Pages 11–19 241 120, no. 2 (2005): 327–40, and comments by Wittreich and Peter Herman with a response by Mohamed in PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1641–44. 12. Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes,” 184. 13. Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 204, 203; Joseph Wittreich, Why Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Writings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 163. 14. Wittreich, Why Milton Matters, 166–72. 15. Ibid., 170. 16. “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy,” Milton’s introduction to Samson Agonistes, 461. 17. Ibid., 461. 18. I argue in a current book project, Milton and the Poetics of Freedom, that Milton very consciously sets out to reframe the concepts of freedom and liberty as active processes. Not coincidentally, Gavin Alexander presents an analysis of Milton as our most original wordsmith: “Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. . . . ‘The OED does tend to privilege famous writers with first usage,’ Alexander admits, ‘and early-modern English — a composite of Germanic and Romance languages — was ripe for innovation. . . . By any standards, Milton was an extraordinary linguist and his freedom with language can be related to his advocacy of personal, political and religious freedoms.’” See Gavin Alexander, Guardian, January 28, 2008; available at blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/01/john_milton_our_greatest_ wordm.html. 19. Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1962), 49, 53. 20. Stanley R. Levin, The Semantics of Metaphor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 127. 21. Earl R. MacCormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 1988), 2.

NOTES TO MCCOLLEY, “‘A TABLE RICHLY SPREAD’” 1. Quoted from The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, ed. Alan Rudrum et al. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 72. 2. Henry Lawes, Sitting by the Streams: Psalms, Ayres, and Dialogues. Consort of Musicke (London: Hyperion Records, 1993). Compact disk. 3. “On the morning of Christs Nativity. Compos’d 1629,” line 7, in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, with Original Spelling and

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Notes to Pages 22–28

Punctuation, ed. Stella Revard. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. All quotations from early Milton’s poems are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text. 4. Le Huray, Peter, Music and the Reformation in England, 1549– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 391. 5. The Choir of Ely Cathedral, Paul Trepte, director of music, with David Price, organist, and the Parley of Instruments, directed by Peter Holman. Hyperion Records, 1995. Compact disk. 6. “And wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger.” Jacob Handl, Christmas Music from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Sixteen, dir. Harry Christophers. London: Hyperion Records, 1987. Compact disk. 7. Joan Blythe, “Reading Milton Greenly: The Flight into Egypt in Renaissance Art,” in Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, ed. Ken Hiltner (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 163–200. 8. John Milton, Prolusion 7, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:295–96. 9. See Wordsworth, “The Two-Part Prelude” (1799): Ye powers of earth, ye genii of the springs, And ye that have your voices in the clouds, And ye that are familiars of the lakes And of the standing pools, I may not think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry — when ye through many a year Thus, by the agency of boyish sports, On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impressed upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, Work like a sea. (186–98) In The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). My thanks to June Sturrock for suggesting Wordsworth’s alternative view. 10. On Milton’s materialism, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). 11. Diane McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 189–90. 12. The Choir of Ely Cathedral. 13. Le Huray, Music and the Reformation, 54, 336–37.

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Notes to Pages 31–44 243

NOTES TO TESKEY, “DEAD SHEPHERD” 1. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 81–82. Pattison is quoted in A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 2, part 2, The Minor English Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 568. It bears mentioning here, and not only because this essay is dedicated to her, that the unsurpassed political reading of Lycidas is by Mary Ann Radzinowicz, in Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 119–26. 2. David Daiches, Milton (1957; repr., London: Hutchinson, 1959), 76. For Ovid’s phrase and Milton’s rendering of it, see Richard DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 71. John Crowe Ransom’s much-ridiculed but to my mind brilliant speculation in “A Poem Nearly Anonymous,” The World’s Body (New York: Scribners, 1938), 1–28, that Milton wrote the poem smooth and rewrote it rough strikes me as being — if not true in fact — true in principle, for it is deliberately rough in manner, aligning itself with the rough country language of Theocritus’s goatherds instead of silver-tongued Virgilian hayseeds. See C. A. Patrides, Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), 68. For Ransom turned inside-out, see Stanley Fish, “Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous,” How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), in which Milton is shown effacing any identifiable speaker: “The suppressing of the personal voice is the poem’s achievement . . . [to be] finally, and triumphantly, anonymous” (259, 279). 3. Patrides, Milton’s “Lycidas,” xvii. 4. John Milton, Lycidas, 12–14, in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 69–94. All further quotations from the poem will be from this edition, which I consider the best available reading text. Thorough students will consult the scholarly notes and commentary in John Carey, ed., John Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed., revised (London: Pearson, 2007), 237–56. The proper basis for any modern text is Milton’s Poems of Mr. John Milton . . . 1645, 57–65, an edition of which has been prepared by Stella P. Revard, ed., in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 74–80, and, for textual notes, 559–61. 5. Measure for Measure, 3.1.126. For suffering caused by the psychological absence of purgatory in Protestant culture, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works, vol. 1, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 278–79.

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Notes to Pages 48–60

7. Pierre Soulages, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Albert Pacquement, exhibition catalog, Pompidou Center, Oct. 14, 2009–March 8, 2010 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009). 8. Marie-Claire Anne Beaulieu, “The Sea as a Two-Way Passage between Life and Death in Greek Mythology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 9, 77–106. See Ad Patrem, line 60. 9. C. S. Jerram, The Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis of Milton (London, 1874), 84, n. on line 166.

NOTES TO JENKINS, “TOWARD LATINITAS” 1. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), xxiii, xvi, 4; hereafter cited in the text. The emphasis in the first quotation is Radzinowicz’s. 2. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Penguin, 1984), 17. 3. Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), argues that Milton’s vision was “explicitly dedicated to positive transformation in all spheres of human activity” (xvi); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), similarly argues that Milton sought to make “his public fit to achieve self-governance through training in virtue” and that despite the trials and vicissitudes of the time, he “never gave up on the English people” (8, 14). 4. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1977), 198, in a chapter entitled “Losing Hope”; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 318–19. 5. Hereafter I will refer to the Defensio pro populo Anglicano of 1651 simply as the Defensio, and the Defensio secunda of 1654 as the Second Defense. 6. “Milton at the Office,” a review of Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), in Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 2009, 12. 7. Latin citations of Milton’s prose are to Frank Patterson, gen. ed., The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), vols. 7 and 8, hereafter cited as CM followed by volume and page number; English translations are from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as YP. 8. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, praises Milton’s Latin in Behemoth; see William Riley Parker, Milton’s Contemporary Reputation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1940), 40. Parker cites similar contemporary praise of the Defensio (85, 86, 105, 108). Samuel

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Notes to Pages 60–63 245 Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, vol. 1, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), too, praised Milton’s Latin (if not his politics) and believed it “smoother, neater, and more pointed” (254) than that of Salmasius. 9. Milton actually had roughly a year to compose the Defensio. He was given the task by the Council of State on January 8, 1650, and the same body ordered it printed on December 23 of the same year. It was actually published on February 24, 1651; one can assume Milton was editing and revising between the order to publish and the actual publication. See William J. Grace’s notes in YP 4.1:285. 10. Appendix F of YP 4.2 lists eight pages of small-print emendations made by Milton. 11. See John K. Hale, “Neo-Latin Polemic in the 1650s: Milton versus Salmasius and Others,” Classical and Modern Literature 21, no. 1 (2001): 17–18. 12. The Yale Prose does not indicate that this is a direct quotation in the text, though it does cite the passage as being from the Defensio regia (YP 4.1:78). I have used Defensio regia pro Carolo I, editio nova ab auctore aucta & recognita (1652), 114. 13. The rough translation is my own, though I am indebted to my colleagues in the Union College Classics Department — in particular Tarik Wareh and Hans-Friedrich Mueller — for their help with the nuances and technicalities of both Salmasius and Milton’s Latin. I am completely responsible for any errors in translation and interpretation, however. 14. Milton concludes his Defensio with a parallel and even harsher attack on “the jealous rage and madness of this raving sophist” (contra insanem et lividissimam furenties sophistae rabiem) (YP 4.1:535; CM 7:55), so I find it hard to see any overall “softening” in Milton’s ad hominem. 15. On the date of Milton’s revision, see YP 4.1:295, and appendices F and G, 4.2:1129–45. On the composition of the Council of State and its role in suppressing faction, see Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 238, who draws on Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1894–1901), and Blair Worden’s The Rump Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 16. The complexities of the late Roman republic’s class issues are beyond the scope of this essay; see, for example, Henrik Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly 139–40, and Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 40–49, for useful summaries. The general idea is that civis would signify to most educated Europeans of Milton’s time

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those with the right to rule, the “government [of the] aristocracy, rule by the worthiest citizens” that Lewalski sees as central to Milton’s ideology, particularly in the Defenses (Life of John Milton, 237). Populus, on the other hand, would refer to the broad mass of the people, while plebs and related terms would indicate something like the “mob,” the “many-headed beast” that government must control. 17. See, for example, Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 14–16, 73–84. 18. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7–10. Filmer cites the fifth commandment explicitly on 11, 18, 41, and 46. 19. The translations here are from CM 7:492. I have added the superlative “most” in the translation of “faithful.” The Oxford Latin Dictionary cites Cicero, Sallust, and Livy all as using opifex/opifices in this manner. 20. See Grace’s summary of Salmasius’s position, YP 4.1:516n1. 21. See particularly chapter 12 (YP 4.1:533), where the two positions merge. On Milton’s use of “natural law” arguments, see Merritt Hughes’s introductory notes to volume 3 of YP. 22. Hale, “Neo-Latin Polemic,” 17–18. 23. Both share the same root, facio, “to make or do.” 24. Once again, the Latin is more telling: what the Yale Prose translates as “murderers,” Milton wrote as “parricidas.” 25. See “Quid nomine populi intelligi velimus: Defining the ‘People’ in The Second Defense,” in Milton Studies, vol. 42, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 191–209. 26. Lewalski gives a succinct summary of the various factions that grew up after Oliver Cromwell’s death; Milton was particularly distressed by those within the government, between supporters of the “Cromwellian” party and those of the Good Old Cause (Life of John Milton, 357–59). 27. Ibid., 357. 28. I use the Columbia translation here as more literal (CM 7:557). The Yale Prose has “not successfully undertaken and completed without divine inspiration” and “the same assistance and guidance” (YP 4.1:536). 29. Oxford Latin Dictionary, instinctus and impulsus. The distinction is a fine one, but that is the point: both words share the idea of divine incitement, but impulsus implies actions that come from the world at large (1) and by transference to those with divine prompting (2). I would particularly like to thank Hans-Friedrich Mueller for his help with unpacking this distinction through the examples cited in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.

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Notes to Pages 77–79 247

NOTES TO LEWALSKI, “INTERPRETING GOD’S WORD — AND WORDS — IN PARADISE LOST” 1. Andrew Marvell, “On Paradise Lost,” lines 7–8, in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 8. Milton’s epic is cited from this edition. 2. Some treatments of Milton’s hermeneutic principles and practices include Maurice Kelley’s introduction to De doctrina Christiana, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 6; hereafter cited as YP followed by volume and page number; James H. Sims, The Bible in Milton’s Epics (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, l962); John R. Knott Jr., The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l97l), chap. 5, pp. l06–30; Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge, l982); Stephen Dobranski and John Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse, and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). 3. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “Paradise Regained as Hermeneutic Combat,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 15–16 (1983– 84): 99–107. See also Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein, eds., Milton Studies, vol. 42, “Paradise Regained” in Context: Genre, Politics, Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), and Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (London: Methuen, 1966). 4. For a range of views on Milton’s, and Samson’s, reading of his divine calling, see, for example, John Steadman, “‘Faithful Champion’: The Theological Basis of Milton’s Hero of Faith,” Anglia 77 (1959): 12–28; Irene Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy,” in Calm of Mind, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1971), 237–57; Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, l978); Joseph A. Wittreich Jr., Interpreting “Samson Agonistes” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Albert C. Labriola and Michael Lieb, eds. Milton Studies, vol. 33, The Miltonic Samson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 5. See, for example, Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 6. See Lewalski, Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 2003), 415–41.

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Notes to Pages 79–102

7. See James Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987), and John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Dobranski and Rumrich, Milton and Heresy, 75–92. 8. See Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 9. For an extended account of this scene, see Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 110–39. 10. For further discussion of the place of history in Paradise Lost see, for example, Marshall Grossman, Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revelation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 169–211. 11. The parallels between Eve’s imagination and art, and the poet’s own, are traced suggestively in Diane McColley, “Eve and the Arts of Eden,” Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 100–19.

NOTES TO WITTREICH, “SITES OF CONTENTION IN PARADISE LOST” 1. William Hayley, A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids, 3 vols. (London, 1785), 2:10–11; cf. 1:90, 2:7. Epigraph from Gordon Teskey, “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50 (Winter 2010): 245. 2. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Politics of Discourse: The Literature of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 207 (also 208, 217) and 229. Radzinowicz has complicated enormously our idea of Milton’s biblical poetics, not just in the aforementioned essay, but also of signal importance in her book, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 63, 75, 81–87, and in “Milton on the Tragic Women of Genesis,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 131–52. 3. Stephen Fallon, “ ‘Certain My Resolution’: Contradiction vs. Uncertainty in Milton,” in Ninth International Milton Symposium, Institute of English Studies, University of London Senate House, July 7–11, 2008, 70.

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Notes to Pages 102–05 249 4. See, respectively, Edward E. Ericson Jr., “The Son of God in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained,” Milton Quarterly 25 (1991): 79–89, whose views, in this instance, have been filtered to me through Thomas N. Corns, Regaining “Paradise Lost” (London: Longman, 1994), 54; and Harry Blamires, Milton’s Creation: A Guide through “Paradise Lost” (London: Methuen, 1971), 193. Corns seems to concur with Blamires as he describes Milton’s synthesis of the old and the new science in a poem that then makes sense whether Milton’s reader “operates from geocentric or heliocentric assumptions” (104). 5. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 439, 462. On Milton’s language of uncertainty, see 545. 6. Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, as quoted by Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 157. 7. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 43. 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as quoted in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 276. 9. Jacques Derrida, as quoted in “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida,” in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), 203. 10. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 14, 108. 11. Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 3, 4, 5, 48. 12. Ibid., 237, 229, 245, 248. 13. All quotations of Milton’s poetry, usually by book and/or line number(s), and where necessary by page number, are from The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971). Quotations from Milton’s prose writings are from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as YP. 14. See George Wesley Whiting, Milton and This Pendant World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 130, 127; cf. 96; but for a challenge to such conclusions, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1977), 3. 15. Harinder Singh Marjara, Contemplations of Created Things: Science in “Paradise Lost” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3, 9, 137, 141. 16. Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels in the Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 310.

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Notes to Pages 105–10

17. See Corns, Regaining “Paradise Lost,” 104, and Walter Clyde Curry, Milton’s Ontology, Cosmogony, and Physics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 122. 18. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 48, 47. 19. Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2, 4, 66; but see also 67. 20. Ibid., 68; but see also 67. 21. Ibid., 203; cf. 70, 79–80. See also “Of the Holy Scripture,” in Of Christian Doctrine, YP 6:574–92. 22. Fish, How Milton Works, 14, 37. 23. Margaret Olofson Thickstun, Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: Moral Education (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), esp. 7, 12, 33–52. 24. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 436, but also 419, 445–48, 461 (for the Galileo analogy) and on perception, see 435, but also 404, 417, 437, 439. 25. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 49. 26. Dennis Danielson, “Astronomy,” in Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215, 223. 27. Angus Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 150, 137. 28. Jonathan Richardson and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (London, 1734), 376. 29. Richard Corum, “In White Ink: Paradise Lost and Milton’s Ideas of Women,” in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 128. On Milton’s narrative strategies, see Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 85–105. 30. Danielson, “Astronomy,” 216. 31. J. B. Broadbent, “Milton’s ‘Mortal Voice’ and His ‘Omnific Word,’ ” in Approaches to “Paradise Lost”: The York Tercentenary Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 99–117. 32. Balachandra Rajan, “The Two Creations: Paradise Lost and the Treatise on Christian Doctrine,” in Milton and the Climates of Reading: Essays by Balachandra Rajan, ed. Elizabeth Sauer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 115. 33. Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23. 34. Ibid., 24, 35. 35. Curry, Milton’s Ontology, Cosmogony, and Physics, 92 (cf. 93), 103.

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Notes to Pages 111–23 251 36. Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 112, 113. On the special importance of Galileo, see the discussion of him “as a metonymic signature for John Milton” and “as a cryptic self-portrait” by John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 160, 161, as well as Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 264, on Galileo as a totemic figure and “as a Protestant hero of free thought.” 37. P[atrick] H[ume], Annotations on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1695), 231. 38. Richardson and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks, 291, 293, 294, 327. 39. Richard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 34, 209. 40. Richardson and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks, 293. 41. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1976), 127. 42. Richardson and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks, 365. Some think otherwise: “No doubt he [Raphael] learned this story . . . from other Angels”; see, for example, Zachary Pearce, A Review of the Text of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (London: John Shuckburgh, 1732–33), 237. 43. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 160. 44. See William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of “De Doctrina Christiana” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), esp. 8–9. 45. William Blake, as quoted in Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, 38. 46. Mieke Bal, Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death, trans. Matthew Gumpart (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 96. 47. See Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 115, 116. 48. Thomas Newton, ed., Paradise Lost, 9th ed., 2 vols. (London: J. F. and C. Rivington, 1790), 2:53. 49. I borrow the phrase from Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” 117. 50. Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum; or, An Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. J. Ellistone and J. Barrow (London: Printed by M. Simmons for H. Blunden, 1654), 80–81.

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51. Diane McColley, “Beneficient Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 242. 52. Feisal G. Mohamed, In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 133, 108. 53. I borrow the phrase from Mohamed; see ibid., 120. 54. Ibid., 112, 115. 55. See Michael Lieb, “Adam’s Story: Testing and Transition in Paradise Lost,” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 22. 56. Ibid., 35; and cf. J. Martin Evans, “Afterthoughts on Adam’s Story,” in ibid., 49, 50. 57. Lieb, “Adam’s Story,” in Pruitt and Durham, Living Texts, 49, 54. 58. Pheme Perkins, “The Gnostic Eve,” in Old Testament Women in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (Conway, Ark.: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1991), 46. 59. Belsey, John Milton, 63. 60. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 404. 61. William Kolbrener, “The Poverty of Context: Cambridge School History and the New Milton Criticism,” in Paradigms Lost and Found: The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

NOTES TO FLESCH, “NARRATIVE, JUDGMENT, AND JUSTICE IN PARADISE LOST” 1. I present my arguments for this bald statement at some length in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). All works by John Milton in this essay are from this volume, hereafter cited in the text. 3. See also my essay “Reading, Seeing, and Acting in Samson Agonistes,” in John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 131–46. 4. See P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 72–93, for the best account of the human psychological assumptions

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Notes to Pages 144–51 253 about the relation between free will and the resentment it courts because it is seen as free. 5. On the flattened and caricatured reality of both the rebel and the loyal angels, see the last chapter of my book Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 223–71. I am about to present a different way of thinking about human depth here, though it is consistent with what I say in that chapter, which began as part of my dissertation at Cornell, supervised by Mary Ann Radzinowicz. I am so glad to be able to contribute to this volume for her. I had many fruitful discussions with the late Richard DuRocher about these and other matters in those days, and I am very grateful and honored that he invited me to be part of this volume. 6. There is a fundamental psychological asymmetry here: we acknowledge the humanity of others in resenting their resentment, but what we resent in resenting their resentment is our (mis)interpretation of their resentment as refusing to acknowledge our humanity. 7. Notice the tension in Comus when the Lady castigates him, even though such castigation is not only useless but credits Comus with too much humanity, since he is no fit audience for her rebuke: “Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced” (792). But of course the idea is that the audience will see the Lady’s justice. 8. One person’s “deep intuition” is another’s “folk theory.” But anyone who is wronged has a special right to demand the remedies that she chooses (as long as they are not themselves unjust), and if she chooses on the basis of a folk theory, that theory is ipso facto a deep intuition. 9. I trust that it is obvious that in the more general contexts of this essay I am using the word “human” to mean those whose moral judgments we readers (and writers) feel capable of judging, our own capacity to judge them being just what we judge in them. 10. For the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, see Dennis Danielson’s argument that God is the one agent in the universe without free will, in Milton’s Good God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 11. Flesch, Generosity and the Limits of Authority, 247–66. 12. John Milton, De doctrina Christiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 79; hereafter cited by page number in the text. 13. In Dante angels have no memory because they have no experience of time or change. Narrative is not an angelic experience. In Milton, of course, it is, but I do not think it is a divine experience. 14. Readers of Stanley Cavell’s work on knowing and acknowledgment, such as “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 238–66,

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Notes to Pages 155–61

should be able to note the similarities but also considerable differences between my perspective and his.

NOTES TO FEROLI, “RETHINKING ‘SHEE FOR GOD IN HIM’ ” 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 4:299; hereafter cited in the text by book and line number. 2. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 224. Key articles and books in this debate include Marcia Landy, “Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, vol. 2 (1972), 3–18; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton on Women — Yet Once More,” in Milton Studies, vol. 6 (1974), 3–20; Marcia Landy, “Milton and the Modern Reader,” in Milton Studies, vol. 9 (1976), 3–33; Joan Malory Webber, “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, vol. 14 (1980), 3–24; Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321–47; Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost,” in Re-membering Milton, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson and Mary Nyquist (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99–127; James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); John Guillory, “From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 68–88; Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Demystifying Disguises: Adam, Eve, and the Subject of Desire,” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 237–58; and Louis Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), 125. All biblical quotations come from the King James Version. 4. Nyquist, “Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” 6. 5. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, vol. 1, trans. Rev. John King (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1948), 96; see also 1 Corinthians 11:7–9 and 1 Timothy 2:11–14; William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (Cambridge, 1600), 236.

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Notes to Pages 161–64 255 6. Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 78–79. 7. John Milton, Christian Doctrine, trans. John Carey, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 6:320. The Complete Prose Works is hereafter cited as YP followed by volume and page number. 8. By contrast, Calvin views Adam’s rib as something “taken from” him or “lost” in the service of gaining “a far richer reward . . . a faithful associate of life” (Commentaries, 133). For more on Milton and Eve’s creation, see Williams, Common Expositor, 87. 9. Milton observes similarly in Tetrachordon, “Neverthelesse man is not to hold her [woman] as a servant, but receives her into a part of that empire which God proclaims him to, though not equally, yet largely, as his own image and glory: for it is no small glory to him, that a creature so like him, should be made subject to him” (YP 2:589). 10. For the privileged status of the human mind in Milton’s vision of God, see Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse, and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 64. 11. Calvin, Commentaries, 95. 12. Perkins, An Exposition, 240. 13. Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 209. 14. James Nayler, Love to the Lost, in Works of James Nayler, 4 vols., ed. Licia Kuenning (Farmington, Maine: Quaker Heritage Press, 2007), 3:50–51. 15. John Whitehead, The Enmitie between the Two Seeds (London, 1655), 5. 16. Nayler, Love to the Lost, 52. 17. Edward Burrough, A Declaration to All the World of Our Faith, in Early Quaker Writings 1650–1700, ed. Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973), 301. 18. For more on Puritan responses to Quaker claims of perfection, see Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 92–107, and David Loewenstein, “Treason against God and State: Blasphemy in Milton’s Culture and Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176–98. 19. Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 124.

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Notes to Pages 164–69

20. Whitehead, Enmitie between the Two Seeds, 8. 21. Edward Grubb, The Historic and the Inward Christ: A Study in Quaker Thought (London: Headley Brothers, 1914), 51. 22. Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, 148. 23. Grubb, The Historic and the Inward Christ, 51, 5. For more on Quaker ideas of divine inspiration and self, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136, 161–62. 24. George Fox, Concerning Sons and Daughters, 2nd ed. (London, 1661), 11. Milton keeps faith with Paul and insists, “Women . . . are instructed to keep silent in the church” (Christian Doctrine, YP 6:609). 25. Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 150, 147. 26. For more on the postscript, see my Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 172. 27. William G. Bittle, James Nayler (Richmond, Iowa: Friends United Press, 1986), 104; John Deacon, An Exact History of the Life of James Nayler (London, 1657), 35–36/44 (p. 36 is mispaginated as p. 44). 28. Quoted in Ralph Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d in His Chair of Pestilence (London, 1656), 16, 14. 29. The precise date of O England is unclear. Wing proposes that it was published sometime between 1656 and 1665. Recent scholarship by Licia Kuenning, Rosemary Moore, Kate Peters, and Bernadette Smith provides evidence for a date of 1656 or 1657. See Kuenning, Works of James Nayler, 3:585; Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 38; Peters, Print Culture, 247; and Smith, Martha Simmon[d]s 1624–1665 (York: Sessions Book Trust, 2009), 37–44. 30. James Nayler, Martha Simmonds, Hannah Stranger, William Tomlinson, O England; thy time is come, in Kuenning, Works, 3:586, 586–87, 589. 31. While I emphasize the authorship of Simmonds and Nayler, Hannah Stranger and William Tomlinson also contributed meditations to O England. 32. Nayler et al., O England, 595, 596. 33. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 201. 34. James Nayler, A Few Words Occasioned by a Paper . . . Together with a Call to Magistrates, Minister, Lawyers, and People to Repentance, in Kuenning, Works, 1:139.

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Notes to Pages 170–80 257 35. Margaret Fell, Womens Speaking Justified (1667; repr., Los Angeles: The Augustan Reprint Society, 1979), 3; hereafter cited in the text. 36. While it is not within the scope of this essay to elaborate this point, it should be noted that Womens Speaking Justified represents something of a departure from “standard” Quaker discourse about the relationship between Christ and the individual believer. Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, comments on “the impersonality of the Inward Christ” and suggests that this “reflects the basic Quaker experience, which was surrender to God’s will rather than discipleship to a risen Lord” (145). As compared with much Quaker writing, the Christ who emerges in Womens Speaking Justified has a strong personality. Moreover, the text as whole emphasizes “women’s discipleship,” according to Margaret Olofson Thickstun, “Writing the Spirit: Margaret Fell’s Feminist Critique of Pauline Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 2 (1995): 274. 37. Jane Donawerth has demonstrated that Margaret Fell’s transcriptions of Scripture in Womens Speaking Justified were constructed from memory and from a composite of different translations. For this reason, I have elected to quote Fell’s transcriptions of Scripture verbatim. See “Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no. 2 (2006): 993. 38. See Womens Speaking Justified, 4, 11, 17, and my Political Speaking Justified, 174–75. 39. For a longer consideration of how Fell links female sexuality and visionary authority, see my Political Speaking Justified, 148–95. 40. Indeed, after viewing the many shapes of death later in the poem, Adam himself will query why being in the image of God is not a sufficient hedge against illness and physical torment (PL 11.507–14). Michael will respond that the divine image “Forsook them” when they instead chose to “serve ungovern’d appetite” (11.516, 517). 41. For a compelling argument about the collaborative nature of Adam and Eve’s spirituality, see Amy Dunham Stackhouse, “Disseminating the Author: Milton and the Trope of Collaboration” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1998), 145. 42. For more on the correspondence between these two passages, see Barbara Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 277. 43. Ibid., 277. 44. In a related reading, Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality, 244, suggests that the dream represents a metaphorical space apart in which God directly teaches (without the intercession of a husband) not

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Notes to Pages 181–97

just Eve but all women about the trials of childbirth, trials that women must endure for the prophecy to be fulfilled. 45. For another approach to the relationship between Milton’s gender hierarchy, and appearance and reality, see Martin, “Demystifying Disguises,” 241–42.

NOTES TO THICKSTUN, “FAME, SHAME, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY IN SAMSON AGONISTES” 1. See, for example, R. B. Jenkins, Milton and the Theme of Fame (The Hague: Mouton, 1973); Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2. “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 260–61. 3. Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: Moral Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 69. 4. Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign (Riverdale, N.Y.: Baen Books, 1999), 386. 5. All quotations from Milton’s poetry are taken from John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957). Quotations from Milton’s prose are from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as YP followed by volume and page number. 6. Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 56. 7. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 167. 8. Joan Bennett, “A Reading of Samson Agonistes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 228. 9. John Ulreich, “‘Incident to All Our Sex’: The Tragedy of Dalila,” in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 188. 10. Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223.

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Notes to Pages 197–216 259 11. Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Dalila, Misogyny, and Milton’s Christian Liberty of Divorce,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. 12. Jenkins, Milton and the Theme of Fame, 62. 13. Cedric C. Brown, “Horatian Signatures: Milton and Civilized Community,” in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 329.

NOTES TO REVARD, “SATAN IN PARADISE REGAINED” 1. See Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 325–26. Also see John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 575–76. The question, Rogers argues, is not who the Son is, but who the Son was. Jesus knows he is Messiah and Son of God from the time he is 12 years old (594). Also see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic (Providence, R.I., Brown University Press, 1966), 135. 2. All quotations of Milton are from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). 3. See PL 10.179–81: “Between Thee and the Woman I will put / Enmity, and between thine and her Seed; / Her Seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel.” 4. As Milton explains in De doctrina Christiana, in Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 963, it is the function of the Father to proclaim the Son, not the Son to proclaim himself. 5. Mary Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 39, 157–58, astutely observes that Satan’s appeals for and denials of hope are self-centered and not God-centered. 6. See C. A. Patrides, “The Salvation of Satan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28, no. 4 (1967): 467–78. Also see C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979). 281–82. 7. Matthew and Mark only differ slightly. In Matthew, Jesus begins, “Get thee hence, Satan,” but in Luke “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Both then cite the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Matt. 4:10; Luke 4:8). 8. See, for example, Elizabeth Pope, Paradise Regained (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 83–98; Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 312–21; William B. Hunter Jr., “The Obedience of Christ in Paradise Regained,” in Calm of Mind, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich Jr.

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(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), 235–57; Charles A. Huttar, “The Passion of Christ in Paradise Regained,” ELN 19 (Fall 1982): 236–60; Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1986), 262–67; James H. Sims, “Jesus and Satan as Readers of Scripture in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies, vol. 32, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 187–215. 9. See Job 1:6: “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan was among them.” In De doctrina Christiana (Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 945– 46), Milton discusses how both the names “God” and “Son of God” may be applied to men and angels. He notes that the Son is entitled to the name of “God” both in the capacity of a messenger and a judge. See also Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes,” 331–32. 10. Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 72–73, has rightly called the temptation of the pinnacle a theophanic moment that confirms the Son’s sacrificial office and prepares for his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. 11. The Greek reads, “Εἰ ὑιὸς εἶ τοῦ θεοῦ” (If you are son of God) (Luke 4:9). My thanks to Matthew Stallard for calling my attention to the missing article in the original Greek. 12. See Russell Hillier’s comments on the final temptation as a testing of Satan: “ ‘O what a Mask was there, what a Disguise!’: The Mechanism of Satanic Defeat in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies, vol. 49, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 167–91. 13. See Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 316. Also, as Hillier, “ ‘O what a Mask,’ ” 191n31, points out, Thomas Taylor in the seventeenth century interpreted the phrase “the Lord thy God” as Christ referring to himself, as though Christ had said, “Thou shalt not tempt me.” 14. Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory,” 605. 15. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 90–91. 16. The Son’s victory on the pinnacle reclaims the territory of the air usurped by Satan. See Ira Clark, “Christ on the Tower in Paradise Regained,” Milton Quarterly 8 (1974): 104–07. 17. As Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes,” 334, asserts, the Son regains paradise by his humanity rather than his divinity. 18. See Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 318. 19. See ibid., 320–21; Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory,” 607–08. Rogers further adds, “On the central question whether either Satan or the Son possesses in the end full knowledge of the Son’s past relation to Satan, the poem is as maddingly agnostic as it is on many another important matter” (611–12).

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Notes to Pages 223–28 261 20. See the discussion of Luke 10:18 and its connection with Isaiah 14:12 in Stella Revard, The War in Heaven (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 32–34. 21. See Hillier, “‘O what a Mask,’” 182.

NOTES TO DUROCHER, “HERMES’S BLESSED RETREAT” 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 6.289–90, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957); all quotations from Milton’s poetry are taken from this edition, hereafter cited in the text. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 99–107, discusses this hermeneutic conflict. 2. As does Wendy Olmsted, “Emotion as Defined by the Discourse of Honour: Spiritual Warfare and Rhetorical Agon in Paradise Lost,” chapter 6, The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 130. 3. Satan’s offer bears at least a verbal resemblance to the title of Raymond Waddington’s study, The Mind’s Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), which explores the minor epics of another Renaissance poet, George Chapman. 4. John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:246. All quotations from Milton’s prose are from this edition, hereafter cited as YP followed by volume and page number. 5. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958; rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Faber & Faber, 1967), 81–82, discusses the contributions on this topos of Fulgentius, Mythologiae II.i; Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis; Peele’s Arraignment of Paris (1584); and particularly, Ficino’s writings to Lorenzo de’ Medici on the triplex vita. 6. On the one hand, George Sensabaugh, “Milton on Learning,” Studies in Philology 43 (1946): 258–72, maintains that the Son’s rejection of pagan learning is out of character with Milton’s own views; on the other, Irene Samuel, “Milton on Learning and Wisdom,” PMLA 64 (1949): 708–23, argues that Milton’s commendation of learning remains constant, and that “he speaks learnedly throughout” his career (722). Perhaps taking a kind of middle ground between such views, Douglas Bush, “Paradise Lost” in Our Time (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1945), argues that Christ’s disparagement of Greek culture in Paradise Regained hardly “represents a barbarous hostility to the classics.” On the contrary, Bush writes, “Milton is simply asserting, with

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an earnestness born of ripened insight, his lifelong hierarchy of values” (51). In that hierarchy the knowledge of God and the ultimate ends of life always rank higher than the natural, scientific, or ethical knowledge that Greek culture can supply, as Bush points out. “To know any thing distinctly of God, and of his true worship,” Milton writes in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), constitutes “the only high valuable wisdom indeed” (YP 1:801). Greek philosophy or pagan literature would certainly rank below that wisdom for both the Son and Milton. 7. Ryan Netzley, “How Reading Works: Hermeneutics and Reading Practice in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies, vol. 49, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 148. 8. At the 1991 Conference on John Milton, a respondent to John Mulryan’s paper making the point that Jesus in this scene is duplicitous, famously said, “Are you calling Jesus a liar?” 9. See Donald Swanson, “Milton’s Scholarly Jesus in Paradise Regained,” Cithara 27 (1988): 3–10, and Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained: A Biblical and Patristic Resolution,” in Milton Studies, vol. 27, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 243–61. 10. A further reason to question the Son’s denigration of Socrates in book 4 is that in book 3 Jesus praises Socrates for dying as a martyr to truth (PR 3.96–98) and places him in the company of Job, as Swanson and Mulryan point out (ibid., 255). For the view that Milton was against humility, see Richard Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 11. See “Ixion,” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 561. Swanson and Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt,” 259, compare Natale Conti’s account in Mythologiae VI, 16. 12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 12.504–06, 2 vols., trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 2:216. 13. Rolfe Humphries, trans., Ovid: Metamorphoses (1955; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 300. 14. George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (1633), ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 564. 15. In addition to the allusion to Ixion discussed here, David Norbrook, “Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” in Milton Studies, vol. 42, “Paradise Regained” in Context: Genre, Politics, Religion, ed. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 122–48, argues that

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Notes to Page 235 263 Milton repeatedly alludes to pagan literature to articulate and support a continuing republican perspective during the Restoration. Jesus’ heroism in the desert generally parallels that of the Stoic Cato from Lucan’s Pharsalia, Norbrook writes (136), whereas Milton’s allusion to Hercules and Antaeus after the Son’s triumph over Satan’s last temptation draws a specific connection between the republican Cato and a Stoic Hercules. Overall, Norbrook concludes, Milton’s “poem does not so much repudiate classicism as reclaim and rework its republican traditions” (138). 16. See the headnote to the ode to Rouse in John Carey’s edition, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 302. 17. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspré,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 222–23; cited in William Shullenberger, Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton’s “Comus” as Initiation (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 31–32.

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About the Contributors RICHARD J. DUROCHER, who died in November 2010, was professor of English at St. Olaf College. He is the author of Milton and Ovid (1985) and Milton Among the Romans (2001). He has published essays on Dante, Spenser, and Bradstreet as well as Milton. He received an NEH fellowship in 2007 to complete a study of Milton’s representation of the emotions. At the time of his death, DuRocher was a member of the editorial board for Milton Quarterly, a contributor to the Milton Variorum project, and editor for the Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies series at Duquesne University Press. MARY C. FENTON is professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her essays on Milton have been published inSEL, Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, and as book chapters. She is author of Milton’s Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (2006), and coeditor with Louis Schwartz of Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton (2011) and Reading, Ruin, and Repair: Milton, History, and Poetics (2012). She served as the 2011 president of The Milton Society of America. TERESA FEROLI is associate professor of English at Polytechnic Institute of NYU in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of

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Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (2006) and editor of a multi-volume facsimile edition of the tracts of Lady Eleanor Davies, forthcoming from Ashgate Press. WILLIAM FLESCH is professor of English at Brandeis University. He is the author of Comeuppance (2008), Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton (1992), and the Facts on File Companion to N ineteenth Century British Poetry (2009). HUGH JENKINS is professor of English at Union College. Recent publications include “‘Quid nomine populi intelligi velimus’: Defining the People in Milton’s ‘Second Defense’“ ( Milton Studies 2006) and “Shrugging off the Norman Yoke: Milton’s History of Britain and the Levellers” ( ELR 1999). He is currently working on a study called Milton and the People. BARBARA K. LEWALSKI is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of History and Literature and of English Literature at Harvard University. Recent books include The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000), an original language edition of Paradise Lost (2007) and (forthcoming) an edition of Milton’s Shorter Poems ( volume 3) for the multivolume Oxford edition of Milton’s Complete Works. DIANE MCCOLLEY is Professor II Emeritus from Rutgers University, Camden, N ew Jersey. Her books are Milton’s Eve (1983), A Gust for Paradise (1993) , Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (2007), and Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (2007). STELLA P. REVARD is Professor Emerita of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She is an Honored Scholar of the

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About the Contributors

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Milton Society of America and past president of the International Association of N eo-Latin Studies. Recent books include Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode: 1450–1700 (2001), Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700 (2009), and an edition — Milton’s Shorter Poems, in original spelling and punctuation (2009). MARGARET OLOFSON THICKSTUN is the Jane Watson Irwin Professor of English at Hamilton College. She is the author of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (1988) and Milton’s Paradise Lost: Moral Education (2007). GORDON TESKEY, professor of English at Harvard University, is author of Allegory and Violence (1996) and of Delirious Milton (2006), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award. He is editor of the Norton Critical edition of Paradise Lost (2005). JOSEPH WITTREICH is Distinguished Professor Emeritus from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. His most recent books are Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting “Samson Agonistes” (2002) and Why Milton Matters (2006). SUSANNE WOODS is provost and Professor of English Emerita at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and has also taught at the University of Hawaii, Franklin & Marshall College, and for many years at Brown University where she founded the Women Writers Project. Her publications include Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (1985) and Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (1999).

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Index

Abdiel, 95, 151; debate with Satan, 90–92, 153, 225 accommodation, 83, 88 Achinstein, Sharon, 58 Adam, 103, 153, 154; banishment of, 25–26, 28, 154; conversations with God, 78, 87–88, 124–25, 227; and Creation myth, 116, 118–27, 161–62, 170–71; and Eve’s creation, 123–28, 161–62, 175, 255n8; and gender hierarchy, 121–23, 127–29; and God’s image, xxiii, 175–77, 257n40; and God’s redemption, 96–97; judgment of Eve by, 153, 171; repentance and return of, xii, 184; spiritual dependence on Eve, 177–78, 181 air, 221, 260n16 Althusser, Louis, 235 Ames, William, 160 Amner, John, 22–23, 27, 29 annunciations, 23, 26–30 apocatastasis, 213–14 Areopagitica, 71, 81; truth in, 8, 15, 240n8; violence and dismemberment in, 5, 7–8, 15 Arianism, 82 Arminianism, 8, 82, 105, 240n9 army, English, 65–66 art: literary, 235; primitive, 54–55; and reason, 57; romantic pathos of, 46–47; and worship, 29

Artemidorus, 44 Ayers, Robert W., 62 Babylonian exile, 18–19 Bal, Mieke, 121 Barbour, Hugh, 164, 257n36 Bassano, Francesco, 20 Bate, Jonathan, 59 Beckett, Samuel, 46 Bennett, Joan, 188 Berchem, Nicolaes, 20 Bible. See Scripture biblical literalism, xxi, 80, 83, 99 Blake, William, 119 Blamires, Harry, 102 Blythe, Joan, 24 Bond, Edward, 36 Book of Common Prayer, 240n8 books and reading, xxv, 228–29, 230, 233, 235 Bradstreet, Anne, xi Brahe, Tycho, 114 Broadbent, J. B., 109 Bryson, Michael, xvi Burrough, Edward, 163 Bush, Douglas, 261–62n6 “A Call . . . to Repentance” (Nayler), 169 Calvin, John/Jean, xxiii, 160, 162, 255n8 Calvinism, 105, 139, 162, 163

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Index

Campion, Thomas, 18 Capel, Lord, 64 Carew, Thomas, 18 censorship, 7, 112–13 charity, 83–84, 85, 88, 93, 99 Charles I, 61, 66–67, 235 Charles II, xii Christian Doctrine. See De doctrina Christiana Christianity, 40, 42, 164, 213 Cicero, 69 classicism, 36, 42, 263n15 clothing and dress, xii, 208 community, 184, 201, 203 Comus, 253n7 Concerning Sons and Daughters (Fox), 165 conversation, 190, 191–92, 200–01, 203 Copernicanism, 112; Milton and, 108; and Ptolemaic system, 109, 114, 120; Raphael and, 105, 106, 108, 113, 120 Corns, Thomas N., 106 Corum, Richard, 109 cosmology, 103–04, 105, 109, 116, 120 Creation myth: Adam and, 116, 118–27, 161–62, 170–71; competing versions of in Genesis, 103–04, 112–13, 114–16, 119, 120–22, 131; of Eve, 118–19, 127–28, 161–62, 170, 175, 227, 255n8; gendering of, 115, 118–19, 160; Milton revision of, 116, 160, 161–62; Raphael account of, 109–10, 117–18, 119, 128–29, 130–31, 175–76; rival hermeneutics in Paradise Lost of, 108–11, 112–13, 117–26 Cromwell, Oliver, 28, 62, 68 Cromwell, Richard, 69 culture, 16, 29, 38, 235; knowledge of death and, 37; myth and, 119, 132; punishment and revenge in, 144 Curry, Walter Clyde, 106, 111

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D’Addario, Christopher, xvi Daiches, David, 33 Dalila, 12–13, 187, 189, 193–98 Danielson, Dennis, 108, 109 Dante, 155, 253n13 David, Gerard, 20 De architectura (Vitruvius), x death, 152, 202; Lycidas on, 35–42, 47; and punishment, 152; and soul, 40, 41–42, 50 De doctrina Christiana, 72, 82, 117, 151, 260n9; on Christian liberty, 84; on correct use of Scripture, xxi, 79–80; on Eve’s connection to God, 161, 178; on indwelling Spirit, 80–81 Defensio pro populo Anglicano: attacks Salmasius Latin, 61–62; composition of, 245n9; defense of tyrannicide in, 66–67; definition of army in, 65–66; dialectic of, xx, 58–59, 64; on factions, 62, 66, 67, 70–71; latinitas of, 59, 60, 70; 1658 revision to, xx, 58, 59, 61, 68–69, 70, 72 Defensio regia (Salmasius), 59–64, 66 Defensio secunda, 58, 60, 68, 71 Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (Herman), xvi dialectic, 57–59, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 72 dismemberment, 4; in Lycidas, 4, 5–7, 15; truth and, 10, 13–14 divine analogy, 110–11 divine image: Adam and, 175–77, 257n40; Eve and, 178–79, 180; gendering of, 160–62; Milton on, xxiii, 162–63, 174–75; Quakers on, 163–64; women and, 160, 171. See also God divine revelation, 77, 117, 118, 119. See also inspiration; Scripture divorce: Matthew 19:3–9 on, 80, 84, 173–74; Milton on, 82, 226–27 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 80, 226–27

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Index Donne, John, 169 dreams, 97–98, 180, 257–58n44 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 98 DuRocher, Richard J., vii–xiii, xxv, 115; “Building Pandemonium: Vitruvian Architecture in Paradise Lost,” x; “Careful Plowing: Culture and Agriculture in Paradise Lost,” ix–x; “‘Cropt by th’ Almighties hand’: Allegory as Theodicy in Anne Bradstreet’s Poems on Her Grandchildren,” xi; “Dante, Milton, and the Art of Visual Speech,” viii; “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles II,” xii; Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum, viii, ix–x; Milton and Ovid, viii, ix; Passionate Milton, ix, xi–xii; “‘Tears such as Angels weep’: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost,” xii; “Tradition and the Budding Individual Talent: Milton’s Paraphrase of Psalm 114,” xii–xiii; “The Wounded Earth in Paradise Lost,” x Eagleton, Terry, 117 Ecclesiastes, 229 Eclogues (Virgil), 44, 53 Edwards, Karen, 106–07 Eikonoklastes, 64 Empson, William, xvi Endgame (Beckett), 46 English revolution: execution of Charles I, 66–67; factions in, 62, 66, 67; as Good Old Cause, 69, 70, 246n26 Epistolae familiarum, 203 Erickson, Edward, 102 Euthyphro dilemma, 139 Evans, J. Martin, 127 Eve, xii, 103, 123, 153, 154, 183, 184; and access to God, 177–78,

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181; Adam’s judgment of, 153, 171; creation of, 118–19, 127–28, 161–62, 170, 175, 227, 255n8; God’s command to, 92–93; and God’s image, 178–79, 180; and history, 97, 125, 180; Satan and, 93–95, 129, 130; as subordinate and inferior, xxiii, 116, 121, 126, 177 Exile and Journey in SeventeenthCentury Literature (D’Addario), xvi experience, 47, 79, 135, 173, 174; as hermeneutic principle, 85, 94–97; and punishment, 143, 153, 154 factions, 62, 70–71, 72, 246n26 Fall, the, 25–26, 28, 154, 162, 171, 184–85; Quakers on, 163–64. See also original sin Fallon, Stephen, 102 fame: Milton’s youthful desire for, 183–84, 203; Samson desire for, xxiv, 183–90, 191, 197–98; Satan desire for, 183. See also reputation Fell, Margaret, xxiii, 160, 165, 177, 181; on women’s authority to preach and prophesy, 166, 169–74 Fenton, Mary C., vii–xiii, 259n5, 265 Filmer, Robert, 64–65 Fish, Stanley, 7–8, 48, 104, 107 Fletcher, Angus, 106, 108 Fox, George, 165 freedom, xvii, 4, 8–9, 56, 241n18; De doctrina Christiana on, 84; in Paradise Lost, viii, 110, 140; in Samson Agonistes, 11, 14, 16; and truth, 10, 14 free press, 8, 78 free will, 8, 85, 253n10 Fulton, Thomas, 240n9 Gabriel, 153 Galileo, 104, 112; Milton and, 108, 113

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Index

gender roles and distinctions, 121–24; competing versions in Genesis, 115, 123–24, 127–29; Fell on, 169–74; Quakers on, 165 Genesis, 88–89, 170–72; competing versions of Creation in, 103–04, 112–13, 114–16, 119, 120–22, 131; on Eve’s creation, 118–19; on God’s image, 160; on immanence of the divine, 159–60; on marriage and companionship, 84, 175. See also Scripture Geneva Bible, 105, 138, 143 gnosticism, 130 God: Adam dialogues with, 78, 87–88, 124–25, 227; as Captain, 167–68; commands to angels by, 78, 89–90; divine disposal of, 140–42; and human relationships, 184; “I am” expression by, 217–18; indwelling Spirit of, 80–81; Jesus as Son of, 206–07, 208, 217, 259n1; judgment of, 78, 95–97, 151, 154; and justice, 139–40, 143; Milton portrayal of, xii, xvi, xxi, 150–51; “Promis’d Seed” of, 96, 178–79, 180; and punishment, 152, 154–55; and reason, 82–83; and Satan, 91, 149, 153, 211; transcendence of, 83; and tree of knowledge, 78, 92–94; ways of, 138–40, 143. See also divine image Godhead, 11, 160 Golden Bough, The, 56 Greek philosophy, 231–32, 234–35 Grotius, Hugo, 240n9 Grubb, Edward, 164 Guibbory, Achsah, 197 guilt, 185, 186, 188, 211 Hale, John K., 67 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 136–37, 138, 150 Handl, Jacob, 23

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Hayley, William, 101 Hercules, 220–21, 263n15 heresy, 71, 84, 130 Herman, Peter C., xvi Hermes, 234–35, 236 Hesiod, 237 Hill, Christopher, 58 Hillier, Russell, 224 Histoire universelle du sieur d’Aubigné, 235 history: Adam and Eve and, 96, 97, 125, 180; Milton’s view of, 53–54; women and, 172, 178, 180, 181 Hobbes, Thomas, 244n8 Homans, Margaret, 118 Homer, 37, 60 Hughes, Merritt, 232 human subjectivity, 145, 152–55 Hume, Patrick, 113 Hunter, William B., 119 Hutchinson, Lucy, 98 identity, 53; of Jesus, 206–07, 208, 216–19, 222; Satan and, 208; and status, 186–87 idols, 24, 28–29, 199 Incarnation, 23, 91, 222 incertitude, 102, 132–33 inspiration: divine, 70, 72, 79, 164, 177; and memory, 109, 112, 118, 119–20, 131. See also divine revelation; Scripture integrity, 164, 171, 198, 202 intuition, 140, 147, 253n8 Jesus Christ: debate of, with Satan, xxiv, 77–78, 205, 207–13, 219, 223–24; exaltation of, 220; indwelling of, 164–65; on learning and knowledge, 228, 230, 231, 237; as liberator, 84; likened to Oedipus, 221–22; as Messiah, 216–17; and place, 19–21; Quaker beliefs on, 257n36; on reading, 228–29, 233; rejects Satan, 29–30, 206, 210,

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Index 227, 230; Satan as adversary to, 206, 218–19; Satan pleading with, 209–10; Satan’s temptations to, xxiv, 29–30, 206–07, 216, 219, 224; and Socrates, 231, 262n10; as Son of God, 206–07, 208, 217, 259n1; and women, 170, 172–74 Johnson, Samuel, 36, 44, 45 judgment: of Adam on Eve, 153, 171; God’s, 151, 154; Milton’s conception of, 11, 151; as narrative, 136, 155; in Paradise Lost, xxii, 78, 95–97, 147–54; Samson and, 142; Satan and, 147–48, 153 Judgment of Paris, 226 justice: divine and human, 148; and God’s ways, 139–40, 143; as human demand, 142–43, 153–54; and narrative, xxii, 145–47; and punishment, 142, 143–45; vindication and, 136 Kerrigan, William, 221 King, Edward, 41 King Lear (Shakespeare), 137 Knoppers, Laura, 186 knowledge: Jesus on, 229–30, 231; and religion, 81; Satan and Son sparring over, 225–28; tree of, 78, 92–94. See also learning Kolbrener, William, 132–33 Lactantius, xii Latin: Milton’s care and skill with, xx, 60, 67, 69, 71–72, 244–45n8; Salmasius attacked for, 61–62 Lawes, Henry, 18 learning, xxv, 227–28; Greek, 228, 230, 231–32, 234–35; Jesus view of, 227–28, 229–30; pagan, 229, 232, 236, 261–62n6. See also knowledge le Huray, Peter, 22, 28 Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, A (Rust), xxiv–xxv, 214

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Levin, Stanley, 16 Lewalski, Barbara K., 31, 58, 106, 108, 180 libraries, 235 Lieb, Michael, 11, 127, 260n10 Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, The, 71, 72 literature, 235 Lucretius, x Luke, Gospel of, 19, 22, 27, 215, 222, 223, 226, 259n7. See also Scripture Lycidas, 31–56; classicism of, xix, 5–6, 36, 42; death in, 35–42, 47, 49–51; framing device in, 51; geographic and cultural scope of, 31–32; high literary estimation of, xx, 31, 35, 46; imagery of, 4, 5–7, 15, 48, 49–51; language of, 243n2; multiple voices in, 47–48; pathos of, 33–34; place in, 48–49; Samuel Johnson criticisms of, 44, 45; sublimity of, 34; temporal dimension of, 32–33, 53; uncertainty and ambiguity in, 6, 47; violence and dismemberment in, 4, 5–7, 15; writing style in, 6–7, 35, 42 MacCallum, Hugh, 162–63 MacCormac, Earl, 16 Mack, Phyllis, 169 “Mansus,” 51 Marjara, Harinder Sing, 105 marriage, 174, 189; and Genesis, 84; Milton on, 226–27; of Samson, 192, 194, 196, 197 Marvell, Andrew, 77 Matthew, Gospel of, 18–19, 20, 215, 80, 84, 173–74, 259n7. See also Scripture McColley, Diane, 126 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 40 memory, 253n13; and inspiration, 109, 112, 118, 119–20, 131 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 232–33

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metaphor, 15–16 Michael, Archangel: and Adam, 5, 25–26, 55, 96, 257n40; artists’ representation of, 28 Milton (Blake), 119 Milton, John: as “adventurous inquirer,” xxii; ambiguity in, xviii, 107, 131; classicism of, x, 5, 36, 42; formidable learning of, 63; and Galileo, 108, 113; and Hermes, 234, 235, 236; Latin of, xx, 59, 60, 67, 70, 71–72, 244–45n8; literary ambitions of, 183–84, 203, 236; and pagan literature, 262–63n15; Renaissance art influence on, 20; and Virgil, x, xii, 60 Milton, John, and hermeneutics: biblical, xv, 4, 5, 77, 78–85, 98–99, 103, 105, 107, 219, 236; on cosmology and Creation, 103–04, 112–13, 114–16, 119, 120–22, 131; and Eve portrayals, 121, 126, 177–78, 180–81; principles of, 80–85, 85, 94–95, 96, 97; privileging Genesis 1 over 2, 114–16, 119, 121; privileging Luke over Matthew, 19, 29; Radzinowicz on, xviii, 3–4, 102; in Samson Agonistes, xv, xviii, 5, 78; Satan reconfigured, xxiv, 29, 154, 214–16, 224, 225; strategy and purpose of, xv–xvi, xvii, 11, 15, 98–99, 102 Milton, John, and literary technique and style: language of surmise, 9, 10, 111; metaphor use, 8, 16, 21, 64, 83, 89, 95, 221; negative constructions, 8–10, 240n10; primitivism, 54–55; rhetorical questions, 8, 9, 10, 47; temporal perspectivism, 53–54; verse, xvi, 6–7, 35, 51, 132; as wordsmith, 241n18 Milton, John, and philosophical and religious beliefs: antagonism

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toward prayer-book religion, 240n8; Arminianism of, 8, 105, 240n9; cosmological beliefs, 108, 116, 160, 161; on divine inspiration, 70, 72, 164; on free will, 8, 85; gender discourse of, 115, 160, 161; on God’s image, xxiii, 162–63, 174–75; on God’s ways, 138–39, 143; on human subjectivity, 145, 152–53, 154; on Jesus as liberator, 84; on judgment, 11, 151; on learning, 227–28, 236–37; monism of, 26, 98; opposes repressive Church orthodoxy, 7, 99; on passions, xi–xii, 45–46; on reason and choice, 8, 81–83; rejects biblical literalism, xxi, 80, 83, 99; on science and theology, 103, 114, 132–33; on suffering’s purposiveness, 7, 153, 180; on truth, 8, 10, 111–12, 115; view of history, 53–54 Milton, John, as polemicist and advocate: admonishment of Cromwell, 68; defense of freedom and liberty, xvii, 4, 8–9, 10, 16, 55, 241n18; defense of justice, 142–43, 153–54; defense of heresy, 71, 73, 84; defense of regicide, 66–67, 78; defense of Rump, 66; dialectics of, 57–58, 63, 67, 71, 72; on divorce, 82, 226–27; on English army, 65–66; on factions, 66, 67, 70–71, 246n26; and Good Old Cause, 69, 70; identification of, with the people, 58, 59, 63, 65–68, 69, 70, 71–72; opposition of, to censorship, 7, 113; opposition of, to patriarchal power, 64, 65; as pamphleteer, 69, 71; polemical career of, 78; as republican, 62–63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 78, 90, 263n15; as revolutionary, 58, 244n3; teaching of toleration by, 30, 81; on tyranny, 67, 69, 70

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Index Milton’s God (Empson), xvi Milton Studies, xii Milton studies and criticism: ecocritical, viii, x; historicist approaches to, 59; Milton seen as site of uncertainty, xvi, 102, 113–14, 132–33; on Milton’s use of Scripture, 105–08; Radzinowicz contributions to, xviii Mohamed, Feisal G., 126–27 monarchy, 62, 84, 85, 90, 91; and patriarchy, 64–65 monotheism, 151 Morrison, Toni, 103 Mulryan, John, 231 music, 27–28, 29, 42–43 narrative, 135–36, 145, 146, 147–54, 253n13 Nativity (David), 20 Nativity ode. See “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” nature, 49, 128; divine, 26, 47, 176, 177; personification of, 23, 24; poetry and, 45, 50; reason and, 81; and Scripture, 25 Nayler, James, 163, 166–69 Netzley, Ryan, 228, 229 Newton, Sir Isaac, 113 Newton, Thomas, 122 Norbrook, David, 263n15 Nowottny, Winifred, 15–16 Nyquist, Mary, 160 Obsequies to the Memory of Mr. Edward King, 41 Observations concerning the Originall of Government (Filmer), 64–65 “Ode to John Rouse,” 228, 230, 233–34 Odyssey (Homer), xv Oedipus, 221–22 O England; thy time is come (Simmonds and Nayler), 167–69, 256n29

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Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, 71, 81 Of True Religion, 203 “On the Circumcision,” 53 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” xix, 19, 20, 27–28, 29, 51; place and time in, 21–25, 53, 54 original sin, xxii, 162, 211. See also Fall, the Orpheus, 4, 5, 7, 13, 15 Ovid, ix, xv, 5, 33, 232–33, 237 “O Ye Little Flock” (Amner), 22–23, 27, 29 paganism, 24, 53; learning, 229, 232, 236, 261–62n6; literature, 236, 263n15 Paradise Lost, 77–99, 101–33, 135–55, 159–81; biblical hermeneutics in, xxi, 78, 101–02, 105, 117–31; Christocentric theology in, 103, 114; contradictions and inconsistencies in, 105, 117, 123; Creation accounts in, 108–11, 112–13, 117–26; divine analogy in, 110–11; divine image in, 178–79, 180; freedom in, viii, 110, 140; gendered hierarchies in, 115, 123–24, 127–29, 159; God’s declarations in, 78, 85–88, 89–90, 92–94, 95–97, 151–52; human subjectivity in, 152–53, 154; justice in, xii, 153–54; Milton’s invocation to, 138, 142; narrative judgment in, xxii, 147–54; narrative techniques in, xi, 131, 145–46; pagan gods in, 24; passion in, xi; place in, x, 25–26; portrayal of God in, xii, xvi, xxi, 150–51; Satan in, xv, 90–92, 93–95, 154, 206; truth in, 55, 108, 111–12, 149; violence in, 4–5 Paradise Regained, xii, xxv, 149, 184, 205–24, 225–37;

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comparisons of, with Paradise Lost, 210–12, 214, 220; narrator’s voice in, 131–32; portrayal of Satan in, 206–07, 211–13; Radzinowicz on, 77–78, 205–06; rival hermeneutics in, 77–78, 101–02, 225; Satan’s temptations of Jesus in, 29–30, 206–07, 210, 219, 227, 230; views of learning in, 227–32, 234–35 passions, xi–xii, 11, 83, 98 “Passion, The” 51, 53 pathos, 33–34, 45–47 patriarchy, 64–65 Patrides, C. A., 214 Pattison, Mark, 31 Il Penseroso, 29 people, 246n16; Milton’s view of, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71 Perkins, Pheme, 130 Perkins, William, xxiii, 160–61, 162 Peters, Kate, 165 Petrarch, 46 Picciotto, Joanna, 102, 104, 106, 108 Pindar, 232 place and time, 19–26 plot, xxii, 136–38, 141, 148 Poems: Both English and Latin, 29, 203, 234 poetry, 6, 52; classical, 43–44; metaphysical, 36–37; passion and pathos in, 45–46; and religion, 35; and song, 42–43 Pound, Ezra, 46 pride, 184; of Samson, xxiv, 188, 189, 192, 200; of Satan, 206, 219, 220 projection, 51 Prolusion 7, 25 prophecy, 41, 79, 112, 165; on Seed of the woman, 172, 178, 190, 207, 208; and women, 170, 178 protevangelium, 95–96 providence, 53, 163 Ptolemy, 108, 109, 114, 120 punishment: death and, 152; God and, 152, 154–55; and vindication, 143–44

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Puritans and Puritanism, 79, 164 Quakers, 163–64, 165–66, 257n36 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 18, 59, 60; and DuRocher, vii, viii, xiii; on Milton’s dialectic, 57–58, 71; on Milton’s heresies, 72–73; on Milton’s hermeneutics, xviii, 3–4, 102; on Paradise Lost, 102; on Paradise Regained, 77–78, 205–06; on Samson Agonistes, 11, 12, 58, 187–88; works: “How Milton Read the Bible: The Case of Paradise Regained,” 3; Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, xiii, 3; Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind, 3, 57–58, 187–88 Ransom, John Crowe, 243n2 Raphael, 105, 150, 153, 229; as Copernican, 105, 106, 108, 113, 120; Creation account by, 109–10, 117–18, 119, 128–29, 130–31, 175–76; on Eve, 127, 128–29, 177–78 Raymond, Joad, 105 Readie and Easie Way, The, 59, 71, 85 reading. See books and reading reason: and art, 57; as hermeneutic principle for Milton, 81–83, 88 Reason of Church-Government, The, 119–20, 236, 262n6 redemption, 23, 95–96, 97, 105, 172, 181. See also salvation; vindication Reformation, 28–29 religion: Christocentric, 103, 114; knowledge and truth in, 81; pagan, 23–24, 45; place-based, 25; and poetry, 35; prayer-book, 240n8; and science, 106, 110, 117, 132–33. See also theology Renaissance, 27, 52 repentance: Adam and Eve and, 96, 184; godly sorrow and, 185, 188;

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Index by Samson, 190–91, 202; Satan and, 214–15 reputation, 184, 185–86, 187, 198, 199. See also fame Richardson, Jonathan, and son, 109, 113–14, 117 Riders to the Sea (Synge), 36 Rogers, John, 206, 220, 259n1, 260n19 Rosen, Stanley, 110 Rouse, John, 233–34 Rust, George, xxiv–xxv, 214 Salmasius, 59–64, 66 salvation, 49, 50, 85–86, 142; Eve and, 180, 181; Milton’s theology of, 8, 79, 103; Satan and, 214, 215, 224. See also redemption Samson: desire for fame of, xxiv, 183–84, 185–90, 191, 197–98; destruction of Philistine temple by, 14, 190, 202; encounter of, with Dalila, 12–13, 193–98; and integrity, 198, 202; and judgment, 142; marriage of, to Dalila, 187, 189, 192, 194–95, 196, 197; pride of, xxiv, 188, 189, 192, 200; repentance by, 190–93, 199–200, 202; and shame, xxiv, 188, 193, 197, 202; and suffering, 183–84, 187, 188, 190, 193 Samson Agonistes, 11–15, 58, 183–203; ambiguity in, xviii, 11; community and conversation in, xxiii–xxiv, 184, 189, 191–92, 201, 202, 203; divine disposal in, 141–42; freedom in, 11, 14, 16; on God’s ways, 138–39; hermeneutics in, xv, xviii, 5, 78; identity and status in, 186–87; impulses to violence in, 13 Samuel, Irene, 261n6 Sandys, George, 232–33 Satan: Abdiel debate with, 90–92, 153, 225; claims to be son of God, 217–18; and Eve, 93–95, 129, 130; fall of, 211–12, 220, 222–24; and fame and glory, 183, 210–11;

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Gabriel and, 153; God and, 149, 153, 211; and grace, 213–14; hopelessness and resignation by, 212, 259n5; as Jesus’ adversary, 206, 218–19; Jesus’ debate with, xxiv, 77–78, 205, 207–13, 219, 223–24; Jesus’ rejection of, 29–30, 206, 210, 227, 230; and judgment, 147–48, 153; Milton’s reconfiguring of, xxiv, 154, 214–15; motivations of, 206–07; pride and envy of, 206, 219, 220; punishment of Adam and Eve by, 149, 153; and redemption, 181; repentance and plaintiveness of, 209–10, 214–15; and salvation, 214, 215, 224; selftrivialization of, 154; temptations to Jesus by, xxiv, 29–30, 206–07, 216, 219, 224; vengeance desire of, 148–49, 150, 153 science, 104, 105, 110, 114; and religion, 103, 106, 110, 117, 132–33 Scripture: 165; and biblical literalism, xxi, 80, 83, 99; Corinthians, 170, 185; Deuteronomy, 84; Exodus, 217; Galatians, 165; Genesis, 84, 88–89, 170–72; Hebrews, 6–7, 44; Isaiah, 26–27; Job, 217, 260n9; John, 164, 217; Luke, 19, 222, 223, 226; Mark, 217; Matthew, 80, 84, 173–74; Milton hermeneutics in, xv, xxi, 3–4, 19, 77, 78–85, 98–99, 107, 236; and Milton privileging Luke over Matthew, 19, 29; Milton scholarship on, 105–08; and nature, 25; Psalms, xix, 17–18, 19, 138, 143; Revelation, 138, 212; Romans, 82; Timothy, 151, 170. See also divine revelation; Genesis; inspiration; Luke, Gospel of; Matthew, Gospel of Sea, The (Bond), 36 Second Defense. See Defensio secunda

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sectaries, 79 Sensabaugh, George, 261n6 shamanism, 45 shame, 183; and guilt, 188; Samson and, xxiv, 188, 193, 197, 202; and sorrow, 185 Simmonds, Martha, xxiii, 160, 165–69 Smith, Nigel, 58, 244n3 social status, 184, 188, 195, 197; and identity, 186–87 Socrates, 139, 231, 262n10 song, 42–43 sorrow, 50, 185, 186, 188 Soulages, Pierre, 38 souls, 33, 145, 161, 164; of dead, 40, 41–42, 50 Stevens, Wallace, 43 Strier, Richard, 184 suffering, 7, 153, 180; Samson and, 187, 188, 190, 193 Svendsen, Kester, 104–05, 114 Swanson, Donald, 231 Synge, J. M., 36 Taylor, Thomas, 260n13 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The, 64, 90 Teskey, Gordon, 101 Tetrachordon, 178, 255n9 Their Maker’s Image, xii Theocritus, 44 theology, 103, 114, 159–60. See also religion Thickstun, Margaret Olofson, 107 Tomson, Laurence, 143 traduction, 161 Trinitarianism, 82 truth, xvii, 8, 173, 240n8; in Areopagitica, 8, 15, 240n8; books’ role in search for, 230; dismembered, 10, 13–14; learning and, 228; in Paradise Lost, 55, 104, 108, 111–12, 115, 149; as processive, xxii, 112–13 Tyranny of Heaven: The Rejection of God as King, The (Bryson), xvi

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Ulreich, John, 194 Uriel, 88, 109–10, 119 Victoria, Tomas Luis de, 23 vindication, 253n6; false, 144; as human starting point, 155; justice and, 136; and narrative, 135–36, 145, 146; and plot, xxii, 136–38, 141; and punishment, 143–44; and vengeance, 145–46, 149. See also redemption violence, xix, xx, 4–5, 11–15 Virgil, 44, 46, 53; Milton and, x, xii, 60 Vitruvius, x war, 27–28 Whitehead, John, 163, 164 Winstanley, Gerrard, 72 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 137 wisdom: Adam-Eve and, 125, 130; eternal, 112; true, 231, 232–33; worldly, 226 Wittreich, Joseph, 11, 12 women: and childbirth, 258n44; and Creation of Eve, 118–19, 127–28, 161–62, 255n8; Fell on, 169–74; and female beauty, 174; Genesis on gender roles of, 115, 121–24, 127–29; as inferior and subordinate, 116, 121, 126, 128, 129, 177, 178, 180; Jesus and, 170, 172–74; man’s desire for, 175, 177; and prophecy, 170, 178; and providential history, 172, 178, 180, 181; as spiritual equals, 165–66, 169, 171. See also gender roles and distinctions Women’s Speaking Justified (Fell), 166, 169–74, 177, 257nn36–37 Wordsworth, William, 25, 45, 242n9 The Wrath of God (Lactantius), xii Yeats, William Butler, 46

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