Milton's inward Jerusalem: Paradise Lost and the Ways of Knowing 9783111632513, 9783111252346

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STUDIES

IN ENGLISH Volume LXXII

LITERATURE

MILTON'S INWARD JERUSALEM Paradise

Lost

and the Ways of Knowing

by FREDERICK PLOTKIN

1971

MOUTON THE H A G U E • PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 76-159468

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

To My Parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among the philosophers who have influenced me more than others in the preparation of this book I should mention Buber, Husserl, Ingarden, Kant, and Rashi. I should certainly mention my gratitude for the opportunity to develop much of this material with the help of my graduate students in my seminar in Puritanism and Phenomenology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I am grateful to many of my colleagues who have been kind enough to examine my manuscript at various stages in its history. To my judicious and patient typist, Mrs. Mary Dryden, I owe special thanks. The substance as well as the form of the book has been radically modified in the light of painstaking and penetrating criticism I received from my learned friends Professors Lionel Abel and C. L. Barber. Finally, I must record the incalculable debt I owe to the inspired and searching comments and warm friendship of Professor Jerome Mazzaro, and to the civilizing contact and vitalizing conversations of Professors James Clifford, Marjorie Nicolson, Howard Schless, and Edward Tayler, my teachers and friends. The writing of a major section of this book was made possible by a Faculty Research Fellowship from the S.U.N.Y. Research Foundation, and the publication of this book was assisted in part by a grant from the Publication Committee of the S.U.N.Y. Research Foundation. No measure of the debt due to my wife, Diana Shulamith, is possible; for in addition to offering invaluable critical advice and being a witness to my daily trials, she has been a constant source of support and inspiration. To my children, Jennifer, David, and

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Avrom, I offer my thanks for their patience. Try as I may, I cannot adequately express what I owe to the faith and wisdom of my beloved parents to whom this book is dedicated. State University of New York at Buffalo March 1971

F. P.

PREFACE

This book will avoid a number of traditional problems from Milton criticism. Epic and dramatic issues will hardly be mentioned, and very little will be said about Satan or science. I am concerned in the main with only one topic: ontological ideas concerning reality and existence in Paradise Lost. This concern explains why I will restrict my discussion to problems related to thought, knowledge, time, and perception. It also explains why at times I will be obliged to go rather deeply into the logical problems raised by Milton's ontology; for if my intuition is correct, the critical controversies concerning the nature of Adam's existence before and after the Fall arise chiefly as a result of certain disagreements about the scope, structure, and technique of Milton's presentation of nature and existence. Nor will this book deal with a number of currently fashionable topics in Milton criticism and scholarship. I will say nothing on whether or not the reader of Paradise Lost is in conflict with the assertions of God, or whether or not the poem is a Protestant epic, the experiencing of which results in self-revelation. I will not discuss these points because I am convinced that there is nothing to be discussed. The correct answers to these questions seem to be so obvious that I simply take them for granted in writing this book. The problem of the reader's knowledge of other minds, particularly the problem of other minds represented in a literary masterpiece of the Renaissance, is of quite a different sort: it is, both from the literary and philosophical point-of-view, interesting and difficult. Though I have undertaken here to say something of a prefa-

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tory nature, and notwithstanding the caveats mentioned above, I am convinced that in matters relating to the criticism of great literary works of art pronouncements are of little use. Reflection has inevitably separated me from the opinions prevailing today concerning Milton's poetic art, and an announcement here disclosing the results of my reflection would be a thought as abrupt as an island, and an abstraction in the worst sense of the word; by the same token, it would be unintelligible. So I propose to begin this inquiry not at the end, and not with a proposal for inquiry, but at the beginning, with what was for me yesterday, the starting point. From this point, I shall move steadily ahead towards a goal which I shall not now spell out because it would not be understood. The complex philosophic problems of Paradise Lost demand a tactic very much like the one employed by the Israelites for the taking of Jericho and its secret and innermost rose gardens: making no direct attack, moving towards the target in concentric circles, their radius growing shorter and shorter and developing a greater degree of tension, circling slowly along the outsides of the abstract and indifferent spirals towards a center which is frighteningly intimate, tightening the curve gradually but steadily while holding alive in the air the dramatic and continuous sound of trumpets. In this book, or ideological siege, it is my intention that the immanent melody of Milton's idea of the transcendent will keep alert in the reader's mind the consciousness of those problems of being that form Milton's drama of ideas. What I want to do, then, is to take the philosophic activity in Paradise Lost, the poem's philosophizing itself, and submit it to basic analysis. If, as I deal with it, I happen to fall through a trap door into the most human of the human, into the damp and palpitating heart of reality, and there find myself pursuing problems of knowledge or of ignorance, of what we know or think we know about seeing, or asking, or finding, this will be because it has to be that way, because the limits and the exigencies of the problem I have set myself demand it, and not because I invent problems out of whole cloth, or think them out to their end in advance. The one thing I advertize in advance is quite the op-

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posite - a monograph on a technical subject; and the only qualifications I wish to make here relate to my freedoms: I feel neither bound to renounce any one of the intellectual difficulties imposed on this study by such a proposal, nor do I feel obliged to interpose between whatever discoveries I may make about philosophic ideas in Paradise Lost and the curiosity of my reader the tremendous dragon of my own closed terminology - though critics are often accused of doing just the opposite. Nonetheless, I consider it more than a courtesy to bare my thinking openly to all minds and be porous for their probings even though by saying this I recognize that the frailty of all ideas - including those of art and criticism - gives our innermost selves a double condition which is extraordinarily curious. In descending, for example, boldly below what each one of us commonly thinks Paradise Lost to be, and which in reality is merely its crust, and piercing this crust, we will enter into secret zones of our own being, zones which hold for us the most intimate secrets of our deepest selves - a subject not ordinarily considered proper for public interest. Let us for the moment assume as Milton did that there, deep in our selves, we find something which 'in itself exists forever, unaltered and unmodified. Let us assume that what we find is quite different from a literary idea or a critical idea in the sense that today's idea may not be serviceable tomorrow. When that something is perceived by a real person who is subject to time, it acquires an aspect that is historical in very much the same way that Milton's Adam acquires a historicity; it surges forth at one moment, it becomes aware of itself at another, it may disappear at yet another. To be sure, this temporal quality does not really affect this deepest self in any real sense, but it does affect the presence of this self in other minds. It is the mental act whereby we think about what happens in time that constitutes an effective change in the flow of time. It is the fact of our knowledge of this mental act, or our ignorance of it, which has a history. And this is the disturbing thing, for it is by virtue of one of our thoughts, which is nothing more or less than a transient reality in a most transient world, that we may enter into possession of something that is immutable and beyond durational time.

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When, for example, I reflect intensively upon a mind such as Adam's, my thought is one where two orders of being, or where two worlds, antagonistic in composition, come together. To say of something or of someone in one of these worlds that "it is forever", is in effect the same as affirming its independence of the topological vagaries of time. Hence, to reflect upon Adam as a reality outside the temporal world is to present my temporal world to myself as if I were thinking about Adam as a sphere surrounded by another circumference having a different ontological atmosphere. It is almost as if the truth of Adam must filter down from the other world into my own so that ideas represented by this truth can be projected as images into my human world and my human history - as images of immanence which pulse in the depths of all men who acknowledge the existence of a truly objective and transcendent self. It is at that fall, at that filtering of a transmundane truth into my world, and at that crevice which opened to Milton's insight and gave his images of Adam's truth a chance to be projected that I have chosen to begin my inquiry.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

7

Preface

9

I. Self Disclosure II. Patterns of Asymmetry

15 30

III. Affective and Imaginal Vision

46

IV. The School of Inner-Light

63

V. Intellectual Vision VI. The Word and Its Afterlife

82 Ill

VII. "The Meaning Not the Name I Call": Reality and the Narrative Process

136

Epilogue

150

Bibliographical Note

152

Index

153

I

SELF-DISCLOSURE

1'attends Dieu avec gourmandise.

-Rimbaud

Oh, Lord, Thou knowest that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in Essex. I beseech Thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes; and as I have also a mortgage at Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee also to have an eye of compassion on that county, and for the rest of the counties. Thou may deal with them as Thou art pleased. Oh Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills and make all my debtors good men, give a prosperous voyage and safe return to the Mermaid sloop, because I have not insured it, and because Thou hast said, "The days of the wicked are but short," I trust in Thee that Thou wilt not forget Thy promise, as I have an estate in reversion which will be mine on the death of the profligate young man, Sir J.L. -John Ward, once M.P. for Weymouth

If, for the purposes of analysis, we restrict our interest in Paradise Lost to dynamic and simple components of large complexes of ideas, we discover that any former perspective we may have had with regard to Milton's ideas soon evaporates. We tend to lose interest in the properties of ideas themselves and tend to become interested more in the properties of the relationships between ideas. We come to view the text as possessing certain inexpungable traits of pluralism. Our 'total' experience of the text, viewed formerly as a temporal phenomenon, i.e., as a direct, discontinuous experience of knowing something which is inappropriate to recurrent types of

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phenomena, is no longer as important to us as apprehending the intentional character of our experience of knowing. In other words, we tend to become metaphysicians. The theory of knowledge we are led to develop tends to be dualistic in the following way. Once we legitimize our isolating for consideration only one property of the glue which holds two specific ideas together - because it is THIS property, and not others, which we presume to be the reason why it stands in the relationship which it does to the specific ideas with which we are concerned - our experience of the text is fractionalized. In a special way, ideas become representative for us of their function. In short, knowing and experiencing cease to be the same. It may be argued, of course, that an analytic approach to the forms of knowledge and experience relevant to Paradise Lost is limited because there are elements in Milton's own epistemology, for example, which analysis cannot completely account for; it should be noted, however, that any canon of evidence at our disposal - theologically convenient or easily visualized — demonstrates that knowledge of facts and knowledge of judgments of effects are both a part of the same complex, and that the total view should include both. One point in our preliminaries remains unclear. A t the onset of the reader's phenomenological vision, the text of Paradise Lost seems equidistant from three primary mountains, the world, man, and God. It is difficult indeed to discover a method which insures the reader a clear, uninterrupted view of the peaks, since they are so often covered with clouds. In addition, owing both to the nature of the reader's location and to the fact that the peaks in question cannot be clearly seen at the same time, experimental verification of their presumed nature is prevented. Is there anything true (in the primary, not the ultimate, sense), we are led to ask, or anything which aspires to BECOME true in the statement that a reader destroys any possibility of achieving knowledge of Milton's text and his method of acquiring knowledge unless he begins with the commonplace that the 'knowable' in the text is something rather than nothing, something - not I, not God, not everything? Apart from its initiatory function, it is

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clear that the statement turns out to be as inadequate and misleading as the question which brought it into existence. Preliminary knowledge of the Invocation to Book I presupposes that the world is something. Indeed, when we look closely, we notice that for Milton the world retains an element of variability. For some men, the name 'world' exists through general consent; not so for Milton, who also decides not only to classify its character and its action but also decides, within limits, what its character has been in the past, and shall be, in the future. The word indicating the thing, then, is not the thing itself, and the classification is not the character or action which it classifies. Milton's designation is clearly the only immutable factor. In this context, the 'world' - and, by extension, man and God - clings to this designated something in a purely external manner. The world can suffer a 'loss of Eden', it has a 'secret top'; it supports a hill, designated 'Sion', and so on. The reason why Milton indicates the existence of something beyond the world while saying that the world is something now becomes clearer. The companion of everything, yet external to everything, is language. If the world is truly something which permits the existence of other things external to itself, language must be a normalizing and projecting bridge between the world and those things external to it. And that is precisely what it is. 'Language' is a simple word. It neither can, nor wants to be, the essence of the world. Even though it appears to function in a deeper region, it merely names the things of the world. When Adam assigns names which find their way to things, he is uttering words which witness his existence. When he speaks, he is sacramentalizing his being by affixing his seal to his external reality. Adam's word is not a part of his world; it is his seal. To say that a mere name of a thing is external to it is also simple. This 'merely', however, implies that it might have a different name. Applied to Adam's OWN proper name, this might appear quite absurd. After all, under ordinary circumstances when a name is required, the one who is named is driven into the presence of his own mind, to the internal by which he is dominated. He is not driven within himself in order to take

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refuge in the laws of the past which always act from without, but rather to 'divest' himself of the external. Hearing his name spoken, the one named recognizes himself and knows that he is present. In this sense, a word may both represent and validate the continuity of existence. True enough that Adam, hearing his name spoken, knows himself as present; but what, it may be asked, constitutes Adam's knowledge of his own existence and the existence of his external world, Eden? How does Adam learn of Adam and of Eden? Since the transcendent entity which Eden represents, because of its nature, is a characteristic of Adam's objective world, Adam can probably have real knowledge of the relationship between his ideas which represent immanent objects of knowledge and ideas of transcendent entities. The reality of his modal ideas of Eden is not dependent upon the existence of the external reality of Eden; since mythical realities may be constructed without reference to objective archetypes, their reality is not contingent upon such a correspondence. Of the two primary elements of knowledge by which Adam can establish certainty or uncertainty, judgments of probability with regard to real knowledge are clearly impossible. Adam has no past, nor any memory of a former existence; and probable epistemological judgments clearly depend on the remembrance and recovery of former intuitions of objective reality. Adam, then, is restricted to using judgments which incorporate intellectual rectitude as well as perceptual certainty. He is obliged to identify that form of cognitive thought which yields objective certainty with knowledge; and, to the extent that he links knowledge to a particular perception which apprehends relationships between, and repugnancies of, objective and transcendent ideas, Adam learns in a medium of restraint, as does a Lockean. To clarify further, an examination of Adam's statements on this subject are in order. Replying to Raphael on three different occasions, Adam remarks: nor knew I not To be both will and deed created free. Yet that we never shall forget to love

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Our maker, and obey him whose command Single, is yet so just, my constant thoughts Assured me, and still assure; though what thou tell'st Hath passed in Heaven some doubt within me move, But more desire to hear, if thou consent, The full relation, which must needs be strange, Worthy of sacred silence to be heard. (V. 548-557) But, since thou hast vouchsafed Gently, for our instruction to impart Things above earthly thought, which yet concerned Our knowing, as to the highest Wisdom seemed, Deign to descend now lower, and relate What may no less perhaps avail us known, How first began this Heaven which we behold Distant so high, with moving fires adorned Innumerable (VII. 80-88) What thanks sufficient, or what recompense Equal, have I to render thee, divine Historian, who thus largely hast allayed The thirst I had of knowledge, and vouchsafed This friendly condescension, to relate Things else by me unsearchable . . . . Something yet of doubt remains, Which only thy solution can resolve. When I behold this goodly frame, this W o r l d . . . reasoning, I oft admire How Nature, wise and frugal, could commit Such disproportions, with superfluous hand So many nobler bodies to create, Greater so manifold, to this one u s e . . . . (VIII. 5-29) From these utterances, it follows that truth constituted by knowledge of a high degree of certainty may be achieved by some faculty of perception which fecundates the perceiver's twofold ability to apprehend the signification of signs, and to perceive the ideas themselves as objects. When perceptual conditions of certainty such as 'hearing' or 'beholding' are not realized, uncertainty is always present.

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If Milton is suggesting that certain innate principles of perception are pre-conditions for knowledge and experience, which may also require external stimulation in order to become accessible to introspection, he is linking his approach to the question of human knowledge to ideas of rationalistic psychology. This would lead to the hypothesis that the organization of phenomenological data in terms of relationships, functions, judgments, and gestalt qualities is the result of a perceptual power which provides any object of thought with a suitable occasion to exercise and make manifest its intellegibility from within itself in an extremely subjective manner. Precisely what form this hypothesis should take in interpretation is and will continue to be, a matter for debate on purely epistemological grounds; at any rate, a critical examination of textual presuppositions concerning this hypothesis is clearly in order. First of all, though Adam's reliance upon the claims of intuitive knowledge is rather slight -he does not, it is noted, perceive the self-evident in nature as irresistably and as consistently as he would like — his affective dependence upon demonstrative knowledge is far less productive. Demonstration (dependence upon evidence not perceived directly) has, for Adam, far more subjective obstacles than intuition, since it depends on memories of previous intuitions about the subject-matter (of which Adam has none) and, of course, the subject-matter itself. The definition of knowledge employed by Adam, then, commits those who operate within its area of dominance to an intentional sort of extreme subjectivism. One implication of this definition is that the function of an idea, related as it is to its locus, is also involved in the very nature of the idea itself, and because of that, is a cornerstone of the activity of perceiving relationships between ideas. Second, external relationships between ideas as objects and ideas as signs which represent reality, in this sense, point to the significance of the intrinsic nature of the ideas. Perceptions of these relationships, then, are dependent functions of the objects of Adam's thought. This means that the objects and the relationships between the objects of Adam's thought which are external

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to him in an absolute sense (i.e., the world of Eden and God) must finally be determined by the objects and their loci. Because of this, perception of this variety of knowledge involves the knower in the objective necessities of apriorism. Indeed, this should hold regardless of whether the objects of thought are mythically objectified or not. Apriorism is not so successful a method when used by Adam to verify the claims to reality of substance, however. Faced with such mysteries as the frame and magnitude of Heaven and Earth, Adam remarks: this Earth, a spot, a grain, An atom, with the firmament compared And all her numbered stars, that seem to roll Spaces incomprehensible (for such Their distance argues, and their swift return Diurnal) merely to officiate light Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot, One day and night, in all their vast survey Useless besides. . . . (VIII. 17-25)

One would imagine, following this trend of thought, that Adam is about to assert the possibility of knowing the reality of these substances; if ideas of substances could be derived from experience on ontological grounds, such knowledge would doubtless be possible. Instead, Adam offers a quantitative comparison of the substances in question which asserts the probable scope and character of their existence. It is almost as if he is aware that a probable existence attributed to a quality of an object is enough to prevent the reality of that idea of substance from being substantiated to any degree of certainty. In other words, Adam recognizes that this kind of probability cannot be determined on a priori grounds. In this regard, the manner in which Adam draws quantitative distinctions is of considerable interest. When Adam compares 'this Earth, a spot, a grain, / An atom' with the firmament and the stars in the heavens, he is stating an analytic proposition whose predicates signify one element of an idea for which its

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subject stands. The epistemological function of this proposition is clearly limited, and Adam knows it, for his analytic judgment can neither extend his knowledge nor distend his soul; its 'certainty' vis à vis knowledge is restricted to the merely verbal level. Adam is aware, on the other hand, that perceptions of relationships between ideas are required for positive knowledge, regardless of whether the propositions are real or probable; that is, true knowledge is a function of perceptions which extend beyond analytic, or what may be termed, synecdochal propositions. As indicated earlier, Adam knows that true judgment is possible and certain when one synthetic proposition affirms another not contained in it. How can Milton's representation of the function and constitutive process of human knowledge be justified? In terms of the fixed spatial and temporal structure of human consciousness and the demands of human experience, only one explanation seems likely. Were it possible to analyze human experience and consciousness in a thoroughly deductive manner, then all empirical and anthropological apriorism would be expunged. It is significant that this explanation is in no way inconsistent with Milton's idealistic position expressed in De Doctrina Christiana to the effect, that owing to the interpénétration of grace with nature and of transcendental law with the historical process, the intentionality of human existence is ultimately relative; or, expressed in theological terms, that theological determinism and predestinationsince they are contingent upon more than the transcendent in nature - are provisional and partial facts of nature, and that salvation is related to the working out of particular convenant obligations between God and man which link, but do not fix, in a rigid way the relationship of the real temporal order of the actual world to the supratemporal. The significance of Milton's belief in the relative intentionality of existence becomes clearer when we return to our discussion concerning Adam's name. Earlier, it was suggested that Adam's name being spoken provides him with the opportunity to discover himself as present. This would be to assert that his name - which signifies his permanent existence in an internal, conscious

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sense - accomplishes what he himself cannot: to endow him with authority over time, which, if accomplished, would result in a permanent condition of Adam's being present to himself. If this were possible, Adam's reason would suffer irreparable damage. Discovering himself from instant to instant, Adam would vanish from instant to instant, eternally annihilated by the temporal claims of cause and effect. Neither the possibility of Christian liberty nor the occasion for Reason to operate as choice exist for Adam, therefore. If a moment exists when Adam can be free, it is already gone. His Fall, or, more accurately, his falling, is constituted, then, by his involuntary loss of his presence in the present which is caused by his efforts to transcend both the transcendental laws of cause and effect governing his being and the temporal laws of the historical process. It is not surprising that the repetitive process which causes each moment to be reborn continually resembles, to the degree that it does, the course of Adam's future life after his creation. It is Adam's future life, after all, from which the opportunities for him to perceive his own existence immanently are drawn. Because the make-up of his consciousness is such that Adam is summoned to live his unique existence, and, at the same time, speak, hear, and behold, Adam's future is guaranteed; he must live despite the fact of numerous 'falls'. His name, the very word 'Adam', however, neither coerces nor liberates him. Because it is mere word, and hence, merely an object of normative thought, it signifies a particular something beyond Adam himself and points to a final conformation with an ideal. That ideal, and its locus vis a vis the object of Adam's thought are particularly important, and to that we now turn our attention. First, it must be established whether or not knowledge of the transcendent is possible in Adam's consciousness. If Adam's remarks about his creation are examined, one discovers that his utterances are characterized at first by no assumptions of any kind about existence; he restricts himself to his own conscious experiences: "As new wak't from soundest sleep, / Soft on the flow'ry herb I found me laid.. .. / But who I was, or where, or from what cause, / Knew not" (VIII. 253-271). In order to move from

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this nearly solipsistic stage of pure consciousness, Adam next attempts to establish the reality of 'others' like himself - 'Thou Sun', 'thou enlighten'd Earth', and so on: Thou Sun, said I, fair Light, and thou enlighten'd Earth, so fresh and gay, Ye Hills and Dales, ye Rivers, Woods, and Plains And ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell, Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here? (VIII. 273-277)

Since his uniqueness is not yet clear to him, Adam may be allowed momentarily to confuse his own pure consciousness with what he mistakenly regards as the ego of the natural world. It was noted earlier that Adam's name cannot liberate him; on the other hand, the method Milton uses to enclose Adam in an idealized subjective structure cannot fail to function as a liberating influence on his thinking. In the sense that whatever object perceived by Adam is considered valid and certain, he is liberated from the claims of presupposition and belief, for all objects of knowledge become correlative functions of his experience. The question raised earlier may now be placed in sharper perspective. If Adam is operating within the idealized structure of his inner world of consciousness, and if, as it has been suggested, the route his experience will take is contingent in some way upon the transcendent world of existence, how must our claims concerning the mechanics of Adam's subjective consciousness be altered? Should they be altered at all? First, it is necessary to recall that the method employed by Adam's conscious mind to define both a distinctive area of inquiry and a special object of inquiry is neither hampered by, nor dependent upon, psychological requirements. Since clarity and certainty are Adam's goals, Adam is faced with an apparently insurmountable problem if he imagines that he can know the unknowable and experience the experience beyond itself. If a priori transcendence or transcendent knowledge were really possible for him, he somehow would have to possess the ability to perceive directly and totally the relationship of knowledge to its tran-

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scendent object, of say, man's mind to God. This he clearly cannot do. Adam is compelled, then, to delimit the transcendent world of existence in order to bring it to self-giveness. In other words, when Adam reduces his knowledge of the transcendent to the area of pure, subjective consciousness, he is eliminating transcendence from his experience. This reduction, of course, is undertaken only after his efforts to rise beyond the transcendental laws of cause and effect have failed. But when it is finally accomplished, Adam has irrremediably fallen. That Adam must fall from the transcendent reality of existence, given the make-up of his conscious world and his epistemology, is clear when we recognize that the transcendent cannot be reduced to immanent perception the way the immanent can. By nature, its existence must be uncertain and problematical. This is why the Creator first appears to Adam under conditions which Milton would probably term artificial - in a dream vision. When the transcendent is reduced to a dream object, it no longer becomes objectionable as a possible false abstraction, a danger which Milton would indubitably have risked if he had transformed the Creator into something capable of being experienced - with a visual content, with a body of apperceptions, and so on: there gentle sleep First found me, and with soft oppression seiz'd My drowsed sense, untroubl'd, though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve: When suddenly stood at my Head a dream, Whose inward apparition gently mov'd My fancy to believe I yet had being, And liv'd: One came, methought, of shape Divine, And said, Thy Mansion wants thee, Adam, rise, First Man, of Men innumerable ordain'd First Father, call'd by thee I come thy Guide To the Garden of bliss, thy seat prepar'd. (VIII. 287-299) But what becomes of our argument when Adam's dream object is transformed into an immanent one?

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whereat I wak'd, and found Before mine Eyes all real, as the dream Had lively shadow'd: Here had new begun My wand'ring, had not hee who was my Guide Up hither, from among the Trees appear'd, Presence Divine. (VIII. 309-314)

First, we are not confronted with a riddle when Adam sees his Creator. Though the transcendent preceded all perception, perception is nevertheless a constituent of the experience of transcendence. Evidence of perception, in addition, has an immaterial quality; since evidence must necessarily be a function of the existence of the object of perception, evidence contains elements far more complex than simple immateriality. In short, things 'correspond' to the perception, whether or not the thing is immanent or transcendent. Even if it is asserted that the transcendental world of existence exists and may be perceived, this claim does not do away with our argument. The potential epistemological dilemma is removed when we remember that the dilemma results from the fact that Adam's aggregate experience is sealed, isolated, and set off from the external reality of everyday life. It is not unusual, in other words, to find the transcendent inhabiting a mythological environment. Second, it may be deduced from God's appearance that Adam is constitutively obliged to see God and that God is under an obligation to make himself seen. As soon as the special conditions that obtain when the creator of the name actually confronts the thing named are recognized, this becomes clear. When God exists merely as dream object for Adam, his name 'Adam', is merely a cognomen. To be sure, Adam has other names which he has not received; he already possesses them. As soon as his names are uttered, they adhere to him. The name 'Adam', is also the word of God. This implies the certainty, not merely the probability, that God's presence is implied by it. The Creator's word implies the presence of both the Creator and that someone to whom the word is spoken - and so also with the word of Adam. When God is absent, that is, when Adam dreams, the word of God does not

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force itself upon Adam's consciousness. But when the appropriate occasion is provided, the existential reality of the Creator's language gratuitously stamps the sign of God upon his creature. The conclusion to which one is drawn, therefore, is that Adam cannot gain in definition by being isolated from an externally perceivable reality. Third, experience and knowledge in Eden are always 'of' something. A priori knowledge of pure phenomena, however, cannot be denaturalized, i.e., disengaged from its antecedent naturalistic environment. Only when one ignores the character of Adam's natural setting in Eden does the epistemological riddle implicit in Adam's perception of his Creator become apparent; apparent, though still unwarranted. Though Adam asks, in the course of his 'awakening', for evidence of other egos in the world, he is certainly obliged to his external reality for providing him with the occasion for reflection and inquiry. The only effective argument against Adam's direct perception of his Creator consists in claiming that his Creator is transcendent in a non-psychical sense - and that, of course, is absurd. That is not to say that when Adam perceives his Creator, he is in the presence of transcendental certainty. There is room enough in Paradise Lost for formalism, or even fantasy, for that matter; but there is also an end to both. If we deny that Adam 'sees' the transcendent, we are hardly better off than he is. Can it ever be said about our subjective world that we are certain that it is while it is, but not quite so sure that it W A S ? In order to reconstruct the mechanics of Adam's 'knowing' the Godhead, it is necessary to discover the connectives and correlatives which link Adam's external world to his conscious, inner world. Adam's statement, "Soft on the flow'ry herb I found me laid", for example, has two meanings: first, as an intentional correlate of Adam's existence (i.e., his existence is immanent, absolute, and logically conceived); and second, as an assertion of ego-presence, in the sense that his existence is confirmed to be in accord with his own consciousness. From Adam's point-of-view, then, the transcendent being of Adam's Creator is incompletely formed. For him, the Godhead is

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initially an object of relative composition, relative shape, relative certainty, and even relative divinity. His Creator's being is almost accidental. It is possible to say, however, that when Adam focuses his consciousness upon the 'Heavenly Vision', the 'partial' in his natural experience of Eden becomes transformed into a 'whole' in his inner, subjective experience. By means of this procedure, Adam acquires a special existential context which provides a PLACE towards which the transcendent can move, be received, and most important of all, a place which constitutes it and gives it form, presenting it with human values and framing it in human terms. With consciousness providing him with a naturalistic point-ofview, Adam directs his thought upon his experiences in Eden and apprehends them as existence. If Adam is to perceive God initially via the artificially detached experience of dream vision, Adam's knowing self must be isolated. This isolation has the effect of demonstrating the impossibility of three things: that of an absolutely isolated self, that of experience without causality, and that of life without the transcendent which constitutes l i f e - a l l of which result, of course, in the mythologizing of the phenomena which constitute Adam's consciousness. As long as no metaphysics is introduced by Milton into Adam's internal world, Adam is free to pursue his inquiry into the structure of knowledge vis a vis God, the world, and himself. For Milton, God is not to be found at the conclusion of a syllogism, nor is his being inferable from historical or psychological evidence. Adam has no history; neither does his perception. Though unseekable and undemonstrable, God can nevertheless be reached by experiencing the nothingness of self. If Adam renounces universals, causality, necessity, and empiricism, then he can be free. Adam does, of course, engage in disinterested reflection; but in the face of those natural necessities of Eden which function as occasional salvific necessities, Adam cannot refuse to accept veritates aeternae - what we term the self-evident today - as anything but illusions. He cannot confront his existence directly, and so, cannot experience authentic freedom from the constraints of the laws of natural necessity.

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According to Genesis, knowledge leads to death. This Biblical belief introduces us into the realm of the purely arbitrary, into a region where it is impossible for thought to orient itself and where it cannot lean on anything. If the view of human reason held by Genesis is correct, even if knowledge, by introducing itself into being, leads to indubitable existence and to d e a t h - t h e n Adam can never cast off reason or disavow choice. He is destined to be imprisoned by truth itself, and be forced to withdraw into an ideal world of his own making. But knowledge does not justify being for Milton; rather, it is from being that knowledge achieves its justififcation. It is Adam's mind that chokes the tree of life, not the tree of knowledge. The 'given', therefore, does not dominate Adam; it neither determines his present nor his future. In Eden, knowledge is radically wrenched away from existence and becomes, in Luther's language, bellua qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (the monster without whose killing man cannot live). Because the data of experience coming from the merely immanent reality of Eden constitutes a kind of autonomous knowledge and an autonomous ethics, all that is discoverable as material and ideal leads Adam to the plane of the petrified 'it is', that is, away from truth. A n ethic plundered by, and from, the sense, therefore, can never unmask for Adam the truths that enter into the consciousness of created being, from his Creator.

II PATTERNS OF ASYMMETRY

The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time. In the concept, the sixth hour is not earlier than the seventh or eighth, although the clock never strikes the hour, save when the concept biddeth. Nicolas of Cusa Sleep faster, we need the pillows. -Yiddish Proverb

When Adam begins to reflect upon his existence, he is obliged to meet one basic condition so that all the connections between ideas in his mind may be unified. He must become conscious of a specific modus existentiae, the passage of time through three states, the present, the past, and the future. Since he finds himself in the singular position of having no temporal predecessor, he requires a certain assurance that he will continue to exist. That assurance of what may be termed a uniform temporal anisotropy both in the local and discrete time continuum of Eden and in the cosmological time of salvation history is provided by Milton within the context of Adam's own conscious mind. This species of time upon which he relies to grant him this assurance of life is neither an organic nor a biological time of nature, however. Since Adam cannot assume with any degree of certainty the existence of an objective world time, he is forced to assume as a priori a transient and 'participial' time - a mode of time which is in the process of becoming and unfolding. Though transiency of time and its appearances do not enjoy an indubitable existence for Adam, he does accept the transient and

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immanent 'present' of his own consciousness. Given Adam's need to reflect the flux of events in some way, it would be meaningless, given his condition, for him to doubt them. Indeed, because his creation gives rise to a shifting distinction between his past and his future, and represents an essential move from the 'uncertain', conditional, and gratuitous world of the transcendent to the conscious world of the immanent, the transiency of the 'now' can hardly be uncertain for him. Moreover, objective time cannot have any meaning for Adam because the history of human consciousness has not yet begun in a coordinated way. His interests and his needs are restricted to the intentional and genetic character of his time-consciousness. When, for example, Adam comments to Raphael that an "inward apparition gently mov'd / My fancy to believe I yet had being, / And liv'd" (VIII. 293-295), he is stating more than a merely ontological proposition. He is manifesting a particular sense of time which he will continue to exhibit at least until his expulsion from Eden. Given the context within which Adam will "Find pastime and bear rule", Adam indicates his awareness of a serial relation between an earlier time and a now-time. The difference he points to is one which relates both to the direction of time-becoming (as if there were a physical basis for time-becoming which he can perceive) and to the structure of his temporally-ordered condition itself. With regard to his sense of the direction of time, Adam's remarks seem to be inspired by a notion that as phenomena flow so does time - as an irreversibly, linear sequence. The narrative of his creation as he relates it to Raphael appears to bear this out. His plea to the Sun which records and measures the 'direction' of the world (as befits a divine, metonymic Arbitrium), for example, illustrates Adam's faith in the notion that the organization of objective, a priori truth is an implicit function of the a priori nature of time. Adam is also interested in his own temporal experience. If, when he is dreaming, Adam can perceive a difference between the temporal order of that experience and the temporal order of his wakeful condition, he is indicating that he is aware that the

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causal relationship between one experience occurring in one temporal condition and another experience occurring in another temporal condition is a relative and asymmetrical one: there gentle sleep First found me, and with soft oppression seiz'd My drowsed sense, untroubl'd, though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve: When suddenly stood at my Head a dream, Whose inward apparation gently mov'd My fancy to believe I yet had being, And liv'd: (VIII. 287-295) Dazzl'd and spent, sunk down, and sought repair Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, call'd By Nature as in aid, and clos'd mine eyes. Mine eyes he clos'd, but op'n left the Cell Of Fancy my internal sight, by which Abstract as in a trance methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I s t o o d . . . . (VIII. 457-464)

From almost the first, then, Adam assumes that time is relative, asymmetrical, and has something to do with his cognitive and physical experiences. For example, when Adam asks Raphael to instruct him in the constitutive elements of objectivity which are determined by apriorism, he twice links his experience of listening and understanding Raphael's analysis of the events and objects (which govern the temporal qualities of Adam's experience) to several different objects which measure objective time (V. 553560; VIII. 94-108). He is clearly employing a concept of causation to connect temporally-acquired data to objective events in the heavens; the resultant connectives, not surprisingly, are rather tenuous. Moreover, the causal relationship established between the movement of bodies in the heavens and Adam's learning is clearly an asymmetrical one. But before it is claimed that Adam's learning proceeds on the assumption that the seriality of time is extrinsic to his perception of time on the one hand, and causally

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related to events, on the other, it should be noted that because Adam perceives heavenly objects as if they are immanent in a temporal sense, his perception of time relative to his objective world is indubitably an intrinsic factor in his learning process. It is now necessary to examine in detail Adam's subjective basis for perceiving Eden as a temporal object. If the spatiallylimited world of pre-lapserian Eden can be said to exist in a state of temporal equilibrium, one could say with some justice that time increases in a linear manner (toward the future) as a direct function of the entropy of Eden. This statement would be only partially true, however, since the only means at our disposal for defining the 'increase of time' depends strictly upon the subjective sense of time's flow in Adam's consciousness, while it discounts the factor of the increase of entropy. How then is time constituted in Eden? If, as we have assumed thus far, objective time is a function of Adam's ability to perceive duration along with immanent and transcendent timeobjects, time in Eden exists as an objectivity and is constituted by sense-data. Topologically, then, it would be proper to say that time in Eden is open - rather than closed - since each of the temporal states viewed by Adam possesses formal properties of what may be termed 'betweenness'. If, then, Adam perceives the 'passage' of time, this perception not only presumes a duration of perception, but also a sense-datum which has its own particular temporal form. The 'betweenness' of Adam's awareness of time, then, may be understood in the context of the recession of each of his sensedata into the past. When Adam recounts his experience of his own creation to Raphael, for example, his recollection of that event has already receded into the past; but Adam still retains the object of thought. As long as he remembers it, the event still possesses its 'own' time; its temporality or 'timeness" is the same as it was initially. It and the length of time it occupies in Adam's consciousness comprise a continuous conscious flow. When Adam initially tells Raphael of his creation, Adam perceives its temporality in the present. When Adam recalls his creation on other occasions, the temporality of that event con-

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tinues to be perceived in his present. The continuity of these earlier stages, then, comprises the duration of the datum for Adam. Only the future duration is unspecified and unknown to him. Within the whole range of Adam's consciousness, this same datum constitutes a temporal state of 'betweenness' since the datum always exists in the transient present, i.e., between the future and the first point of its existence in the past. Adam's creation, therefore, is unknown to Adam 'before' the first point in his enduring now; it is known 'later'. The whole range of extendable time between the first point and the now-point is the transient 'between', cut off from the vivifying capability of the present. This raises an interesting problem with regard to our earlier presupposition that the direction that time takes in Eden is directly proportional to Eden's entropy. The fact of Adam's existence in Eden in Book XI, for example, allows us to infer that he was there earlier, in say Book VIII, but not that he will be there later. This suggests that the temporal structure of Adam's past may be inferred from the very space displaced by Adam in Eden. After all, the fact that Adam does occupy space should reflect some principle of local entropy. The point at which the principle of entropy is invoked in our analysis is crucial. If Eden is considered as a whole, the fact of Adam's presence gives rise to the tentative conclusion that the relative order of the spatial arrangement of 'objects' in the total environment of Eden is high, and that the entropy is lower than it would be, were Eden an indubitably isolated system. The principle of entropy applied, in this case, precludes the possibility of an isolated evolution of Eden from a former stage of organization characterized by randomness to the stage in Paradise Lost where Eden is characterized by its relatively high degree of order. It is possible, therefore, to conjecture that Eden 'at one time' must have been an open system whose heightened organization was achieved at the expense of an at least proportional reduction of order in the system (Adam) with which it interacted; Adam, in short, must have been diminished in some significant metabolic way.

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35

This would appear to be what is implied in Satan's remarks on creation addressed to the 'great consult' of fallen angels in Pandemonium: There is a place (If ancient and prophetic fame in Heav'n Err not) another World, the happy seat Of some new Race call'd Man, about this time To be created like to us, though less In power and excellence, but favor'd more Of him who rules above; (II. 345-351) Further, this would also go some distance toward illuminating the reason why God characterizes the race of men he is about to create as deficient - imperfect though perfectible: [God] in a moment will create Another World, out of one man a Race Of men innumerable, there to dwell, Not here, till by degree of merit rais'd They open to themselves at length the way Up h i t h e r . . . . (VII. 154-159) In this context, even the famous zimzum special significance.

passage takes on a

My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee I send along, ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heav'n and Earth, Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I uncircumscrib'd myself retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessity and Chance Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate. (VII. 165-173) If Eden was initially contained within the infinitely wide system of God (which it obviously was), it is clear that Eden must have acquired its condition of relatively low entropy at the expense of a simultaneous and corresponding entropy expansion in that wider, inclusive system; Adam's creation, then, because it dis-

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persed his energy reserve, increased the entropy of the wider system. As a genuine veridical being (and not a random form), who signifies an interaction with a larger system, Adam and the 'space' he occupies is extremely important. Since Adam is a 'later' indicator than the wider system with which he interacts, Adam's spatial configuration in Eden has retrodictive meaning, thereby being an object of memory, and something recordable. But what is meant by the suggestion that Milton is keeping a record of Adam's existence insofar as he interacts with the wider world of which he is a part? From the initial Invocation to Book I where the narrator invokes the Holy Spirit (whose special province is the realm of memory), we see that the subject of Man in Eden is eminently recordable. But this is an example of more than mere recordability. When the narrator declares his subject Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

(I. 1-5) he is making a veridical prediction of an interaction to take place in the future (within, of course, the context of the poem). This fact forces the reader to modify his perception of temporal asymmetry in the poem in a special way. After we have taken note of the difference between the narrator's initial prediction of Adam's subsequent Creation, later Fall, and even more distant 'restoration', and the textual evidence given later which records these events, we notice that recorded evidence of the Creation and Fall is contingent upon the actual occurrence of those interactions in the text. A distinction must be made here between the narrator's contention in the Invocation that Adam functions as a retrodictive sign and the pragmatic, epistemic use the reader may make of the information implicit in that assertion. The fact that Adam does indeed interact with a later and larger system is clearly a necessary prerequisite (later in

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the poem) for both recordability and INTERPRETATION; it is not necessary in the case of the first allusion to Adam, i.e., the prerecorded reference to Adam in the Invocation as an interactor. If the first mention of Adam as a veridical personality were enough to establish a pattern for subsequent interpretation in the reader's mind, the predictive theory employed by the reader would have to be pre-determined and applicable to a truly closed system. On both structural and theological grounds, this is not the case. Furthermore, since the partitive and supplicatory statement concerning Adam in the Invocation to Book I is not an explicit and inherent part of Adam's interacting system to which it refers, it must relate to, and interact with, another system. As long as one later recorded factual statement concerning Adam is placed within his system, interpretation is possible. The conditions thus required in Paradise Lost for the composition of the Invocation and for the composition of later books which include statements about Adam differ radically with regard to symmetry. With regard to the structure of Paradise Lost as a whole, this information is very important. It is of considerable use, for example, in explaining the reason why the narrator begins his epic narrative in a limited Aristotelian manner rather than in medias res, or chronologically, in the sense of natural or physical time. First of all, for the narrator to begin Book I with a later event of creation rather than with Satan on the burning lake would require knowledge on his part of an extremely high order of certainty about at least two things: those beings not presently existing, and the potential accessibility of existence to prospective created things. If the narrator had begun the narrative in this fashion, he would have needed complete and certain information about a closed, wider system within which all other interacting systems were included. In lieu of this knowledge, it is doubtful that the narrator would have been able to guarantee that any being created in the future - Adam, for example - would not be prevented from coming into existence by some instrument beyond the wider system and thereby uprooting any information contained about Adam in the initial Invocation from its foundation and crippling

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Adam as a workable veridical personality capable of indicating interactions. In short, though the appearance of Adam in Eden is a sufficient quotient of Adam's recordability (but not for his predictability), Adam's ability to interact with Eden is not sufficient for the continuous writing of the record once it has begun. Once it is understood that since Eden is a potentially open system that has recently come into being, it is not surprising that Eden cannot function as a recorded indicator of its own future interactions in vacuo without the agency of some symbol-forming organism such as Adam whose perception of the limits and laws of his system and of the larger system is pre-determined. This account of the asymmetrical character of recordability insofar as it applies to two interacting systems in Paradise Lost - A d a m and Eden - illustrates two interrelated facts: first, that the circumstances in the past surrounding Adam and Eden as past indicators of interactions can be inferred from their present (while their future circumstances cannot); and second, that on entropic grounds, it is possible to infer total causes from partial effects. More precisely, if the recorder of "Man's First Disobedience" is to be logical AND consistent in predicative and temporal terms, he must begin with a rather specific assertion about the past which excludes inferences concerning Adam and Eden. In other words, the temporal demands of Adam and Eden preclude their occupying an initial position in the narrative. Satan on the burning lake, however, fulfills the required conditions of retrodictiveness and interactiveness on entropic grounds. In this context, the description of Hell in Book I may be characterized as an inference concerning an early event in Creation and an interaction which has an incomplete effect upon another system while that system is open; in addition, the partial effect exhibits a low entropy characterized by a relatively small quantity of interactions in number and kind. To establish the validity of this assertion about Hell, it will be necessary to describe the constitutive character of Milton's Hell within the framework of those relative states of temporal asymmetry and temporal anisotropy noticed in Paradise Lost thus far.

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39

Before that, however, the chief textual obstacle to this description must be removed. In the debate among the fallen angels in Book II, we run afoul of at least two specific objections which appear to undercut the assertion that placing Hell first in the narrative is a structural necessity. Satan's remarks, together with those of his followers, concerning the interactibility of their past with their present and future seem to function as exceptions to the asymmetrical pattern of recordable statements noticed in Eden. Satan's first address to the assembled demons in Pandemonium is perhaps of chief importance here: P o w e r and Dominions, Dieties of Heav'n, F o r since no deep within her gulf can hold Immortal vigor, though opprest and fall'n, I give not Heav'n f o r lost. F r o m this descent Celestial Virtues rising, will appear M o r e glorious and more dread than f r o m no fall A n d trust themselves to fear no second fate: M e e though just right and the fixt Laws of Heav'n Did first create your Leader. . . . (II. 11-19)

Of special interest is the fact that Satan exhibits himself as a veridical being to such a high degree of generality. Satan's specific assertions about his past seem to argue against Hell's being an open system, for when he refers to the cause of his fall he is implying his own earlier role as interactor in Heaven. Yet, Satan does appear to have considerable knowledge about the totality of all the causes of his fall; otherwise, it would be impossible for him to make any inference concerning his future. This CAVEAT notwithstanding, it is still necessary to explain the reason why Satan can infer both the past AND the future from his present, and why he can make predictive and recorded statements in the same utterance. On entropic grounds alone, a simple typological explanation will not suffice. The first noticeable exception to the pattern noticed earlier is exemplified by the fact that Satan's introduction into Hell has been spectacularly sudden; "Him the Almighty Power / Huri'd headlong flaming from th'

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Etheral Sky" (I. 44-45). Indeed, had it been possible to take a barometric reading in Satan's vicinity at that very moment, a considerable drop in pressure would have been detected, a drop foreshadowing an impending cloudburst. But what precisely would the gauge have recorded? Only the interaction in Satan's immediate past in Satan's immediate neighborhood. Pre-recordability of either future weather conditions or of future temporal interactions demand far more information about not only the immediate subject and his immediate meteorological system but the wider system of which the subject is a part. Yet a prediction of limited scope is still possible and still valid. Since the change in pressure is, in many ways, an effect of an allinclusive cause, viz. God, the guarantor of all storms, the drop in pressure is a future indicator of an impending interaction. What is important for analysis, however, is a recognition that insofar as Satan's recordable statements about his fall do have a causal ancestry, the de facto conditions of Satan in Hell are not necessarily contingent upon the existence of any future indicator of Satan's fall at an earlier time. In addition, with regard to the intentionality of Satan's predictive assertion that the fallen angels will rise again "and will appear / More glorious and more dread than from no fall", it must be noted that Satan's determination itself functions as a dependable indicator of future interactions. The presumed (and debated) circumstances under which Satan's restipulation to glory will be achieved, coupled with Satan's aspiration to rise 'Beyond thus high' yields Satan's intentionality. In other words, were Satan able to rise again, he would. Finally, given the fact that both Satan and Hell individually comprise isolated systems with low entropy levels, it is very probable that each will shift into a greater entropy state. Given the further possibility that Satan's long-range behavior will consist of a series of fluctuations in which he will plunge from a level of high entropy as often as he rises from a level of low entropy, there is an absolute and equal probability that each of his periodic and reversible flights will be made. In view of this kind of probability, the time factor is especially significant.

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41

There is, moreover, a definite difference between the asymmetry of causality and the intrinsic seriality of time in Eden on the one hand, and the structural nature of causality and time in Hell, on the other. Since reversibility and repetitiveness characterize symmetrical time in Hell, Satan cannot be said to manifest temporal anisotropy in his behavior with any degree of certainty. The safest thing one could say about Satan's 'fall' and selfpredicted 'rise', then, is that he himself is aware of his constitutive ability to 'reverse' the flow of his 'system', and that he knows that he is just as likely to move in an upward direction as he is to move in a downward one. Within this context, it may be seen that Satan's phenomenological assertion about his status expressed before the group of demons assembled in Pandemonium provides Milton's narrator with the appropriate nomological basis and occasion for beginning his narrative in Hell - a beginning which has as one of its outcomes, most fittingly, the expurgation of anthropological apriorism. One further property of Hell concerns us. Hell exhibits striking disequilibria and inhomogeneities with regard to physical setting, temperature, and so on. The fact that Milton represents three disparate hells in physical terms - the burning lake, Pandemonium, and the huge continent with extremes of heat and cold - coupled with his representation of Hell as a condition of mind is clearly the result of Milton's homiletic intention to delocalize the concept of Hell so as to bring the concept of Hell into more or less harmony with his notion of Hell as an ethical condition. That notion is of course most clearly expressed by Satan in his first lament: Farewell happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be changed by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. (I. 249-255)

But ethics notwithstanding, it is important to recognize that the

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relatively low entropy and rather ubiquitous quality of each of these 'physical' sub-hells is purchased at the co-ordinate expense of a wider 'hell-system' which contains considerable reserves. Since each of these local hells exists in a condition of relatively low entropy, each may be characterized as a disaffiliated entity for a relatively short span of time; since each sub-hell cannot continue to exhibit its discreteness for very long, each is forced to restipulate itself to the wider 'ethical' Hell from which it was separated. The presence of the ubiquitous local Hell in Paradise Lost has certain basic implications: first, it is overwhelmingly probable that the wider, inclusive Hell was formed in the immediate past as a result of an interaction with some external force. This comes as a surprise to no one, not Satan, not the reader. Second, the de facto properties of each local Hell imply that 'laws' of temporal asymmetry govern each locale. They do. It is only in the combination, or more precisely, in the ensemble of hells that symmetrical regularity is manifest. The key point to recognize here is that the ensemble, together with its parts, exists in a state of equilibrium regardless of whether or not the sub-hell is at a point of high entropy or low entropy. Thus, the existence of processes in Hell whose irreversibility were not contingent upon any entropic consideration but could be inferred exclusively from the fact that the temporal inverse of each local Hell would require a deus ex machina operating from within a Permenidean universe is an inference which is clearly absurd. If, as it has been suggested, the reason why the narrative structure of Book I may be understood in terms of a relationship between a law of temporal symmetry and a law governing entropic properties of space, it should now be possible to discover whether or not the temporal structure of Adam's consciousness is similarly related to a law of entropy, or, indeed, whether Adam's consciousness is constituted by, or is a function of, any physical principle at all. It was suggested earlier that time-objects are perceived by Adam as sense-data in his transient present. Also, it was asserted that the existence of a transient time in Adam's

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consciousness affirmed, by extension, a shifting, transient, triplex division of time into past-contents, now-contents, and becomingcontents. But insofar as they are inferable, do the relativistic laws of Eden permit such a division? Adam, awakening to his first moments of existence, has no conception of objects or events which are 'becoming', or coming into existence. Rather, until 'with such knowledge God endu'd', Adam is merely permitted to encounter objects, and by confronting existence more or less randomly, to fabricate the ceremoniality of their existence by engaging himself in their future. about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shady Woods, and sunny Plains, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that liv'd, and mov'd, and walk'd, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling: all things smil'd, With fragrance and with joy my heart o'erflow'd. Myself I them perus'd, and Limb by Limb Survey'd.. . . (VIII. 261-268)

But Adam is not in Eden when he utters these words. Until God requires Adam to 'name' the objects of his external world in Eden, Adam is in the presence of an objectivity which does not 'happen'; it merely is. He perceives that objectivity with his consciousness. Only after Adam is brought to Eden, then, can Adam discover himself in a position to attend to the temporal aprioriness of the objective world. In other words, Adam perceives the temporality of immanent objects in Eden as they appear in a continuum within which the objects themselves are given. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the passage in which Adam assigns names to the beasts and birds of Eden: As thus he spake, each Bird and Beast behold Aproaching two and two, These cow'ring low With blandishment, each Bird stoop'd on his wing. I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu'd My sudden apprehension.. . . (VIII. 349-354)

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It is necessary to recall that Adam has just seen God. Intellectualis visio Dei in the ordinary sense of that concept is usually enough to suggest that perceptibility is a definite quotient of cognition, i.e., that an intuition of God is an experience of knowing. Adam's perception, in this instance, functions as a corrective to knowledge, however. True enough, Adam approaches the business of naming the animals with somewhat of a sentiment du déjà-vu, based of course upon a definite impression of 'foreknowledge' (God has just said: "I bring them to receive / From thee thir Names"), but Adam finds that previous knowledge of this sort is wanting. The beasts mentioned by God - together with the duration of time belonging to them-were not really described by God. Rather, they were presupposed. Two questions may now be asked. When God's statement and Adam's statement are analyzed, is the reader confronted by a problem concerning synchronicity or continuity? With regard to the first possibility, one is obliged to determine whether or not any acausal principle connects both statements about the animals. Is God's psychic state coincident with the simultaneous objective, psychic act of Adam naming the animals? Is there any evidence of a causal relationship between the state and the naming? To the extent that any cognitively transcendent utterance stakes its claim for credibility on a subjective, immanent experience, Adam's act of naming neither constitutes, nor derives from, true knowledge. In addition, the fact that God says that he will bring the animals to Adam and does just that fails, on mantic grounds, to provide an answer to the question of causality simply because God's psychic state at the moment in question is far too vague, and hence indeterminate. With regard to the matter of continuity, analysis is more productive. Earlier, it was noted that Adam perceives in a continuous stream the conversation with God and his subsequent experience of naming the beasts. In addition, it may now be suggested that the duration of the whole event is a fabricated duration in a twofold sense: first, as Adam relates the experience to Raphael, he is putting parts of the story together; and second, once fabri-

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cated and articulated in speech, it is still known and hence subject to 're-membering' in the future. The auditory effect Adam creates when he speaks to Raphael is the same sound which is perceived as past in a later stream of consciousness. Though the details of passing time recede from Adam's consciousness in a manner similar to the way in which the features of Eve's face withdraw from her when she 'starts' back from the lake, the object itself remains unmoved, and Adam's speech retains its own temporal specificity. Indeed, though every particular detail in the temporal continuum is immutable, each plunges quickly into the distant continuum of consciousness. We are now in a position to answer the question posed earlier: is Adam's consciousness in Eden constituted on any objective grounds? As we have seen, Adam's consciousness may be divided into a number of constitutive states, the last of which comprises the temporal continuum of Adam's 'stream' of consciousness. Because of its composition, then, subjective time in Eden can never really exist as an object of cognitive knowledge. In a circuitous way, this is one implication of Raphael's counsel to 'be lowly wise'. Subjectivity, then, provides the appropriate context within which all the objects of Adam's experience are defined. Temporal objects and events, together with physical objects, are similarly contingent upon Adam's consciousness. A conceptual formulation which locates the make-up of objectivity in subjectivity easily leads to a point-of-view which relates the external world to a transcendental ideal in at least two ways: in the sense that a recorded pattern must exist in the objective world, and in the sense that an object of knowledge may be broken down into its constituent parts. From this perspective, it may be deduced that because Milton constitutes Adam's objectivity in subjectivity, he holds little stock in the value of any method which endeavors to deduce truths from phenomena as an instrument for completing the external renovation and reformation of the world before 'one greater Man' accomplishes that deed at his Parousia.

Ill AFFECTIVE AND IMAGINAL VISION

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse: Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. - G e o r g e Herbert For I was flax and he was flames of fire. -Francis Quarles Si volumus non redire, currendum

est. -Pelagius

When Adam is expelled from Eden, his empirical assault upon the world and history is characterized by a divine ceremonial: Michael guides our parents down the slope 'To the subjected Plain', holding aloft the flaming sword of God 'Fierce as a Comet'. This gesture carries a twofold signification: it is meant to signify both man's homelessness and finite nature, and it makes manifest God's sacrifice of the world to history. God, hitherto committed to expressing the concord of inexpressible and indeterminate laws to Adam, now declares his will, through Michael, to disengage himself from the world of the quantitatively determinable. From this point forward in time, the natural world is transformed from its primitive condition, one of partnership with God in praeparatio evangelica, into its new condition, a world predicated upon its nature as an anthropocentric object characterized by utilitas and potentia. Now the decisive question, one is forced to ask, concerns the nature of Adam's place and status in this transformed and fallen

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world. This much is clear: if Milton's Adam is obliged to exist in a universe prescribed by time (wherein his being is contingent upon his fulfillment of certain gratuitous and absolute covenants), and if he is to be virtually imprisoned within his own perception, forced continually to postulate himself to himself, then Adam is compelled to exist in the world as a factual and contingent pariah. Even if Adam were somehow capable of transforming his perception of the order of created beings into more than a perception, into a point-of-view about the world, he would still progress no further than the point at which an observer who dips a bowl into the stream and fills - not quite to the brim - and at which he then stares in contemplative awe. Indeed, the fact that after the fruit is eaten, Adam can on occasion consider himself as a 'fragment' of the world, as something isolated from the agglomerate of randomly encountered real objects in Eden illustrates his latent potential for escaping from consciousness into pariahic illusion. Adam's efforts, moreover, to discover the limits beyond which the potency of his consciousness ceases to be applicable to himself are doomed to failure. Efforts alone cannot achieve for him the means required to create the world as an imaginable home. Notwithstanding the fact, therefore, that Adam's consciousness is profoundly split into two 'viewpoints', one which characterizes his existence as contingent upon his corporeality and the other as contingent upon his spirituality, Adam is unable to encounter his own self-consciousness except beyond the boundary of himself. This type of metaphysical displacement is apparent almost immediately after the Fall in Adam's first lament to Eve where Adam, affirming his perception, complains: "How shall I behold the face / Henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy / And rapture so oft beheld?" (IX. 1080-1082). Strictly speaking, the witness is witnessed while witnessing. Further along in this speech, Adam is just as explicit as he expresses a wish to dive beneath the surface of his self-conscious self, to reach a place where corporeal sense is inoperative. Nothing appears to be there as he declares "Cover me ye Pines, / Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs / Hide me, where I may never see them more" (IX.

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1088-1090). It is almost as if Adam is expressing the despair of an erstwhile empiricist: he never could trust his sense-data. The astonishing fact about Adam's viewpoint here is not that something exists beyond Adam's immediate self-conscious perception to which it appears. The object of any perception APPEARS! Here, however, the configuration of the appearance is most important. For Adam to function like the 'metaphysician' he appears to be, he would have to understand not only the occasional and permanent salvific necessities of his own existence but the contingent relationship between those necessities and the objective necessities of the natural world as well. Given his 'fallen' status, that is clearly improbable. In other words, the fact that Adam perceives his ego as perhaps the most problematic 'appearance' he has encountered in Eden falls short of explaining the nature of the perceiver. The pines, the cedars, indeed the whole natural world of Eden function as objects of Adam's perception. Any object may exist without a perceiver, but not without a source. It is not Adam to whom the pines and cedars appear, but to him who creates the pines and cedars; the creator, not the created, is concealed behind its appearance. Adam can discover himself neither behind nor beyond the perceived objects of his world: he can discover only his maker. What Adam is left with, after his efforts to escape beyond consciousness fail, is a perception which requires far more than it can apprehend qua perception. What he is left with is a sense of his existence as contingent on certain absolutes, chief of which is the determinant that man's existence is without any real support. But that is not to say that such an absolute is intolerable, for as long as Adam remains aware of a single determinant upon which his existence is predicated - i.e., his ultimate restipulation to Paradise accomplished by 'the promised Seed' - he can manage somehow to continue. Now there is a striking correspondence between the visible world in Eden which functions for Adam as the trustee of all appearance, and Adam's self-conscious self, in which all appearance is reflected and reappears. But is not this a correlative

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purchased at far too high a cost? Were it a heuristic function of interpretation, everything in Adam's created world, including his perception of the Godhead, would have to be considered as mere appearance, as shaded and shimmering surface. The creator of Adam's objective world could not, moreover, depart from that condition as long as he wished Adam to accept him as something beyond mere appearance. Is this not the implication of Adam's 'O miserable of happy' lament, spoken after his eating the forbidden fruit? O fleeting joys Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes! Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay To mould me Man, did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me, or here place In this delicious Garden? as my Will Concurr'd not to my being, it were but right And equal to reduce me to my dust, Desirous to resign, and render back All I receiv'd.... I sought it not: Wouldst thou admit for his contempt of thee That proud excuse? Yet him not thy election, But Natural necessity b e g o t . . . . That dust I am, and shall to dust return: O welcome hour whenever!... How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be Earth Insensible, how glad would lay me down As in my Mother's lap! (X. 741-778)

The God of this lament remains the God who does not necessarily exist for the purpose of manifesting contingent existences. For Adam, he remains the God of a world which is incapable of recognizing anything beyond itself. Adam's acknowledgment of this fact, however, is apparently contradicted by another belief that all manifestations of the objective world of Eden are themselves appearances, clarified by nothing and clarifying nothing. But as soon as it is noticed that Adam's lament manifests an awareness that tautologies cannot be reduced to existentials, the apparent contradiction is removed. According to Adam's particular complaint, Eden has expunged

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apriorism in a nearly absolute sense; for him, Eden possesses no reality beyond its own perceivable appearances, which are irradiated by and made to interact with, those same appearances over and over again. Because of this, Adam is incapable of perceiving his objective world as a completely unified world, for such a perception would imply a total perception of the sum total of the continuum of spatial and temporal objects in Eden. Indeed, any hypothesis of a psychic-physical unitarian reality which fails to come to terms with apriorism is, of necessity, inadequate. But more remains to be said on this matter. Though Adam cannot answer the question concerning the nature of the connection between his self-consciousness and his received perception of the external world, he is still capable of uttering statements which assert a process of reducibility radically different from his original concerns. Speculating upon the notion that God's sentence of death visited upon man might extend beyond the finite limits of man himself, and, so to speak, reach into the infinite, Adam exhibits a special awareness of the laws of natural necessity "By which all Causes else according still / To the reception of thir matter act, / Not to th' extent of thir own Sphere" (X. 806809) - an idea which expresses a kind of thermodynamic law of naturalistic ethics. By this simple statement, it would seem that Adam appears to exhibit a belief in the existence of something which he considers beyond himself, beyond the world of Eden, and even beyond God himself. If so, his consciousness would have to be something that clinged to that something beyond itself in a purely external manner. Yet even were his statement reducible to that meaning, Adam's senses would still function as a goad to his conscious desire to transcend more than his senses themselves could grasp. In other words, even if the object of Adam's perception manifested itself in a transcendent configuration, his experience of the object - in this case an external law of necessity - would always be a one-sided view. The argument mentioned earlier concerning Adam's perception of Eden - Adam perceives the externals of Eden with his con-

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sciousness, and Eden mirrors it in its appearance -proves to be an invalid one, since Eden mirrors Adam's conscious self even as it perceives. Adam's perception cannot, therefore, lie beyond his Eden; actually, the opposite presupposition permits us to follow Adam as he reduces, even annihilates, his perception to the nothing that he wants it to be. Though Adam's thoughts about his perception force us to accept his premises, it turns out that the answer which he arrives at is wholly inadequate. When he remarks in desperation, "O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears / And horrors hast thou driv'n me; out of which / I find no way, from deep to deeper plung'd!" (X. 842-844) he is experiencing a phantom. In one sense, the phantom he experiences fulfills certain momentary, physical qualities of his own self-conscious state. When, for example, Adam remarks that "all my evasions vain / And reasonings, though through Mazes, lead me still / But to my own conviction" (X. 829-831), he perceives something which, though it does not enjoy a specific physical existence, exists, however, as a presupposition on his part on an extremely high level of objectivity. Like the phantom which appears to the viewer of a stereoscope, Adam's sense of the maze within his conscious mind is a perception in the process of changing its orientation. At that particular instant of time, the objective world presents itself to Adam as an appearance which lies between two of its particular configurations. That is not to say that Adam does not experience any object in Eden in its multiple aspects; he does, of course; but because any object of his perception presents itself to him in only one of its aspects at a time, Adam always perceives in a one-sided manner. The question here concerns Adam's perception in its most liberated and in its most multiple ideality. In terms of a mathematical analogue, Adam's senses behave as if they are capable of defining any number of mean points between two infinities, the infinitely external world and the infinitely inner world; in other words, the distance between the absolutely objective Godhead he confronts in the Garden and the original form in which his selfconscious self appears in his mind. That self originally appears

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to Adam as a demonstrably spatial and temporal extension. After his Fall, however, that self appears to Adam as a 'Nothing' extended infinitely, deprived both of virtuous predication and of predication by virtue: Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know, Which leaves us naked thus, of Honor void, Of Innocence, of Faith, of Purity, Our wonted Ornaments now soil'd and stain'd, And in our Faces evident the signs Of foul concupiscence; whence evil store; (IX. 1073-1078)

what he expresses ironically, by means of a pun, when confronted with this awareness of delimitation is, it is interesting to note, analogous to Job's remark: "Hast thou not poured me out as milk and curdled me like cheese?" (Job 10:10). This position between two horizons of the infinitely 'inner' and the infinitely 'outer' is to both Adam and Job analogous to the twofold spatial character of their perception: objects have a perceived side and an unperceived side. The 'double terror' with which Adam's consciousness presents all objects to him (including himself) provides still another clue to the nature of Adam's perception. When Adam considers the fallen state in which he finds himself, he is aware that he is presenting himself with a real appearance and a co-appearance. Despite the fact that Adam entered Eden originally as a fully predicated being, Adam discovers himself obliged, after the Fall, to remove layer after layer of predicate in order to get back to the material point of his natural being. A depredicated perception is necessary to provide Adam with the appropriate means for locating his peculiar and unique existential character. No longer can the objective world of Eden provide Adam with the occasion for discovering - or, for that matter, attempting to discoverhimself. This is clear in Adam's remarks: "O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales, and Bow'rs, / With other echo late I taught your Shades / To answer, and resound far other Song" (X. 860-863). At this point, Adam is more 'aware' than he has ever been

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when he acknowledges the fact that he has perceived merely one side of the objects in Eden instead of the objects in his world as things in themselves. It should, however, be pointed out that to acknowledge this existence of a continuum of perceivable aspects of an object is not to deny the meaningfulness or the feasibility of having an intuition about a single aspect of an object which extends beyond itself. By accepting the implausibility of perceiving an object in all its multiple sides, in other words, one does not automatically nullify the intentional (and intuitive) character of a perceiver who examines a single side of that object. Indeed, by the end of his speech, Adam has come to recognize that when he considers something as an objective thing, he is investing it with continuity. When he addresses the woods and fountains, moreover, he is aware that the very words he utters have the transformative force of converting mere appearance and illusion into reality. Until that awareness, Adam's orientation vis a vis the fathomless infinity of the truly objective being, God, and the abyss of his consciousness has been a shifting one. As soon as he realizes that knowledge of a high degree of certainty about his existence and the nature of his perception cannot be achieved by searching for an intuitive core within himself which points to something beyond, it suddenly becomes possible for him to utter the word 'Death' simply because he no longer is obliged to insist on the thing. It has taken Adam this long to develop a faith in the power of words to confer continuity. But how, one might ask, is it possible to describe this development? As early as Book V , Adam exhibits himself as a man who is incapable of understanding the transcendent significance of words. The discussion he has with Raphael about God's 'one easy Prohibition' illustrates this; by trying to isolate the notion of obedience from Raphael's warning, Adam fails to apprehend the concept to any great degree of definition: But say, What meant that caution join'd; if ye be found Obedient? can w e want obedience then T o him, or possibly his love desert

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Who form'd us from the dust, and plac'd us here Full to the utmost measure of what bliss Human desires can seek or apprehend? (V. 512-518)

It is clear from what follows that it is not enough for Raphael to rely upon Adam's good intentions to integrate his newlyacquired language into the context of words chosen by God to be introduced into the world. The nature of the conditional covenant offered to Adam shortly after his creation implies, in very strict terms, however, that Adam is obliged to accomplish just such an integration. Though God is aware that Adam is obviously unfamiliar with words hitherto lacking, God still intends that both the pristine man and the pristine word insist on their privilege of being named: But of the Tree whose operation brings Knowledge of good and ill, which I have set The Pledge of thy Obedience and thy Faith, Amid the Garden by the Tree of Life, Remember what I warn thee, shun to taste, And shun the bitter consequence: for know, The day thou eat'st thereof, my sole command Transgrest, inevitably thou shalt d i e . . . . (VIII. 323-330)

And how does this finally pass into Adam's perception? To say merely that Adam exists consciously, and hence, that he surpasses all perceivable objects by containing them as a priori is to miss the point. Man's 'surpassibility' is a definable limit, and not a phenomenological or a psychological process. In addition, good intentions, as noted earlier, are too variable, and hence, too unreliable. Intentionality can, however, open the door to perception for Adam. As suggested earlier with regard to Adam's first lament after his eating the fruit, the intention underlying Adam's final address to the woods and fountains is grounded in the momentary, changing configurations of the perceived woods and fountains. Usually, Adam's interest in an object of his perception is awakened without Adam's intention; that is, the objective world

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of Eden simply presents itself to Adam's consciousness. Sometimes, Adam will investigate further; more often he does nothing more than receive appearance. The occasion (described above) which God provides to acquaint Adam with the contingencies of his existence finds Adam mute and incapable of availing himself of affecting a truly multiple perception. His being momentarily égaré, Adam cannot see beyond the word. When he speaks to Raphael, however, Adam has matured sufficiently so that he can do more than simply receive the warning one-sidedly. While he perceives, his self-conscious self extends itself and reaches beyond the object, enfolds it, is modulated, and returns. Following an intentional arc (which subtends the spectrum of his consciousness and sustains the unity of his senses), in that instance, Adam permits the multiple stream of which his perceived obligations are a part to inundate him. In the fullness and maturity of his perception, then, Adam awakens in himself a potentiality for fulfillment. If this analysis of Adam's perception is correct, the substance of its conclusions should in no way be altered by a consideration of the shifting temporal sequence of events recounted in Book V through VIII. In the simplest terms, two distinct stories are narrated by two distinct personalities who are conversing with each other. The temporal continuum defined by Raphael's narrative occasionally overlaps the timescheme of Adam's, but both periodically converge and meet in the 'now-time' of their conversation. Together, these three orders of time constitute a dialectical argument which moves the narrative from hypothesis to thesis. Underlying each locus communis, or seat of argument, or 'speech within a speech', is the Ramistic notion of inventio, which implied that poetry was a temporal-spatial matrix in which one located ideas stored in places in the mind - a notion based ultimately on the thesis that images of ideas in the mind are constituted by pure symbolic forms which are inimical to objective knowledge, but which can offer an awareness of truth. These three orders of time also constitute a kind of discontinuous and asymmetrical hierarchy of space and time, which resembles, in its discontinuity, the geometrical relationship between a line and a point, a plane and a line, a body and a plane.

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Viewed in this context, a question which inquires into the validity and maturity of Adam's perception while he speaks to Raphael takes on a new perspective. It can now be recognized, for example, that Adam's ability to apprehend more fully the terms of the gratuitous and conditional covenant implicit in the commandment, Increase and multiply, in Book X (729 ff.), is not the result of a continuous evolution of perception. The first temporal point at which God's warning appears to Adam in Book VIII cannot be extended backwards to a point which intersects the temporal line delimiting Raphael's reinforcement of the same warning in Book V, nor can such a line of time be divided down to the point at which fallen Adam apprehends the significance of the terms of the warning in Book X. In short, to suggest that the line of textual time moves in a forward, though serpentine, direction, which corresponds in a proportional way to the development of Adam's awareness, fails to take account of the empirical variability of Adam's ego, his consciousness, and the external and internal objects of his perception. Further, such a hypothesis neglects the fact that the 'original' word of warning (independent of its temporal location in the text) requires, from the first moment it is uttered, a strength of continuity sufficient to traverse and subtend the whole temporal spectrum of Adam's consciousness so that it may finally become the 'last' word vis a vis Adam's existence - in the sense that the intentionality of the word of God is ultimate from the beginning of time. Having raised the issue of Adam's perceptual variability, it is pertinent to consider the polarity of Adam's arguments in his 'O miserable of happy!' lament (X. 720-844). The formulation of so many question-answers in this speech is enough to suggest a wide range of self-reflective alternations. The alternation of object and mind is particularly germane to our discussion here. Speaking ontologically and materially about God's warning and its appearances, Adam uses expressions such as 'Heavy', 'fleeting', 'endless', 'being', 'Causes'. When he utters phrases such as 'My own deservings', 'O voice once heard', 'Be it so', 'With cruel expectation', 'let this appease / The doubt', and so on, these remarks belong to

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another order of description - one which relates to the 'how' of knowing an object, not the objectively known, or the intentionality of the being who CAUSES the knower to know. The warning, then, may now be understood as a polarity as it appears to Adam's perception. On the one hand, Adam's process of reflection refers him back to himself; on the other, it refers him back to the object. Also, because his perception of what, and upon what, the object is materially predicated is contingent upon the meaning or substance of the object, Adam's perception of the object must be intentional. A s mentioned earlier, Adam's difficulty in perceiving all the appearances qua appearances of objects presented to him fails to invalidate his intuitive grasp of one of the appearances of the object. Indeed, the intentional 'side' of the object always exists in the continuum of Adam's consciousness despite the fact that it presents itself variously from moment to moment. The intentional character of God's warning spoken to Adam, therefore, must be considered as being distinct from the predicating apparatus with which it is always clothed. Though Adam's self-analysis in Paradise Lost may occasionally appear to be locally self-directed and locally determined, it must be recalled that, for Milton, the ultimate meaningfulness of all human predication, prescribed by the text of the poem as a whole, is determined solely by God. From the first, Adam apprehends the warning from within the framework of his unchanged intention to perceive all such external objects, but the way he sees or speaks about the warning changes continually. His perception and his language change first, as functions of the different predicating and determining factors with which the external world presents the warning, and second, as functions of the predicates with which Adam's consciousness intuitively adorns all external objects which appear to him. In other terms, they change in accordance with a principle of external and internal forms whose givenness and order are regulated by causality (when presented from the natural world), but by contingency (when presented by Adam's consciousness). Adam's remark to the effect that God's absolutely objective wisdom will get the better of him is a con-

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crete example of the force of the external, predicated world which confronts him: God made thee of choice his own, and of his own To serve him, thy reward was of his grace, Thy punishment then justly is at his Will. Be it so, for I submit, his doom is fair, That dust I am, and shall to dust return: O welcome hour whenever! (X. 766-771) From this it is clear that when the central noematic factor is the externally-predicated object, Adam's intuition, and indeed his judgment, is sublated if not suspended. When experienced fully, the force of the natural world of Eden is ontologically subversive. It results not in a confrontation with the givenness of Nature as captive and captor (like Goethe's Ganymede), but in a solipsistic and counterfeit surrender to the dialectic of being, a surrender which leads, if not reversed, to the total sacramentalization of the world and to the concept of God as an essentially alien, transcendent being. In the face of what may be termed this negative aspect of his perception, Adam's partial skepticism about his 'search' for the object of God's will is natural enough. Yet when the object is de-predicated from the outside, and when Adam's intentionality is permitted to consider the warning and its alleged consequences intuitively in the 'how' of its predicates, his suspended judgment and his skepticism become only vanishing elements in his search for perceptual knowledge of the absolute, objective God. Were this 'egoless' goal Adam's final condition in Paradise Lost, Milton would have succeeded in 'remythologizing' the myth of Genesis beyond the point of recognizability as a Hebraic and Christian myth of origin, for he would have transformed Adam into a Gnostic par excellence, into a being whose sole concern was the divinization of his inner self and the self-knowledge attendant to that condition. Though the range of Adam's perception is extraordinarily broad, neither of these two extremes of perception - each with its pathogenetic source and resultant anesthesia - is Adam's final condition. To summarize, then, there is the object unqualified by Adam's

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intentionality on the one hand, and the internally-predicated object on the other. With regard to the de-predicated object, Adam is confronted with a phenomenological process whose effect is to make his uncertainty fulfill itself. The character of this fulfillment is such that it does not permit Adam to apprehend the Absolute face-to-face; rather, its force is directed against all of Adam's one-sided perceptions with such a strength as to result in the break-up of Adam's finite determinations. Deprived of these impurities, Adam would quite logically be driven to accept reason over intentionality as a means of 'curing' his doubt. The fact, however, that Adam cannot decide to resolve this apparent contradition is the final proof that Adam's 'defect' is not the result of a mere lack of faith. The real nature of that defect becomes clearer when we turn to an examination of the predicated object. Here, Adam is faced with a phenomenology of mind which drives him to ameliorate the effects of uncertainty by substituting (subjectivism) insight and intuition for the 'certainty' offered by empirical tests: Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die, Lest that pure breath of Life, the Spirit of Man Which God inspir'd, cannot together perish With this corporeal Clod; then in the Grave, Or in some other dismal place, who knows But I shall die a living Death? O thought Horrid, if true! yet why? it was but breath Of Life that sinn'd; what dies but what had life And sin? the Body properly hath neither. All of me then shall die: let this appease The doubt, since human reach no further knows. (X. 782-793)

Once it is recognized that Adam's skeptical argument is not directed against reason, it becomes possible to discuss the broader implications of Adam's remarks. To begin with, all of Adam's thoughts resemble the thoughts of a true skeptic: he does not argue that something is or is not so; he only declares how a thing appears to him. Indeed, he appears to have intentionally determined to be undetermined. In addition, his remarks reflect a

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principle of relativism and exclusion. God's warning and judgment have substance and meaning to Adam either in relation to the external, objective world of Eden or to himself as a perceiving and knowing subject. There is no way for Adam to ascertain what death is per se, relative to itself (according to its own nature), or relative to himself with any degree of certainty. He can only reflect upon this: death is relative to life. Because Adam recognizes the relativity of death and life to inner and outer factors, to eternity and to the present, to the objective and subjective demands of conditional promises of salvation made to him by God, he cannot decide what death is, but confronts each one-sided perception of the object with a correspondingly one-sided configuration of his consciousness. Indubitable suspension of certainty is the inevitable result. It would seem, therefore, that Adam's skepticism argues against the validity of both reason AND belief. Indeed, in the passage cited above, Adam does identify a purely rational solution of his dilemma with faith in a solution. The intentionality ascribed earlier to Adam's perception is the key to this puzzle. Adam's intention is to attain certainty by way of excluding everything doubtful. Intentional, predicated objects are, at Adam's direction, devoted to this end. Their ultimate aim, however, is suspension of judgment - a process which is intuitively willed. This process is fulfilled at a relatively high cost. In the sense that Adam refrains from deciding the issue at hand by recourse either to reason or to Revelation, his abstinence produces a kind of perceptual ataraxy, a condition, which, insofar as it is represented in Adam's 'O miserable of happy!' lament, is governed by a principle which excludes any permanent cultivation of certainty. Since Adam doubts in a radical way, all of his alleged certainties are shaken up. He is almost obliged to ask questions of himself and to generate ideas which, hopefully, will spin out their full meaning reflexively. The potential for ending his search exists, however, in the object of Adam's search itself. Insofar as God's warning and judgment are the subjects of Adam's sensible and intuitive predications, they are also the subject of determinations

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external to Adam, which on their part, REVEAL themselves WITHIN Adam's sensible domain. In this sense, Adam's effort to subject the appearances of God's words to causal analysis is perfectly legitimate. As a creature whose intentionality defines his acceptance of all externals (be they simple or multiform, individual, mythic elements, or total matrices or gestalts), Adam's falling into the rhythm of the thing inevitably involves him in ontological mimicry, in an intersubjective process whose chief result is existential counterfeiting. The thing perceived, in other words, is precisely the thing which becomes the subject of those predicates which appear to Adam's perception. These, then, are the bare bones of Adam's predicament of perception. Faced with the announcement of an 'unexpected' judgment at some point in the immediate future for a crime incompletely understood, a crime whose preventability was never possible for reasons of logic and place, Adam is temporarily paralyzed, caught in the dilemma of logic and trust. The maxim, Reason is Choice, the covenant-effect of death, the covenantpromise of life - these paradoxes occasion Adam's inability to differentiate between subject and object. In his lament, it can be seen that Adam is trapped in a double-bind, which is the mirror image of the original pathogenic one created the instant the forbidden fruit was eaten. Involved in an intense relationship with survival value, Adam is confronted by his own subjective assertions and by God's objective meta-assertions, both of which are mutually exclusive. Adam cannot react to this situation non-paradoxically, for he cannot step outside to comment on it; yet he cannot NOT react to it either. Moreover, he is made to feel punished for his 'correct' perception. In this system, no change can be generated from within; for to be free of the dichotomous claims of the system would necessitate Adam's being able to seize upon, and to accept, formally decidable and verifiable propositions. But because he can, as it were, construct a double proposition through the agency of his perception which is, on the one hand, provable from axioms of that system, and which, on the other, proclaims itself unprovable, were any proposition developed by Adam via his percep-

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tion provable, its unprovability would also be provable. Mere appearance, in other words, is always undecidable for Adam, either in terms of his internal condition of subjectivity (his corps propre including his perception) or his external, objective milieu. It is clear from this that any symbolic system in Paradise Lost, insofar as Adam functions as an element of that system, is incomplete, and that the consistency and validity of the system can be proved only by recourse to methods more general than, and hence, transcendent to, those methods which the system can itself generate. In principle, what reveals itself to Adam is transcendent; but Adam possesses no way of approaching anything OF God except through his perception. Even if Adam were to interpret God's words (whether of warning or of judgment) as signs, not of themselves, but of a reaching out for his consiousness, he could neither justify nor understand the existence of a God unknowable through his perception. If he could, he would be in no better position than the modern physicist who tries to infer a world beyond this world, for that would require that the scientific method be understood as an intentional correlate of a transcendent order, itself being a predicate of nature as it appears in human experience. But that is to misuse reason and insight in a very profound way. Adam, then, cannot even hypothesize the significance of God's words, not even as a speculative theory for the explanation of appearances. And that is the essential reason why Adam 'fails' to perceive God's words in their full signification. Since each of God's words has its indefinite number of sides of givenness which converge in Adam's perception toward the predicated object, and since these, in turn, converge as well toward the sheer object, even if Adam were GIVEN the complete and total content of God's words, the intentional object would still be there. Given Milton's problem of having to establish the possibility of Adam perceiving falsely, Milton must provide Adam with the tools for analyzing the 'what' of all objects of Adam's perception.

IV THE SCHOOL OF INNER-LIGHT

The formall cause is that by the which the thing hathe his name and beyng. And therefore every thing is distingued from another by his forme. The forme also is engendred togeather, with the thing it self: as, a reasonable soule is the forme of man, for by it Man is man, and is distingued from all other thinges. The Geometricall figures have their forme, some beyng triangles, and some quadrangles. So hath naturall thinges: as the heaven, the earthe, trees, fyshe and suche others. So that every thing is to be expounded as the nature of it is, if we maye attayne to the knowledge therof, as in artificiall thinges is more easie to be founde. (Petrus Ramus, The Logicke, pub. Eng. 1574, Book I, Cap. VI)

What is at the core of this assertion? The structural arrangement and temporal composition of the parts of a thing give it its distinctive character and appearance. On the surface, an observation so fundamental it seems hardly worth mentioning. And yet the the formal combination of qualities which constitute a thing do change in the course of time. The formal cause of a thing about to come into existence may not be its same cause either when the thing is coming into being or when it has already come into being. In an even narrower temporal sense, the nature of the thing remembered, the thing desired, and the thing finally apprehended, are not the same. They may even be quite different. But since the thing always possesses some kind of denotative character, it is reasonable to assume that one can locate the connectives and the differentia which define the relative position of

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the thing's formal qualities within its singular temporal continuum. Indeed, one requires a differentia because reflection insists that the thing manifest its formal givenness in a priori terms; even though this differentia is not perceived, this 'ideal' link is always present. Actually, no one has ever perceived this 'ideal'. When one investigates carefully, it disappears. What remains is a dependent line traversing three points: the past, present and future. When this notion is applied specifically to Paradise Lost, we notice that although God and Christ travel separately along the subordinate line of their respective forms, they appear neither God-like nor Christ-like. It is a commonplace that when a man endeavors to apprehend the Godhead in ordinary life, he will proceed intuitively and discursively along a path calculated to deliver the contents of his sensory experience from the isolation in which the forms of God that appear in the world originally occur. He will, most probably, use the content of his experience as an immanent content, as a point from which he can treat all formal images of God in the world reciprocally and concatenate them into one total concept. He will do this, of course, in order to link his varied and multiple impressions of God and the world to a single demythologized context characterized by the stamp of totality. As revealed in Paradise Lost, mythological thinking, as manifested by Adam, is inimical to such a conceptual process. When we examine Adam's narrative of his dialogue with God in Book VIII, for example, we notice that insofar as God appears to Adam in dream vision, God resembles a 'past' God up to the moment when Adam sights God awake - only then does God become a 'present' God. This temporal movement of God's form in Adam's consciousness clearly shifts. At some definite point in its conversion, a transition from the 'past' to the 'present' takes place. But how does this come about? Is it possible to assert, for example, that timelessness mediates between two distant points linking two disparate forms in time? To say that God's formal configurations manifest themselves in Adam's mind in terms of different intelligible ideas is to give an explanation of dubious value; it is certainly an explanation par-

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tial enough to be deceptive. To claim that Adam intuitively relates his perception of God when dreaming to his perception of God when awake in such a way as to make his perceptions of God in both states reflect one another in an image-mirror-image configuration is to make a statement of partial truth serious enough to be misleading. What really has taken place is nothing nearly so complicated as that. Adam, in effect, is simply transforming the image of God in his memory into what he sees in reality. If one considers the difference between "One came, methought, of shape Divine" and "Up hither, from among the Trees appear'd,/ Presence Divine" without prejudice, one may observe that nothing but the word 'Divine' remains the same. When Adam awakens, the form of God he perceives appears not to have changed from the form God possessed in Adam's dream vision. In short, the name endures; a cognomen, however, need not be the thing which it describes. The activity of uttering God's name, however, does confront the namer with sheer and indubitable exigencies. These pressing needs may relate to the awe and fear Adam manifests when he remarks "Rejoicing, but with awe,/ In adoration at his feet I fell/ Submissed" (VIII. 314-316), or they may relate to the kind of experience Isaiah had when a seraph of God touched Isaiah's lips with a live coal remarking "thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged" (Isa. 6:7). In other words, although an individual transcendent phenomenon is usually transfigured within a mythico-religious context, contracted and compressed through the instrument of human language to its utmost tension, the needs felt by the observer who, first, experiences the transcendent, and second, speaks about it, vary from moment to moment. The suspension of ego forced upon such an observer is, of course, directly related to that tension which is created between the subject and its object; reality, in a sense, overwhelms the observer with the force of immediacy. It was noted earlier that a tension exists between the demythologized context which informs the temporal continuum of Adam's perception and the mythical context of ideas toward which Adam is pulled. The nature of that tension may be located precisely

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within the confines of that overpowering moment described above. One must not overlook the fact that within a mythical context, immediate content - together with object and ego - cannot be annihilated for good. Judgment, too, cannot remain indefinitely suspended; at this horizon, where judgment is held in abeyance, the observer is faced by a transcendent reality unwilling to yield. Because of this, the observer's ability to continue reducing his experience to the point where he is in a position to utter the name of the thing is severely curtailed. Indeed, because the duration of the observer's stay at this horizon is limited, he cannot consistently uphold the immutability of the thing's classification; his confidence in the naming relation is, therefore, weakened. He seeks for that is all that is left to him - the facticity of the object, the perpetrator of his experience. As suggested earlier, for God's 'true' form (that is, the formal 'ideal' which connects all God's temporal forms) to be perceived by an observer as immanent content, the observer must locate the subordinate line of time upon which God's formal qualities are objectified so that he can be in a position to incorporate himself into the dynamic structure of his creator. He must transform himself from a being whose existence is characterized by purely emotional and atomistic configurations into a being with particular, denotative form. Accomplishing this, the observer ceases to be an observer in the ordinary sense; the image he projects is now divorced from any contact with conceptual thinking. He is now a creature who ideates mythically. As his inner sense becomes activated, his sensible consiousness 'falls away'. Because he has located the differentia of God's forms, and because he has incorporated himself within the source of all image, he is no longer in a position to accept formal 'content' as a transcendent, unlimited abstraction; he is no longer obliged to apprehend God's immediate content as if it were delimited by isolated points in time and space. For this observer, God is no longer subject to description in terms of primary linguistic forms and primary forms of logical conception. No longer in need of uttering words which express either picturable models of God's form or correspondences between parts of the model and parts of himself

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which the model reflects, the observer discovers himself fulfilled linguistically. We have been talking about man's relationship to God as if this relationship were an analogical one. Given the tightly predicated relationship between God and Adam in Paradise Lost, this makes perfectly good sense. It has already noticed that a definite and meaningful pattern of analogy - both of attribution and proportionality - exists between God, sensible Adam, and the objective world of Eden. Milton's introduction of this pattern into the fabric of his epic provides a means whereby we, as readers are allowed to perceive and hence affirm the existence of God in a cognitive sense. In other words, by setting forth a doctrine and a model of analogical predication, Milton is permitting his audience to assert the existence of God at a time when God may be identified only by describing him in terms derived from a finite historical order and from a finite language. This is the context within which one must understand Raphael's description of the method he will use to relate the story of creation to Adam: yet for thy good This is dispens't, and what surmounts the reach Of human sense, I shall delineate so, By lik'ning spiritual to corporeal forms, As may express them best, though what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heav'n, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought? (V. 570-576)

It is important to recall the full context within which Raphael's remarks are placed. In dialogue with Adam, moments earlier, Raphael has begun to acquaint Adam with the structural mysteries of the universe. In the famous passage in which Raphael describes the Great Chain of Being to Adam, he employs a tree simile to express analogical relationships between a root and earth, a stem and water, a leaf and air, and a flower and fire. Raphael also distinguishes between angelic reason, which he calls 'intuitive' and Adam's 'Discursive' reason. What is significant to note here is the fact that this doctrine manifests a twofold principle: first, it attributes to the Godhead those (causal) perfections which corre-

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spond to the effects of the natural world and the creatures he has created; and second, it awakens within the listener a recognition of the contingency of his own existence in a 'formal' sense. This recognition is possible, of course, only after the listener has been acquainted with the fact that on earth essence and being are always separated one from another, whereas within the Godhead, essence and being are congruent and synchronous. These cosmological principles are communicated to Adam in quite specific terms: O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not deprav'd from good, created all Such to perfection, one first matter all, Indu'd with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and in things that live, of life; But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure, As nearer to him plac't or nearer tending Each in their several active Spheres assign'd, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportion'd to each kind. (V. 469-479)

What is meant by this is that any analogue which relates God to Man - whether formal, ontological, or temporal - may be located formally within each of the analogates but in a condition predicated upon, and determined by, the very character of the analogates themselves. Indeed, this is the meaning of Raphael's remark to the effect that Adam's form will evolve 'proportionally'. This doctrine which asserts a direct proportionality between Adam's form and his finite nature, and God's form and God, derives, of course, from another analogy of attribution which is its source. Expressed in simple terms, Adam's existence is contingent upon God both in the conceptual and in the existential order. In other words, any analogical predicate such as form belongs properly to Adam, but only derivatively to God. That this doctrine is consistent with Milton's view of Adam's epistemology is clear when one recognizes that knowledge, in this context, cannot be a correlative of what is called being, but rather the kindling of essential form within being. The very process of

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learning is possible for Adam only because there is in his mind some form which corresponds — sometimes perceivable, sometimes not - to God's form. Knowledge, then, for Milton, may be revealed in multiple ways in accordance with various degrees of consciousness; but beyond all these levels of consciousness stands the man who "may at last turn all to spirit,/ Improv'd by tract of time, and wing'd ascend/Ethereal" (V. 498-500) - in short, the transcendent man. By itself, this doctrine would not succeed in permitting Milton's remarks about God to have cognitive significance. For analogical knowledge about a transcendent object to have any significance, one must have some appropriately direct or literal knowledge about the object. Without some objective knowledge about God, one would continually be forced to invoke new analogies to explain old ones. Milton overcomes this obstacle in a very subtle way, however. Recognizing the impossibility of grasping the significance of any linguistic expression if one understands it as a mere representation - symbolic or otherwise — of the transcendent world of reality, Milton emphasizes the fact that an experience of the transcendent is itself contingent upon the particular teleological perspective from which it is confronted. Whatever 'form' Adam's awareness of all of the other 'forms' latent in creation may take, that and only that will receive the stamp of 'significant meaning'. On the surface, this would appear to mean that Milton is driving Adam, together with all of us, into the sphere of the inutterable; and, that any effort to express a transcendent truth in cognitive terms belongs to the class of things that just cannot be said. Indeed, Adam's dialogue with Raphael on astronomy provides such an occasion for Raphael to assert that for answers which are inexpressible, the questions too cannot be expressed: be lowly wise: Think only what concerns thee and thy being; Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there Live, in what state, condition or degree, Contented that thus far hath been reveal'd Not of Earth only but of highest Heav'n. (VIII. 173-178)

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Raphael appears to be saying that doubt is introduced into the world only when there is a question; a question only when an answer is possible, and this only where something with cognitive significance can be expressed. To be sure, Raphael's remarks are related - albeit distantly - to the Augustinian notion, that true religious knowledge forces the knower to reform the spiritual qua linguistic structure of his soul and move from the utterable to the inutterable. Yet these assertions do, on one level, appear to preclude the very possibility of speaking about truth. Even if it were granted that religious truth possessed a cognitive though ineffable signification, the consequences following from the fact of inutterability would be devastating for the organization of ecclesiastical structures on earth. In the face of this, even the doctrine of analogical predication would not avail. Before it is suggested that the signs of a new Miltonic heresy have been discovered, it would be well to recall the importance played by teleological and phenomenological perspective with regard to the utterability and inutterability of certain theological truths. First of all, Milton would probably agree with the assertion that revelation is falsifiable on principle. The shifting, and hence probative, character of the mechanics of revelation alone would probably lead Milton to recognize that direct knowledge of God as a principle is probable only in relation to data which lies beyond itself. No direct knowledge of God would be possible, he would claim, unless God were actively involved with man in this concern. Though God is 'unknowable' in principle in Paradise Lost, simply because there is nothing in Adam's experience - except his 'face-to-face' confrontation with God - which stands in a probative relation to it, it must be noted that the crucial fact about Adam's consciousness is that it ITSELF is a primary phenomenological objectivization of revelation. Adam's perception, in other words, is not capable of being explained away in terms of historical causality; its existence is conclusive evidence that revealed truth is assured its cognitive meaningfulness. With regard to the matter of teleological perspective and its relationship to the significance of Raphael's assertion, a careful examination of the following statement of Michael's will prove most useful:

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God from the Mount of Sinai, whose gray top Shall tremble, he descending, will himself In Thunder, Lightning and loud Trumpet's sound Ordain them Laws; part such as appertain T o civil Justice, part religious Rites Of sacrifice, informing them, by types And shadows, of that destin'd Seed to bruise The Serpent, by what means he shall achieve Mankind's deliverance. But the voice of God To mortal ear is dreadful; they beseech That Moses might report to them his will, And terror cease; he grants what they besought, Instructed that to God is no access Without Mediator, whose high office now Moses in figure bears, to introduce One greater, of whose day he shall foretell, And all the prophets in thir Age the times Of great Messiah shall sing. (XII. 227-244)

Michael is saying, in effect, that behind history's relativity, indications of metahistory can be glimpsed. The relationships between history and metahistory, however, cannot be expressed simply in terms of subject and object alone; nor can the metahistorical be reduced to the historical in any absolute sense. But insofar as Christ's birth is the central event of human history, the possibilities of divine intervention in the course of history are not exhausted. Indeed, though God is invisible, he appears in history in many forms. As long as God is in the objective world of Eden incognito - as Kierkegaard was fond of saying - his presence may be revealed to us through the agency of typology. Michael's position, then, is that theological truth cannot be proved cognitively meaningless in a practical sense. Eschatological prophecy expressed in typological terms, assures its meaningfulness. It is this sort of prophecy which marks the limits of what may be called Milton's kataphatic theology in Paradise Lost. By his use of typology as an instrument to verify eschatology, which in turn, JUSTIFIES both Adam's alleged theistic experience and the status of theological truth in general, Milton has made the Kingdom of Christ sociomorphic and dependent upon history.

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Yet before we develop our method of analysis to the point at which it becomes a sacerdotal technique, let us clarify the problem as it has evolved. We are faced with the fact that Milton's Adam reveals to us a consciousness which tends towards telescoping and foreshortening his received impressions of his mythic milieu - in short, a consciousness which perceives objects, events, and concepts immanently in a hypostatized way. Because of this, Adam's relationship toward words (toward their 'form' and their 'content') is not quite the same as it would be were Raphael's description of Adam's reason as 'discursive' true without reservation or were Adam not in prelapserian Eden. Indeed, as we have seen, it is entirely different. Every 'form' and every 'content' that presents itself to Adam's consciousness is reduced to a point at which the immanent content of the object he is perceiving assumes a linguistic form and Adam utters the Word. At that point, Adam's consciousness undergoes the same sort of hypostatization as his utterance. Whatever the form Adam's consciousness has taken, whatever fixed by his name, enters into a relation of identity with the Word. In short, the name becomes the thing, the thing the name, and the namer fulfills himself. From the reader's point-of-view, then, the validity of theological fulfillment in Paradise Lost (viz., the Pauline paradox of the Fortunate Fall) is assured by eschatological prophecy, but is expressed in typological terms. In addition, the polynomic variety of divine forms in the text is accounted for when it is recognized that the meaningful potency of Milton's God, together with his angelic and demonic beings, is related to the abundance of appellatives, cognomen, and epithets used to express that power. In more general terms, although it is possible and even interesting to place the catalogue of fallen angels, together with many other remarks concerning ranked and titled angels, within the context both of the idea of the Great Chain of Being and within the context of the Patristic notions of the hierarchical composition of Heaven and Hell, the very polynomic character of Milton's language and its explicit relationship to the polynomic character of Milton's God should not be overlooked.

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We have been talking about Milton's God as if he were the goal which lies behind the language of 'form' in Paradise Lost, and as if he were - in Meister Eckhardt's words - die stille wueste, die einveltic stille. (the silent desert, the simple silence). Two points must be made about this thesis. If, as it has been noted, cognition and its metonymic, death, are the consequences of eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, what is the nature of the linguistic relationship which connects both knowledge and death to the salvific condition characterized by unqualified silence? According to Genesis, when God declares that fallen man has become 'as one of us', he means that Adam and Eve have acquired a cognitive consciousness. They do not emerge from Eden cognizant of the world in general, however. This distinction must be made quite clear. Knowledge of good and evil means nothing more than the ability to discriminate between antitheses and dichotomies latent in all being. In this context, the 'fall' of man introduces a new linguistic stratum into the world - ambiguity. We have already noticed perhaps the most extreme form of ambiguity when we examined Adam's 'O miserable of happy!' lament in the preceding chapter. An analysis of the substantive linguistic configurations of Adam's remarks revealed what may be termed an antithetical perception of primal words. This antithetical sense is exhibited in many forms in Paradise Lost. A few examples may be mentioned. When Eve remarks to Satan "Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess" (IX. 648), she is employing an extremely simple linguistic antithesis, the pun. Adam's "Can he make deathless Death?" (X. 798) is another example of the sense of the multiplicity of antithetical meaning. Often, there are cases in which Adam's intercourse with such opposites reveal meanings which dissolve into vagueness; sometimes, the meanings interpenetrate with other meanings to form a larger meaningful context; at other times, the meaning will hinge upon the placing of a word in a new collocation. Most important of all antithetical senses manifested by Adam - and, needless to say, by every other speaker - may be located within the context of his typological utterances. Before considering the explicit relationship between typology and cognition, on

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the one hand, and typology and eschatology on the other, it is necessary to recognize certain methodological distinctions which Milton is making between different kinds of typological statements. Consider the following statements made by the narrator: "till one greater Man/ Restore us" (I. 4-5); "Betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd" (XII. 3); or Adam's remark, "though all by mee is lost,/ Such favor I unworthy am voutsaf't,/ By mee the Promis'd Seed shall all restore" (XII. 621-623); or Michael's, "Informing them, by types/ And shadows, of that destin'd Seed to bruise/ The Serpent, by what means he shall achieve/ Mankind's deliverance" (XII. 232-235). As soon as one attempts to establish the cognitive meaning of each of these utterances in isolation from its immediate textual function, one comes to realize that the number of its meanings far exceeds its functions. In each remark, for example, the prepositions, which usually express or introduce a simple temporal or spatial relationship, acquire new significance. Indeed, each of these remarks takes on so many additional meanings extending 'outward' in so many directions, that each appears to form a continuum of systematic ambiguity - systematic, in the sense that as we extend the temporal or spatial horizon of each meaning, we pass through what may be termed a hierarchy of predicating levels, each of which restricts and modifies the meaning in a manner corresponding to the applicability of its predicate. The methodological distinction that Milton establishes between these kinds of statements, therefore, is one which offers the possibility of a unique form of escape from the paradoxes and antinomies latent in statements which manifest a veritable continuum of cognitive significance. As soon as one 'fixes' any statement within a specific level of predication, circumscribing its limit of predication, so to speak, the ambiguity disappears. It is clear from this that man cannot encompass all 'levels' of meaning, and hence, all antitheses, within himself. He is incapable, both in a structural and temporal sense, of co-existing with all meaning. Adam is aware of antithesis only insofar as his spatial and temporal 'position' within it allows him to know it; indeed, as noted earlier, Adam's awareness varies according to the particular con-

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figuration in which an object appears to his perception. His linguistic behavior, in other words, is consistent (in a proportional sense) with his perceptual behavior. The object of Adam's perception at any given moment, together with Adam's speech, then, jointly contribute to preparing the path to the last step whereby Adam's language may itself be transcended and provide him with his final salvific medium of expression - a rhetoric of silence. With these distinctions in mind, we are now in a position somewhat better than before, to consider the relation of typology to cognition, and typology to eschatology as expressed in Paradise Lost. With regard to the first relationship, it is important to acknowledge, from the very outset, that Milton's typology is a method which confronts human time with an ambiguous actualization of convenant-promises and convenant-obligations allegedly witnessed and inferred from God's words. Because Adam symbolizes both the loss and the salvation of all at one and the same time, the existential relevance of Adam's 'type' proceeds and develops in a continuum, prefiguring all the latent antitheses of his first condition of rejection, and prefiguring the future antitheses of his final condition of fulfillment. In his 'first' condition in Eden, Adam's violation of his convenant-obligation dissociates him from God's protection. With this deed (expressed metonymically by Adam's eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree), Adam causes all dichotomy - all dialectic and antithesis - concealed within creation to burst forth at its most precipitous point in time and space, that of the objective world's closest proximity to God. In this context, Satan's remark to Eve "ye shall be as Gods,/ Knowing both Good and Evil as they know" (IX. 708-709) can only be understood in terms of an ironic dialectic. From the first moment that Adam becomes aware of the primal nature of ambiguity, his perception and his language change, and change again, reacting to, and defining his objective world within the framework of a continually recrudescent perspective. Knowledge of death for him, therefore, is as much a cognitive limit as it is consolatory paradox. Expressed in others terms, the vehicle of typology allows Adam to know things substantively. His very existence may be appre-

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hended in its most complicated form of contingence, for example, when Adam claims to Michael: O Prophet of glad tidings, finisher Of utmost hope! now clear I understand What oft my steadiest thoughts have searcht in vain, Why our great expectation should be call'd The seed of Woman: Virgin Mother, Hail, High in the love of Heav'n, yet from my Loins Thou shalt proceed, and from thy Womb the Son Of God most High; so God with man unites.

(XII. 375-382) This final assertion which expresses an absolutely remedial union with God takes its stand on a linguistic expression of Adam's being, and finds its strongest sanction in the Word. Indeed, since it incorporates all the substantive configurations of God under a single typological rubric, the statement "So God with man unites" is the predicate of all subordinate predicates. Before we leave this passage, and with it, end our discussion of the relationship between cognition and typology, it will be of some use to consider the cognitive context in which typology's existential dialectic provides the occasion for Adam to speak about the Incarnation in the manner in which he does. The 'context of experience' within which Adam conceives of the Incarnation bears a striking similarity to the pattern of Adam's mythical ideation discussed earlier in this chapter. It is easy to see, for example, how the pattern of Adam's thinking which leads to a hypostatization of concepts also leads to a special attitude toward language. It is only after Adam has managed to foreshorten and intensify his ideas about the Godhead by means of a perception which reduces and depredicates the totality of his experience that he is permitted to arrive at the point where the mythical form of the Word emerges and fills whole of his subjective world with immanent presence. Only after the systematized context of experience is shattered, is the Word permitted to unite with its object. Christ's embodiment in flesh is a process which substantially reflects the same sort of hypostatization (or transubstantiation) that Adam's objective ex-

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perience undergoes when he 'thinks' mythically; all discrepancies between objects and images are obliterated, and find themselves in a relation of complete congruence in a manner comparable to the congruence asserted by the remark "So God with man unites." Now, turning to the correlative problem raised earlier, that of the relationship between typology and eschatology in Paradise Lost, it should be recalled that our definition of Milton's typology emphasized the notion of man's phenomenological and historical incorporation within a movement of salvific history whose continuity was assured by God's grace and judgment. From our discussion of eschatological prophecy, it should also be recalled that the function of Milton's doctrine of analogical predication is to provide a means for verifying and validating the cognitive meaningfulness of all 'images' of theological truth. Now, the essentially ideal 'image' of truth which operates as if were a sign of all substance (the res signum, in Augustinian terms) may be located in its most faithful form in the Gospels. It is there that one finds a language which more or less adequately expresses that relation of identity between the Word and the Thing. The existential imperative to which man is called to account in Scripture demands that every man somehow look beyond Christ's language, beyond the allegorical figurations and dialectical structures, and locate the norm of divine action vis a vis human existence. To this goal, the language of parable is directed, not to a concern with the relative feasibility of typology's philosophical structure. In possession of a fallen consciousness, however, a man who seeks to 'know' and 'conform' to the imago Christi must first confront, and then overcome, the tension produced by existence itself - an existence which presents him with omnipossible images from the objective world, on the one hand, and with his own inner imaginings, on the other. At the mercy of his own consciousness, unable to transcend its dichotomies - there is no route towards the transcendent apart form the path which leads him back to his Creator - man is self-driven into the chaotic of the possible, which is forever, capriciously, incarnating itself. In the vortex of this 'possible', Adam laments:

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But say That Death be not one stroke, as I suppos'd, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; Ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenseless h e a d . . . . (X. 808-815)

Whatever fabric of particulars comprises Adam's reality at this point, his awareness of some kind of interconnectedness of parts illustrates that he is aware of a sphere of meaning which exists beyond either mere objectivity or mere subjectivity. That Adam finally perceives a connection (which is itself an immanent experience) between himself and death shows that he is apprehending a structural type. The type expressed inheres as an image. The relationship Adam recognizes, therefore, relates neither to cause, nor to fact, nor even to history at this point. Its concern and its signification are structural. Yet to avoid the chief danger of treating the name which Adam assigns to this structural relation as if it WERE those very objects he has 'connected', he is obliged to introduce the type into the phenomena of his own life. Once incorporated into the retrogressive continuum of Adam's life and the lives of his progeny, the type will function indirectly in very much the same way as does what Kohelet refers to as the yeast in the dough, that principle of 'irritability' placed in the soul by God, without which the human soul cannot rise. Strengthened by the mediating force of the type which intervenes between his will and his subsequent experience, man is now in a position to embark intentionally and methodically upon a path which will bring him into more or less conformity with both Christ's image and Christ's language. It is almost as if obedience to the force of the type were obedience to the laws of indirection; Adam appears to acknowledge this very notion in the following remarks addressed to Michael: Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk

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As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend, Merciful over all his works, with good Still overcoming evil, and by small Accomplishing great things, by things deem'd weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simply meek; that suffering for Truth's sake Is fortitude to highest victory, And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life; Taught this by his example whom I now Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest. (XII. 561-573)

Adam's newly-acquired teleological perspective demands, in effect, that Adam move away from his final goal rather than towards it; instead of reacting reflexively and 'naturally', bringing the object of its search within reach, the imago Christi, the applied type of Christ within him, reacts as if it is obliged to differentiate its conduct, encompassing an increasingly wider and apparently less significant class of things, so that the final integrative sum of its reflexive qua human behavior may achieve the desired goal. In this context, the covenant 'direction' (the direction that leads toward God) upon which Adam has at this point set himself, may be understood as an absolute and unconditional direction; the convenant promise, however, remains for him a goal conditionally and gratuitously obtainable. The teleological coefficient of man's existence, therefore, may be seen as recoverable not by means related to any criteria for cognitivity in the ordinary sense of knowledge. But that is not to say that because typology is related to a principle of eschatology (and implicitly, to an eschatology which verifies and validates the existence of the type), the relationship between the two is tautological. A recognition of the meaningfulness of hypostatization in human experience will not permit such a conclusion. Such a recognition is implicit, for example, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "Who can speake of eternitie without a soloecisme, or thinke thereof without an exstasie?" and in T. S. Eliot's " T o become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern" (Little Gidding, III). Expressed in other terms, the true nature of the

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contingency of one's existence emerges only within the context of a transcendent and typological-eschatological perspective towards a being from whom all being and all essence flow. What distinguishes Milton's God from a merely imagined God, then, is not something related to essence but rather the nonrational conviction of existence which is external to essence. In a sense, this is Raphael's estimate of man's condition. When he advises Adam to concern himself with HIS being and to 'be lowly wise', he is insisting that those who rely upon solely empirical verification and logical articulation in their pursuit of cognitive meaning will discover it inimical to the image of Christ. Indeed, he would probably assert (in Augustinian terms) that a mind sufficiently refined as to be impressed more by the FORM than the matter of things, does not require the continued existence of the objective world in which it exists, neither does it run any risk of being despoiled by the objects in that world. Such a mind, according to Raphael, may rest "Contented that thus far hath been reveal'd / Not of Earth only but of highest Heav'n" (VIII. 177-178). The issue of hermeneutics (and, with it, of justification) is central here. In general terms, Raphael is arguing that an insistence on empirical verification and logical articulation is inimical not only to cognitivity and to revelation, but to justification as well; and, by extension, if one willingly forsakes any effort to comprehend the obstinate chaos of appearances (the intangible appearance in experience constitutes, in this context, a revelation) as if it were a cognitively unified form, he will make up in another 'direction' and in another 'form' what he has been denied in this. Without assigning the multiple objects of the external world form, names, and hence meaning, man's reality will remain unencompassable, an inchoate press of forms unconnected by any purposive bond. The goal of this procedure, in short, is an objectivity that approaches (but does not verify) the objectivity of God, the truly objective being. Milton would no doubt claim that the 'form' taken by words in Paradise Lost can yield something approaching a unified image only if the reader attends to them in the proper

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manner and from the proper direction. Only after the image has been interpolated into the reader's own life can the activity of hermeneutics and justification proceed.

V INTELLECTUAL VISION

Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren.

-J.S. Bach

If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception vary. If Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also. William Blake Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother. Franz Rosenzweig A bourgeois who has not lost his illusions is like a winged hippopotamus. Leon Bloy

In the preceding chapter, it was noted that Milton organized his ideas of creation and existence in accordance with what may be termed a principle of existential forms. It was observed, from Milton's perspective vis a vis fulfillment and salvation, that the form of existence man takes in his post-lapserian state is conditional and gratuitous; indeed, man's existential form emerges only when placed within the context of the imago Christi. Man's formal participation in the reality of this most profound form may best be understood, then, by locating in the world of nature and of history those 'linguistically' persistent forms of predication with which that most profound and essential image of Christ has clothed itself. If, consequently, Paradise Lost may be understood as containing any theodicy at all, Milton's notion of the structural relationship between God's form and man's essence serves that function. With a view towards understanding this structural relationship,

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our attention has been directed towards an examination of Adam's encounter with various external processes, with time, with formality of cause, with the world in statu nascendi, and with the world of 'the subjected Plain', as the narrator puts it. One further significant criterion of dialectical structure, which underlies all of these epistemic distinctions in Paradise Lost, is yet to be discussed. It relates not so much to the difference - real or apparent - between either of these two areas of the subjectobject problem, but rather to the prophetic, and cognitive significance to human consciousness of the distinction Milton sets up between Nature and History. Here again, Milton's emphasis upon method and epistemology is typically a mark of his modernity. It is the general aim of this chapter, then, to examine how the concepts of nature and history implicit in the epic function as 'phenomena' which contribute to the constitution of Adam's objective world. Far from being related in the text to the a priori world of things, arranged categorically according to fixed predicates of one sort or another, Milton's ideas of Nature and History contribute 'methodically' to the structural make-up of Adam's objective reality, and, indeed, make the positing of predicates possible. The Pisgah vision of the historical future shown by Michael to Adam, and its correlative, an almost negative concept of the 'natural history' of the world of nature, perhaps best illustrate the subtle manner in which this dialectical structure is effected. On one level, the Pisgah vision of history appears to be accessible to Adam's cognition, whereas the world of nature (partially because Adam is not its creator) appears to be relatively inaccessible; on another, just the reverse. Analysis reveals the mechanics and the function of this polarity. First, to God, the source of the vision. God's instructions to Michael are brief: "reveal / to Adam what shall come in future days, / As I shall come thee enlighten, intermix / My Cov'nant in the woman's seed renew'd" (XI. 113-116). After which, of course, Michael is to escort our first parents out of Eden down to 'the subjected Plain'. Moments before Michael's arrival in Paradise, Adam and Eve see signs in nature which foreshadow, Adam senses, 'some further change'. These signs from the world of

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nature are significant for at lea^t two reasons. Initially, they have the tendency to radicalize the 'historicity' of the imminent vision. For if nature is not an autonomous entity, a self-bounded and self-regulating matrix divorced from the world of conscious man, and if it merely functions as a multi-predicated object encountered solely within the scope and context of human perception, the world of nature would have to be inextricably and proportionally interwoven with human existence in a historical sense. In short, the natural world would have to be regarded as an existentially formal construction. Next, the signs perceived in nature before the expulsion tend to radicalize and polarize the natural world into two apparently mutually-exclusive parts: the world accessible through itself (and, of course, its formal predicates), and the world accessible through the instrument of the human mind. Another way of expressing this logical relationship is by means of a dialectic of corporeality and consciousness: human consciousness tends to become aware both of itself and of the world of nature, while the material world of nature tends to become cognitively unaware of itself. This last epistemic distinction requires further explanation. If one considers the relationship just mentioned as a dialectic of contingency, the issue becomes clearer. The question now is how can man's mind (in contra-distinction to the contingency of man's existence) change history or determine its course in any way if his consciousness is a direct quotient of the world of history rather than a function of the world of nature? How can Adam, for example, locate his 'place' in the future world shown to him by Michael without perceiving, or even without the desire to perceive, these first 'signs' in nature? Is Milton suggesting, among other things, that in order for Adam to express his faith in ongoing history, his faith in the fortunate aspect of his Fall, indeed, his faith in the salvific process, he must first recognize with cognitive certainty the fact that God is actively involved in history, and that because of this, God as such can become not only visible and incarnate, but also assume a form recognizable to man in history? Does the vision of the future shown to Adam provide the occasion for Milton to illustrate the compatability of free will

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and the laws of causation? The temptation is to answer yes. But is visibility ever a function of recognition in Paradise Lost, or in ordinary life for that matter? Indeed, can recognition ever be divorced from the issue of faith? These are some of the problems with which Michael's panoramic vision of history confronts the reader. When the reader observes Adam accepting the 'visibility' of the vision shown to him, he tends to be drawn to the notion that Adam is also seeking visibility's correlate, recognition or faith. From the fact that the vision initially proceeds on an unfixed level, on a level of shifting, kaleidoscopic forms, the concept of history (quite apart from its correlative) recoverable from it must be quite difficult for Adam to apprehend with any degree of certainty. It is rather telling, in fact, that Adam's attempt to penetrate the meaning of the confusing proleptical signs in the air and on the ground which herald Michael's arrival meets with such difficulty. The 'double object' confuses Adam to such an extent that he appears to conceive of this sign as if it were a substantive: "by these mute signs in Nature shows / Forerunners of his purpose" (XI. 194-195). Later, Adam represents the imminent vision in similar terms, as he remarks to Michael "Ascend, I follow thee, safe Guide, the path / Thou lead'st me, and to the hand of Heav'n submit" (XI. 371-372). Linguistically, 'his purpose' and 'the path' function attributively, as if they were substances, representing something distributed variously over beings or over objects. Adam's difficulty in expressing the object of his foresight (the historical future) in conceptually precise terms stems, undoubtedly, from a combination of at least three reasons: the first relates to the fact that since the vision SHOWN creates a thing (the panorama delimited temporally) which has discrete, and substantial existence, it functions far too rigidly as a personification to render the total idea of history that is there for Adam to be grasped; the second relates to Adam's negative (because the objective world of Eden remains mythically unfixed and undifferentiated) capability to perceive and recognize both the concept of the future and the objects in that future without some assistance of an artificial kind.

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The third and most important reason may be located within the contextual background of the chief reason Adam gives for not wishing to leave Eden and enter into history: This most afflicts me, that departing hence, As from his face I shall be hid, depriv'd His blessed count'nance; here I could frequent, With worship, place by place where he vouchsaf'd Presence Divine, and to my Sons relate; On this Mount he appear'd, under this Tree Stood visible, among these Pines his voice I heard, here with him at this Fountain talk'd: So many grateful Altars I would rear Of grassy Turf, and pile up every Stone Of lustre from the brook, in memory, Or monument to Ages, and thereon Offer sweet smelling Gums and Fruits and Flow'rs: In yonder nether World where shall I seek His bright appearances, or footstep trace? (XI. 315-329)

The stratum of consciousness which gives rise to the verbal forms in this declaration precedes in order of mythical 'depth' the predicated level within which God actually appears to Adam's perception. The quality of the divine with which Adam is here concerned is not the divine being as trustee of the world of mere appearance; it is not even the discrete and subjective shadow cast by the mirror of Adam's senses. The 'Presence Divine' to which Adam refers is an anonym, unnamed, and inutterable, the divine presence which exists prior to the divine name. So for at least two reasons, God's 'Presence' forms the backdrop against which the anonym may subsequently assume a particular form and acquire a specific name: first, since Adam has moved away from his earlier, 'pre-lapserian' concept of God's name as polynym, his words are not in any position to find their way to things - whether the things be God or history; second, a correlate of the first, since the word for Adam signifies HIS presence (his naming of things, it should be recalled, both sacramentalizes the object and witnesses his presence before the object), Adam's 'linguistic' behavior at this point betrays him

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incapable of perceiving any incarnational process in any undifferentiated sense. He is particularly unable to perceive any incarnation which emanates from the category of the transcendent. And, of course, the vision of history to be vouchsafed to Adam cannot be fully apprehended without a fundamental acceptance on his part of the doctrine of Incarnation. The Incarnation, after all, is that which gives cognitive significance and meaning to history. It is the Incarnation, with its undifferentiated emphasis upon the message of Immanuel, the graceful presence of God himself, that is at the center of Michael's reply to Adam's lament. It should be pointed out, however, that Michael's stress upon the continuity of man's salvific encounter with 'his presence' throughout history appears to link the nature of man's contingency, together with contingency in the natural world, to God's existential presence: Yet doubt not but in Valley and in Plain God is as here, and will be found alike Present, and of his presence many a sign Still following thee, still compassing thee round With goodness and paternal Love, his Face Express, and of his steps the track Divine. (XI. 349-354)

Carried to its furthest logical limit, this assertion holds that revelatory activity within the spatial and temporal dimensions of history is, in part, mediated through two existential norms: the natural world and human existence. One effect of such a statement is, of course, to bring about the incorporation of human will and reason into the causal organization of the historical world instead of dissipating itself. Another is to suggest that a finite series of external determinations made manifest by means of vision can, by disposition, show both the interaction between, and the compatability of, free will and determinism. But this appears to raise more questions than it answers. If man's subjective will, indeed, his subjective consciousness, receives its content from the world of nature, for example, how can man perceive his contingency as a predicate in the historical

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world by means of revelation or through any other means? It would seem, then, that to speak of Nature and History as mediating revelation is very much a contradiction in terms, though from the conception of revelation exhibited in Books XI and X I I God may make any situation, into which man may come at any time, the medium of his revealing word to the human soul - that not all situations or events are equally calculated to be a medium of it, though any situation may become such, owing to a particular existential significance, which it may at any moment assume. A similar dialectic may be seen in the building of a shelter. The natural world provides the materials to construct a refuge from the very elements used to construct the shelter. Indeed, the longer the shelter lasts, the more successful it is thought to be. It is suggested that the way out of this apparent contradiction in Paradise Lost may be discovered in the very materials at Adam's disposal for conceptualizing himself and his external, objective world. Adam's perception, as we have come to understand it, functions in a manner comparable to the theological process of Incarnation. As Adam initially confronts his Creator in Eden, the encounter is set within the framework of the phenomenal world. Aware that he himself is an incarnation, Adam begins quite early to reflect, through his speech, as it awakens to the procession of divine and natural appearance, the variety of appearance in the natural world, and the polynymic variety and abundance of the divine presence. Bound by the contingencies of both, however, Adam and his perception are obliged to remain continuous with the phenomenal world. Yet Adam's 'historicism' is not merely the product of perception historicized. The fact of his transcendent origin and transcendent environment does contribute scope and considerable cognitive significance to Adam's historical perspective. Adam's obligation to preserve and maintain covenant laws, for example, assures the presence of the divine in history at the same time as it accompanies all sorts of contingencies of nature in the natural order. God's Providence is similarly linked with both History and Nature: in the sense that Adam's liberty is bound up in the natural process, Adam's dependence upon history and upon the

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processes of nature cannot be otherwise. Nature, after all, not only gives rise to Adam's existence as a form of God's image, but also carries with it an internal law of necessity based upon the character of Adam's conditional obligation to obey the will of God in the natural world. A natural process inherent in Adam's language provides yet another clue to the character of Adam's contingent relationship to Nature and History. Given the variety of kinds of statements made by Adam, each consisting of differing quantities of evidence, it should be possible to discover which contingency (in a scale including belief or disbelief in subjective historicism, relative historicism, nature as existential norm, nature as autonomous and creative absolute, and so on) is appropriate to any of Adam's given cognitive assertions. It should be possible, in other words, to adopt a method of inquiry which succeeds in uncovering what Adam believes. Indeed, it would be possible to formulate such a method of analysis were it not for the following objection: the appeal of this formulation of a scale of belief involves the epistemologist in a fundamental acceptance of the doctrine of Incarnation. If one accepted, as Milton did, Augustine's notion that what is cognitively known cannot be divorced from what is loved, one's use of a merely linguistic category of interpretation which employed faith as a function of cognition could never discover Adam's views about History and Nature. True enough, it might provide the reader with some indicators, some avenues of cognition. But such a method could never succeed completely simply because if one maintained that knowledge of the meaning of history was inextricably bound up with faith in the doctrine of Incarnation, absolute belief would become a fundamental and conditional principium of knowledge. Such a distinction between faith and knowledge may be found in Adam's final remarks to Michael and in Michael's reply. Indeed, the chief reason that Michael offers the notion that faith is a CONDITION for knowing rather than the concept that faith is a WAY of knowing appears to be that it offers Adam an escape from the antimonies and antitheses which threaten to impede Adam's

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perception of truth and offer obstacles to Adam's achieving a paradise within: This having learnt, thou hast attain'd the sum Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the Stars Thou knew'st by name, and all th' ethereal Powers, All secrets of the deep, all Nature's works, Or works of God in Heav'n, Air, Earth, or Sea, And all the riches of this World enjoy'dst, And all the rule, one Empire; only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call'd Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far.

(XII. 575-587) According to Michael, the notion of history per se is in reality a misnomer; he implies, in effect, that if the natural order were ever incorporated into the historical order, a question about the cognitive significance to man of the 'secrets of the deep' would be identical, in a predicative sense, to a question about the meaning of history. Together with Adam, Michael fails to take into account the fact that all questions about historical meaning are themselves historically conditioned by the teleological and providential perspective of scriptural revelation. Indeed, there is virtually nothing in either angelic or human experience which can serve as a point d'appui with the Arbitrium which directs history. With its patterns and symbols typifying the processes of history and the processes of nature, the terms of the problem (as reflected in the dialogue between Adam and Michael) reveal the way in which Milton as Christian historiographer is obliged to treat his subject matter. In the absence of a divine, purposeful will operating immanently, Milton realizes that the quest for historical knowledge must be undertaken creatively by human will. Given the fact that the limits of human will, with its plurality and complexity, are forever shifting, whatever unification of historical and natural experience man undertakes must proceed by means of the symbols and patterns which serve as instruments for the

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functional analysis of the problems at hand. Milton's terms, therefore, must be understood as pointing not to history's appropriation of nature but rather to history's estrangement from nature. In short, by grouping the limits of historical and naturalistic analysis around the major obstacles to cognition, Milton is throwing into high relief the most effective means for dealing with the problem. However limited, knowledge of History or of Nature can still serve as an analytic instrument which man may use to locate the pattern and the course of his own future. It is of utmost significance, for Milton, that in the absence of divine prescience and purpose, human will cannot locate its own telos, for man's search for meaning within history stands or falls with eschatology. In this connection, Michael's assertion concerning the existence of a paradise within which lies in the future is precisely the one article of faith demanded by the search for meaning in history. Perhaps the most important thing to be recognized here is that Michael's idea of a paradise within cuts across the processes of history and the processes of nature at the same time. With regard to the immediate existential relevance of the vision shown to Adam by Michael, it is significant that the complete history of man - that is, the resultant outcome of those processes of nature and concatenations of events which constitute the sum of Adam's existence within history - is accumulated, gathered, focused, and unified in the present. If, for Adam, Nature were either an indistinct and inchoate anomaly or a wanton, superabundant society (such as Eden appears to be), Michael's telescoping and unifying of Adam's history by means of vision would have no basis in reality; without structural patterns of eschatology and teleology, history could have no meaning or significance for man. That Michael can, however, succeed in temporally unifying Nature and bringing to a focus the significance of man's past, present, and future in the perspective of Adam's present should lead one to conclude that Adam's ability to apprehend the vision of human history is a direct function of his ability to transcend the natural order, even though it must be noted that Adam's cognitive ability is itself derived, in part, from the natural world. The external world of Eden, as noticed earlier, though itself a

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'condition' of objectivity, is not objectively self-sufficient. Its phenomena are subject to complete and total apprehension by man only if man's senses contribute to them an increased 'awareness' of the imago dei, an awareness 'experienced' by Eden itself in its pristine condition of objectivity when God's presence was at its highest peak. One problem remains to be disposed of before this analysis can proceed. We have been speaking about apprehension and awareness as if these terms were descriptive of criteria for identifying both man and Nature. One reasonably accurate test of the validity of this description is to locate the direction taken by both man's will and nature's processes, whether towards the sensory world of perception or towards the world of existence or being. For if both man and Nature can be shown to be forever transcending themselves in Paradise Lost, the vision of the future vouchsafed to Adam acquires as much significance as the myth of his creation. This test, then, involves more than description; it involves a normative judgment. If one proceeds from Milton's contention, discussed earlier, that an acceptance of history involves an acceptance of the doctrine of Christ's Incarnation, it is possible to argue from this that as man's will moves through history while maintaining a proper 'attitude' towards Christ, the image of Christ, as 'the promised Seed', will of necessity emerge to human perception. If this deduction were true, the Incarnation would then provide man with the only meaningful 'historical' referent which could serve as a point of both contact with, and interpretation of, the natural order. Is this not the deductive and prescriptive procedure historians actually use when they try to develop philosophies of history? Indeed, is this not the manner in which the order of the natural world is commonly called upon to 'generate' philosophies of history? Any philosopher of history whose aim is to determine the true significance of man's place in nature must devise methods capable of uncovering plausible relationships and coherent patterns from the historical 'artifacts' with which he is dealing. He must, in other words, locate relativistic links between the past and the present. Michael's vision of the future presents an extraordinary set of

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these relativistic correlatives. Insofar as the vision constructs a future which will 'answer' to Adam's present interests, the vision is held together by an eschatological connective. And yet, paradoxical though it may be, the concept of the future expressed by the vision must also be apprehended as a function of the past, for, in point of fact, the primary linguistic form associated with the narrator's concept of the past (whose story encapsulates the vision, together with all the other narrative elements of the poem) is the past tense. If the reader carefully examines one of the narrator's apparently simple statements, one which provides a frame for the story of Michael and Adam, a very complex procedure for conveying a concept of the past may be observed. Introducing the Pisgahic vision, the narrator remarks: It was a Hill Of Paradise the highest, from whose top The Hemisphere of Earth in clearest Ken Stretcht out to the amplest reach of prospect lay. Not higher that Hill nor wider looking round, Whereon for different cause the Tempter set Our second Adam in the Wilderness, To show him all Earth's Kingdoms and thir Glory. (XI. 377-384)

Were it not for the special relationship between conditionals, declaratives, and ostensives in this statement, the reader might properly be more impressed than he is by the narrator's alleged proprioceptive presence in the specious present in which the event described allegedly took place. As soon as one recognizes the fact that the time of the present of which the narrator is aware in his remark, "It was a Hill / Of Paradise the highest", is not a definite instant of time, but rather an indefinite interval, one releases himself from any potentially ostensive connection with the narrator's concept of the past. The narrator's use of this conditional expression, in other words, contributes virtually nothing additional to the reader's understanding of the past, for this kind of ostensive construction presupposes that the reader associate his knowledge of all of the

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presently known attributes of hills, for example, with his sense of the construction 'was'. To add to the confusion, "It was a Hill / Of Paradise" is a statement about an event neither very recent nor of which it is possible to have memory or beliefs which the reader can regard as cognitively meaningful to any high degree of certainty. But to recognize this distinction is not enough. If one acknowledges a concept of the past which impinges upon the eschatological connectives within the vision, and even if one agrees to relate the concept of the past which is STRUCTURALLY implicit in the vision to an interacting connective myth of creation, all the reader has succeeded in doing is to hypothesize a system of binary histories, a kind of kairos of origin interpenetrating, and being interpenetrated by, an aion of outcome; or, expressed in other terms, a history of a definite past (creation) linked to a history of a partially-defined future (redemption) by means of a point-of-view. Whether or not one regards this system of binary history as either a morphogenetic manifestation of a Christian's aesthetic experience of history, or as a product of symbolic thought, the parts of this binary system may, in any case, be understood to stand one to another in a relation of level to meta-level. Indeed, from the point-of-view of logic, the two apparently self-coherent frames of reference seem to be incompatible in every sense but a structural one. Yet it must be noted that the bi-associative process that gives rise to a perception of these structural frames is, after all, a mental one. It may even be that the paradoxical structural of these two-fold concepts of history is generated in a manner similar to the way a man who is aware of himself in his existential nexus generates other self-reflexive phenomena. But it is as an example of a Ramistic propensity to hypostatize reality by means of a definite plan that the relationship between the parts of this binary history reaches its highest degree of complexity. Milton had at his disposal a method which could decode (and sometimes recode) the vital messages from nature and history. At this point, it is necessary to recall Petrus Ramus' relevant definition of methodus:

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The methode is a dispositio by the which among many propositions of one sorte, and by their disposition knowen, that thing which is absolutely most cleare is first placed, and secondly that which is next: and therefore it continually procedethe from the most generall to the speciall and the singular. By this method we proceade from the antecedent more absolutely known to prove the consequent, which is not so manifestly knowen. (The Logicke, London, 1574, Cap. XIII)

Proceeding from the general to the specific, Ramist method emphasized the suitable collocation of arguments {i.e., the placing of appropriate loci communes in a dialectical series) in an orderly field which moved the arguments from hypothesis to thesis. One implication of this logic, in which the meaningfulness of predicates is modified by an apriorism which exists apart from the human mind, is that poetry, or, indeed, any techne, could actually behave as if it were a spatial and a temporal matrix wherein givenness of historical or natural time could be communicated via human consciousness. In a poetic work such as Paradise Lost, which employs this logic of predicates, the suitable organization of the a priori meaning (in a transcendental, not in an anthropomorphic, sense) of these givens into dialectical 'places' can itself, one might argue, contribute to the human 'sense' of both history and nature. This could indeed be possible because the predicates of time and place - although they APPEAR from human consciousness - are modified by eschatological kairoi and aidn which emanate from the transcendent's lordship over time and place, history and nature. Through this method, the human sense of nature and history, in other words, can be shown to be contingent upon an apriorism which exists independent of human mind. Because of this, one is strongly tempted to consider the reader of Paradise Lost summoned methodologically to place his very linguistic existence at the service of transcendent kairoi of contingency. The chief points to be considered with regard to this discussion of Milton's ideas concerning the relationship of nature to history, then, are these decisive moments which have a special place in the execution of redemptive history, moments which are singled out by Milton from his concept of time as a whole. From the point-of-view of redemptive history, insofar as it is applicable to

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Michael's vision of the future, the 'appropriate' kairoi, or spatialtemporal 'seats of argument', seem to be rather arbitrarily chosen. Though the moments of creation within the context of time as a whole in Paradise Lost are given quite clearly and even appear to be 'fixed' (in the sense one can always use the time of origin as a fulcrum to chart the emergence of Adam's nature from the nonhuman nature of Eden), the decisive terminus ad quem of the eschatological drama described by Michael's vision remains incompletely revealed both to Adam and the reader. One is led, in other words, to consider the meaning of human nature in history as a function of history ITSELF. It is as if one were obliged to consider the relationship between a decisive salvific moment, still to come into being, and a kairos along the identical redemptive line of time, which has already appeared in the past. Such a correspondence is described quite clearly in I Timothy 2:6: "[Jesus Christ] gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time [kairoi]." What can now be said about the narrator's role in conveying Milton's concept of the past? It must be acknowledged immediately that the narrator's very existence in the midst of what has been termed the specious present (those points in time at which the various 'appropriate' events described by Michael's vision allegedly took place) introduces a component of systematic ambiguity into the issue. In one respect, the reader is forced to accept the narrator's evaluation of 'truth' as he would accept the conclusions of a pragmatic philosopher: the narrator appears to apprehend one aspect of the truth at a time because the 'present time' in which his consciousness exists has not perceptible duration insofar as the reader's awareness is concerned. Yet from another point-of-view, the narrator's special awareness of the natural world of Eden encourages the reader to interact with the narrator's sense of the past in an explicitly existential partnership. It is almost as if Milton is suggesting a solution for the problem of the interaction between different faculties of perception and reason - a problem which proved so troublesome to Descartes and Cudworth. The final lines of the poem spoken by the narrator define the limits of his relationship with the reader:

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whereat In either hand the hast'ning Angel caught Our ling'ring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast To the subjected Plain; then disappear'd. They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late thir happy seat, Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate With dreadful Faces throng'd and fiery Arms: Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitary way. (XII. 636-649)

It is striking to notice how the partnership established in these lines between the narrator and the reader functions effectively as the source of many clues about the narrator's knowledge of nature; for example, while the narrator is forced to depredicate the source of his knowledge of the event by indirectly inferring the facticity of the event (beyond reason) as a deficient cause of his knowledge, the reader must admit that his accessibility to the sensible world in which he lives is severely restricted and contingent upon how far he can apprehend it in rational terms. The most distinctive fact about these lines, moreover, is that they all reveal a strong, though very ambiguous, tendency to hypostatize nature. Describing the natural world as if it were capable of yielding a subjectively experienced set of logical truths about man's existence, the narrator seems to be saying that existence and truth are inseparable concepts. Indeed, he seems to be arguing that Adam, together with those potential existential partners in humanity who comprise the future readers of Paradise Lost, may propose virtually any definition of human nature they wish as long as they gratuitously engage in the business of confirming or rejecting their true nature in accordance with a mutually agreed upon existential norm-whether that norm emanates from the natural order, from the historical order, or from the 'effectual might' of God. But this statement is certainly only a partial solution to our

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problem; indeed, as it stands, it is certainly misleading. It is necessary to explain more fully the implications of 'virtually any definition of human nature'. When, for example, one attempts to establish the isomorphic regularity or irregularity of two or more propositions about human nature implicit in the narrator's remarks in order to determine whether or not each proposition is constructed in accordance with the 'rules' and 'limits' of a particular existential norm, it is soon discovered that the 'local' properties of the narrator's logic are contradictory. One is prevented from pursuing questions concerning the logical relations between two or more statements made by the narrator about human nature simply because all of his statements are not constructed in the same logical 'style'. Take, for example, the statement about Eden, 'so late thir happy seat', and the statement, "The World was all before them, where to choose / Thir place of rest." The first statement is characterized by a law of inference in which the law of excluded middle does not really apply in any systematic way. In addition, its meaning relies far too heavily upon images from memory. Since 'so late thir happy seat' expresses an indeterminacy of both time and place, the statement - which may or may not express a meaningful inference about Adam in Eden-cannot be pinned down. The second statement is even more ambiguous, if that is possible. It clearly employs inferences predicated exclusively on place; moreover, its 'tone' (the reader's attitude towards the statement, particularly) is radically different from that of the first statement, because it functions in a manner similar to the way Ramist 'space' functions - i.e., it requires a frame of its own to constrain and delimit it. Sometimes the frame is quite sharp and clear; 'so late thir happy seat', provides such a frame because it designates a specific point of time at which the self-revealing 'seat' of Eden affects Adam's nature as if his nature were itself a phenomenon. From this it may be gathered that as human nature is delimited, as well as defined, by Adam's nature, so the world of the 'subjected Plain' is constrained by Eden. It is also clear that the form

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taken by this 'constraint' is related more to the loci communes of human consciousness than it is to the spatial-temporal configurations of objective reality. The visual image formed in the reader's memory as a result of having perceived Adam's words, for example, precedes objective language; even more, the image partakes in the creation of language. The process of affixing incarnational seals to objects or events, in this context, is authentic only when the 'word' or instrument of incarnation exists within a fixed and particular spatial frame. Conversely, when the 'word' precedes the image, when, for example, Satan remarks 'myself am Hell' (IV. 75), the self-revealing locus of that expression has no fixed frame whatsoever, and so functions in such a way as to 'uncreate' or fragment the image of Satan in the reader's memory. The relation of incomplete or partial, revelation to 'place' in Michael's vision may perhaps be better understood in terms of the following analogy to a special case of Zeno's paradoxes. Take a man, halve him, and then halve each of the resultant halves. Were this operation performed indefinitely, the man under analysis would be nominalized out of existence, split into the most illimitable fragments of his being, the point at which matter is 'bottomless'. There is, of course, no such point in analysis, because the mind performing this halving operation calls a halt to this process long before it reaches its goal of non-divisibility. The mind similarly cannot accept a definition of time which holds that it is constituted by indivisible moments, because the mind requires some appropriate point (or points) at which it can focus, and upon which it can rest. Moreover, were one confronted with the fact of an infinitely nominalized man, one would experience considerable difficulty in reconstructing the man with which one started simply because it would soon become clear to human perception that infinitely small pieces of matter have no basis in reality. It follows, then, that any such sensory examination of matter's spatial qualities leads away from a definition of matter as something which resists endless disintegration, and that any hypothesis which takes matter to be ultimately real must of necessity be irrational. A similar conclusion is conveyed by Michael's vision with

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regard to the temporal qualities of human nature. Given its dual and dichotomous form, sometimes fixed and sometimes mutable, time carries a twofold necessity for man - occasional and permanent. But to the extent that human perception provides the appropriate occasion for a salvific escape from time to function as an occasional necessity, the permanent remains hidden. Insofar as it is perceived, to paraphrase Vaughan's Quickness, time does not permit the 'true' to come on. Adam's actual 'historic' experience of time in Michael's vision is formless. Yet it is this very formless experience of Adam's which expresses another kind of indeterminiteness wherein the experience of God's will supercedes, in order of strength, God's form as Creator. In other words, none can express the true signification of time, according to Michael, without first experiencing another aspect of time's form - time structuralized by God. This second experience of form, however, is not meant to be understood in terms of a merely 'historic' sense, but rather in terms of a structural sense. It is God who endows both human experience and human perception with appropriate structural relations, which, when all the aspects of the prophetic vision are communicated to Adam are integrated, constitute a unity with personality. In part, this is what is meant by the bifurcation of the vision into visual and spoken parts. The narrator bridges both experiences when he remarks: As one who in his journey bates at Noon, Though bent on speed, so here the Arch-Angel paus'd Betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd, If Adam aught perhaps might interpose; Then with transition sweet new Speech resumes.

And Michael continues: Thus thou hast seen one World begin and end; And Man as from a second stock proceed. Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceive Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine Must needs impair and weary human sense: Henceforth what is to come I will relate, Thou therefore give due audience, and attend. (XII. 1-12)

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Adam's perception of the 'visual' part of the vision has been dependent, up to this point, upon images and spatial schema represented enactively - i.e., upon objects spatialized by Michael in such a way as to appear to Adam as extensions of Michael's actions. In effect, Michael is constructing objects within Adam's prepared and innate visual framework in order that Adam's perception may 'discover' the form and function of particular salvific necessities implicit within time and history. Yet because A d a m is taught by Michael to recognize objects in the world via images dependent upon action, Adam is an easy victim of camouflage; indeed, as long as the a priori forms of Adam's 'seeing' exist prior to his perception, Adam's ability to see must clearly be prior to Adam's ability to know. Throughout the first half of the vision, then, Adam is obliged to perceive objects in a concrete manner. From his point-of-view, his perception is nontransformable, diffuse in organization, and subject, almost exclusively, to the diversified influences of affect. Even more important is the temporal context within which Adam's perception of the 'visual' portion of the vision is organized. For Adam, time itself in the vision is spatialized and extensive. Since Adam SEES the past, present, and future as if he were 'reading' the relative positions of the hands on a clock, and since time is converted by Michael into a simultaneity projected into space, the relationship between Adam's knowledge and Adam's perception must be asymmetrical in an isomorphic sense. Unable to coordinate his visual and 'kinaesthetic' systems, A d a m is unable to avoid the succession of 'visual' cliffs, and hence is obliged to confuse causality with finality. What A d a m is confronted with in the first part of the vision is not precisely what Michael declares it shall be when he remarks: Adam, now ope thine eyes, and first behold Th' effects which thy original crime hath wrought In some to spring from thee, who never touch'd Th' excepted Tree, nor with the Snake conspir'd, Nor sinn'd thy sin, yet from that sin derive Corruption to bring forth more violent deeds. (XI. 423-428)

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For what follows essentially is a carmen figuratum whose theme elaborates, with a good deal of complexity, the rationalistic concept that natural law is an immanent law of internal relations, and which presupposes an essential interdependence between man and Nature. Later, in Book XII, Michael will introduce an antithetical theme, which presents to Adam a Deist and Cartesian concept of nature as a law which is imposed from the outside and which consists solely of an intercalation of external relations. In the first part of the vision, the law of 'immanence' which is alleged by Michael to be Israelite in origin and character is, of course, not basically Hebraic at all; rather it resembles more a law of Newtonian mechanics than anything else. The visual part of the vision is directed explicitly at Adam's sight; as such it situates him in front of things, sequentially. Events and persons are presented to Adam's perception as surfaces; because of this, Adam is obliged to translate pictorial simultaneity into a virtual time sequence. It is as if the rhythmic structure of Book XI were effected exclusively by projecting immediately experienced rhythmic configurations (similar to, but not identical with, the kairoi of the New Testament covenant cycle) into extended periods of time. Inasmuch as the direction of time is defined by Michael in Book XI as forward, however, the rhythm of this vision differs from the rhythm of Christian time in the synoptic Gospels and in Revelation because there is no finality - only causality. Apart from this crucial difference, Michael's vision offers a mechanistic explanation of the future which is only an a tergo explanation. Events are explicable only by reference to earlier events. Indeed, the perceived equilibrium of the vision {i.e., the apparently symmetrical movement of types through time and space) is only virtual, for within the context of the vision, each event and each person is represented to Adam not as a kairos, oriented teleologically, but as an instantaneous moment successive to, and simultaneous with itself. In causal terms, each element in the vision is a chiralitic event affected by its own future effects. This violation of spatial and temporal symmetry notwithstanding, it is perhaps enough to recall, and accept without further discussion,

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Milton's description of Adam at his creation as a creature with enormous capacities for time-binding and condensing his temporal experience into simultaneity ( V I I I . 250-333). Time in this visual portion of Michael's vision is realized not by means which the narrator associates with the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit (I. 17-26), i.e., by means of what may be termed the final process in the rite de passage of incorporating man into the context of a sacred world, a process not unlike the purifying rite of baptismal lustration, which is possible only after the intermediate rituals of naming and separation have been successfully accomplished. True to the temporal schema of the Old Testament covenant cycle, time is gratuitously realized. When Adam agrees to ascend "In the Visions of God", he is voluntarily accepting the conditions imposed by a ritual of separation comparable to the holy pariahic ritual of wandering and travail experienced by the Israelites in the desert prior to their re-incorporation into the sacred world of Canaan. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, Adam atop the highest hill of Paradise is set apart gratuitously; it is only there that Adam can experience the dynamistic, monistic, and 'impersonal' rhythms (both temporal and spatial) of separation. In this context, the events he perceives on the mountain might perhaps be more meaningfully discussed as if they were moments, rather than as types, points, or vague periods of time. For is it not true of each of these elements in the vision that each shares an equal rank with every other? They are simply a set of nominalistic distinctions, grouped together in such a way as to exhibit an order which itself constitutes Adam's experience. In orderly distribution, the pattern of elements is just as regular as is the distribution of the material. Unlike Christian types which are basically philosophemic in principle, and which usually represent distributions of probability and exhibit certain invariant characteristics, the elements in the Pisgahic vision are ordered in accordance with a principle of psychophysical isomorphism. In other words, the distribution of elements is as symmetrical functionally as it is visually, because their order is contingent upon EVENTS in Adam's brain. Furthermore, their

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collective moments throughout the vision appear to follow a straight route instead of a vagrant route. Returning for a moment to the suggestion, discussed earlier, that the structure of the first part of the vision is based upon a principle of natural law of immanence, it may now be observed that the method of communicating this principle is not strictly rationalistic. Indeed, the method is neither one of logical entailment, nor strictly deductive; it is not even the method of a rationalist manqué. Rather, because there is a fundamental ambiguity in Adam's observational evidence - his experience is psychophysical^ isomorphic - the method of ordering the vision can now be recognized to be one of phenomenological description. Since Nature and all its components are shown by Michael to be disordered except when constrained by rigidly PRE-ESTABLISHED laws of internal relations ("Th' effects which thy original crime hath wrought"), Adam, together with the reader, cannot refuse, in the face of psychophysical ambiguities, to abandon the hypothesis Michael has SELECTED for a priori espousal (XI. 423-428). This, of course, is only one way to explain the salvific inadequacy of the vision; a good way to be sure, for it also explains the reason why the vision continues in Book XII with altered thematic material, with a different pattern of distribution, and from a radically diferent point-of-view. Examined from a different perspective - from the angle of the distribution of rhythmic types (rather than Christian types) in relation to virtual time-the same conclusion may be reached. Earlier, it was suggested that the pattern of forces which Adam beholds in Book X I is in equilibrium, i.e., each kairos of event or person holds an equal and invariant rank with every other. A closer examination of the narrative is now needed. At the start of the vision, Adam beholds a mise en scène in pantomime; the murder of Abel by Cain is wordlessly enacted. After a brief dialogue between Adam and Michael dwelling upon the 'deed' and 'the cause', the Lazar house appears before Adam's eyes. Another short dialogue follows; Adam is appalled at the fact that man, created in God's image, will become so deformed and debased. Michael's reply is especially significant:

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Thir Maker's Image, answer'd Michael, then Forsook them, when themselves they vilifi'd To serve ungovern'd appetite, and took His Image whom they served, a brutish vice, Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve. (XI. 515-519) On the one hand, Michael appears to accept the view held by some Realists today (Lobachevski, for one) that all things exist independent of mind and independent of belief; he appears to be saying that the APPEARANCE of man's disfigured image is essentially REAL, and that man's substantial and material being is mere appearance. On the other hand, Michael is paying token lip service to dualism; for by evaluating: (1) the absolute truth that man was created in 'Thir Maker's Image'; (2) man's subjective expectation of his future sinful condition; and (3) man's own mental picture of himself as imago Dei, Michael is trying to correlate mutually exclusive observables. He is trying, in other words, to harmonize appearance and reality by talking about them as if they do in fact have equal rank. This is clearly impossible in the context of his assertion, for if it were possible it would mean that both functions are possessed by man at the same time; it would mean in fact either that man as imago Dei could represent two contradictory invariant characteristics of equal weight at the same moment - one, an appearance which was real, and the other, a substance, which was appearance. Furthermore, it would imply that still a third factor, similar in principle to horor vacui, though as yet hidden and unnamed, could account for the strange phenomenon of the Lazar house. It is suggested that the way out of this apparent dilemma lies not along the path of inductive uncertainty, though clearly some adaptation of logic on the part of the reader to the new situation is certainly required. Induction, as Michael here, and as Raphael earlier, asserts, is based solely upon theoretical choice, and as such is a damnable logic. Deductive uncertainty, however, would involve empirical choice. Through deduction, one could choose those heuristic factors affecting even the choice of hypotheses; and factors such as invariance and symmetry, for example, could

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easily be based upon a metaphysical principle of man as imago Dei. The raw result of Michael's claim that God's image departed from man when man chose another image is, therefore, a concrete answer to the subjective, Johnsonian brand of idealism exhibited in Adam's question: one can certainly kick a man; one might even be able to kick God. The image of a God who has absconded is beyond the reach of a boot, however. Nor should this result be surprising. Adam has accepted shapes and temporal form as phenomena sui generis since his creation; they have assisted the strengthening of his memory. Indeed, shapes have functioned as irreducible attributes of his perception since he first awoke in Eden. Formerly, before this vision, all the elements of Adam's experience had shape. In spite of this, the fact of man's altered shape perplexes him. One is obliged to conclude that the major obstacle which prevents Adam from seeing what may be termed the 'transposed shape' of man's 'new' image in the Lazar house is the anisotropy of Adam's own visual field, i.e., his visual field is oriented along a different axis and a different dimension than that of the visual field of Michael's vision. The chief implication to be drawn from this is the following: though sight is a dissecting sense, usually understood to be capable of experiencing time intensively or spatializing time extensively, Adam's vision here beholds shapes only in spatialized time which, though organized logically enough cannot possibly be experienced by him as if they had value as existential norms of any kind. Like the other visual shapes in the Michaelic vision, the Lazar house has no revelatory content. How can it, since knowledge of God is possible only in relation to data which lies beyond itself, and possible only when God is involved in the shape directly, or stored in human symbol? Furthermore, these shapes cannot even function as recordable symbols in Adam's memory; Adam can learn nothing of any value from them because anisotropy of psychological time is required for the recordability of traces in human memory. And clearly, the distribution of shapes in this vision is visually and functionally symmetrical, for time and space are projected as if

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they were absolutely coincidental. The same observation holds for all the other elements in the vision, from the musical section on Jubal and Tubal-Cain to the prophecy of Noah's Flood. With regard to the negative significance to Adam (both revelatory and epistemological) of what has been termed the symmetrical distribution of shapes in the vision, the narrative concerning 'primitive' music is most instructive. The sight Michael prepares for Adam is placed on a broad and spacious plain: whence the sound Of Instruments that made melodious chime Was heard, of Harp and Organ; and who mov'd Thir stops and chords was seen: his volant touch Instinct through all proportions low and high Fled and pursu'd transverse the resonant fugue. to the Harp they sung Soft amorous Ditties, and in dance came on: The Men though grave, ey'd them, and let thir eyes Rove without rein, till in the amorous Net Fast caught, they lik'd, and each his liking chose; And now of love they treat till th' Evening Star Love's Harbinger appear'd; then all in heat They light the Nuptial Torch, and bid invoke Hymen, then first to marriage Rites invok't; With Feast and Music all the Tents resound. (XI. 558-563, 583-592)

It has recently been pointed out by a number of critics, that the rhythmical pattern of 11. 561-563 corresponds more or less to one form of fugal effect. This suggestion, though interesting, is certainly partial enough to be misleading. Even acknowledging the presence of fugal and canonic effects in Paradise Lost, it would make more sense to speak in terms of much larger thematic groups, say the whole of Book XI, rather than attempt to fill a pint bottle with more than it can hold. That is not to imply that efforts to see correlations and correspondences between the metrics and rhythmical pattern in Milton's poetry and structural, temporal, or motive elements in music are misguided efforts; indeed, the opposite is true. That the ordinance of rhythmical patterns in his verse is quantitatively determined is beyond con-

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troversy, and is meaningful on the grounds that his musical rhythm derives from his language, which is itself based upon a prosodic model. Restated simply, our problem is this: if the symmetrical distribution of shapes in the vision is significant in relation to Adam's view of time and the meaningfulness of his existence, what exactly is the nature of that symmetry and just what kind of significance does it hold? Also, is our recognition of fugal effects and canonic techniques instructive in any way in the light of the 'suggestion', mentioned above, that the vision offers negative (or, at the very most, neutral) significance to Adam in his search for substantiality? Perhaps the best way to confront these questions is to begin with an examination of the concept of symmetry and the concept of space. If it is so that the calligramatic quality of the vision is realized in a chain of dynamic and durational motives, the structural pattern of all images in the chain is contingent upon the eye's ability to translate physical space into musical space. In other words, in order for Adam to perceive the unity in time of all the images shown to him by Michael, he is obliged to 'empty' the space into which these images are projected. In this space, as in Swedenborg's heaven (described by Balzac in Seraphita), there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward. Physical direction, per se, vanishes completely; in its place, one discovers musical 'direction', or rhythm. Though the images of Cain and Abel, Lazar house, Jubal and Tubal-Cain, Enoch, and Noah appear separate and in sequential order, they reveal their true meaning only through their cooperation, for all that occurs at any point in this musical space has more than a local effect. It functions not only in its own plane (linear), but also in all other planes, and is not without influence even at remote points. Their effect is very much like the effect of progressive rhythmical subdivisions: the elements of the vision (a basic set of five tones) are incorporated partly into the linear and horizontal plane as successive images, and partly into the vertical plane as simultaneous images. Every rhythmical configuration of each image has to be comprehended primarily as a mutual relation of visual tones appearing at different places and times.

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The closer one gets to the movement of Milton's verse in this vision, the deeper grows the conviction that one is in the presence of a rigorous rhythmic program in which the five-tone group subjects the progression of images and their sequence of imagevalues to the laws of the ROW. Like vocal and instrumental polyphonics, the rhythmic structure of the vision obeys the laws of additiveness, seriality, and symmetry. Not only is the single motive the basis for all subsequent motives, the number of motives is determined by symmetric formations within the chain; like background music for the film, the additive structure of the vision is without boundaries save for the limits imposed by the extramusical model - in this case, a law of symmetry which Milton is intentionally indisposed to permit Adam to comprehend. This concept of symmetry requires further explanation. If one accepts the premise that the structure of space into which the five images of the vision are projected (and through which, time is converted into simultaneity) is preserved from the beginning of the vision to the end, one can readily acknowledge the congruence of each of the images. A concept of automorphism is basic to any description of the structure of space. Here, the variety of congruence with which we are dealing is translational in character: though the rhythmic lengths of each image overlap the metric base in an asymmetrical sequence, the overall sequence of rhythm - a clear directional progression - is invested with the automorphic structure of musical space. The result is that as the vision develops, it translates a slow temporal into a spatial rhythm. Hence, the extraordinary fugal effect of contrapuntal imitation, where the fugal subject, i.e., the slow temporal rhythm and its intentional meaning, determinism, causality, and progress, and the answer, i.e., the 'spatial rhythm' of the surfaces of the images actually seen by Adam, and its intentional meaning, Deus absconditus, follow in such close succession as to overlap. The key to the 'spatial rhythm', which, of course, is also the key to the meaningfulness of the vision to Adam, is the fact that empty space has a very high grade of symmetry: every point is like any other, and at a point there is no intrinsic difference between the directions. Thus, because the images in the vision 'exist' as sur-

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faces in the directionless space, Adam is in no position to 'see' man's true nature in any terms save those of mechanics. He is certainly in no position to perceive God; for in a world (scio vision) in which time is defined sequentially and projected into space, and in which ONLY pre-determined causal relationships are manifest, God is absent. It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that the function served by the vision in Book X I is enormously important. The vision provides Adam with the raw experience of doubt with which, and because of which, he can perforce perform the rite of pivoting from the monistic qua mechanical world of surfaces and intellectual vision to the covenantal world of gratuitous incorporation with the sacred. It is as if the rite of separation which Adam experiences is the single necessary precondition which must be satisfied before Adam is permitted to recognize that to be set apart is a gratuitous condition in very much the same way as grace itself is a gift. He will come to recognize more than that, of course. In the audial prophecy in Book XII, he will become acquainted with the real meaning, through typology, of something he formerly was incapable of comprehending - the nature of his telos\ and it is to this issue our attention will be directed in the following chapter.

VI THE WORD AND ITS AFTERLIFE

We remember how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words, and how frequently the dream-work makes use for various ends of a reversal of the material to hand for representation. (Here it is no longer letters but visual images of which the order is reversed.) We should therefore rather be inclined to derive the reversal of sound from a factor of deeper origin. Sigmund Freud, From "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words". E io: 'Si come cera da suggello, che la figura impressa non trasmuta, segnato e or da voi lo mio cervello. Ma perche tanto sovra mia veduta vostra parola disiata vola, che piii la perde quanto piu s'aiuta?' Dante, Purgaturio, Canto XXXIII. 79-84. (And I: "Even as by seal the wax, which does not change the imprinted figure, my brain is now stamped by you; but why do your longed-for words fly so far above my sight that the more it strives the more it loses them?")

In the previous chapter, it was suggested that the apparently rhythmic design of the elements of Michael's vision was not strictly rhythmical in any formal sense at all; but rather, it was a virtual or musical rhythm consisting of a mutual conditioning of forms. For formal rhythm, a phase principle or a principle of dialectic is required, and here it is missing. Though the vision satisfies the conditions of periodicity, of repetition, and even of

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accent, it does not possess two formal properties essential to rhythm: inviolability and fusability - i.e., because its elements are serially and additively organized, they fail to succeed one another temporally. They are projected into space in such a way that Adam is obliged to perceive them as if they were 'constructed', visual projections. Moreover, the 'visual' vision also fails to satisfy the rhythmic requirement of interactibility of illusion. A dialectical pattern which pervades an event (or even an act or artistic expression, for that matter) is the primary source of its unity. Its unity consists of more than the sum of its parts, however; its substantive character - its appearance of substantiality to its addressee or observer - is wholly illusory. The vision, then, is primarily illusory in its representational appeal. Though it brings Adam and 'itself' to the brink of an existential transformation (the rite de passage of separation and preparation discussed in the preceding chapter), it tends to enhance the semblance of human potentiality only up to the point where both Adam and the vision presented to him seem ready to assume a different pattern of organization. The impression of a shift from one level of existence to another is achieved nominally by means of a recursion of the primary mode of expression, on the one hand, and by means of an apparent incursion of another mode, on the other. When, for example, Jubal's art is presented to Adam's sight, the narrator remarks: Such happy interview and fair event Of love and youth not lost, Songs, Garlands, Flow'rs, And charming Symphonies attach'd the heart Of Adam, soon inclin'd to admit delight The bent of Nature; (XI. 593-597)

nature is presented to Adam through one sense though it usually reaches him via another. Had the vision come at the very end of Paradise Lost, this secondary mode - the differentiation and organization of the vision's elements into a serial and additive pattern - would conceivably have communicated to Adam a transitive act of existence from one level to another. As it is, however, it is mere transition made perceptible.

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This phenomenon of transitive illusoriness is by no means unique either to poetic vision in general or to Milton's poetry in particular. Secondary illusions which have neither somatic ground nor somatic existence are apparent in most fantasies, for example. Perhaps even more interesting analogies may be discovered in the area of myth. The limits (both problematic and functional) of defining myth are related directly to this twofold process outlined above: of an objective world of 'perceivable' things and events which present abstracted forms to the perceiver, which, ab initio, engender a symbolic use of these forms, which, in turn, are endowed and invested with mythical content. In ordinary circumstances, this is how much of the natural world comes to be subjectified. In this context, the formulation of a definition of myth in its widest sense suffers from a tendency to insulate its subjective point-of-view against the a posteriori claims of verification or falsification. Because myth achieves an illusory sublimation of subjective feeling, the apparently autonomous act of envisaging myth is permitted to come to formal expression. Still the very structure, function, and status of myth and mythical expressions do effectively inhibit the creation of an unambiguous and verifiable definition; indeed, the non-cognitive symbolic predicates with which myth is invariably clothed deny the very language by means of which this formulation could objectively proceed. With regard to the element of sublimated feeling in the audial part of Michael's prophecy in Book XII, this phenomenon takes on special significance. Two modes of expression are here intertwined: the mode of words presented as objective signa, and the mode of words presented as telic forms. It is of some usefulness to consider this problem initially within the context of man's habit of speaking about the Word or logos which gives rise to all other words. According to Calvin, one can indeed speak about the Word and all other words which derive from it because man uses words to transfigure his natural power; conversely, for Calvin, the painter is unable to speak about painting because his way of speaking, indeed, his very 'language', fails to POSITION the subject of his representation in the world of meaning.

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Now if one accepts the hypothesis that the first Word of God polarizes man's existence in a certain direction expressive of its initial and inclusive intention, what does it mean to use other, derivative words to speak about the primary Word from which all others derive? More specifically, what does it mean for Michael to tell Adam about God 'beholding' the builders of Babel who wish to "get themselves a name"? From a structural point-of-view, why is this episode in Book XII at all? The answers to these questions should place us in a good position to examine the overall structure of the audial prophecy more effectively. Shortly after the 'transition sweet', Michael relates the story of Babel to Adam: Of Brick, and of that stuff they cast to build A City and Tow'r, whose top may reach to Heav'n; And get themselves a name, lest far disperst In foreign Lands thir memory be lost, Regardless whether good or evil fame. But God who oft descends to visit men Unseen, and through thir habitations walks To mark thir doings, them beholding soon, Comes down to see thir City, ere the Tower Obstruct Heav'n Tow'rs, and in derision sets Upon thir Tongues a various Spirit to rase Quite out thir Native Language, and instead To sew a jangling noise of words unknown: Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud Among the Builders; each to other calls Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage, As mockt they storm; great laughter was in Heav'n And looking down, to see the hubbub strange And hear the din; thus was the building left Ridiculous, and the work Confusion nam'd. (XII. 43-62)

On the surface, this passage seems quite simple. Utilizing the shape (and temporal form) of the tower to 'assist' their memory, the builders of Babel mean to recapture a pure and substantive state of being by means of a ritual re-enactment of divine gesture and divine word. For them, a return to illud tempus (the time OF the logos) is essentially a re-enactment of all the topoi of me-

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mory; they build in order to reactivate a process of recall, the goal of which is the remembering of all those traces of original forms which, it may be assumed, originally caused them to utter God's name (the source of all memory). In addition, they seek to remember the fate of all those traces between learning and recall. In a sense, then, they use the tower as if it were a Neoplatonic learning machine programmed anamnesically. From this it may be deduced that the reason why they vindicate their subjectivity as the central area of their concern may be located in their intention to 'get themselves a name', for in at least one sense, the route they choose to take to Heaven resembles the path a mechanist takes through the material world - a path, it should be added, taken by many Protestant sectarians in Milton's century. Their subsequent vulnerability results not so much from the fact of God's omnipotence, but rather from a misapplication, on their part, of their concept of matter and reason. Because they behave as if matter is a legal fiction insofar as it relates to reason, they are obliged - like most sacramentalists to confuse matter with the merely rational - a confusion which reverberates outward and upward into the area of perception and epistemology. They use matter because they require it, and, of course, because it is plentiful. Matter's virtues, therefore, become reason's form. Like Hooker's and Cartwright's, the route they follow to the divine harmonizes primitivism and Platonism: by representing the divine name in terms of matter and size, they endeavor to synthesize their ritual of participation in the Godhead with their rationalistic apprehension of forms. On another level, the Babelians behave in a manner similar to the way the narrator writes: they are gnostics in that they attempt to locate empirically existential norms by the manipulation of matter instead of tone. Yet their efforts to build of stuff and brick 'A City and Tow'r, whose top may reach to Heav'n' stamp them as deductionists in a twofold sense: their anal fantasy takes the 'prehistoric' form of relating the multiplicity of 'stuff' to the normative, while their presupposition that they require an 'other' to define their identity results from their fundamental belief that man can be split into nominal essences, including those of

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memory, name, reason, etc. The problem of their intention to 'get themselves a name' is central here. Were the attribute of God's name not accidental (i.e., added to his essence) but essential to his truly objective being, the mode of differentiating God's attributes would not be terribly important. But for the builders of Babel, God's name clearly functions attributively. They wish to 'get' it as if it were a detachable predicate. The unattributive quality of God's name is not, of course, subject to debate. Were it ever in doubt, this knowledge concerning God would, of necessity, suffer a similar fate at man's hands as did the frogs in Egypt when they 'learned' that they were plagues; in other words, were God's name really detachable from God's essence, and were it truly obtainable by man, man's perception and man's ability to learn about himself (in the broadest sense) would be forever polarized in such a way as to support man's non-being. Still, it cannot be denied that the narrator of Paradise Lost does seem, from time to time, to speak about God's presence and other divine attributes as if they were indeed accidents. Is one to believe that the narrator is really like the Babelians? Not at all. When, for example, the narrator invokes Urania, he is uncertain by what name to call her. Though he declares "Descend from Heav'n Urania, by that name / If rightly thou art call'd" (VII. 1-2) he adds that it is "The meaning not the Name I call" (VII. 5); when he declares that "God is Light", his interest is not strictly related to the meaning of light as a divine predicate; rather, it is suggestive of the spiritual and illuminative use which he can make of his condition of blindness, for he says "Shine inward . . . there plant eyes, all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to human sight" (III. 52-55). Unlike the builders of Babel, the narrator appears to believe that of all the names which man attributes to God, none operates in an unattributive or depredicated manner save the inutterable and unpronouncable name which Judah ha-Levi called the Shetn haMeforesh, Yhvh (Cuzari, II. 2). Even for Adam, no other name of God could have any absolute meaning without some reference either to the objective world of things or to the essence of other beings. Uncertain about the proper way to address God, Adam

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asks "O by what Name, for thou above all these, / Above mankind, or aught, than mankind higher, / Surpassest far my naming, how may I / Adore thee, Author of this Universe" (VIII. 357360). According to Adam, all other names are but accidental appearances of the primary, or first, name of God. Yet it goes without saying that the builders of Babel, like the narrator, do find many uses for a number of attributively descriptive names of God. Their empirical efforts to construct a tower to reach heaven obviously exhibit a tendency to coordinate verbal images (city, tower, top, and heaven), and psychic phenomena (of language, of memory, and of reason) with the forms of God's name. Like idealists, too, they associate God's name with concepts and with exterior signs. They discover 'significance' in many predicative layers within which the original, creative name of God is obscured; in the last analysis, however, this significance has little or virtually nothing to do with the meaning of the divine name itself. Yet in spite of this, or perhaps even because of it, the reader of Paradise Lost may still acknowledge that it is certainly comforting from the human point-of-view to speak of God and man in the same utterance, and to employ common appellatives derived from a commonality of action and interest. Indeed, it may be argued that this is precisely what the reader should assume; doubtless Milton would himself have asserted that it is precisely from within this commonality of interest and expression that the preliminary step in the process of organizing history's relations (both symbolic and real) with a view towards their fulfillment in Christ (by means of an appropriate application of Christian typology) can be undertaken. God's quiddity certainly cannot be understood by the Babelians, or by anyone else for that matter, except by way of negation by means of those negative attributes predicated of God. In effect, this means that although all negations may be predicable of God, the builders of Babel cannot negate any particular attribute unless they know how God's essence applies to the thing characterized by it. In this case, the 'thing' and the 'essence' happen to be identical - God's name is his Word. Still it cannot be denied that the 'stuff' of the Babelians' building is improper

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to their goal; actually, it is even irrelevant to their intention to get themselves a name. The initial step of diffusing and delimiting their subjective goal is, however, a proper use of the typological method. Proper, though by no means appropriate; for instead of diffusing God's negative attributes (words spoken out of, and directed at, human experience), they attempt to relate the multiplicity of brick and stuff to the normative. Their mistake is twofold: the first relates to the Babelians' mistaken objectivity; the second to objectivity's object itself - in this case, the builders' peculiar sense awareness that heaven is for the here-and-now, and that the loci standi of their existence - and of God's - overlap. It should be pointed out that from the perspective of the English Reformation, the means by which a man might undertake to discover an ABSOLUTE existential Christian norm within history could never succeed without the appropriate positioning of the self along the dynamic, and always eschatological 'line' of Christ's existence. Only when undertaken properly, i.e., subjectively, this method of typologizing the self could achieve the desired result - a self-transformation whose ultimate goal is incorporation and fulfillment in Christ. It is clear that the only comfort inherent in the successful completion of this process is of the telic kind. The Babelians, however, wish to continue living after they accomplish their goal. When they attempt to conform to Christ in an anthropologically self-transforming move, they use a sacramental device - the building - whose function is inimical to true conversion; the building can neither assist nor accomplish their transformation, because it is wholly an object of substance, not of mind. It can, however, function in such a way as to insure the continuity of their temporal existence in the world. However ineffective or misapplied, a typological perspective is certainly present in Babel. Though the builders EXPERIENCE no finality, they are 'in sight of' the terminus ad quem. With regard to their second 'mistake', this much may be said. The Babelians have inadequately learned the physical qua moral lesson related by Michael to Adam in Book XI, that the artificial spatializing of time cannot really contribute to a resolution of the problem of free will. Had they been only slightly uncertain about

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the validity of their intention to construct 'A City and Tow'r, whose top may reach to Heav'n', their act would, in a sense, have been a 'free' act - a moral act, capable of transforming their existence in an authentic way. Their very self-indecision in the face of deciding between alternative future acts would have transformed their choice to build-when it was finally m a d e into something quite different from the mechanical effect of a mechanical cause. In ordinary life, when one reflects on alternatives, one's self grows, expands, and is transformed. After reflection, one's action usually springs from one's whole subjective personality. For the Babelians, the process is quite different: their BUILDING grows and expands, and God's actions transform their PERSONALITIES. Any possibility of a genuine experience of God in the here-andnow is thus cut off from them because they equate the activity of experiencing the transcendent, together with the continuity of their existence, with the prolongation of the tower; had they realized (what by now one might characterize as chief cornerstone in Milton's moral doctrine) that virtually any human experience could potentially result in an experience of the Godhead as long as it could be transfigured by Christian type, they would have understood that as one approaches God, the flow of time seems to stand still. Indeed, they would also have realized that all voices must grow silent as man draws nearer to the sight of God, for, to paraphrase John the Baptist (Joh. 3:30), once the Word increases, the voices grow silent. As the service of the voice decreases when the spirit draws nearer to the Word, man's voice becomes stilled as the Word grows stronger and as man's understanding and grasp grow wider. But for the builders of Babel, time never loses its negative externality. Because of this, it may not be too extreme to suggest that Milton is speaking about the Babelians as if their view of time is a view which holds the timeless as a sustaining element of time, and which functions as an a priori element of temporal experience. In other words, Milton appears to be speaking about them as if they are impatient Christians - as perhaps he once was - who pant for a terrestrial paradise of temporal felicity. In a more general sense, it may be

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suggested that the Neoplatonic antithesis of voice vs. word, no matter how transposed, continues through Book XII to hold sway over Milton's conception of final salvation in the beholding of the Word. Unlike the visual prophecy, where the pattern of external time is perceived by Adam as a framework within which merely the possibility of durational or participial time exists, the pattern of time in the Babel section and in the succeeding episodes in Book XII is apprehended by Adam internally - as a time which provides a foundation for concrete and fully articulated duration in all its fulfillment by means of an application of typology's existential dialectic. In the preceding chapter, it was suggested that the idea of a linear shape of time is conveyed in the visual prophecy by means of a series of spatial images. There, the succession of time-points (their existence one after the other in a serial and additive pattern) is transposed into a mere spatial contiguity; on top of that mountain in Eden, spatial images express duration in terms of the presence of all past times and all future times in Adam's single motionless present. To that vanishing instant of time in the visual prophecy of Book XI, an eternal present nunc stans is contrasted and opposed in Book XII. In other words, the duratio successiva of the vision is contrasted with the duratio permanens of the audial prophecy. The repose of time represented in the vision, and the movement of time represented in Book XII do not, however, radically exclude one another. Though the reader is certainly struck with the asymmetrical character of the interaction between the visual sensorium of the exterior vision of Book XI and the audial sensorium of the interior 'vision' of Book XII, the exchange is not strictly a relation between two discrete systems. Insofar as Adam is concerned, there is no truly mutual transaction between the two, because the time-space stasis of the vision - in which no change can be generated from within him - possesses gross control over him, while in the spoken prophecy, the fine control (i.e., the eschatological and moral prescriptions for Adam's future existence) rests solely with Adam, and is bound up with those conditional-covenant obligations implicit in the promised 'paradise

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within'. As Adam finally recognizes: Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend, Merciful over all his works, with good Still overcoming evil, and by small Accomplishing great things, by things deem'd weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simply meek; that suffering for Truth's sake Is fortitude to highest victory, And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life; Taught this by his example whom I now Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest. (XII. 561-573)

Yet examined from another perspective, there is no ontologically real inversion of the objective 'times' of the visual and audial sensoria produced by the INTER-ACTION between the two parts of the prophecy. The two parts are indeed interdependent, but the presence of two different and distinct objective 'times' in each section makes them especially difficult to reconcile. Notwithstanding this CAVEAT, it must be emphasized that the apparent interweaving of the 'times' of Books X I and XII does not imply their fusion; quite the contrary. This becomes clear as soon as one examines the real structure of the elements in the audial prophecy, and the real function of the 'transition sweet'. From the mid-point between the two prophecies (represented by XII. 1-5), individual prophetic features of each narrative shine both in a forward and backward direction. This mid-point, this 'transition sweet' in other words, is itself prophetically interpreted history as far as Adam is concerned. So should it similarly be for its readers. Like the Incarnation of Christ, which functions as the mid-point in the Pauline line of history, the 'transition sweet' - with its symbolic message of a pause 'Betwixt the world destroy'd and the world restor'd' - MEANS both salvation 'once' and 'once for all'. It carries this twofold meaning in very much the same way as do Michael's remarks about the resurrection of Christ:

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so he dies, But soon revives, Death over him no power Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning light Return, the Stars of Morn shall see him rise Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light, Thy ransom paid, which Man from death redeems, His death for Man, as many as offer'd Life Neglect not, and the benefit embrace By Faith not void of works: this God-like act Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldst have di'd, In sin for ever lost from life. (XII. 419-429)

Because of this, one can see that it is infinitely easier for Adam to believe in the prophecies of Book XI, than those of Book XII; in the vision, the mid-point of Adam's redemptive history, as in Judaism, is placed in the distant eschatological future, i.e., in a 'time' beyond him. It is even placed beyond his eyes (in front of which the historical elements in the prophecy are situated sequentially), in a time that can ONLY be the object of prophecy and not the object of historical verification. It is far more difficult for Adam to grasp on faith the significance of prophecy in the audial section, because the same mid-point of his salvific history (which is, in fact, a type of the Christ-deed) is transferred from the future into his past, and indeed, into Adam's immediate past. Even Michael ironically alludes to this difficulty when he asks, expecting no answer, "for on Earth / Who against Faith and Conscience can be heard / Infallible? yet many will presume . . . " (XII. 528-530). In this context, one can now speak about the very beginning of Book XII as the initial beginning of typological prophecy. It is only at this point that Adam becomes able to order his temporal existence himself, as Adam himself implies in his declaration to Michael: now first I find Mine eyes true op'ning, and my heart much eas'd, Erewhile perplext with thoughts what would become Of mee, and all Mankind; but now I see His day, in whom all Nations shall be blest, Favor unmerited by me, who sought

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Forbidd'n knowledge by forbidd'n means. (XII. 273-279)

Now aware that appropriate knowledge achieved by appropriate means is a function of seeing 'His day', Adam implicitly acknowledges his ability to relate himself freely to his past and his future by means of his own volition. By means of these relations, Adam may now learn how to actively mediate his present as well. In his brief dialogues with Michael in Book XII, Adam even begins to realize that some elements of revelation and prophecy MUST be past in order to be re-discovered, and that some elements must somehow remain present too. In addition, he comes to learn that the presumed co-existence of future and past in the present of Michael's 'pause' between Books XI and XII cannot be predicated upon a concept of time as a succession of present moments. The viability of successive time cannot be completely rejected by this co-existence, however, since it is already contained in the very concept of a relation between past and future. The main point of all of this is that the concept of time as succession in Book XI loses all continuance in Book XII, because duration as an omnipresence (i.e., the duration implicit in the salvific 'paradise within') is arrived at by a negation of all succession. Adam is distinctly aware of this in his final reply to Michael: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the Race of time, Till time stand fixt: beyond is all abyss, Eternity, whose end no eye can reach. Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge, what this Vessel can contain; Beyond which was my folly to aspire. (XII. 553-560)

In addition, the pattern of types in the audial sensorium is so ordered through the dialectic of applied typology not really to console Adam within history; indeed, it can be argued that it does not even satisfy his imagination. What the system of types does accomplish is far more significant, however. It provides Adam with a key for escaping the dilemma of man in time presented to

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him in both halves of the prophecy. It teaches him that one CAN accept the reality of the past (including the loss of Eden), and the reality of the future (as it is described in Book XI) in terms other than those of the present. There is consolation for Adam - neither Vergil's nor H o m e r ' s - b u t of the typological and teleological kind. That the apparently paradoxical elements in Book XII (from Adam's perspective) confirm this may be seen when one considers their gross structure and their particular form. On the surface, the narrative is as simple in outline here as it was in Book XI. Situating Adam in the midst of actuality and in the midst of simultaneity, Michael speaks to Adam about Nimrod and the builders of Babel (in many ways, the very last 'story' in Paradise Lost flavored with Docetism), quickly moves on to tell of the history of Abraham the Patriarch, the founding of the Israelite nation, the Egyptian captivity, Moses and the Exodus, the wandering in the desert, and the giving of the Law on Sinai. From there, Michael tells Adam about the Babylonian captivity, and the prophecies relating to the coming of a Messiah. Finally, the story of the birth of the Messiah, his life, his crucifixion, and his resurrection. Briefly, the gross differences between the elements in this sensorium and those in the visual part of the prophecy are: the direction of time in Book XII is defined as circular, instead of forward; hence, only in this section of the narrative, the possibility of finality - in the vision, only causality. Here, the law of nature which Michael's story stresses is external, instead of immanent and mechanical. That this external law is also stamped with the seal of covenant doctrine may be seen in Michael's remarks to Adam which follow the Babel episode: yet know withal, Since thy original lapse, true Liberty Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur'd, or not obey'd, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce

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Man till then free. Therefore since hee permits Within himself unworthy Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in Judgment just Subjects him from without to violent Lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthral His outward freedom. . . . (XII. 82-95) Since Adam's 'control' over his reason is contingent upon his carrying out the terms of his covenant-obligations to God, and since true Christian liberty will be witheld from man until he gratuitously and voluntarily fulfills ALL of his covenant-obligations, Michael asserts that man's nature and existence will be constrained from within and from without. With regard to other differences; in the first part of the prophecy, the elements succeed one another symmetrically; in Book XII, the elements are basically philosophemic and are distributed asymmetrically. In the vision, Adam perceives past, present, and future in a static present; in addition, his perception of duration involves no action on his part - he has neither choice, nor freedom of will. The opposite holds true in the audial prophecy, for here, Adam can SEE AND DO the future event. Furthermore, unlike the Babelians, Adam exhibits deductive uncertainty about all future acts and events which impinge on his existence; he is FREE to choose any course of action - even an action which can transform his very choice. The breadth and scope of his uncertainty is thrown into the highest possible relief immediately following Adam's exuberant doxology in response to the paradox of the fortunate fall: O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By mee done and occasion'd, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. (XII. 469-478)

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The chief reason why Adam is here filled with doubt can hardly be emphasized strongly enough: Adam is now in a position to doubt and choose because he is also in a position to EXPERIENCE TIME INTENSIVELY. Formerly, Adam perceived distinctions between things and acts like a Nominalist; now, because of his exposure to type and telos, he is obliged to see as a Realist. One further matter remains to be discussed - the interrelated issue in Book XII of the shape of time presented by the audial prophecy as a whole, and the organization (both rhythmic and historical) of the types. It has already been suggested that the typical elements of the audial prophecy are arranged asymmetrically, i.e., in such a way that the overall and collective form of all the types may be outlined by identifying each individual type with the overall order. Unlike the musically rhythmic arrangement of episodes in the vision (where the pattern is serial, additive, and quantitatively determined), the rhythm of each element in the narrative of Book XII conforms to the natural rhythms of typology. In other words, the rhythm is an antithetical or dialectical one, for one type 'grows' out of another in a nearly organic way. The function of one type is often contrasted with the function of a second type which follows the first in narrative sequence, but occasionally the opposite is the case. To borrow a concept from music, one could say that the overall progression of types in the audial prophecy is harmonic, but that it is a progression which contains both dominant and tonic motives. Because of this, it may be asserted that the rhythm's peculiar antithetical quality results from the probabilistic asymmetry of the overall design of Book XII, for even when the relation between one type and its succeeding type is of the most inexact and dubious kind, a 'pair' of such types will always so delimit each other as to determine the form and function of the next type. When, for example, the initial dialogue between Adam and Michael describing the 'irreverent Son' of Noah and the divine selection of Abraham to be the patriarch of the elect nation of Israel follows immediately after the story of Babel, the narration of the Babel-event is designed to recall the circumstances surrounding the other two events. Because of this special juxtaposi-

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tion, the reader is obliged to accept the notion that the Babelevent functions as a special agency of dispersal - the scattering of Noah's descendants over the surface of the earth; moreover, the reader is led to conclude, with some justification, that man's disposition to gather together into a single locality was one of the sources of evil in the antediluvian world. In this context, it is not altogether inconceivable that Milton did not intend that Babel function strictly as a palladium of idolatry, but rather intended that it function as a substitute of some form for the loss of Edenic symbols, and as such, that it represent a center of union for the human family. After all, there is nothing strange or arbitrary in the notion that the Babel-event and the story of Ham represent incomplete titles to the heirship of fullness and faith; however 'high' they both stand - the one in space and the other in the hierarchy of the Noahite remnant - both symbolize types of an imperfect righteousness, and as such, are heirs of a corruptible and transitory inheritance. The world's altered condition, it should be recalled, had been secured against the return of apostasy by means of a twofold plan implicit in the covenant of perpetuity established by God with Noah: the new world was to become SPIRITUALLY and NATURALLY superior to the old. But the obvious imperfections which Milton represents in Babel with regard to the constitution of the world, together with the distinctly prophetic intimations which Noah gives of the future destinies of his children (XII. 101-104) indicate Milton's belief that although this divine plan had advanced a stage in its process, it had by no means reached its perfection. But it is the nuances of the alteration of this process with which we are concerned here. One may see at a glance that the general tendency and design of the stories of the Babel-event and of Ham plainly intimates the commencement of a change in the divine economy. In Babel, Milton presents the reader with a statement of very broad principles, and with an indication of general results - its scope is the prospective destiny of mankind under the governance of nature and grace. In contrast, the prophetic announcement of Noah (an allusion to Gen. 9:25) is strikingly particular.

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As Michael presents it, the story of Ham and Noah echoes the Babel narrative (backward in time) in such a way that the first historical incident which reveals the conflict of nature and grace in Adam's future family presents an historical and biographical recapitulation and sub-fulfillment of the Babel-type to which it itself witnesses: Witness th' irreverent Son Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Done to his Father, heard this heavy curse, Servant of Servants, on his vicious Race. Thus will this latter, as the former World, Still tend from bad to worse, till God at last Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw His presence from among them, and avert His holy Eyes; resolving from thenceforth To leave them to thir own polluted ways; And one peculiar Nation to select From all the rest, of whom to be invok'd, A Nation from one faithful man to spring: (XII. 101-113)

such is the decided tendency here towards the particular, that it is Canaan, the son of Ham, who is specifically selected as the special object of judgment in connection with the future development of the divine scheme of grace. The fitness of the types of Babel, Ham, and Abraham (as they appear in that order) must, therefore, be understood R E L A T I V E L Y - i n terms of sub-fulfillments of faith and righteousness. For the particular direction which is now given to the revelatory call of God (from Babel to Ham to Abraham) is not particular in the absolute sense of exclusive; rather, it is particular only for the sake of a more efficient working out of man's destiny in history and for a more comprehensive result. By now, it should be clear that this dialectical presentation of typology is IN ITSELF without any special significance; it merely signals to Adam a life which can, and will, grow out of a spiritual conformity to Christ as soon as Adam begins to participate in the new existence which God is revealing to him. Formally considered, it signals to Adam the twofold truth that the antediluvian

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revelations of God had been addressed commonly to people who spoke a common language, and that the instituted means of access to God through ritual and sacrificial worship had been offered to all men - including, of course, the Babelians - without distinction. When Michael informs Adam of the history of man after the deluge, he is thus illustrating that the means of access to God had to become narrowed when it was found that only a very small portion of mankind, an elect and righteous seed, truly had faith in divine testimony. Moreover, as time advanced, that faithful seed decreased in number proportionally. Adam is further enlightened about the substance of God's plan when he is told that the proper commencement of the divine plan {i.e., the first link in the sub-fulfilling chain of total incorporation in Christ) dates from the call of Abraham: him God the most High voutsafes To call by Vision from his Father's house, His kindred and false Gods, into a Land Which he will show him, and from him will raise A mighty Nation, and upon him show'r His benediction so, that in his Seed All Nations shall be blest;

(XII. 120-126) this fact is destined to constitute for Adam the root and center of the world's future history: its terminus d quo, the Mesopatamian shepherd, 'faithful Abraham'", its terminus ad quern, the universal brotherhood of man, and the round circumference of the earth. It cannot be overemphasized that the channel of natural blessings which these, and all subsequent, types claim and make intelligible means virtually nothing to a reader without the existential claims and demands which accompany them. As the types 'migrate' from a natural existence to an existence in election, the reader's existential incorporation in Adam via the dialectics of applied typology is set up as an antithesis, alternatively, to an incorporation in Christ. The typological pattern in the final book of Paradise Lost is NOT, however, strictly concerned with the absolute antithesis between these two forms of existence; rather,

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it is essentially concerned with change specifically in Adam's, and more generally in man's, existential condition. Hence, when Adam declares "So God with man unites", the typological subfulfillment implied therein (expressed organically from seed to promised seed) has its true P L A C E in faith and righteousness, and derivatively, in existential conformity to Christ-i.e., in a conformity wherein Christ and Adam meet in such a way that henceforth, or again, the one becomes our (the reader's) future, and the other recedes into our past. Once these special relationships between typology and existence are recognized, it becomes possible to speak more meaningfully, and with greater assurance, about the relationship between the pattern of types and the shape of time in Book X I I - a relationship which emerges as Milton's final thought on that subject in Paradise Lost. From Adam's perspective, one may speak about the rhythm of types in the final book metaphorically, as if it were a phenomenon capable of being studied by say, a solid-state physicist - as if it manifested itself as a sort of counterpart to the Doppler effect, wherein the relative frequency of approaching events are compacted and receding ones thinned. The legitimacy of this comparison becomes apparent as soon as one notices that Michael's narrative of 'remembering' the type backwards in time impels Adam's thoughts effectively into the anti-typical and fulfilling world of the future. In this context, Adam may be seen to apprehend the type in a twofold manner: deductively, via his experience of his objective world, and 'primitivistically', by means of the subjective world of his 'paradise within'. Like a drawn bowstring, the structural system of types and anti-types in Book X I I may also be examined dialectically in a manner similar to the way one empirically studies a detectable phenomenon which has its unique, and perhaps even mirror-image, opposite; for example, Adam's ears tense to Michael's unfolding words, the messages or contents of those words tauten and their girth contracts - all, of course, within the context of passing time. But Michael as addressor and Adam as auditor do not really function as complementary mirror-images in any behavioral sense. For Adam, future time is not merely compressed in a linear plane;

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it is also compressed in a vertical plane perpendicular to its axis. Here, the concept of 'verticality' as a direction of time should, for the purposes of this discussion, be understood in terms of a metaphoric division of time into the direction of real time and the direction of transcendent time. Once it is acknowledged that Milton accepted a universe beyond mere process-an unchanging essence supporting a universe constituted by mobile and dynamic forms - it becomes possible to grant to this notion of a 'vertical' time which is wholly transcendent, the status, at least, of a department in Milton's total conception of time. (It should be noted that the introduction of the concept of vertical time at this stage of our discussion is a mere convenience; a metaphoric one, to be sure, but one which is of considerable value in speaking about typological rhythm and the shape of time.) Raphael's remarks on the matter are particularly useful in this context. Instructing Adam into the mysteries of creation, Raphael says "For Time, though in Eternity, appli'd / To motion, measures all things durable / By present, past, and future" (V. 580582). Also the narrator's, when he declares "the speed of Gods / Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes wind'd" (X. 9091). And Adam's, when he replies to Michael's prophecy and judgment in these words: "How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, / Measur'd this transient World, the Race of time, / Till time stand fixt: beyond it all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach" (XII. 553-556). This, then, is Milton's reductio ad absurdum of what has been termed vertical, or transcendent time - illud tempus means itself. It is invisible to human eyes, and it is wholly real; it is never subject to the strains and stresses of human perception or human illusion. It is beyond the linear flow of natural time. Finally, it is possible to speak about it only in terms of its givenness - a givenness which, not surprisingly, is contributed by a consciousness wholly unregulated by the laws of causality, but one which is modified primarily by the contingencies of the eschaton. In other words, vertical time is someone. It temporalizes ITSELF as the absolute future (the 'time' beyond the 'abyss') lapsing into the past by coming into the present. What is ultimate in vertical time is also ultimate in subjectivity - a notion

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central to the final lines of Paradise Lost, wherein Michael leads Adam down 'To the subjected Plain', and then disappears. Returning to the problem posed earlier, one can now see that the relationship between the dialectics of typological rhythm and the concept of vertical time in Book XII can be studied in the context of the non-mirror-image behavior of phenomena; or, in other words, in the context of the asymmetrical relation between type and anti-type, and linear time and vertical time. The structural capabilities of columns may here serve as a useful analogical model to broaden the scope of our discussion. When columns are compressed vertically, they soon reach their slenderness ratio and begin to buckle and fall. Vertical time has no such limit, because its 'length' or duration subsists discretely quite apart from its 'girth' or whatever message it may carry or enfold. As future time becomes more extensive, what occurs is that the lengthened span of time is realized as vertical direction, or more precisely, as a directional link between the present and the future wherein nowtime and then-time tensionally cohere. We know that this is so, because the future cannot fly away from the present; indeed, it must be so for in both dream and wakefulness one can hover between the present and the future without ever severing their coherence. By visualizing the column as if it were time realized, and moreover, as if it were capable of being transformed in some way by means of typological 'mechanics', the question is what sort of column would one want to construct so that an application of the principles of typology could function with maximum effectiveness? What would its shape have to be in order to be perfectly intelligible both as a kerygmatic fact and as a bare assertion whose nakedness could receive total human assent? Two further qualifications: how would the column have to appear if one insisted that it express in some way (1) the transformative character of its creator's actions, and (2) the phenomenon of man's continual efforts to imitate the existence of its creator? (This last phenomenon, it should be added, would have to incorporate both the idea of man's eschatological self-alignment and the idea of an alignment with the past.)

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To test the structural feasability of this metaphoric column to 'carry' its 'programmed' load, one might increase the column's relative girth and shorten its height. Were this manipulation carried out to its logical limit, what would result finally is a structure that would be compressionally (scio, typologically) ideal - a sphere. Formerly, when it was a slender column, one was obliged to place it carefully on its neutral axis so as to avoid eccentric bending; in other words, to stabilize it. (The tower of Babel, it should be noted, is such a column; it is clearly unsuitable to carry the full burden of transforming even its builders who are also its intelligible 'victims' — from one existence to another, or from one conformity to another; that column involves the Babelians in merely an anthropological move from one place to many places, from one tongue to many tongues - a move which, because it fails to align its 'travelers' eschatologically, seals their destiny as existential counterfeiters.) When the column becomes a sphere, however, the quality and quantity of compression - loads applied from any direction are automatically opposed by one of an infinity of neutral axes. The spherical shape thus provides this world's truly optimum limit in that it stands in structural opposition to all the compressive forces in the universe. The main point of all of this is that when the shape of time is understood and accepted as spherical, the total sensus allegoricus of Christian typology may be covenantly realized-in both expression and action. It is maintained that only after Adam realizes the full force of the relationship between spherical time and his, and his progeny's, existence that he can bring himself to declare "O goodness infinite, goodness immense!" For it is only after Adam learns that the shape of time can be shaped by man himself by means of a SUBJECTIVE application and manipulation of the dialectics of typology that Adam's earlier sense of his equivocal relation to, and dependence upon, God's past acts can be blunted. In other words, once one learns the lesson well that Dasein ist rund, to borrow Rilke's phrase, one also learns that salvation is truly possible. When applied directly to Milton's notions concerning Adam's understanding, in time, of the Word of God, the process of inter-

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action described above takes on special significance. The entire substance of Michael's audial vision is the revealed Word of God, since God, instructing Michael, declares: If patiently thy bidding they obey, Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveal To Adam what shall come in future days, As I shall thee enlighten, intermix My Cov'nant in the woman's seed renew'd; So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace: (XII. 112-117)

in mere mechanical terms, the message here is that the prophetic words which Michael is to utter to Adam, together with their denotative objects, are not separable but constitute an indivisible, spherical whole - as it befits any predicate which emanates directly from God. Like revelation, the prophetic utterance can look to the future and see it in terms of the past, though the past is to be transcended. In consonance with the sapiential books of the Old Testament, Milton's narrator identifies God's revelatory words (which self-translate themselves into Michael's prophetic words) with the divine plan as elements essential to God's intention in creating the world initially; he does this in order to be in a position to urge the fulfillment of this intention, from the perspective of man's covenant-obligations via a rite of incorporation, as that proper to a scribal prophet. Just as the sensory world is only a symbol of the true, intelligible world, simply awakening him to the contemplation of the latter, so the narrator throughout Paradise Lost continues to consider the Word purely as a symbolic representation, and to ascribe to the Word as proclamation, the function of awakening and illuminating him and of showing him the way. Significantly, the narrator consistently proclaims two subjective truths of major significance, one ontological and the other epistemological, and both derived from Neoplatonism: (1) the clear, dualistic distinction between mind and matter, between lasting truth and transitory appearance, between subject and object, and (2) the concept of what may be termed the magister intus, according to which the logos, or Word of God, is the only true teacher, in comparison

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with which all external words and material signs are mere symbols of the truth and partial calls to strive after it, which, short of inner illumination, fail to provide truth by themselves. Indeed, because the Word OF God's acts come to the reader through the typological form of the narrator's autorial act of telling the story, the poem's presentation of eschatological news and existential vocation may remain mere 'news' for the reader. In other words, though the narrator may oblige existential conformity to Christ, the reader may or may not accept the challenge to conform. Yet the obligation is of primary importance here; the response which the narrator's news does indeed oblige the reader to make is one of 'metanoia', a moral transformation of mind in accordance with a new understanding of God's acts in history, and in witness to the Word of God which is the final judge of all typologies. To re-introduce the earlier metaphor, the prophetic statement in Paradise Lost does, therefore, enjoy this zero-girth-to-extensive-length tensional relationship with time in general, and with spherical time in particular. All the words spoken by Michael (and derivatively, by the narrator) in Book XII are FULL of God, and as such - to paraphrase Thales of Miletus - are as alive as magnets are alive, for they clearly have the power to move both iron and themselves. Moreover, Michael's words are endowed with a power to realize that which as symbols of expression they signify - whether that reality be of a natural or of a transcendent kind. Michael's words can be found, seen, brought from place to place, presented as gifts, and even eaten; they are concentrations of powers that can save or kill. They also bespeak of the shape of time as spherical for they also return to God. As Isaiah records: For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the mower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Isa. 55: 10-12)

VII "THE MEANING, NOT THE NAME I CALL": REALITY AND THE NARRATIVE PROCESS

Weiser stehen auf den Strassen, Weisen auf die Städte zu, Und ich wandre sonder Massen, Ohne Ruh, und suche Ruh.... Einen Weiser seh ich stehen Unverrückt vor meinem Blick; Eine Strasse muss ich gehen, Eine Strasse muss ich gehen, Die noch keiner ging zurück. Franz Schubert, "Der Wegweiser", Opus 98, Winterreise, No. 20. I who erewhile the happy Garden sung, By one man's disobedience lost, now sing Recovered Paradise to all mankind, By one man's firm obedience fully tried Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd In all his wiles, defeated and repuls't, And Eden rais'd in the waste Wilderness. Paradise Regained, The First Book, 1-7.

In the light of the preceding chapters, the questions usually raised concerning the nature of Milton's narrator and his function, both structural and hermeneutic, in Paradise Lost as a whole may now be more meaningfully confronted. The problems of his abstract method of narration have never been philosophically surveyed and analyzed. They occur, in the main, as questions of volition and tone: what subject to record next, how to deal with a disturbing or commonplace passage, how to concentrate or unify an image, an impression, a homiletic, or whatever? The narrator's subjective goals are even more difficult to assess if that is pos-

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sible. As artist once removed, the narrator's expression of his aims involve a complex play of abstractive, projective and formulative devices based on a disconcertingly broad variety of principles. It will be the purpose of this chapter to examine the relationship between the narrator's objective presentation of the story of the loss of innocence in Eden as an image of human experience and his need to objectify that experience. With respect to the narrator's articulation of the forms of his experience, it will be suggested that the narrator's need for objectification has been met by a principle inherent in his perception itself: essentially, a principle which tends towards the closure of form. In the sense that all of the narrator's ontological judgments and beliefs about existence are suspended in the mythological world of Paradise Lost, the methodus which he has chosen to articulate his experience functions transcendentally in a reflective way. It obliges the reader to attend to his experiencing of the object, rather than to the object directly; at the same time, it provides a technique for treating the total enterprise of Adam's experience, and therewith a groundwork for a theory of ways of knowing God via perception. Since neither the method nor the consequences of its use are related, except negatively, to the naturalization of the reader's consciousness in the Hobbesian and Parmenidean sense, what the reader should achieve is what the narrator experiences: the pure and immanent world of consciousness. In order to achieve this goal, Milton makes a radical beginning, and undertakes an absolute eidetic reduction of all types of human experience, together with the meant objects of experience, to the realm of immanent consciousness. By commencing the Invocation to Book I of Paradise Lost with the consciousness of the narrator, Milton avoids circularity at the outset; for restricted to that which is self-evident in the absolute sense, the narrator cannot speak of any other mind but his own. What the narrator does is to make the searching out of himself (and the objects of his experience) itself an object of reflection in order to refine the orderliness of his search for God and the ways of knowing. In ordinary circumstances, to have something as the object of one's search is to have faith in the existence of

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the object. The narrator, however, like the modern phenomenologist, suspends, even 'avoids' belief in the existence of the object of his search in order to focus more directly on the essential characteristics of his searching. In the sense that his searching is object-directed, he does believe in the object of his search; but this is not his concern. In other words, when the narrator is involved in searching (an activity always requiring the existence of the object, but not necessarily a belief in its existence), this act cannot really be distinguished from an act of consciousness. While searching, the narrator 'sees' perceptual and cognitive objects as he classifies them, but he cannot see THAT he is STRUCTURING them. It is as if the narrator is taking the Platonic concept of the soul as his chief principle of subjectivity and giving it a mythical objectification. His soul becomes both the form and the predicate which determines his body. Since his soul has a purely intelligible content, its nature must be identical to the nature of its object; or, in ontological terms, his soul which is the subject of pure thought is also the objective being. Unlike the Averroist who abandons subjectivity and considers the intellect absolute, Milton cannot simply place the soul of his narrator within a world of objective forces and attribute the true subject of his thought to a nonpersonal being. T o have the narrator behave as if he is really free from the constraints of the objective world (in the Pauline sense), Milton must exclude from the narrator's knowledge all assertions incapable of realization in terms of intuitive experience. The mechanism for this ideal of freedom from presupposition is provided initially by the reductive methodus of the initial Invocation. Because the Invocation aims empirically to clarify ideas of knowledge and ideas of transcendent objects, its assertions must be prior to all empirical theory. It is obliged to express a theory of theories which functions as a kind of pure mathesis, comprising all a priori knowledge. Because the narrator excludes from his statements all assertions concerning real existence, the freedom from presuppositions that he expresses is ultimately neither metaphysical, naturalistic, nor

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psychological. When the narrator remarks: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men (I. 22-26)

he is attempting to undertake the clarification of all the forms of knowledge available to him by recourse to the concept of fulfilled inspirations. The subject of his investigation, in other words, is the aggregate ideal meaning of those experiences in which the objects of his knowledge are documented, i.e., 'Man's First Disobedience', 'the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree', and so on. The epistemological value of this methodus holds regardless of whether or not the narrator's objects of knowledge exist in reality, in his imagination, or as a possibility. This is not to suggest that the narrator is a natural scientist interested solely in the given in nature; quite the contrary. By setting forth a procedure initially which implies that all things posited as existent - and, along with them, all experience - must be called into question, the narrator holds that nothing is pre-given. His methodus, in short, aims toward the direct intuition of the knowledge of those essential relations which are necessary for, and necessarily prior to, empirical knowledge. It would, however, be misleading to say that the Invocation endeavors to derive existence by utilizing a logic that abstracts from existence. Explained properly, the procedure is a method of construction which analyzes the character and make-up of experience (or objectivity) independent of belief in its existence. In terms of Ramist logic, this makes perfectly good sense. Ramus endeavored to trace all ideas back to their sources in prepredicative experience in order to achieve the clarity necessary for the epistemological understanding of logic. As a descriptive field-logic which confronts the objects of experience with an interest restricted to their essential structures, Ramist logic, because of its subjectivity, intentionally refers all ideas back to their origins in particular levels of the human consciousness. The nar-

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rator of Paradise Lost, like the Ramist, then, views leality as composed of subjective and objective elements with the subjective (its form exclusive of presumptive 'content') the a priori of objectivity; but, disdaining Parmenidean noema, the narrator negates objective reality. Christ is invariably viewed by the narrator as a perceived object which transcends objective reality but is still experienced as a sense-datum. For example, after Christ has responded in the affirmative to God's question, "Which of ye will be mortal to redeem / Man's mortal crime, and just th' unjust to save, / Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?" (III. 214-216), the narrator remarks: His words here ended, but his meek aspect Silent yet spake, and breath'd immortal love To mortal men, above which only shone Filial obedience: as a sacrifice Glad to be offer'd, he attends the will Of his great Father: Admiration seiz'd All Heav'n, what this might mean, and whither tend Wondering (III. 266-272)

With this in mind, one is now in a good position to deduce certain additional features which inform the world of the narrator's consciousness. Indeed, one is now in a position to foresee, and to some extent, describe, the route his inner life will take. As long as the narrator's self-conscious intellect is fixed on his 'illumining' of self, tension and uncertainty will be inevitable characteristics of his personality. But once his goal of apprehending the make-up of objectivity (transcendent and transcendental unity) is reached, all antithesis will be surpassed. Even the fundamental opposition of knowing subject and known object will have disappeared; knowledge will turn into being, or ganzheit. This also means that the narrator's concept of metaphysics, i.e., that transcendent form lies behind everything, implies specific metalogical prerequisites, the most important of which is that ontology implies determinism. Of secondary importance is the existence of a predicative dimension in which the predicates determine an individual subject which can never become a predicate itself.

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The narrator's first 'world', wherein the subject is determined by predicates, is the physical or natural world at the center of a spherical universe. Even the transcendent is predicatively 'expressed' by the narrator in his invocation to Light: Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born, Or of th' Eternal Coetemal beam May I express thee unblam'd? since God is Light, And never but in unapproached Light Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose Fountain who shall tell? (III. 1-8)

Transcending the plane of the predicative dimension, the narrator's self comes into sight on the horizon of the predicates; it becomes the subject of another world, inner experience, a world in which self determines itself, and poetry determines the poem. In this world, subject and predicate no longer confront each other. The narrator is here sufficiently distanced from the subject that he can even comment ironically upon the imponderables inherent in the process of narration: If answerable style I can obtain Of my Celestial Patroness, who deigns Her mighty visitation unimplor'd, And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated V e r s e . . . . (IX. 20-24)

The antimonies of self and content then transcend that selfconscious world and reach into the transcendental, intelligible world where the transcendental self is determined by intellectual intuition, given in the perception of ideas. This is essentially what the narrator expresses in his invocation to Urania, when he remarks "The meaning, not the Name I call" (VII. 5) and "So fail not thou, who thee implores: / For thou art Heav'nly, shee [Calliope] an empty dream" (VII. 38-39). This world resembles the world of Kant's Bewüsstsein überhaupt insofar as each of the narrator's worlds reaches higher, beyond itself, transcending the former ontological and predicating dimension.

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At the deepest ontological level of the narrator's inner self, then, one discovers a transcendental self which - like Schlegel's ironic self - views itself reflexively, in an intuitive manner. This activity, or process of self-sight, is informed by a Platonic content in which subject and object, inner and outer, are one. Since the world of his consciousness, viewed epistemologically, is an absolute subject of knowledge, it can construct any number of objects of knowledge whose character becomes indistinct and disappears as his self-conscious self confronts another 'double object': the 'fallen' world of disparate meanings, laws, and values, and the world of prelapserian events and speech. That the core of the narrator's personal self is an intelligible self becomes clear when one recognizes the press of his willing ego, his 'Heavenly Muse', to transcend his personal self and reach into the most inward core of his real being where self and its antinomy are harmonized. As a place to which all ontological levels are reduced, this innermost core cannot simply be characterized as being, however; it is a mere locus where being is revealed. It resembles the 'place' of which Heidegger remarks: "Ins Nichts gehalten wird das Sein offenbar" (when contained within nothingness, being is manifest). The metaphysical self-identity expressed by this core results in a very special salvific point-of-view towards being. Although the narrator's innermost self transcends all objectivity because it exists at a depth where moral consciousness is entirely absent, it is incapable of providing the basis of definable being or definable objectivity. Still, this core is not antithetical to being. Rather, it is just the 'place' where the transcendental and metaphysical attributes of being coincide and exist in equilibrium. The final place of being, for the narrator, then, cannot really be an object of knowledge. Why? Inasmuch as all being unfolds itself into the formless eternal, and because all form is a figure of that eternal, all being must be filled at its deepest core with the presence of an essentially formless and impersonal eternal. In Aristotle's logic of subject (where all predicates REFER to a subject which cannot be completely reduced), the subject is a remnant which remains essentially irrational. The philosophical

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medium in which the narrator speaks, however, is a logic of place or predicate, a field-logic, in which subjects are determined by their place. For the narrator, the only irreducible is the very last place in which, and by which, all being is determined. Rather than seeking the object of knowledge in the subject of judgment, this logic strives for the locus in which this object is determined. This tendency may be observed in the narrator's very first utterance. In the invocation to Book I the narrator remarks: Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of Chaos.. . . (I. 5-10)

When, because of limitations of space or time the locus cannot contain the nature of an object, when contradictions are introduced, another, increasingly deeper, level of determinant is required, while the irrational remnant of the object in the former place evaporates. Oreb gives way to Sinai, then to Sion. Or, if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know'st; (I. 10-19)

The particular character of each place which enfolds the object is such that by transcending one place, and then another, it becomes increasingly more concrete. Examined with regard to noema, this means that by transcending in the direction of the object, new objects become manifest to the narrator as being, and that by transcending in the direction of the predicate, the narrator's self-conscious self is always transcended. When the narrator solicits illumination and support so

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that "to the heighth of his great Argument, / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men" (I. 24-26), he is declaring that this LAST transcendence cannot be apparent as being because it is a progression to a place which is merely a place, i.e., a place which does not have its place in something other than itself. In this context, the typological message of "till one greater Man / Restore us" takes on an additional force and meaning. If one understands the illumining of the narrator as necessarily prior to 'one greater Man', in the sense that knowledge of the soul presupposes total knowledge of human personality, the reader cannot possibly accept the narrator's statement as if it were hypostatized, or as if it were devoid of a certain intemporelle. It is extremely dubious that the narrator's assertions comprise statements either of absolute or of partial reality. What is very likely, however, is that the narrator is concerning himself with clarifying characterological distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity within the framework of Christian time. In other words, he is setting about to confront the reality of Christian typology as an object of his own subjective, inner experience. This is not as surprising as it might at first appear. Since Milton is principally interested in those a priori structures which comprise knowledge, his view of time should no more differ in its essential relations with his narrator's inner world of consciousness than does, say, his logic of place. The logic of his narrator, because of its subjectivity, is in its final consequences primitivistic. Since his logic confronts an organic world (from seed to seed) whose efficacy is teleological action, his view of time must be a circular view. Unlike the materialist, the narrator cannot make of time a mechanical and linear construct whose efficacy is causal action. Though he regards time as if it were always in the present, the implication is always strong that the present is pregnant with the future which carries the past on its back. It is not enough to say that it is characteristic of Milton's thought that he should accept Christian typology as a method which could relate history and the world of nature and experience to their fulfillment in Christ. What is required is an explana-

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tion of how Milton has his narrator hypostatize his theory of knowledge. It has already been suggested that the narrator of the initial Invocation communicates, not unlike the Kantian, through a highly conventionalized process of expectation and selection. Implicit in his theory of knowledge is the need for describing the shape of reality in terms of selective categories. When he cuts out a segment of empirical reality such as his sense of time passing, or his imagining of it, or even his sense of the future Parousia, for instance, one can be certain that he is structuring that reality in accordance with a special, localized, historical convention - a convention, which, in a fundamental way, is no more than a tonal reflection of his original response to his own experience of reality, except on a different frequency. Similarly, when the narrator subjectively asserts that Christ will restore man when typology's existential dialectic is applied correctly, both he and the reader are forced to realign themselves eschatologically. The narrator is saying, in effect, that in order to provide himself with the appropriate occasion to 'assert Eternal Providence' and 'justify the ways of God to man', he must locate an absolute existential norm within time. This existential norm, because it is spoken out of human experience, is clearly not objective. It is located only by means of deductively relating the multiplicity of human experience to the normative in such a way as to make the typologist and those who listen to him move from one existence to another. Because the narrator's typological assertion first involves the reader in a sub-fulfillment as he incorporates himself in Adam's existence and then in a complete fulfillment as he incorporates himself in Christ's existence, the nature of the eschatological realignment forced upon the reader compels him to make himself conform to Christ in an anthropologically, selftransforming move. There is a very fine line between arguing that Milton's application of typology's existential dialectic provides the occasion for the manipulation of tone and arguing that the nature of Milton's doctrine, ideology and language justifies the necessity for conforming to Christ. If the first were true, the occasion which

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Milton provides in the Invocation to Book I for the renewal of his reader's mind is confirmed by his language; if the second were true, the occasion is confirmed by his method. Perhaps a more constructive question to ask here is this: can one find any reasonable criterion for arguing that Milton's method itself provides a justification for his narrator's attempt to transcend it? Were it possible to provide a satisfactory answer, one would then be in a position to understand, to a degree somewhat better than before, how the initial Invocation could function phenomenologically as well as existentially. To summarize a sophisticated doctrine certainly does it less than justice; but, at the very least, one could assert that because the narrator seeks assistance, instruction, and illumination from the Holy Spirit, his method is a procedure for the transmission of the art of God, which includes the arts of creation and the secrets of first and last things. Invoking the Holy Spirit, the narrator remarks: Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of G o d to men.

(I. 18-26) By making traditional dialectical distinctions between the discovery of arguments which make his case plausible (inventio), and the suitable disposition or collocation of those arguments which transmit the essence of that art, the narrator is arguing from universal principles to their subordinate parts. He is using logic deductively in order to perceive the whole subject. The chief drawback of this method is that the best one can hope for - if one tries to relate the multiplicity of experience to the normative by means of language - is a mimetic dialectic. For even if Milton assumed, as did St. Augustine in De Doctrine Christiana, that it were possible for one to create a condition in which his mind would be in contact with a transcendental reality,

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he would be forced to make EVERYTHING in Paradise Lost a metaphor for the unseen. Even the narrator's words, having all linguistic potential, could point to symbols of that reality. It must be admitted, that in point of fact, that is essentially what they do. In short, when Milton makes res et verba metaphors for transcendent reality, the subjects of the metaphors do, in a sense, collapse away from its parts and are fragmented. The method of the initial Invocation does indeed confirm the language of the Invocation, because it provides the occasion for the fragmentation of the subject, i.e., the location of an absolute existential norm by means of relating multiplicity to the normative. The occasion for depicting the application of typology's existential dialectic is provided by the language, which allows the reader to be transformed by the renewal of his mind. This renewal of mind, therefore, is the aim of first, Milton's language, and second, Milton's method. When the mind of the reader has passed beyond those words spoken by the narrator which are signs for things they signify, it is free to perceive those divine signs which are immutable. Only then is the reader in immediate contact with the reality of the transcendental subject of all words, and only then is true selfconformation to Christ accomplished in a twofold sense, subjectively as 'phenomenon', and objectively as 'being'. Milton would probably argue that the reader who could perceive that the function of knowledge was to clarfiy signs, and who could enter upon a course of applying typology to his own consciousness and his own existence was in a position to distend his soul, strengthen his memory, and pass from the syntax of self and experience to the syntax of the Holy Spirit, or, in other words, pass from words to silence. For Milton, the linguistic distinction between transcendental reality and sensible reality rests squarely on an ontological one. The existence of the Holy Spirit, for example, is not contingent upon any of the particular objects which manifest or exhibit it textually in Paradise Lost. Broadly speaking, Milton's ontology is one in which transcendental exemplars figure, by means of res, signa, et verba, their transitory embodiment in sense objects.

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Linguistic attributes and representations of the objective and sensible world in the text have their source in the immutable hypostasis of the transcendental and supersensible reality. When Milton's narrator invokes the aid of the Heavenly Muse who "Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss", for example, he is asserting that the sensible world is generated by, and depends for its existence upon, the transcendental reality above it. By alluding to what may be termed vertical causation, Milton is metaphorically asserting the existence of a vertical chain of realities, a chain of being. This is evident in the narrator's epistemic system when he declares "What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support"; it is also evident, not surprisingly, in the illuminative theory of St. Augustine, who asserted that as a result of infused grace, God 'shines like a sun in the soul', in order that the soul may perceive 'all truly intellectual objects' in God's mind {de Gen. c. Manich. 1:43; de Gen. ad Litt. 12). Because of this, it should not be deduced that the narrator is aware of himself only as a phenomenon. As a Christian, the narrator's philosophy of both self and salvation is clearly a philosophy of the subject, not of the object. What is important to recognize about the narrator, however, is not that he is simply setting spirit in opposition to being; but rather, that his epistemic stance vis a vis the objective and the subjective in human experience is extremely complex. This is understandable in view of the fact that he links the subjective necessities of the descent and ascent of his soul, of justification of the divine Arbitrium, and of empirical knowledge to a subject which is transcendent - that is to say, to the Godhead, a truly objective being. One further problem, still unresolved, should be considered: the nature of the relationship between illumined knowledge and hypostatized reality. If the narrator is saying that his soul becomes what it knows, and knows what it becomes, then he believes that perceptual knowledge of an attribute of the Godhead involves the knower in a union with a succession of hypostases, in a union with those ideas which form a part of the Godhead, and in a union with God himself. If, on the other hand, he is saying that the activity of perceiving God, because it is a process

REALITY AND THE NARRATIVE PROCESS

149

of formulation, has as its object a form which is both an experienced thing and a symbol for that thing, then he is claiming that his perception of a hypostatized reality is dependent upon a form which he first abstracts from his experience and then uses to conceptualize the total experience. The narrator would then be carrying epistemology into processes pointing to the existence of forms, and he would then be arguing that to know God is not to unite with him. Further, it would follow that the narrator's excursion into Gestaltung would ultimately result in his perceptual paralysis, in a condition wherein he could apprehend only a world of things and a history of things. Though Milton's concession to the hypostatized reality of Paradise may invite rather than preclude logical analysis, the fact that he has capitulated to intuition and illumination takes him beyond propositional thought to the point where he can speak alternately of knowledge of God and of union with God. In effect, when the narrator asserts the necessity for illumination after invoking the Heavenly Muse who "didst inspire / That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed / In the beginning how the heavens and earth / Rose out of Chaos", he appears to be developing the view that because there are certain qualities of his mind which are not self-sufficient and others which are, the activity of knowing is deficient, and that to know is not to possess. But to say this is merely to suggest that the subject and object of the narrator's contemplation are distinguishable entities on one level of existence. This much is clear. What the narrator is suggesting is a multileveled reality, each stage of which is constituted by a quality of mind which, since it proceeds from a transcendent unity, has the function of administering the sensible world in accordance with the pattern and structure of the transcendent world. In this context, the supreme reality to which the narrator is appealing is characterized by unity and multiplicity at the same time. Multiplicity, for him, implies unity; for without some bond between the two, the multiple existence in the narrator's mind which he characterizes as 'dark' and 'low' would constitute a disintegrated mass of spatial objects in much the same way as subject and object are separated from each other in discursive reasoning.

EPILOGUE

Paradise Lost — what is Paradise Lost? If I now say, invoking an image of Leibniz', that it is akin to 'green justice' in the sense that its truths stand completely apart from all temporal qualification in the same way that the ideal body of justice offers no orifice where the attributive, 'greenness', can be hooked onto it, I shall have failed to interpret properly the results of my inquiry. If, on the other hand, I claim that Paradise Lost is ALWAYS WHAT IT is, a form of the non-temporal, or a species of the purely nontemporal, I will in effect be affirming that there is no greater degree of homogeneity than that which exists between the atemporal mode of being which is characteristic of the truths of Milton's epic and the temporal mode of being that defines me as a man who seeks to discover the truths of, say Milton's Adam, or ignores them, repeats them or forgets them. This also will not do. If I assert, as I have come close to doing now and then in my analysis, that Milton's poem is like the elegant gesture of the fairy queen, Titania, who in Shakespeare's enchanted forest, caressed the head of a donkey, I shall confront myself with an irony which confounds. There is, of course, something obsessively compelling about each of these answers, for each endeavors to escape the essential realities of the poem; but insofar as reality is the living of the poem and the internalizing of its symbols, maybe the best and most discreet course, of critical action to take here is to emphasize it, and to say that the major achievement of this poem is Milton's internalization of certain fundamental symbols of transcendence (chief among them, God and Adam) in such a way as to confer a new dignity on poetry as a route to salvation.

EPILOGUE

151

Preparing the way in his vision of Paradise Lost for a new and complex subjectivism of man as a moral agent, Milton develops a twofold argument which takes the form of the deflation of abstract modes of perception, and the inflation of the subjective elements in man. Milton's construction, then, is based on a revised emphasis on the senses as a legitimate form of the perception of divine Will in nature, if not the only authentic way to truth. For Adam to live in the natural world, while at the same time investing life with its ideal possibilities, a double-directed 'conversion' of his perception is required. If, on the one hand, the division introduced into his consciousness between mind and matter is to be overcome, the pit into which all reality must be poured is Adam's self. Knowledge started from self and ends up in self, be it self-realization or human wisdom or divine revelation internalized, which goes by the name of truth. But Milton is also saying that ours is a moral universe, a universe in which man must attain a balance of reason and action, and will and perception, to avoid a breakdown of the proper relations among our natural attributes, and that ours is a world in which morality is purely subjective. And, if Adam's new life after the final vision and after his expulsion from Eden is to be an effort to achieve substantiality, a struggle continually to acquire true existence, Adam's place (together with ours) in the rhythm of coming-to-be and passing-away is not indeterminate. Subject as a ball to the play of the waves, man is at the same time at the mercy of the laws of the artificer of all oceans, and thus, is subject to the laws of change themselves. For Milton, the law of the order of man's nature is the Word, the one imperishable and immutable element in the entire flux of coming-to-be and passing-away. Only within this eidos, Milton asserts, is the harmonization of man's history and man's existence truly possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In writing this book, the author has been especially indebted to the works of Martin Buber, chiefly Bilder von Gut und Böse (Köln: J. Hegner, 1952) and Gottesfinsternis: Betrachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Religion und Philosophie (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1953), to Edmund Husserl's Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), Hrsg. von Rudolf Boehm ('s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), to Roman Ingarden's Time and modes of Being, tr. by Helen R. Michejda (Springfield, 111.: Thomas, 1964), to Immanuel Kant's Schriften zur Metaphysik und Logik (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1958), and to The Torah, with Targum, with Commentaries of Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, David Kimhi, et al. (many editions).

INDEX

Adam 18-21, 22-23, 26, 33-34, 36-37, 42-44, 47, 50-51, 54-56, 58-62, 64-68, 75-76, 83, 96, 99-103, 106107, 112, 117, 122-123, 131, 133 Anisotropy, temporal and visual 30, 38, 41-42, 106 Appearances 48-49, 51-52,62, 80, 85, 105 Apriorism, anthropological and empirical 21-24, 27, 32,41, 49-50, 57, 63-64,95, 110 Asymmetry, patterns of 30-45 Augustine, Saint, his theory of knowledge 70, 77, 80, 89, 146-149 Babel, tower of 114-120, 127-129 Being 17-18, 29, 36, 47, 58, 64-68, 80 Causation, claims and principles of 23, 25, 31-32, 34-40, 50, 57, 67-68, 82, 84-85, 110, 124 Certainty, perceptual and empirical conditions of 18-19, 22, 37, 59 Christ 64, 71, 76-78, 82, 92, 96, 118, 121-122, 124 Cognition 18, 21, 44, 73-75ff, 89 Consciousness, structure and perception of 22-24, 27-28, 30, 32-33, 42, 45, 47-53, 61-64, 70-73, 84, 95, 99 Covenant, nature and obligations of 22, 47, 54, 56, 61, 75, 79, 88, 103, 110, 120,124-125 Creation 23, 26-28, 32-33, 36, 38,6768, 82, 94 Death 29, 36, 50, 53, 60-61, 73, 78,

121-122 De Doctrina Christiana 22, 146 Deduction 22, 105, 115, 125 Determinism 22, 57, 87 Deus absconditus 106, 109 Dialogue 44-45, 55-56, 64, 67-70, 104f, 126f Dream 25-26, 28, 31-32, 64-65 Eden, composition and knowledge of 17-18, 20-22, 25, 28-29, 32-35ff, 41,48, 50-53, 55, 58, 60,67,72-73, 84-86, 91-92, 120, 122-124 Ego 24, 27, 48, 56, 58, 65 Entropy 33-34, 38-42 Epistemology, method and empirical dilemmas of 16, 18, 20, 25-27, 68, 83, 89, 115 Eschatology, prophecy and 71-72, 110, 121-123; typology and 7475ff, 91, 94-96,102f, 118,132-133, 145 Essence 17,68, 80, 82, 116-118 Ethics 29, 41 Eve 45,73, 83 Existence 17-18,21-23, 29-30,48,50, 55, 61-63, 67-68, 75, 80, 82, 84, 112, 118-119, 130 Existential reality and dialectics 26, 28, 49, 76-77, 82, 87, 118-120, 129-130, 145-146 Experience 16, 19-20, 22-23, 26-28, 50-52, 61-62, 64, 118, 125 Expulsion 31, 46, 83-84, 123-124 External, problems of the 17-18, 20, 27, 50, 61, 91-92

154

INDEX

Faith 31, 53, 60, 84-85, 89, 122, 137138 Fall 23, 36, 39-40, 50-53, 73 Forms 63-64, 66-68, 72-73, 80-82, 106-112

Fortunate Fall 72, 76, 84,125, 133 Free Will and causation 84-85, 87, 118-119 Genesis 29, 58, 73 God, knowledge and character of 17, 19, 21, 25-28, 44, 46, 48-49, 58-58, 61-68, 72, 80, 86, 88-89, 100, 106-107, 109-110, 114-116, 118-119 Grace and nature 22,77, 110, 148 Great Chain of Being 67-68,72 Heaven, frame and magnitude of 19, 21,39,41,72, 115, 117-119 Hell, composition and nature of 38-39,41, 72,99; entropy of 38-40 History 46, 71, 77, 83, 86-87, 89-90, 91-95, 121, 129f Hypostasis, meaning of 76, 79, 94, 97, 145-146 Ideas, properties and perception of 15, 18, 20-22, 63-65 Image 65, 76-78, 80, 89, 99, 105-106 Immanent 18, 25, 31, 64, 72 Incarnation 76, 84, 87-90, 92, 99, 121 Instruction 19, 32, 69-70, 78-79, 90, 131 lntellectualis viseo Dei 44 Intentionality, principles and function of 16, 20, 22, 31, 40, 54-55, 58-60 Interpretation 37, 49 Intuition and knowledge 20, 44, 59 Invocations 17, 36-37, 116, 137-138, 143-147

16, 18-24, 27, 29, 44, 58, 61-62, 69-70, 73, 77, 80, 89-91, 97, 106107, 123, 137-149 Liberty 23-24, 88 Loci communes 55, 95, 99 Logic 61, 80, 94, 105; narrator's 98, 137-143; Ramistic 95 Luther, view of knowledge of 29 Memory, function of 17, 20, 31, 33, 36,45,65,94,98-99,106,114-115, 130-131 Method, epistemological, historiographie, and Ramistic 16, 20, 74, 90, 94-95, 137-139 Michael 46, 76, 78-79, 83, 85, 90-91, 96, 99-101, 104f, 113-135 Mind 17, 19, 24, 29-30, 51-52, 55-57, 84, 99-100, 105 Music and prosody 106-110 Myth 26, 58,61,64,71,113 Names, significance and understanding of 17-18, 22-23, 26, 43, 54, 64, 72,78, 86, 113-116, 137-149 Narrative, process and structure of 31-34f, 37, 39-42, 55, 106-107ff, 119-122, 126-127, 137-149 Narrator, logic and function of 3638, 41, 74, 83, 93-94, 96-98, 100, 112,115-117,134-135,137-149 Nature, self-evident in 20, 58, 62; knowledge and definition of 19, 22, 27, 62, 83, 87, 91-92, 94-99 Objective world 18-19, 31-33, 43, 49, 61-62, 82-83 Objectivity, elements of 32, 45, 51, 80-81, 91-92 Objects of experience, myth, and thought 20-21, 23, 25-26, 43, 50, 56-59, 61-62, 64-66, 69, 76-77, 8586.

Judgments, analytic 18, 21-22 Knowable, what is 16, 21, 27, 44, 57, 69-70 Knowledge, theory and elements of

Ontological propositions 21, 31, 56, 58, 121 Paradise Lost, structural system of 34, 37, 55-56, 62, 64, 72, 80-82,

INDEX 95, 106-110, 124 Paradise within 90-91, 120-121, 123 Paradox 61, 72-76, 84, 99 Perceiver, nature of the 19, 23, 44, 48, 60 Perception, principles and function of 19-21, 23, 25-26, 32-33f, 44, 47-52, 54-56, 58, 61-62, 72, 75, 88-89, 96, 99-101 Phenomenological vision 16, 59 Phenomena, definition, knowledge, and organization of 15-16, 20, 2728, 31, 65, 70-71, 77, 83, 101-105 Pisgah vision 83, 85, 91-93, 96, 99110 Place, dialectics and frames of 28, 84, 95 Predication, limits and logic of 58, 62, 67, 74, 76, 82, 95, 116-117, 139-141 Promised Seed 48, 74, 92, 130 Ramus 55, 63, 94-95, 98, 139-140 Raphael 18, 31, 33, 44-45, 53-56, 6780, 131 Reader, experience and perception of 16, 36, 67-68, 80-81, 85, 93-97, 99, 126-127, 137 Reality, ideas and seals of 17-22, 26-27, 49-50, 64-65, 69, 79, 94, 137-149 Reason 23, 27, 59-61, 67-68, 72, 96, 115, 125 Recordability 36-38 Reduction, eidetic 25, 50, 137 Revelation 60, 69-70, 80, 87, 102 Rite de passage 103, 112 Sacramentalism 17, 58, 117-119 Salvation, history and necessities of 22, 28, 30, 48, 60, 77, 82, 83-84, 120 Satan 35, 37, 39-41, 73, 99

155

Self 15, 28-29, 48, 50-52, 55 Signs 19, 77, 83-85, 113 Silence, sacred 19, 73, 119; rhetoric of 75 Soul, distension and objectification of 22, 78, 88, 138 Space, entropy of 41-42; automorphistic concept of 109; musical and Ramistic 36, 98, 106-110 Subjected Plain 83, 98, 132 Subjective, character of the 20, 25, 27, 45, 87-88, 129-130 Subjectivity 20, 25, 45, 59, 131-132 Substance 21, 85, 115-118 Symmetry, concept of 106-110 Teleology 91, 102, 110, 113, 124 Text, presuppositions and structure of 20, 55, 72 Time, perception and structure of 23, 29-34, 41-42, 64, 75, 85, 93-96, 99, 100-103, 117-118, 121 f, 124126, 129-135 Transcendence, experience and idea of 18, 22-28, 31, 58, 62, 65, 69-70, 129-132 Tree 29, 67f, 75 Truth 19, 29, 69-71, 77 Typology, Christian 39, 71-74, 7677ff, 102f, 104, 110, 117-120, 122130 Union 76-77, 91, 114-118, 130 Vision 25, 28, 46-62, 64, 82-110, 111-135 Wisdom 19, 57-58 Words 17, 52-55, 61-63, 66-67, 7273, 76-78, 80-81, 99, 113-119, 133-134, 146-148 World 17-19, 21-22, 24, 27, 43, 58, 75, 83, 91-92

STUDIES Some 9. 10.

Shakespeare's tural Analysis. 1966. 125 pp.

Early Comedies: A StrucGld. 22 —

BLAZE ODELL BONAZZA:

The Fierce Equation: 1965. 165 pp.

THOMAS KRANIDAS:

A Study

Shakespeare's Problem Plays: Studies in Form 1966. 242 pp. Gld. 33.—

Three Children of the Universe: Emerson's View of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton. 1966. 199 pp., portrait. Gld. 25.—

WILLIAM M.WYNKOOP:

31. ERIC LAGUARDIA: Nature Redeemed: The Imitation Three Renaissance Poems. 1966. 180 pp. 38.

Thomas Dekker: 1969. 250 pp.

JAMES H. CONOVER:

Structure. 40.

COBURN GUM:

Comparative 41.

of Milton's Gld. 25 —

WILLIAM B. TOOLE:

and Meaning. 26.

LITERATURE

titles:

Decorum. 19.

IN ENGLISH

An Analysis

of Order in Gld. 25.— of

Dramatic Gld. 34.—

The Aristophanic Comedies of Ben Jonson: A Study of Jonson and Aristophanes. 1969. 207 pp. Gld. 30.—

SHEROD M. COOPER: The Sonnets Stylistic Study. 1968. 184 pp.

of Astrophel

and Stella: A Gld. 28.—

42. MARION TAYLOR: A New Look at the Old Sources of Hamlet. 1968. 79 pp. Gld. 18.— 46.

CHARLES J. LEES:

51.

GEORGE M. MULDROW:

57.

MANFRED WEIDHORN:

Milton and the Drama of the Soul: A Study of the Theme of the Restoration of Men in Milton's Later Poetry. 1970. 270 pp. Gld. 36.—

Literature. 64.

The Poetry of Walter Haddon. 1967. 314 pp. Gld. 39.—

Dreams 1970. 167 pp.

in Seventeenth-Century

English Gld. 27.—

j. TRACI: The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Study of Shakespeare's Play. 1970. 171 pp. Gld. 28.—

PHILIP

All volumes

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