Scholarly Milton 9781942954811, 1942954816

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Scholarly Milton EDITED BY

Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan

Scholarly Milton EDITED BY

Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan

© 2019 Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-942954-81-1 (print) eISBN: 978-1-942954-82-8 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Festa, Thomas, editor. | Donovan, Kevin Joseph, editor. Title: Scholarly Milton / edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Description: First edition. | Clemson, South Carolina : Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018042049 (print) | LCCN 2018051432 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954828 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954811 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Milton, John, 1608-1674--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR3588 (ebook) | LCC PR3588 .S416 2019 (print) | DDC 821/.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042049

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Contents Scholarly Milton

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan

I Milton and the Ethical Ends of Learning 1 High Enterprise: Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts Sharon Achinstein 2 Typology and Milton’s Masterplot Sam Hushagen

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3 The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost 61 James Ross Macdonald 4 “The First and Wisest of Them All”: Paradise Regained and the Beginning of Thinking J. Antonio Templanza 5 Learning, Love, and the Freedom of the Double Bind Gardner Campbell

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II Milton and the Trivium 6 Revisiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018 Emma Annette Wilson

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7 God’s Grammar: Milton’s Parsing of the Divine Russell Hugh McConnell

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8 Raphael’s Peroratio in Paradise Lost: Balancing Rhetorical Passion in Virgil and Paul Joshua R. Held

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III Milton and Scholarly Commentary 9 Euphrasy, Rue, Polysemy, and Repairing the Ruins Emily E. Stelzer

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10 Paradise Finding Aids Nicholas Allred

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11 Political Diplomacy, Personal Conviction, and the Fraught Nature of Milton’s Letters of State Edward Jones

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Notes 241 Contributors 287 Index 291

Acknowledgments

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cholarship most often begins and ends with community, and so we would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have enabled our sense of the community of Milton scholars and therefore helped see this book through to its completion. First off, because this book gathers extended versions of essays initially presented at the final Conference on John Milton to be held in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, we must thank yet once more Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, the conference’s “Grand Parents,” who were moved to found the conference “in that happy State,” and the English Department of Middle Tennessee State University, who sustained the conference for all those years through institutional support. Like the rest of the community, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kris and Charley for all of their efforts on behalf of Milton scholarship. More recently, we have had the great fortune to work closely with Dr. John Morgenstern, Director and Executive Editor of Clemson University Press, and Dr. Alison Mero, Managing Editor of the Press. Many thanks to our contributors, who have created this community by allowing us to publish their fine scholarship. Lastly, allow me a few words of farewell. I would like to thank Kevin Donovan for collaborating with me on this volume and the previous collection to emerge from Murfreesboro. Kevin will be moving on after this to other projects. On a sadder note, I must end these acknowledgements by mourning the passing of Edward W. Tayler of Columbia University, one of the very greatest teachers I have known, who will for me always exemplify the nature of scholarly virtue.                      T.F.

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Introduction Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan

Dorothea’s faith supplied all that Mr Casaubon’s words seemed to leave unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even bad grammar is sublime. George Eliot, Middlemarch1

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eaders of Milton have always understood the depth and breadth of his intellect. In the range of his references and in the penetrating discernment with which Milton deploys his vast learning, his works characteristically exhibit not only learnedness, but also knowingness. Even dyspeptic critics as given to harshness as Samuel Johnson must finally concede that Paradise Lost offers “a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from ancient fable or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts.”2 In the memorable praise of William Hazlitt, “The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition.”3 His poetry and prose exude a scholarly disposition that both admirers and critics have come to recognize as a signature of his authorship.

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As soon as one tries to describe the basis for the enormous confidence and authority of this scholarly persona, however, the air begins to leave the room. A portrait leaps to mind of an anemic pedant, perhaps of the sort exemplified by George Eliot’s Edward Casaubon—vainly, tragically, and ironically compiling his doomed attempt at grand synthesis, The Key to All Mythologies. And yet, as our epigraph suggests, the unquestioned faith of the true believer can also mislead one to believe in a text’s infinite elasticity, “expanding for whatever we can put into it,” so that “even bad grammar is sublime.” Uncritical admiration of an author, insufficiently tempered with knowledge of historical and theoretical contexts, can wed any of us to a scholarly position as precarious as that of Dorothea Brooke, the intelligent but naive heroine of Eliot’s masterpiece. As professional scholars writing principally for other scholars, then, we need not apologize for taking an interest in the vicissitudes of historical scholarship. Yet questions arise directly: what does it mean to historicize and theorize Milton’s work as a scholar? How would that endeavor today relate to what a seventeenth-century intellectual would imagine the tasks of scholarship to be? How can we responsibly translate, or at least for today’s readers make sense of, the specific pressures affecting early modern scholarly exchange—epistemological, political, and theological? A natural outgrowth of these period-based questions would be a meditation on their potential relevance to scholars today. Scholarship has rarely ever existed, not for long anyway, in a vacuum. So consideration of one figure entails inquiring into networks of interaction not bounded by period, nation, or faith. Moreover, the implications of such inquiry into the “scholarly Milton” extend into further questions concerning how Milton’s writings have become the subject of intense scholarly debate through their reception. So, “scholarly Milton” inevitably means not just “Milton as a student,” but also the reconstruction of his works and their contexts as an object of study—“the scholar’s Milton” as well as the scholarly polemicist, statesman, and poet. From this vantage, the abundance of Milton’s own scholarship may be seen through the labors of other scholars to disseminate evidence of it in annotations and other textual apparatuses, starting with Patrick Hume’s massive Annotations on Paradise Lost for Tonson’s sixth edition of the poem (1695). Before turning with several of our contributors to the more complicated matters of Milton’s poems and their reception, it may be helpful to begin more simply and concretely with a brief survey of passages representative of

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Milton’s development as a scholar, as witnessed by his prose works. Milton’s earliest expressions of the value and purpose of scholarship appear in his Seventh Prolusion, an oration delivered near the end of his time at Cambridge, probably in the Michaelmas Term of 1630.4 The topic set for this speech was a defense of the arts of learning against the incursions of what Milton calls, clearly taking a swipe at the scholastic tendencies still prominent at Cambridge, “gowned Ignorance” (togatae ignorantae; CM 12:276).5 Very much in keeping with the humanist education he himself had encountered at St. Paul’s School in London, Milton elaborates a strictly hierarchical and elitist philosophy of education, revealing a typically humanist preoccupation with the establishment of what Fritz Caspari described as “an aristocracy of the mind.”6 In keeping with the common Renaissance understanding of moral philosophy, Milton describes the social and political consequences of education along a continuum of controlled governance—from self, to family, to state. (Not surprisingly, these divisions correspond exactly with the categories under which Milton distributed the excerpts in his commonplace book: Index Ethicus, Index Oeconomicus, Index Politicus.) Milton argues in the Seventh Prolusion that those who have “gained possession of this stronghold of wisdom” created by scholarship will “indisputably enjoy a kingdom in themselves” (CM 12:267, 269). The conventional, orderly, schematic psychology of the individual mirrors both the ideal structure of the state and the divine architecture of the universe: the great Framer of the universe, although He had founded all other things on change and decay, had intermingled in man, beyond what is mortal, a certain divine breath and as it were a part of Himself … which, after it had sojourned spotlessly and chastely on earth for a while, a guest as it were from heaven, should wing itself upward to its native sky. (CM 12:253–55) All Milton’s early, optimistic preoccupations are present here: the emphasis on spotless chastity; the rekindling of the divine image through learning; and the seamless union of scholarly rigor with spiritual purity. What will probably be most unsettling to readers of Milton’s later republican and regicidal works is the uncompromising political hierarchy through which Milton defends the value of scholarly endeavors in this early work. Knowledge, as he sees it, “enthrones itself on high with the intellect as king and emperor” (cum

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rege imperatore intellectu in excelso locat se; CM 12:260–61). As early as the 1630s, Milton advocates rule by the virtuous few, perhaps more in the mold of humanist scholar-kings than Plato’s philosopher-kings, and he cites Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar as the “pattern for emulation … divinely produced for mankind, to which sort of man particularly the helm and reigns of affairs ought to be entrusted” (CM 12:269). “Without doubt,” he argues, “one family, one man endowed with knowledge and wisdom, like a great gift of God, may be sufficient to make a whole state virtuous” (CM 12:258). In retrospect, of course, such harmonies between scholarship, theology, and statecraft seem at best artificial and inherited, at worst specious and naive. When Milton began to think more deeply for himself about how scholars are formed—once he had gained experience tutoring others—his focus shifted more concretely to the individual student. As he wrote in his commonplace book sometime in the second half of the 1630s under the topic heading “On the Education of Children”: “The nature of each person should be especially observed and not bent in another direction; for God does not intend all people for one thing, but for each one his own work” (YP 1:405).7 The emphasis on learning now becomes specifically experiential and experimental. Although the rhetorical orientation of his own humanist schooling can still be felt in his writing, as it will throughout his career, new influences on Milton’s thinking about the proper method and curriculum of study begin to appear. Francis Bacon exerts a powerful influence along with Prussian educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius and his follower and translator Samuel Hartlib, to whom Milton’s brief tractate Of Education (1644) is dedicated.8 The impressive (if not oppressive) ideal represented by the course of study in the tractate remains firmly grounded in the classics and the language arts, but it includes what we might call the spiritual, physical, and political sciences as well in an ambitious synthesis of the circle of knowledge. This program “would trie all [the students’] particular gifts of nature, and if there were any secret excellence among them, would fetch it out, and give it fair opportunities to advance it selfe by” (YP 2:413). In this early summation of his thought about the making of a scholar, again drawing on the grand project first outlined by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning, Milton imagines the regeneration of the fallen intellect through the graduated steps of inductive reasoning: “because our understanding cannot in this body found it self but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly

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conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow’d in all discreet teaching” (YP 2:367–69). The method, then, is lucid and forward-looking, in that it champions something approaching the modern scientific method in the service of its overtly theological aim. In the tractate’s most rousing, optimistic estimation: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. (YP 2:366–67) What is most remarkable is that, within the inevitable context of the Fall of Man, the ruination of the human intellect has become reversible. The decay of human faculties as a result of the primordial transgression is not total. In this passage, the rift between created and creator looks reparable, if only human beings could do the right scholarly work with sufficient humility and perspective. With the right focus and dedication, Milton argues, learning can make us godlike in soul and intellect, though we must through proper faith also know this “end” to be a limit. To “know God aright” means endeavoring to understand creation in all its variety and complexity, imitating the deity not in omniscience but through virtue and love of creation. As Adam in Paradise Lost says in thanking his “propitious guest” the Archangel Raphael for his explanation of the monistic structure of the universe: “In contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God.”9 This sense of possibility, of political and spiritual liberation conditioned through a liberal and experimental approach to scholarship, reaches its climax in Milton’s great polemic against prepublication censorship, Areopagitica (1644). The spirit of open inquiry that informs the curricular tractate enlarges as Milton defends intellectual freedom in terms that, as contemporary legal scholars have suggested, anticipate the First Amendment to the US Constitution.10 To subsequent generations of scholars, Areopagitica has seemed to present a sympathetic manifesto of the scholarly ideal and a robust defense of the emerging public sphere.11 The passages are too well known—and too many—to quote serviceably in the limited space of this introduction, but one powerful evocation of “the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read” may perhaps suffice to recall the force and concentration of Milton’s

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prose at its best (YP 2:517). Here, Milton calls for “the reforming of Reformation it self ” in his panegyric to revolutionary-era London: Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. (YP 2:553–54) The rush of Milton’s oration is infectious. The ideal toward which he imagines his cohort striving seems in some respects prescient, anticipating in its comprehensiveness and inclusivity the ideals that would come to be identified with the best of the Enlightenment. Milton presents the “approaching Reformation” as a revolution in consciousness, an open-ended, fast-evolving project that thrives only when its participants are “trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.” Amid the revolutionary ferment, Milton imagines a scholarly community not only tolerant of what he calls elsewhere in Areopagitica “brotherly dissimilitudes” (YP 2:555) but also accommodating of a complex plurality of perspectives and approaches to what constitutes a necessarily incomplete search for truth. This openness to changes of mind is the very quintessence of the intellectual endeavor in Milton’s early, optimistic vision of scholarship. Despite differences in focus, method, and conclusions, the essays collected in this volume attest to the fact that the idea of scholarship we have explored so far in Milton’s earlier prose underwent serious changes as a result of the momentous public events of the 1650s and 1660s. It is a commonplace of Milton scholarship to note the gradual curdling of Milton’s optimism as the godly republic began its decline and, ultimately, its fall into the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy. Although there are a few important exceptions among the chapters that follow, the overwhelming majority of the contributions to this collection concern themselves with works principally composed in the aftermath of the Restoration and therefore in reaction to it.

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So it is worth asking, how can we characterize the transformation that occurred in Milton’s thinking about what it means to be a scholar as a result of the changes to the political and religious contexts? Among our contributors, Sharon Achinstein and Edward Jones carefully chart some of the juridical, philological, and diplomatic contexts during the mid-1640s and early 1650s, when practical concerns drove Milton to frame new kinds of arguments in relation to church and state. This period clearly marks one transition in Milton’s thought— from the early hopes we have been outlining to more grounded and reflective scholarly practice in the service of specific social and political goals. To put the matter another way, if some of the intellectual ideals found in Of Education and Areopagitica remained close to Milton’s core beliefs as he composed his late poems, which were they? And which did he discard? Some clues may be found in the comments on the state of education and learning in the prose he published during the period of transition and crisis just before the Restoration. Taking a stand against the conventions of contemporary university life as he had since his rustication poem Elegia Prima (1626) and, as we have seen, the Seventh Prolusion, Milton argues in his Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659) that the universities encourage scholars to develop superficial disputatiousness and mere rhetoric without depth of knowledge or wisdom: “those theological disputations there held by Professors and graduates are such as tend least of all to the edification or capacity of the people, but rather perplex and leaven pure doctrin with scholastical trash then enable any minister to the better preaching of the gospel” (YP 7:317). One senses the vitality and range of the early ambitions closing down, the arguments on behalf of learning becoming more local and practical, indeed more insistently theological in concentration. Echoing his own practice as a schoolteacher in his home during the 1640s, Milton even implicitly advocates disestablishment of universities: “What learning either human or divine can be necessary to a minister, may as easily and less chargeably be had in any private house” (YP 7:316). Although the tone of these later suggestions may be less inspired than the soaring rhetoric of Areopagitica, a newfound progressive impetus propels the suggestion that the disestablishment of church education could provide greater opportunities for more of the public to receive an education: To erect in greater number all over the land schools and competent libraries to those schooles, where languages and arts may be taught

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Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan free together, without the needles, unprofitable and inconvenient removing to another place. So all the land would be soone better civiliz’d, and they who taught freely at the publick cost, might have thir education given them on this condition, that therewith content, they should not gadd for preferment out of thir own country, without soaring above the meannes wherein they were born. (YP 7:319)

By 1659, the ideal of “reforming of Reformation it self,” given voice in Areopagitica (YP 2:553), has diminished in scale to focus specifically on the formation of a humble, scholarly ministry. In order to oppose the reestablishment of prelacy and all levels of state-enforced clerical hierarchy, Milton advocates founding a network of civilizing institutions such as schools with “competent libraries” so that local communities across the nation can educate themselves without centralizing educational power under royal supervision in the universities. Likewise, Milton imagines such new model schools rendering the English simultaneously more urban and urbane, as he indicates in his unpublished Proposalls of certaine expedients for the preventing of a civill war now feard, & the settling of a firme government (1659): “the liberty to erect schooles where all arts & sciences may be taught in every citty & great towne, which may then be honoured with the name of citty whereby the land would become much more civilized.”12 Clearly, with the experience of his own private academy of the 1640s in mind, Milton turns to the potential liberation of people through investment in scholarship when all else has failed. Even in these later and more exigent tracts, Milton found cause to propose scholarly activity as the source of hope in the face of all but certain political defeat. Despite the fact that, in the short run, history would prove Milton’s idealism ineffective as the backsliding nation returned within a matter of months to monarchy and state-sponsored religion, Milton clung to the notion that the right emphasis on scholarship could transform those ignorant of their own God-given rights and interests into a spiritual polity worthy of its liberty. That consummate, if never fully attainable, scholarly ideal would continue to inform and motivate the creation of Milton’s great poems in the years that followed.

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*** Milton’s conception of the ethical ends of learning is a primary concern of several of the chapters that follow. Sharon Achinstein, in “High Enterprise: Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts,” argues that in the course of his research for the divorce tracts “Milton became a modern sort of scholar,” as his scholarship changed and developed, showing an increasing use of secondary scholarship beyond the Bible and the Church Fathers. Milton “resisted the typical seventeenth-century confessionalization of scholarship” that constrained English learning in his time and likewise resisted the increasing professionalization of philology. Achinstein shows that Milton was “ambivalent about the role of scholarship in his biblical work for the divorce tracts,” particularly regarding the question of philological threats to the authority of scripture and the use of non-sacred materials. While “carrying on a humanistic philological tradition bequeathed from Erasmus,” Milton “came to a position where he could both use the tools of philology and disavow the textualism on which philology depended by his notion of ‘inner scripture.’” The notes which Milton amassed in his commonplace book while researching for the divorce tracts were focused toward argumentative ends, specifically the goal of “adjudication by historical precedent.” Although in the divorce tracts themselves “Milton adheres mostly to biblical and legal interpretation,” his scholarship “took the model of testimony rather than scientific inquiry.” The fruits of that scholarship, Achinstein asserts, never left Milton. Shifting from Milton’s scholarship to the pedagogy of his epic poetry, Sam Hushagen’s “Typology and Milton’s Masterplot” argues that typology in Paradise Lost not only constitutes “the poem’s principal form of organization” but also serves pedagogical ends, supporting Milton’s “concern throughout with how reason might be restored to its position as principal legislator and how history might be understood as the process through which autonomy is secured.” Drawing on theorists of typology ranging from Coleridge to Auerbach, to Gordon Teskey and Jacques Monod, Hushagen finds Miltonic typology to be “historical and teleonomic rather than transcendent or anagogic: his figures exhibit ‘a purpose or project’ but without a final cause or ultimate fulfillment that would supersede them.” For Milton “the end of history is not transcendent,” and “the desire to leap outside the historical process the poem describes is Satanic.” Ultimately, “the typological ecology of Paradise Lost is anti-anagogic and anti-idealizing because its telos is not

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apocalyptic but directed towards the kind of self-guidance that Milton defined as the essence of reason, and that Kant defines as the essence of Enlightment.” Accordingly, “in Paradise Lost the typological view of history yields progressive politics.” Satan’s perversion of rational education in Paradise Lost is also a concern of James Ross Macdonald’s “The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost,” though Macdonald’s conclusions are more pessimistic. He argues that a consideration of Satan as a kind of teacher reveals Milton’s increasing pessimism regarding the function of education. The optimism about the value of experience in education and the confidence in the inevitable victory of truth over falsehood expressed in Of Education and Areopagitica, as well as the “inductive and incremental model of truth-seeking” found there, are undercut in Paradise Lost. Macdonald finds that Milton follows the sixth-century biblical poem De spiritalis historiae gestis by Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus in “presenting the temptation of Eve as a diabolic parody of heavenly pedagogy.” The temptation of Eve thereby exhibits an important “shift in Milton’s own thinking about the place of inductive inquiry and empirical evidence in the search after truth.” Ironically, Eve falls “through a rigorous yet erroneous logical analysis of her situation.” Macdonald relates this more pessimistic view of education’s potential to Milton’s translation of the Ramist Art of Logic (1672) and to his disillusionment following the failure of the commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy. Transcendent general principles rather than inductive particular data become the basis of knowledge. Milton’s interest in recuperating authentic thinking is a particular concern of J. Antonio Templanza’s “‘The First and Wisest of Them All’: Paradise Regained and the Beginning of Thinking.” Templanza focuses on the famous (or notorious) episode in book 4 of the brief epic in which Satan tempts Jesus with the glories of the classical tradition of learning symbolized by Athens. Jesus’ dismissive rejection of classical learning as false or merely fanciful has sometimes embarrassed or scandalized commentators. Templanza argues that the Athens temptation should be distinguished from the temptation of “The Kingdoms of the world,” which it follows: “to interpret Athens as just another self-contained episode where the ‘kingdom’ of Christianity is defined though the negation of its ‘other’” is, he argues, “a particularly satanic analytic,” one which “reifies the very distinction between Christianity and philosophy that the temptation implicitly posits.” The rejection of Athens should be seen as “an ironic response to the question of what true and redemptive knowledge

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is.” The poem implicitly rejects a “hermeneutics of validity” for authentic thinking; instead, “Paradise Regained demands that its readers interpret the Son’s response to Athens not in terms of its validity or correctness, but in such a way that lets Jesus’ thinking become their own.” By presenting the Son’s knowledge as inseparable from its expression, Paradise Regained implies that knowledge does not somehow exist in a separate ontological realm from matter and thereby reiterates the authentically Socratic ground of Milton’s monism, in contrast to Satan’s (and the modern scientific) conception of knowledge as an object that the mind contains. Milton’s poetic adumbration of a fuller and more authentic awareness of learning is likewise a concern of Gardner Campbell in “Learning, Love, and the Freedom of the Double Bind.” In contrast to the common view of Milton as dour and humorless, Campbell finds instances of “a certain unusual playfulness” in Paradise Lost when Milton takes “what appear to be direct philosophical propositions” and expresses them “in a piquant oxymoron.” Viewing the poem through the lens of the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory, Campbell argues that some of the poem’s “odd or striking moments” produce the “paradoxical effect of a meta-liberation into a fuller awareness of the dissociative elements within the very discipline of freedom itself.” Sometimes a person experiencing the double bind, involving “mutually incompatible injunctions,” suppresses metacommunicational symbols in order “to escape the possibility of a higher learning that cannot be experienced without confronting something surprising, something genuinely new—not least of which are possibilities for freedom and love that have not yet entered the person’s experience.” Campbell finds Satan claiming to experience such a bind in his soliloquy on Mount Niphates in book 4. Concerning the paradox of required voluntary service enunciated by Raphael in book 5, Campbell concludes that “perhaps God’s creation, like the poet’s, inextricably involves the strict necessity of appointed bounds and ordained freedom, without which the meaning of love, the most vital, disconjunctive, and transcontextual creation of all, cannot emerge into experience.” The chapters discussed thus far in this introduction have all been primarily concerned with the ethical ends of scholarship and learning. Ethical concerns are inescapable in discussions of Milton, but a second group of essays focuses more precisely on Milton’s lifelong engagement with the educational curriculum of his age, specifically with the trivium, the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that provided the basis for higher

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education. Emma Wilson’s “Re-Visiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018” draws on “Milton’s own evaluative writing methods from his Artis plenior logicae (1672) to read the logic of his God,” arguing that “the poem is good not primarily because it makes God either good or bad,” pace Empson, “but because it lays bare the cosmic structure to which we are all subject.” In this structure, “God will be justified, because [the cosmic structure] is his own creation; yet that justification does not have to make him good or kind within human definitions of those terms.” Ultimately “Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.” Wilson concludes that “Paradise Lost is an epic founded on identifying and exploring personal logical accountability in a divine system which is harsh and intolerant”; it is “Milton’s unflinching willingness to explore and lay bare that system which makes the poem terrifying and tragic. However, read as a product of Milton both as scholar and as teacher of the art of arts, it is the ubiquitous individual logical accountability which argues that Empson’s position bears elaboration: according to Milton’s logic, Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.” Russell Hugh McConnell’s “God’s Grammar: Milton’s Parsing of the Divine” grounds close reading of passages in Milton’s poetry in the context of contemporary grammatical education, drawing on Lily’s widely influential Short Introduction of Grammar, endorsed by church and state, and on Milton’s own simplified and streamlined Accedence Commenc’t Grammar. He begins with Addison’s observation that Milton’s confidence in his powers of poetic sublimity seemingly falters when rendering divine speech. McConnell focuses specifically on Milton’s “poetical use of grammar,” arguing that when Milton’s poetry “encounters the divine it does not precisely founder, but it does run up against the limits of worldly, fallen language.” Apparently, “in order to adequately discuss the transcendent quality of divinity, Milton’s grammar must become strange or go (artfully and deliberately) awry.” Accordingly, “speech by and about God in Paradise Lost features a range of grammatical manipulations that are important to characterizing his divine nature,” including seeming inconsistencies in verb tense. McConnell also discusses the Nativity Ode, whose unusual manipulations of grammatical tense seem to belie the simple and straightforward account of verb tenses provided in Accedence Commenc’t. “For Milton, to be a grammarian is not to be a pedant, but to be a writer who understands the rules and when to break them—and breaking the rules is what you need to do when you need to flexibly adapt

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your fallen and imperfect language in taking on the role of the prophet–poet, striving adequately to convey the nature of the divine.” We shift from grammar to rhetoric with Joshua Held’s “Raphael’s Peroratio in Paradise Lost: Balancing Rhetorical Passion in Virgil and Paul.” Held focuses on “Raphael’s peroratio, his concluding speech to Adam in Paradise Lost 8.633–43,” which “brings together the wisdom of classical rhetorical scholarship, classical epic, and the Christian scriptures to help Adam maintain the perfect pre-fall balance of ‘passions.’” Quintilian, Aristotle, and Cicero all comment on the peroration as an appropriate place to appeal most strongly to the passions or emotions of an audience. Mercury’s peroration in book 4 of the Aeneid, which chiefly excites the passion of fear, and Paul’s in Ephesians, which chiefly emphasizes fortitude and steadfastness, as well as Paul’s peroration in 1 Corinthians, with its emphasis on love, all serve Milton as models. According to Held, “whereas Virgil’s Mercury in his peroratio elicits the passions of shame and fear from Aeneas, and whereas Paul elicits the passions of confidence and love in epistolary perorations to his Ephesian and Corinthian audiences respectively, Raphael balances all these passions against one another.” Raphael “understands the great power of the passions and adapts his final message to balance them.” A third and final set of essays collected here is concerned with the scholarship of Milton’s reception and the commentary and editorial apparatus surrounding his texts. Emily E. Stelzer’s “Euphrasy, Rue, Polysemy, and Repairing the Ruins” examines “those modest ingredients” of “ocular purgation,” euphrasy (also known as eyebright) and rue, which Michael applies to Adam’s eyes in book 11 of Paradise Lost, and which have been variously glossed by editors of the poem. In medieval and early modern herbals euphrasy was associated with joy or cheerfulness in contrast to rue’s association with sorrow, reinforcing the poem’s “ethical message of tempering joy with sorrow,” which “accords with other exhortations toward moderation” in Paradise Lost. Euphrasy was also, thanks to false etymology, associated with pleasing eloquence and poetry, allowing Milton an occasion for wordplay. Noting that Adam “does not always judge or interpret the visions [shown to him in books 11 and 12] successfully,” Stelzer suggests that “the remedy Michael administers in book 11 is temporary and imperfect, albeit extraordinary.” Nicholas Allred, in “Paradise Finding Aids,” discusses early verbal indices or concordances to Paradise Lost, especially the expanding series in the editions

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printed by Jacob Tonson from 1695 to 1711, frequently reprinted in later eighteenth-century editions, and Alexander Cruden’s concordance published in 1741. Examining these indexes not only illuminates “the habits of reading involved in making and using them” but also “can disclose structures in the poem that we have perhaps forgotten how to see, and even throw our contemporary critical practices into relief.” Allred notes that “the ‘Table of the most remarkable Parts’ that Jacob Tonson appended to the poem’s sixth edition in 1695” is organized around “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches” as rhetorical markers or generic features of the epic genre. Tonson’s 1695 “Table” of generic ingredients, expanded into the subject “Index” of 1711, was composed mainly of descriptions (which disappear as a separate heading), “underscore[ing] how a finding aid can enlist the print codex to circumvent the epic’s basic ordering principle: the story”; instead, the index “processes epic into something like lyric.” Alexander Cruden’s 1741 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost “played a key role in making Milton’s language part of the lexicon, and anticipates twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical approaches to the poem as well.” Employing book and line numbers rather than page numbers, the verbal index assumes that Paradise Lost, “like the Bible, had achieved enormous market penetration: the verbal index was designed for readers already equipped with copies in scores of different editions.” Thus “the verbal index helped Paradise Lost not only enter the lexicon,” as it “allowed readers to make the poem’s language their own,” but also helped to “define the lexicon through its pivotal role in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.” Cruden’s verbal index “leads Johnson into the sort of close attention to Milton’s diction that would rock Paradise Lost criticism like a depth charge some two hundred years later.” In addition, “the verbal index can illuminate the wide and intricate patterns that often escape the naked eye: it enables close reading at a distance.” Finally, Edward Jones’s “Political Diplomacy, Personal Conviction, and the Fraught Nature of Milton’s Letters of State” discusses the considerable challenges facing the editors of the letters of state for the Oxford University Press Complete Works (OCW), which “remain among the least read, consulted, or understood of all his writing.” These include the difficulty of ascertaining the degree of Milton’s authorship of state letters which were subject to revision by other agents of the Commonwealth, a problem only partially remedied by scholars’ ability to distinguish Milton’s Latin from that of other government employees. The discovery of additional manuscript collections unknown to earlier editors provides additional challenges, as does the fact that the final

Introduction

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published versions of the letters often revise and alter Milton’s Latin. Jones shows that it is dangerous to assume that Milton’s own political convictions are substantially reflected in the state letters, as can be seen by comparing the letters issued by the Commonwealth on the Waldensian massacre with Milton’s sonnet on the topic. Taken together, the chapters in this collection enrich our understanding of Milton’s self-conscious commitments to scholarship and his engagements with the learned traditions that influenced him the most—of “scholarly Milton” as a formidably learned writer of poetry and prose. They also demonstrate the continuing rewards and challenges facing readers and interpreters of his work from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries—“scholarly Milton” as an ongoing enterprise, an ever-evolving academic discipline. Engaging with a writer both learned and knowing and a scholarly enterprise both theorized and historicized, Scholarly Milton promises to stimulate further scholarship on Milton and his scholarly reception.

I Milton and the Ethical Ends of Learning

c ha p te r on e

High Enterprise Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts Sharon Achinstein

W

hat kind of scholar was Milton? In our contemporary research universities, whether private or public, occupationally-directed fields seem at odds with “basic research.” With applied research as the goal, academic work whose goal is knowledge alone is increasingly under threat in the USA and the UK by those distributing public coffers. Early modern scholarship was, likewise, not detached from social exigency—after all, training at university was to be training for a career, in the ministry, in law, in diplomacy, in state service.1 With the values of our current situation in mind, can we gain insight into the early modern scholar? And, vice versa, can the early modern ideas and practices of scholarship illuminate the present? Indeed, the question of what kind of scholar was Milton is not a disinterested question for us. Nor would it be for Milton. Milton did, indeed, possess great learning. Studies of the poet have outlined his grammar school education, with its humanist curriculum;2 they have analyzed his tract on education;3 and have hunted down Milton’s allusions to reveal his deep knowledge of literary and historical sources;4 his languages;5 his use of the Church Fathers;6 his biblical and rabbinical readings;7 his engagement with Plato, for instance.8 Scholars have recently located precise editions of Milton’s stated sources, or his association with particular spaces of reading in order to address the particular ways that Milton engaged with his sources in their modern or original editions.9 The apparatuses to all modern editions of Milton attest to his very evident and deep learning. Even the rejection of all that learning in

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his late work, Paradise Regained, testifies to the significance of learning in Milton’s literary formation.10 What kind of scholar was Milton? What was his conception of scholarship? Was he the sort of scholar of the age that produced such figures as those on the Continent who had revolutionized the textual criticism of Latin poetry—Lorenzo Valla or Nicolas Heinsius, for example? Milton was certainly no slouch as a Latinist, language of entry to this world. When Isaac Vossius received a copy of Milton’s attack on Salmasius, the Pro populo anglicano defensio, he wrote to Heinsius of his amazement at that literary accomplishment: “I had expected nothing of such quality from an Englishman.”11 Milton’s philological work on Euripides, too, done early in his literary career, points to an alternative scholarly future for the poet as textual scholar.12 What kind of climate did England nourish for the kind of scholarship that could be respected on the Continent? England did produce scholars and excellent philologists (for instance, Henry Savile, John Selden, and Patrick Young), but historians of scholarship tend to put these figures as lesser lights compared with the great Continental scholars, owing to the fact that their impact really was not very widespread, and their contributions were not widely disseminated (and, in Young’s case, never made it into print in finished form). Across the seventeenth century, Mordechai Feingold holds that although there were in England “competent philologists,” nonetheless, the environment was crabbed. As Feingold sees it, English scholars lacked the freedom from religious institutions and religious controversy, and thus were held back from becoming scholars of the first order with the Continentals. For instance, when Isaac Casaubon came to England in 1610, he was immediately put to use in writing for the Protestant cause.13 It was to religious ends that Theophilus Gale put prodigious scholarship to use in his masterpiece, The Court of the Gentiles (1669–77), proving that all knowledge derived from the Hebrews, as would Jesus in Paradise Regained (4.334–39). In such a constrained intellectual environment, claims Feingold, scholarship cannot flourish. Indeed, scholarship in England became increasingly confessionalized over the early seventeenth century. Nicholas Hardy’s examples of Greek biblical scholars John Bois and Patrick Young illustrate the differences of approach as scholarship became confessionalized and professionalized over the period from the King James Bible (1611) to the creation of the Polyglot Bible (1657).14 Indeed, what has been called an “ideological antiquarianism” was behind the great push to revive ancient historians by Renaissance editors

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and philologists.15 As Hardy argues, biblical scholarship was not moving away from Latin towards the vernacular, but instead was becoming more technical and confessionalized as scholars turned to the Greek text of the Septuagint and the ancient Church Fathers. If in the history of scholarship, Milton and his English compatriots have largely been dismissed, it is because modern concepts of scholarship as independent, curiosity-driven inquiry have been the framework for judgment. The concept of Wissenschaft (the study that is science, learning, and knowledge), without practical application, is the paradigm in the history of ideas for thinking about early modern scholarship. However, when we look at Milton’s practices as a scholar, critic, commentator, we can see that there are ways that scholarship was being undertaken in the service of argument that deserve our attention. The scholarship may be a byproduct, or simply the means to an end, in the service of argument, but it is scholarship nonetheless. In his divorce writings, which I consider below, Milton adheres to modes of adjudication appropriate for particular audiences. We can see this quite starkly in the gap between the reading Milton undertook and made notes on in his commonplace book, and the prose writings he created in 1643 to 1645 from that reading.16 In the commonplace book, as Fulton has shown, Milton took notes inclining more particularly towards adjudication by historical precedent. However, in his divorce writings, Milton adheres mostly to biblical and legal interpretation. In the divorce writings, his scholarship took the model of testimony rather than scientific inquiry, as the writer adhered to a principle of “propounding,” that is, putting before an audience for judgment. In the 1644 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton argues primarily by theological principle and biblical exegesis, with the key terms “Doctrine” and “Discipline” indicating practical, reformed themes. The genre is patently to be advocacy, heroic combat: “A high enterprise” (YP 2:224), that of being “the sole advocate of a discount’nanc’t truth.”17 Advocacy and epic task: both ends are central to Milton’s self-fashioning as a scholar. Milton, however, was ever ambivalent about the role of scholarship in his biblical work for the divorce tracts, and this is the topic below. It has long been known that Milton drew upon a wide range of sources. Recent scholarship and the new editions of his works (OCW) tell a story of Milton’s reading encounters and engagements with the international communities of learning, specifically in the context of post- or counterReformation intellectual discussion.18 Early in his career, Milton spent five

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years in private study, and his commonplace books show him consulting several authors simultaneously, mingling references to various works in the same note, his polemical and historical writings thick with learning. On his continental journey he met up with scholars and sought contacts with Northern humanists. Milton’s London residences are at the heart of the book-making parts of the city; he purchased and sent books to friends across the seas; he borrowed or consulted books of his friends or patrons, possibly in libraries at Eton and Kedermister, in addition to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Milton left evidence of his scholarship: he jotted down his notes in his commonplace book; he contested philological scholarship in the margins of his copy of Euripides; he armed himself for combat by means of his learning by compiling an arsenal of relevant quotations from his authors. Milton has long been understood as a great lover and user of books, an advocate of “books promiscuously read.” What was, indeed, his scholarly profile? Of course, Milton used his scholarship for polemical purposes: but what is interesting is to see how Milton applied his scholarship, how Milton sought credibility for his thoughts and how he deployed his methods of scholarly accuracy and philological sophistication. Milton, as it turns out, was not entirely limited by the hermeneutic principles of biblical interpretation as sola scriptura but was carrying on a humanist philological tradition bequeathed from Erasmus.19 Milton was ambivalent about the uses of scholarship in two ways. First is his unstable position on the question of whether the Bible was to be approached strictly through the hermeneutics of sola scriptura or whether humanist philology could discredit (some of) the sacred authority of the Bible. And, second, in his mode of adjudication through scholarly engagement in his divorce writing, Milton managed to assemble non-sacred materials to gather strength. Milton took up the tools of philology bequeathed to him by the first generation of Christian humanist scholars who approached thorny issues of interpretation in the Bible. How did Milton cope with the philological work on the Bible that was discrediting the authority of biblical texts? Indeed, Milton came to a position where he could both use the tools of philology and disavow the textualism on which philology depended by his notion of “inner scripture.” Further, as the essay will show below, over the course of his writing and thinking in his divorce writings, Milton widened the range of secondary sources he allowed into his thinking. Thus, Milton’s work as a scholar changed over the course of his writing his divorce tracts. For instance, Milton’s first

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divorce tract made little use of secondary material, and references to other writers (mostly Church Fathers) are only in passing and do not derive from direct analysis of texts. However, over the course of his divorce writings, as will be seen in the forthcoming edition from Oxford, Milton developed his scholarship on the subject.20 Indeed, with each tract, he injected into his work books he had just read, and sources just consulted. The path of his scholarship may be traced in the diversity and depth of his sources—whether biblical annotations and commentary; Continental writings on jurisprudence and theology; or even in the increase in his use of geometrical or mathematical language—all these were augmented during the period 1643–45. During the period of his divorce research and writing, it may be claimed, Milton became a modern sort of scholar; and the habits of that scholarship never left him. By this I mean that in widening his range in scholarly sources, Milton, to some extent, resisted the typical seventeenth-century confessionalization of scholarship as decried by Feingold, whereby sources and interpretations were driven by positions on salvation, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or Arminian. As we shall see, on the contrary, we find in Milton’s work on marriage a desire to seek a common truth within a broadly Protestant, juridical framework for his views.

I Christian Humanist or Academic Theologian? To be sure, Milton was reading the Bible and reinterpreting Scripture in his divorce tracts, driven by the aim of reconciling Christ’s prohibition of divorce for any ground other than adultery and the Mosaic laws that permitted divorce for a range of reasons. What kind of biblical work was that to be? That of a Christian humanist scholar; an academic theologian; or a polemical controversialist? Milton was aware of the issues involved in subscribing to the Hebraica veritas doctrine—that is, the belief that Hebrew text was literally true; rather he belonged to those scholars who were developing the techniques of textual criticism, seeing the Hebrew text as subject to the historical construction through time.21 The humanist scholars of the Renaissance, including Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, rather than using the Latin translations handed down to them, based their analyses on philological and historical criteria instead of strictly theological concerns that had dominated the study of scripture in the Middle Ages.22 Moreover, the scholarly preoccupations of the Renaissance humanists, as Jerry Bentley’s study shows, were not in the

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construction of fashioning “a comprehensive theological system that answered all possible questions bearing on salvation,” but rather looking to the Bible as a source of moral and religious doctrine and as a historical record of the earliest Christians; less a matter of looking to arrive at coherent doctrine but rather to attend to details of the texts themselves.23 It is still an open question how involved Milton was in this world. One possible clue is to be found in his tract Of Reformation. There, Milton attacks the donation of Constantine, that is when Pope Sylvester I allegedly acquired temporal authority as a gift from Emperor Constantine I. Did Milton subscribe to Lorenzo Valla’s textual discrediting of that as a forgery? Here are his lines: Then past hee to a flowry Mountaine greene, Which once smelt sweet, now stinks as odiously; This was that gift (if you the truth will have) That Constantine to good Sylvestro gave.24 (Of Reformation, YP 1:560) The lines suggest two readings: that ecclesiastical hierarchy stinks odiously now because it was an evil gift; and possibly that it stinks because it is a forgery. Milton does not go fully on the philological team here, as did Valla.25 The humanist mode of attack on authenticity of scripture is generally not Milton’s primary mode, but he nonetheless is aware of the ways textual philology could be used in the service of engaged politics and religion. On first glance, and second and third, it appears that Milton’s approach to the Bible in his analysis was through hermeneutics rather than through philology. As per the Reformed sense of sola scriptura, Milton held a view of a “twofold scripture: the external scripture of the written word, and the internal one of the holy spirit,” what is also called a “double scripture” (De Doctrina Christiana, Book 1, Ch. 30: OCW 8:811;26 cf. YP 6:587), with the internal scripture of the Holy Spirit written on the heart of the believer.27 This got round the problem, discovered by the Christian humanist philologists, that Scripture was, indeed, not perfect, but had been subject to the material processes of cultural use, transformation through translation and time. In this Milton is a direct contrast to Hobbes’ conclusions about the insecurity of the biblical text. Because through philology the external scripture had become so suspect, Hobbes went so far in Leviathan to question the authorship of Moses for his Five Books, asking how, indeed, could he write of his own death, or tell

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that his own tomb could not be found.28 Milton, of course was aware of this controversy raging in his own day, and addresses this problem in De Doctrina Christiana several times, even going so far as to state in Bk I, Ch. 30, “Of the Holy Scripture,” that, “the scripture of the New Testament, I say, has often been liable to corruption, and has actually been corrupted, because [having been] in the charge of diverse untrustworthy custodians, [having] accordingly [been drawn] from diverse and discrepant manuscripts, it was finally transcribed and printed diversely too” (OCW 8:811; YP 6:587–88). Well-versed in the theory of the corruption of the text of the Bible, Milton mentions, “countless … passages occur on almost every page produced by Erasmus, Beza and other New-Testament editors” (OCW 8:813; YP 6:588). Against these instances of corrupt text (“textus corrupti”— OCW 8:810), however, Milton posits the incorruptible Spirit: “Yet no one can corrupt the spirit which guides man to truth, and a spiritual man is not easily deceived” (De Doctrina Christiana: YP 6:588—a better translation than OCW 8:811), which point he then justifies by a quotation from 1 Corinthians 2:15–16 to assert the primacy of the “spiritual man.” Scriptural reasoning29 is the main method of his argument in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and the rule is spiritual rule of charity.30 There is, however, the philological and historical interest, as Milton wrote in his first version of his first divorce tract in 1643, that “all places of Scripture wherin just reason of doubt arises from the letter, are to be expounded by considering upon what occasion every thing is set down: and by comparing other Texts” (YP 2:282). Yet, when he brushed up the work for republication in 1644, he realized he had to say a bit more about his own method, reassuring readers that when looking to other texts and commentaries he is decidedly not going secularist-philological. Instead, he emphasizes not simply philological competence nor obedience to church authorities, but faith, that is: the firm faith of a knowing Christian, which is the best and truest endowment of the keyes, I pronounce, the man who shall bind so cruelly a good and gracious ordinance of God, hath not in that the Spirit of Christ. Yet that every text of Scripture seeming opposite may be attended with a due exposition, this other part ensues, and makes account to find no slender arguments for this assertion out of those very Scriptures, which are commonly urg’d against it. (YP 2:282)

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Drawing upon the principle of “charity,” taken from John (YP 2:331), Milton claims, “Charity is the high governesse of our belief ” (YP 2:340).31 So, in the case of Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce overturning Christ’s prohibition, Milton urges a spiritual hermeneutics, not a mode of adjudicating interpretation by the method of scholarly decision (that is, by textual criticism or philology). First therefore let us remember as a thing not to be deny’d, that all places of Scripture wherin just reason of doubt arises from the letter, are to be expounded by considering upon what occasion every thing is set down: and by comparing other Texts. The occasion which induc’t our Saviour to speak of divorce, was either to convince the extravagance of the Pharises in that point, or to give a sharp and vehement answer to a tempting question. And in such cases that we are not to repose all upon the literall terms of so many words, many instances will teach us. (YP 2:282: this passage is from 1643) The point here is to note that Milton is working within the knowledge domain of hermeneutics and not going down the path of textual or philological scholarship. Because we know he is sharply aware of those approaches, we see that is a choice Milton is making. Indeed, Milton himself is almost allergic to acknowledging his work with sources. He boasts in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that he had “publisht book without the help or imitation of any precedent Writer, I had labour’d out, and laid together” (YP 2:435). For Milton, that was something to be proud of. In Tetrachordon, when he cites Grotius’s commentary on the New Testament, Milton comments on his use of sources: These authorities without long search I had to produce, all excellent men, som of them such as many ages had brought forth none greater: almost the meanest of them might deserve to obtain credit in a singularity; what might not then all of them joyn’d in an opinion so consonant to reason? For although som speak of this cause, others of that, why divorce may be, yet all agreeing in the necessary enlargement of that textual straitnes, leave the matter to equity, not to literal bondage, and so the opinion closes. Nor could I have wanted more testimonies, had the cause needed a more sollicitous enquiry. But

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herein the satisfaction of others hath bin studied, not the gaining of more assurance to mine own perswasion: although authorities contributing reason withall, bee a good confirmation and a welcom. But God, I solemnly attest him, with held from my knowledge the consenting judgement of these men so late, untill they could not bee my instructers, but only my unexpected witnesses to partial men, that in this work I had not given the worst experiment of an industry joyn’d with integrity and the free utterance though of an unpopular truth. Here we see him defending this method—not as textual-critical but instead as “testimony,” understood as finding “consenting judgment,” “witnesses” in commentary—Milton is motivated by the work of charity. Milton introduces his poetic image, that of the “skilful and laborious gatherer” (YP 2:338) at this point in his argument, after he has just worked out that fornication need not mean sexual straying. Milton’s defense of using biblical commentary is the darkness of scripture, and in it we can see Milton teetering on the brink between medieval biblical hermeneutics and the newer forms of textual scholarship and biblical criticism: THus at length wee see both by this and by other places, that there is scarse any one saying in the Gospel, but must bee read with limitations and distinctions, to bee rightly understood for Christ gives no full comments or continued discourses, but as Demetrius the Rhetorician phrases it, speakes oft in Monosyllables, like a maister, scattering the heavenly grain of his doctrine like pearle heer and there, which requires a skilfull and laborious gatherer, who must compare the words he findes, with other precepts, with the end of every ordinance, and with the generall analogie of Evangelick doctrine: otherwise many particular sayings would bee but strange repugnant riddles. (YP 2:338) By using the term “analogie,” Milton evokes the Augustinian scheme of interpretation, ruled by “Charity.” In Reformed hermeneutics, the analogy of faith is charity, a commonplace method of expounding Scripture by harmonizing with Scripture. As he put it in De Doctrina Christiana, in Book 1, Ch. 30, “On

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Holy Scripture,” it was to be accomplished by the “comparison of text with other texts; also the ‘analogia fidei,’” what Columbia translators rendered as “mutual comparison of texts; and regard to the analogy of faith” (OCW 8:803; CM 16:265). Frustrated with the fixity and literalism of the interpretation of his critics on divorce, Milton writes in The Judgment of Martin Bucer that they “will needs expound the words of our Saviour not duly by comparing other places, as they must doe in the resolving of a hunder’d other Scriptures, but by persisting deafely in the abrupt and Papistical way of a literal apprehension against the direct analogy of sense, reason, law and Gospel” (Bucer, in YP 2:431).32 And yet, it is clear in his reasoning in the divorce tracts, that there is no way to harmonize the conflicting interpretations of Scripture. Milton’s rule of charity, thus, departs from the Augustinian or Reforming senses; as John Potts has argued, it seems more Platonic than anything else: marriage must be a good given by God, and therefore reasoning from the nature of God is the starting point.33 Milton is the starting point, a “self-concernment,” as Steven Fallon has shown, and that is what drives and motivates his ethos, a method that would be the case no less in his scholarly work than in his poetic a­ ccomplishment.34 So, he shouldn’t need scholarship at all.

II Milton Changed However committed in general to the Protestant dictum of sola scriptura, and somewhat allergic to scholarship, Milton also leaned the other way, making use of philology and scholarship if it served his purpose.35 In his divorce writings, I want to look at Milton’s treatment of the term “fornication” as an instance of his increasing engagement with the world of textual scholarship.36 Christ had appeared at Matthew 19:3–9 to argue that there is no cause for divorce except for fornication. And that this supersedes Moses’ less rigid allowance for divorce. Over the course of writing his pamphlets, Milton deepened his work in the library, with philology and commentary on this important point. He added material for his second, revised edition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce on precisely this topic, and we can see that Milton went to the library and found himself drawn in to the textual and critical scholarship on the question. Augmenting and revising Chapter One of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton seems to turn to Hebrew philology to address this question: “The cause of divorce mention’d in the

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Law [i.e., Deut. 24:1] is translated some uncleannesse;[37] but in the Hebrew it sounds nakednes of ought, or any reall nakednes: which by all the learned interpreters is refer’d to the mind, as well as to the body” (YP 2:244). Hebrew solves the problem for him. Widening the definition of “uncleanness,” Milton includes not simply sexual infidelity in order to serve his purpose. Milton does bring in a philological heavy-hitter, Grotius, but takes care to limit the perceived damage of such a humanist approach to the Bible. HAving thus unfoulded those ambiguous reasons, wherewith Christ, as his wont was, gave to the Pharises that came to sound him, such an answer as they deserv’d, it vvill not be uneasie to explain the sentence it self that now follows; Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery. First therfore I vvill set down vvhat is observ’d by Grotius upon this point, a man of general learning. Next I produce vvhat mine own thoughts gave me, before I had seen his annotations. (cf. YP 2:329) Grotius, in his Annotationes in libros Evangeliorum (1641), on Matthew 5:32, had cited Origen and civil law, and compared the text with other words of the Apostles in light of equity on this passage; to these considerations, Milton adds points wholly his own: “From hence, is what I adde,” and thus he goes into his own interpretations of scripture, namely that this was a command issued only for before the Fall; for after the Fall there needs to be another approach (see YP 2:330). Interpretation by the spirit, Milton’s own spirit, in this instance thus wins over philology. But he includes Grotius nonetheless. It is towards the very end of his Doctrine and Discipline that Milton turns in earnest to the philological arguments, taking up the quarrel over the term that served as the ground of Christian divorce, “fornication.” In Chapter 18 (out of a total of 22), he comes to the heart of the matter, that “the word fornication is variously significant in Scripture” (YP 2:334). To argue that fornication does not strictly designate sexual infidelity, but can also mean a kind of stubborn disobedience against a husband (335–36), Milton pulls in the heavyweight commentators. Consulting not only the Christian interpreter Grotius, who sources the Roman civil code and also Jerome, Milton is drawn back to the Jewish historian Josephus, and rabbinical commentary of the medieval rabbis Kimchi and Ben Gersom, whose commentaries had appeared in the

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great Buxtorf Bible, Biblia Sacra Hebraica & Chaldaica, published by Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564–1629) in Basel; Kimchi and other rabbis were also cited in Fagius, Thargum, which Milton also consulted. Milton writes: “to this I adde that Kimchi and the two other Rabbies who glosse the text, are in the same opinion. Ben Gersom reasons,” highlighting the work of commentary or glossing, rather than philological or textual scholarship (YP 2:335–36). Milton’s deployment of commentary and philology was thus selective, chosen to serve his argument. Milton is also possibly aware of the textual corruptions that earlier philologists had found in a passage he cites in his divorcive writing. In this chapter on the Holy Scripture in De Doctrina, Milton points out several instances of corruption—one an example of uncertain manuscript evidence being “in the story of the woman taken in adultery” (589), which is a reference to John 8:2–11. This was a passage whose authenticity Reformed commentators and translators Erasmus, Calvin, Beza, and Grotius had all questioned. But, in the divorce tract, Milton used this example without commenting on its problems (see YP 2:337): “For that sin [adultery as sexual infidelity] needed not the riddance of divorce, but of death by the Law, which was active ev’n till then by the example of the woman tak’n in adultery.” To me, this suggests that when he was writing the divorce tracts, he was aware of the textual corruption but chose to overlook it. Given his involvement with textual commentaries in the writing of his tracts it is unlikely he missed the issue. Milton developed as a scholar over the course of writing and revising his divorce tracts. By the time he writes Tetrachordon, he has decided that linguistic or philological evidence should be part of his argument. As he will write in his long exposition in Tetrachordon in 1645 on the word “fornication” from Matthew 5, he starts off with a general point; indeed, a mini-lecture about the literary style of the Greek lexis of the New Testament, as having the mixture of the Hebrew and Syriac languages: The New Testament, though it be said originally writt in Greeke, yet hath nothing neer so many Atticisms as Hebraisms, & Syriacisms which was the Majesty of God, not filing the tongue of Scripture to a Gentilish Idiom, but in a princely manner offring to them as to Gentiles and Foreiners grace and mercy, though not in forein words, yet in a forein stile that might induce them to the fountaines; and though their calling were high and happy, yet still to acknowledge

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Gods ancient people their betters, and that language the Metropolitan language. (YP 2:671; “Metropolitan” here meaning that of the supreme authority) Milton insists on the necessity of going beyond the Greek, as he did in his educational tract where he urged the learning of Chaldey and Syrian Dialect (YP 2:400; and in De Doctrina Christiana, where he claimed to have studied the original tongues from his youth; see OCW 8:5). In Tetrachordon, as if in imitation of this special, hybrid style, Milton makes up a new word, “scholiaze,” meaning to write commentary: “He therefore who thinks to Scholiaze upon the Gospel, though Greek, according to his Greek Analogies, and hath not bin Auditor to the oriental dialects, shall want in the heat of his Analysis no accomodation to stumble.” And then, he undertakes his philological work, broadening the definition of “fornication”: In this place, as the 5th of Matth, reads it, Saving for the cause of fornication, the Greek, such as it is, sounds it, except for the word, report, speech, or proportion of fornication. In which regard with other inducements, many ancient and learned writers have understood this exception as comprehending any fault equivalent and proportional to fornication. But truth is, the Evangelist heer Hebraizes, taking word or speech for cause or matter in the common eastern phrase, meaning perhaps no more then if he had said for fornication, as in this 19th chapter. And yet the word is found in the 5th of Exodus also signifying Proportion; where the Israelites are commanded to doe their tasks, The matter of each day in his day. A task we know is a proportion of work not doing the same thing absolutely every day, but so much. Whereby it may be doubtfull yet, whether heer be not excepted not only fornication it self, but other causes equipollent, and proportional to fornication. Which very word also to understand rightly, wee must of necessity have recours again to the Ebrew. Himself having recourse to the Hebrew and original languages, thus Milton takes up philological analysis. Which he does in earnest, finding out that in Hebrew the word roots for “word” or “speech” are also those for “cause,” and finding other instances in the Hebrew Bible where that word (“d’var”) gives other meanings: “d’var yom b’yomo”; Vulgate: “quidquam quotidie.”

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In Matthew 5:32, logos is the word being discussed (“matter [Gk: logos] of fornication”). Milton is pursuing his linguistic search with the Hebrew word root “d’var” (used in Deut. 24:1; King James Bible: “some [Heb.: d’var] uncleanness”). For confirmation of his readings of the New Testament logia on divorce, further, Milton comes to be ever more heavily indebted to the scholarship of Erasmus over the course of his writing. In Tetrachordon, Milton mentions the titles of three of Erasmus’ works on divorce: the Annotations on Matthew, Annotations on the First Book of the Corinthians, and his Answer to Phomostomus (Responsio ad Disputationem ciuiusdam Phomostomi de Divortio). That “large and eloquent” discourse from Erasmus’ Annotations on the First Book of the Corinthians was Erasmus’ long note on 1 Corinthians 7; in Colasterion, Milton also refers to this work (YP 2:752); and, in “Post-Script” of Bucer, writes admiringly that Erasmus, although a foreigner, wrote especially to the English “out of compassion” for their plight, “for the need he saw this Nation had of some charitable redresse heerin,” citing directly from Erasmus’ text of his Annotationes in 1 Cor. 7.39 (Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam, 1969– ) (ASD), 6.8:190). Erasmus’ note on 1 Corinthians 7 is a treatise encompassing a revolution in thought about marriage, and the sources upon whom Erasmus calls (Ambrose, Origen, Augustine) are also central to Milton’s argument. Erasmus’ understanding of the meaning of “fornication” (Matt. 19:9), as does Milton’s, expands the concept beyond the sheer physical, sexual relation. Erasmus’ thinking on marriage, however, goes beyond philological examination of the Hebrew and Greek terms on which the Church’s teaching of divorce errs. Erasmus’ theology contributed to Milton’s sense of the spiritual meaning of marriage as meaning something more than procreation.

III Ecumenical Milton Milton’s trick, I suggest, in his use of philology, biblical criticism, and commentary, is not simply to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the Hebrew Bible and Christian teaching on divorce, but also to smooth over differences among reformers in their views on divorce, and his use of scholarship is crucial to this move. Milton is insistent in his divorce tracts that his views have precedent, whether biblical, theological, legal, or historical. Yet he avoids adherence to Hebraic, Bucerian, or Lutheran principles of interpretation, and

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largely resists allusion to contemporary historical examples, as were found in the writings of those justifying Reformed legislative plans on the Continent (Geneva, for instance) and that were the subject of his research in the commonplace book. Milton’s sources, on the other hand, are not simply a random smorgasbord of Reformed thought, but offer carefully nuanced readings of legal precedent in a newly reformed tradition of interpretation. His divorce tracts are not all of one piece in their attitude towards scholarship; they change. In his first divorce tracts he is working in a mode in which Scripture may be reconciled to Scripture and uses philology only lightly. But, by the time he gets through Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Bucer, the story is a little different. The goal of his argument, by this point, is to balance scriptural interpretation with gleanings from civil law. In part, this shift in mode of adjudication reflected his turn away from the Westminster Assembly’s authority to write in new legislation about marriage and divorce, and towards Parliament as the body to decide the proposed laws. Milton’s scholarship was always in the service of argument, but the kind of arguments he put forward demanded his engagement with new fields of scholarship, particularly in biblical philology and Roman civil law. These directions, I suspect, grounded his understanding of key topics not only in divorcive writing, but in modes of thought that broadened his outlook towards a more ecumenical and liberal thinker than he vouched earlier. Of course, from the very first, Milton adjusted the learning of his advocating pamphlet on divorce to a contemporary audience of the members of the Westminster Assembly and Parliament, that is, to readers who favored biblical interpretation rather than secular arguments. They would likely not accept the kind of scholarship—secular, historicist cultural analysis—as may be found in his commonplace note-taking. In Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, indeed, his usage strongly reflects the method of debate of the Westminster Assembly in its early days, where the weight was almost exclusively on biblical precedent and interpretation of scriptural passages. Whereas some Erastians, in their use of scriptural precedent and Hebrew proficiency (for instance, John Lightfoot and Thomas Coleman), were coming to show that there was no scripturally prescribed mode of church government, in their discussions of the questions of excommunication, ordination, and the nature of elders, in the Westminster Assembly, Milton’s work, on the other hand, seeks to reconcile contradictory bits of scripture to show there is a common, and higher truth behind them.

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In the 1644 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, apart from the prefatory note to the Parliament of England and the Assembly, Milton gives reference to reformed interpreters of the Bible (for instance, Fagius, Rivetus, Grotius), and even where explicit citation is lacking it is clear Milton is engaging with reformed discussion on the interpretation of his chosen biblical passages.38 On the question of whether marriage is a divine command or a human choice, for instance, Milton sides with choice (of course) and disputes Beza’s interpretation of I Corinthians 7:25 (Novum Testamentum … Annotationes, 1598); he also hedges his bets by saying that even if marriage was a command, “there must be a joynt assent and good liking on both sides”—this Milton’s interpretation of Beza’s Latin: “quae libens consentiat ad habitandum cum eo”; which in the Geneva Bible is translated as: “if she be content to dwell with him”; and in the King James Bible goes: “if she be pleased to dwell with him.”39 Milton as scholar works to translate and interpret known biblical cruxes. In contrast to Selden, for example, Milton’s interpretations based on his scriptural work do not take up the biblical material as a cultural historian. They are there for the present, to get to the bottom of. Further, Milton puts himself as part of the international reformed conversation on the topic of marriage, a conversation that he believes the Westminster Assembly and Parliament should be part of as well. This is doubly evident in Tetrachordon, where not only international reformed biblical commentary is engaged, but also reformed interpreters of Roman Law. If in Doctrine and Discipline biblical commentary was the name of the game, in Tetrachordon Milton weaves in a great deal of research in Roman Law, that is the body of legal thinking to do with civil matters, and which was liberal on divorce. This summoning of Roman Law in a theological context may seem strange; but is appropriate to the needs of the English state. Roman civil law may have been attractive because the English Church had done away with Canon Law.40 With his genre “Expositions,” Milton summons a genre [Enarratio] distinctly emerging in the Reformation, combining the new philology inviting the study of sources and original languages and a historical view of the texts of prophetic meaning. Enarratio as a genre belonged to the scholarly work of Reformation.41 The “Exposition” was not the same thing as “commentary” or “exegesis.” Deriving from classical usage, the enarratio was a grammatical genre applied principally to poetic texts.42 Milton’s model of exposition is that

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of the humanist Erasmus—for instance, in his Ennarationes on the psalms, drawing upon many non-theological, legal, and even literary resources.43 In his Exposition in Tetrachordon, then, Milton takes up the magpie methods of that particular form of scholarly inquiry, and writes suiting that genre. There he takes scholarship abundantly from Reformed interpreters of Roman civil law, which had been re-interpreted in Continental hotbeds of legal innovation, especially in Strasburg and Wittenberg. Through these, he re-works Church Fathers, and he applies his Hebraic learning. To be sure, his approach towards the Law favored Reformers, but the particular reformers he cites represent an ecumenical balancing among various often vociferously opposing ideologies within Lutheran and Calvinist opinion. He even cites Alciato, a Roman Catholic resource. I use the word “ecumenical” advisedly; in the early modern period, it was used to describe that which represented the universal church, and was associated with papacy. I am using it in our modern, more neutral, sense. Whilst the authors Milton cited differed in the utmost on questions of obedience to a sovereign, ecclesiology, and positions on the Eucharist, for example, their common ground on the question of remarriage and divorce was a boon to Milton’s strategy of cementing bonds across ideological divides, and, in particular, healing the rift between the Congregationalists (who represented more of the radical-Calvinist flank of the Reformation) and the Scottish Presbyterians. An instance of this Reformed ecumenicism is in order: Milton cites the Justinian code numerous times in his divorce writings, starting with a definition of matrimony that better suits his purposes perhaps than the Divine Institution approach. As Milton writes in Tetrachordon: “The Civil Lawyers, and first Justinian or Tribonian defines Matrimony a conjunction of man and woman containing individual accustom of life.”44 The definition is a translation of the works of Roman Law by the Professor of Civil Law at Leiden, Gerardus Tuningus: “Definitio nuptarum: Nuptiae autem, sive matrimonium, est viri & mulieris conjunctio, individuam vitae consuetudinem [accustomed] continens.”45 Milton likes this language of “conjunction,” as he elaborates on the term “conjunctio”: “Therfore where conjunction is said, they who comment the Institutes, agree that conjunction of minde is by the Law meant, not necessarily conjunction of body.” Milton remarks that this definition out of Roman Law confirms another of the Pandects—legal digests—also out of Tuningius, that he states “do not define, yet well describe Mariage,” and writes the

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following translation from Tuningius’ textbook of Roman Law: Marriage is “the conjunction of male and female, the society of all life, the communion of divine and human right.”46 So consonant Milton makes this with religious reformed thought that he adds that “Bucer also imitates [this language] on [his commentary on] the fifth to the Ephesians.”47 In his divorce writings, Milton tends to rely here and later on the Calvinist commentators on civil law, Tuningius, Grotius—those proponents of the mos Gallicus, whose humanist methods sought to systematize Roman civil law for modern purpose.48 Law was not then, as now, a neutral subject. The choice of secondary source carried with it a theological and ideological message. For several other bits, when Milton cites a different reformed jurist Henning Arnisaeus (1575– 1636), he is quoting a renowned Helmstedt Lutheran political philosopher, jurist, author of De Jure Connubiorum (Frankfurt am Main, 1613), who, as it turns out, was the named antagonist on the title page of none other than the Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644).49 There he was attacked along with Grotius and Barclay by the Presbyterian minister whom Milton would mock in his “On the New Forcers” sonnet. With this source of Arnisaeus Milton is lining up with natural law against strict Presbyterian writing. Another source for Milton’s Roman Law work came from an alternative theological perspective, and that was Neils Hemmingsen, known in English as Nicholas Hemminge, a Danish Lutheran theologian (1513–1600), who studied at Wittenberg under Melanchthon, and became Professor of Greek and of Theology, and then Vice-Chancellor, at the University of Copenhagen: a syncretist, well known in England, with several of his works in translation (Burton owned four of them). Hemingius had been hailed by none other than Joseph Hall for his views on infant baptism. It is Hemminge’s Libellus de coniugio, repudio & diuortio (Leipzig, 1575, 1581, 1586), that Milton cites on the question of consent: “Hemingius, an approved Author, Melanchtons Scholler, and who next to Bucer and Erasmus writes of divorce most like a Divine, thus comprises, Mariage is a conjunction of one man and one woman lawfully consenting, into one flesh, for mutual helps sake, ordain’d of God.50 Hemminge, seen by Nicholas Tyacke as one source for the origins of English Arminianism, had views on predestination that differed from those of Calvin and Zwingli as against the rigidity of God’s decrees.51 These Reformed sources Milton names and cites would be known to the Presbyterians and those knowledgeable in law in Parliament, and indeed constituted their common code of authorities.

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In his divorce writings, Milton also quotes Luther’s work “on conjugal life,” and uses an intermediary source, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), a Lutheran church leader, whose Locum Theologicorum included an index that helped Milton arrive at passages of relevance to his argument, and which was published in numerous continental editions.52 However, Milton follows for the most part those non-Lutheran thinkers of Protestantism on marriage who had done so much to influence the early Reformation. Calvinist ascendancy, first in Scotland, and then in England, brought a different approach, especially in the late sixteenth century over controversies to do with the Eucharist and Vestments. The Calvinists’ approach to marriage, however, did not map on to the standard theological divisions, and what I have indicated here is that a more careful look at Milton’s use of his sources will reveal just how complicated it is to tie up theology and practice. Indeed, it was in the Swiss and Genevan states that the Reformers had a chance to test their theology against practical matters, running courts to manage the questions of marriage that were now handled by city authorities. For instance, in Zurich, marriage reform was undertaken under a unified leadership of magistrates and clergy.53 Indeed, a number of Milton’s citations in Tetrachordon follow the Swiss Reformed tradition: Gwalter, Bucer, Vermigli. And Martin Bucer was widely used as a touchstone in controversies in the Scottish church, even down into the seventeenth century.54 Even the Presbyterian George Gillespie found support from Bucer in his opposition to the English-imposed prayer book in 1637, and in writing against sects in 1645.55 Bucer, Milton thought, would be the glue binding these various warring groups in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly together; who could argue that he wasn’t the beacon of the English national church? However, in his Judgment of Martin Bucer, the scholarship is a little different to that in Tetrachordon. This work is titled a “Judgment,” and when Milton writes this title in Latin we get a sense of what genre this is. In his handwritten list of contents on the flyleaf of the presentation volume given to John Rous of his collected prose pamphlets in the Bodleian Library (Arch.g.e.44), he writes that title as “Judicium Buceri de Divortis—lib. 1” . The Latin word “Iudicium” has a legal sense (a decision) and also a general sense of a judgment, considered opinion (Cicero, Tacitus). In Bucer, it is something like the moment in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen, responding to a takedown by a pompous media studies professor while waiting in a line at a movie

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theater, brings the actual Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to back him up, “I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.” “Boy, if life were only like this,” Woody says into the camera. As Milton puts it, “I leave him also as my complete suretie and testimonial, if Truth be not the best witnes to it self ” (Bucer, Preface, YP 2:439). With the political and the spiritual end in mind, then, how do we square Milton’s scholarship with the theological controversies of his day, specifically those between the inheritors of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Arminian ideas of salvation that were creating new concepts of political obligation, ecclesiology, and community? Here Milton does not seem to adhere to a specifically sectarian model of scholarship, as has been argued about Milton’s Ramism and its connection to Calvinism—for instance, as a model of Calvinist academic endeavor.56 Theologically, although the admission of sin required by Calvinist understanding bears on his esteem for the fruits of rational inquiry and liberal research, there is no slackening of intellectual power nor concern about the limits of human understanding.57 Politically, we might observe that his turn to Roman Law, and to the common past of the reign of Edward VI, under whom Bucer wrote his laws for the polity (his Scripta Anglicana), is an ecumenical move, a move in the direction of a broadly Christian, reforming approach to moral questions.

IV Conclusion Was England a hostile ground for independent, curiosity driven scholarship? Or was the reluctance of free thought inquiry part and parcel of what it meant to be an intellectual in England in the seventeenth century? Perhaps our idea of disinterested scholarship owes too much to Kantian notions and Enlightenment fictions of freedom of thought, and seeks a truth that could only be described, in the seventeenth century, as the genres of natural philosophy, not in the arts of language and literature. In his 1643 publication, Milton’s principle of interpretation was announced to be “the Rule of Charity” and the recovery of meaning of “many places of Scripture.” Rather than a strict literalism, this hermeneutic principle allowed for a freer interpretation. Still putting the Bible first, in his revised volume of 1644, Milton promised a restoration of “the true meaning of Scripture in the Law and Gospel compar’d.”58 The principle of charity (1173–1186) dispenses with a strict literal interpretation of biblical passages, but cooperates with the “illuminating Spirit” (1181).59

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Moreover, he addressed particular audiences and occasions for whom specific modes of argument were appropriate, in this case the men who were busy with the practical affairs of reforming Church and State at the time, whom he addresses as “wee Christians” (1325). His 1643 book was meant to be of the moment, for practical application, “seasonable” (t.p.), and it was an offering in what Milton called “this generall labour of reformation, to the candid view both of Church and Magistrate” (37). But Milton did not avoid philology and textual scholarship, no less than scholarly commentary. He did cite his sources rhetorically, as a polemicist, as Thomas Roebuck has shown in Milton’s use of antiquaries.60 In our critical work to detach Milton’s polemical work from his scholarship we mistake the characterization of the Milton of the divorce tracts, a writer who was arming himself for a spell of polemical writing through his intensive reading. In Milton’s approach, we see that his scholarship was undertaken with ultimate ends in mind: framing the godly commonwealth, reaching collective salvation, following right living, and ordering earthly existence: all part of achieving proper understanding of Christianity as knowledge and as action. That was, indeed, doctrine and discipline. The truth about marriage and divorce would be unthinkable outside a reformed Christian purpose. For his divorce writings in particular, however, Milton uses up-to-date methodologies of biblical philology and reaches across sectarian divides. His scholarship is inclusive, it seems to me, the most ecumenical in contriving to square the robust Calvinism of Martin Bucer with the aggressive Lutheranism of the interpreters of Roman Law as are cited in Tetrachordon most fully; his writing to Parliament is an attempt to court the Erastians and Independents, who are outnumbered in the Westminster Assembly. I believe Milton is not simply chucking in all the evidence he can find; he is assembling a case that will appeal to the widest possible reformed community suggesting that, despite theological division, a state can order its civil affairs with robust civil structures, guided by general Christian principles of charity and equity. Milton’s aim in these is to “restore a truth” and he is ambivalent about how far to go to deconstruct sacred authority by his biblical scholarship or to undertake that scholarship without vigorous public purpose. It is also the case that the conditions of the contemporary public sphere and audience mattered to his concept of scholarship. It is particularly interesting to see him turning to Roman Law for precedent, and to the Reformers’ debates over it, not only as a step away

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from strict biblical hermeneutics and theology, but a movement to settle the question of marriage firmly within the framework of civil law.

c ha p te r t wo

Typology and Milton’s Masterplot Sam Hushagen

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”

T

he sixteen-line opening sentence of Paradise Lost runs through a series of biblical scenes. The four prepositions modifying the main verb condense providential history and situate the narrative of the poem within that larger arch: “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, / Sing heavenly muse.”1 The passage compresses biblical history and the 10,565 lines of Paradise Lost to a six-line summary while prefiguring the paradigmatic structure of the epic. The “man” of the first line recurs in the fourth to produce an analogy between the two. The parallel between the disobedient man and the “greater man,” mirrors the association of Eden, in the fourth line, with the “blissful seat” of the fifth. Rather than a return to Eden, the “blissful seat” suggests the post-Revelation heavenly kingdom and the “living temples,” of the redeemed Christian heart (12.527). Adam is not subsumed to Christ, the “Greater Man,” just as Eden is not sublated to the “Blissful seat.” Rather, the relationship between them is typological: that of type to antitype. The figures represent successive scenes in God’s master-narrative,

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aligned to represent history as a purposeful succession of analogous figures and situations. These lines both condense Milton’s justification of providence and indicate the poem’s principal form of organization: typology. The invocation of the Holy Spirit, Milton’s “heavenly Muse,” connects the inspiration of the Pentateuch to the composition of Paradise Lost. Milton’s muse is Mosaic, the same “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” (1.6–10).2 He connects Moses’ inspired writing during the forty-day fast on Sinai and the education of the Israelites to his own epic intentions. Set apart on the “secret top,” sacer, the primal scene of Judeo-Christian holy teaching is figural for Milton. It anticipates subsequent scenes of divine guidance, including the Pagan muses’ perversion of the “divine afflatus” (noted in Fowler, 58). The invocation adds Isaiah and David to the progression of shepherd poet-prophets, elevating “Siloa’s brook” and the holy mountains Oreb, Sinai, and Sion over the Hippocrene and “Aonian mount” (1.11; 1.15).3 Milton’s ambition as a poet, as Northrop Frye remarks, “is to join the tradition of inspired prophetic speech.”4 But Milton invokes a pedagogical scene. Moses has learned, and what he teaches is a narrative of beginnings. What he conveys to the Israelites is discursive historical guidance rather than transcendent revelation. In Milton’s invocations, divine guidance is rational and communicable rather than enthusiastic.5 The images and themes in the invocation derive principally from Exodus and create a pattern that is repeated at key intervals. Mosaic inspiration and the coordinated images of blinding light, social separation, and divine instruction generate a pattern, like Dante’s conversion scene at the beginning of the Commedia.6 The Mosaic pattern in the poem is narratological, contributing to the feeling of intricate cohesion that distinguishes Paradise Lost.7 Many critics have identified syntactical patterns that organize individual books, and broader schemas that join books together.8 The balance of lyrical density with the cosmological demands of epic defines the poem’s achievement. As David Quint writes, Paradise Lost is constructed under the assumption that its reader “will hold in his or her memory word patterns that form and repeat themselves through the course of the entire poem.”9 But the recurring scenes and images are not homologous and the patterns it generates are not circular.10 The structure of Paradise Lost, as Gordon Teskey has recently presented it, is developmental and opens out rather than closing in upon itself.11 Beneath the critical consensus that Paradise Lost intricately coheres there is little

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agreement about how to describe its coherence.12 Typological patterning, as a poetics of narrative continuity, affords a way to account for the purposive structure of the poem while affirming Milton’s anti-idealizing pedagogical and ethical imperatives. The invocations develop one of the epic’s principal figural patterns. In book 3, Milton re-invokes the muse, only here the divine breath is rendered as “holy light, offspring of heaven first-born” (3.1). The Holy Spirit is both God’s original, ambisexual creative energy and a first-born “offspring.” The play of difference within identity that distinguishes Milton’s complex trinitarianism also characterizes his handling of typological figures.13 The Holy Spirit participates in God, the over-arching universal, but retains an identity and individuality of its own: “of the eternal co-eternal beam” (3.2). Divine brightness and holy fire, as in the theophany on Oreb, visually cue scenes of inspired instruction. The association of divine inspiration with celestial light recurs through the Bible and has a long history in the exegetical tradition.14 The conjunction of brightness and darkness on Sinai familiar from the invocation is repeated here as Milton invokes blinding light, anticipating the description of God as “dark with excessive bright” (3.380). The streams of “Siloa” that were a synechdoche for David’s composition of the psalms recur as “pure ethereal stream, / Whose fountain who shall tell?” Mosaic inspiration on Oreb is not superseded by David’s divine poetry but preserved in the verbal echoes that secure the continuity of holy texts. Milton’s invocations are literary historical, suggesting a typological succession of divinely inspired writers. In the second invocation, the fructifying energy of the Holy Spirit “as with a mantle didst invest / The rising world of waters dark and deep / Won from the void” (3.10–11). The Holy Spirit clothes and comforts the growing world rather than brooding over it, foreshadowing the Son’s mercy in book 10 (10.97–181).15 As the Spirit mantling the newly formed world prefigures the Son clothing the newly mortal Eve and Adam, so Moses emerging from the cleft anticipates Milton, “long detained / In that obscure sojourn / […] / Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend” (3.14–21). The sojourn brings him into a closer relationship to God. But Milton’s sacred sight blinds, “with ‘dim suffusion’ veiled.” The radiance of Moses on his descent from Sinai, his spiritual separation “from the chearful ways of men,” and his own veiling anticipate Milton’s dramatization of his blindness (3.26; 3.46). Like Moses, Milton is cut off from the “ways of men,” in an echo of the “ways of God” that

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he sets out to justify. The withdrawal from human immediacy is in inverse proportion to nearness to God, as the dual nature of sacer—sacred and set apart—indicates. Milton sacrifices nearness to “human face divine” in order to justify God.16 The figural succession is agglutinative as each addition to the sequence rearranges and redefines the family resemblance between the figures.17 The alienation of Moses and his veiling, wrapped in “cloud and ever-during dark,” is the precondition for original writing. To compose the Pentateuch, he must first “for the book of knowledge fair” be “Presented with a universal blank” (3.47–48). Milton’s blind inspiration redeploys Mosaic imagery to connect him to the Judeo-Christian origins of poetry, so that he might “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3.55–56).18 Inspired composition requires sight expunged of nature’s works so that the poet-prophet can turn inward and grow closer to God. Milton’s invocations position him within a succession of vatic poets that starts with Adam. Much of the drama of the poem derives from the presentation of its own composition, and the invocations create a sequence running parallel to the scenes of instruction in the poem’s narrative. Despite widespread attention to typological symbolism in seventeenthcentury lyric, few critics have attended to the narratological function of typology in long poems from the period.19 Typological exegesis, following Paul’s letter to the Galatians, identified patterns of filiation between scenes, figures, and events to bridge the Old and New Testaments.20 The practice of linking topoi from the Old to the New Testament based on the recurrence of identifiable patterns became known as typology. Simultaneously retrospective and proleptic, typological exegesis links potentially disparate scenes and stories within providential history, viewing the succession of types and antitypes as the gradual unfolding of the Logos. As critics have noted, Milton uses typological figures extensively, but figural patterning also crucially contributes to the cohesiveness of his major works.21 An intricate typological ecology joins the potentially discontinuous scenes of Paradise Lost. There are echoes throughout the epic, with the effect that individual words, phrases, and figures provide the conditions of intelligibility for later events in the poem. According to Erich Auerbach, typology developed under the banner of literalism as a response to perceived excesses of allegorical interpretation.22 Allegory, as Gordon Teskey argues, consists of a “centered structure in which differences infold into one another,” and particularity is subordinated to a super-textual, “ineffable” signified. In contrast, typology unites

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historical specificity to exemplarity without the violence of sublation, or what Teskey terms allegorical “capture.”23 The impetus of the typological approach was to affirm the historical reality of biblical events and the value of biblical language. Figura, Auerbach’s preferred term for typological symbols, emerges from a semantic field shared with forma and schema in the early Christian period and designates types, or “plastic forms,” in opposition to words describing the supersensible, such as eidos. Auerbach’s “plastic form” captures the central ambiguity of figura, because “form” is supposed to designate the subtending identity beneath the change and flexibility defining plasticity. Figura is distinguished by a formal flexibility, intermediate between the lawful and the mutable. What differentiates figura from eidos, and typological from allegorical exegesis, is the insistence on the concrete particularity of the figura. However, its “inclination towards the universal, lawful, and exemplary,” joins the plasticity of the particular to the universality associated with forms.24 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description in The Statesman’s Manual of “tautegorical” symbolism anticipates Auerbach’s definition of figura. For Coleridge, the “statesman’s manual” is the Bible because it contains a rich array of historically particular yet exemplary narratives that serve as models for the conduct of statecraft. The Bible is “a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.” Biblical narratives are complete and self-consistent on their own. And while they exhibit universal applicability, they are not mere allegories that point beyond themselves to idealized truths. Using the language of electricity, Coleridge describes biblical stories drawing together the particular and the universal through the intermediate form of exemplarity. Biblical narratives are tautegorical, distinguished by “translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the Especial, or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal.” The stories are eductors of the universal: it is only by thinking with and through them that their exemplarity emerges. Exemplary biblical narratives are irreducible to sets of abstracted rules. Instead, they offer contextually embedded narratives constituting a model or methodus—a way of proceeding that is both contingent and paradigmatic. A tautegorical model “Always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative.”25 Tautegory differs from allegory in that the truth of the passage is not external to it, lying behind the

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veil of narrative. Like Auerbach’s figura, the exemplarity of tautegorical stories consists in concrete and practical modeling. The tension that Auerbach identifies with figura, and that Coleridge locates at the center of tautegory, emerges from its simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory quality, suggesting a view of history as a coherent—if catastrophic—sequence.26 Each type is provisional because it both anticipates future types and recalls anterior iterations, but “fulfillment” does not amount to the supersession of earlier examples. This duality conforms to what David Quint distinguishes as Milton’s “writerly” poetics, characterized by “verbal arrangements and thought structures that bind together—in widening configurations—episodes, individual books, motifs that run through the larger poem, and motifs running through Milton’s still larger career.”27 These patterns join the poem to sequences that exceed its narrative frame and open out to history. Milton’s typological narrative is not a closed symbolic system because it generates and enters into an evolving continuum of similitudes that links its content to both its composition and its eventual reading.28 The process initiated by the unfolding pattern mediates biblical and lived history. Figural history is formalist, distinguished by the tendency to identify patterns that progress and develop while deferring ultimate fulfillment.29 The absence of closure to Milton’s typological chain, especially in the context of his antiapocalyptic eschatology, opens typology to contemporary history and future articulation, as the dialectic of type and antitype displays a potentially infinite, subtly developing pattern.30 Miltonic typology is oriented towards fulfillment, but with the sense that every end is a type for future antitypes, a view Milton may have picked up from Origen (who, in the third century, argued, heretically, that the apocalypse was an occasion to start everything over again, rather than the definitive end of history).31 Echoing Origen, Milton writes in De Doctrina Christiana: “There shall be no end of his kingdom … till time itself shall be no longer, Rev. 10:6, until everything his kingdom was intended to effect shall be accomplished … It will not be destroyed, nor will its period be a period of dissolution, but rather of perfection and consummation, like the end of the law.”32 Milton concludes his reflection on the apocalypse with a typological reference to the fulfillment of Hebraic revealed law in Christian self-governance. The distinction between dissolution and consummation is essential to Miltonic eschatology. History will not conclude with reabsorption into the divine or with a conventional epic return to the origin but with the perfection of the typological pattern in the

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exercise of “right Reason” (Paradise Lost 12.84).33 Miltonic typology is historical and teleonomic rather than transcendent or anagogic: his figures exhibit “a purpose or project” but without a final cause or ultimate fulfillment that would supersede them.34 The epigenetic pattern used to understand the unity of the Bible and interpret the past extends into the present. The rejection of atonement understood in term of dissolution redirects the purpose of the figural succession towards critical historical consciousness. In allegory, history is dissolved in the absolute, while Milton’s typological history rejects allegorical “capture.”35 Considering its origin in the construction of historical coherence, it is peculiar that critical attention to the proleptic and retrospective patterning of Paradise Lost has overlooked the narrative role of typology.36 An exhaustive taxonomy of Milton’s typological ecology would exceed the limits of an essay, but Milton’s figural organization of the poem can be seen by continuing to trace the scenes of inspired instruction that begin with the invocation. Figural succession is not a sequence of homologies. Variation is essential to the pattern, and deviation is indispensable to identifying the resemblances.37 After the prologue to light, and its positioning of Milton’s inspired poetics relative to Moses and David, a perversion of God-given instruction diverts the figural succession. At the beginning of book 5 Eve awakes “with tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek, / As through unquiet rest” (5.10–11). Her glow recalls the radiance of Moses, but the discomposed tresses indicate a stutter in the sequence. After giving thanks for “morn returned,” she recounts her dream in the healthy light of the sun. Her brightness and the light of day are set off against the gloom of the “irksome night,” and Adam’s “enamoured” whispering while she sleeps anticipates the “gentle voice” that Eve describes calling in her dream: “I thought it thine” (5.37). In contrast to the brightness of book 3, the voice in her dream describes a seductive glow: “now reigns / Full orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light / Shadowy sets off the face of things” (5.41–43). Each scene of inspired instruction in Paradise Lost is presaged by an influx of celestial light, and the dream light recalls the pattern. Satan’s invocation of shadowy light is parasitical, relying on its divine other and the alliance of light and dark in book 3. The imagery cues the thematics of divine instruction by recalling precedents—a voice in the garden; light joined with darkness; and words of praise to celestial light, as “heaven wakes with all his eyes” (5.44). The voice leads Eve, who presumably still thinks it belongs to Adam, to “the tree / Of interdicted knowledge” which appears under the light of the moon, “Much fairer to my fancy than by day” (5.52; 5.53). The dream figure fragments divine

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light into so many adoring eyes, prefiguring the ascent to godhead imagined later. Winged, like the holy spirit of the invocation, stands an angelic figure, “like one of those from heaven / By us oft seen” (5.55–56). The figure launches into an apostrophe to the tree, “O fair plant … with fruit surcharged,” that is echoed later by Raphael’s “flowers and their fruit / Man’s nourishment” (5.58; 5.482–83). He convinces Eve to eat with language that anticipates Raphael’s description of transubstantiation, and recalls the language of inspired ascent from book 3: “Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods, / Thyself a goddess, not to earth confined, / But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes / Ascend to heaven, by merit thine, and see / What life the gods live there, and such live thou” (5.77–81). Like Milton, Eve dreams of moving across orders, “through utter and through middle darkness” to arrive at a comprehensive prospect of the cosmos (3.16). The Satanic dynamics of willful ascent—“self-raised”—reiterates the scenes of elevated instruction. Eve eats and glimpses “the earth outstretched immense” (5.88–89). Quint concludes that Eve’s dream parodies in advance Raphael’s subsequent speculation in the same book 5 that, through a process that includes a vegetarian diet and thus also seems to include eating fruit, although fruit of a different kind, the bodies of Adam and Eve may at last turn all to spirit.38 Her vertical ascent affords an illusory revelation, and the ecstatic dream state is matched by a corresponding plunge. Eve’s claim that she “could not but taste” is fallacious and foreshadows her self-justification in book 9. Her willingness to be led passively surrenders her autonomy. After she recounts her dream of surmounting worldly limits, Adam (in history’s first instance of mansplaining) repudiates the misjoinings he ascribes to “fancy,” and dismisses Eve’s dream as innocent, since “Evil into the mind of God or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind” (5.117–19). Echoing a point from Areopagitica, reason is free to examine good and bad, besmirched only by what it accepts as doctrine.39 But the easy entry of self-idealizing fantasy is foreboding. Eve’s dream anticipates Raphael’s visit but with the key distinction that Satanic tutelage aims at the absolute, but concludes “sunk down.” The attempted transcendence and corresponding fall connect Eve to the poem’s other failed flyers.40 Milton’s figural succession contrasts ecstatic and irrational experience with the discursive inspiration he identifies with sacred instruction. Later in book 5

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God sends Raphael to “converse with Adam … and such discourse bring on / As may advise him of his happy state, / Happiness in his power left free to will, / Left to his own free will, his will though free / Yet mutable; whence warn him to beware / He swerve not too secure” (5.243–48). Their conversation clashes with Eve’s enthusiastic dream vision.41 The dream suggests revelation, but “discursive figuration rather than sensual data or mystical vision” characterizes Milton’s theory of pedagogy in Paradise Lost.42 God leaves it to Raphael to determine what mode of discourse will guide Adam to consideration of freedom and the happiness that depends on its judicious use. The Lucretian verb “swerve” foreshadows the “wand’ring” appetites of Adam and Eve in book 9, and their first “wandering steps” out of Eden.43 Raphael’s task is to instruct Adam of the freedom of his will and the personal responsibility attached to it, and to warn him against the deceptions of Satan. Raphael describes Lucifer’s insurrection as a story about hybris. The rebellion of the angels is figural: a narrative model through which later events should be interpreted. Thus, the fall of Adam and Eve represents a repetition with a difference, foreshadowed by the initial figure. As Stanley Fish has pointed out, the cataclysmic fall of Adam and Eve is in turn the type for the fall of readers caught by the force of Satan’s dramatic self-representation.44 The fall of Fish’s “harassed reader” extends the typological succession beyond the frame of the narrative, as the type for the everyday falling that Milton identified with the faltering of reason. Every fall in the poem recalls its antecedents and anticipates future iterations.45 The story of Satan’s fall is meant to provide an example of the insecurity that comes with free will, in the hope that a narrative will suffice to guide Adam’s future conduct.46 But Adam, insufficiently schooled in identifying types, interprets Raphael’s story as “above earthly Thought,” and fails to identify the purpose of the narration (7.82). The education of Adam described in book 5 conveys sacred truths “perhaps not lawful to reveal,” but it is anchored in mutually informative dialogue (5.569–70).47 His descent is announced by a blazing light, like “A phoenix” (5.272), though “shadowed” so that his “lineaments divine” will not overawe Eve and Adam. Adam glimpses “another morn / Risen on mid-noon” adumbrating “some great behest from heaven” (5.310–12). Milton describes the archetypal scene of divine education using imagery he has associated with his own inspiration. Joining Adam and Eve at their table, Raphael’s discourse favorably compares Earth to Heaven: “such place hast here to dwell, / As may oft invite, though spirits of heaven / To visit thee” (5.373–75). Heaven and Eden exist on a continuum rather than separated by the unbridgeable chasm

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postulated by a Platonic or two-world system.48 What distinguishes them is neither ontology nor space but time, and Raphael describes history as the gradual narrowing of any distinction between supernal and material realms. When Raphael describes earth becoming heaven-like and heaven becoming earth-like through the course of history, Catherine Gimelli Martin argues, he reconfigures “traditional platonic and Christian allegorical ascent from earth to heaven as a descent in which each material form will be seen to be more like heaven’s than even an angelic sense might suspect” (44). The material world is not a degraded copy of the heavenly but worthy of the praise of “more spirituous” forms of life. But Raphael’s use of “may” recalls the cautionary imperative of his visit. Paradise is imperiled, and the continuity between Eden and heaven is contingent on faith and the exercise of right reason. Raphael’s metaphysics are at the center of critical debates surrounding Milton’s monism. But the discussion also discloses a progressivist and evolutionary view of history.49 The beginning of the conversation is taken up by the discussion of matter that emerges from Adam’s question about angelic digestion. Raphael develops the relationship between material sustenance and spiritual life as an example to explain the relationship between type and fulfillment: “Food alike those pure / Intelligential substances require, / As doth your rational; and both contain within them every lower faculty / Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, / Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate / And corporeal to incorporeal turn” (5.407–13).50 He blurs the distinction between eating and cognizing by describing conception in terms of taste and physical transubstantiation. Spirit is not immaterial but like human discursive reason has a worldly, physical basis. The analogy between cognition and the working up of caloric material into vital energy suggests the continuity of mind and matter, and the reliance of the incorporeal on the bodily: the inputs of sound, scent, taste, sight, and touch, and the vegetarian fare Adam and Eve share with Raphael. Human understanding, like its angelic analog, is embodied and can no more exchange its discursive, worldly orientation for intellectual intuition than the body can live without food. His progression is from obscure to clear, from the manifold of sensibility to the insights of reason.51 The “corporeal” is transitive. It leads to fulfillment in ideas, in forms, and, as the narrative form of Raphael’s discourse suggests, in types. But the fulfillments of reason do not supersede their inputs. As a good Baconian, Raphael insists on the “intermediate axioms,” the intervening steps that proceed from corporeal to incorporeal.52 The monist emphasis in Raphael’s explanation is that reason

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and universals depend on and partake of the corporeal and particular: on food, on sense, and on the ostensibly lower, or “shadowy” types of the physical. The monism of book 5 conjoins “shadowy types” to the truths they body forth by presupposing a single material substratum. The successive articulation of the material substratum in ever-increasing orders of perfection constitutes historical evolution. As the discussion of embodied cognition continues, Raphael expands his principles to describe a unified cosmos.53 “Of elements / The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea, / Earth and sea feed air, the air those fires / Ethereal” (5.415–18). The universe evolves in accordance with a physics of ascent culminating in “fires / Ethereal.” Celestial fire then reciprocally distributes its accumulated energy back into the process fueling the continuous ascent of “grosser” elements. Raphael’s reciprocal hierarchy is purposive: everything strives for perfection, passing through evolutionary stages—or types—along the way: “One almighty is, from whom / All things proceed, and up to him return / If not depraved from good, created all / Such to perfection, one first matter all, / Indued with various forms, various degrees, / Of substance, and in things that live, of life; / But more refined, more spirituous, and pure / As nearer to him placed or nearer tending” (5.469–76). He imputes an evolutionary telos to both nature and history, but the end of the succession is not a transcendent withdrawal from the system: “Nor doth the moon no nourishment exhale / From her moist continent to higher orbs. / The sun that light imparts to all receives / From all his alimental recompence / In humid exhalations, and at even / Sups with the ocean” (5.421–26). The reciprocity of Raphael’s ecology suspends anagogic transcendence, and the image of the sun supping with the ocean suggests that while the anagogic striving of the system is teleonomic, there is no fulfillment beyond it. Paul Tillich writes, “The circular line is disrupted in the historical view of being. Time tears reality out of its limitation in space to create a line that does not return to itself but nevertheless does not weaken but strengthens the power of being.”54 Raphael’s “quasi-evolutionary vision of striving nature” identifies the progressive dialectic that characterizes Miltonic typology as a principle of nature itself (noted in Fowler, 311). But Raphael’s view is imperiled. His suggestive, “If not depraved from good” introduces bidirectional movement along the “emanative hierarchy.”55 Festa describes the Miltonic “if ” as a “Satanic word, in that it riddles his speeches and operates as a synechdoche for his enterprise.”56 By cuing uncertainty and doubt, “if ” presages the fall. Declension is a possibility alongside ascension. The obscure agent of depravity

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introduces self-perversion and perversion by influence as equally damning. Milton’s earlier uses of the word include an agent of degradation but here he doesn’t distinguish one, implying that depravity by another and self-depravity is a distinction without a difference.57 Martin says that in Paradise Lost, “the sacred remains essentially continuous with the putatively ‘profane’ because the vehicle of both has become the free will and motivation of individual subjects who naturally ‘transubstantiate’ its common elements.”58 The “or” that pivots between “nearer to him placed” and “nearer tending” in Raphael’s discourse connects depravity to choice and the control of the will by reason. Since it is in one’s power to tend towards God and become more spirituous and pure—by which Milton means more responsibly free—it is also within one’s power to deprave oneself from good. Raphael’s physics lead upward against the tertiary movement of books 5 through 8. His instruction ends in book 8 when he tells Adam to lower his eyes and focus on what is coming. Midway through Raphael’s discourse Milton reinvokes his muse with a plea that she descend rather than lift him up. The supersession of the pagan muses by Urania—“by that name / If rightly though art called”—and of Parnassus and Olympus by Eden and Sinai recurs here, as does the now-familiar elevation of the divine fountain over the Hippocrene (7.1–2). But there is a growing sense of risk, as Milton reflects on failed and fallen figures of poetic prophecy. “If ” again signals the uncertainty that now includes the muse. The presumptuous fliers circumscribe the range of inspiration. Across Paradise Lost, as David Quint says, “Falling is depicted as the failure of aspired flight.”59 Inspiration, “wherewith to scorn the earth,” risks the action Milton singles out as the “root of all our woe” (9.1011; 9.645). The association of Eve’s ecstatic dream and Raphael’s cautious instruction conveys Milton’s growing unease about the thematics of enthusiasm. Eve’s dream declares that not all inspiration is from God, and Raphael’s intimations about the sources of depravity suggest that devils can also inspire. Milton never repudiates divine instruction, but he carefully distinguishes it from the enthusiastic inspiration of Bellerophon, who, like Milton, “presumed / An earthly guest” to intrude “Into the heav’n of heav’ns,” but without proper guidance. As Milton stands “on earth, not rapt above the pole,” at the midway point in the poem the difficulty of distinguishing the “empty dream” from the “heav’nly” becomes the focus. The invocation at book 9—the last in the poem—chastens the earlier, soaring rhetoric of inspiration. The “venial discourse” between “God or Angel

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guest / With man, as with his friend,” is not sinful, but the close association of divine instruction with transcendence in the context of the imminent fall is under careful scrutiny (9.5; 9.1–2). The first invocation established Moses on Sinai as the figure for the successive scenes of divinely obtained knowledge dramatized in subsequent invocations. But in the chronology of the poem their proper type is Adam’s education in the mountain-top garden. At the beginning of book 9 he has received the first books of Genesis; the rest must wait until the postlapsarian visits of the Son and Michael. Milton suppresses imagery of divine light and soaring heights in this invocation, describing his argument, “Not less but more heroic” than those that have preoccupied epic poetry since Homer. Inadequacy, and uncertainty about his “intended wing,” depressed by age and weakness, precede the image of darkness with which the diegesis of book 9 begins: “The sun was sunk” (9.58). Following the subdued invocation, Satan’s seduction of Eve echoes the figural pattern of inspired instruction. Otherworldly light joins the scene to the iconography of the invocations.60 The seduction hinges on an image of otherworldly fire that links it both to Eve’s dream and to the iconography of divine guidance. The simile that describes Satan guiding Eve to the tree as an ignis fatuus perverts the celestial light that has anticipated divine visits:         Hope elevates, and joy Brightens his crest, as when a wondering fire Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindles through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool There swallowed up and lost, from succor far. (9.633–42) The degraded form of the ignis fatuus visually connects Satan’s performance to Raphael’s. James Whaler describes Milton’s similes as compressed, anticipatory “mini-narratives,” a proleptic device “anticipating events in the fable.”61 The similes are figural, and play an integral role in the poem’s typological ecology.62 The “amazed night-wanderer” recalls Milton’s “pilot of some nightfoundered skiff ” from book 1 (1.204). Like the pilot, the night wanderer

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emerges in an uncertain setting, unaware of the “lower deep / Still threatening” that opens below her (4.76–77). Both figures adumbrate Eve following Satan—that untrustworthy guide from Eve’s dream—to the tree of knowledge. But like Eve they are also figures for the mundane surrender of self-control and the self-incurred tutelage that for Milton defines falling. The simile expands and contracts, as the airy, upward energy of its hope, joy, and brightness are abruptly undercut by the image of consolidated, oily, unhealthful air. The claustrophobic, encircling darkness of night “kindles” the malevolent light into existence—a word that shares with inspire the sense of arousal into being and inbreathed energy. The ignis fatuus is attended by superstition and magical thinking. It leads a passively drawn and unobservant figure into perdition. The delusive lights of the dream and the seduction counterpoise the light of theophanic instruction, but the relation highlights the importance of wandering, deviations, and missteps to God’s providence. In the simile, Milton connects the (mis)interpretation of the fire with human fallibility: the ever-present possibility that finite human reason will mistake the ignis fatuus for “fires / Ethereal” and follow it into damnation. Falling is defined by abdications of reason. Carelessness, inattentiveness, vanity, and desire are united by Milton under the heading of heteronomy. The abdication of self-governance that defines both Eve and Adam’s falls is internal but also ethical and political. Satan is initially described as a fawning flatterer, but, following his description in the simile as a delusive guide, he adapts Raphael’s role of orator and instructor. After Eve suggests she should not eat the fruit, Satan breaks into apostrophe: “O sacred, wise, and wisdomgiving plant, / Mother of science, now I feel thy power / Within me clear, not only to discern / Things in their causes, but to trace the ways / Of highest agents” (9.679–83). He praises the power of the fruit to provide not only scientific knowledge of cause but, more importantly, immediate knowledge of the transcendent “ways / Of highest agents” (9.683). While Eve’s dream “parodied in advance” Raphael’s description of enlightenment in conjunction with metaphors of alimentation, Satan exploits similar reasoning, crafting the seduction in terms of a fulfillment of Raphael’s prophecy that “Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit / Improv’d by tract of time and wing’d ascend / Ethereal” (5.496–98). In Satan’s recapitulation: “Ye shall be as gods.… / What are gods that man may not become / As they, participating godlike food?” (9.708–17). Satan echoes Raphael, but with a crucial difference: the erasure of Raphael’s “tract of time,” the historical axis which is the primary feature

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that distinguishes typology from the vertical ascent of allegory. Satan’s seduction redeploys the promise of Raphael’s discourse that, by “gradual scales” humans will be “sublim’d,” but he subtracts the mediations of history, offering the apple as a shortcut to the absolute. In his presentation, the forbidden fruit provides the means to surmount the reciprocal ecology Raphael describes. Whereas Raphael’s nature is governed by mutual subjection, in which everything serves everything else, Satan offers the forbidden fruit as a means to transcend Raphael’s theory of universal subordination. Raphael’s progressivist metaphysics present a vision of history as the incremental labor of enlightenment. The genius of Satan’s argument lies in verticalizing the typological by converting Raphael’s theory of enlightenment as epigenetic evolution into an instantaneous effect of the fruit. Where Raphael insists on concrete historical advances, Satan allegorizes Raphael’s schema by identifying transcendent knowledge with “those fair apples” (9.585). He simultaneously supersedes the intervening steps that yield an enlightened human condition and substitutes teleological transcendence of history for Raphael’s evolving cosmos. Eve assumes a wholly abstracted God, external and prior to the system of the universe, and collapses that godhead with the fruit, as Satan’s instructions encourage her to do. By eating, she attempts to surmount the labor of enlightenment that Raphael identified with the physics of the universe and on which his evolutionary history depends. Satan’s delusive guidance revises Raphael’s anti-idealism by redefining his historical dialectic of exemplary types as a dispensable process the end of which is the supersession of history itself. The succession of guides in the poem is inclusive, providing both good and bad models for succession. Connecting the good models—Raphael, Abdiel, the Son, Michael, Enoch, and Moses—is the cultivation of selfguidance. But the negative models—Satan and the demagogues and tyrants that follow after him—are defined by their eschewal of autonomy. The final scene of instruction in the poem is Michael’s historical corrective to the attempts at transcendence. As with the divine teachers that have preceded him, Michael’s arrival is presaged by uncanny “morning light / More orient in yon western cloud that draws / O’er the blue firmament a radiant white / And slow descends with something heavenly fraught” (11.204–7). Adam has learned to recognize the signs that his offspring will record as indicators of divine visitation. Michael is dispatched by God to expel Adam and Eve from Eden and give them knowledge of the future. He reveals biblical

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history as a catastrophic unfolding of events and figures, covenants made, broken, and renewed. A steady succession of tyrants, unified by their reliance on the passivity of their followers, follows after Satan, occasionally derailed by the actions of righteous individuals. Michael’s narrative is an evolutionary process full of lapses, missteps, and gradual gains, like Raphael’s, but in a concretely historical register. The Old Testament law adumbrates “by types and shadows” the coming of the messiah, just as in the invocation Adam foreshadowed the “greater man,” while Eden pointed beyond itself to Sinai, Zion, Calvary, and ultimately the “blissful seat” of the upraised human heart. The chain of correspondences that joins the Old to the New Testament unifies the body of the epic. The poem’s dialectic of divine and diabolic teachers determine the halting pace of Eve and Adam’s first “wandering steps” out of Eden and into history. After Michael’s description of the incarnation and reference to the second coming, Adam breaks out in joy: “Oh 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!” (12.469–73). Michael’s patterned history is alchemical, turning degradation, “by gradual scale,” into goodness (5.483). He offers a justification for and redemption of the fall, while subordinating the tremendous suffering of history to the “far happier place / Than this of Eden” that is thereby achieved. But Adam’s delight at providence is undermined by the gradual realization of the reality of life on the subjected plain, revealed in his and Eve’s lingering in Eden. His initial joy is tempered by the arduous and uncertain labor that Michael’s history conveys. History is the advance from self-incurred bondage to self-achieved liberty, but the path is indirect. The succession of heroes from Abdiel to Enoch to Milton himself offer examples of the exercise of God-given freedom within history. Milton’s use of typology to unify the epic supports his concern throughout with how reason might be restored to its position as principal legislator and how history might be understood as the process through which autonomy is secured. Human fallibility suggests that the labor of enlightenment is unending.63 Michael’s history traces the development from the external “mercy seat,” to the “living temple,” understood as an autonomous subjectivity, no longer subject to the heteronomous desire that Satan propagates. History emerges from the last two books “as a dialectical process of ‘ceaseless change.’”64 The human imperfection that figures so prominently in the similes means falling is an ever-present possibility that

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can only be offset by self-awareness and critical attention. Paradise Lost asks most pressingly how one can know when they are following “God’s Umpire, Conscience” or just following historical exigencies. The telos of history is not its transcendence, but the free use of reason within history. The scenes of instruction and the invocations form a central thread in the skein of Paradise Lost inseparable from its exemplary and pedagogical imperatives. Typology is a mode of instruction, a method for developing patterns and matrices of relation to understand the present and future. Milton’s open-ended typology in Paradise Lost relates scenes of instruction to the “quasi-evolutionary” vision of enlightenment, from exemplary guides (by instructors like Raphael, Michael, and even Satan) to the guidance of reason and conscience that Michael prefigures and that Milton identifies with the purpose of history.65 The position of Satan in the sequence of guides makes clear that misinterpretation, misdirection, poor guidance, and the accidents of history, like the fall, are indispensable to the interminable development that Miltonic typology articulates. A pattern of incremental advances, recurrent scenes, and textual analogies organizes Paradise Lost and unites the books of the poem with its central argument: “to assert eternal providence,” and in so doing, “justify the ways of God to men” (1.25; 1.26). The ways of God take the form of the gradual articulation of the Logos, through the dialectic of types and antitypes. The simultaneously recursive and prophetic integration of Miltonic figures, purposively aligned for the fulfillment of God’s masterplot, generates poetic integrity. The sequence does not end with unveiling, or a transcendent encounter with God, “face to face,” but with critical historical consciousness. Education by examples does not violate the autonomy of the individual by enforcing rules or ideal formulas. An example is irreducible to a set of Levitical doctrines of conduct or belief. What examples offer are methods, paths of transit, closer to what Immanuel Kant describes as models for succession (Nachfolge) instead of models for heteronomous imitation. Sanford Budick describes the guidance of exemplary models as “freedom under the condition of influence,” that he connects to artistic excellence. Miltonic types thus correspond with what Kant calls “aesthetic ideas,” those representations that are irreducible to a determinative concept, but which are infinitely productive.66 The ampliative energy of Miltonic types assures the deferral of conceptual containment that would cast Milton’s horizontal poetics back upon the vertical, idealizing axis of allegory. Milton’s own poetic exemplars are those

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poet-prophets who learned directly, though discursively and rationally rather than epiphanically, from the divine.67 The drama of the poem’s composition, presented in the succession of invocations, is continuous with the sequence of instructional scenes, marking out a pattern through which artistic and political liberty are obtained—by following the example of archetypal figures. For Milton, the end of history is not transcendence. While typology often asserts a teleological advance towards ultimate fulfillment in the apocalypse, Milton rejects the escapism of idealism. His history is not anagogic.68 The succession of historical stages, the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, the “wandring steps and slow” that slip and stall, over and over again, are not advancing towards the supersession of history itself (12.648). The desire to leap outside the historical process the poem describes is Satanic. It presumes an outside that Milton’s monistic metaphysics denies even to God, a place from which to watch, utterly abstracted from the created universe. The telos of Paradise Lost, as Teskey has recently argued, is engagement with history on the transcendental ground of human freedom.69 The question Milton confronts most urgently is how original freedom can be discovered in a world where the wrecks of history seem determining. Budick has phrased the question at the heart of Milton’s ethics as “How can one achieve a mental life that is characterized by independence and spontaneity … and at the same time inherit one’s given world?” The homelessness and radical insecurity of the conclusion of Paradise Lost that Bentley disliked so much opens into history, rather than folding the narrative in upon itself. But the fall that occasions history is not insurmountable, or an ontological blight. Martin explains that by “rationally moralizing evil, Milton situates its roots in the fallen mind and will, not in the material ‘spot’ of infection that the Christian/Greek tradition had continued to associate with original sin.” It follows that the way to overcome evil—which for Milton is heteronomy and its political consequence tyranny—is also found in the fallen mind and will. According to Teskey, the lesson of Paradise Lost is how “to free ourselves in the midst of history” without escaping it.70 Liberty and autonomy were not lost with the fall despite the exigencies of history. Milton’s heroes in Paradise Lost are figures of internal resolve, who derive worldly strength from submitting to a transcendental principle of freedom. To be morally good and obedient to God is to follow the edicts of his “umpire Conscience,” in the free exercise of moral reason. The ingenium of reason, the genius of human autonomy, represents for Milton the way not to overcome or transcend history but the means to realize liberty within it. Milton’s

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“right reason” asserts that God’s own freedom “has now been untraditionally dispersed to the finite subjects who can both discursively and intuitively intersect with his free agency in historical time.”71 The typological ecology of Paradise Lost is anti-anagogic and anti-idealizing because its telos is not apocalyptic but directed towards the kind of self-guidance that Milton defined as the essence of reason, and that Kant defined as the essence of Enlightenment. In Paradise Lost the typological view of history yields progressive politics. Autonomous self-legislation is emancipatory, and for Milton it is the project and purpose of human history. His late inward turn, and the supposed rejection of political and worldly engagement in his mature poetry is not skeptical or quietist. In Paradise Lost he turns to the ground conditions of the exercise of human freedom. The critical search for its first principles leads Milton to realization of God’s disseminated divinity: “It is a revelation of the human as having taken into itself the full authority of a transcendent God.” The Miltonic ground for political action is an idea of the unconditioned—of God, as represented in free reason—to which the succession of types in Paradise Lost leads: “its telos or fulfillment is eventual engagement: to live within history while subverting its most powerful illusion; that how things are is indeed how they are, and how they must be.”72 Against the perspective that Paradise Lost is fatalist, or denies the necessity of human action, typological providence, as it is developed in the poem, depends on the incremental types, the progressions, missteps, and leaps of individual historical agents acting in and upon history.

c ha p te r t h r ee

The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost James Ross Macdonald

I

n Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus’s sixth-century biblical poem De spiritalis historiae gestis, Satan boasts that after tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit he enjoys a better claim over the first couple than God himself: En, diuina manet promissae gloria laudis! Quicquid scire meum potuit, iam credite uestrum est: omnia monstraui sensumque per abdita duxi, et quodcumque malum sollers natura negabat, institui dextrisque dedi coniungere laeuum. Istinc perpetua uosmet mihi sorte dicaui. Nec Deus in uobis, quamquam formauerit ante, iam plus iuris habet: teneat, quod condidit ipsae; quod docui meum est; maior mihi portio restat. Multa creatori debetis, plura magistro.1

Behold, the godlike glory of the praise I promised abides with you. Whatever knowledge was within my grasp, trust now that it is yours. I have shown you everything, have guided your senses through what was hidden, and whatever evil ingenious nature had denied to you, this I have taught, allowing man to join left and right, foul and fitting. And so your fate is sealed forever and I have consecrated you to myself. Nor does God, although He formed you earlier, have

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James Ross Macdonald greater rights in you. Let Him hold what He Himself made. What I taught is mine, and the greater portion remains with me. You owe much to your Creator but more to your teacher.2

This passage lacks a direct analogue in Paradise Lost,3 but its conception of the devil as a teacher resonates powerfully within Milton’s epic, because education ranks among his most central and sustained interests: as Margaret Olofson Thickstun remarks, Paradise Lost is “a poem about the education of its main characters and at the same time dedicated to the education of its readers.”4 Having served as a schoolmaster himself during the 1640s, Milton knew firsthand the pleasure and perils of teaching, a vocation that he seems to have considered “parallel, if not quite equal, to preaching and poesy.”5 Over the past fifty years, many scholars have contributed to a deepening understanding of Miltonic learning, often employing his tractate Of Education (1644) as a framework for assessing the methods and success of Raphael, Michael, and the Father in guiding Adam and Eve’s progress towards true knowledge in Paradise Lost. This essay aims to bring Satan within the compass of that conversation, suggesting that Milton follows Avitus in presenting the temptation of Eve as a diabolic parody of heavenly pedagogy: approaching her alone in the garden in book 9, the devil initiates an episode that closely parallels the colloquy with God recounted in book 8, where Adam had petitioned, against apparent divine resistance, for a companion. In these encounters, both God and Satan play the role of constructivist educator, employing questions to draw out their interlocutors’ capacity for understanding and judgment. Yet the falsified fact of the talking snake ultimately leads Eve’s reasoning astray, suggesting shifts in Milton’s own thinking about the place of inductive inquiry and empirical evidence in the search after truth. Beginning with Avitus, this essay will examine how Paradise Lost plays upon and against the trope of the devil as teacher, moving finally to explore the implications of viewing Satan in this way for Milton’s evolving vision of intellectual growth and epistemological authority.

I In a study of Paradise Lost’s literary antecedents, J. Martin Evans found De spiritalis historiae gestis to be the first poetic account of the Fall to make the patristic identification of Satan with the serpent in the garden.6 The case

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for a textual relationship between Milton and this late antique hexaemeron remains circumstantial but suggestive. Avitus’s poem would certainly have been available during Milton’s lifetime: after a first edition in Bologna in 1507, it went through thirteen more continental printings before 1667.7 In 1952, Watson Kirkconnell identified several passages where “very close correspondence in phraseology” might indicate “verbal recollections on the part of the blind Milton.”8 When Milton’s Satan tells Beelzebub, for example, “All is not lost; the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield,”9 he echoes Avitus’s devil speaking in soliloquy: “Non tamen in totum periit: pars magna retentat / uim propriam summaque cluit uirtute nocendi” (“And yet, it is not totally lost. A great part retains its native strength and must be reckoned with for its great capacity to do harm”).10 The argument that Milton borrowed the trope of the devil as a teacher from Avitus must rest in the same balance of probability.11 Certainly, however, education represents an important thematic link between the poems, because acts of teaching and learning pervade both writers’ presentations of the creation and the fall. As Adam awakens to consciousness in De spiritalis historiae gestis, he receives instruction from God concerning his relationships with creator and creation: Haec que mundanis cernis pulcherrima rebus incrementa nouis ornatum tensa per orbem, solus habe totisque prior dominare fruendo. Tu mihi, cuncta tibi famulentur; maximus ordo est te parere pio qui subdidit omnia Patri. All this profusion of beauty you behold among the earth’s new furnishings, extending as they do throughout this decorated globe, hold as yours alone and, as the very first man, rule and enjoy them all. But here is My greatest command: as everything serves you, so do you serve Me and obey your devoted Father who subjects all this to you.12 The defining fact of Adam’s existence is his dual role as God’s subordinate and nature’s master, and Avitus emphasizes that these offices proceed inseparably from the same universal hierarchy. The logical structure of this speech, as well

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as of God’s subsequent lessons, represents an effort to illuminate the moral imperatives implicit in created order. In the same markedly hortatory style, for example, God goes on to furnish the new couple with guidance on how their marriage must work: Uiuite concordi studio mundumque replete … Tum lex coniugii toto uenerabilis aeuo intemerata suo seruabitur ordine cunctis. Femina persistat de uiscere sumpta uirili coniugio seruare fidem, nec separet alter, quod iungit sotiatque Deus: cum patre relinquat et matrem iusto constrictus amore maritus. Ista parentales non rumpant uincula curae, uita sed amborum carnem teneatur ad unam. Live in harmonious devotion to one another and fill the world … Thereafter in every age, the venerable law of marriage, will be preserved in its own form inviolate by all. Let woman, who was taken from the body of man, remain faithful in marriage and let another not separate what God has joined and united. And let the husband, bound by a righteous love, leave his mother with his father. Let concern for parents not break those bonds, but let the lives of both man and woman become bound in one flesh.13 In a striking gesture, Avitus reverses the Genesis narrative by framing as divine teachings the ideas about the unity of spouses that the biblical Adam had propounded himself at Genesis 2:23–24. Moreover, because Adam and Eve lack parental attachments to balance against conjugal affection, they cannot be the only intended audience. God’s lessons are thus sufficient not only for their own immediate purposes but for their posterity as well, so much so that he can disengage himself from direct management of Eden: “At Pater instructos sacrata in sede relinquens / laetus in astrigeram caeli se sustulit aulam” (“And God the Father, leaving them in their holy dwelling with these instructions, ascended joyfully into the star-filled court of the sky”).14 Before departing, however, God warns Adam and Eve not to trespass beyond the bounds that he has set for their knowledge:

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Est tamen in medio nemoris, quam cernitis, arbor notitiam recti prauique in germine portans: huis ab accessu uetitum restringite tactum, nec uos forte praemat temeraria discere cura, quod Doctor prohibet … There is, however, in the middle of the grove a tree that you can see and that carries in its seed the knowledge of good and evil. Do not extend to it a touch that is forbidden. Nor, by any chance, let the reckless desire to learn what your teacher forbids overcome you.15 More than merely unnecessary, a too-eager wish for knowledge poses a threat to Adam and Eve’s well-being. Yet while Avitus avers that in Eden they possess “libertas secura” (they are “perfectly free”),16 he also emphasizes the extent to which innocence leaves them vulnerable to deception: “Sic ignara mali nouitas nec conscia fraudis / incautas nulla tetigit formidine mentes” (“And so, their new natures, ignorant of evil and unaware of guile, instilled in their unsuspecting minds no fear”).17 The poet meets this burgeoning problem of theodicy by suggesting that if Eve had followed God’s instructions properly she would never have been exposed to the devil’s cunning at all. After the serpent begins his temptation with praise of her beauty, Eve explains the prohibition on eating the tree’s fruit. But then, confessing that she does not understand the penalty for transgression, she turns to the snake for information about death: “Quid uocitet mortem, tu nunc, doctissimae serpens, / pande libens, quoniam rudibus non cognita res est” (“What He calls death, do you now, wise serpent, graciously explain, since it is a thing unknown to us in our simplicity”).18 Speaking as narrator, Avitus harshly chastises Eve for communicating with the snake at all: Quis stupor, O mulier, mentem caligine clausit? Cum serpente loqui, uerbum cummittere bruto non pudet? Ut uestram praesumat belua linguam et monstrum pateris; responsumque insuper addis? What stupidity, woman, clouded your mind? Did you feel no shame in speaking with the serpent, conversing with the brute, when that

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The poet evidently believes that the roots of Eve’s sin lay in a category error: because Adam and Eve are absolute rulers of creation, Eve’s question itself is a transgression against their own state and violation of God’s sovereignty. Indeed, Eve’s culpability is further heightened by Avitus’s unusual claim that consuming food was voluntary for the unfallen: “Et nisi concessum libuisset noscere pastum, / esuries ignota cibos non posceret ullos, / nullaque constantem fulcirent pabula uitam” (“Were it not their pleasure to try the food given them, hunger, which was unknown to them, would have asked for nothing to eat, and no nourishment would have been required to support their life, which was unfailing”).20 Adam and Eve truly require nothing from nature for either their bodies or minds. The devil, of course, proves only too ready to step into the role of pedagogue once bidden: “Callidus inde draco et leti tum sponte magister / interitum docet” (“Then the shrewd snake, teacher of death, gladly instructed her in destruction”).21 Rooted in his own experience of resentment and alienation from God, he takes the opportunity to speak far beyond Eve’s original question by launching a broad attack on divine providence: Consilium mage sume meum mentemque supernis insere et erectos in caelum porrige sensus. Namque hoc, quod uetitum formidas tangere, pomum scire dabit quaecumque Pater secreta reponit. Tu modo suspensos tantum ne contene tactus, nec captiua diu frenetur lege uoluptas. Namque ubi diuinum libaueris ore saporem, mox purgata tuo facient te lumina uisu aequiperare deos, sic sancta ut noxia nosse, iniustum recto, falsum discernere uero. But take my advice instead. Fix your mind on things celestial and turn your mental powers, once lifted up, heavenward. This fruit you fear to touch because it is forbidden will give you knowledge of whatever your Father lays away as secret. Whatever you do, don’t withhold your touch in hesitation now. Don’t let your captive joy be bridled

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by this law any longer, for when you have tasted the divine savor on your lips, your eyes will soon become clear and make your vision equal to that of gods, in knowing what is holy as well as what is evil, in distinguishing between right and wrong, truth and falsehood.22 Equal parts conspiracy theory and self-help book, Satan’s speech employs a hortatory mode that closely resembles God’s own. Moreover, he skilfully combines emotional and sensual temptations, even enhancing the apple’s scent to sway her will: “unum de cunctis letali ex arbore malum / detrahit et suaui pulchrum perfundit odore” (“he … drew one of the apples from the deadly tree, bathing its beauty in a pleasant fragrance”).23 Such sensory perceptions help to mislead Eve, a condition that Avitus identifies as prototypically human when he digresses to describe the great creatures that God formed and placed in the sea, cautioning the audience against underestimating the creator’s skill based on their hideous appearances: “Quodque hominum falso credit mens nescia fedum, / per propriam speciem natura iudice pulchrum est” (“And yet we should remember that what the ignorant mind of men mistakenly believes to be ugly, when seen for what it is, is beautiful in nature’s judgment”).24 It is in this context that the devil can claim that Eve has come under his power: acting as a “surrogate teacher,” Satan usurps God’s pedagogical role at Eve’s foolish invitation, offering her knowledge of the world that he presents as more comprehensive than what God permits.25 Avitus emphasizes, however, that such acts of unsanctioned inquiry are ultimately futile. Arriving to give sentence for Adam and Eve’s crime, God confronts the same question about death’s nature that Eve had earlier posed to Satan. But, because they have rejected his teaching, God explains, it will be answered only through bitter experience: Ante tamen proprium nati praecurrere laetum conspicies, poenasque tuas in prole uidebis. Ut metuenda magis cernatur mortis imago, peccasse agnoscas quid sit, quid mortua fleri, quidue mori. Before your own death, however, you will behold your children die before you and see in your children your own punishment; this so that the fearful image of death may be better discerned by you and so

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James Ross Macdonald that you may recognize what it is to have sinned, what it is to lament the dead, what it is to die.26

Eden has served Adam and Eve as a noetic cocoon, protecting them from the erring thoughts that had left the devil himself “succensus … se semet fecisse putans, suus ipse creator / ut fuerit” (“set aflame … imagining that he had made himself, that he himself had been his own creator”).27 Indeed, for Avitus, human cognition never can be a morally neutral act: as God cautions Adam, “melius nescire beatis / quod quaesisse nocet” (“It is better for those who are blessed to be ignorant of what causes harm when it is examined”).28

II “But take my advice instead”—Avitus’s straightforward model of diabolic subversion insists on the schematic replacement of one set of instructions by another. If Paradise Lost follows De spiritalis historiae gestis in presenting Satan as God’s unauthorized substitute teacher, however, Milton’s devil faces a considerably subtler test than Avitus’s, who needed only to inflame curiosity in order to provoke disobedience. Milton’s Adam and Eve, by contrast, participate in a very different educational process because, as A. D. Nuttall notes, it is their “Creator who wills the acquisition of knowledge.”29 In Paradise Lost, prelapsarian learning is rooted in the cooperative interchange between creatures and their environment. While Avitus’s unfallen humans have no need to eat, even Milton’s angels cannot do without continual nourishment, as Raphael assures Adam: “food alike those pure / Intelligential substances require / As doth your rational” (5.407–9). Consequently, in Adam’s bower, Raphael eats “nor seemingly / … nor in mist … / … but with keen despatch / Of real hunger” (5.434–37), because “whatever was created, needs / To be sustained and fed” (5.414–15). In Milton’s monist cosmos, all beings are joined by such bonds, a web of mutuality that Geoffrey Hartman illustrates with Adam’s first experience of sunshine:     As new waked from soundest sleep Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed. (8.253–56)

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Even as the sun warms Adam with its rays, he sustains it with his perspiration. It is “an entirely unhurtful, sympathetic, even symbiotic relation: what one creature takes from another benefits both.”30 The embassy of Raphael shows how the same dynamic works through Adam and Eve’s minds as much as their bodies. In terms that suggestively parallel Hartman’s, Ronald Cooley observes that learning before the fall “involves a paradoxical state of simultaneous deficiency and fulfilment.” He goes on to read the meal itself as an “emblematic pre-enactment of the conversation that will follow,”31 because in truth “knowledge is as food,” as Raphael tells his host directly (7.126). This economy of information requires both generosity and restraint. When Adam asks about the heavens, the angel does not reprehend his curiosity: “To ask or search I blame thee not” (8.66). But Raphael declines to provide a clear answer or to lead Adam any deeper into the question, instead counseling him to            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 revealed Not of earth only but of highest heaven. (8.173–78) Emma Annette Wilson notes that “unfallen angelic instruction proceeds in very clear order from cause to matter to form and end,”32 so what Raphael counsels against here is impatience, amplifying his earlier warning against a “surfeit” of knowledge (7.129) and anticipating Michael’s caution after the fall that the body’s health is preserved by observing the “rule of not too much, by temperance” (11.531). As Kathleen Swaim remarks, prelapsarian learning proceeds contiguously, expanding “outward in sequential circles from a secure and unified core and thus annexing and assimilating new territories that are immediately adjacent to core knowledge rather than far-fetched.”33 Unlike Avitus’s, Milton’s is an “open-ended world,”34 in which Adam and Eve may be “by gradual scale sublimed” (5.483) until their      bodies may at last turn all to spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend Ethereal, as we, or may at choice

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James Ross Macdonald Here or in heavenly paradises dwell; If ye be found obedient, and retain Unalterably firm his love entire Whose progeny you are. Meanwhile enjoy Your fill what happiness this happy state Can comprehend, incapable of more. (5.497–505)

Adam and Eve are created “perfect, not immutable” (5.524), signaling an important distinction for Milton that would be without meaning in the static context of Avitus’s Eden. By envisaging earthly perfection itself as a developmental process, Raphael warns Adam against pushing past boundaries prematurely even as he signals their fundamental impermanence. As a result, God’s education of Adam and Eve is not confined to deposits of divine instruction, but progresses through what Barbara Lewalski regards as a “species of Socratic dialogue.”35 Indeed, such encounters can originate even in solitude, as Adam’s intellect is stimulated by contemplation of the natural order around him. In contrast to Avitus’s account, Milton’s Adam awakens to consciousness without encountering God directly. Yet even before God appears to him through “inward apparition” (8.293), Adam is made ready for his presence through the examination of his own body and the garden around him. Realizing that he cannot be his own creator, Adam intuits from his surroundings that he has been formed “by some great maker then, / In goodness and in power pre-eminent” (8.278–79). With evident accuracy, he discerns God’s nature and intuits his own relationship to divine power before God reveals himself explicitly: “Whom thou sought’st I am” (8.316), God tells him approvingly in his seeming dream. As Jeffrey Gore observes, God’s teaching “guides his student to recognize continuities in lessons already learned and to appreciate on a greater level the unified system of the universe and his place within this system.”36 In displaying Adam’s reasoning prowess, Milton follows the dynamic of the Genesis narrative that Avitus had altered, returning the substance of Genesis 2:23–24 to Adam’s own mouth when he encounters Eve:              I now see Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself Before me; woman is her name, of man Extracted; for this cause he shall forgo

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Father and mother, and to his wife adhere; And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul. (8.494–99) These principles of marriage and family life appear to Adam as corollaries of God’s action in producing the female sex; though there exist no mothers or fathers yet in Eden for him to encounter, Adam can theorize their existence speculatively. Milton even moves a step beyond Genesis by attributing to Adam himself the impetus for a suitable companion because, he asks, “In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?” (8.364–66). God, appearing to brighten with pleasure, nevertheless responds with a challenge of his own: “is not the earth / With various living creatures, and the air / Replenished” (8.369–71)? When Adam replies that the animals remain unsuitable to “participate / All rational delight” (8.390–91), God is “not displeased” (8.398), yet continues to probe Adam’s understanding by prompting him to consider the singularity of divine nature: What thinkst thou then of me, and this my state, Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed Of happiness, or not? Who am alone From all eternity, for none I know Second to me or like, equal much less. How have I then with whom to hold convérse Save with the creatures which I made, and those To me inferior, infinite descents Beneath what other creatures are to thee? (8.403–11) Neil Graves remarks on the intimate, even playful quality of the dialogue, as the Father “teaches and teases … never dictatorially imposing the truth, but encouraging the self-expression of his interlocutor.”37 As Adam seemingly wins the argument by pointing out the fundamental dissimilitude between divine boundlessness and his own limited state of being, God reveals that the initial withholding of an appropriate partner was only a trial to “see how thou couldst judge of fit and meet” (8.448). It is, argues Michael Allen, the poem’s most successful lesson, with the Father “deftly leading Adam to self-knowledge by prompting him to articulate Eve’s qualities.”38 Unlike Avitus’s divine lectures, the episode affirms prelapsarian learning as collaborative, a process in which Adam can generate knowledge for (and, indeed, of) himself through

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the interplay of direct instruction, insightful reasoning, and an ongoing inductive analysis and interpretation of the created universe.39 When Satan enters the garden, he recognizes that he must arouse Eve’s wish to know, in order to draw that desire into conflict with her obedience to divine commands: One fatal tree there stands of knowledge called, Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know, Can it be death? And do they only stand By ignorance, is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith? Oh fair foundation laid whereon to build Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with design To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt Equal with gods; aspiring to be such, They taste and die: what likelier can ensue? (4.514–27) Like Avitus’s devil, he identifies the first couple’s subordination to God as his point of attack. But rather than seeking to seize God’s office as teacher for himself, Satan instead strives to induce Eve to take his own place in relation to God by imitating and subverting the deity’s own approach to instruction. The device of the talking snake evokes and revises Adam’s encounter with God in book 8, presenting Eve grappling with the epistemological implications of an analogous existential challenge. Yet the episode also stands in stark contrast to traditional accounts of her temptation, including that of De spiritalis historiae gestis, which place emphasis on her sensual, intellectual, or moral weakness. As Karen Edwards observes, however, Milton’s Eve “perceives at once, correctly, that she needs to test the truth of the serpent’s speech, in the double sense of how and what he speaks.”40 When Satan approaches with flattery of her “celestial beauty” (9.540), Eve’s first response is not a flush of pride but keen intellectual curiosity: “What may this mean? Language of man pronounced / By tongue of brute, and human sense expressed?” (9.553–54). Just as Adam had formed an initial conception of God from the observation

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of his surroundings, her instinct is to ask how this new fact reflects larger truths and meanings, because “such wonder claims attention due” (9.566). When the serpent dilates on how the fruit “more pleased my sense / Than smell of sweetest fennel, or the teats / Of ewe or goat” (9.580–82), Eve remains skeptical, apparently unmoved by hunger and thirst; it is only after “his words replete with guile / Into her heart too easy entrance won” (9.733–34) that her own “eager appetite” awakens and she eats “without restraint” (9.740, 791). The dawning irony is that Milton’s Eve will fall through a rigorous yet erroneous logical analysis of her situation. Rather than overwhelming her reason, Eve’s appetites seem to wait upon it, and so Satan shifts his tactics. Obedience to reason has been an infallible standard for behavior in Eden: “we live / Law to our selves, our reason is our law” (9.653–54), Eve says, without giving any offense to God. John Rogers observes, though, that the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the divine prohibition furnishes the devil an “inherent, structural contradiction that he knows will be easy to exploit.”41 To do so, his temptation presents the inverse image of Avitus’s devil, filled with leading questions but offering few imperatives: The gods are first, and that advantage use On our belief, that all from them proceeds; I question it, for this fair earth I see, Warmed by the sun, producing every kind, Them nothing; if they all things, who enclosed Knowledge of good and evil in this tree, That whoso eats thereof, forthwith attains Wisdom without their leave? And wherein lies The offence, that man should thus attain to know? What can your knowledge hurt him, or this tree Impart against his will if all be his? Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heavenly breasts? (9.718–30) Satan subtly relocates the level of persuasion from explicit propositions to tacit assumptions, ultimately developing a false dichotomy between freedom and obedience: his apparently tentative syntax certainly disguises illocutionary coercion, what Cooley terms “the declarative pressure of rhetorical questions.”42 Yet, as the devil places upon Eve the burden of resolving the

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contradiction between the fruit’s evident effect and God’s prohibition, his pedagogical approach clearly parodies God’s own. Where God had helped Adam to see past a facile, anthropomorphic understanding of the divine nature, the snake invites Eve to infer the effects of the fruit upon herself by analogy to his own apparent transformation into “[i]nternal man” (9.711): “Look on me, / Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, / And life more perfect have attained” (9.687–89). Even Satan’s most loaded question, whether God will “incense his ire / For such a petty trespass, and not praise / Rather your dauntless virtue” (9.692–94), calls to mind Adam’s persistence in the face of seeming divine opposition, raising the possibility that here too disobedience may be licensed or even sought. In contrast to Avitus’s poem, where the devil picks the fruit himself and dandles it in front of Eve, Lee Jacobus points out that in Paradise Lost the “final stages of the temptation are achieved alone, without the intervention of the Serpent.”43 This narrative structure implies a chiastic relation between Adam’s and Eve’s episodes of instruction: while Adam moves in book 8 from reasoning alone to learning from God, the trajectory of Eve’s diabolic re-education regresses towards solitude (if not solipsism). The core of her inner dialogue comprises the clash between her own moral reasoning and the tree’s proscription, in what Evans terms a “brilliant verbal impression of her intellectual waverings:”44 Thy praise he also who forbids thy use, Conceals not from us, naming thee the tree Of knowledge, knowledge both of good and evil; Forbids us then to taste, but his forbidding Commends thee more, while it infers the good By thee communicated, and our want: For good unknown, sure is not had, or had And yet unknown, is as not had at all. In plain then, what forbids he but to know, Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not. (9.750–60) Far from naive acceptance of the serpent’s advice, Eve’s deliberations display the same intellectual acuity and ethical sophistication as Adam’s own. Jacobus observes that her reasoning remains notably clear of outright logical

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fallacies—with the possible exception of equivocation, as she and the devil repeat the word fear without properly discriminating between its senses of “respect and reverence” and “anxiety or fright.”45 Eve’s analysis, finds Jacobus, is manifestly wrong, yet not necessarily unreasonable: Under the best of circumstances, if all that Eve saw and perceived were true and not false—in other words if all the artificial arguments were true and their causes properly analyzed into true causes—then she might be justified in making the assumptions she does. But even then she is dealing with probabilities and not certainties.46 Her logical chain goes awry because it includes a false premise, but inducing a merely intellectual blunder will not suffice for the devil’s purpose: as Stephen Schuler notes, the “fact that the Father and Raphael correct Adam’s errors before he falls suggests that a human can be mistaken about facts and yet remain unfallen.”47 Yet in failing to account for the gaps in her own knowledge, Eve has conflated her own exercise of reason with truth itself. Although these have hitherto coincided within her experience, Satan’s disguise draws them into conflict and converts Eve’s obedience to her own conclusions into apostasy from God, an act of self-will that Thomas Festa identifies as “a form of idolatry.”48 But Eve can hardly recognize it as such, mistakenly thinking the serpent “[f]riendly to man, far from deceit or guile” (9.772), because he disarms suspicion by presenting himself as having received the gifts of speech and rational thought from the tree. Instead, it is the tree itself, the “sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant, / Mother of science” (9.679–80), that the devil sets up as the ostensible teacher, allowing him to proposition Eve on its behalf with what appear to be disinterested motives. Rather than pressing a frontal assault on Eve’s epistemology in the guise of an alternative pedagogical authority, Satan employs fraud to undermine the integrity of her existing reasoning process.

III Despite the remarkable breadth of Milton’s allusions to classical mythology, Nuttall inquires into a conspicuous absence: “Could it be that Prometheus is left out not because he was irrelevant to the theme but because he was embarrassingly relevant?”49 Milton never explicitly names Satan as a teacher, but if the devil is indeed made recognizable as one through extended parody

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of God’s own dialectical method, it suggests that Milton’s view of education shifted between the 1640s and the first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667. His earlier writings evince considerable optimism about the mind’s capacity to come to truth through experiential learning and inductive reasoning. Of Education itself was in fact dedicated to Samuel Hartlib, although several scholars have recognized that the treatise offers sketches for a revised humanist pedagogy rather than a comprehensive program of educational reform along the lines proposed by men like Hartlib, John Amos Comenius, and John Dury.50 Milton’s primary affinity with these “modern Janua’s and Didactics,”51 however, lies in his emphasis on furnishing students opportunities to explore the ­practical applications of their learning: To set forward all these proceedings in nature & mathematicks, what hinders, but that they may procure, as oft as shall be needfull, the helpfull experiences of Hunters, fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and, in the other sciences, Architects [,] Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists … And this will give them such a reall tincture of naturall knowledge, as they shall never forget but dayly augment with delight.52 Milton makes a similar point about the value of experience in a more overtly political context in the Areopagitica, written in the same year, when he says that he “cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”53 Such strenuous effort is licit and necessary because truth itself will emerge spontaneously from the struggle: “though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter.”54 As Milton’s famous image of the hewn body of Osiris suggests, even though diligent search is required to find true knowledge, it remains accessible and intelligible, standing within the world rather than outside it. As Festa observes, this “allegory seems poised to suggest a method by which we might construct an educational response,” reminding the reader of the essential immanence of discrete truths even while truth as a totality remains “steadfastly contingent, unverifiable, and interrogative.”55 This

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would be, necessarily, an inductive and incremental model of truth-seeking, and Schuler observes that such modes of inquiry predominate in the early books of Paradise Lost, as “Raphael’s lessons also emphasize the importance Milton placed on privileging concrete, practical knowledge, over speculative cosmology and metaphysics.”56 Yet, when Eve proposes working apart from Adam she justifies the trial of her own obedience on strikingly similar grounds to the Areopagitica, asking, “what is faith, love, virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?” (9.335–36). As her plan backfires disastrously, this echo seems to suggest qualification of Milton’s own early optimism about experiential knowledge-gathering: even prelapsarian reason proves inadequate to separate the wheat from the tares, and falsehood carries the day without a fight through a ruse de guerre. Yet Jacobus notes that while “Eve is quite adept—adroit actually—at the use of logic,” she is consistently impeded by an inclination “to rely too heavily on second causes while seemingly forgetting more primary or hidden causes.”57 Indeed, this intellectual fragmentation is precisely what Satan achieves by adopting the guise of a fellow learner, inducing her to consider the serpent’s speech as a purely natural occurrence, apart from the “efficient cause of God’s intentions.”58 Even as Adam presciently warns her that “reason not impossibly may meet / Some specious object by the foe suborned, / And fall into deception unaware” (9.360–62), Eve remains fatefully credulous in the reliability of inductive reasoning: because her analysis of new phenomena locates truth in the datum (the special case of the snake), she permits a single piece of extraordinary evidence to overrule the maxim of divine beneficence. Eve’s fall, suggests Jacobus, shows Milton’s awareness that “reason is not proof against deceit, particularly reason which gives credence to specials and builds arguments from them.”59 This insight, moreover, seems to track other indications of Milton’s intellectual life, because his Artis logicæ plenior institutio ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata (A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus) explicitly reverses Eve’s apparent dynamic of epistemological authority. This Latin text, incorporating into a continuous whole Ramus’ Logic, earlier commentary from George Downame, and Milton’s own words, was probably prepared at some point in the 1640s and first published in 1672.60 For Milton, the proper practice of Ramist logical “method invariably proceeds from universals, as containing causes, to singulars, and what is more, from antecedents which are generally and absolutely better known, to the clarification of unknown

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consequents.”61 Recognizing that invention itself “proceeds from singulars, which are prior in time and present themselves first to the senses, and by whose induction general notions are gathered,”62 Milton does not absolutely exclude other valid types of noetic arrangement: when the listener is to be influenced through pleasure or some stronger impulse by an orator or a poet, as is commonly the chief concern of some, a crypsis of method will usually be employed; some homogeneous axioms will be suppressed, such as the clarifying definitions, divisions, and transitions. Certain heterogeneous ones will be appropriated, such as digressions from the point and dwelling on a point. And especially will the order of things be inverted.63 Satan, likened at the outset of his temptation to “some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished” (9.670–72), clearly abuses the legitimate license that Milton grants these discursive forms. But within the domain of pure logic (as opposed to rhetoric) the meaning of empirical evidence must be ascertained within a larger epistemological context, considering special cases through deduction from first principles. Thus, notes William Riggs, for Ramists, “teaching the general is ideally prior to the particular.”64 And precisely such a model of intellectual reorientation, Swaim argues, appears to be the aim of Michael’s private tutorial after the fall, as he “supplies Adam with the universals, the biblical givens, and teaches Adam how to evaluate the particulars of experience by that light, to dispose experience within a methodical scheme of spiritual priorities.”65 Comparing Milton’s treatment of this moment with the parallel episode in Avitus is instructive, because in De spiritalis historiae gestis Adam suffers delusory visions from the moment of eating the apple: Uix uno pomum libauerat horrida morsu ingluuies, summumquae dabat uix esca saporem: ecce, repentinus fulgor circumstetit ora, lugendoque nouos respersit lumine uisus. Non cecos natura dedit, nec luminis usu priuatam faciem peperit perfectio formae. Nunc mage cecus eris, cui iam non sufficit illud noscere, quod tantus uoluit te nosse Creator.

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Ad uitam uobis cernendi facta facultas, uos etiam letum uestra sed sponte uidetis. Scarcely had his horrid maw taken a single bite of the apple, scarcely had the food released its first faint flavor, when, behold, a sudden brilliance played about his face and scattered strange visions around him with its mournful light. It was not Nature, you see, that caused blindness in mankind. No, our perfect species did not bring forth faces deprived of the use of light. But rather now, Adam, you will be blind, you who were not satisfied to know what your Almighty Creator wanted you to know. The power of sight was created for you for use in life, but now, by your own choice, you will look upon death as well.66 In choosing an autodidactic approach, Adam and Eve forfeit their privileged access to divine truth, and the attainment of the knowledge they desire becomes the just punishment for improperly seeking it. Milton’s Adam, of course, undergoes his own alteration of vision, but Michael instead offers true pictures of sacred history to console and enlighten him. Yet rather than Adam intuiting and God approving, Ann Baynes Coiro points out that this second dialogue instead turns on repetition and correction. After Abel’s death, Michael must retrieve Adam from hopeless despair, while Adam’s glee at the mismatched marriages of the daughters of Cain forces Michael to warn him against his own instincts: “Judge not what is best / By pleasure, though to nature seeming meet” (11.603–4). Michael must teach “Adam his lessons over and over again, allowing him to contemplate moral good and evil that he may judge correctly for himself. Over and over again, Adam judges incorrectly and learns from his mistake.”67 In a fallen world where reason itself is compromised, Adam must learn to correct his responses to the world’s diversity of special cases by considering them in terms of transcendental principles of truth. Coiro observes that “each lesson is weighted down by a darker, more complex vision of man’s capability for corruption and failure and weighted by the admission that knowledge can lead not only to good, but to evil,”68 bringing Adam towards the intellectual modesty that Raphael had originally counseled: Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill

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“This having learned, thou hast attained the sum / Of wisdom,” Michael replies (12.575–76). Adam’s growing awareness of the fallibility of his own mind reminds him that empirical knowledge must be received within the epistemological context of divine intentionality and human obedience. Certainly the shift is subtle: as Riggs points out, Comenius himself “repeatedly asserts the pedagogical priority of universal axioms,” and it is Milton whose tractate places less emphasis on this aspect of experiential learning.69 Yet as Milton moved past the failed experiment of the commonwealth and protectorate, it would seem hardly surprising if his optimism about the edifying potential of experience and the immanence of truth had waned. Throughout Paradise Lost, he remains deeply engaged with the same fundamental questions of epistemology that preoccupied him throughout his life, and the epic poem should be considered a crucial component of the constellation of texts, mostly polemic, that Thomas Kranidas regards as Milton’s extended moral “attack on formal education and on bad teachers.”70 In presenting Satan as the pattern of this type, Milton evidently shares with Avitus a conception of the devil as a parodist of divine instruction, but he significantly reworks the simpler view of diabolic subversion in De spiritalis historiae gestis. For Avitus, self-directed learning and human sin became ­inextricably intertwined with Eve’s first bite of the apple: Namque hinc posteritas uitiato germine duxit artibus inlicitis cognoscere uelle futura arcanisque sacris tardos inmittere sensus, edita uel caelo uel tetro mersa profundo rimari, et cautas naturae inrumpere leges; quaerere nunc astris quo quisquam sidere natus, prospera quam ducat restantis tempora uitae … It was from that act that their posterity, because of their tainted seed, conceived a desire to learn the future through unlawful arts, to direct their dull senses towards holy secrets, to search out what Heaven holds on high or what is sunk in the foul depths of the earth, and to

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break the careful laws of nature, now to inquire from the stars under what constellation each man is born and how prosperous he may be for the remainder of his life …71 Moreover, the devil’s program of continuing education remained painfully visible to Avitus in the world around him: “Horrendum dictu signisque notabile monstrum: / nam quicquid toto dirum committitur orbe, / iste docet scelerumque manus ac tela gubernat” (“This is a portent dreadful to speak of but known by the traces of his work, for whatever dire deed is committed anywhere on earth it is he who instructs the hand of crime and guides its weapons”).72 Rather than a wholesale rejection of autonomous human learning in either the unfallen or fallen worlds, Paradise Lost seems crucially concerned with defining its proper place, for Eve as much as for the poem’s fallen readers, who seem intended to follow Adam by making sense of the poem’s own copious (and frequently ambiguous) specials in terms of its own declared purpose, to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26). Milton’s devil infiltrates an Eden where independent study is not grounds for expulsion, and so he works to deconstruct Eve’s existing knowledge, counterfeiting God’s Socratic method with sophistry. Thomas Festa sees the fall as “a contest between pedagogues,”73 and the depth of Satan’s immediate victory is clear: as Eve convinces herself and then Adam to partake of the fruit, she becomes not merely the devil’s student, but his epigone. Yet compared to Avitus’s devil Satan seems a peculiarly marginalized, even self-effacing figure, subverting Eve’s obedience not by imparting any forbidden knowledge directly, but by compromising her reasoning and then standing aside: as she concludes her deliberations, he “unminded slunk / Into the wood fast by” (10.332–33). As Stanley Fish observes, Eve “does not reproduce any of his questionable syllogisms in her appeal to Adam, because they are less important than her willingness to listen to them.”74 Ironically, her own effort to make sense of the anomaly of the talking snake seems to do more to precipitate the fall than the content of the serpent’s carefully prepared solicitations.

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“The First and Wisest of Them All” Paradise Regained and the Beginning of Thinking J. Antonio Templanza

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fter rejecting the spectacles of Parthian military might and imperial Roman luxury, the Son of God in Milton’s Paradise Regained is confronted by a subtle revision of the knowledge temptation that Adam and Eve faced in Eden. Satan recommends that Jesus “Be famous then / By wisdom; as thy Empire must extend, / So let extend thy mind o’re all the world, / In knowledge, all things in it comprehend.”1 Satan assumes a conflict between the universal nature of the forthcoming Kingdom of God and the Son’s comparatively limited and parochial Hebrew education. “All knowledge,” he tells Jesus, “is not couch’t in Moses Law, / The Pentateuch or what the Prophets wrote” (4.225–26). As if to supplement what he characterizes as deficient in Hebrew learning, Satan offers the Son the sum of pagan classical learning, symbolized by the city of “Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts / And Eloquence” (4.240–41). Moreover, he does so while abandoning the temporal specificity of the earlier temptations in favor of a purely asynchronous presentation. Unlike his previous offers of Parthia and Rome, which appear contemporary to the narrative action, the “kingdom” of Athens is presented as a timeless compendium of rhetorical, philosophical, and artistic pagan glory. In Satan’s vision, Homer appears as a colleague to Plato, and Socrates to Alexander. Jesus rejects Satan’s offer, just as he does every other in Paradise Regained, and he disparages all of classical learning as “false, or little else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm” (4.291–92).

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The Son’s dismissive rejection of the Athens temptation (and, by implication, the tradition of classical learning in its entirety) has provoked a history of apologetic responses by anxious Miltonists who remember all too well the Nativity Ode’s apocalyptic banishment of pagan deities. Taking the ethos of that poem as a guide, these critics interpret the Jesus of Paradise Regained as the voice of the poet’s always agonizingly correct superego, who constantly reminds us that what we should value is not what we would value. Elizabeth Pope deems classical learning to be “the one form of worldly activity which appealed to [Milton] most,” the “last infirmity of the noble mind.”2 Barbara Lewalski defends the rejection as being well within the mainstream of Christian belief: “the tone of Christ’s denunciation of the schools does not seem noticeably harsher than that of many similar Christian comments on classical learning.”3 Consequently, the Son’s response to Athens is construed not as a rejection of knowledge but of satanic guile. As Richard DuRocher writes, “In tempting the Son with knowledge, Satan is not offering the Son knowledge itself; instead, the fallen angel casts knowledge as a political tool rather than a means of genuine enlightenment”; in contrast, Jesus asserts that “he has sufficient knowledge [such that] he does not depend upon pagan learning for his life or mission.”4 His independence from pagan learning is seen as the result of his adherence to a superior Hebraic education, whereby “rather Greece from us these arts deriv’d,” though “Ill imitated” (4.338–39), and this declaration of classical learning’s inherent inferiority and “secondariness” is what allows Thomas Festa to claim that “veneration of the classics is logically consistent with devotion to the character who rejects them”: to wit, Jesus, the “secondary, created deity … in relation to the Father.”5 Yet however correctly these recuperative readings may account for the limitations of Satan’s politically motivated conception of knowledge, uncertain and unsettled questions still remain. If the Son has “sufficient knowledge,” what is it? Is it possible to state in positive terms what he knows? What exactly is the “Light from above” he claims to receive, and how does it make “other doctrine [unneeded] though granted true” (4.289–90)? Are we meant to interpret his subsequent praise of “Sion’s songs” (4.347), “our Prophets” (4.356), and “our Law” (4.364) as support for an exclusively biblicist education? Finally, why would the Son mock Socrates with the line, “The first and wisest of them all profess’d / To know this only, that he nothing knew” (4.293–94), when in the preceding book he praises the philosopher in the same breath as “patient Job” (3.95)? Jesus’ praise or censure of his prior types in Paradise Regained

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may be limited, but he is consistent. Socrates is the only figure who receives two apparently different appraisals, so how can we account for this inconsistency? We can ask a corollary question: what are we to make of the fact that Milton, author of Paradise Lost, put into the mouth of Jesus an indictment of Plato, who “to fabling fell and smooth conceits” (4.295)? Frank Kermode wryly notes that “it is characteristic of the situation that this line should itself be redolent of Platonism,” and that Paradise Regained gives us “an objection to Plato which is, ultimately, Platonic,”6 but is the entire scene then nothing more than a clever joke? Is Milton just being silly? It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate the ways in which Milton invites us to consider the Athens temptation and the Son’s reply to be profoundly and productively different from what happens during the long “kingdoms temptation” to which Athens is invariably appended. If we recall that by this point in the poem Satan has already offered Jesus “The Kingdoms of the world” (4.163), which have been rejected “with disdain” (4.170), then we must interpret the Athens scene with great care and rigor. Just as Satan tempts Jesus to reduce his mission to a politically motivated conception of philosophy as “profound dispute” (4.214), a particularly satanic analytic tempts us to interpret Athens as just another self-contained episode where the “kingdom” of Christianity is defined though the negation of its “other,” which in this case is classical learning. Yet such an interpretation merely reifies the very distinction between Christianity and philosophy that the temptation implicitly posits. As long as we analyze Athens in the same way we do the second temptation as a whole, and not as an ironic response to the question of what true and redemptive knowledge is, we will have no choice but to identify Jesus’ rejection as the rejection of a certain system of knowledge, and we will fall for the same temptation that the poem celebrates the Son for overcoming. In contrast, an expansive yet rigorous examination of the Athens temptation points the way to more satisfying answers to our earlier questions. We can indeed state in positive terms what Jesus knows, although we must do so very carefully. The “Light from above” is simultaneously severe and charitable to classical philosophy and learning because it precedes (or is the precedent for) them. Despite how the individual Jesus chooses to “delight [his] private hours” (4.331), he does not at all advocate an exclusive biblicism as the sine qua non of education. Finally, his apparent indictment of Socrates is in truth no indictment at all, for in Paradise Regained the Son enacts a mode of knowing totally at home in the man who “profess’d / To know this only, that

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he nothing knew” (4.293–94). William Madsen points out that “Paradise Lost brings into dramatic and symbolic confrontation two modes of thought that appear in varying proportions in the Christian tradition,”7 which he identifies as the Greek and the Hebrew. Paradise Regained continues in the spirit of the earlier epic, not by collapsing the confrontation into the unequivocal victory of the Hebraic side of this tradition, but by setting the stage for readers to redeem the very side of it that the Son ostensibly rejects.8 The poem would be an artistic and theological failure otherwise. In short, the Athens temptation represents the redemption of thinking; and, because Jesus’ heroism is both exemplary and unique, his response to Athens is at once the example and the ground of this redemption.

Obedient Reading The narrator of Paradise Regained begins with an intention to “sing / Recover’d Paradise to all mankind, / By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d / Through all temptation” (1.2–5), so once again the nature of obedience takes center stage, although more obliquely than it did in Paradise Lost. It is up to the reader to decipher the Son’s exemplary obedience by referring to the earlier epic as a guide, as its final two books’ overview of human history includes the period during which the action of the brief epic unfolds. Desiring to know how his posterity will finally avenge him, Adam asks Michael to describe the battle that he imagines will be the turning point of history. In response, Michael demurs in one of the most famous corrections of Paradise Lost:           Dream not of their fight, As of a duel, or the local wounds Of head or heel: not therefore joins the Son Manhood to Godhead, with more strength to foil Thy enemy; nor so is overcome Satan, whose fall from heaven, a deadlier bruise, Disabled not to give thee thy death’s wound: Which he, who comes thy savior, shall recure, Not by destroying Satan, but his works In thee and in thy seed: nor can this be, But by fulfilling that which thou didst want, Obedience to the law of God, imposed

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On penalty of death, and suffering death, The penalty to thy transgression due, And due to theirs which out of thine will grow: So only can high justice rest apaid. (12.386–401)9 While it remains unclear from these lines what exactly “Obedience to the law of God” looks like or how this obedience can destroy Satan’s works not only in Adam’s descendants but in Adam himself, it is clear enough that Michael’s speech does not restrict the redemption to a single historical event like the crucifixion. The Son’s death is the consequence of his obedience, not its expression: “For this he shall live hated, be blasphemed, / Seized on by force, judged, and to death condemned / A shameful and accursed, nailed to the cross / By his own nation, slain for bringing life” (12.411–14). The antecedent of “this” is not any one act, but the more general “fulfilling [of] Obedience to the law of God.” Thus, wherever or whenever the obedient action that redeems humanity appears, it will certainly precede the crucifixion.10 In Paradise Lost, the nature of obedience is abundantly clear. For unfallen human beings and the angels, obedience consists simply in following God’s direct and unambiguous (albeit arbitrary11) decree. Inside the postlapsarian world of Paradise Regained, by contrast, God pronounces no single command for Jesus to follow. Although God does have a speech in the brief epic, it happens only once and then only to the angel Gabriel, who neither replies to God nor has any traffic with the characters and events of the poem. God is effectively absent in the narrative world of Paradise Regained, where everybody has to make do like fallen Adam, “deprived / His blessèd count’nance” (11.316–17). In addition, like Milton’s theological conception of the Son, the Hebrew scriptures to which Jesus has access cannot be imagined as a perfect substitute for the explicit commands of God. At best, they comprise the starting point for the Son’s redemption of thinking, not the full extent of his being.12 Upon learning his divine parentage from Mary, Jesus “strait … again revolv’d / The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ / Concerning the Messiah” (1.259–61), but soon finds no clear and explicit instructions about how he might “Publish his God-like office now mature” (1.188). The “Messiah” he will become is “to our Scribes / Known partly” (1.261–62), and at this moment the poem cleaves the Son and the texts that prophesize him. Jesus “revolves” the Hebrew scriptures and, with a telling enjambment, “soon found of whom

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they spake / I am” (1.262–63). Unlike the definitive divine “I am” of God, the Son’s “I am” here points to an essential ambiguity: it may be the case that Jesus deduces (“found”) that he is in fact the figure “of whom they spake,” or it may be that he locates (“found”) such a figure that the historical “Prophets” need or want him to become. This profound confusion—in contrast to the Son’s certainty in Paradise Lost—also unfolds on a syntactic level. His declaration that a “multitude of thoughts” (1.196) arises from consideration of “What from within I feel my self, and hear / What from without comes often to my ears” (1.198–99) makes sense on its own (he wonders how to square the external testimony of his birthright with what he knows about himself) until the last line: “Ill sorting with my present state compar’d” (1.200). At first it seems that the phrase “Ill sorting” describes the relationship between “What from without” and “What from within,” a chaotic gap where rumor and the Son’s self-knowledge come to blows, such that “my present state” is a reiteration of the latter with which the former is improperly mixed; but upon arrival at “compar’d,” the logical thrust of the sentence changes. The conflict between external rumor and internal intuition becomes itself the “Ill sorting,” from which the Son’s “present state” is set apart. The reader thus gains no positive knowledge about the Son’s identity by imagining it in terms of an opposition to (or association with) external testimony. Paradise Regained transforms this otherwise maddening ambiguity into a source of the Son’s innovative interpretive strength, one of the earliest instances of which occurs during the banquet temptation scene. Often glossed as an extension of the biblically sanctioned first temptation to turn stones into bread, Milton’s expansion sees Satan offer the Son “A Table richly spred in regal mode, / With dishes pil’d, and meats of noblest sort / And savour,” which also includes “all Fish from Sea or Shore, / Freshet, or purling Brook, of shell or fin” (2.340–45). That the “law of God” to which Michael refers in Paradise Lost is not reducible to meaning only the “Law and Prophets” of Paradise Regained becomes clear in Jesus’ response to Satan’s banquet, in which he does not even mention the Hebrew prohibition on shellfish. Michael Fixler argues that “such detailed ritualistic prohibitions as are enjoined in Leviticus xi would have for [Milton] no positive force as expressing the everlasting will of God [and] there is an indication here that any assumption restricting Man’s free will and faith by chaining piety or virtue to such injunctions would act as an instrument of temptation.”13

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The threat Fixler identifies is very real in Paradise Regained, given that Satan has access to the same texts and materials (“The Law and Prophets”) that are available to Jesus. The Adversary may have lost some of his memory14 and luster from Paradise Lost, but his rational powers are quite intact in the brief epic. Satan is a being of hideous intelligence, capable of learning from his experience in the poem and transcending (in his own way) merely literal interpretations of Jesus’ mission. Not only does he have access to all written documents (including, of course, the Hebrew scriptures) from the beginning of history, and not only does he admit to having observed Jesus from a young age, but he also interprets the end of the Son’s being on earth the same way Jesus does. When Jesus studies what his sources say about the Messiah, he concludes that he must undergo “many a hard assay even to the death, / E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, / Or work Redemption for mankind, whose sins / Full weight must be transferr’d upon my head” (1.264–67). Satan’s own research points him to a similar conclusion: “Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate, / Attends thee, scorns, reproaches, injuries, / Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death” (4.386–88). Neither Satan nor the Son explicitly articulate what causal relationship might obtain between suffering death and the genesis of the Kingdom of God, and it is certainly not the case that the Son possesses this knowledge and simply keeps it secret from Satan. If we understand “knowledge” to mean information or data, then both Jesus and Satan can be said to have the same knowledge of the Messiah at the outset of Paradise Regained. Despite this fact, both the poem and its critics maintain and assume that Jesus is somehow right and Satan somehow wrong, the critical position summed up by Robert Pierce: “Satan knows his Biblical texts so well that he can manipulate them ingeniously, but Jesus sees through the manipulations because his knowledge of Scripture is deep and because he understands its spiritual meaning, not just its letter.”15 Ultimately, what separates Jesus and Satan is not the latter’s mere literal-mindedness, but a fundamental disagreement on the nature of obedience. To Satan, obedience simply means following the orders of a superior without question. He imagines his task in Paradise Regained as deciphering the orders of Jesus’ superior, God, so that the divine plan might be frustrated. It does not occur to Satan (perhaps it cannot) how the Son’s redemptive obedience can be at once liberating and not antinomian. Michael’s prophecy at the end of Paradise Lost—that “Obedience to the law of God” is what repairs the effects of the fall—leaves the exact character

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of that obedience opaque; and although it is the task of Paradise Regained to “now sing / Recover’d Paradise to all mankind, / By one mans firm obedience” (1.2–4), Milton’s prose writings also shed light on what this obedience looks like. In fact, Milton takes up the question of authentic knowledge in Of Education: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.”16 Immediately we can make two observations. First, “repair[ing] the ruins of our first parents” involves “regaining to know God aright,” which suggests that there exists for Milton a relationship between soteriology and epistemology that is both essential and positive. The more we know, the more thoroughly the ruins are repaired. Second, “know[ing] God aright” is identified as the precursor to a virtue “united to the heavenly grace of faith,” such that the exercise of faith is not at all construed as an inherently anti-intellectual activity. Thus, if redemption requires the active exercise of the faculty of reason, then for Milton genuine obedience consists in authentic thinking. In contrast, any obedience that does not consist of thoughtful reflection and deliberation will not redeem humanity but instead perpetuate its fallen enthrallment. Milton strongly condemns such “obedience” as fraudulent and illegitimate in Areopagitica: “A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”17 If Milton contends that faith without understanding is not faith but blasphemy,18 then Paradise Regained must demonstrate that contention in the figure of the Son. In this sense, if Jesus chooses to reject Satan’s banquet on the grounds that it includes shellfish, then he would be accepting Satan’s tacit argument that the world’s bounty—except a few arbitrary restrictions—ought not to be denied by its rightful possessor. That is, like Adam, Jesus should submit to “The bond of nature” (9.956). Likewise, if the Son chooses to reject Athens simply on the grounds that it is not Jerusalem, then his salvific mission would become his heresy. The Son’s response to the Athens temptation is thus the culmination of an ongoing series of productive negations that reveal the kind of thinking that allows our own “regaining to know God aright.” During the early part of the dialogue, Satan sees his conception of himself and his history refuted point by

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point. When he claims to have “resort sometimes” in Heaven (1.367), Jesus replies that his visits are “As a poor miserable captive thrall” (1.411). When he recalls with pride his task “To prove [Job] and illustrate his high worth” (1.370), Jesus refuses to acknowledge that anything other than “pleasure to do ill excites” him (1.423). Finally, when Satan professes to aid humanity by granting “answers, oracles, portents, and dreams” (1.395), the Son retorts: “But what have been thy answers, what but dark / Ambiguous and with double sense deluding, / Which they who ask’d have seldom understood, / And not well understood, as good not known?” (1.434–37). This final refutation provides an important clue for understanding the Athens temptation. Jesus maintains that Satan’s oracular claims are illegitimate on the grounds that whatever truth his “oracles” might contain is so intermixed with falsity that their “truth” becomes finally unintelligible; and, in Milton’s logocentric universe, unintelligibility is tantamount to non-existence. The solution to this dilemma, Jesus concludes, is not to reject the desire for intelligibility—not to reject thinking—but to render the world intelligible in the right way. God “sends his Spirit of Truth henceforth to dwell / In pious Hearts, an inward Oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know” (1.462– 64), so that what once may have been called “oracling” must now become “thinking.” The Son’s redemption of thinking continues even on occasions when knowledge does not appear to be directly at stake. Satan begins book 3 by sycophantically praising the Son, claiming that his “Counsel would be as the Oracle” to “Kings and Nations” (3.12–13). He bases this claim on Jesus’ declaration in book 2 that “he who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King” (2.466–67), a description of temperance that Satan interprets as nothing other than warrior’s discipline, the prerequisite for conquest on the battlefield or in the court. Satan imagines Jesus’ spectacular oracular ability (which is really just knowing the value of self-control) can be marshaled for martial ends. The Son’s response, that Satan’s conception of military glory is both transient and destructive and that genuine glory consists of “deeds of peace [and] wisdom eminent” (3.91), places the focus squarely on the question of knowledge. He dismisses conceptions of glory defined by popular acclaim, because the “miscellaneous rabble[s] praise and … admire they know not what” (3.50–52). Yet we should note that, because the “rabble” is condemned not for choosing the incorrect object but instead for not choosing reasonably, Jesus’ becomes more a condemnation of not

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thinking than one of making an error. The “miscellaneous rabble” is a “heretic in the truth.” While Milton’s rationalist ethics is based on the assumption of an effectively absent God and is set within a postlapsarian world where human beings are “deprived / His blessèd count’nance,” an explicit divine sign does in fact appear in Paradise Regained, but this sign turns out to be the exception that proves the rule. The event that begins the narrative is the baptism of Jesus at the Jordan, and triangulating the various ways the narrator, Satan, and Jesus interpret this event (and specifically, the dove) reveals what is at stake in the Milton’s conception of truth in the poem. The first account is given by the narrator: “Heaven open’d, and in likeness of a Dove / The Spirit descended, while the Fathers voice / From Heav’n pronounc’d him his beloved Son” (1.30–32). Shortly thereafter, Satan reports to his infernal council that he witnesses “A perfect Dove descend, what e’re it meant” (1.83), and his postulation of ambiguity persists, despite having heard “the Sov’raign voice” (1.84) proclaim Jesus’ birthright. In contrast, when the Son recalls the scene, saying that “The Spirit descended on me like a Dove” (1.282), his account aligns with the narrator’s identification of dove and Spirit, so he clearly realizes what the dove “meant.” Affirming the Son’s hermeneutic victory at this moment in the poem, Steven Goldsmith argues that Satan’s equivocation reveals how he is “cut off permanently from such revelation,” whereas Jesus “emerges … as the Logos, an expression of divinity where no discrepancy exists between vehicle and tenor.”19 However correct this interpretation of the Son’s superior account of the baptism may be, the adversarial-juridical framework it implies proves to be an unsatisfactory and ineffective hermeneutic model for Paradise Regained. If the differing reports of the scene are to be judged according to their validity (that is, according to their correspondence to the reality of the world), then Jesus’ agreement with the narrator renders his account beyond reproach. Of course, such an interpretation predicates Jesus’ superiority merely on correct correspondence to a given (or supposed) narrative reality. If the Son is right simply because he agrees with the narrator—despite considerable critical hand-waving that seeks to ground his righteousness on something a bit more real, such as the “private wisdom he derives from access to the Father”20—then Paradise Regained is advancing a perversely platonic idea of truth as mere correctness or orthodoxy. If not Jesus, then certainly we as his interpreters would be “heretic[s] in the truth,” with no way of meaningfully following his

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example in our own lives, and following the Son’s example is precisely what postlapsarian humanity must do to redeem itself. The thrice-told baptism scene’s refusal to participate in a hermeneutics of validity provokes our informed recognition of the Son’s exemplary obedience, which consists in this and all cases not in interpreting correctly but in re-interpreting meaningfully. When Robert Pierce writes that Jesus’ “knowledge of Scripture is deep … and he understands its spiritual meaning, not just its letter,”21 we must not just stop there, but carry forward our suspicions of any interpretation grounded on notions of validity or correctness. In Paradise Regained, genuine obedience (and the redemption with which Milton identifies it) ultimately depends upon cultivating “A spirit and judgment equal or superior” (4.324) to any command given by pastors, assemblies, or books— whether pagan or scriptural.

Knowledge and Power Milton’s conception of redemption is profoundly epistemological. We may not be able (on our own) to think ourselves back into the Garden, but thinking remains the indispensable activity if we are to regain or cultivate “A paradise within” (Paradise Lost 12.587). The temptation of classical learning is the most important proving ground for this kind of thinking, disclosed by the Son’s exemplary response, which is required for us to become fully redeemed creatures. Contrary to the prevailing critical understanding, it is actually the case that this response does not reject classical learning but instead redeems it; and it does so by associating the Son’s mode of knowing with the most authentic mode of thinking available to the classical tradition. The recent history of critical interpretations of Athens reveals the tendency to set the Son’s superior knowledge (validated by his purported yet murky connection to God’s omniscience) over and against a classical philosophy that is at best incoherent and at worst incorrect. Frank Kermode notes the “Puritan manner” of the rejection of Athens, with Milton “identifying useful learning with the Law, and dismissing, like St. Augustine who is throughout this passage not far from his mind, the dissensions of the gentile philosophers in favour of the concord of the canonical scriptures.”22 John Ulreich explicitly links his knowledge and divinity: “The apparent harshness with which Christ rejects unredeemed philosophical wisdom should not blind us to the true wisdom he espouses [which] comes only through participation in the Logos,

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who is the divine nature of Jesus.”23 Richard DuRocher carries on the critical tradition by associating Athens with the prior kingdoms temptation: “What the Son’s stance shows us is a kind of higher, absolute standard of depending solely on the word of God, a stance that is consistent with all of his rebuttals—including the final one—to Satan’s temptations throughout the poem.”24 What these critical perspectives on the Athens temptation share is their uncritical willingness to accept at face value the sentiment with which Jesus begins his response: Think not but that I know these things, or think I know them not; not therefore am I short Of knowing what I aught: he who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true; But these are false, or little else but dreams, Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm. (4.286–92) Despite the overwhelming critical predilection to assume that Jesus is in fact the “he” “who receives / Light from above,” the poem does not demand this reading. The assumption is of course very reasonable and perhaps even valid; but, given what is at stake in the Son’s redemption of thinking, it would be a mistake to interpret his response to Athens as an assertion of “inner light” doctrine. Notwithstanding the fact that the Son is perhaps the only being in Milton’s universe who can properly lay claim to such inspiration, the more important fact that Miltonic soteriology requires Jesus be an exemplary Messiah suggests that there is more to the Athens scene than meets the eye. As was the case in the baptism scene, Paradise Regained demands that its readers interpret the Son’s response to Athens not in terms of its validity or correctness, but in such a way that lets Jesus’ thinking become their own. Arguments couched in the rhetoric of “inner light”—regardless of the ultimate source of the light, whether from within or “above”—always already assume a conception of truth as validity or correctness. Typically, the problem with such arguments lies in the difficulty (if not impossibility) of their verification. Yet, even if we were to rule out the verification problem by granting the Son privileged access to even a limited form of divine omniscience, doing so would abolish the exemplary character of his heroism, relocating the salvific force away from his actions (which we can imitate) to his nature (which we

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cannot). As Gregory Chaplin points out, Milton’s aversion to the doctrine of redemption by crucifixion alone stems from the same theology that grounds his politics: “Milton turns away from the Passion for reasons quite different from those of Donne and Herbert. He rejects it as a spectacle that disempowers the individual believer.”25 This exemplary character of the Son’s heroism comprises the center of Milton’s theological synthesis of epistemology and ethics. After all, “regaining to know God aright” requires that we not only “love him,” but also “imitate him [and] be like him, as we may the nearest.”26 For Ryan Netzley, the Son’s exemplary heroism consists in the hermeneutics he articulates during the Athens scene: “Rereading is itself training in dispositional ethics, a constant attention to the practices and attitudes one brings to evaluation and decision, not conclusive results or meaningful propositions or pietistic lessons.”27 Netzley argues that it is Jesus’ repetitive reading of the Hebrew scriptures that provides this training for him, inculcating “A spirit and judgment equal or superior” (4.324) to the corpus of classical learning as well as even the scriptures themselves. I believe we can take this insight further; for, if “the usefulness of reading Paradise Regained is not tied exclusively to knowledge achieved or learned, but rather to its exercise of readers, which produces the superior spirit and judgment,”28 then the interpretation that Jesus rejects a certain system of knowledge when he rejects Athens is precisely the wrong one. He does not respond to the temptation of classical learning by judging the validity or correctness of Athenian learning; instead, he redeems it. If Jesus is the “perfect Man” whose task is “To earn Salvation for the Sons of men” (1.166–67), then Paradise Regained articulates that salvation as a mode of knowing or thinking; and it is very important to distinguish this mode of knowing from something like a fact that is known. At the end of his indictment of the various schools of classical philosophy, the Son summarizes their harmful impact: “Who therefore seeks in these / True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion / Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, / An empty cloud” (4.318–21). Significantly, the Son never states in certain terms where one might seek “True wisdom” successfully. When he extols the virtues of his “native Language” by mentioning “our Law and Story strew’d / With Hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscrib’d” (4.333–35), he maintains that their purpose is to “delight [his] private hours / With Music or with Poem” (4.331–32). He does not assert a necessary connection between these private delights and his intention to “Publish his God-like office now mature” (1.188).

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In Paradise Regained, both the Son and Satan pursue the question of how that intention might be realized in the world, and the assumption that this “God-like office” involves the inauguration of the “promis’d Kingdom” (1.265) functions as the implicit ground of their dialogue from the closing of the banquet scene in book 2 until the storm scene of book 4. Typically called the long kingdoms temptation, this sequence sees Satan invariably associate Jesus’ “high designs” (2.410) with notions of leadership and domination. He introduces the Athens temptation by reminding Jesus that “with the Gentiles much thou must converse, / Ruling them by perswasion as thou mean’st” (4.229–30); and he closes the asynchronous display of Athens by reducing Greek philosophy to an assemblage of “rules [that] will render thee a King compleat” (4.283). According to the overwhelming critical consensus, these “rules” perform the same task in Satan’s imagination as do the Parthian “Utensils of war” (3.336). Arnold Stein reads the Athens temptation entirely in terms of conquest: “Satan makes no effort … to conceal his concept of mind as power. He does not hesitate to attribute spatial existence to the mind, and activity like the activity of one kind of matter dominating another.”29 Similarly, Barbara Lewalski interprets Athens as the “kingdom which is the embodiment of precisely that nonmaterial good—classical learning—which seems to be … necessary for Christ’s kingly rule by persuasion.”30 Taking this line of reasoning to its conclusion, Patricia Taylor notes with approval the political impact of the Son’s responses: “The Son in Paradise Regained, like the Christ of the Gospels, is ‘the Word,’ whose words have power, and this power, like the kingship of self-rule, is extended to all Christians … The heroic action of the Son is in his publishing of truth, the ruling of minds instead of bodies.”31 While it is true of course that Satan conflates knowledge and power like a perverse Baconian, the Son does not actually need to refute this satanic conflation during the Athens scene, because by the end of his rejection of Rome and the conclusion of the long kingdoms temptation he has already done so. Because the Athens temptation includes the “schools of antient Sages … who bred / Great Alexander to subdue the world” (4.251–52), the critical claim that “the fallen angel casts knowledge as a political tool”32 seems warranted. Yet if political conquest is the end of knowledge or learning for Satan, then Rome already embodies this end. Rome possesses the “ample Territory, wealth and power, / Civility of Manners, Arts, and Arms, / And long Renown” (4.82–84) that are understood to be the ends and benefits of classical learning during the Athens temptation. In addition to the historical fact

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that Greece is already a province of Rome when the poem takes place, Satan’s own announcement that the kingdoms temptation ends with Rome—“These having shewn thee, I have shewn thee all / The Kingdoms of the world, and all thir glory” (4.88–89)—renders his subsequent offer of Athens redundant or at the very least out of place. I think the difficulty in providing a satisfying account of the Athens scene stems in large part from critics’ conflation of two different interpretive apparatuses usually brought to bear on Paradise Regained. The first apparatus is centered on the biblical source of the poem, the Son’s sojourn in the wilderness where he is tempted by Satan three times. Merritt Hughes, whose interpretation stretches the kingdoms temptation from Satan’s second meeting with Jesus just before the banquet all the way until his departure after the Athens temptation (2.300–4.393), deploys this apparatus in order to refer to the Protestant essence of the poem as a whole, whereby the first temptation entails the distrust of God’s providence while the third involves presumption upon it.33 The second critical framework articulates Paradise Regained as Milton’s wisdom epic, a classical genre that narrates the philosopher’s ascent from appetite, through passion, and finally to reason. Howard Schultz projects all of Satan’s temptations onto an “ethical ladder,” whereby “learning, or, more exactly, clergy-learning [becomes] the fairest and most plausible bait known to Antichrist.”34 James Nohrnberg is slightly more careful, and he restricts this ascent only to the events of the second day: “On the second day concupiscent, ambitious, and curious appetites are addressed in an order that suggests the partying of youth, the power-games of adulthood, and the sagacity of seniority. Christ in turn has quieted the sensual cravings of the body, the impatient strivings of the spirit, and the curious restlessness of the mind.”35 Although both critical frameworks can be helpful guides for appreciating Milton’s expansion of the biblical story in Paradise Regained, neither can provide a satisfying account for the unique and unprecedented appearance of Athens. During the poem, there are three satanic events that do not appear in the biblical rendering of Jesus’ trial in the wilderness: the banquet, Athens, and the storm. If not a reasonable extension of the temptation to turn stones into bread, the banquet can plausibly fit (given its “regal” airs) in the “philosophical ascent” framework, where it represents the appetitive desires that the Son—who by this point has already endured a forty-day fast—must resist. Likewise, there is merit in David Quint’s suggestion that the Son’s calm response to the storm—“Mee worse than wet thou find’st not; other harm

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/ Those terrors which thou speak’st of, did me none; / I never fear’d they could” (4.486–88)—confirms that “he has seen through the howling ghosts and dart-wielding furies for the satanic impostures they are,”36 and that this is the moment when Paradise Regained inherits the ethos of the Nativity Ode’s banishing of pagan deities. In contrast, the Athens temptation cannot be part of the kingdoms temptation because the kingdoms temptation is already finished by the time Athens appears. Satan has already offered the “Kingdoms of the world” (4.163) under the “condition” that Jesus “fall down, / And worship [Satan] as thy superior Lord” (4.166–67). If Milton does mean for Athens to count as a kingdom, then it would be a simple matter for him to move Satan’s condition to any point after the Son’s rejection of classical learning. That he does not do so should strike us as profoundly significant. Therefore, while it may indeed be the case that Satan offers classical learning as yet another mode of kingship, Paradise Regained provides enough evidence to suggest that Satan has a different form of temptation in mind with his vision of Athens. His exasperated response to the Son after the Athens scene reveals his changing goals since the rejection of Rome: Since neither wealth, nor honour, arms nor arts, Kingdom nor Empire pleases thee, nor aught By me propos’d in life contemplative, Or active, tended on by glory, or fame, What dost thou in this World? the Wilderness For thee is fittest place[.] (4.368–73) What Satan finds aggravating here is his failure to gain knowledge, not about the nature of the Son’s prophesied kingdom, but about the nature of the Son himself. Following these remarks is the storm scene, after which Satan divulges the question he has apparently spent the whole of Paradise Regained pursuing: “that I might learn / In what degree or meaning thou art call’d / The Son of God, which bears no single sence” (4.515–17). Of course, it is quite possible to argue (along with Stanley Fish37) that each temptation in the poem differs but in degree, but recognizing that Athens belongs in that ambiguous realm between the second temptation for the world’s kingdoms and the third when Satan demands that the Son “Now shew thy Progeny” (4.554) changes how we think about his ostensible rejection of classical learning. Even if we insist that Satan is incapable of articulating a temptation like Athens beyond

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the terms of kingship, it remains clear that the Son responds to Athens quite differently than he does to the earlier temptations. When Jesus first ponders his mission as Messiah, he recognizes great trials must come, “E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, / Or work Redemption for mankind” (1.265–66, my emphasis). The Miltonic “Or” is significant. Certainly these objectives are conflated, but according to Satan’s imagination that “Or” is actually an “And,” which is to say that Satan bestows temporal and material precedence to Jesus’ “promis’d Kingdom”: “all thy heart is set on high designs, / High actions; but wherewith to be achiev’d? / Great acts require great means of enterprise” (2.410–12). Perhaps he cannot think of redemption outside of politics and war,38 but in contrast the Son’s resolute holding fast to the “Or” characterizes his thinking throughout the poem in general and during the Athens scene in particular. He even reverses Satan’s chronological conflation of redemption and kingdom when he rejects the offer of Rome: “What wise and valiant man would seek to free / These thus degenerate, by themselves enslav’d, / Or could of inward slaves make outward free?” (4.143–45). According to Jesus’ understanding, the conflation of “promis’d Kingdom” and “Redemption for mankind” makes sense only with the insight that this is a kingdom of the already redeemed. His role as redeemer looks less like a political or otherwise belligerent leader and more like the cause of the reprobate discovering their own redemption. This focus on the individual believer (which we already know is central to Milton’s theology) simultaneously accentuates and deemphasizes Jesus’ salvific role, and Paradise Regained expresses this balancing act most clearly during his response to the Athens temptation. As opposed to Parthia and Rome, whose instruments of conquest the Son says he does not need, Athens’ gifts are not needed by anyone. In fact, aside from the opening statement (which itself provides no positive information), the Son does not even speak in the first person until after his catalogue of philosophies and books of ostensible wisdom; and when he finally does refer to himself, he does so in order to state what “would delight my private hours” (4.331), not his public office. The same holds true for the “spirit and judgment equal or superior” (4.324), which the Son identifies as the prerequisite for the kind of reading and encountering of texts that does not leave the reader “Uncertain and unsettl’d” (4.326). This “spirit” may be possessed by Jesus or by anyone else, which means that his response to Athens more broadly reiterates his proclamation from book 1:

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While it could reasonably be argued (using only these lines) that God’s “living Oracle” and “Spirit of Truth” refer to proper agents of Godhead such as the Son and perhaps the Holy Spirit, when taken in conjunction with Jesus’ response to the Athens temptation this proclamation discloses a vision of the world peopled by the individually redeemed. In other words, during the Athens scene the Son is concerned with the nature of conversion. The redemption of the reprobate requires that he convert people into beings like he himself is, and this activity differs in kind from activities like military or political conquest. True conversion entails the cultivation of “A spirit and judgment equal or superior” (4.324) to the books inside of which one might look for wisdom, precisely because “True wisdom” (4.319) cannot be thought of as something contained inside books. As Ryan Netzley points out, Milton’s theological epistemology—which values “the spirit of a text and reading with charity” above propositional content— engages within a historical tradition: “Jesus’ appeal to a spirit and judgment equal or superior not only harkens back to the interpretive circle of Augustine and his classical predecessors, but also resembles the modern hermeneutic circle described by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer [who argue] Circularity is not to be eschewed, but embraced, albeit in the correct manner.”39 As Heidegger himself remarks, this resemblance stretches back to Plato. Certainly, the philosopher would recognize that this “spirit and judgment” is the end of an authentic education, which he does not distinguish from conversion: “the essence of παιδεία does not consist in merely pouring knowledge into the unprepared soul as if it were some container held out empty and waiting. On the contrary real education lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all leading us to the place of our

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essential being and accustoming us to it.”40 This is exactly what Jesus intends to do for humanity as its teacher. Therefore, the weakness of most Greek philosophers resides in their ineffective pedagogical beliefs and practices. After the catalogue of the various schools, the Son asks: “Alas what can they teach, and not mislead; / Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, / And how the world began, and how man fell / Degraded by himself, on grace depending?” (4.309–12). If we were to adopt the critical willingness to take these lines at face value, then it would seem to us that the Son indicts classical philosophy for its lack of specific propositional content: to wit, the Hebrew story of the fall of man, which is made available to human understanding only because of the exclusive revelation at Mount Sinai. The pagans would be wrong simply because they lack the Hebrews’ privileged access to God. However self-righteously satisfying this interpretation may be, accepting it would still render us “heretic[s] in the truth.” That being said, classical philosophy does have its flaws, and Jesus’ catalogue of indictments lists the schools promoting doctrines that can quite rightly be called “false, or little else but dreams” (4.291). Skepticism of “all things, though plain sence” (4.296) is a willfully erroneous misreading of reality; “vertue joyn’d with riches and long life / In corporal pleasure … and careless ease” (4.298–99) does not constitute a real, necessary, or exhaustive definition of genuine virtue. To affirm any of these positions is to affirm what is objectively incorrect, with the Stoic drawing special attention. His professed disdain of worldly things such as wealth, sensual enticement, or even pain and death makes him look most like the humbly suffering Jesus, but he is just another example of an insincere rhetorical posturing that masks an underlying cowardice: “For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, / Or subtle shifts conviction to evade” (4.307–8). The Son’s self-sacrifice made only for the sake of another—and not at all for personal glory, renown, or projecting the fantasy of self-domination—is fundamentally and finally unimaginable to the Stoic mentality, whose ethical system is based on the belief that he can be “perfect in himself ” (4.302), which means that when push comes to shove the Stoic is on his own side. In contradistinction to these schools, the Son does not say anything necessarily damning of Socrates. The charge “that he nothing knew” against a man considered to be “The first and wisest” (4.293–94) of a series of wise men does more to insult the supposedly wise men, for they are even less wise than

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a man who claims to know nothing. Furthermore, given the conception of knowledge associated with the Son in Paradise Regained, this charge turns out to be an argument of Socratic strength rather than of weakness. If stressing the content of a text over its spirit is tantamount to being a “heretic in the truth,” then the poem represents the Son’s knowledge as having no content per se precisely because it is the kind of knowledge that does not exist as data but rather as its expression in the world. Thus, he replies to the Athens temptation with the gnomic: “Think not but that I know these things, or think I know them not; not therefore am I short / Of knowing what I aught” (4.286–88). The content of Jesus’ knowledge (and whatever that content might be remains hidden by the poem) is secondary, and this response contrasts with Satan’s conception of knowledge as an object or instrument that something called mind somehow contains or wields like the “Utensils of war” (3.336). After all, the exhortation “as thy Empire must extend, / So let extend thy mind o’re all the world” (4.222–23) can come only from the kind of being for whom “The mind is its own place” (Paradise Lost 1.254). Divine knowledge does not work that way. When it comes to divine knowledge, we do not possess it; rather, it possesses us. Our actions in the world reveal the ideas that ground us, when all the while we “nothing knew.” During the Athens scene, then, Jesus is concerned with the nature of authentic conversion, which better resembles education rather than kingship. When he rejects wealth as the basis for his “Great acts” (2.412), what he chooses in its place is pedagogical wisdom: But to guide Nations in the way of truth By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part, That other o’re the body only reigns, And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight. (2.473–80) Understood in terms of the Athens temptation, Jesus’ rejection of “force” takes on greater meaning. Force of any kind—whether the “cumbersome / Luggage of war” (3.400–401) or even the “winning words [that] conquer willing hearts, / And make perswasion do the work of fear” (1.222–23)—is all the same; and

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it is opposed in principle to the authentic kind of conversion that “lead[s] / To know” God, the proper object of “knowing worship.” Likewise, to make persuasion do the work of fear is not to remove the effects of fear (which is itself grounded in ignorance), but to produce such effects by other means, and then more insidious ones, given that the instruments of subjugation are more difficult to locate and resist. Yet however diverse its instruments, coercion is always and everywhere the same, whether upheld by the rifle or the radio. Authentic conversion—so both the Son and the poem must maintain—is the only genuine alternative to subjugation that is available to us. The ironic identification of Jesus and Socrates, which as I have tried to argue here represents the redemption of even the Greek mode of thinking, does raise important questions. Why would Milton compose such an elaborate and ambiguous temptation scene? In other words, why would Paradise Regained make what is perhaps its most important moral lesson so easy to misunderstand? The context of the Athens scene might provide a circumstantial basis for Jesus’ misdirection. After all his task is to outwit Satan, not to re-educate him. Conceding positively that Socrates might have something wise to say (even if that something is the wisdom to profess knowing nothing) could constitute a good use of time in a felicitous symposium, but Satan is not acting in good faith. Jesus must understand that any concession, even if it finally proves his point, would hamper his answer to Satan’s ultimate claim, which is simply that classical knowledge is better for ruling the world than what God revealed to the Hebrews. Jesus needs only to explain to Satan why his claim is incorrect, but the poem leaves subtle clues for his corollary counterclaim—that the spirit of classical thinking is no different than the Hebrew devotion to God—so that its “fit audience … though few” (Paradise Lost 7.31) might not fixate on the rejection only to become “heretic[s] in the truth.” Both Jesus and the poem want this once and future audience to continue the work of thinking, of revising what has previously been thought settled. This revising is the substance of true and redemptive knowledge, which is not at all the same as data or mere information. For the Athens scene to represent the Son’s redemption of thinking for the rest of humanity, it must couch Jesus’ embrace of Socrates within the rejection of Satan’s offer of Socrates, and leave its readers to discern, discuss, and argue about the difference.

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Conclusion The temptation of classical learning in Paradise Regained functions on several different levels, and it requires a more sophisticated interpretive apparatus than the one critics (who consider Athens as simply another kingdom temptation) have heretofore exercised. Appearing after the formal end of the long kingdoms temptation and presenting a “kingdom” outside the narrative present of the Son’s and Satan’s dialogue, the Athens scene discloses the nature of Jesus’ “God-like office” (1.188) of being a teacher. Yet because his students must not thus become “heretic[s] in the truth,” merely transmitting the content of his knowledge to them is secondary to their own inculcation of “A spirit and judgment equal or superior” (4.324) to any information they might later encounter. Jesus’ claim that “he who receives / Light from above, from the fountain of light, / No other doctrine needs” (4.288–90) ends up being not really a claim but an elementary statement of fact. He does not argue for a particular school of thought that is for some quantifiable or objective reason better than other schools. He does not cite privileged access to the mind of God as evidence for the superiority of his doctrine. In this universe, orientation toward the Good, or toward the idea of ideas, or toward that which legitimates the ideas with which we are presented access to the world, is not something one can prove by citing data, but by thoughtfully participating in the dialogue (perhaps the agon) of living. This is what is called thinking. The Son’s emphasis on thinking over knowledge (or revelation over correctness) links him with Socrates, who is un-ironically “The first and wisest of them all” precisely because he “profess’d / To know this only, that he nothing knew” (4.293–94). Both Jesus and Socrates proceed in a good faith belief that their public actions are underwritten by an inward orientation that corresponds to no thing-in-the-world; and both understand themselves as being as homeless in their worlds as Adam after the expulsion was in his, a recognition that is more important than (and the point of) knowing that there once was a place called Eden. For Milton, theological truths are existential truths. Fallen-ness is a condition of our being in the same way that facticity is. William Kerrigan wrote: “the gesture by which Heidegger converts this homesickness into an opportunity for authentic existence in the resolute grip of life’s finite possibilities is recognizably a version of the therapy Milton’s God designs in order to prepare Adam and Eve for their Expulsion: accepting loss and privation as our

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own, and not as fates chosen once in a mythical past and ever after suffered passively, makes us human beings able to choose a place of rest in the possibilities of our history.”41 Articulating the conditions of our being in more than one vocabulary (whether Hebraic, Hellenic, or Heideggerian) constitutes the most meaningful and most sincere expression of our freedom. From this we can conclude: first, the seeds of the redemption of philosophical inquiry have always already been disclosed from the beginnings of Western philosophy; second, the poem can maintain this possibility by exhibiting a hermeneutic method at once severe and charitable to the classical tradition; and, third, teaching this method (or better yet, practice) for its readers’ spiritual and intellectual edification stands at the center of the ethical imperative behind Paradise Regained.

c ha p te r f ive

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he question of Miltonic humor is something we should take seriously. What William Kerrigan calls Milton’s “almost unremitting sublimity” disposes us toward the larger and more obviously dramatic moments in the epic.1 The well-known line in which the elephant “wreathed his lithe proboscis” for Adam’s and Eve’s amusement is usually adduced by critics who believe Milton had a sense of humor, but the very fact that those defenders resort so often to the same citation simply reinforces the charge of humorlessness. Worse still, we have the testimony of Milton’s early biographer John Aubrey, who reports that Milton had a satirical temperament whose effect was aggravated by the way Milton pronounced his “r”s—very hard, we are told.2 (Perhaps this makes Milton one of the founders of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”— but would Milton have gotten the joke?) Yet, for all that, one may also detect a certain unusual playfulness at times, not only in the puns but in the way Milton takes what appear to be direct philosophical or theological propositions and phrases them with a double negative or in a piquant oxymoron. A sacred and homefelt—and surprising— delight may emerge from the experience of Milton’s arts of saying, unless one has already decided that these are no laughing matter. I myself once came under some friendly fire on the Milton listserv for identifying one of these artful moments as potentially conveying a certain hard-r’sed humor in the midst of a theologically foundational assertion. The moment is the one in which Raphael, the ever-patient explainer, unfolds for

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Adam and Eve one of the core tenets of the poem, that we are free only if we obey God. Apparently without a shred of self-awareness—it is Raphael, after all—the angel confidently proclaims to Adam and Eve a ringing declaration of the position of every sentient being in this universe in relation to their Great Author, God Almighty: “Our voluntary service he requires” (Paradise Lost 5.529).3 The line has always made me laugh, though not in derision. How then? The sense of the line expresses a central paradox of Milton’s version of the Christian faith, yes, but it does so in a peculiar fashion that becomes even odder in the context of this poet’s life, work, and temperament. First, there are no fewer than four potential hard-r occurrences in the line. (Read it aloud and you’ll hear the opportunities for “Talk Like A Milton Day.”) In addition, the line is an unusually regular line of iambic pentameter. Our poet, who prided himself on the easy numbers afforded him by the friendly Muse who loved him so, our poet who in his note on the verse of Paradise Lost memorably defined the “true musical delight” of his poetic art as “apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another,” could hardly have missed the nearly martial insistence of “Our voluntary service he requires.”4 My case is strengthened by what I’d term the emphatically present non-elision in the word “voluntary,” that is, the way in which the word “voluntary” must expand to a clear four-syllable pronunciation to fill out the line, with a strong secondary stress where the poet might just as well have elided the syllable altogether and made the word pass into our awareness with much less fanfare: i.e., “volunt’ry.” Imagine how much more congenial the paradox would sound to our ears with that one syllable gone. An Empsonesque reader, by contrast, might extend the argument by saying, as I imagine, “think how the essential contradiction in that line would be softened, how the creed of this morally repulsive religion would hide its abhorrence more effectively, with a key elision at this moment!” Yet the marvel here, to my ears, is that Milton does not offer the spoonful of sugar of an elision to help the declaration go down. Rather the opposite. And yet not only the opposite, for the angel’s declaration is clothed in a striking line that hovers on the edge of satire, or of onomatopoeia, or of irony, or of all three. Even if the smile were only rueful, I cannot think Milton would write such a line without recognizing the humor in it. While I was more or less chastised by my fellow Miltonists for suggesting a smile might have played upon Milton’s lips as he dictated that line, a mild

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scolding that led me to abandon my suggestion, I want to pick it up again here within a different conceptual framework, that of Gregory Bateson’s “double bind theory,” as outlined across several of the republished essays collected in Bateson’s masterwork Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Within this framework, I have come to think there may be another kind of humor at work in this line, that what appears ripe for lampooning here may be connected to similarly odd or striking moments elsewhere in the work, something with the even more paradoxical effect of a meta-liberation into a fuller awareness of the dissociative elements within the very discipline of freedom itself. I hope the ideas I present here can start a conversation about dimensions of Milton’s thought, theology, and poetry that Bateson’s framework may help to illuminate. Cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson lived from 1904 to 1980. During his long and varied career, Bateson’s studies ranged from addiction, to schizophrenia, to ecology, to learning, to the fledgling field of cybernetics, the study of communication within feedback structures that permit emergent forms of organization and meaning. Bateson was an important part of the Macy conferences in the 1950s, an emphatically interdisciplinary gathering at the threshold of the information age that devoted itself, among other things, to deep and sophisticated explorations of what we would now call complexity or systems theory. Although Bateson’s training was as an anthropologist and included what we would recognize as traditional fieldwork, much of it carried out with his first wife and fellow-anthropologist Margaret Mead, the character and extent of Bateson’s concerns raised him to the level of a metaphysician, indeed a philosopher of meaning. His thought and writing are unusual in their playfulness, clarity, self-awareness, and insight, bridging and combining humanistic and scientific ways of understanding the world.5 One of Bateson’s most influential ideas is the concept of the double bind. A double bind, as Bateson explains it, arises when mutually incompatible injunctions are given by an authority figure within a relationship that matters intensely to the person who is subject to that authority. The double bind is not merely a contradiction or a paradox. Rather, the double bind manifests itself in what Bateson terms an “unresolvable sequence of experiences.”6 Bateson’s chief example is that of the family, with an emphasis on the role of the mother as authority that may well strike the contemporary reader as outdated Freudianism. At the same time, however, Bateson’s analysis continually expands beyond those strictly psychoanalytic boundaries into much larger and more enduring insights regarding communication, understanding, action, and love.

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For Bateson’s theory of the double bind, drawing on Bertrand Russell’s arguments regarding logical types, is also a theory of ways in which learning and meaning involve boundary-crossing among levels of experience and ideation. For Bateson, such boundary-crossing metacommunicational experiences may be profoundly liberating or profoundly dissociative, leading either to a vastly expanded universe of potential meaning or to a collapse of communicative competency. In unexpected and revelatory ways, Bateson’s analysis concludes that “schizophrenia involves general principles which are important in all communication and therefore many informative similarities can be found in ‘normal’ communication situations.”7 These “informative similarities” stress the role of what one might go so far as to call types of dissociative experiences emerging from “various sorts of communication which involve both emotional significance and the necessity of discriminating between orders of meaning.” (Compare Bateson’s “informative similiarities” between complex communications and schizophrenia to T. S. Eliot’s insistence that the “variety and complexity” of modern civilization, “playing upon a refined sensibility,” results in the poet’s determination to “become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”8) Bateson’s inventory and description of these “sorts of communication” is particularly fascinating as a lens onto Milton’s poetic practice: Such situations include play, humor, ritual, poetry, and fiction. Play … is a situation which strikingly illustrates the occurrence of metamessages whose correct discrimination is vital to the cooperation of the individuals involved; for example, false discrimination could easily lead to combat. Rather closely related to play is humor … [which] involves sudden shifts in [Bertrand Russell’s] Logical Types as well as discrimination of those shifts. Ritual is a field in which unusually real or literal ascriptions of Logical Types are made and defended as vigorously as the schizophrenic defends the “reality” of his delusions. Poetry exemplifies the communicative power of metaphor—even very unusual metaphor—when labeled as such by various signs, as contrasted to the obscurity of unlabeled schizophrenic metaphor. The entire field of fictional communication, defined as the narration or depiction of a series of events with more or less of a label of actuality, is most relevant to the investigation of schizophrenia.

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We are not so much concerned with the content interpretation of fiction … as with the formal problems involved in simultaneous existence of multiple levels of message in the fictional presentation of “reality.” The drama is especially interesting in this respect, with both performers and spectators responding to messages about both the actual and the theatrical reality.9 In each of these communication modes, Bateson argues, the mode carries with it certain signals that “are evidently of higher Logical Types than the messages they classify.” Bateson concludes that “among human beings this framing and labeling of messages and meaningful actions reaches considerable complexity, with the peculiarity that our vocabulary for such discrimination is still very poorly developed”—mostly, indeed, “nonverbal media of posture, gesture, facial expression, intonation, and the context for the communication …”10 The experience of the double bind may, like a koan, trigger a metacommunicational enlightenment, or it may spiral downward into a self-reinforcing disorientation, which can become a permanent inability to perceive the possibilities of complex meaning.11 The dual possibilities result from the unavoidable “hierarchic discontinuities” between the various “orders of learning” Bateson analyzes. He writes, “It is as if a new learning process were involved with each step to a higher order of complexity …”12 In its positive manifestation, what Bateson calls the “benevolent bind” of the therapist, the double bind, because of its dissociative energy, can inspire the new learning process needed to leap across the discontinuity between the orders of learning.13 In its negative manifestation, the double bind’s dissociative energies result merely in frustration, and finally in a kind of semantic paralysis. In Bateson’s analysis, a double bind typically involves five principal ingredients: “two or more persons,” “repeated experience,” “a primary negative injunction” involving punishment if an action is committed or omitted, “a secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishment or signals which threaten survival,” and “a tertiary … injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field,” a field or context or encounter that may be negative—e.g., an enlarged or additional threat to survival—or apparently positive—e.g., “capricious promises of love, and the like.”14 Bateson further observes that “the complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns. Almost any part of a double bind sequence

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may then be sufficient to precipitate panic or rage”—or, presumably, a new level of learning, though understandably Bateson’s therapeutic practice, much of the time, is to analyze the panic or rage.15 By now it will be clear that the double bind is a hallmark of many abusive relationships, the very reason Bateson explores the double bind as it occurs between parents and children. It may be much harder to see, however, how such an experience can be anything but abusive, given the psychological warfare and consequent destruction it appears, almost inevitably, to enact. One obvious example of the double bind within Paradise Lost occurs in the famous speech Satan gives on Mount Niphates. Critics have long debated how much of Satan’s anguish is sincere, how much of it is self-exculpating, how much of it is little more than the narcissistic victimology of the evidently deceptive dictator of Hell. These are crucial questions, of course, but whatever the answer or answers, it is striking to see the ways in which the speech maps onto Bateson’s double-bind theory. There are two persons: God, and the fallen angel. There is a primary negative injunction, or what Satan takes to be a negative injunction: be subject to the creator, and to the Son he elevates to the head of the angels. The secondary injunction, then, is that the subjection must take the form not only of obedience but of gratitude, an “endless gratitude” Satan terms a “debt immense.” The “tertiary injunction” is that the very power that gave him the “free Will and Power to stand” is also the defining power that underlies his very being, which means that one cannot forsake God without forsaking being itself. In other words, the very conditions of being ensure that one cannot “escape the field.”16 This tertiary injunction, explicit and implicit throughout creation, becomes the hallmark of Satan’s repeated encounters with what he appears to experience as a double bind, so much so that, just as Bateson predicts, he begins to perceive nearly everything in his fallen experience in double bind patterns. At the slightest hint of what appears to be a double-bind sequence, Satan responds as if a full sequence is already present—and in some respects this is a perfectly reasonable response. Yet for Milton, I believe, the paradox is that the experience of the full sequence of the double bind may also lead to enlightenment for Satan, depending on Satan’s decision to regard the double bind as either benevolent or not. Of course, Satan decides against benevolence, and in that respect chooses pathogenesis—which is always a choice available in this context. As a result of Satan’s perseverance, a hot hell is therefore almost guaranteed to burn within him, flaring into “panic or rage”

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even after being struck stupidly good at the sight of Eve at work in the garden immediately prior to his tempting her. At the same time, in this very example, we see that Satan’s heart is “hardened more by what might most reclaim,” to use Raphael’s description of the falling angels’ response to the Son’s restoration of Heaven. This perseveration, in the name of a proud self-preservation, removes the possibility of any boundary-crossing, any new order of learning: Before him [the Son] power divine his way prepared; At his command the uprooted hills retired Each to his place, they heard his voice and went Obsequious, Heav’n his wonted face renewed, And with fresh flow’rets hill and valley smiled. This saw his hapless foes but stood obdured, And to rebellious fight rallied their powers Insensate, hope conceiving from despair. In heav’nly spirits could such perverseness dwell? But to convince the proud what signs avail, Or wonders move th’ obdurate to relent? They hardened more by what might most reclaim, Grieving to see his glory, at the sign Took envy … (6.780–93) We appear to have come very far afield of the question of divine humor, unless one is now prepared, like Empson, to dismiss Milton’s God as in many respects a cruelly sadistic joke that one must servilely share to escape the joker’s wrath. This is certainly a possibility that Milton courts. Perhaps Christian theology does as well. Yet just at this moment Bateson’s theory of the double bind reveals its own doubleness. The “bind” in the double bind depends on a context in which two contradictory injunctions exist within a relationship from which one cannot extract oneself without a threat to survival. But it also relies upon the enforced suppression of what Bateson calls “metacommunicational” statements in which the person experiencing the double bind articulates to the authority figure what he believes to be the double bind in which he or she finds him or herself. Such “metacommunicational” statements may signal to everyone in the relationship the nature of the powerfully implicit metastatements within the context itself.

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Ironically, Bateson argues, the suppression of such statements may be a stratagem adopted not by the person creating the double bind situation but by the person experiencing the double bind. In other words, the refusal of metacommunicational signals, what Bateson calls “context markers,” becomes a way for the person in a double bind to escape the possibility of a higher learning that cannot be experienced without confronting something surprising, something genuinely new—not least of which are possibilities for freedom and love that have not yet entered the person’s experience. Of course, Milton has a good deal to say about education specifically, and learning generally, in his tractate Of Education. The difference between Milton’s account of the purposes (ends) of education, of curriculum, of diet and exercise, etc. and the orders of learning Bateson proposes is chiefly that of narrative manifested within poetry, a dramatic account of learners responding to new information in new contexts within the meta context of Milton’s “apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn from one verse into another.” Analyzed within Bateson’s levels of learning, then, the architecture of experienced meaning in Paradise Lost stimulates in the reader a kind of voluntary service out of which, paradoxically, enlarged freedom results. Story and the diegeses (story-spaces) within which this paradox emerges are crucial to Milton’s aim, which makes Stanley Fish’s claim that “story” is the very thing we must resist in Paradise Lost both strange and destructive.17 As it turns out, Bateson’s idea of “context,” what (following Russell) he also calls a “class” that expands into a “class of classes,” maps very powerfully onto the idea of narrative and diegesis, for, as Bateson writes, “‘learning’ is a communicational phenomenon,” and because communication is among other things an experience of sequence that results in various orders of learning, learning necessarily involves some experience of time.18 The complexities within learning emerge from, and are fed by, the process of learning as a communicational process in time. Bateson observes, “Change denotes process. But processes are themselves subject to ‘change.’ The process may accelerate, it may slow down, or it may undergo other types of change such that we shall say that it is now a ‘different’ process.”19 This basic insight underlies Bateson’s schema of the four orders of learning, which may be summarized in this way: •

Zero learning, in which “an entity shows minimal change in its response to a repeated item of sensory input.” For Bateson,

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“zero learning” is like a reflex, one that may be triggered inappropriately, but one in which the discovery of such an error “can contribute nothing to his [the learner’s] future skill” (Bateson’s emphasis).20 •

Learning I is “change in specificity of response by correction of errors of choice within a set of alternatives” (Bateson’s emphasis).

•

Learning II is “change in the process of Learning I, e.g., a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated” (Bateson’s emphasis). Elsewhere Bateson describes such “punctuation” as decisions the learner makes about what constitutes context in a given stream of events in which multiple contexts might plausibly be understood. The learner’s decisions within the communicative environment, then, are indicated by means of what Bateson calls “context markers,” part of what he considers “metacommunicational” statements.

•

“Learning III is change in the process of Learning II, e.g., a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made. (We shall see that to demand this level of performance of some men and some mammals is sometimes pathogenic.)” (Bateson’s emphasis). The corrective change Bateson describes here involves the kind of dislocation of language into meaning that Eliot describes, an acceptance of profound disorientation occasioned by the teacher’s presenting to the student a situation in which the inherently self-validating character of Learning II, in which “behavior is controlled by former Learning II and therefore … will be of such a kind as to mold the total context to fit the expected punctuation” is somehow disrupted.21

Without access to Learning III, however, one’s early experiences of sensemaking, of deciding how to “punctuate” experience in order to understand it—that is, to tell a story about it, to trace cause and effect, to experience freedom—creates a dependency that amounts to a resistance to further learning. What occurs in Learning III, by contrast, renews, expands, and

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transforms the self, a difficult and unusual experience that appears to be at the center of what Milton imagines as the exercise of freedom, certainly within the bounds of Paradise Lost. By the time he writes his epic, Milton’s understanding of what it means to be a “true poem” has itself undergone vast reorganizations that both affirm and complicate his early confident definition of a “true poem” as “a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things.”22 Milton’s definition is absolutely right so far as it goes. Yet it is experience, the stream of events between 1642 and Paradise Lost’s first publication in 1667, that suggests how much further truth might go to result in a true poem, a distance traveled in a journey empowered by an extraordinary teacher: Taught by the Heav’nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend, Though hard and rare … (Paradise Lost 3.19–21) How “rare”?—that is, how seldom does this descending–reascending occur, and what makes it such a rare occurrence? In his description of Learning III, Bateson illuminates the question: What has been said above about the self-validating character of premises acquired by Learning II indicates that Learning III is likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings. Expectably, it will also be difficult for scientists, who are only human, to imagine or describe this process. But it is claimed that something of the sort does from time to time occur in psychotherapy, religious conversion, and in other sequences in which there is profound reorganization of character.23 Bateson goes on to explain that such reorganization demands the full experience of the contradictions of the double bind, which he links to the “contraries” William Blake describes as necessary to “progression.” That full experience, however, cannot happen unless the teacher has taken pains to close the “loopholes by which the impact of contradiction can be reduced.” Closing such loopholes can be, in the practice of a loving teacher, the setting in which “unexamined premises” are thrown “open to question and change.” Bateson links religion, pedagogy, and psychotheraphy when he states, “the therapist must certainly so support or hedge the contraries by which the

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patient is driven that loopholes [of shaping context to fit prior assumptions] … are blocked. The Zen candidate who has been assigned a paradox (koan) must labor at his task ‘like a mosquito biting on an iron bar.’” And Bateson notes immediately that “explosive” questions may result. A risky business, this exercise of freedom to learn. “Even the attempt at level III can be dangerous, and some fall by the wayside.”24 A certain humility, a certain courage, a certain receptiveness to the disruption of an unexpected new datum, one might even say a punch line, and a certain quality of teacher, then, are needed for the learner to recognize and respond to benevolent binds. Noting those implications, according to Bateson, involves crossing the boundaries of logical types, for these metastatements are a level beyond the initial injunctions themselves. In other words, following Bertrand Russell, Bateson argues that a class is not a member of itself, for the idea of a class represents a level of abstraction that is simply not present within the members of the class. A new order of learning reveals the idea and experience of orders of learning, an idea and experience Bateson describes as “deutero-learning,” that is, not just learning to solve a puzzle, but learning by the way about puzzlesolving. These strategies are profoundly mediated by contexts of culture as well as of personality and free will. Bateson writes eloquently of the complex textures of this kind of freedom and the “apperceptive habits” that form dispositions of remaining alert to metacommunicative statements and the boundary-crossings they signal: To suggest that the only method of acquiring one of these [apperceptive] habits is through repeated experience of learning contexts of a given kind would be logically analogous to saying that the only way to roast pig is by burning the house down. It is obvious that in human education such habits are acquired in very various ways. We are not concerned with a hypothetical isolated individual in contact with an impersonal events stream, but rather with real individuals who have complex emotional patterns of relationship with other individuals. In such a real world, the individual will be led to acquire or reject apperceptive habits by the very complex phenomena of personal example, tone of voice, hostility, love, etc. Many such habits, too, will be conveyed to him, not through his own naked experience of the stream of events, for no human beings (not even scientists) are

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Benevolent binds can be recognized, then, by tramlines of apperceptive habit mediated through the very thing Fish’s argument insists we reject: story. But, by rejecting story, we reject the boundary-crossing to new orders of learning that is essential to the exercise of creaturely freedom. For Milton, clock-time (chronos) is not merely an accommodation of eternity (Kairos, or divine time) to finite minds. Time is the space of story, and of learning, and of freedom. Time is the space of play. Without such a space, Bateson writes, “Life would … be an endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor.”26 My argument is that Milton’s poetic creation is not such a game, and is relieved by change or humor throughout. Bateson insists that play is a prime example of metacommunicative statements resulting in benevolent binds, because play signals the condition of acting as if a false thing is true, not as a deception, but as a special class of counterfactual that in other contexts really is what in play it pretends to be. When children engage in rough-and-tumble, for example, they really are being aggressive, they really are struggling—but there is a metacommunicative layer that assures the participants that what they experience as real is also not real (or, perhaps better said, real in a different way that is both like and unlike what they experience in a non-metaphorical setting). This theory applies also to ideas of sacrament, Bateson notes, in which symbols acquire their power through a kind of metaphorical transubstantiation, a disjunction (this bread is not really flesh) that nevertheless in a kind of sacred play becomes, at a level of abstraction that may vary according to creed, the thing it pretends to be. For Bateson, this metacommunicational symbol-play is a hallmark of what he calls “deutero-learning,” that is, learning about the conditions of learning itself.27 Given this analysis, it seems to me that one might argue such deuterolearning exists within the conditions of freedom and love in Milton’s theology, and that such a double-bind, a kind of “disconjunction,” as we might call it, may be necessary to the idea of free will generally. As we have seen, there are two ways to approach and resolve a disconjunction. Bateson notes that one option is the psychotic break, observing that schizophrenics typically speak in metaphors that they cannot or will not signal as metaphors

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within metacommunicative statements, for they perceive that such metacommunicative statements are prohibited and will be punished within the context of a double bind. By contrast, Bateson argues that another option leads not to psychosis but to an acute and transformative enlightenment, if it occurs within a loving relationship that frames the experience of disconjunction as an occasion—or, one might say, a provocation—out of which a kind of deutero-learning occurs. For Bateson, as we have seen, this deuterolearning is a crossing of boundaries that reveals a larger context in which a newly complex understanding of context itself emerges. This boundarycrossing is precisely analogous to the way an enjambed line of poetry both flouts and depends upon the sense of an ending, bounding in a manner that enacts the pun within “bound” itself, a pun John Leonard describes in Paradise Lost 5.478, part of Raphael’s great speech on a monist universe, as uniting the primal opposition of “leaps” and “limits,” from which Leonard concludes that “Milton’s universe is both hierarchical and dynamic.”28 I would argue that the same conclusion, and the same punning disconjunction, occurs when Satan enters Paradise by simply jumping over the wall: “Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt, / At one slight bound high over leaped all bound … ” (Paradise Lost 4.180–81). Leonard describes this instance of the bound/bound pun as “contemptuous,” following Satan’s apperceptive tramline, but we need not follow that tramline ourselves, and Satan need not either.29 Satan’s contemptuous leap is also available to us, and to him, as a funny and insight-producing experience, a clue to benevolent binds if Satan’s apperceptive habits were to change as a result of realizing, in a moment of deutero-learning, that there might be something surprising and benevolent to learn from a puzzling encounter—in this case, with a wall that cannot keep him out.30 Satan could have been surprised, struck stupidly good by that surprise, and perhaps, in that moment, laughed and learned. Milton’s Paradise, then, like his poetry, may be viewed as a walled yet penetrable garden of sacramental play, one in which larger or even what Freud calls “primal” meanings emerge not from a dissociative or psychotic break but from a disconjunctive moment of sharply expanded awareness, a resolution into a higher disconjunction, a deeper experience of boundary crossing. “Sense variously drawn from one verse into another” enacts the very exercise of repunctuated event streams, layered metacommunicative context markers, and hence also “collateral ideas” about the hierarchies of learning that Bateson describes in his analysis.31

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Let us return now to Raphael’s version of the kind of double bind Satan experiences on Mount Niphates, the statement with which I began my argument about the possible varieties of Milton’s humor. Raphael’s double bind emerges very quickly after the angel enters Paradise and meets Adam and Eve. It follows Raphael’s extraordinary hymn to monism, “one first matter all,” and in that very placement suggests that concord will also be disjunctive, that the steps by which contemplation of created things may ascend to God may be discontinuous, each step a rung on a ladder of thresholds and boundary crossings. God made thee perfect, not immutable; And good he made thee, but to persevere He left it in thy power, ordaind thy will By nature free, not over-rul’d by Fate Inextricable, or strict necessity; Our voluntarie service he requires, Not our necessitated, such with him Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve Willing or no, who will but what they must By Destinie, and can no other choose? (5.524–34) The disjunctions in this passage spill from line to line in breathtaking sequence. The alliteration of “perfect,” “persevere,” and “power” sounds more godlike than human, and rings strangely in the context of a speech on various decrees and impossibilities that emerge from a creator whose making, ordaining, and definitions of being seem both to emphasize and negate the freedom he insists upon. The climax is Raphael’s insistence that, without freedom, God cannot try humanity to see if they serve him freely, an assertion that appears to trap God himself within a double-bind: a “necessitated” service “with him / Finds no acceptance, nor can find” (emphasis mine). Yet why not? Why cannot God accept enforced servitude? Or, to put it another way, why is God forced to require freely chosen service? Who made him that way? That is funny (surprising, striking). It appears that God himself is in a double bind: Go therefore, half this day as friend with friend Converse with Adam, in what bow’r or shade

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Thou find’st him from the heat of noon retired, To respite his day-labor with repast, Or with repose; and such discourse bring on, As may advise him of his happy state, Happiness in his power left free to will, Left to his own free will, his will though free, Yet mutable; whence warn him to beware He swerve not too secure … (5.229–38) My suggestion here is not entirely fanciful. Given God’s insistence in book 7 that his own goodness is free while at the same time the Deep he fills is both bound and boundless, it is not impossible that every act of creation within a monist theology of creaturely free will involves some kind of double bind. The question, even for God, it seems, is whether the double bind tends to psychosis or to the enlightenment of the new level of learning of the kind Bateson calls “Learning III”—i.e., a deutero-learning about contexts of learning and the boundaries that both define and connect, and thus render usable, those contexts. One might even conclude that the ultimate context for learning is the context of other learners, whether they are angels, men, women, or perhaps even God himself. As we have seen, for Milton and for Bateson, learning is a “communicational phenomenon.” Perhaps God’s double bind of creation arises from God’s desire for a universe in which work is also play for mortal stakes,32 where the imagination, the creative disjoining and rejoining of shapes within dreams or the nocturnal visitation of the muse, characterizes the liberating disconjunctions of both art and love, disconjunctions that are made more intense, more dangerous, and more potentially liberating when they are occasioned by shared experience. To set this imagination free is to risk psychosis as well as to aspire to a sacramental reality, one in which, again to quote Raphael, “Earth / Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein / Each to other like, more then on earth is thought” (5.574–76). But note that the deepest level of the learner’s imagination, or, to put it another way, the highest type of transcontextualism, will always be that of imagining another mind, another imagination, a companion imagination similarly empowered and operating, one also risking collapse as well as courting enlightenment within a double bind. It probably surpasses even Milton’s imagination to create a complete portrayal of God’s transcontextual learning within a providential

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universe whose bounds God appoints, but within that universe Milton can imagine some near approaches within tightly wrought, poetically explosive passages, the kind of compact, definitive, and comprehensive lines William Kerrigan terms the “enfolded sublime.”33 And within that universe Milton can playfully signal the very boundary-crossing that play represents while also signaling the enlightenment and sacramental companionship that emerges from, and inheres within, true community. Within the fantastic bounds of a poem full of echoes, Milton may even signal the moment of such boundary crossings in prosody that recalls the cosmic play within a more poignant context of hard-won human learning, as when Adam comes to his own liberatory realization of the double binds within all love, saying at last to Eve as she makes her terrifying, necessary case for working separately within a garden of temptation: “Go, for thy stay, not free, absents thee more” (9.372). We do not laugh at those words, and they are not meant to be funny. But they do play their part within increasingly intricate contexts of loving action, a transcontext that must define, and bind, the freedom of love itself—a disconjunction that we discover within the sentence with which we began. “Our voluntarie service he requires.” Read one way, Raphael’s line describes a textbook case of the abusive double bind, one not unlike O’Brien’s insistence in 1984 that Winston not just say that two plus two equals five, but really bring himself to see five fingers before his face when the problem is posed. Yet another reading is also possible, one that supplies a different object after the verb “requires.” Perhaps, whether Raphael knows it or not, the unstated object might not be simply “requires of us.” Perhaps the unstated object is also, or even primarily, “our voluntarie service he requires of himself.” Perhaps God’s creation, like the poet’s, inextricably involves the strict necessity of appointed bounds and ordained freedom, without which the meaning of love, the most vital, disconjunctive, and transcontextual creation of all, cannot emerge into experience.34

II Milton and the Trivium

c ha p te r si x

Revisiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018 Emma Annette Wilson

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ifty years ago, William Empson published the revised second edition of Milton’s God (1965) in which he reaffirmed his case that the reason that Paradise Lost “is so good is that it makes God so bad.”1 Empson was of course participating in a rich and deeply divided critical tradition about Paradise Lost which John Leonard has instructively split into three positions in his field-defining variorum: (a) the poem is good because it makes God seem good; (b) the poem is bad because it makes God seem bad; (c) the poem is good because it makes God seem bad.2 Half a century of historicism and high theory has passed since Empson’s revised text appeared, and I wish to take the opportunity opened up by Leonard’s variorum to revisit Milton’s God to argue for a fourth available reading of Milton’s God and the poem’s ensuing goodness (or lack thereof). This chapter engages with Milton the scholar, both as a reader and writer of textbooks, to argue that as both trainee and trainer the poet is presenting an epic that is definitively (provably) good, but only if construed according to the divine art of logic. Calling on Milton’s own evaluative writing methods from his Artis plenior logicae (1672) to read the logic of his God, I argue that the poem is good not primarily because it makes God either good or bad, but because it lays bare the cosmic structure to which we are all subject. That structure in and of itself seems to be at least potentially separate from any inherent moral valency, either good or bad, but when explored by Milton’s penetrating logical searchlight it manifests as a very uncomfortable and difficult universe in which mankind must

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strive to “persevere” in his “happy” state (5.520–25).3 In this structure, God will be justified, because it is his own creation; yet that justification does not have to make him good or kind within human definitions of those terms. Through a logical reading of God and his interactions with his creations, I wish to suggest that Milton’s God is indeed Empson’s unpalatable deity, but that he achieves this status through a rigorous system of justification founded upon the logical independence and individuality of his creations, and which we can access courtesy of Milton’s output as a scholar. As such, while Empson takes his conclusions to mean that we can and should reject Christianity for its cruelty, I propose a reading of Paradise Lost which sees the poem as good because God is bad and justified, and it explores ways in which we as human beings can live within His system. This is not to take Fish’s position that God seems bad because we are reading Him from a fallen perspective, but rather to elaborate Empson’s tragic understanding of the poem to see its virtue as embodying a bleak, relentless divine system which we can hate but must learn to live and work within. A fourth line of thought is thus proposed: Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.

I Milton as Scholar Before setting forth to justify the ways of God to men, Milton penned a much less lauded and much less read text invested, in part, in enabling the human intellect to begin to comprehend divine questions, his logic textbook. The Artis plenior logicae was probably written during his work as a tutor in the 1640s, though it remained unpublished until 1672, when it was enlisted to boost the catalogue of printed Miltoniana in circulation. Milton’s text was one in a long line of logic manuals spanning the duration of early modern humanist education, each aspiring to teach a new generation of young readers and writers effective ways of discovering, understanding, and then writing about any and every subject thinkable, in both prose and poetry. Following the precepts of pedagogical innovator and Protestant convert, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), Milton’s logic, while not original in its subject or ordering of materials, represents a particularly compelling synthesis of early modern logical precepts, smoothed after years of rolling over tutorly riverbeds into easily pocketable, comprehensive, and lucid discursive strategies.4 Comprising one-third of the early modern educational trivium augmented by grammar and rhetoric, logic was the ars artium, the “art of arts.” While Milton explicitly adopted a

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Ramist model for his textbook, he also draws extensively on the three-book reformed Systema logica (1600) of Dutch scholar Bartholomäus Keckermann. Cromwellian Zachary Coke furnishes the first complete English translation of Keckermann’s text, stating that “Logick is an Art of ordering and directing mans [sic] understanding in the knowledge of things.”5 While this is a direct translation of Keckermann, Coke adds a pertinent extension to his definition, expanding the role of logic to being that which “teacheth how to think and judge distinctly in all things.”6 Milton wrote earlier than Coke, but their texts are aligned both in origin and in this focus upon the rationalizing capacity of logic, which is defined in the Artis plenior logicae as the ars bene ratiocinandi or “the art of reasoning well.”7 Walter J. Ong, SJ, notes that Milton’s definition was an advance on Ramus’, but on a wider scale Milton is the first early modern logician to employ the gerund of “ratiocinare” to form the crux of his definition of logic, and as such represents an important though small move forward in the philosophy of this art.8 When reasoning well is the manifesto of his textbook, in the context of God’s justification, scholarly Milton presents at least one potential model by which human readers can begin to assess and understand God’s ways. However, what emerges from that analysis, while it may be based on reason, does not in any way have to be emotionally compelling, and this is a crucial step in reconsidering the Empsonian position and its cognates. Not only is Milton’s logic manual important as an instrument of reason, but logic in the seventeenth century was repeatedly characterized as a divine art which, if used dexterously, could facilitate the human pathway to redemption. Coke puts this forcefully: Since the defection of our first parents in Paradise, our understanding cannot faithfully and certainly determine the [sic] comprehend the natures of things with the distinctness and order, and by its own acies and strength to determine the truth, unless by artificial and outward rules, directed and governed, unto which the understanding looks, as the Mariner to the Compass.9 Coke’s view is typical of that put forth by several explicitly Puritanical English logicians, including Thomas Spencer in The Art of Logic (1628), the translator of Pierre Du Moulin’s Elementa Logica, Joshua Ahier in The Elements of Logick (1647), and, in the previous century, one of the earliest English translators

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of Ramist logic, Dudley Fenner, in The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584). Logic is the navigational aid to which the human mind must turn to discover its direction and successfully complete its voyage in the search of divine truth. Whilst Milton’s output as a tutor–scholar does not explicitly espouse this view, there is an argument to be made that he puts it into practice in forging the logic of his epic poem. It is through logical reading that Adam, Eve, and the poem’s human audience may come to accept the epic as Milton’s justification of God’s ways. Richard Strier has helpfully parsed Milton’s aim “to justify the ways of God to men” as meaning either justifying the things to which God subjects mankind or, alternatively, explaining all of God’s “ways” in human terms.10 He proceeds to argue that in line with the second of these two strands there is a moment in which Milton “makes God exactly like us.”11 That is in God’s centerpiece speech in book 3, in which he argues for the necessary freedom of his subjects on the basis that otherwise “what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love” (3.103–4). Strier’s case rests on God’s concern with proof: why, after all, should He want or need any such thing? This formulation meshes with Victoria Kahn’s astute assessment that early modern discursive training was primarily conceived of in terms of its ability to encourage “practical reasoning,” indeed the very kind of reasoning that might enable humans to comprehend the ways of God.12 I would agree that this is a moment when Milton taps into human reasoning mechanisms to enable his readers to divine God’s ways, but when read through the lens of his work as a scholar and tutor God’s ways may be more perspicuous, and indeed justified according to human measure, but that does not lend them empathy. Logic is Milton’s way of showing God’s operations, while not only preserving but actively vivifying the separation between him and his creations.

II God’s Logic: A Human Perspective A facile observation when approaching God in Paradise Lost is to say that he is not there very much. He has relatively few words in the text. Yet the point extends in a more exciting direction with the suggestion that God is quite literally separate from the creatures whom he has made, and the worlds which they inhabit, and it is his use of logic which makes this separation manifest. This separation is the crucial mechanism for free will in Paradise Lost: God’s creatures must be separate from him, and in command of their own individual causal responsibility in order to be able to perform acts of faith. It is the

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logic of God and its interpretation by his creatures that embodies the separation necessary between God and his creations to enable free will which in turn explains and enables Milton to fulfil his opening literary pledge to justify the ways of God to men, though not in a way designed to make us warm to God or his logical system. To commence an investigation of the logic of Milton’s God, it is instructive to look at the description of him which is presented to us in Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian prayer in book 5: These are thy glorious works, parent of good, Almighty, thine this universal frame, Thus wondrous fair; thyself how wondrous then! Unspeakable, who sitst above these heavens To us invisible or dimly seen In these thy lowest works, yet these declare Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine: Speak ye who best can tell, ye sons of light, Angels, for ye behold him, and with songs And choral symphonies, day without night Circle his throne rejoicing, ye in heaven, On earth join all ye creatures to extol Him first, him last, him midst, and without end. (5.153–65) Here Adam and Eve’s blissful state is affirmed as they pray in unison, aligned verbally, logically, and theologically with their creator. Milton’s logic was founded on four fundamental components: efficient cause, matter, form, and end. He defines “efficient cause” as “the cause by which a thing is or is brought about,” “matter” is “the cause out of which a thing is,” form is the specific unique shape giving identity to that matter, and end is the goal or aim of causal action.13 As a writer, Milton’s task is to invent these components and then set them out to create his vision of divine justification; as a scholar, Milton is teaching readers how to notice and then to comprehend these components and their significance in any and every text being scrutinized, and it is this binary that makes Milton’s scholarly output an apposite lens through which to consider questions of writerly justification. In Adam and Eve’s speech, both the matter and form of their prayer are testimony to Milton’s God, detailing him through an elucidation of his creations, themselves acting as living

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witnesses to his fundamental causative role in his universe. Richard Strier suggests that the poetry of Milton’s Eden is better because it is “an area free of the Great Argument,” but by looking through the lens of Milton-as-scholar, that argument remains at the core of prelapsarian earthly operations, made manifest in their logic.14 Indeed, as one facet of justifying God’s ways in the broader of Strier’s two senses, the logic of Adam and Eve’s Edenic praise plays a central role in explaining the omnipresent, omni-powerful glory of their creator, setting both themselves and readers up to comprehend the rationality though perhaps not the compassion of his later punishments. Adam and Eve begin their praise of God by enumerating a copia of descriptions of the different types of matter comprising his creation, from his “glorious works” to the “universal frame” in which these works are situated (5.153–55). Even the phrase “wondrous fair,” which overtly applies adjectively to describe the logical qualities of the “universal frame,” could be read as additional logical matter if “fair” is a latent pun on “fare.” The efficient cause creating and acting upon all of this matter in its wide array of “glorious” and “wondrous” (but terminally non-specific) forms is God. Adam and Eve emphasize God’s causal role as they repeat first that he is acting as the “parent of good,” and then immediately redouble this description by referring to the “almighty” in the very next line (5.153–54). What is striking about this causal elaboration is the difficulty of sequence within it. For all of the matter of the “works” and “frame,” which God has acted upon as the procreating cause bringing them all into existence, also by dint of this very creation process serve as God’s logical ends in that they are the goals which he was seeking to attain. Certainly, there is a further effect at work in this passage, which Adam and Eve identify as they observe “how wondrous then” is God (5.155), and this comment in itself makes a deft and efficient argument of comparison reminding us that God’s creations resemble his glory in an earthly context. Yet even before that outcome is revealed, God’s aim of creation has already been fulfilled through his actions as a creator, and is made manifest in the “glorious works” and “universal frame” which he has thus produced. As such, there is a self-fulfilling circularity when God works directly on matter with an end in mind, transmuting that matter into an outcome both literally and in the language structures which his other creations Adam and Eve use to communicate that process to us. Thus, although God himself is “invisible or dimly seen / In these thy lowest works” (5.157–58), “these” various different matters and forms “declare / [His]

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goodness” and “power divine” (5.158–59) in a way which created beings can witness and appreciate. In this way, Adam and Eve’s prayer both affirms and complicates their definition of God as “unspeakable” (5.156): for while they cannot furnish a direct, unmediated description of Him, even in their prelapsarian state, their logical argument of agreement between God and His creations does allow them in a literal sense to “speak” Him. In their prayer, readers can begin to see not only the type of logic which describes Milton’s God, but also the importance of that logic to God, in that this is the art which enables His creations to know Him at all. Even His prelapsarian human creatures still have recourse to reason in order to mediate the distance, which is both subtle and infinite, which separates them from their creator. The question of distance is critical when considering the question of blame for falls from grace in the epic. Adam and Eve’s prayer gives at once insight into God’s own logic and concomitantly the corresponding logic through which his creations can fulfil his divine end of glory. The majority of the prayer involves Adam and Eve either instructing or observing angels and every component of the natural world and visible universe “to extol / Him first, Him last, Him midst, and without end” (5.164–65). Scharr has discussed the rich heritage of this depiction of God, drawing on the classics and, as Alastair Fowler has noted, Ben Jonson’s Mask of Augurs.15 In calling upon these venerable depictions of divinity, Adam and Eve create an alternating causal sequence in which the matter of God is praised in all its chronologically possible forms: “Him first, Him last, Him midst.” The triple spondee interposes the matter of God with His first, last, and midst temporal forms in the even rhythm of a heartbeat, and begins to suggest the chronological comprehensiveness. Yet, at the same time, the emphasis upon temporality confirms that this is an entirely creaturely understanding of God: for while his creations have to use a chronological framework to parse him, and their relationship to him, he exists without restrictions of human time. Thus, in the same phrase which makes their praise of God so complete and all-encompassing, Adam and Eve delineate precisely how distinct they are from a divine understanding or intellectual position. Just from these three feet we can see a God who is omnipresent in a chronological sense, and for whom all such times are equal and equally visible. Yet, as Fowler has noted, Milton made an addition to his classical commonplace when he has Adam and Eve describe God as being “without end.” In this elaboration, Milton breaks the logical counterbalance of his spondees, allowing this final

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divine form to overwhelm the end of his line. This manoeuvre emphasizes not only the temporal omnipresence of God, but also his eternal durability, which is a logical form incomprehensible to human beings, fallen or otherwise. He underlines this logical disjuncture between human and divine comprehension by ending on a logical pun, as God is both without temporal end, and at the same time his own logical end or aim is inherently unknowable to his creations, beyond whatever information he has permitted to them; just as they must rely on description at one remove to speak the unspeakable God, they must rely on logic at one remove to fulfil but not understand his purpose. In this way, logically speaking, God is indeed without discernible end for Adam and Eve. There is an alternative reading available for this formal sequence, in that it could be God’s creations’ extollation which is the cause to which the forms first, last, midst, and without end apply. In this configuration the whole of divine creation acts as a maintaining efficient cause upon the matter of God with their praise itself taking the various forms of being first, last, midst, and without end. In this instance, the continuous praise itself must both formally be without end, i.e., ceaseless, and also lack any logical end beyond fulfilling its own inherent task of laudation. For once again the created universe is being required to interact with and serve a larger divine purpose which to it is inherently unknowable. These two logical readings work hand in hand to suggest the self-fulfillment and circularity of divine reasoning when parsed by created entities; in turn it foregrounds and makes concrete the distinct separation between those entities and their creator. It is hard to tell whether Adam and Eve’s prayer is working upon the components of divine creation primarily as a provoking procatarctic cause invoking action through a series of logical imperatives, or whether they speak as maintaining observers using their logic to detail the praise of God which they already see taking place in the natural world around them: Moon, that now meetst the orient sun, now fly’st With the fixed stars, fixed in their orb that flies, And ye five other wandering fires that move In mystic dance not without song, resound His praise, who out of darkness called up light. Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of nature’s womb, that in quaternion run

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Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great maker still new praise. Ye mists and exhalations that now rise From hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey, Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold, In honour to the world’s great author rise, Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky, Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers, Rising or falling still advance his praise. (5.175–91) At moments when the human pair address the earth and its creatures, from birds to things “that in waters glide,” and “that walk / The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep” (5.200–201), it seems most likely that their words are acting upon all of these matters in their manifold forms to convince them to “join voices” (5.197), with the end of praising God. For Adam and Eve have been placed in a custodial role as guardians of these creatures, thereby commanding their own mini logical universe, acting upon it externally or, to use Milton’s term, procatarctically, to attain a mutual goal of glorifying God. Yet, earlier in their prayer, they use the same logical structure to impel or describe celestial entities over which they have no remit at all. In each case, whether addressing angels (5.161) or things that “lowly creep” (5.201), Adam and Eve either instruct or describe how these beings “speak” (5.160) or “join voices” (5.197) “to extol / Him” (5.164–65). Likewise, their own prayer can be seen to act on the sun with the end of it “acknowledging him” (5.173), the moon, and “ye five other wandering fires” (5.177) to “resound / His praise” (5.178–79), air and “ye elements” (5.180) with the end of furnishing “our great maker still new praise” (5.184), “mists and exhalations” which should “rise” “in honour to the world’s great author” (5.188). Likewise, the earth, winds, and fountains are impelled to join their various logical forms with the end of raising praise for God. It is notable among the celestial elements of God’s creation that all conduct their praise in a form which is ceaseless: angels sing “songs / And choral symphonies day without night” (5.101–2); the sun praises him in the form of its “eternal course” (5.173); the moon and planets are engaged more obliquely endlessly “in mystic dance not without song,” which is evocative of Milton’s description of unfallen angelic maze dancing (5.618–25); while the air and elements operate in “a perpetual circle” of “ceaseless change”

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(5.182–83). These cyclical logical actions are inherently endless in order to achieve a divine end which is unknowable but made manifest in the form of created glory. In contrast, the earthly creatures can only perform finite actions to achieve the same end, suggesting a further disjuncture between earthly and celestial creation and their accompanying logical behaviours. Divine separation becomes increasingly apparent through the course of the prayer: Adam and Eve begin by acknowledging their collective inability to see God (5.157) who is “to us invisible,” and, by sharing the experience of honoring “our great maker” (5.184) with the rest of creation, there is a notable shift to first person singular as they implore their created surroundings to “witness if I be silent” (5.202). In breaking their pair into two distinguishable, identifiable individuals, Adam and Eve render themselves independently logically accountable to act as their own efficient causes within their own distinct lives to achieve ends or not in accordance with their own personal singular actions. As such, while praise can take a collective form, it becomes clear that in Milton’s God’s creation each individual created entity is discretely responsible for their own behavior and its consequences. This individualistic dynamic is obviously a pressing issue when it comes to condemning falls from grace, and is instructive in explaining why those “stood who stood and fell who fell” (3.102). Thus, while Adam and Eve can implore God as a duo “to give us only good” (5.206) in accordance with the logic of his creation they remain individually independently responsible for their own conduct and its effects.

III God’s End: “All You Had to Do Was Stay” As soon as God starts to speak, a familiar pattern for divine logic appears in the lengthy enumeration of the various matter of angels in an array of forms whom he addresses: Hear all ye angels, progeny of light, Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers, Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand. This day I have begot whom I declare My only Son, and on this holy hill Him have anointed, whom ye now behold At my right hand; your head I him appoint … (5.600–606)

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This list of angels and their domains is one which we have heard before in Satan’s repeated re-appropriation of this regal address in the council of hell (2.11: “powers and dominions, deities of heaven;” and again in 2.310–13: “thrones and imperial powers, offspring of heaven, / Ethereal virtues; or these titles now / Must we renounce, and changing style be called / Princes of hell?” and again in 2.430: “O progeny of heaven, empyreal thrones, / With reason hath deep silence and demur / Seized us, though undismayed”). Having detailed the matter and form of the angels, God reveals that it is his “decree” which will be the efficient cause working on his creations. Delaying the explanation of efficient cause is a recurrent feature of God’s logic, and it is in keeping with the notion of the distance between him and his creations that the driving force of his universe takes time to unfold. Indeed, it is questionable whether God’s fundamental causes can possibly be penetrable to any other than his own divine intellect, and one of the consequences of this divine obscurity can be seen in this speech as he informs the angels not of one of the effects of his decree or disobeying it, but simply its end which is that it “unrevoked shall stand” (5.602). In so saying, God does not even provide a very satisfactory aim for his decree: the angels are told it will “stand” immutable, but the reasons for this remain carefully hidden, as “invisible” as the maker of the decree itself. God continues to set forth the origins of his decree: And by myself have sworn to him shall bow All knees in heaven, and shall confess him Lord: Under his great viceregent reign abide United as one individual soul For ever happy. (5.607–11) He acts as the efficient cause first begetting and then naming his “only Son” with the end of “declar[ing]” him to be such. A characteristic of God’s logic is that frequently his end and effect are one and the same. This makes perfect sense as a necessary consequence and condition of God’s omnipotence and ability to discern all temporal circumstances, past, present, and future at the same time, thereby rendering end and effect simultaneous with one another. When God states to the angels of the Son that “your head I him appoint,” he indicates his efficient action upon the angels and the Son with the end and immediate effect of assigning their warden. However, as God outlines

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the angels’ causal sequence which should enable them to accept the Son’s viceregency, the question of logical independence and agency arises when he explains that they will “bow” and “confess [the Son] Lord” (5.607–8). The issue of agency is complicated in these lines. One reading involves understanding that the pronoun implied for “have sworn” is “I,” as God continues to unfold his own causal path in the exultation of the Son. In this scenario, “[I] have sworn” reveals God acting as the direct efficient cause acting on the matter of angels in all their hierarchical forms, with the end and effect that they bow to the Son and accept his seniority. Yet by the requirements of “voluntary service” (5.529), which Raphael has explained is a stipulation of free will for Milton’s God, there is an argument available in these lines which sees God transfer causal agency from his own actions having “anointed” and “appoint[ed]” (5.605–6) the Son to the angels themselves so the action of accepting him and bowing to him emanates from their own internal or, Miltonically, proegumenic volition as creatures separate from God. In this revolution, it is “all the knees in heaven” who act as the causal impetus as they “have sworn” “by [God]” to “bow” to the Son and “confess him Lord.” In light of the importance placed upon choosing and volition in determining faith in Paradise Lost it seems feasible that God would place the onus on the angels to acknowledge the Son, but even the idea that he can transfer causal power and thereby allow independent decisions to be made is difficult in that he is still the procatarctic cause driving the angels to make a choice. However, the careful causal negotiation is critical to fundamental ideas of free will in Paradise Lost because even if God is seen as the prime mover causing angels or mankind or even the Son to make a decision, the baton is then in their hands and they are personally responsible for choosing which track they will run down. Finishing first or last? Your choice, according to Milton’s God. In this way God is the creator of all things including the capacity of reasoning, and will indeed be omniscient, knowing what will happen without actually inhibiting the free will of his creations: each may act at his procatarctic prompting, but in acting they follow their own causal motivations. This idea goes a long way to understand Raphael’s observation that in order to stand “in happiness,” one must “persevere” (5.525), constantly piloting one’s vessel in the apposite theological direction regardless of external pressures which will try to buffet and blow off course. The point of causal separation gains additional importance as God explains the ramifications of transgressing:

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       Him who disobeys Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place Ordained without redemption, without end. (5.611–15) With the Son’s “vicegerent reign” working on them as an external impelling cause, the theologically proper and desirable effect is that the angels will “abide” in their “united” form. God draws an incredibly succinct argument of comparison between the angels and “one united soul” to suggest that this type of harmony will result in the angels being “For ever happy” (5.611); it is highly unusual for him to make this kind of parallel, as I have discussed, and it may be that he does so here in part to acknowledge the potency of the angelic ability to divide themselves from bliss if they cannot “persevere” (5.525). He continues this tactic, using a larger-scale argument of comparison to parallel the effect for those who freely stand with that for those who freely fall. In a series of concise causal statements, God explains that “him who disobeys / Me disobeys,” an immensely compact logical construction in which the person “who disobeys” acts as the efficient cause working per se due to their own internal motivations not on but in opposition to the matter of God with a simultaneous end and effect that they “disobey.” Ezra Pound attacked this formulation, arguing that it is an example of Milton doing “wrong to his mother tongue,” but, elegant or otherwise (and plenty have found evidence for each view, which I will not rehearse here), in a logical reading this is a point in Paradise Lost when Milton explicitly defines the cause, end, and effect of wrongdoing.16 There is an interesting tipping point in the phrase “him who disobeys / Me disobeys,” as God’s personal pronoun morphs from being a final remnant of his own causal role in this scene (“I am the person who gave you something to disobey”) to being the party suffering from a hypothetical angelic cause of disobeying (“I suffer from your disobeying”). God takes pains to demarcate these liminal causal moments in such a way that the falling party cannot deny or avoid their own agency or its consequences. Here he spells out to the angels that if they disobey then they are explicitly pitching their causal impetus against his, in a move that makes this a substantially better warning than that which Adam and Eve receive prior to their transgression. In examining the causal interplay of this phrase, we can open the closed loop of an apparent tautology to understand it afresh as a detailed and clear definition

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of the meaning of transgression. It is this statement which enables the fallen angels to transgress willfully, which might in turn raise further questions about God’s own causal role in the lowest deep. God is able to explain his to his prelapsarian angels that they are free to transgress, and may do so at their own choosing, all because he made them this way. The prelapsarian angels are furnished with a picture of the effects of disobedience in the last part of the decree. God states that they will be “cast out from God and blessed vision” (5.613). Transgressors will be in “utter darkness, deep engulfed,” and even their “place” itself it described in terms of what it lacks, being “without redemption.” The crowning glory of these concatenated logical privatives or arguments of deprivation is the effect that fallen angels will be in their new, bleak abode “without end.” Immediately the parallel between this eternal outcome and being “for ever happy” chime as the two halves of God’s argument of disagreement delineating the consequences of falling and standing. Further, there is a Miltonic pun at work in the fallen angels being in a place “without end,” not only in a temporal sense but also more fundamentally in a logical sense, as their new domain is aimless—this would appear to be the first imagining of hell’s “wandering mazes lost” (2.561). Not only are the fallen angels cast into the abyss, but so estranged will they be from the divine that God is able to self-dissociate to describe their new forms as being “cast out from God.” The third person description is grammatically curious in a speech wherein he has everywhere employed first person singular. However, read logically, this more distant perspective serves as an additional indicator of the impassable distance which will separate the fallen from the divine. So separate are they that post-lapsarian God refuses to give them even a privative formal description in direct relation to himself. Rather, he augments the distance between himself and putative transgressers so that it is from their remote perspective that he shows how they will be deprived of his presence, as his role as an independent, remote entity is underscored. The third person perspective aligns with a logical remoteness as God imagines himself from the point of view of falling angels, painting a picture in which he is the matter and locus of bliss, which is rapidly vanishing from view, standing in opposition to the new place of “utter darkness.” This logical dislocation is a property unique to God in Paradise Lost and is another way in which Milton uses the art of reasoning well to elucidate the differences in both theological status and corresponding knowledge: as

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an omniscient being, God is able to displace himself logically to envision events including his own presence or lack thereof within these scenarios, from and for another perspective. Again, this ability means that he can craft a rather better warning for the angels than Raphael’s second-hand account express delivered to Adam and Eve. However, the difficulty remains that, just like their human counterparts, the angels have no experience of what a life with the form of being “cast out from God” in “utter darkness” would be. The concept of a life “without end” in both a temporal and logical sense which was simultaneously perpetually separate from God and “blessed vision” is something the angels can only imagine dimly through God’s own description of it, making this less a warning with the intent of a positive effect than a disclaimer. Throughout God’s decree he explains the causal actions of obedience which he demands upon the anointing of the Son, yet he gives no insight whatsoever into the potential proegumenic causes such as faith or love of God which might act positively within an angel to make them want to follow the path of obedience which he has set forth. This is a distinction between the types of causal structure invoked by God and Satan when addressing an audience which argues for their different goals. As God speaks to the angels and, by Raphael’s report, to his human creations, it is with the overarching end of explanation and demarcation: here are the boundaries, here is the condition of obedience, adhere or don’t. Quite literally, from God’s perspective, all the fallen angels have to do is stay. Conversely, Satan’s role is that of an active recruitment officer: a potential injustice has surfaced and your leader needs you. The difference between the two speakers can be traced to their larger aims in the epic. God’s desire from his creations is faith: faith performed through obedience to the laws which he has set forth, and as such he will not issue instructions or even guidelines as to the internal motivations which might fuel such a behavior as those are the causal responsibility of the individual, whether angel or human, in question. Each created being is in charge of their internal causal impulses, so God will not instruct them as to what these should be, or why, because in so doing he would undermine the possibility of a faithful act. As such, he yet his silent judgment keeps as to why one of his creations might be internally prompted to obey, invoking only the negative consequences of disobeying so that if a creature fails they do so willingly with a knowledge, at least in theory, of what they are in for. Conversely, Satan always has a specific short-term goal in the epic, a particular way in which he will strain

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against the confines of purported obedience and try to flout God. He speaks accordingly, infusing his addresses with details of the proegumenic and procatarctic motivations which might operate on his audience to persuade them to follow his course of action.

IV God’s Version of the Falls from Grace God provides a succinct Janus-faced account of the two falls from grace: For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command, Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall, He and his faithless progeny: whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the ethereal powers And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love? Where only what they needs must do, appeared, Not what they would, what praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When will and reason (reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity, Not me. They therefore as to right belonged, So were created, nor can justly accuse Their make, or their making, or their fate (3.93–113) From his omniscient perspective he builds an argument of comparison between the faith trajectories of Satan and his crew, and mankind, to argue for the individual accountability for standing or falling. God’s omniscience creates a potential ambiguity in that the future description of “he and his faithless progeny” who “will fall” could refer to mankind, but from the point of view of a creator able to view all time simultaneously this statement could

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nod likewise to the satanic band, in particular with the emphatic formal definition of their “faithless[ness].” Both Adam and Satan have associates who have and will fall with them, and while Satan’s may not be “progeny” in a genetic sense, from Raphael’s description of his infusion of corruption into their minds they can be seen to have acquired his characteristics in this sense. The dual potential references for this narrative are underscored when God switches tense to say that “he had of me / All he could have”: by taking us back to the past, God could be describing either creation process, and the shared causal origins and formal properties condense to make a compelling argument of agreement between Adam and Satan. God explains how he originally acted as the efficient cause when he “made” his creations, acting on indeterminate human or angelic matter to create forms which were “just and right.” His end in doing so was to make beings capable of giving “sincere” “proof ” “of true allegiance” (3.103–4) which could only be possible if his creatures were formed “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” At this juncture, God performs a deft but vital handover in causal control, as his creatures become their own efficient causes as they stood in the form of acting “freely” with the effect of having stood, or they acted upon themselves as they “fell” again in the form of acting “freely” but with the effect that they did indeed fall. Read logically, this compact line does not indicate two predestined types of being, standers and fallers, nor an indifference on God’s part as to which of these roles beings act out. Rather, it firmly insists upon individual causal accountability of the “free” forms of created divine beings, which has the effect of putting each person in charge of their own decisions and actions. Far from suggesting divine indifference, God explains how he has purposefully acted as an efficient cause to create forms which had the power of genuinely using “will and reason” (3.108) with the end that they could genuinely make a choice to serve him and not “necessity” (3.110). Interestingly, it is this exercise of choice which God says will work upon him, with the effect of giving him “pleasure,” and in this way he makes use of the system of reasoning which he created to make logically independent creations as only under these circumstances is it possible for his own goals to be met. By aligning the human narrative with that of the fallen angels in an argument of agreement, God explains with the utmost efficiency the ubiquitous application of logical responsibility within all of his creations capable of reason. God takes pains to repeat the incarnation of logical independence

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from multiple different angles in the remainder of his speech, shifting focus to demonstrate the way in which this exonerates him from blame: They therefore as to right belonged, So were created, nor can justly accuse Their maker, or their making, or their fate; As if predestination overruled Their will, disposed by absolute decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had proved no less certain unforeknown. (3.111–19) Here an argument of disagreement begins by imagining “an absolute decree” or “high foreknowledge” had worked upon the angels or humans specifically on the form of their will with the end of overruling it, and the effect of predestination. In contrast, God immediately affirms that his creations “themselves decreed” their actions with the end of revolt. As a qualifier he explains the inability of “foreknowledge” to act as an efficient cause, insisting that known or otherwise “their fault was their own.” God recaps his creations’ causal responsibility by stating that they acted as efficient causes as “authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose” (3.122– 23). He stipulates that while he acted as the efficient cause upon their matter initially with the end of “form[ing]” them free, now it is they who have the efficient causal power to work upon their own matter “till they enthrall themselves” (3.125). However, his argument of agreement does not hold true for the ultimate fate of his angelic and human creations, as he explicitly contrasts the causal workings of angels whose “own suggestion” internally worked to generate the effect that they fell. With mankind’s second-hand lapse engendered by the external cause of deceit it is this distinction between internal and external causes of temptation which means that God intends for man to have grace, while Satan and his fallen crew are afforded none (3.131–32). In this way, not only is individual causal responsibility acutely examined for each of God’s creations but if this should lead them down a wrong path an onward investigation into the provocation of their efficient causal actions will be conducted to assign grace or blame. What is more, the ultimate effect of the efficient causal actions of Satan tempting Adam and Eve, which initially

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results in their fall, comes finally through their redemption to “heighten God’s glory” (3.133). God creates a logical life-cycle in which he is the efficient cause of his creations who in turn through various causal operations of their own effect his own glorification, completing the circle which allows him to declare “mercy first and last shall brightest shine” (3.134). Paradise Lost is an epic founded on identifying and exploring personal logical accountability in a divine system which is harsh and intolerant, as Empson lucidly drew out in 1961 and again in 1965, and it is indeed Milton’s unflinching willingness to explore and lay bare that system which makes the poem terrifying and tragic. However, read as a product of Milton both as scholar and as teacher of the art of arts, it is the ubiquitous individual logical accountability which argues that Empson’s position bears elaboration: according to Milton’s logic, Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.

c ha p te r seve n

God’s Grammar Milton’s Parsing of the Divine Russell Hugh McConnell

Now had th’ Almighty Father from above, (From the pure Empyrean where he sits High thron’d above all height) bent down his Eye, His own Works and their Works at once to view. About him all the Sanctities of Heav’n Stood thick as Stars, and from his Sight received Beatitude past utt’rance: On his right The radiant Image of his Glory sat, His only Son. On earth he first beheld Our two first Parents, yet the only two Of Mankind, in the happy garden plac’d, Reaping immortal fruits of Joy and Love; Uninterrupted Joy, unrival’d Love In blissful Solitude. He then surveyed Hell and the Gulph between, and Satan there Coasting the Wall of Heaven on this side Night, In the dun air sublime; and ready now To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feel On the bare outside of this world, that seem’d Firm land imbosom’d without firmament; Uncertain which, in Ocean or in Air. Him God beholding from his prospect high,

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Russell Hugh McConnell Wherein past, present, future he beholds, Thus to his only Son foreseeing spake. (Paradise Lost, 3.56–79)1

Joseph Addison, in his famous discussion of this passage, awards extremely high praise to Milton’s sublime poetic ability: As his Genius was wonderfully turned to the Sublime, his Subject is the noblest that could have entered into the Thoughts of Man. Every thing that is truly great and astonishing, has a place in it. The whole System of the intellectual World; the Chaos, and the Creation; Heaven, Earth and Hell; enter into the Constitution of his Poem.2 In ascribing this grand, sublime view to Milton, Addison appears to be ascribing to him something approaching a divine perspective on the world, a synoptic, all-inclusive understanding that encompasses all the geographic regions of the universe. Yet, in Addison’s view, even Milton’s poetic sublimity ultimately must founder, and it founders against the impossible task of representing divine speech: If Milton’s Majesty forsakes him any where, it is in those Parts of his Poem, where the Divine Persons are introduced as Speakers. One may, I think, observe that the Author proceeds with a kind of Fear and Trembling, whilst he describes the Sentiments of the Almighty.3 As John Leonard observes, “Addison is not chiding Milton. He is commending him for knowing his limits. Addison thinks that poetic sublimity should founder when describing God” (note in Leonard, 482). My argument here about Milton’s poetry is specifically about his poetical use of grammar: when his poetry encounters the divine it does not precisely founder, but it does run up against the limits of worldly, fallen language, and that in order adequately to discuss the transcendent quality of divinity Milton’s grammar must become strange or go (artfully and deliberately) awry. While Addison identifies Milton’s “Fear and Trembling” when approaching divine speech, I emphasize his evasiveness and imprecision in discussing God’s location and temporality, a different sort of “foundering”: a deliberate foundering of English grammar in establishing spatial locations and relationships. This difficulty has to do specifically with God’s physical

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position in Heaven, which is ultimately inseparable from the matter of His temporal position. The one question shades poetically into the other, and both factors (space and time) are treated in this deliberately problematic way to illustrate them as attributes belonging to a partial, fallen, mortal perception of the world. Milton’s necessarily limited mortal perspective, whether or not it bars him from direct access to “the Sentiments of the Almighty,” bars him from the ability truly and directly to recreate God’s divine perspective upon the world, there being no unfallen human grammar available in which to express it. Addison’s view of this book 3 passage is that “The Survey of the whole Creation, and of every thing that is transacted in it, is a Prospect worthy of Omniscience.”4 Here he uses the word “Prospect” in the sense of “The view (of a landscape, etc.) afforded by a particular location or position; a vista; an extensive or commanding range of sight” or perhaps as “A mental view, survey, or inspection; an account or description” (OED, “prospect, n.”). Milton, however, uses the word in a significantly different sense: “A place which affords an open and extensive view; a lookout” (“prospect, n.”). And the nature of this “prospect” turns out to be crucial in understanding God’s “place” in Milton’s universe: his spatial place, his temporal place. This paper argues that speech by and about God in Paradise Lost features a range of subtle grammatical manipulations that are important to characterizing his divine nature; it contextualizes its close readings in terms of early modern grammatical education—both William Lily’s standard Short Introduction of Grammar and John Milton’s own Accidence Commenc’t Grammar. Therefore, before I launch into a detailed discussion of this passage of Milton, I need to take a detour through a major facet of early modern grammar school education. Lily’s A Short Introduction of Grammar, also known simply as “Lily’s Grammar” or “the Royal Grammar,” is easily the most important and influential grammar textbook in the history of England and dominated grammatical education from 1548 to 1758. This book is a compilation of texts published by Lily between 1513 and 1527, and was in circulation by 1542, twenty years after Lily’s death, although it did not have an entirely stable edition until 1548.5 The reverse of the title page of the 1548 edition features an address from Edward VI to all the schoolmasters of England, commanding “that this one kynd of grammar … shuld be openly and priuately redde to al kynd of lerners in euery grammar schole, and other places of techyng, and the same and none other to bee vsed.” The proclamation continues, explaining that this rule is in place

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because “the tēdernes of youth is so soft, that thei can scarcely auoyde the print of any one kynd of grammar; and much lesse can suffer the endles diuersitee of sundry scholemaster[s], which how many so euer ther be in nūbre, doth almost think euery man hym selfe to haue the best and rediest kynd of techyng.”6 Elizabeth I, in her Royal Injunctions of 1559, proclaims, “39. Item that euery Scolemaster and teacher, shall teache the gramer set forth by kyng Henry theight of noble memory, and continued in the tyme of kyng Edward the syxt, and none other.”7 The English Church was also a supporter of Lily’s Grammar: Elizabeth’s Injunctions were endorsed in the Canons Ecclesiastical of 1571 and Richard Bancroft’s proposed Canons of 1604,8 which were drawn from various “articles, injunctions, and synodical acts passed during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth.”9 In addition to these proclamations, we can be sure of the dominance and ubiquity of Lily’s text because there exists a substantial print record of various educators writing their own supplements and critiques of it, evidently chafing at its compulsorily central place in the schoolroom. John Brinsley, in Ludus Literarius (1612), advocates translating the portions of Lily’s grammar written in Latin into English and having students practice learning the rules with the translated version; by this means, he claims, he can get his own students to learn their grammatical rules in half the normal time.10 In 1616, Thomas Granger published Syntgma grammaticum, or an easie, and methodicall explanation of Lillies grammar whereby the misterie of this art is more plainely set forth. This was followed in 1625 by the anonymous text Animadversions upon Lillie`s Grammar, or Lillie Scanned. In 1631, John Danes published A Light to Lillie, or the better Teaching and Learning of the Latin Tongue. Then, in 1642, there was William Haine’s Lilie’s Rules Construed, which enjoyed several reprintings into the 1730s. In 1651, Charles Hoole published The Latine Grammar Fitted for the use of Schools, wherein the words of Lilie’s Grammar are (as much as might be) retained; many errors thereof amended, many needless things left out: many necessaries, that were wanting supplied; and all things ordered in a Method more agreeable to Children’s Capacitie. Bassett Jones’s Herm’aelogium; or an essay at the rationality of the Art of Speaking. As a supplement to Lillie’s Grammar appeared in 1659 and then in 1660 Anthony Huish published Priscianus nascens, or A key to the grammar school presenting a familiar praxis on all the rules of the common accidence; with a plain introduction into the rules of syntax, as an assistant to Lillies grammar. Also in 1660 came the anonymous A Breviate of

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our King’s whole Latin Grammar.11 This series of publications thus attests to Lily’s ubiquity in grammar schools and to the fact that schoolmasters took the command to use it seriously. These various publications constitute a tradition of resistance to Lily’s dominance in the grammar schools, and they range from moderate supplementation to fairly radical revision and critique. John Milton’s Accidence Commenc’t Grammar is a particularly interesting and significant entry in this tradition. Milton’s text is greatly streamlined, and less repetitive than Lily’s, being less than half the length of the Royal Grammar. In his preface to the reader, Milton (although he does not name Lily) complains about the standard practice of “making two labours of one, by learning first the Accidence, then the Grammar in Latin,” unmistakably referring to the two-part structure of Lily’s textbook. Milton argues that “The only remedy of this, was to joyne both Books into one, and in the English Tongue; whereby the long way is much abbreviated, and the labour of understanding much more easie.”12 The difference between the two books’ organization and emphasis is evident in their framing of their subject, as it is not until the second half of his book that Lily gets around to defining what grammar actually is. Lily explains: “Grammatica est rectè scribendi atque loquendi ars.” That is, “Grammar is the art of writing and speaking correctly.” Lily divides grammar into four components: Orthographia, Etymologia, Syntaxis, and Prosodia.13 Milton, in contrast, places his definitions up front, and simplifies them. On the first numbered page of his textbook, immediately after his preface to the reader, Milton opens with a definition: “Latin Grammar is the Art of right understanding, speaking, or writing Latine, observed from them who have spoken or written it best” (Accidence, 1). He divides grammar into only two components: “Right wording, usually called Etymologie and right-joyning of words, or Syntaxis” (1). Another point of contrast between the two works can be found in their respective discussions of verb tense. According to Lily, “There be fiue Tenses or Times: the Present tense, the Preterimperfect, the Preterperfect, the Preterpluperfect, & the Future tense.” In distinguishing the first three of these, Lily separates out “time not perfectly past (“I loved”) and “the time perfectly past (“I have loved”) and the Preterpluperfect of the time more than perfectly past (“I had loved”).14 Milton, in contrast, declares: “There be three tense which express the time of doing: The Present, the Preterit or past, and the Future” (Accidence, 18). Milton’s discussion of tense is thus simpler in its initial

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definition. He does eventually include the Preterit, the Preterimperfect, and the Preterpluperfect by listing them as categories within the past tense. The finer gradations within the “past” category only serve to provide detail about the completeness of a past action, and its relationship with other actions in the past or present. For Milton, tense, strictly speaking, is a matter of time, and the only three categories of time are past, present, and future. These three sharply defined categories are what Milton’s God transcends. This matter of transcendence brings me back to book 3 of Paradise Lost, specifically to the conclusion of the passage that Addison so admires. God observes Satan passing through Chaos: Him God beholding from his prospect high, Wherein past, present, future he beholds, Thus to his onely Son foreseeing spake. (3.77–79) This passage contains an interesting shift in verb tense: God “beholds,” apparently in the present tense, and then “spake” to the Son in the past tense. This tense shift echoes that in the opening stanza of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” which begins by announcing that “It was the Winter wild,” and then in line three notes that the infant Jesus “in the rude manger lies” (ll. 1, 3). In that poem, Christ’s relationship with chronological time is not that of any normal human being; although his birth is a historical event, its meaning and significance transcend history and the shifting of grammatical tenses is a reminder that Christ does not occupy time in the same way that the rest of us do. In this passage from Paradise Lost, the present tense is serving a specific function. As Milton states it in his textbook, “The Present Tense speaketh of the time that now is, as Laudo I praise” (Accidence, 18). Yet in a story told in the past tense, this present tense does not indicate that God occupies his prospect at the current moment, but that he occupies it in general, as a repeated or continuous state of affairs. That is to say, God does not just happen to be occupying this prospect at the moment; rather, he is always in this prospect, there will never be a time when he does not occupy it, and thus never a time when it is not the case that “past, present, future he beholds.” While the three tenses are listed chronologically, the asyndeton prevents any strong sense of order or hierarchy: they are simply three equal components. God, like the infant Jesus in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” thus does not take part in normal chronological time.

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The fact that God sees past, present, and future in the present tense indicates that he is himself out of normal time, and thus he does not really reside in any particular tense. The three-line passage depends upon a metaphor of physical space: put in the most crudely literal terms, it would indicate that God, occupying as he does this particular place or “prospect,” is so high up that he can see everything, including the past and future. He has the best view in the universe because he has the tallest chair. Although absurd when thus literalized, this passage’s treatment of physical location follows r­ easonably enough from what precedes it in book 2: Satan’s voyage through Chaos. In Chaos, the matter of Satan’s physical location is hopelessly confused, as the unformed matter is utterly unpredicatable and unmanageable. At times, Satan is “in the surging smoke / Uplifted,” but abruptly “meets / A vast vacuitie”; at another moment he is “in a Boggy Syrtis” which is “neither Sea, / Nor good dry Land” (2.929–40). Satan’s physical place in chaos is changing and indeterminate, the opposite of the absolute stability and certainty of God’s position on His prospect. Of course, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect anyone to find his feet in Chaos, but even when Satan arrives at his goal and lands upon the outside of Earth’s atmosphere, he still does not seem to know quite where he is or what surrounds him, “Uncertain which, in ocean or in air” (3.76). He seems ill at ease, uncertainly placed, even in the physical universe as it is normally constructed. God, in contrast, knows exactly where he is, and apparently occupies his “prospect” with perfect confidence, security, and knowledge—even if we readers cannot really comprehend what that prospect is (more on this point of comprehension in a moment). One of the clearest clues to God’s physical position in book 3 is the word “Empyrean,” which has multiple obviously relevant celestial meanings, including, “Of or relating to the highest or most exalted part or sphere of heaven” or “of or relating to the sky or firmament,” and “The highest or most exalted part or sphere of heaven; … the abode of God and the angels” (OED, “empyrean,” adj. and n.). This last meaning is more specifically locative, although even it does not distinguish between “highest” and “most exalted,” poised perfectly between physical location and importance, extending rather than resolving the question of God’s location as opposed to God’s status. The polyptotonic description of God as “High thron’d above all height” helps to confirm the point: God’s position exceeds the physical dimension of space; he is so “high” in importance compared with the spatial concept of “height.”15

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Earlier in the epic Satan attempts to achieve a certainty and power of position that resembles God’s: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). The use of antimetabole is already blasphemous here, balancing Heaven and Hell as if they were an equal and interchangeable pair. In the specific context of the grammar of place, particularly in contrast to the coming description of God’s promontory, the prepositional phrase “in itself ” is ambiguous, meaning either “by its own power” or “inside itself.” Satan could be making an assertion about the power of the mind to transform the world, or an assertion about the mind being a place in which one can create fictional worlds. One of these statements looks outward, towards the world that the mind might transform, and one looks inward, towards the interior stage of the mind, where one might transform one place to another. Both God and Satan are figured as being “in” certain places (God is thus presented by the narrator; Satan places himself). The location God is “wherein” is one from which he can see the whole universe, and an impossibly, transcendently high “place” is a way of representing his divine status. Satan asserts (at least as one of the possible meanings of his utterance) that he is, or could be, “in” a place where he can himself become the divine creator—or else that his mind has the power to transform the world (even if only imaginarily). That these two passages parallel one another is all the more firmly established by the similar actions that the two characters perform. This speech of Satan’s in book 1 occurs just after Satan has risen from the burning lake and is taking his first good look around, surveying the landscape of Hell, which is his new home: “Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime … ?” (1.242). Similarly, when God’s prospect is described in book 3, the point of placing him there is to show how he occupies this seat “His own Works and their Works at once to view” (3.59). The phrase “at once” indicates the nature of omniscient perception: God’s perception of the world is not partial or temporal, but simultaneous, taking in all things in all times and all places “at once.” Yet this point clashes almost immediately with the requirements of linear narrative, as we learn that “on earth he first beheld / Our two first parents” (3.64–65). This paradox is another example of the impossibility of representing God in mortal, fallen speech. Milton’s strategy of creating grammatical oddity or contradiction in the face of divinity is not limited to Paradise Lost, but appears even in his earliest poetry. It is particularly interesting in his treatment of the birth of Christ in “On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:

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See how from far, upon the Eastern rode The Star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet: O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at his blessed feet; Have thou the honour first, thy Lord to greet, And joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire, From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire. (22–28) At this moment in the poem Milton faces us with a vitally important, quasi-spatial question that manifests on the level of the poem’s grammar: what exactly is it that comes “from out his secret Altar”? There are several plausible candidates in the preceding lines: the sacred muse that Milton is addressing, the muse’s voice, and the Angel Quire perhaps seem the most likely, although “thy Lord” and “the honour” are also entirely possible. The question is an important one, because its answer specifies the exact relationship between the sacred altar of the final line and the possibility of sacred poetry, which is what the young Milton (thoroughly educated but as yet poetically unproven) here seeks to produce. This sacred altar constitutes a clear allusion to Isaiah 6:1–8, which concerns Isaiah’s becoming a prophet, able to speak with divine knowledge and authority. The passage appears in the Geneva Bible as follows: 1 In the yere of the death of King Vzziah, I sawe also the Lord sitting vpō an high throne, and lifted vp, and the lower partes thereof filled the temple. 2 The Seraphims stode vpon it: euerie one had six wings: with twaine he couered his face, and with twaine he couered his fete, and with twaine he did flie. 3 And one cryed to another, and said Holy, holy, holy is ye Lord of hostes: the whole worlde is ful of his glorie. 4 And the lintels of the dore chekes moued at the voyce of him that cryed, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 Then I said, Wo is me: for I am vndone, because I am a man of polluted lippes, and I dwell in the middes of a people of polluted lippes: for mine eyes haue sene the King and Lord of hostes. 6 Then flewe one of the Seraphims vnto me with an hote cole in his hand, which he had takē from the altar with the tongs:

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Because the altar is the source of the purifying coal that makes Isaiah fit and able to speak as a prophet of God, then the question of how one can get access this purification seems a vitally important one for anyone wishing to produce a poem like “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Yet this easy access appears to be denied to us: the path to the sacred altar—both a (physical?) path in the (metaphorical?) space of the poem, and a grammatical path within Milton’s syntactical construction—is obscured. This truly is a “secret altar.”17 The point of the grammatical disjunction is that it both describes and illustrates the mysterious nature of the source of sacred speech. The question of where this sacred altar is and how the heavenly muse (or its voice, or the Angel Quire, or “thy Lord,” or honour) gets “From out” of it to the region of earthly music and poetry seems hopelessly obscured. For help in elucidating how this obscurity operates we can turn to Milton’s Accedence Commenc’d Grammar. Milton begins this text by defining the two basic components of grammar: “Right-wording, usually call’d Etymologie; and right-joyning of words, or Syntaxis” (Accedence, 1). In this fourth stanza syntaxis fails: words are deliberately not quite joined together in an airtight grammatical formation. Here Milton’s grammatical engagement with the divine once again (or, rather, for the first time) confronts it in terms of space and deals with the ineffability of divine inspiration by deliberately deforming his syntaxis. One grammatical feature of the poem that has received some commentary is its frequent tense shifts; these begin immediately in the opening stanza, which begins by announcing that “It was the Winter wild,” and quickly moves to line three, in which the infant Jesus “in the rude manger lies” (“Nativity,” 1, 3). Manipulations and variations in tense that blur the question of exactly when the speaker is situated relative to the events he describes are not what one would expect from Milton if one had only read what he said on the topic in the Accedence Commenc’d Grammar: There be three Tenses which express the time of doing: The Present, the Preterit or past, and the Future.

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The Present Tense speaketh of the time that now is, as Laudo I praise. The Preterit speaketh of the time past, and is distinguisht by three degrees: the Preterimperfect, the Preterperfect, and the Preterpluperfect. The Preterimperfect speaketh of the time not perfectly past, as Laudabam I praised or did praise. The Preterperfect speaketh of the time perfectly past, as Laudavi I have praised. The Preterpluperfect speaketh of the time more than perfectly past, as Laudaveram I had praised. The Future Tense speaketh of the time to come, as Laudabo I shall or will praise. (Accedence, 18) This brief and straightforward account of grammatical tense, in which past, present, and future are clear and distinct, belies the manipulations that Milton enacts in the poem and makes these manipulations all the more striking. The earliest detailed discussion of tense in the poem comes from Lowry Nelson’s Baroque Lyric Poetry, in which he discusses not the role of the poet per se but rather the “weddedness of time” enabled by what he refers to as the poem’s constant “baroque” tense shifts. Similar tense shifts occur throughout the poem and Nelson argues that this is from Milton shifting his focus from the actual event of Christ’s birth to the whole span of time between the first Creation and the final Judgment. Nelson further argues that by the end of the poem, “While the past tense has been left far behind, we cannot think that the poem merely emerges into a historical present … the tense has helped to identify the birth of Christ with Christmas as it has been celebrated ever since” and emphasizes “how much the time structure depends upon special uses of tense and how closely tense is linked to meaning.”18 Nelson’s work has been followed up by that of R. M. Fransson, who argues that Milton’s manipulation of tense aids in the conflation of cultures and times that runs throughout the poem and ultimately “celebrates all union and creation within the moment of Christ’s birth: the Nativity becomes the focus, the matrix of the history of mankind.” Rosamund Tuve, although she does not delve into matters of tense as specifically as Nelson and Fransson, maintains that the poem “exists to celebrate a mystery rather than to describe and comment upon an event”; it “celebrates the meaning of the Incarnation not only in history but after history is over, an event both in and not within created nature, a peace both in and

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not within created time.”19 In light of this characterization it is easy to see the problem that Milton would face if he governed himself strictly in this poem according to the clear and straightforward account of tense that he offers in the Grammar. Similarly, C.A. Patrides, in Milton and the Christian Tradition, compares Milton’s poem to Richard Crashaw’s “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord.” Patrides argues that “Crashaw concentrated on the one specific moment in history that witnessed the union of God and man,” whereas “Milton chose to go much further, affirming the birth of Jesus as an event affecting the whole universe.” He agrees with Tuve in maintaining that Milton “celebrates the meaning of the Incarnation not only in history but after history is over.”20 This perspective, simultaneously historical and trans-historical, is achieved in part through the manipulation of tenses. The matter of time and tense in the poem has received further discussion from David B. Morris. He argues: The deliberate fixation in time (“This is the Month”) seems at first to reflect the perspective of the poet Milton, who is writing his ode … during the dawn of Christmas 1629. The perspective of the modern poet, however, soon blends with that of an ancient bard who is sending his poem as a gift to the newborn Saviour. “This is the Month,” then, refers both to December 1629 and to the historical moment of the Nativity. These two figures of modern poet and ancient bard may seem very distant from one another, but, as Morris argues, “To the eye of God, the centuries which separate the two figures pass as in a single instant. Poet’s ‘now’ and prophet’s ‘now’ are subsumed in the Nunc stans of eternity.”21 In the ordinary course of mortal life, distinguishing between “the time that now is” and “the time past” (Accedence, 18) can be a matter as simple as Milton’s streamlined textbook explanation would suggest. Thus what would be, in an ordinary engagement with the rules of grammar, obscurity, and perhaps error, is an effort to create for the reader (in a necessarily inadequate way) a sense of what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of God and the sharp disjunction between the grammatical rules and the poetic effect indicates the difficulty of attaining this perspective: our normal understanding of time, and therefore our normal grammatical construction of consistent tenses, must be radically disrupted.

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Some of the tense shifts in the poem occur in conjunction with a conjunction—specifically with the word “but.” Morris specifically singles out the “But” at line 149 which moves the poem from a description of the rapturous golden world that is to come after the final Judgment back to the “present” (although in this poem that word is necessarily misleading). The tense shift occurs between stanzas: And Heav’n as at som festivall, Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall. But wisest Fate sayes no, This must not yet be so. (147–50) Morris argues that Milton here, and elsewhere in the poem, uses the word “but” to “signal violent breaks in the normal successive flow of time.”22 Here, with the conjunction “but,” wisest Fate brings us from a glorious vision of the end of the fallen world back to the morning of Christ’s nativity. Yet Morris here somewhat overstates his case: the word “but” in this context does not signal a violent temporal break. It simply shifts the poem from the future tense to the present tense. Saying “This will happen … but not yet” cannot plausibly be described as a violent break in the successive flow of time, but rather as a perfectly ordinary construction that contrasts the future with the present. Much subtler, and thus more worthy of poetic accolade, is the temporal shift that occurs immediately afterwards: The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy That on the bitter cross Must redeem our loss; So both himself and us to glorifie. (151–54) Here the temporal shift does not take the form of a tense shift but of a modal shift that we reach via the relative pronoun “that.” In the section of the Accedence Commenc’d Grammar devoted to pronouns, Milton distinguishes between “Demonstratives” and “Relatives”; the former “shew the thing present” while the latter “refer to a thing antecedent or spoken of before … as qui who or which” (15). Here “that” refers to “the Babe” and provides the means to introduce “the bitter cross.” The cross is followed by the auxiliary

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verb “must,” which identifies Jesus’ sacrifice and mission of redemption as an obligation, already present in his infancy. Thus, although Milton does not here shift tenses, Jesus’ whole future is here implied in the single “present” (or at least present tense) moment on the morning of His nativity. By this means, by means more subtle than any violent shifting of tones, Milton continues to achieve the effect of the “weddedness of time” celebrated by Lowry Nelson. Finally, in addition to the subtle temporal manipulation enabled by “that” and “must” we can continue the discussion of grammatical mode and note Milton’s even more intriguing use of the “should” later in the first stanza: “For so the holy sages once did sing / That he our deadly forfeit should release” (5–6). From the point of view of the grammarian, the word “should” is among the most interesting in early modern literature, as it is poised ambiguously between two different grammatical modes: the subjunctive and the potential. Milton appears to be unique among early modern grammarians in recognizing this ambiguity and acknowledging it within his grammar text. William Lily explains the two in this way: The Potentiall mode is knowen by these signes, may, canne, might, wold, shuld or oght: as Amem, I cāne or may loue, without an Aduerbe ioined with him. The Subiunctiue mode hath euermore some Coniunction ioined with him: as Cum amarem, whē I loued. And it is called the Subiunctiue mode, bicause it dependeth of an other verb in the same sentence, ether going afore, or cōming after: as Cum amarem, eram miser, when I loued, I was a wretch.23 Yet, while Lily distinguishes clearly between these two moods (or modes, as he terms them), Milton places them together in the same category: “The Potential or Subjunctive is Englisht with these Signs, may, can, might, would, could, should” (17–18). It is worth noting also that this account of the Potential– Subjunctive mood is distinct from Milton’s accounts of other grammatical moods in that he leaves its precise function unstated. While he will say that “The Indicative Mood sheweth or declareth” and “The Imperative biddeth or exhorteth, as Lauda praise thou” (17), he does not say what the Potential– Subjunctive does; he says only how it is indicated in English. This grammatical distinction, and how to recognize it, becomes a matter of supreme importance in cases like that of lines 5 and 6: “For so the holy sages once

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did sing / That He our deadly forfeit should release” (5–6). The key ambiguity here lies in the word “should.” It could be a subjunctive anticipating a known future action: known because of the basic principles of Christian doctrine, and because Milton is writing after the fact. Alternatively, this “should” might be an instance of the potential mode, indicating obligation: “should” here carrying the sense of “ought.” If the latter is the case then the holy sages are engaged in the potentially dangerous theological game of placing obligations upon Jesus, although if we read them as simply announcing an obligation that the Son of God has willingly taken on, then they may be all right. Thus the “should” functions simultaneously as a celebratory announcement of Jesus’ action and as either the imposition or announcement of a divine obligation. That this blending of two different modes is acknowledged in Milton’s Grammar is significant, given that Lily’s standard text regards the two modes as entirely distinct. Milton, in giving his English explanation and examples, acknowledges the fact that the English language lacks a formal, grammatical mechanism unambiguously to indicate a distinction between the two modes, and that English users must therefore rely upon context to determine any and all ambiguous cases. Just as with the series of imperatives in the fourth stanza that situate Milton himself as the efficient cause of the hymn, this even more subtle grammatical manipulation (which Milton rather radically incorporates into his Latin grammar textbook as well as into his English poetry) again aggrandizes poetry. This time the object of aggrandizement is explicitly the singing holy sages rather than Milton himself, particularly Isaiah.24 Yet, although the holy sages of course speak with the authority of God, as we have already seen in the fourth stanza, which also has close ties with Isaiah, the divine influence on a prophet (or prophet–poet) is sufficiently mysterious as to have considerable credit left over for the poet himself. In this poem, the singing poets are given, in the carefully manipulated grammar of the poem, the status of major movers and shakers in the Christian world. Returning to Paradise Lost, we may encounter yet one more important discussion of past, present, and future. It occurs in book 5, lines 580–82, in Raphael’s explanation to Adam of the moment when primordial Chaos gave way to God’s creation of the angels. Raphael explains: (For time, though in eternity, applied To motion, measures all things durable By present, past, and future,) (5.580–82)

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This passage appears to mean that time, although it existed “in eternity” prior to the creation of the world, becomes meaningful to us in a moving universe because it enables the categorization of events into the tenses of past, present, and future (this is another aspect of God’s creation being only partially apprehensible to fallen creatures). God’s preeminent place on his “prospect” establishes him as independent of the moving, changeable nature of the created universe. Appropriately, Raphael as teacher of Adam and Eve places “present, past, and future” in the same order as they appear in the Accidence Commenc’t Grammar. Milton’s grammar, with its tripartite account of tense (in contrast to Lily’s quintipartite account), carefully distinguishes tense as a matter of time (past, present, or future) from tense as encompassing the nature of particular events within time, or the relationship between these events and the present (Lily’s Preterimperfect, Preterperfect, and Preterpluperfect). These distinctions can, of course, still be made, but they are not to be confused with the stark, clear, simple understanding of past, present, and future that is the true essence of verbal tense. It is the stark, clear, simple set of categories that Milton’s God utterly transcends from his lofty prospect. This reading accords with the view of Rosalie Colie, who argues: It is in the medium of His eternity that God has foreknowledge: because He “is” in all things and thus knows all things, God is beyond time and outside it, as well as in it. All things, including the historical events that men experience and identify in time, happen at once and continually in the mind of God.25 The incomprehensibility of this prospect that God inhabits is ensured in part by a simple lack of detailed elaboration, but it also emerges from Milton’s choice of pronoun: this is the prospect “Wherein past, present, future he beholds” (3.78). Once again, we may note an interesting similarity with the opening stanza of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: “This is the month, and this the happy morn / Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King / Of wedded maid, and virgin mother born, / Our great redemption from above did bring” (ll. 1–4). Here the infant Christ occupies a time that is no time and all time, an uncertainty of temporal placement that belies the apparent definiteness of the repeated “this.” Both Christ in this early poem and God in Paradise Lost have this special place in relation to time, and have that place

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indicated with the same distinctive pronoun. If we are to develop the literal understanding of this “prospect” that I articulated a moment ago, it should of course be to understand this place that God occupies not as an actual place but as a state of being. The difficulty of understanding these lines is compounded further by the polyptotonic repetition of “beholding” and “beholds” in lines 77 and 78. These lend a distinctly tautological quality to the description of God’s special vantage point. (Where does God do his beholding? Why, in the place where he beholds, of course!26) This piece of information about the nature of God’s prospect is both necessarily (because tautologically) true and is also an essential feature of God’s omniscience. At the same time, however, it is entirely unhelpful if what you want to do is actually understand God, in the sense of truly comprehending his location, his nature, and how he knows and sees the things he knows and sees. Thus the crude understanding of “prospect” as physical location and “high” as physical height, an understanding that provides the foundational metaphor of these lines, although it cannot constitute a complete understanding of their full meaning, is not much less illuminating than the more abstract understanding of “prospect” as a state of being and “high” as divine status. When Adam and Eve, speaking in book 5, declare that God “sits above these heavens / To us invisible, or dimly seen” (5.156–57), they are reaffirming what this earlier passage so subtly enacts, both in their literal reference to height (God is way up high above the heavens) and in his incomprehensibility. I would like to offer the concluding observation that we encounter additional difficulties of parsing time (although difficulties of a new type) if we return to book 5 of the epic and to Adam and Eve’s prayer in which they call upon the angels of heaven to join with earthly creatures in praise of God, “to extol / Him first, him last, him midst, and without end” (5.164–65). There are at least two different ways of understanding the grammar of this short passage, depending on whether the words “first,” “last,” and “midst” are read as adjectives or adverbs. This is exactly the sort of ambiguity that syntaxis, “the right-joyning of words” in grammar” (Accidence, 1) is normally supposed to prevent, but it is also the sort of ambiguity that can prove so fruitful and interesting in poetry, and which Milton is so adept at exploiting when he wishes. The most obvious reading of this line is that “first,” “last,” and “midst” refer adjectivally to God, paired as they are with the rhythmically repeated “Him,” and characterize his relationship with the universe: God is that being

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who is first, last, and midst all time, a reading which corresponds perfectly with the transcendence of grammatical tenses that we have already observed. These words could also, however, be understood as applying adverbially to the verb “extol”: Adam and Eve, in the course of performing their extolling, praise God first, last, and midst. This way of describing their process of prayer is potentially comical in its parody of the idea of categorization and listing (“How do we pray? Well at the beginning we extol God, and at the end we extol God, oh, and in the middle we extol God as well.”) This division of a perfectly constant, consistent, and continuous practice into a series of separate actions highlights the absurdity of such separation where praise of God is concerned: such praise is not something that one performs occasionally, amongst other items with which it shares more-or-less equal importance. The parodic segmentation here serves perhaps as a reminder that when it comes to God there are no times when he should not be praised, and there should be no discontinuity in the truly obedient life under his eternal rule. If we follow this second, adverbial, reading of this line, then the additional phase “without end” does not just refer to God’s eternal nature but to Adam and Eve’s supposition that they, the angels, and all early creatures will share in God’s immortality, and will continue their praise forever. Milton’s concern both with clear pedagogy and with verbal precision in his Accidence Commenc’t Grammar provides a clear backdrop for an understanding of the grammatical ambiguities and manipulations that occur in God’s speech and descriptions in Paradise Lost and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” These are beset with grammatical problems and ambiguities, which belie the straightforward, streamlined, and clearly articulated rules that Milton provides in his textbook. The contrast between his grammar text and his endlessly subtle epic poem indicate the importance to Milton of manipulating normal grammatical structures in order to convey adequately the nature of the divine. For Milton, to be a grammarian is not to be a pedant, but to be a writer who understands the rules and when to break them—and breaking the rules is what you need to do when you need flexibly to adapt your fallen and imperfect language in taking on the role of the prophet–poet, striving adequately to convey the nature of the divine.

c ha p te r eig h t

Raphael’s Peroratio in Paradise Lost Balancing Rhetorical Passion in Virgil and Paul Joshua R. Held

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he role of the angel Raphael, whom God dispatches midway through Paradise Lost to instruct Adam and Eve, has attracted increasingly contentious comment over the last decades. That Raphael’s visit takes up a lengthy middle third of Milton’s narrative complicates the debate, allowing scholars to focus on various segments of the angelic instruction to adduce evidence for these diverse positions. William Empson, making more strident the critiques of earlier generations, argues that “Adam and Eve would not have fallen unless God had sent Raphael to talk to them, supposedly to strengthen their resistance to temptation.”1 Empson reasons that, among other flaws, Raphael “never once says the practical thing which would be really likely to prevent the Fall, that Satan is known to have reached the Garden and spoken to Eve in her sleep, and will probably soon address them again in disguise.”2 More recent scholars such as Kimberly Johnson and Michael Allen also argue that Raphael demonstrates various shortcomings in his rhetorical duties, respectively through casting Satan as a martial foe in book 6 or mishandling Adam’s questions in book 8.3 By contrast, many present a relatively favorable view of Raphael, one claiming that he exemplifies virtue, and others that he explains aspects of Adam and Eve’s future redemption and postlapsarian existence.4 In a more even-handed study, N. K. Sugimura attenuates the weakness of Raphael’s account within the larger problems of causation in Paradise Lost.5 As Sugimura suggests, and as Peter C. Herman more specifically observes, Raphael does not escape the tinge of “contributory negligence”

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that spreads through the poem.6 Yet I expand cursory insights regarding Raphael’s rhetoric by scholars such as Clay Daniel and Eric Charles Reeves to emphasize Raphael’s adroitness in at least two related rhetorical duties.7 He integrates rhetorical scholarship and precedent into a powerful peroratio, and in doing so he suggests a balance among a complex set of passions within his audience. In Raphael’s peroratio, his concluding speech to Adam in Paradise Lost 8.633–43, the angel brings together the wisdom of classical rhetorical scholarship, classical epic, and the Christian scriptures to help Adam maintain the pre-fall balance of “passions,” or its approximate synonym in the seventeenth century, emotions.8 Whereas Virgil’s Mercury in his peroratio elicits the passions of shame and fear from Aeneas, and whereas Paul elicits the passions of confidence and love in epistolary perorations to his Ephesian and Corinthian audiences respectively, Raphael balances all these passions against one another: Be strong, live happie, and love, but first of all Him whom to love is to obey, and keep His great command; take heed lest Passion sway Thy Judgment to do aught, which else free Will Would not admit; thine and of all thy Sons The weal or woe in thee is plac’t; beware. I in thy persevering shall rejoyce, And all the Blest: stand fast; to stand or fall Free in thine own Arbitrement it lies. Perfet within, no outward aid require; And all temptation to transgress repel. (8.633–43) Raphael emphasizes the two Pauline passions in his opening imperatives, “be strong … and love,” and moves toward fear in the instructions to “beware” and “repel.” He also includes hints of shame in the possibility that, if Adam fails, Raphael “shall” not “rejoice / And all the Blest.” Looking back to the original created order in Areopagitica (1644), Milton proposes the divine purpose of passions: “Wherefore did he [God] creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of vertu?”9 In accordance with this understanding of passions that can be “rightly temper’d” to produce “vertu,” Raphael includes at the center of his

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peroratio a set of commands to “temper” the passions against one another, and to order all of them under reason, or “Judgment.” By focusing on Raphael’s rhetorical accomplishments within the small structure of a peroratio, I aim to raise the angel above at least his most serious detractions. Furthermore, by focusing on his rhetorical expertise and the models for this expertise, I add to an understanding of Milton’s concurrent scholarly interaction with classical rhetoric, classical epic, and the Bible.10

Peroratio Classical rhetoricians held that the peroratio of a classically structured speech, preceded by the exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, and confutatio, carried particular emotional power.11 Although the full six divisions of a speech often appear only in the judicial type of oratory, the deliberative type, such as that used by Raphael and other epic messengers, retains a peroratio, which follows the exordium and the body of the speech (here the narratio of Paradise Lost books 5–7). Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria explains the immense rhetorical significance of the peroratio: “The recapitulation and assemblage of the facts, which in Greek is called anakephalaiōsis, and by some Latin writers ‘enumeration,’ both refreshes the memory of the judge, and places the whole Cause before his eyes at once.”12 Most basically, Quintilian acknowledges that a speaker in a peroratio should review the “headings” of the foregoing address, as he suggests in the term anakephalaiōsis, from the Greek kephalē (“head”). Quintilian goes on to show that besides offering a summary, a peroratio should stir passion, or affection (adfectus), more urgent there than in any other part of the speech, insofar as “there is no further stage to which we can put things off.”13 Other classical rhetorical theorists as significant as Aristotle also emphasize the importance of appeals to the passions of the audience (pathos) in the peroratio (Greek epilogo).14 Likewise, Cicero in De oratore declares that “the most appropriate place for them [emotions; commovendo] is in the introduction and conclusion [in exoriendo et in perorando].”15 He explains elsewhere, in De partitione oratoria, that one of the most successful ways to “engender” such passions is by “analogies and instances [similitudines et exempla].”16 Quintilian shows that an eloquent style also contributes to the emotional potency of a peroratio: “All these appeals to passion [adfectus] … may be employed in other portions of the speech as well, but more briefly,

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because most of them must be reserved for the opening or the close. But it is in the peroration, if anywhere, that we must let loose the whole torrent of our eloquence [totos eloquentiae aperire].”17 Quintilian establishes a parallel between the final outpouring of eloquence (eloquentiae aperire) and the moment of the greatest rhetorical appeal to the passions, reserved for that final moment. He thus implies the power of eloquence, including rhetorical schemata and tropes, to cause a release of passions. Milton demonstrates thorough understanding of classical rhetorical theorists as such scholars as Daniel Shore and Helen Lynch have shown.18 Although Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler has critiqued both Shore and Lynch for neglecting the seventeenth-century rhetorical advances to which “Milton himself contributed,” the structure of his conclusions remained relatively consistent with classical models.19 From the youthful Prolusions through the avowedly rhetorical Areopagitica and into the late plea for a Readie and Easy Way (1660), Milton employs a summative appeal with heightened emotion, effectually a peroratio.20 Raphael in Paradise Lost does this perhaps most forcefully by referring to the struggle to “stand” against “temptation” (8.640, 643) that he had illustrated in Abdiel among others. But he also follows models of perorations both classical and biblical, which themselves contain exempla, or lessons. Thus, Raphael’s peroratio becomes a master index of exempla, designed to transfer to Adam the central motivations of epic heroes and Christians of all eras, and thus heightening its logical and emotional force. Raphael’s peroratio forms a chiasmus, at the center of which stands the injunction, “beware,” which God made the center of his own instructions to Raphael (5.237). On either side of this injunction, Raphael includes varying stakes for Adam’s obedience, first naming the stakes for the “weal or woe” of Adam’s own descendants and then for “the Blest” in heaven, including Raphael himself. In the next step out from the chiasmic center, Raphael reminds Adam first of “free Will” and then of “Arbitrement,” noting in both instances the possibility of “fall[ing]” or letting “Passion sway” him, a parallel that elides Adam’s fall with his refusal to be divided from Eve, a crux of book 9 and of the epic. Raphael structures the chiasm around ten imperatives: “Be strong,” “live happie,” “love,” “keep,” “take heed,” “beware,” “stand fast,” “perfet,” “[do] no[t] … require,” and “repel.” Raphael uses these imperatives and other syntactical breaks to sub-divide the peroratio into briefer segments, a syntactical structure that Aristotle prefers.21 These verbs also build emotional intensity even as they appeal to the will, which ultimately will choose whether to obey the

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commands. Further to appeal to Adam’s passions, Raphael uses several schemata verborum such as periphrasis (“Him who to love is to obey”), anadiplosis (“stand fast: to stand”), and alliteration—a kind that draws attention to enjambment (“Will / Would” … “fall / Free”)—schemata that become still more frequent in the final lines of the peroratio.22 After the slower pace and more divagated syntax of the middle lines (8.635–41), the final lines increase the eloquence through interwoven schemata verborum, emphatic meter, and crisp commands, stylistic features that appeal to the passions as well as the intellect. Indeed, had Raphael ended at the antepenultimate line of his peroratio (8.641), he would have weakened the rhetorical force of his speech, leaving in Adam’s ear an innocuous indicative verb with its vague, pronominal subject (“it lies”) rather than a resounding combination of an infinitive and an imperative verb, each of prominent iambic feet (“transgress repel”). Raphael heightens the rhetorical and corresponding emotional power of his last line through alliteration (“temptation to transgress”) and through the pointed contrast (antithesis) and reversed sequence (anastrophe) between the final two words, for “repel” transmutes the effect of “transgress.” Furthermore, Raphael links the final line with the penultimate line, and thus augments the combined rhetorical power of these parallel clauses. He repeats the hysteron proteron, for the verbs “require” and “repel” succeed their objects “aid” and “temptation.” More broadly, he creates isocolon through two lines of equal length, each containing six words within the typical five iambic feet. The resulting alliteration of the imperative verbs “require” and “repel” reveals the still more structurally complex figure of paromoiosis (parallelism of sound between two equal clauses), which unites the final couplet into a climax of combined metrical, sonic, and rhetorical force. Whereas Raphael in the middle of his final speech echoes several biblical commands to “beware” and to “take heed,” he appeals in the final couplet, the doubly crucial peroratio of the peroratio, as it were, to human “Arbitrement,” instilling the seemingly opposite but intricately connected confidence and fear. Raphael lauds human moral capability in stentorian iambs: “Perfet within, no outward aid require; / And all temptation to transgress repel” (8.642–43). He thus contributes an oratorical flourish that, according to rhetorical theorists such as Cicero and Quintilian, heightens the emotional impact of his speech. Whether Raphael commands Adam to remain “Perfet” (imperative mood) or simply describes Adam’s state of “Perfe[c]t[ion]” (indicative mood), Raphael suggests the heightened moral capabilities of his audience who require “no outward aid.”

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He thus very likely compliments human magnanimity, an unfallen version of pride according to Aquinas, following Aristotle.23 Insofar as God creates Adam (and Eve) morally perfect, a state many contemporary thinkers noted, Raphael may deliver “Perfet” in the indicative mood.24 Yet Raphael could imply that the couple should remain, rather than become, “Perfet,” continuing the litany of imperatives. Alternatively, he may leave Adam hanging somewhere between these two interpretations as he waits to hear a final line from Raphael that will clarify the preceding clauses. Insofar as Raphael swiftly departs “up to Heav’n” (8.652), however, and insofar as the mood of the verb heavily influences the dominant passion of this couplet—fear for the loss of perfection, confidence in the status of perfection—and thus the peroratio, and thus the discourse, Adam remains in a kind of interpretive, and emotional, limbo.

Balancing Passions The limbo, or balance, that remains among various issues in Raphael’s peroratio—warfare, creation, passions—may seem a fault of his, as Herman and Sugimura have independently suggested.25 Yet I argue that Raphael’s peroratio proves the more remarkable because he embraces complexity in it, adapting it to material that Adam adds in book 8, particularly regarding his passion for Eve. Raphael ends his lecture series on the war in heaven (book 6) and on the creation (book 7) and enters instead into a discussion forum, a “Q&A” with Adam (book 8). Michael Allen considers Raphael’s general “loss of control” over his rhetorical situation to be a significant problem.26 Instead, I emphasize that Raphael excels precisely because, impromptu, he constructs an emotionally powerful, multidimensional peroratio from the foregoing elements in his conversation with Adam. Raphael in his peroratio contextualizes the passionate activity of “lov[ing]” within the more overtly rational and volitional actions of “obey[ing]” and of “keep[ing] commands” at least partly in response to the immediately preceding discussion regarding the “passion” Adam feels for Eve. As Adam explains to Raphael, in his own first amorous encounter with her, passion first I [he] felt, Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else Superiour and unmov’d, here onely weake Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance. (8.530–33)

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Adam goes on to pinpoint the particular area of conflict within him between wisdom and his “awe” (8.558) of Eve’s beauty, parallel with Raphael’s later contrast between “Judgment” and “Passion.” Adam extenuates his “weake[ness]”: “All higher knowledge in her presence falls / Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her / Looses discount’nanc’t” (8.549–53). In a modified stichomythia, Raphael retorts: “She [Wisdom] deserts thee not, if thou / Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh” (8.563–64). In displacing the physical “she,” Eve, who dominates Adam’s praise, Raphael describes the metaphoric “she,” wisdom, with reference to the biblical personification of wisdom as an elegant woman, most notably in Proverbs 8 and 9. Having pointed Adam to personified wisdom, a feminine prototype in marked contrast with Eve, Raphael proceeds to critique Adam’s use of the term “passion,” marking it instead in the context of the mating of “Cattel and each Beast” (8.582) and distinguishing it from “love.” Raphael reasons that though beasts partake of the pleasure of passion, human beings must be above beasts in this respect: What higher in her societie thou findst Attractive, human, rational, love still; In loving thou dost well, in passion not, Wherein true Love consists not; love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale By which to heav’nly Love thou maist ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause Among the Beasts no Mate for thee was found. (8.586–94) Several of Raphael’s detractors find his chief fault here. Barbara Lewalski, for instance, observes that Raphael here “overstate[s] his case” and Michael Allen that he “overreacts,” a miscue that Thomas Copeland, in an essay almost entirely favorable to Raphael, calls “his only failure.”27 I agree that Raphael over-emphasizes the “carnal” aspect of human nature, but his point, strident here, becomes more even-handed in his condensed treatment of several human passions in his peroratio. There, he recertifies the passions, balancing them against one another, all under the aegis of “Judgment.” In some of Raphael’s later commands, the angel proposes ways for Adam to keep his “Passion,” particularly his love for Eve, in balance with

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his “Judgment.” Indeed, Raphael’s mention of “Passion” proves the catalyst to transmute a series of positive commands at the start of the peroratio (“Be strong, live happie, and love”) into a list of warnings, many of them modeled on biblical warnings that temper confidence and introduce wariness, a modest version of fear. The biblical command “Take heed” is common in both the Gospels and in Paul’s letters, often translating the Greek blepō, a word that the King James translators render elsewhere as “beware,” another of Raphael’s commands, and a command that Milton cites from Paul’s letter to the Colossians (2:8) in his own Treatise of Civil Power.28 This related command to “beware” occurs in two New Testament perorations: in Paul’s final extant letter, 2 Timothy, likely written shortly before his execution in Rome, and in Peter’s second and final letter, probably composed just before his own execution.29 Whereas Paul commands his protégé Timothy, “bee thou ware [phulassou]” (2 Tim. 4:15) of a particular opponent to Christianity, a coppersmith named Alexander, Peter commands wariness as a means of standing fast more generally: “beware [phulassesthe] lest yee also being led away with the errour of the wicked, fall from your owne stedfastnesse” (2 Pet. 3:17). Both Paul and Peter here use not blepō but phylassō, a verb that implies not just watching but also guarding, used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe soldiers guarding prisoners (e.g., Acts 12:4, 23:35).30 Raphael’s concern that Adam “take heed lest Passion sway” the “Judgment” follows logically not just from awareness of biblical language but also from Reformation and seventeenth-century discussions of pre-fall human beings, with perfectly balanced inner selves. John Calvin, a reformer who has a complex relation to Milton, in Institution of the Christian Religion describes pre-fallen passions in a way that relates closely to Milton’s depiction: “then [at the creation] all the partes of hys [Adam’s] soule were framed to ryghte order [parfait droiture], then stoode safe the soundenesse of his vnderstandyng mynde, and his will free to choose the good.”31 Having identified a perfect (parfait) pre-fall order within the soul, Calvin in his commentary on the Gospel of John provides that unfallen reason can properly direct the “affections”: [w]hen God dyd create man he gaue him affections [affectus illi indidit], but those which were dutifull and obedient vnto reason.”32 Calvin’s idea that the divinely implanted (indidit) affections ideally are “obedient vnto reason” and gain their balance from it derives from a theological tradition that extends from Aquinas (and before) through Milton’s contemporary Edward Reynolds (1599–1676) who wrote A Treatise on the Passions.33

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Although Raphael speaks in the context of the perfect pre-fall passions, he glances toward the disorder of fallen emotions when he warns Adam to “take heed lest Passion sway / Thy Judgment.” Aristotle and other pagan philosophers did not believe the fall had occurred and thus thought that human beings retained the capacity for rational self-government. Yet Christian theologians such as Martin Luther explain that the fall made “the will [to be] impaired, the intellect depraved, and the reason entirely corrupt and altogether changed.”34 In a practical corollary to Luther in Milton’s era, Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Mind in Generall (1604) presents the passions as abased: “Those affections then which are common with vs, and beasts, we call Passions, and Affections or perturbations of the mind.”35 Later in the seventeenth century, William Marshall illustrates this view of the unruly, fallen passions in the frontispiece to The Use of Passions (1649).36 Although Marshall shows reason controlling the emotions with chains, Gail Kern Paster recently emphasizes a contrary view of the emotions in Renaissance England, quoting the philosopher Susan James: “Whether passive or tumultuous, whether the cause of suffering or the motive for action, the passions were ‘forces that are at once extremely powerful and actually or potentially beyond our control.’”37 Raphael later illustrates the terrifying “high Passions” such as “Anger, Hate, / Mistrust, Suspicion” that shake the “inward State of Mind” (9.1123– 25) of Adam and Eve after the fall. Yet the angel in his peroratio deliberately instructs Adam away from this possibility by contextualizing Adam’s amorous passions within other passions, including love for God. To analyze the combination of passions in Raphael’s peroratio, I now examine some examples of how ancient perorations convey the passions of shame and fear to Aeneas, confidence to the Ephesians, and confidence and love to the Corinthians. The Virgilian and Pauline perorations serve as models for how to convey the passions to audiences who will encounter great difficulty, a dangerous journey (Aeneas) or persecution (Paul’s readers). These three perorations also demonstrate, by their more limited focus on one emotion, or two, the greater emotional complexity of Raphael’s, which summarizes more material and thus brings more fully narrated, vivid passions into the final charge.

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Virgilian Peroratio As Milton’s God sends Raphael to warn Adam of the coming temptation, Jove sends the messenger Mercury to warn Aeneas of the danger of remaining with Dido early in book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid, a parallel noted by scholars such as Francis Blessington.38 To prompt Aeneas to obey the divine order to leave Carthage and found the city of Rome, Mercury returns to Aeneas in a dream later in book 4, delivering in effect a peroratio, insofar as he summarizes the content of his former message and stirs Aeneas’ emotions once more. But whereas Raphael mildly warns Adam of the danger of “Passion,” particularly toward Eve, Mercury excoriates Aeneas and denounces his beloved Dido:        Son of the goddess, Sleep away this crisis, can you still? Do you not see [nec … cernis] the dangers growing round you, Madman [demens], from now on? Can you not hear [nec … audis] The offshore westwind blow? The woman [illa] hatches Plots and drastic actions in her heart, Resolved on death now, whipping herself on To heights of anger. Will you not be gone In flight, while flight is still within your power? Soon you will see the offing boil with ships [turbari trabibus] And glare with torches [faces]; soon again The waterfront will be alive with fires [litora flammis], If Dawn comes while you linger in this country. Ha! Come [heia age], break the spell [rumpe moras]! Woman’s a thing Forever fitful and forever changing [varium et mutabile                     semper femina].39 Mercury engages the passion of shame for Aeneas’ failure to found Rome, and emphasizes even more powerfully the baser passion of fear, which Aristotle describes as a more immediately alarming emotion, as opposed to the slower affect of shame.40 Although Virgil was understood in his own era and in the Renaissance to be a poet who appealed to the judgment of his readers, Virgil’s messenger here appeals to base passions, using several problematic methods such as scare tactics and ad hominem jibes.41

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Mercury provokes the emotion of shame through a trio of rhetorical questions, culminating in a forceful command, much as he had in his earlier speech to Aeneas (4.265–76). In the first two parallel questions in particular, Mercury appeals to Aeneas’ senses of sight (cernis) and hearing (audis), implying that the danger should be discernible with even the slightest attention to the observable world. Between the first two questions, Mercury begins to impugn the character of Dido, and by extension the character of Aeneas, a double critique he continues throughout the speech. Mercury suggests Aeneas’ own complicity in Dido’s feminized anger by calling him demens (mad), a word used elsewhere in book 4 almost exclusively of Dido (lines 78, 374, 469).42 In the only other occurrence, Venus says that anyone would be demens to cross her rival Juno (line 107). Ironically, Venus herself undercuts Juno, and thus she implies she herself is demens or, in another view, that she uniquely is brave enough to defy Juno. Yet, in either case, the word demens is gendered feminine, made the center of a divine catfight. Mercury further stimulates the passion of shame within Aeneas by concluding the earlier train of insults against Dido with an infamous aphorism regarding the mutability of women. Mercury suggests that she, like all women, is varium et mutabile, a generalization that Robert Fitzgerald anticipates by rendering the pronoun (illa) as the more specific “woman” early in the address. Yet Mercury startles Aeneas from his dream and into action by implying that although Dido changes like all other women she can perform terrors in a unique way. Mercury thus inflames the emotion of fear, which Aristotle grants a powerful role in creative literature. He treats it not only in his Rhetoric as a major emotion but also in the Poetics as one of the two primary passions leading to catharsis in a tragedy.43 Capitalizing on the literary power of fear, Mercury intensifies the terror Dido wields by depicting it in a series of vivid images, including the flaming shores (litora flammis) and the alliterative turbari trabibus, tumultuous beams presumably from the wreckage of Aeneas’ ships. Although Gilbert Highet sees Mercury’s speech as evidence that “[s]ome questions are equivalent to commands,” I instead maintain that Mercury uses the deliberate questions in the first half of the peroratio to prepare the commands of the final lines.44 Mercury starts with the most basic command for any kind of action, age, and ends with its tautological inverse, rumpe moras, “break delay.” After Mercury melts away, the narrator reports

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that Aeneas is exterritus, frightened from his dream, apparently the response desired by Mercury and, by extension, Jupiter. Whereas Raphael appeals to a pre-fall potential of fear and shame, as well as to Adam’s “Judgment,” which should rule these and other “Passion[s],” Mercury instead appeals more directly to Aeneas’ emotions and to vivid predictions rather than to observable reasons. As Susanne Wofford notes: “Even as Aeneas sails away Virgil stresses his ignorance.”45 Milton would most likely regard heroic ignorance as an oxymoron, unless it were in the heroism of rationally choosing not to eat of the tree of knowledge. But Wofford’s conception of Aeneas—a conception founded on his response to Mercury’s command and the attitude towards the gods that it reveals—illuminates by contrast both how Milton handles Raphael’s commands to Adam and Eve and their failure to obey those commands. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton shows that both obedience to God and heroic standing rest on intuitive rather than observable reasons. Abdiel, for instance, has no reason to know that the Father is right and Satan wrong beyond the premise that God is good, but from this premise he grasps the reasons behind the Father’s elevation of the Son. For Raphael, likewise, God’s “great command” informs all human “Judgment,” as the rhetorical sequence implies. Whereas Mercury pushes against Aeneas’ passion for Dido with the greatest urgency, Raphael attempts to balance Adam’s passion for Eve under the control of “Judgment.” And whereas Mercury builds the passion of fear over the whole course of his peroratio, Raphael most clearly conveys fear only in the middle lines of his, referring to the grand stakes of “weal or woe.” The potential “woe” for all Adam’s “Sons” informs the warnings that bookend this middle warning section: “take heed,” and “beware.” Yet Raphael tempers the passion of fear with other passions rather than escalating the terror as Mercury does through vivid images of the alliterative faces and flammis (line 567, “torches” and “fires”). Whereas Raphael in the last line of book 6 warns Adam and Eve to “remember, and fear to transgress” (6.913), Raphael at the end of book 8 says instead to “repel” any “temptation to transgress” (8.643). He thus inserts the action verb “repel” in place of the more emotionally pregnant word “fear” in the similar syntactical construction. As Milton steps away from the more schematic passion of fear, he opens up a wider scope for passions in his peroratio, which uses some of the same motivating techniques and language as other perorations, not just classical but also biblical and, in particular, Pauline.

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Pauline Peroratio Paul, who has attracted considerable attention from literary scholars and theorists in the past decades, uses rhetorical techniques in his letters that have led many scholars to analyze his possible familiarity with classical rhetoric.46 Whereas Ben Witherington III argues for Paul’s extensive knowledge and application of classical rhetoric, Ryan S. Schellenberg maintains that Paul used Greek rhetorical terms not necessarily because of his training but because of their common usage.47 Although these and other scholars differ regarding the extent of Paul’s formal training in classical rhetoric, they agree that his letters demonstrate some similarities with classical rhetoric. More specifically, Jeffrey T. Reed has shown the similarity between rhetorical peroratio and Paul’s epistolary closings in a way that opens toward a comparison with Raphael’s peroratio here.48 Like Raphael, Paul combines rational and emotional appeals, the former often in persuading his audiences toward repentance, metanoia (to change the mind, from meta + nous, “mind”), the latter more commonly in personal appeals to a familiar audience such as the Corinthian churches, as Laurence Welborn and others have shown.49 Paul gathers this concurrent emphasis on the mind and passions from Jesus himself, who began his earthly ministry with a focus on metanoia (Matt. 3:2; 4:17) but who later in his ministry names the “heart” first in what he calls the “great commandment”: “Thou shalt loue the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soule, and with all thy minde [dianoia]” (Matt. 22:28, 37).50 Raphael demonstrates both his flexibility of ideas and his expert grasp of rhetoric, insofar as the classical peroratio was usually understood to summarize, repeat, and drive home emotionally and logically the preceding parts of a speech, which in Raphael’s case ranged across biblical and classical material. For instance, whereas Raphael in book 6 describes the war in heaven often in terms of a classical epic combat, in book 7 he describes the creation by reference to Genesis 2. Thus, in drawing conclusions from these and other segments of his foregoing dialogue with Adam and Eve, Raphael quite naturally forms his peroratio from formulas similarly representative of classical and Christian traditions. Whereas Virgil’s Mercury stirs the passion of fear in Aeneas to prompt immediate action, a passion Raphael uses to convey the immediacy of the temptation to Adam, Paul stirs the passion of confidence in the close of his letter to the church of Ephesus. Although Harold W. Hoehner claims that

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the conclusion does not function as a peroratio, Andrew T. Lincoln has persuasively argued otherwise.51 I validate Lincoln’s position by showing the structural and conceptual similarities between the perorations of Paul and Raphael, dignifying the rhetoric of both. Like Raphael, Paul here conjoins commands to “be strong” and to “stand fast” that, together with the military context, suggest several comparisons to Raphael’s message, especially given the angel’s lengthy narrative of the war in heaven in books 5 and 6 of Milton’s epic. Although Raphael refers to none of the specific weaponry of the later verses of this passage, the sheer number of times that Paul commands the Ephesians to “stand fast” and the concentration on strength suggest the importance of this peroratio for Raphael’s: Finally, my brethren, be strong [endunamousthe] in the Lord, and in the power [kratei] of his might [ischous]. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand [dunasthai … stēnai] against the wiles [methodeias] of the deuill. For wee wrestle [palē] not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers [exousias], against the rulers [kosmokratoras] of the darknes of this world, against spirituall wickednes in high places. Wherefore take vnto you the whole armour of God, that yee may be able to withstand [dunēthēte antisthēnai] in the euill day, and hauing done all, to stand [stēnai]. Stand [stēne] therefore, hauing your loynes girt about with trueth, and hauing on the breast-plate of righteousnesse: And your feete shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace. Aboue all, taking the shielde of Faith, wherewith yee shall bee able [dunēsesthe] to quench all the fierie dartes of the wicked. And take the helmet of saluation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Eph. 6:10–17) Paul makes strength, and the confidence that derives from it, into the keynote of this passage, from beginning to end. When he encourages the Corinthians that they are “able to quench all the fierie dartes of the wicked” (my emphasis)—in Greek the more forceful word dunēsesthe, related to the noun dunamis and thence to the English cognate “dynamic”—he grounds this statement in the theme of “strength” from earlier in the peroratio. In the Greek, Paul mixes three terms for strength, applying one (dunamis) directly to the Christian soldier and the other two directly to God and to the soldier only insofar

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as he relies on God’s mighty power. The soldier’s own strength (dunamis), founded on God’s double strength, “the power of his might” (kratei tēs ischous), makes the soldier “able to stand” (dunasthai … stēnai). Some translators and scholars collapse the phrase “the power of his might” (kratei tēs ischous) into the hendiadys “mighty strength.”52 But I argue along with others that Paul returns to this rhetorical formula from chapter 1 (kratous tēs ischous, Eph. 1:19) to confirm once more the fullness of divine power conveyed in the dual nouns.53 Here and throughout the passage Paul multiplies synonyms for “strength,” developing the kind of strength for “stand[ing] fast” that such a “spirituall” battle requires, and that the faithful angel Abdiel exemplifies early in Raphael’s narrative. Paul develops the keyword of verses 10–12, “strength” and its synonyms, through the images of verses 14–17, and in the middle verse, 13, he anchors these descriptions of “strength” in the governing image of standing. Within the space of eleven Greek words straddling verses 13 and 14, Paul repeats the word “stand” or its cognates three times, the last two consecutively and in different independent clauses: “withstand [antisthēnai] in the euill day, and hauing done all, to stand [stēnai]. Stand [stēne].” Paul thus includes some of the same rhetorical figures that Raphael does, including anadiplosis: “stand fast: to stand” (Paradise Lost 8.640). Paul commands Christians to “stand fast” many times through his letters, often at turning points in his arguments such as in Philippians 4:1, 2 Thessalonians 2:15, and Galatians 5:1, and Milton cites the last of these uses in A Treatise of Civil Power (1659).54 Developing the metaphor of standing more fully in Ephesians 6, Paul associates it with military might and perhaps even with epic heroism, parallel to Raphael’s own mixture of the classical epic and biblical backgrounds for standing fast.55 Furthermore, as scholars have long marked Paul’s martial imagery as an allusion to the first-century Roman imperial soldier, Jeffrey Asher persuasively argues that Paul’s emphasis in Ephesians 6 on strength (dunamis, kratei, ischous) and cunning (methodeias) refer also to the Homeric portrayals of these qualities in figures such as Achilles and Odysseus, respectively, suggesting yet another link between this passage and the shared classical and Christian sources of Raphael’s peroratio.56 But just when Paul’s commands to “be strong” and “stand fast” might seem to overwhelm the contrasting passion of fear, or any other passion, the (likely) passive voice tempers the force of the imperative. Paul thus balances confidence more fully among the other passions that result at least in part

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from other influences rather than from their own power. Although F. F. Bruce argues that endunamousthe is middle voice (“strengthen yourselves”), most other biblical exegetes and commentators argue for the passive voice.57 In either case, the phrase “in the Lord” indicates the source of the strength, emphasizing human reliance on the divine. Paul thus renders the human actor largely dependent and the verb effectually passive. Although imperatives traditionally require an active response, Paul emphasizes the Christian reliance on God for this strength by making the verb passive, a sense perhaps best conveyed in English through the Catholic New American Bible, derived from the Douay-Rheims translation of the sixteenth century and thence from the Vulgate: “draw your strength from the Lord [confortamini in Domino].”58 By contrast, Bibles in the Protestant tradition such as the New King James Version and the New International Version retain the “be strong” construction.59 The passive voice of the sentence implies that the Christian must passively draw strength from a helper, deferring to the physical and rational control of another (God), even while remaining actively engaged in combat. The passive imperative may also comport with the paradox of an inner battle Paul describes in terms of “wrestling” and of “trueth,” “righteousness,” and “Faith.” Paul gestures toward the corollary paradox of control and its loss even in the term “wrestl[ing] [palē],” which, in contrast with the description of armor elsewhere in the passage, implies more vulnerable, naked physical struggle.60 More generally, Paul’s insistent commands early in this passage, followed by his rousing description of Christian armor, heighten the emotional power of his peroratio in a way designed to strengthen his audience, in accord with the overt theme of strength, as Andrew Lincoln observes.61 As Raphael uses the commands “be strong” and “stand fast” in the peroratio of Paul’s Ephesian letter, he also interweaves several references to the end of the first epistle to the Corinthians, a section that also functions as a hortatory peroratio, as Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner suggest. Without using the term “peroration,” they adumbrate it: “Paul provides a series of crisp exhortations summarizing much of the message of the rest of the letter.”62 Paul commands the Corinthian church members in what I identify as the peroratio of that letter: “Watch yee, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men: be strong [Grēgoreite, stēkete en tē pistei, andrizesthe, krataiousthe]. Let all your things be done with charitie [agapēn]” (1 Cor. 16:13–14). As in the conclusion of the Ephesian letter, Paul again closes with a charge to “be strong,” as Rudolf Schnackenburg and Ernest Best note.63 Yet if the active imperative

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krataiousthe (“be strong”) in 1 Corinthians 16 implies a conquering power over another, the passive voice endunamousthe (“be strengthened”) in Ephesians refers to an inner strengthening that occurs by divine and not human power.64 Through all these mandates, Paul stirs his audience to action based on heightened passions and intensified sense of duty, effects that Raphael transfers into his own peroratio through a similar array of imperatives. In his last lines, Raphael draws particularly on Paul’s dual emphasis on standing and being strong, which taken together form a theme of stentorian resistance that Paul establishes earlier in the epistle and that itself draws together related images of “standing” in biblical and classical literature. Paul initially presents the theme of standing in 1 Corinthians as a paradox, in a passage relevant to Raphael’s warning against temptation, and relevant more generally to the action of Paradise Lost: Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth [dokōn hestanai], take heed [blepetō] lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man: but God is faithfull, who wil not suffer you to bee tempted aboue that you are able [dunasthe]: but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may bee able [dunasthai] to beare it. (1 Cor. 10:12–13) Rather than commanding the Corinthians simply to “stand” midway through the epistle, Paul warns them against merely supposing (dokōn) they stand when they actually are about to fall. Paul here assures his readers once more that they can keep from falling and can “beare” any temptation through some combination of God’s faithfulness and their own effort. Yet in the peroratio of the letter Paul shifts the onus more fully onto human responsibility, even as Raphael does in his own peroratio. Paul may do this at the close of 1 Corinthians in part because the church members presumably have read his full instructions in the letter and thus can more properly fend off temptation. Whereas Raphael draws on the passion of confidence in Paul’s perorations to the Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, in the latter he tempers the passion of confidence from Paul’s first four commands—“Watch yee, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men: be strong”—with the passion of love, which also informs Raphael’s peroratio (“love,” 8.633). Quite unlike Mercury in his message to Aeneas, Paul frequently prioritizes “love,” or “charitie,” elsewhere in the Corinthian letter naming it the “greatest” virtue (1 Cor. 13:13).

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Furthermore, the particular biblical Greek term in these verses (agapē) refers distinctively to love of God and to behavior based on this love, a fuller, more selfless kind of love than the philia that Aristotle describes in Rhetoric.65 Instead, agapē proves closer to Cicero’s parallel terms for love in De partitione oratoria, both robust and interchangeable at least at some points of his career (as Barbara Rosenwein argues): “men are moved either by love [caritate] … or by affection [amore].”66 Although “love” might seem out of place in a series of commands such as “be strong” and “stand fast,” this seemingly strange alignment implies that a Christian’s inner strength, and the passion of confidence, derive in part from love, insofar as God gives inner strength to a person to carry out loving actions. Calvin, anticipating an objection against the link between the commands to be strong and to love in 1 Corinthians 16:13–14, argues that Paul desires not that “charitie” be simply another command in a list but “that Charitie should be the Moderatrix [moderatricem] and dyrector of all their [the Corinthians’] actions.”67 Similarly, Milton reasons in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) that Christians must consider “charitie the interpreter and guide of [thei]r faith.”68 For Calvin and Milton, as for Paul in 1 Corinthians, love oversees all other Christian actions and dispositions from “Watch[ing]” to “be[ing]” made “strong.” Although the angel Michael later in Paradise Lost differs from Raphael in many ways, he too ends his instruction with a peroratio that links love and inner strength. I have elsewhere shown that Eve in her final speech (12.610– 23) interprets the “paradise within” (12.587) that Michael describes at the end of his peroratio.69 Yet, even before Eve, Michael himself gives a series of instructions to “possess” such a paradise:                onely add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call’d Charitie, the soul Of all the rest. (12.581–85) Although Michael initially names “Love,” which could include a wide range of behaviors, from general affection to passionate devotion, he points ultimately to the more devoted “Charitie” that Paul highlights, and that Peter also features in his second epistle, in a list that also ends with “charitie”: “And

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besides this, giuing all diligence, adde to your faith, vertue; and to vertue, knowledge; And to knowledge, temperance; and to temperance [egkrateian], patience; and to patience, godlinesse; And to godlinesse, brotherly kindnesse [philadelphia]; and to brotherly kindnesse, charitie [agapēn]” (2 Pet. 1:5–7). Insofar as the Greek term for “temperance” derives from strength (kratos) within (en), inner strength and love form interlocking parts of a chain of virtues here, as in Michael’s list. Thus, when Raphael commands Adam to “Love,” he anticipates the most universal command of scripture and also links it to the strength that God supplies to love not just friends but also enemies (Matt. 5:43–46). The link between love and inner strength further clarifies the emotional balance that Raphael attempts among shame, fear, confidence, and love, insofar as love oversees the confidence that combats fear and, by extension, shame. Paul’s fellow apostle John claims, “perfect loue casteth out feare” (1 John 4:18), suggesting that love not only oversees confidence but supplies a confidence of its own, though confidence alone, while combatting fear, may lead to hubris. Paul’s 1 Corinthians peroratio may, in its brevity, only adumbrate the passion of confidence that his Ephesians peroratio explicates more fully. Yet this adumbration comports with the balance that Paul expresses among the passions in the longer, more complex initial letter to the Corinthians, an emotional balance that Raphael seeks as well, especially given his conversation with Adam just before the peroratio. Whereas Paul envisions an application of apapē to “all things” (1 Cor. 16:14), Raphael, working with the less distinctly Christian term “love,” limits the word by designating God, not Eve, as the principal object of Adam’s love: “Be strong, live happie, and love, but first of all / Him whom to love is to obey.” Raphael’s periphrastic reference to God (“whom to love is to obey”) further defines the role of “love,” through overt parallelism transmuting the word “love” into the narratively central yet far less emotionally charged verb “obey.” Raphael’s neat parallel between love and obedience makes “love” not just a matter of the passions but also of the reason and will, a position he emphasizes still further in his next clause: “keep / His [God’s] great command” (8.634–35). Given the parallelism in this passage between “love” and “obey” and between “love” and “command,” Raphael may recall the words of Jesus just before his crucifixion: “This is my Commaundement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you” (John 15:12). The most immediately relevant “great command” for Adam, however, is the prohibition against eating from

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the forbidden tree, and Adam’s response to this command visibly reveals his degree of love for “Him whom to love is to obey.” Rather than reading Raphael’s peroratio as a cause of the human fall, I see it instead as a proleptic emblem of the human difficulty in negotiating complex rhetorical maneuvers, a difficulty that returns at Eve’s fall in particular in book 9. At the center of the peroratio, Raphael, by critiquing the exercise of human passion, circumscribes the freedom of choice solely within the realm of rational thought, which oversees the passions. Concurrently, he takes the passion that Adam first feels regarding Eve and nests it among a series of other passions that other epic or biblical rhetoricians treat more disjointedly. He thus adumbrates in his very rhetoric the problematic relationship among the passions, human free will, and obedience. Whereas Michael Schoenfeldt has convincingly shown that passion is both central to Milton’s paradise and also “what undoes it,” I emphasize that Raphael understands the great power of the passions and adapts his final message to balance them.70 To do this, he draws on a long history of rhetorical scholarship, and on practitioners of rhetorical models in both the classical and Christian traditions, an integration of sources that is itself a kind of mimetic balancing act. Although much of Paradise Lost evidences Milton’s careful scholarship in many fields from mythology and history to scientific developments, Raphael’s peroratio reveals in a condensed space the lessons of a range of rhetorical sources that enhance an understanding of both Milton and his skilled rhetor, Raphael.

III Milton and Scholarly Commentary

c ha p te r n i n e

Euphrasy, Rue, Polysemy, and Repairing the Ruins Emily E. Stelzer

        but to nobler sights Michael from Adam’s eyes the Film remov’d Which that false Fruit that promis’d clearer sight Had bred; then purg’d with Euphrasie and Rue The visual Nerve, for he had much to see; And from the Well of Life three drops instill’d. So deep the power of these Ingredients pierc’d, Ev’n to the inmost seat of mental sight, That Adam now enforc’t to close his eyes, Sunk down and all his Spirits became intranst: But him the gentle Angel by the hand Soon rais’d, and his attention thus recall’d.             (Paradise Lost 11.411–22)1

I

n book 11 of Paradise Lost, the angel Michael must remove a film from the eyes of Adam, preparing him for great sights. The film is the hazy residue of forbidden food eaten with the ironic expectation of clearer sight. Upon its removal, Michael administers euphrasy, rue, and three drops from the Well of Life. The compound purges the optic nerve, and even works “to the inmost seat of mental sight” so powerfully that Adam, entranced, perforce must close his eyes until Michael gently awakens him

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and begins his revelation from the Mount of Speculation. What follows is a guided tour of biblical history, crescendoing to eschatological fervor. At its conclusion, Adam summarizes what he has learned, upon which Michael assures him that he has “attain’d the sum / Of wisdom,” and that, with the addition of “Deeds … Faith, / …Virtue, Patience, Temperance, [and] Love,” he will achieve a “paradise within” him, “happier far” than Eden and its pleasures (12.575–76, 582–83, 587). Such a prospect might well direct the reader’s interest to the purging of vision as preliminary to this interior Eden. Accordingly, this essay will consider how vision and imagery cooperate with narrative and diction in Paradise Lost, particularly with respect to the last two books of the poem, and will entertain various possibilities for signification held in the poem by those modest ingredients of such acute ocular purgation, euphrasy and rue.

“Eyes how op’n’d”: Fallen Vision and the Film of False Fruit The first point to make is that the introduction of sin never improves vision in Paradise Lost. This applies to Satan as well as to Adam and Eve. Fallen Satan’s eyes are said to be baleful, experienced, sparkling, cruel, commanding, scornful, and unable to shut in sleep, but never is their operation blessed or enhanced by sin (1.56, 193–94, 568, 604, 3.614, 5.674, 6.149). Instead, we repeatedly learn that Satan’s vision incites his envy. For example, scanning God’s newly created universe, Such wonder seiz’d, though after Heaven seen, The Spirit malign, but much more envy seiz’d At sight of all this World beheld so fair. (3.552–54) Even as Satan admires the splendors of creation, envy proves more powerful than admiration. The predominance of envy as an attribute or consequence of fallen vision extends to Satan’s followers; it is exhibited in the War in Heaven, where the sight of the Son of God in celestial panoply elicits the rebel angels’ envy and obdurate opposition: They hard’n’d more by what might most reclaim, Grieving to see his Glory, at the sight Took envy. … (6.791–93)

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As fallen vision leads to envy, envy conversely enervates the sight, obscuring or misdirecting one’s vision. The connection between compromised vision and envy is partly etymological: envy, the Latin invidia, is derived from in, “upon,” and vidēre, “to see”—referring to envy as looking malevolently upon one’s neighbor. The Latin prefix in- also being oppositional, the roots of envy /invidia also intimate its consequences: not seeing clearly, having been blinded by sin. The connection is also traditional: for example, in Canto XIII of Dante’s Purgatorio the eyes of the envious are sewn shut, their blindness a punishment for (and a portrait of) the way they used their sight on earth. Milton’s Satan is less obviously but as significantly affected by envy. While vistas of paradisal beauty and goodness occasionally astonish Satan, more often such sights pain him. When Satan first surveys the garden and spies Adam and Eve, he interjects, “Oh Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold[?]” (Paradise Lost 4.358); his envy compels him to divert his gaze, to stare obliquely:        aside the Devil turn’d For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Ey’d them askance. … (4.502–4) Adam and Eve imparadised in each other’s arms is a “Sight hateful, sight tormenting” to him (4.505). By contrast, unfallen Adam is said to have an “Eye sublime,” and active, “wond’ring Eyes” (4.300, 8.257); prelapsarian Eve has “Heav’n in her Eye” and “eyes / Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d” (8.488, 4.492–93). These perfections notwithstanding, there are limits to visual powers among the created, even among the unfallen. Even Uriel, regent of the sun and the angel tasked with being the Eye of God, cannot with his back turned see Satan’s approach, and initially he fails to see through Satan’s disguise. Moreover, God’s glory is too intense for the created eye: even the “brightest Seraphim / Approach not [God’s throne], but with both wings veil thir eyes” (3.381–82). Sleep eventually shuts all eyes, all but the unsleeping eyes of God (4.658, 5.647). It is only “th’ Eternal eye, whose sight discerns / Abstrusest thoughts” that sees all (5.711–12). Knowing these natural limits to created (even perfect) eyesight, when Satan in his envy seeks to seduce the human pair, he dangles before them the prospect of enhanced sight. He seeks to make the forbidden fruit more tempting through the promise of better eyes and clearer vision. With blunt

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allegations and leading questions, the overpraising serpent tells Eve that it is God who is envious, and that God has unfairly withheld an extraordinary but well-deserved ocular power from her through the interdicted tree:       he knows that in the day Ye Eat thereof, your Eyes that seem so clear, Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then Op’n’d and clear’d. (9.705–8) Eve is seduced by this promise to fix the unbroken, to heal the whole. Soon believing the forbidden fruit to be “of Divine effect / To open Eyes” (9.865– 66), Eve eats, and, briefly, all seems well, but she soon falls prey to envy, even of a nonexistent rival for Adam’s love, as she fears her trespass might lead to “Adam wedded to another Eve” (8.828). Insecure, Eve repeats the serpent’s promise of improved vision as part of her successful attempt to gain Adam’s partnership in her sin: “Opener my Eyes / Dim erst,” she relates (9.875–76); instead of death, she claims to experience “Life / Augmented, op’n’d Eyes” (9.984–85). The Fall does mark a change of vision for Adam and Eve, but not toward wisdom or insight. Envy is the sin that most obscures Satan’s vision; for Adam and Eve, it is blind lust. Unfallen Lucifer’s great perfection, his brilliant status among the angels, devolves into envy at his fall; Adam and Eve’s great shared perfection, their love for each other, is twisted into lust, another deadly sin associated with the eyes. As Stanley Fish reminds us in this context, “the eye is traditionally the entry place for the arrow of lust.”2 After eating the forbidden fruit Adam casts “lascivious Eyes” on Eve, and Eve’s eyes “darted contagious Fire”; “in Lust they burn” (9.1014–15, 1036). Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian disport concludes in a certain clarity: the stark, uncomfortable perspective of the morning after a new but psychically unsatisfying kind of sex, one focused on self-gratification rather than love. The bard explains: “each the other viewing, / Soon found thir Eyes how op’n’d, and thir minds / How dark’n’d” (9.1052–54). “[O]ur Eyes / Op’n’d we find indeed,” Adam admits, “and find we know / Both Good and Evil; Good lost, and Evil got; / Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know” (9.1070–73). Their eyesight has changed for the worse—their experience with sin has ironically limited their ability to understand their moral position.3 Their new and peculiar awareness of sin is not unlike a new and peculiar awareness of one’s own cataracts. Impeded by

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“the Film … / Which that false Fruit that promis’d clearer sight / Had bred,” Adam needs this film removed in order to grasp the postlapsarian revelation and lessons intended for him in the final books of the poem (11.412–14). Adam and Eve are not left alone in obscurity after the Fall, but the remedy Michael administers in book 11 is temporary and imperfect, albeit extraordinary. Michael’s guidance incites Adam, rightly or wrongly, to praise the angel as “True opener of mine eyes, prime Angel blest” (11.598), and Adam repeats the commendation in book 12: Enlight’ner of my darkness, gracious things Thou hast reveal’d, those chiefly which concern Just Abraham and his Seed: now first I find Mine eyes true op’ning, and my heart much eas’d. (12.271–74) However enthused, relieved, or confident Adam may be here, he does not always judge or interpret the visions successfully; Michael corrects Adam’s response several times.4 After the vision of Cain and Abel, Adam asks if all death takes the shape of violent murder. Upon seeing the vision of the lazarhouse, Adam, weeping, questions why anyone would choose to live with such diseases, and Michael must teach Adam to temper his response. When the vision shifts to the intermarriage of a “sober Race of Men” with the daughters of Cain, Adam is pleased until Michael instructs him to “Judge not what is best / By pleasure,” and when Adam adjusts his opinion to blame women for the sorrows of men, he is again reproved: “Man’s effeminate slackness” is to blame, Michael replies (11.603–4, 621, 634). Adam consistently demonstrates his need for Michael to help him understand what he sees atop the Mount of Speculation. At last, even Adam’s visual powers begin to fail, and he depends on Michael to describe the vision as well as interpret it. Here is Michael again: 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. (12.8–12) From the vision of the Deluge and the Noahic covenant, Adam relies on Michael’s narration to further unfold the story of the human race. This shift

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of emphasis from visual to verbal revelation is important enough for Milton to remind his readers of it in the middle of book 12; as Michael recounts the story of Abram, he tells Adam, “I see him, but thou canst not” (12.128). The method of revelation, like the message revealed, proceeds “from shadowy Types to Truth,” from images to doctrine (12.303). Law gives way to gospel, and as Barbara Lewalski has argued, the transition from vision to narrative supports the theme of faith in both prophecy and poem.5 But this cannot be a blind faith. As Michael’s instruction atop the Mount of Speculation concludes, Adam notes the limits of this vast historical vista: “beyond is all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach” (12.555–56). He then summarizes what he has gained from vision and narrative: 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. (12.561–64) “To observe… providence”: the project frames the poem nicely. The bard’s task, announced in the poem’s opening lines, is to assert Eternal Providence; Adam’s, confirmed at the end of the poem, is to observe it. Emphasis on the value and limits of vision pervades Milton’s poem, operating on more than one level of the narrative. The euphrasy and rue and the three drops of water from the Well of Life have on Adam the effect that Milton’s narrator prays for in the opening lines of book 3. Hailing Holy Light, and pondering the “drop serene” or the “dim suffusion” that has shut out the Book of Nature from the optic entrance, the blind bard requests “Celestial Light” to Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. (3.25–26, 52–55) In the context of examining Milton’s visual imagination in Paradise Lost, Stephen Dobranski notes, “The internal ‘mist’ that Milton wants dispelled resembles the mental darkening that Adam and Eve suffer upon eating the forbidden fruit.”6 Impaired vision is associated with fallenness, and even

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considering Milton’s contention against those who attributed his blindness to divine retribution, the blindness of the narrator of the book 3 invocation is not untouched by original sin. As Dobranski explains, “Milton and his readers, as descendants of the first couple, presumably suffer from the same visual impairment, and one way of interpreting the invocations of Paradise Lost is that the poet seeks from the heavenly Muse an ocular purgation like the one Michael administers to Adam.”7 The gloss for Paradise Lost 11.412 in the Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon edition supports this reading: “A god clearing mortal eyes is an epic convention … but given the real physiological effects of the forbidden fruit … it seems likely that this film is actual rather than metaphorical: Adam had incipient gutta serena, the “dim suffusion” (3.26) from which Milton suffered.” The film that obstructs Adam’s sight, and by association the mist that veils the bard’s vision, is also reminiscent of the story of Tobit, a righteous man who loses eyesight in the context of courageous, Antigone-like burial of the dead in defiance of tyrannical edict. Within the Book of Tobit, Milton was drawn to the story of Tobit’s son Tobias and his wife Sarah, and of the expelling of the demon Asmodeus with the smoked heart and liver of a fish on their wedding night. Paradise Lost alludes to the story several times (4.166–71, 5.221–23; cf. 6.362–65). Yet the narrative framing this story may have been personally meaningful to the poet, especially in its description of Tobit’s loss of vision proceeding from righteous activity to presumably accidental impairment to full blindness hastened by medical experiment: On the same night after I, Tobit, returned from burying the dead, I went into my courtyard and slept by the wall of the courtyard, and my face was uncovered because of the heat. I did not know that there were sparrows on the wall and their fresh droppings fell into my open eyes and white films formed on my eyes. I went to the physicians to be healed, but the more they treated me with ointments, the more my vision was obscured by the white films, until I became completely blind. (Tobit 2:9–10a, RSV-2CE) For four years Tobit remains blind, until the angel Raphael instructs his son Tobias to make a salve from the gall of the very fish used to drive away the demon that had so tormented his bride:

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Emily E. Stelzer With this [Tobias] applied the medicine on [Tobit’s] eyes. Next, with both his hands, he peeled off the white films from the corners of his eyes. Then [Tobit] saw his son and embraced him, and he wept and said, “Here I see my son, the light of my eyes!” (Tobit 11:12–14a)

The story of the restoration of Tobit’s sight involves a divine messenger, the removal of a film, and the application of a powerful medicine derived from the natural world, and in this it becomes a precedent for Milton’s description of Adam’s eye treatment in book 11 of Paradise Lost. Of course, there are notable differences: the film cannot, except in the most indirect, remote, and general way, be traced to the effect of sin; the ointment derives from the gall of a fish, not from the herbs euphrasy and rue; the order is reversed, with ointment applied first, and then the film removed; the treatment is administered by a human intermediary, not the angel; and the prescribing angel is Raphael, not Michael. Here is not the place to speculate what Milton is doing with these similarities and dissimilarities, but the point to make is that Milton is drawn to vignettes where a divine agent restores sight to a faithful man through spiritual power but by the physical act of removing an obstructing haze. This is what Raphael and Tobias do for Tobit, what Michael does for Adam, and in part what the narrator prays for in the book 3 invocation. In the context of book 3, the bard is preparing for a description of Heaven, and even for introducing divine speech in his poetry. In book 11, the bard again prepares for an extraordinary revelation. The seventeenthcentury narrator has the advantage of hindsight as he relates key events from the Old and New Testaments; however, from Michael and Adam’s perspective, the revelation is prophetic and beyond the boundaries of purely human speculation. The vision of book 11 is also supernatural in that it spatially includes more than the human eye can take in from one single vantage point, no matter how high the mountain; the vision extends beyond human limits geographically as well as historically. Moreover, this vision includes more than meets the eye: it pierces the mind as Adam sees and Michael tells of things invisible to mortal sight: of motivations and intentions; of motions of the heart as well as outward actions. It is true that fallen Adam retains some visual and mental power to interpret signs and visions; he correctly if vaguely predicts Michael’s arrival: “Adam observ’d … he err’d not” (Paradise Lost 11.191, 208).8 But the vision that follows is far beyond the power of

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unassisted fallen man to interpret; in both book 3 and book 11, the purging of vision requires divine intervention. Such connections between the bard’s request for insight and Adam’s postlapsarian need for his vision to be purged “Even to the inmost seat of mental sight” lead one to wonder if Milton and his readers might access some correlative to the poultice that prepares Adam for sight and insight (11.418). One may draw parallels between the Holy Light of the book 3 invocation, described as “Bright effluence of bright essence increate,” a “pure Ethereal stream” of mysterious fount, and the Well of Life in the garden of Eden, the fountain by the tree of life (3.6–7, 4.229, 9.73); both are associated with strengthened visual powers, both of heavenly source and with divine properties (3.357, 11.279).9 But why euphrasy? Why rue? Why does Milton choose these herbs to do for Adam what the poet wants a heavenly muse to do for him? Let us consider several compatible explanations for the choice of euphrasy and rue in this important but under-examined passage.

Literal: “[S]till to tend Plant, Herb, and Flow’r”; Euphrasy and Rue in Early Modern Herbals Editors of Paradise Lost consistently note that the herbs euphrasy (medieval Latin eufrasia, from the Greek euphrasia, and also called eyebright) and rue (Latin ruta) are mentioned in medieval and early modern herbals as beneficial to physical eyesight. This is glossed in the notes and editions of Hume, Hughes, Shawcross, Teskey, Orgel and Goldberg, Leonard, and Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon. The sources identified in such notes are herbals still popular and deemed reliable in Milton’s day: Henry Lyte’s A New Herball (1586, a translation from the French of the celebrated Cruydtboeck of Rembert Dodoens), John Gerard’s Herball (1597), and John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640). The eye ailments treated with these herbs include, in particular, dimness of sight. Thus we read, for example, in Lyte’s A New Herball, “Eiebright pound and laid upon the eies, or the juice thereof with wine dropped into the eies, taketh away the darknesse of the same, and cleareth the sight,” and Rue “cleareth the sight, and quickeneth the same very much”; wild rue in particular “removeth all cloudes and pearles in the eies.”10 One may find references to the eye-quickening powers of euphrasy and rue from the printing of the first English herbal, the anonymous Proprytes of herbes (London, 1525), generally referred to as Bancke’s Herbal, from the

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name of the printer.11 This herbal will particularly interest Miltonists because it has the uncommon feature of offering a remedy for eye ailments that uses euphrasy and rue together: “Stampe rewe and fenel together of yche lyke moche be weyght [of like amount by weight] and medle them with hony and eufrose and it is good oyntment for eyes.”12 Considered separately, euphrasy and rue were promoted in many other early modern English herbals: the anonymous Grete Herball (Southwark [London], 1526), Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Health (London, 1539), Robert Wyer’s Knowledge, Properties, and the Vertues of Herbes (London, 1540), Nicholas Culpeper’s The English-Physicians Dayly Practice (London, 1652), and Joseph Blagrave’s Astrological Practice of Physick (Cambridge, 1671). Given the repeated recommendations of euphrasy and rue for eye ailments, including dimness of sight, in these herbals, it is not unlikely that Milton himself tested the restorative powers of these herbs against his own loss of vision, with or without the assistance of Dr. Nathan Paget. Milton’s self-diagnosis in his 1654 letter to Leonard Philaras supports such experimentation. Milton’s anonymous early biographer, generally thought to be Cyriack Skinner, mentioned the “issues and seatons, made use of to save or retrieve” the poet’s eyesight, and while John Aubrey’s Collections for the Life of Milton promotes the image of a hale man who “Seldom took any physic,” attempts to preserve his eyesight are presumably excepted.13 The biography by Edward Phillips records Milton’s “perpetual tampering with physic” in hopes to stave off blindness.14 Considering “the surprising detail” in Milton’s description of “the physiological process by which Michael initiates his ocular proof,” Stephen Dobranski draws attention to “Milton’s blending of personal experience and poetic knowledge.”15 Euphrasy and rue may indeed have served as part of that personal experience. But in the herbals mentioned above there are many other remedies for the eyes beyond those featuring euphrasy and rue. Joseph Blagrave’s Astrological Practice of Physick, for example, recommends eyebright, celandine, white roses, archangel, angelica, balm, century, germander, hawkweed, heath, lavender, lovage, elecompane, melilor, medesweet, rue, savory, vine, vipers grass, sparagus, wake-robin, and valerian for their eye-quickening powers.16 Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Health lists “thynges good for the eyes,” including “Eyebryght, fenell … roses, celandine … agrimony … cloves, [and] Colde water.”17 In a list of “Meates which do hurt the eyes” one finds activities as well as foods: “Drunkennes, Lechery … sweete wynes and thicke wynes,

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hempseed, very salt meates, garlyke, onyons, colewortes, radyshe, [and] readynge after supper immediately.”18 Given these long lists of harmful substances and health remedies, not much scholarship has sought to explain Milton’s particular choice of euphrasy and rue. In 1967, Jon S. Lawry offered an allegorical interpretation, joining “paschalian rue with eschatological euphrasy” in the Son’s expulsion of the demons in the War in Heaven, and arguing that in the final books “The rue of tragic suffering for error is twinned with the euphrasy of divine illumination.”19 In 1970, Charlotte Otten presented the case for Milton’s awareness of a tradition identifying the herb rue with Homer’s moly, the plant more often connected to the haemony of A Maske. In doing so she refers to the scholarship of Edward S. Le Comte and of Thomas P. Harrison, Jr., each building the case for Milton’s familiarity with various early modern herbals, particularly those of John Gerard and Henry Lyte (respectively).20 Using Hugo Rahner’s work with the medical theories of Galen, the herbal of Dioscurides, the Natural History of Pliny, and the allegoric interpretation of moly as phronesis (practical wisdom) by Heraclitus, Otten conjoins classical and Christian myths through the identification of moly with rue, both with a black root, a white flower, and a bitter taste, and both thought good for the sight.21 Rue is moly, Dioscurides and Galen (but not Pliny) attest, a connection preserved, for example, in Lyte’s A New Herball and John Parkinson’s Teatrum Botanicum.22 The effects of Homer’s moly and Milton’s rue are likewise joined. In The Odyssey, Hermes presents Odysseus with moly to counteract the charms of the witch Circe. “There is a mind in you no magic will work on,” Circe gasps, when Odysseus withstands her wiles.23 Because Circe attributes Odysseus’ invulnerability to his mental strength, the protective moly was also associated with divinely given wisdom. I follow Rahner and Otten in quoting the (non-Christian) neoplatonist Themistius: “The rare and heavenly gift of moly is the heavenly paideia by which man, while yet here below, prepares himself for the final ascent into the light. Moly is self-control, circumspection in conduct, and that ascetical form of life that has a bitter, black root but a flower that is white and sweet.”24 Otten then adds, “The Church Fathers (whom Milton knew well) richly adapted the Homeric Odysseus to their Christian message, while the early Christian artists transformed him into a Christian symbol … always accompanied by the divine moly.”25 The story of Odysseus, Hermes, and Circe subsequently lent itself to medieval and Renaissance mythographers and allegorists, from Natale Conti to Boethius

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to Roger Ascham. Circe’s allure represented humanity’s more beastly urges, which could only be quelled by the rational part of man sustained by divine assistance.26 Through identification with moly, then, rue is associated with Odyssean reserve and Hermetic mental powers. Giving rue /moly special consideration, Otten affirms that, as Adam’s enlightener and medic, “The Archangel Michael clearly inherits the Hermes-role in Paradise Lost.”27 Presumably restorative of physical eyesight, rue’s virtues were associated with God-given wisdom and insight. Euphrasy, too, was thought to fortify the mind—according to Lyte’s New Herball, eyebright compounded with mace “comforteth the memorie very much”28—but euphrasy held none of the rich classical and Christian associations rue had through its ­identification with moly. Perhaps a satisfying explanation for Milton’s choice of euphrasy and rue rests on our own attention to the visual. Wendy Furman-Adams’ scholarly observations guide us here. Examining Jane Giraud’s drawings in Flowers of Milton (London, 1846), Furman-Adams looks to the illustration for euphrasy and rue: “Here the lush flowers of all the previous designs give way to two bitter-tasting and austere-looking herbs.” Furman-Adams quotes a seventeenth-century herbal’s description of euphrasy that compared its purple and yellow spots and stripes to those of diseased eyes, and she refers to another commentator attributing rue’s healing power to “the signe of the Cross imprest on the Seed.”29 These early modern descriptions of euphrasy and rue testify to the persistence of the doctrine of signatures, the ancient belief that the very appearances of plants hint at their specific pharmaceutical virtues. More generally, Furman-Adams observes, “The very commonness and austerity of these herbs … give vivid visual testimony to the new dispensation within which not only Adam and Eve but all of nature will have to live.”30 Noting that the eighteenth century still held those who “shared Milton’s assumption of a fundamentally moral universe, designed by a unifying Providence, in which forms embodied ethical meanings,” Furman-Adams argues that “a number of the associations Milton would have made with certain plants [including euphrasy and rue] … would still have had meaning for Girard, particularly when the symbolic properties were classical and/or biblical as well as early modern in origin.”31 At the same time, visual attention to the herbs themselves corresponds well with Dobranski’s investigation of the many instances in which “Milton’s visual details seem influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the contemporary more than the classical, by the observed more than the

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biblical or literary.”32 Milton’s blindness, after all, erased neither his memory nor his habitual attention to detail. Early modern herbals also recommended rue as a charm against poison, plague, witchcraft, and demonic possession. Bancke’s Herball instructs, “For bytynge of venomous best or worm / plaster Rewe to the bytynge,” and Nicolas Culpeper identifies rue as “a good antidote against the plague” and “against deadly poisons being often taken in Meat or drink.”33 According to Lyte’s Herbal: The leaves of Rue … are good against all evill aires, and against the pestilence, and all poison, and against the bitings of vipers and serpents …. The body that is annointed with the juice of Rue, or that shal eate of Rue fasting, shall be (as Plinie writeth) assured against all poison, and safe from all venemous beasts, so that no poison or venemous beast shall have power to hurt him.34 The reference to Pliny, who in his Natural History more mildly avouches the efficacy of rue “as a preservative against the attacks of caterpillars,” also gives testament to the extremely long history of reverence for this herb, for Pliny adds that “The ancients held rue in peculiar esteem.”35 To return to medieval and early modern applications, sprigs of rue were hung on doorframes as apotropaic protection against the plague or the evil eye, and Neopolitan folk medicine preserves a long history of adorning infants’ necks or cribs with cimaruta (“sprig of rue”) amulets.36 Medieval benedictions were used on rue to render the herb efficacious to exorcise demons. A handbook of cures used in the diocese of Nevers, France (Paris, 1579) offers two official blessings to be used on rue, one including a prayer that God also send Raphael in the context of his protection of Sara and Tobias from Asmodeus: “Benedic domine Iesu Christe, hanc creaturam ruthe … supplico tibi, domine, ut secundum angelum tuum Raphaelem mittas, qui evulsit et expulit a Sara et Tobia demonum mortiferum.”37 The Franciscan inquisitor Girolamo Menghi in Flagellum Daemonum (1578) recommends rue in the rite of exorcism, justifying the use of this pungent herb with reference to the exorcism of Asmodeus.38 The tradition of using rue in exorcisms, Bishop Thomas Newton tells us in his gloss on Paradise Lost 11.414, is the reason that rue is the “herb of grace.” So it is called in Salerne’s Regiment (1617; cf. OED s.v. rue, n.2 1.a.γ). David Scott Kastan and Professor Boyd also note in their glosses of Paradise

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Lost that Shakespeare’s Ophelia knows rue is called “herb-grace o’ Sundays.”39 So does Richard II’s gardener, who, when all seems to look irremediable for Richard II and his court, turns to rue as the appropriate memorial for the abused queen: Here did she fall a tear, here in this place I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace. Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen, In the remembrance of the weeping queen.40 The gardener selects rue for pity’s sake, and for the sake of memory—“for ruth” and “remembrance”—encouraging both an emotional and an intellectual response to the queen’s sorrow. His description of rue as a “sour herb of grace” calls to our attention not only the fact that rue was known as the herb of grace for its being used in exorcisms, but also that it was used so for its unpleasant taste and scent. Rue is bitter, and wild rue in particular is “of a very strong and grievous smell”; consequently, like the fishy fume that vexes Asmodeus, the herb was thought to be noisome to demons (Paradise Lost 4.166).41 In sum, as Frederick Thomas Elworthy has noted in his late nineteenth-century study of the ancient superstition of the evil eye, “No plant had more virtues ascribed to it in ancient times than rue, and the belief in these has continued down to the present day.”42 So much for rue— but what of euphrasy? It lacked the reputation rue held for providing Odyssean insight or spiritual protection. Entries for euphrasy in herbals are often much shorter than the entries for rue. Euphrasy had the distinction of the alternative names eyebright and luminelle, presumably from its power to brighten, clarify, and rejuvenate the eyes; in hardly any other respect is it distinctive among other herbs good for the eyes, at least as far as the early modern herbals are concerned.43 Milton’s choice of rue may be sufficiently explained by looking at the semantically rich classical and Christian associations this herb carried, meaningful associations promoted through elaborate entries and prescriptions in herbals, sometimes with detailed drawings supporting the doctrine of signatures. Milton’s decision to include euphrasy, however, demands further investigation.

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Literary: “[F]rom flesh to spirit”; Euphrasy and Rue as Joy and Sorrow To my mind, the cleanest, most convincing treatment of Milton’s euphrasy and rue thus far is Alastair Fowler’s gloss of Paradise Lost 9.414, both in the Longman Poems of John Milton (1968), edited with John Carey, and the Longman Paradise Lost, revised 2nd edition (1998). Fowler notes that euphrasy and rue were deliberately “selected for the sake of wordplays”:44 The name “euphrasy” is from Gk. Euphrasia, cheerfulness, while the bitter rue puns on rue = sorrow, pity, or repentance (a pun so common that no fewer than five instances are given in OED s.v. rue, n.2 1.b). In other words the herbs are correlates of the “joy” and “pious sorrow” that Michael told Adam to temper, at ll. 361f. Note, however, that the tempering is connected with the operation of the well of life: true Christian patience depends on grace and repentance.45 John Leonard’s gloss for Paradise Lost 11.414 also notes Fowler’s association of euphrasia with cheerfulness and rue with sorrow, and their correlation to Michael’s instructions to Adam:            good with bad Expect to hear, supernal Grace contending With sinfulness of Men; thereby to learn True patience, and to temper joy with fear And pious sorrow, equally inur’d By moderation either state to bear, Prosperous or adverse (11.358–64) I find this reading eloquent and convincing within the context of the poem. The ethical message of tempering joy with sorrow is itself tempered by the spiritual necessity of the three drops of water from the Well of Life. It well accords with other exhortations toward moderation, including Michael’s instructions to Adam after the lazar-house vision—“Nor love thy Life, nor hate” (11.553)—or the Son’s plan for confronting Adam and Eve after their Fall—“I shall temper so / Justice with Mercy, as may illustrate most / Them

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fully satisfied, and thee [God] appease” (10.77–79). This reading of euphrasy and rue as cheerfulness and sorrow is also correlative to God’s own tempered response to the Fall, as seen in his instructions to Michael: “Dismiss them not disconsolate”; “send them … sorrowing, yet in peace” (11.113, 117). And it well corresponds with the paradoxes in the last image of the poem—Adam and Eve banned from the garden yet with the world all before them, hand in hand yet solitary, wandering yet with Providence as their guide. In euphrasy and rue we find emblems of the paradoxical cooperation of joy and sorrow, which, mingled with the spiritual refreshment and renewal betokened by the three drops from the Well of Life, together effect the purgation of sight, enabling the prospective vision that in turn enables movement forward. Perhaps the best tribute to be given to this reading of euphrasy and rue is to point to it without elaboration, but I will add one further reflection, noting that the entry for eiebright in Lyte’s A New Herball states that the herb is also called euphrosyne.46 This variation on the name of euphrasy will remind the Miltonist of Euphrosyne, the goddess of Mirth, one of the three graces or charities attending Venus, and the figure invoked in Milton’s L’Allegro: But come thou Goddess fair and free In Heav’n yclep’d Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing Mirth (11–13) From this it is apparent that euphrasy and rue in their oppositional partnership are correlative to the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Rue, after all, intimates a peculiarly melancholy species of sorrow, and euphrasy, a mirthful sort of joy.

Lyric: “[G]racious was that word”: Euphrasy and Rue as Poetry and Grace But I think Milton’s wordplay does not end here. Fowler mentions euphrasy is derived from the Greek euphrasia / εὐφρασία, mirth, good cheer. The verb form is euphrainein / εὐφραίνειν, “to cheer, delight, gladden,” its parts composed of εὖ (adv. well, competently, fortunately, easily) + the root drawn from φρήν, φρενός, ἡ (n. heart or mind as the seat of the passions or of thought).47 Yet euphrasia has a “false etymology” or homophonic resonance that would be evident to a student of Greek: εὖ + phrasis / φράσις (n. phrasing, expression,

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way of speaking). The adjectival form in this case is euphrastos / εὔφραστος, -ον, “easy to speak or utter” or “easy to make intelligible”; the corresponding verb form would be εὖ + φράζειν, to point out, show, tell or to cultivate style or phrasing.48 With these two definitions of the verb form, euphrasy then could signify a good declaration, showing, or revelation on one hand, or, on the other, good speaking, eloquent phrasing, and especially (to put it more bluntly) poetry.49 Since the prefix eu- carries connotations of pleasure and beauty as well as goodness, Milton’s euphrasy is not only his gospel, his assertion of the goodness of God—it is also the success of his poetic style. This is to say that euphrasy could refer to the sort of activity Michael the archangel does in revealing the matter of books 11 and 12 through vision and narration, and also to what Milton does in composing Paradise Lost itself. And while the Liddell and Scott Greek–English lexicons provide no entry for εὐφράζειν (verb form) or εὐφράσις (noun form), the adjective εὔφραστον appears there and in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.50 The alternative definition of euphrasy as fine phrasing or eloquence is reputable enough to make its way into the OED: 2. In pseudo-etymological sense: Fine phrasing. rare. [A Greek *εὐϕρασία in this sense might have been < εὐ- + ϕράζειν to speak, but it is not actually found.] Although the OED’s only cited instance of this use of the word is from 1833, the definition in its “pseudo-etymological sense” is worth considering in relation to Milton. Even without supporting evidence from Aristotle or the OED this definition of euphrasy would be snugly wedged in the tradition of classically derived Miltonic coinages and paronomasia. Pandemonium, terrific, and sensuous are notable examples of Milton’s classically derived neologisms (Paradise Lost 1.756, 7.497; YP 1:522), and while Milton can be pedantically precise in his use of Latin and Greek, he is flexible in his wordplay, adding homophonic layers of meaning that go beyond the semantic possibilities discovered through exact etymology. For example, in book 10, as Sin and Death aggregate chaotic matter to form a bridge linking earth and hell, Milton compares their actions to that of proud Xerxes scourging the waves of the Hellespont, traversing the straits “the liberty of Greece to yoke” (Paradise Lost 10.306–11). Through simile and pun, Milton links Sin and Death to Xerxes as tyrant, and the Hellespont to the bridge to Hell. The pun imaginatively departs from strict

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etymology in two respects: the Helles- of Hellespont has nothing to do with Hell (etymologically speaking), and in fact the Hellespont was traditionally so called for the mythological Helle, who was drowned there, rather than for Greece, as suggested by Milton’s reference.51 It is not that Milton is mistaken here—it is that we are in the thick of Miltonic wordplay. A misleading “Monument / Of merit,” the bridge is further described as pontifical in more than one sense; puns building from the Latin pons allow Milton in the space of a few lines of narrative to rebuke proud tyranny in pope and priest as well as in emperor or king (10.258–59). Milton’s readers and critics have long noted his use of ambiguity and polysemy within his poetry, often located within a single word or phrase through etymology. Thomas Newton, for one, frequently comments on the etymological puns in his notes on Paradise Lost, which create “a singular beauty and elegance in Milton’s language, and that is using their words in their strict and litteral sense, which are commonly apply’d to a metaphorical meaning, whereby he gives peculiar force to his expressions, and the litteral meaning appears more new and striking than the metaphor itself.”52 Christopher Ricks explains Milton’s wordplay as a predominantly conservative enterprise, to purify the dialect of the tribe: his temperament and his respect for literary decorum impelled Milton to choose to bring ancient metaphors back to life rather than to forge new ones.… Milton, like all epic poets, is concerned mainly to lead us back, not to blaze new trails. And the vigour of his words is a matter of his leading us back to the riches buried in them.53 Milton’s wordplay may not even be limited to English and the classical languages; for example, Patrick Hume reads Milton’s punning on the French puisné, “born afterwards,” when Beelzebub refers to humankind as the “puny habitants” of a newly created world (Paradise Lost 2.367).54 “At its simplest,” Ricks assures us, “such a use of language does no more (and no less) than make words mean what they ought to mean.”55 Nevertheless, Milton does not ignore the vulgar eloquence of words; he rather uses it to advantage. As Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh observed, Milton “was not content to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word with two meanings at once.”56 And even when Milton uses the linguistic roots of words to add meaning

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we may discover that he layers homophonic senses or meanings that would ring in the ear of the reader trained in classical languages but are not strictly etymological. The pun, the lowest form of wit in neoclassical hierarchy, may appear at odds with the grandeur expected of the epic style, but the crudest, bluntest examples of punning in Paradise Lost are often directed toward or spoken by Satan and his company, and become part of Milton’s satire and polemic.57 Thus, in Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the character based on Robert Southey remarks of the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost, “It appears, then, on record that the first overt crime of the refractory angels was punning: they fell rapidly after that.”58 Such puns signify the duplicitous nature of the fallen angels, but are more importantly signs of their crudity, of becoming “gross by sinning grown,” in language as well as matter (Paradise Lost 6.661). As Christopher Ricks has explained, most eighteenth-century commentators object not to Milton’s play on words per se, but to the obviousness and crudity of the examples; nevertheless, “[T]he crudity at this point is perhaps dramatically apt, as some eighteenth-century commentators argued.”59 He notes that most of the puns Addison objected to in The Spectator (No. 297) signify contempt. Yet Milton’s wordplay is hardly limited to contexts of insult and contempt: beyond the puns that may be admired for their cleverness, in certain passages, Milton’s paronomasia exquisitely elevates both style and meaning. If Milton has fallen Adam slight Eve as the product of a crooked, bent, supernumerary, and sinister part of him (and thereby reminiscent of Sin, sprung from the left side of her progenitor), who could forget Adam’s prelapsarian elations when describing the Divine Presence taking from him a rib “with cordial spirits warm, / And life-blood streaming fresh,” lent from the side closest his heart, to fashion the woman whom he calls (as Eve herself relates) “an individual solace dear” (2.755, 4.481–86, 8.465–67, 10.884–88)? The complex and layered senses of “cordial,” and “individual solace dear,” for example, have attracted many scholars.60 Examples of punning in Paradise Lost are well known and frequently pointed out in the classroom, beginning with the first line of the poem—and it would be folly to try to catalogue these instances here. But I submit euphrasy as an example of Milton’s more decorous brand of wordplay, one in which he intimates something quite serious: the prospect of good words, and of poetry in particular, recovering some vestige of paradise. Indeed, given its subject, Paradise Lost would not work as poetry

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at all if it failed to transport its readers into Eden through the imagination, however temporarily, however provisionally. One of the ways Milton does this is through imagery, and one through the backward glance of etymologically charged diction. Consider how both imagery and diction work in Milton’s descriptions of Eden. The bright clarity of “crisped books” and the undulations of “Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold” are enjoyed in the sound as well as the sense of the words (4.237–38). The luxuries of paradise are experienced in the descriptions of its lush vegetation: “rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm” and pendant boughs carry fruit “burnished with Golden Rind” (4.248–49). The description of a lost paradise is a poetic attempt to repair the ruins of Eden through the imagination, but Milton is not so innocently optimistic as to suppose he can remove all vestige of the Fall from view and viewer. Thus, in his portrait of Eden there is a complex of connotations hinting variously at innocence, temptation, foreboding, and dissipation: “umbrageous Grots,” where the grapevine “creeps / Luxuriant,” rivers running in “mazy error,” and darksome passages through which the nether flood of postlapsarian experience surfaces (4.231–32, 239, 257, 259–60). Miltonists have not been remiss in offering a variety of explanations for such semantically charged words as “error,” “wept,” “shade,” and “luxuriant” in these descriptions of paradise.61 The poetry is beautiful, and yet bears the mark of the Fall. In considering Milton’s penchant for layered meanings I assume that Milton is indebted to the medieval tradition of polysemy advanced by Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, and Aquinas.62 While these theologians wrote of polysemy within the context of biblical hermeneutics, their categories for different senses of the written word were soon applied to imaginative literature in general. Perhaps the most famous instance of such use is preserved in Dante’s Letter to Can Grande Della Scala, where the poet instructs his reader to look in his Commedia for multiple, coexistent meanings. The literal held its own meaning, but the poem was also to be interpreted in three other senses: the allegorical-historical, the moral-tropological, and the anagogiceschatological.63 Following this scheme, any particular literary passage could be subject to multiple senses at once, adding layers of meaning without contradiction.64 One may consider these senses with respect to Milton’s botanical selections: on the literal level, euphrasy and rue are medicinal herbs that so quicken the eyesight, that, paradoxically, Adam is forced to close his eyes

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until an angel bids him open them; on a more literary, etymology-based, moral–tropological level, euphrasy and rue are the cheerfulness and sorrow essential to temper man’s awareness of and response to his fallen condition; and, perhaps, on a more lyrical, anagogical–mystical level, euphrasy is the “good speaking” evident in Milton’s own poetry, and rue is the herb of grace that not only exorcises the demons but points to immense and infinite goodness and ultimate glory (cf. Paradise Lost 12.469–78). The anagogic reading of euphrasy and rue would then make Paradise Lost both a deeply reverent hymn to divine grace, and an exultantly vigorous example of human poetic action. Considered together, as eye-quickening herbs, euphrasy and rue represent the need for and the possibility of an improvement in human vision, and in doing so they draw the reader’s attention to Milton’s imagery, to his successes and perhaps even to his failures; in turn, in drawing attention to the importance of imagery and vision, euphrasy and rue further validate the first half of Adam’s experience on the Mount of Speculation, what Adam sees but does not always interpret to Michael’s satisfaction. At the same time, on a figurative level, the various potential meanings of euphrasy and rue, drawn (1) from the myths and spiritual applications that created or advanced the reputations of these herbs far beyond their botanical virtues, (2) from their etymology, and (3) from an eloquent version of homophonic wordplay, draw attention to the importance of the word well chosen, to good news and grace, and thence to the verbal narrative constituting the latter half of Michael’s revelation. The senses blend: the literal, botanical purposes of euphrasy and rue point to imagery and vision, and the figurative meanings point to the importance of etymology and diction. The herbs cooperate; euphrasy and rue are compounded and applied together as ingredients of a single unguent.65 Euphrasy and rue, then, may not only carry connotations of cheerfulness and sorrow intermixed, but also expose deeper layers of the paradoxical, exquisite dance of human and divine action within Milton’s poetry. The paradoxes work with the Arminian theology in the closing passages of Paradise Lost, which promote obedience and works of faith, a dignified striving after virtue and a deep gratitude for and reliance on divine provision. The distinctions between the literal and the literary, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine, and euphrasy and rue blend together. We remember that rue, through association with classical moly, is itself a symbol of human self-control; through association with Christian rites it is associated

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with divine grace. One cannot tell how well the poultice might work alone; however potent euphrasy and rue, in any of their senses, may be to correct fallen vision, their efficacy still depends on the addition of three drops of water from the Well of Life, and the removal of the obscuring film of fallenness by a divinely sent guide. Knowledge of the virtues of herbs, moderation in viewing life with both joy and sorrow, and the activity of good, beautiful speaking through poetry are not enough to correct one’s vision without divine help. Even if one may succeed in gathering euphrasy and rue in any of these senses, the film of the Fall still obscures our vision of paradise, including the paradise within. And, like vision, the potency of words is limited: “With the Fall of Man, language falls too.”66 This brings us to perhaps the most important wordplay in the poem, involving the assertion of God’s providence, where to provide means not only to supply but also to see forth (pro-videre). The success of Milton’s stated project depends on God looking out for humankind—but there is also a role for human vision. Adam’s accepted commission “to observe providence” counters envy (as we have seen, from in-videre, to look upon [maliciously]— or, more creatively, not to look at all, to be blind to). Barbara Lewalski has explained the structure of the final two books of the poem, and its progress from vision to non-vision, as movement toward faith. But the task of observing providence means this faith ought not to be blindly accepted, and that it will depend on attention, perspective, and the reading of images as well as words. If euphrasy and rue are analogous to human poetry and heavenly grace, they are emblems of the best that man can offer God—eloquent words of praise, or a life well lived, which is “a true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things” (in Milton’s words in his Apology for Smectymnuus)—and the best that God gives man—favor and blessing preceding one’s virtuous deeds and extending far beyond one’s deserving (YP 1:890). I turn once more to Milton’s letter to Leonard Philaras on his blindness, which concludes with a faith in providence that also reveals the effort he has expended in personal poesis: Whatever hope the physician may gather from this account, I prepare and compose myself under the consideration that I am certainly incurable. And I often think, that since the days of darkness, to which every man is destined, are, as the wise man warns, many; that mine by the great mercy of Providence, happening in the

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midst of leisure, and studies, and the conversation and salutations of my friends, are much brighter than the shades of death. But if, as it is written, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, why should not any one submit for this reason also, that he can see not only with his eyes, but that the leading and providence of God is sufficient sight. Truly, if he take care of me—if he provide for me—which He does, and lead me by the hand, and accompany me through life, I shall willingly permit my eyes to be unemployed.67 But Milton himself was not unemployed. In 1654, the year he wrote the above letter, he also wrote in the Second Defence: “[T]he loss of my eyesight has not left me sluggish from inactivity but tireless and ready among the first to risk the greatest dangers for the sake of liberty” (YP 4:591); and as for his poetry, he had already begun Paradise Lost and was about to enter an energetic period of further development.68 This essay’s reading of euphrasy and rue supports the idea that Paradise Lost itself is a partially successful attempt at undoing the effects of the Fall, or, as Milton says in Of Education, repairing the ruins of our first parents (YP 2:366–67). I argue that this is an enterprise not merely ethical or theological, but poetic. The bard is not simply proposing a moral path for his human audience to follow—in addition to justifying the ways of God to men he is participating in the creative act of poesis. This is euphrasy according to the accepted pseudo-etymology—a kind of speaking that aims at beauty as well as goodness and truth. The poem is like a fugue in its contrapuntal composition and in the interweaving of its various parts, and as a whole it aims for and sets off the exalted and transporting lyrical moments that cannot be infinitely sustained in a fallen world. As Keats’s fears of dying before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain were mitigated by the poetic expression of those fears; as the black ink of Shakespeare’s pen protects love and beauty from sad mortality and the wrackful siege of battering days; as the young Milton’s concerns about delayed fruition of “inward ripeness” are calmed both with trust in his Great Taskmaster and also with the emergent “bud or blossom” of Sonnet 7, so Milton in Paradise Lost presents both an account of the Fall and an attempt to do something about it—an attempt that, he reminds us, always depends on heavenly inspiration, guiding providence, and grace.

c ha p te r te n

Paradise Finding Aids Nicholas Allred

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hile today we might wonder what the purpose of an index or concordance to Paradise Lost could be, their eighteenth-century creators seem to have considered it too obvious to bother explaining. “It would be Time lost to speak of the Use of such Indexes as these,” claims the preface to one such document; and after exhaustively cataloguing every appearance of almost every word in the poem the compiler must not have had another moment to spare.1 Rather than identify the point of his labors, he simply points to it as if self-evident—indexically, as it were. The point of supplementing Paradise Lost with finding aids must have been clear to the poem’s most influential editors as well. The title page of Jacob Tonson’s sixth edition of the poem in 1695 advertised a “Table to the POEM, never before Printed” in addition to Patrick Hume’s “Notes.”2 The table’s three lists of “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches” and where to find them was expanded in the 1711 eighth edition to a full-scale subject index. It is hard to find an edition of the poem, even pirated, without this index over the following decades (including Bentley’s 1732 “emended” version), and at no point did editors or publishers feel compelled to justify its inclusion. In 1741, a standalone “verbal index” or concordance (the terms were then interchangeable) appeared, with the short preface quoted above. Thomas Newton’s definitive edition of the poem in 1749 reprints both the 1711 and 1741 finding aids, but for reasons he, too, pointedly passes over. “The man, who is at the pains of making indexes, is really to be pitied; but of

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their great utility there is no need to say any thing,” he writes, “when several persons, who pass in the world for profound scholars, know little more of books than title-pages and indexes, but never catch the spirit of an author, which is sure always to evaporate or die in such hands.”3 Newton’s condescension for index compilers and users alike makes “great utility” ring more or less sarcastic; far from telling us what these reference works are intended for, he leaves us wondering what would compel an editor to include documents that he so disdains. For Newton, explaining the function of an index seems not just pointless but tasteless, like extending an invitation to enter the book, in Swift’s double entendre, “by the Back-Door.”4 This sort of breezy apophasis, this allusion that claims to require no explanation, suggests that eighteenth-century indexes not only enabled certain familiar reading practices, but expressed them so powerfully that merely pointing to such a document’s existence could metonymically evoke a whole set of readers or spirit of reading. Perhaps, with some effort, we can make the indexes to Paradise Lost do the same for us: point to the habits of reading involved in making and using them. In turn, this work can disclose structures in the poem that we have perhaps forgotten how to see, and even throw our contemporary critical practices into relief. In what follows I’ll focus on three documents: the 1695 table, the 1711 subject index into which the table expanded, and the 1741 verbal index. The three works have a great deal in common, but their differences in structure wind up highlighting different reading practices. The table’s rhetorical breakdown suggests a particular theory of the epic genre, made explicit in the Spectator and mocked by the Scriblerians; the subject index processes the epic narrative into lyric excerpts; and the verbal index turns Milton’s words into standards of the English lexicon (by way of Samuel Johnson) and sites for a kind of long-distance close reading. In each case, eighteenth-century and even contemporary criticism can help illustrate, contextualize, and tease out the approaches to Paradise Lost implicit in these finding aids. As we can see in Newton’s and Swift’s cursory dismissals above, these documents have been trivialized since they first appeared, portrayed as blunt tools too obvious to bother explaining. Pushing past that dismissal and taking indexes seriously can shed light on the critical assumptions of eighteenth-century readers—and perhaps, by refraction, our own.

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I Classifying the Epic: The Table The “Table of the most remarkable Parts” that Jacob Tonson appended to the poem’s sixth edition in 1695 is an instructive place to start because it is a finding aid that tells us exactly what to look for: according to its subtitle, “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches.” Each category is alphabetized; descriptions by the thing described, similes by tenor, and speeches by speaker, with multiple entries under the same head listed in narrative order. Book and line numbers tell us where a description, simile, or speech begins.5 In other words, the table is structured like an index, with the notable difference being that it explicitly names and sorts the kinds of things it will enable readers to find.6 A few hard-to-categorize “remarkable Parts” get shoehorned into the relatively vague “Descriptions,” but by and large each part of the table contains more or less the sort of thing we’d expect. In turn, the table tells us what we can expect from the poem: what we are supposed to read for. The “remarkable Parts” are the parts that readers are assumed or directed to remark upon, to notice; the table not only confirms their prominence but codifies it, explicitly bringing together memorable passages as instances of a type. Grouping Abdiel’s speeches to Satan in book 5 with his monologue about Satan in book 6, for instance, implicitly suggests that they belong to the same kind of poetic language whether addressed to an interlocutor within the narrative or not. The narrator is the exception that proves the rule: here represented only in the passive “Urania Invoked,” Milton’s authorial persona is understood to be “speaking” only when addressing someone who might plausibly speak back, whereas the “Author’s blindness lamented” is filed under “Descriptions.” That latter category operates at a breathtaking level of abstraction, ranging from the narration of a sudden event like Satan rising off the lake to a history-collapsing digression like the Paradise of Fools. Taken at its most audacious, the table seems to say that just about anything a reader might want to find in Paradise Lost fits into one of these three enormous buckets: a description, a simile, or a speech. Identifying certain types of language—“Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches”—as the basic building blocks of a poem like this sets in motion a certain aspect of genre: the set of conventional features by which a work can be classified and appraised. Like breaking down a substance into its molecular composition, breaking down a text into its rhetorical components serves to identify what kind of text it is. The table, in other words, embeds a kind of

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literary theory, a theory of how to recognize and navigate a particular kind of work. It classifies twice over, marking the poem’s genre by categorizing its components. We can see the distinctive features of this double-classification concept of genre most clearly when it is caricatured. If the implications of a rhetorical inventory for literary criticism seem subtle or obscure in the table to Paradise Lost, they become hard to miss in John Gay’s and Alexander Pope’s satires. Gay’s 1714 mock-pastoral “The Shepherd’s Week” includes an “Index” to his poem’s “Names, Plants, Flowers, Fruits, Birds, Beasts, Insects, and other material Things,” facetiously showing off his rural imagery as proof of pastoral accomplishment.7 His index mocks the notion that pastoral poetry can be recognized by its imagery alone, like a rhyming seed catalog—and, by extension, seems to question whether any genre can really be reduced to an inventory of its conventions. Gay might have had in mind Richard Blackmore’s ponderous epic Eliza, which appeared in 1705 with an “Index explaining the Persons, Countries, Cities, and Rivers mention’d in this Book”—as though flaunting his work’s historical and geographic sweep could compensate for the author’s historical and geographic remove from the genre’s origins.8 If eighteenth-century mock forms treat the possibility of reviving classical genres as a problem, then cheekily listing all the cowslips, hogs, and turnips in a mockpastoral prods the reader to think about what criteria the inventory theory of genre might be leaving out. By testing the limits of a purely rhetorical concept of genre, writers of mock-form thematize precisely the importance of cultural and historical context that Milton worries about in book 9, when he defends a theme “not less but more Heroick than the wrath / Of stern Achilles” while worrying whether the “age” or “Climate” might put the epic out of reach (9.14–15; 44–45). The generic logic of the finding aid seems to bypass those concerns, ending up far more sanguine about the possibilities for epic in Restoration-era Britain than even Paradise Lost itself. An itemized rhetorical breakdown not only abstracts away from the circumstances of composition, but even suggests that anyone can write an epic (if not necessarily a good one) by using the appropriate materials. Alexander Pope’s “Receipt to Make an Epic Poem” takes the ingredient-list genre theory of the finding aid one step further by turning it into a full-blown bookcookbook.9 His satiric recipe for an easy-bake poem offers to domesticate the epic, to minimize and feminize it for “sonneteers and ladies.” The recipe sets itself up as something like a finding aid: a reference that facilitates intellectual

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labor by replacing it, a tool that to Pope’s cynical eye seems like a crutch. Indeed, the recipe facetiously sings the praises of finding aids for hack poets: the ignorant need not fear “as long as indexes and dictionaries may be had, which are the compendium of all knowledge.” If a genre really can be boiled down to an inventory of its ingredients, Pope argues, then finding aids might substitute not just for the work of reading but also for the work of writing. Indeed, Pope’s recipe sees finding aids as a standing invitation to raid existing epics for parts. Would-be poets are advised to imitate Milton’s “Hebraisms and Grecisms” with a pinch of Middle English taken “from the dictionary commonly printed at the end of Chaucer”; for an epic battle, one should “season” a stock of “images and descriptions” borrowed from Homer and Virgil “with similes.” Where can a verse sous-chef find these figures? “[T]hey are all over Creation,” Pope assures us; “the most ignorant may gather them, but the Danger is in applying them. For this advise with your Bookseller.” Potentially cryptic at first, these lines make most sense when read as a reference to works like Tonson’s table. If only the raw materials for comparison could be found “all over Creation,” then the work of “gathering” them for a poem arguably requires at least a bit of observational talent; and, moreover, the role of the “Bookseller” seems inscrutable. Pope instead seems to claim that the similes and metaphors themselves, harvested and prepackaged by booksellers in works like the table, are practically hiding in plain sight, begging to be “borrowed.” In this context, that final line seems to suggest that publishers who dispense individually wrapped snippets of rhetoric have a prescribing pharmacist’s duty to prevent misuse: in other words, if Tonson makes it easy to “gather” Milton’s similes, he should be answerable for what readers do with them. (Ask your doctor if the beehive simile is right for you!) Pope’s jab reminds us that of the categories in Tonson’s table, the “Similes” most clearly mark Paradise Lost as an epic: they are, so to speak, an active ingredient. Odes or lyrics have descriptions and dramatic poems have speeches, but epic poems in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism live and die by the simile, and a table drawing readers’ attention to the similes of Paradise Lost invites comparison to Virgil and Homer just as insistently as White’s frontispiece or Hume’s notes. This implicit claim of Tonson’s paratext becomes explicit in the landmark Spectator series, to which we now turn. Joseph Addison’s 1711 essays appraising Paradise Lost “by the Rules of Epic Poetry” were pivotal in earning Milton a mass readership and a singular stature as the English answer to Homer. These weekly papers were bound

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together and reissued throughout the century, leaving their mark on Milton criticism and even English literary criticism in general.10 Generations of critics and readers tended to approach Paradise Lost like Addison. In turn, I want to suggest that Addison approached the poem much like Tonson’s table. It is certainly likely that Addison used Tonson’s edition, which was advertised in the pages of the Spectator, but more interesting for our purposes is how Addison lays out a program for reading, classifying, and evaluating Paradise Lost that echoes the logic of the finding aid. Addison shares the finding aid’s instinct to approach the whole by classifying its parts. Indeed, he provides almost too many rubrics to choose from. The divisions among the essays themselves already separate the poem along narrative (one essay per book), narratological (“Action,” “Actors,” “Sentiments,” and “Language”), and evaluative (“Imperfections” and “Beauties”) lines. Further ad hoc taxonomies spring up within the series, often crosshatched with the headings of Tonson’s table. No. 321, for instance, addresses the fourth book under “three Heads”: first are the “Descriptions,” or “Pictures of Still-Life”; second are “Machines, which comprehend the Speeches and Behaviour of the good and bad Angels”; and finally we have “the Conduct of Adam and Eve,” under which we find passages in their voices and the narrator’s.11 The rhetorical rubric of “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches” peeks out from beneath an overlapping taxonomy of orders of being, two classificatory schemes momentarily thrown together for the duration of an essay. While descriptions and speeches appear cross-cut with other categories of analysis, similes get their star turn in the essay on the first book, No. 303. The first book’s similes become an occasion for general remarks on how similes work throughout the poem, with classical models always in the background. Instead of working through endless examples, he charges the audience to apply his observations for themselves: “If the reader considers the Comparisons in the First Book of Milton, of the Sun in an Eclipse, of the Sleeping Leviathan, of the Bees swarming about their Hive, of the Fairy Dance, in the view wherein I have here placed them, he will easily discover the great Beauties that are in each of those Passages.”12 Addison enjoins us to read or re-read in a way that the table makes possible. A reader without the table would have to skim the entire book for these four moments, particularly since Addison offers neither line numbers nor contexts; but the table allows and even encourages us to quickly jump to these “Beauties”—indeed, all the moments he mentions can

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be found there. If the Spectator papers act as a sort of travel guide to Paradise Lost, Tonson supplies the road atlas. Similes are not just roadside attractions, however: Addison offers a fascinating account of their intimate relationship to the epic as a genre. First, he is particularly insistent about linking Paradise Lost to epic tradition while talking about the similes. The implicit rationale for collecting Milton’s similes becomes more or less explicit: each comparison in the poem becomes a comparison of the poem with its classical forerunners. Further, Addison’s account of how the epic simile works fits nicely with the table’s way of representing them. Like Homer and Virgil, Addison observes, Milton “never quits his Simile till it rises to some very great Idea, which is often foreign to the Occasion that gave Birth to it”: his trademark figures race ahead as if propelled from within, in search of a new ground.13 The table, which lists similes by tenor, vehicle, and the line at which they begin, seems to emphasize and mold around this open-ended structure. From these initial coordinates there’s no telling when, where, or how a figure will finally alight. Soon after Addison defines the epic simile by this internal compulsion to outstrip itself, he further suggests that this is because it already contains something much larger. “In short, if we look into the Conduct of Homer, Virgil, and Milton,” Addison writes, “as the great Fable is the Soul of each Poem, so to give their Works an agreeable Variety, their Episodes are so many short Fables, and their Similes so many short Episodes; to which you may add, if you please, that their Metaphors are so many short Similes.”14 Like the table, Addison describes the epic as a whole by accounting for its parts—and then, one step further, uncovers in each of those parts an echo of the whole. Each figure is a kind of miniature “Episode,” which is in turn a miniature “Fable”: if the “great Fable” is the epic’s “Soul,” then a kind of microcosmic soul appears in each component like a monad, a reference in each part to the form of the whole. The Spectator’s vision of the epic simile in Paradise Lost is more fully articulated—both more explicit in its claims and more intricate in its structure—than anything we might get from Tonson’s table alone. But I want to conclude this section by quickly recapitulating just how closely Addison’s approach tracks with the logic of the table. First, his synoptic view of the poem, alighting quickly on particular sites to illustrate more general claims, models precisely the kind of reading that finding aids make possible and encourages others to follow by revisiting Milton’s “beauties.” Furthermore, the synecdoche of the epic genre and its rhetorical ingredients lies at the crux of

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both the table and these Spectator papers. The double-classification concept of genre that we discerned in the table, in which cataloging the poem’s parts also categorizes the poem as a whole, becomes the springboard for a bold reimagining of epic form: the epic simile as master trope, a miniature impression of the outlines of the whole.

II Lyrical Reading: The Subject Index In the same year that the Spectator series on Paradise Lost appeared, Tonson’s table underwent a major renovation. The three “Heads” of “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches” merged and expanded into one “Index” for the 1711 ninth edition.15 It is worth dwelling a bit on the transition from table to index in order to get a feel for how the index retains parts of the table’s approach to the poem while scrapping or replacing others. The table’s speeches disperse without a fuss, proving easy enough to relocate as daughter entries under the names of the characters speaking. (There are some interesting implications to this reframing, to which we shall return later.) The similes, by contrast, refuse to go quietly. Between the entries for “Sideral Blasts” and “Sin, and Death” comes a mammoth section of “similes” (the heading centered and in small caps), in which all the comparisons from the original table check in—albeit reworded and re-alphabetized, and with significant additions. This half-digested holdover both confirms our hypotheses about the table and marks the shift entailed by the subject index. The “Similes” are the table’s breakout stars, the category that most firmly categorizes the poem’s genre, and breaking them up would defeat the purpose of collecting them in the first place. But that determination to keep all the similes together is what makes the section so awkwardly vestigial in the new format: according to the logic of a subject index, comparisons should clearly be filed under the subject compared. Indeed, “Vide Similes” pops up throughout the subject index to alert readers that the entry they’re looking at also appears as part of a figure—a concession that most readers of the new document would be navigating not by trope, but by topic. Where, then, have the “Descriptions” gone? As it turns out, everywhere. “Descriptions,” as noted above, was always the table’s broadest heading: moments of ekphrastic pause mingle here with narrative events, and even lines that perhaps ought to be classed as speeches (“Declaration of [the] Son”) or similes (“Leviathan”) get relegated to this catch-all category. The

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subject index takes this omnivorous logic to the next level. The heading of “Descriptions” drops out in 1711 because it has become redundant: the whole document inherits and extends the category’s trademark elasticity, turning description from a particular (albeit expansive) kind of language within the poem into a paradigm for what poetic language does. In so doing the subject index secretly undermines the table’s generic agenda. The table, as outlined above, aims to establish Paradise Lost as an epic by taking an inventory of its epic parts. But the subject index, by expanding that inventory’s scope and positing a certain equivalence among those parts, underscores how a finding aid can enlist the print codex to circumvent the epic’s basic ordering principle: the story. The subject index dissolves narrative time into a series of descriptive snapshots, framing each moment—whether in the narrator’s voice or a character’s—as an evocative tableau. In other words, it processes epic into something like lyric. I say “something like” because lyric itself is a notoriously difficult term to pin down, both historically and formally. The work of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins has usefully recast the consolidation of lyric as a process of “lyrical reading”: a shifting set of conventions about what a poem is and what (if anything) it represents that gradually come to shape how readers and critics think about verse in general.16 Here I want to focus on what might be the most definitively lyrical and anti-epic conventions of “lyrical reading,” time and voice: the emphasis on discrete moments rather than plot sequence and the attribution of sentiments to a single, invitingly quotable “lyric I.” The subject index offers a case study in how a finding aid could solicit, support, and make visible these kinds of reading practices, and hence usher the last great epic poem into a lyrical afterlife. The key epic convention that the subject index upends is the progression of diegetic time. In the words of Jonathan Culler, “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now.”17 Lyric tends to take place in a kind of floating instant, its “plot” (if the term even applies) crystallized in feeling or situation rather than a series of events. The telltale lyric predilection for the simple present tense (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”) points to the genre’s often-implicit exemption from ordinary time, “neither past, present, nor future, neither single nor repeated, but of a different dimension entirely.”18 The index jolts narrative sequence into this sort of lyric suspension by framing the poem not as the linear unfolding of an action but as a constellation of moments to visit and revisit. It offers the reader a map of

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landmarks instead of a guided tour, and thus circumvents some significant assumptions about what reading Paradise Lost is like. Classical epic, in keeping with its oral roots, carefully times its narrative sequence through framed tales and foreshadowing—Odysseus recounting his journeys to Alcinous or Aeneas to Dido, or Patroclus’ prophesied death. Milton follows suit and then some: Paradise Lost starts in medias res with Lucifer’s descent to Hell, rewinds to the War in Heaven and the Creation, hurtles towards the Fall like a runaway train, and finally offers a synopsis of antediluvian history and a glimpse of Christ before Adam and Eve head off on their solitary way. That meticulous arrangement seems to assume that the audience will take in the poem from book 1 to book 12 as the crow flies. Accounts of “the reader” in Paradise Lost often rest on such assumptions, at any rate, like Stanley Fish’s landmark Surprised by Sin: Fish’s reader heads into Paradise Lost at the front door and blunders straight on through, an easy mark for hermeneutic temptation followed by shock and remorse once Milton turns the tables.19 No one, however, reads Paradise Lost this way more than once. Indeed, it is hard to think of a single English poem more often read in parts (sometimes before or instead of that quasi-virginal “first time”), and the index shows how non-sequential reading can disarm many of the traps laid for the tunnelvisioned plodder. Positioning an event like the council in Pandemonium a book before its angelic equivalent is far less powerful when readers can see both at a glance—and with Heaven coming before Hell in the index’s alphabetical order to boot. If, as Fish suggests elsewhere, the temptation of Satan is aligned with the temptation of plot, this non-sequential approach perhaps even helps explain the relative lack of “devil’s party” readings before William Blake.20 Keeping the whole design of the poem in hand like a mirrored shield might have prevented Milton’s early readers from falling under Satan’s spell. Instead of Satan’s perspective, the index offers a vantage point almost heretically close to God’s. The whole sweep of sacred history lies at our fingertips, “at once to view” (3.59) and sorted for our use. A quick scan through the index offers the impression of a sweeping panorama from an impossible perspective, a bit like the Archangel-assisted vision of books 11 and 12. Entries for God the Son form a catalogue of prolepsis: “On his proposing the manner, &c. of Man’s redemption,” “His resurrection, as God and Man Decreed”; “The Second Adam,” and finally a succinct “Vide Messiah”—in this last move there’s an almost-too-perfect synthesis of reference terminology and Christian

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eschatology. Framing the Son’s coming triumph as a redemption of Adam’s fall hits the sequential reader like a twist ending, a dramatic reversal; but the synoptic logic of the Index literally instructs us to see it coming. From this perspective, the adumbrations, repetitions, and fulfillments of Paradise Lost no longer appear as traps; instead, they look like types and antitypes, figures that appear with all of their coming permutations already in play. This logic of traps becoming types from a heavenly perspective provides a final twist in the poem’s most famous staging of entrapment: the Leviathan simile, where Milton compares a defeated Satan floating on the lake of fire to the sea-monster from the book of Job. As James Whaler famously pointed out in 1931, the ground of the comparison starts with size but soon extends to “untrustworthiness,” as the narrator imagines a hapless “Night-founder’d Skiff ” taking the creature’s sleeping bulk for solid ground—foreshadowing Eve’s misplaced trust.21 Like Leviathan at the break of an unwittingly “wishèd morn,” Satan is about to stir and literally raise Hell. Fish suggests that in this allegory the pilot is a figure for the reader, lulled into a false sense of security; lulled, in fact, by the simile’s own false premise that Satan and Leviathan are merely comparable and not (as per exegetical tradition) identical, a telling slip that might awaken “the informed reader” just in time.22 These echoes across different diegetic and temporal boundaries—Satan on the lake, Satan deceiving Adam and Eve, Satan tempting the reader—catapult the figure into a kind of lyric suspension: “the simile compresses them, and all deceptions, into a single instant, forever recurring.”23 Under the guise of nailing down its referent, the comparison seems to multiply and complicate reference beyond comprehension: Satan is like the Leviathan, who fools the sailor in the suspended frame of the figure just as Satan will fool humanity in the narrative “future” that is the audience’s collective past, and just as Satan has already fooled that audience in the outer frame of the telling—and all are secretly too closely nestled for that anaphoric “as” to quite fit, because each referent in each of those open frames is already Satan and always has been. For Fish, this simultaneity is “so complex that it defies analysis”; insult to injury, in effect, as the staging of our own hoodwinking gets folded into a pattern that is itself beyond our grasp.24 That collapse is a compelling account of how this moment resonates, and how it approximates a kind of lyric present. With the subject index in hand, however, I think this appears less as a moment of overload than a point at which the poem emulates the index’s own temporal logic. The Leviathan

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figure gathers up these instances of deception under a single head; it doesn’t cancel history per se, but arranges it such that a whole set of references, even of different sorts and in different frames, can be bound together in loose parallel. The index offers a model for straightening out these threads of reference, for imagining the poem’s capacity to point towards different parts of its own narrative and even its own narration in a single lyric instant. It makes the simile’s sudden proleptic and metadiegetic flashes illuminating rather than blinding. The index-reader, vindicated rather than thrown by this tangle of references, is primed to recognize Satan as the ultimate fool of a pattern he can’t understand. Just as the simile ends, the narrator informs us that the archfiend remains on God’s leash, the “high permission of all-ruling Heaven” granted only “That with reiterated crimes he might / Heap on himself damnation” (1.212–15). Satan, unable to see his “reiterated crimes” with God’s or the index’s synoptic eye, is the one too bound up in the sequence of action to realize he has already been had. That final twist reminds us, too, that the Leviathan appears in Job as a figure for theodicy, a terror to humanity but a product and instrument of divine dispensation—and exegetical tradition up to Milton’s time imagined Leviathan as a type for Satan’s defeat by Christ, a giant fish caught on the “hook” of the cross.25 This final turning of the tables lends a new weight to the simile’s beginning fifteen lines earlier. As the comparison finds its footing, the narrator quickly moves from titans “that Warr’d on Jove” to “Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream”: from a polytheistic god’s rebel siblings to monotheistic God’s handcrafted instrument (1.198–202). Its implications drawn out by the caveat to come, that shift in referent anticipates Satan’s providential containment, God’s rival revealed as his creature, minion, and dupe (1.198–202). From a divine perspective, every instance of each thematic series is visible at once: Milton’s God, in other words, reads history like an index. This neutralization of Satan brings us, finally, from lyric time to the lyric speaker—the other key convention of “lyrical reading” that the subject index installs. According to Gérard Genette, the conceit that lyric poetry describes a state of mind was key to its recognition as a genre in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe: neoclassical poetics required some form of mimesis for admission, and lyric was framed as the “imitation … of feelings,” feelings that themselves might be “imitated” insofar as the poet imagines rather than experiences them.26 Lyric becomes the genre that makes private

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sentiments publicly available by presenting them as descriptions of an attitude rather than utterances of an individual, putting them in a voice that readers can make their own because it is neither quite the author’s nor quite a character’s to begin with.27 Lyric poetry comes into its own, in other words, by reimagining speech as implicitly a kind of description—precisely what the subject index does to the rhetorical breakdown of the table. By undoing the table’s categorical separation of “Speeches” from “Descriptions,” the subject index repackages the orations of Paradise Lost’s characters as (to borrow Helen Vendler’s definition of lyric) a script for readers to say—even lines written for Milton’s devils.28 A particularly subtle and striking example of this lyric appropriation appears near the end of the century in 1789. Emancipated Afro-British writer Olaudah Equiano’s autobiographical Interesting Narrative is peppered with lines of verse, ranging from John Denham’s Cowper’s Hill and William Cowper’s The Dying Negro. Equiano’s citations, occasionally mingled with paraphrase in a sort of off-the-cuff sprezzatura, are strategic: he shows off his hard-won erudition as proof of his humanity, the intellect and capacity for refined feeling that slavery and its apologists tried to deny him. Paradise Lost looms particularly large among his references, culminating in a remarkable address to British slaveholders: “Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection? Nor would it be surprising: for when”:       —No peace is given To us enslav’d, but custody severe; And stripes and arbitrary punishment Inflicted—What peace can we return? But to our power, hostility and hate; Untam’d reluctance, and revenge, though slow. Yet ever plotting how the conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice In doing what we most in suffering feel.29 As Eric Song observes, “what Paradise Lost deems ‘devilish counsel’ Equiano uses as evidence for his claim that the maltreatment of slaves can only lead to uprising.”30 He moves from his own words to Beelzebub’s without breaking stride, nor shedding an ounce of his moral earnestness. By citing a speech as a sort of description, Equiano recasts the lines as a lyric sentiment: a

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recognizable and shareable feeling rather than a piece of rhetoric masking an ulterior motive. Indeed, no passage in the poem could better highlight the profound shift that this lyric model of the speaker entails. In the linear, “dramatic” reading of book 2, the overdetermined “speaker” of these lines is proof of their disingenuousness: Beelzebub, we know, is parroting Satan and setting up a tag team, making his demagogic “we” scan as hollow and manipulative. But, in Equiano’s lyrical citation, the fluidity of the first person is an index of sincerity: a lyric sentiment is apt precisely because someone else can stand in the speaker’s shoes, and Equiano’s ventriloquized “we” is all the more effective for its flickering between identification and reportage, as he tries to make his wary readers understand a feeling that he can recognize in Milton because he’d known it himself.

III Keyword Criticism: The Verbal Index For all their differences, the 1695 table and 1711 subject index share some basic structural features. Entries succinctly describe the sites in the poem to which they refer: readers follow an entry that says, “Bridge built over Chaos,” for instance, expecting to find a much longer account of the bridge in the poem itself, and probably not in those exact words. The way these entries are framed would change significantly from table to index, but many of the entries themselves are unchanged from one document to the other. The 1741 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost features an entirely different take on the basic units of the poem and their representation in the finding aid. Instead of tagging the poem’s content section by section, the verbal index lists almost every word that appears in the text; it proclaims itself “as copious as possible, except that such Particles and Prepositions are omitted, as would have only contributed to enlarge the Volume, and consequently increase the Expence.”31 This is no empty boast: the 250-odd-page tome includes interjections like “Ah” and “O” and all but the most common conjunctions and prepositions—“yet” and “above” make the cut—the latter with a daughter entry for the phrase “from above.” In short, the verbal index is less like a modern index and more like a concordance. As it turns out, this strange, specialized document played a key role in making Milton’s language part of the lexicon, and anticipates twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical approaches to the poem as well. The very publication of the verbal index attests to the poem’s enormous influence. Because of the enormous time and expense involved in preparing

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them, the majority of concordances in the hand-press era were compiled for the one book virtually no reader would lack: the Bible. Indeed, the probable creator of the verbal index, Alexander Cruden, was better known for his 1738 Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures.32 There are clear parallels between the verbal index and its biblical cousins. Unlike Tonson’s 1695 table and 1711 subject index, the verbal index was published without an edition of the poem attached (though it would later be included in Newton’s). Consequently, instead of page numbers, it refers to standard divisions of the text: book and line numbers for Paradise Lost perform the same function as chapter and verse in scripture, hence verbal index’s claim to be “adapted to every Edition but the First, which was publish’d in Ten Books only.” Standalone publication and universal compatibility assume that Paradise Lost, like the Bible, had achieved enormous market penetration: the verbal index was designed for legions of readers already equipped with copies in scores of different editions. That kinship between the verbal index and the biblical concordance extends to a shared sense of reverence for language considered inspired. Both the Bible and Paradise Lost could be and often were paraphrased in the eighteenth century, but this particular sort of reference work shows a pious regard for the words themselves—as though paraphrase really were a sort of heresy. The extraordinary labor that must have gone into compiling the verbal index treats Milton’s diction with nigh-theological nicety, attentive to the slightest variation. Verbs and nouns appear with every grammatical inflection they take; there are separate entries for “Advance,” “Advanc’d,” and “Advancing.” Spelling, too, is untouched: “Shew” and “Show” are separate, as are their various conjugated forms. Proper nouns are distinguished from common by capitalization: “LORD” and “Lord,” “SON” and “Son,” and so on in quite a few cases. The index also includes phrases presumably judged to be semantic units unto themselves. Those judgments are on occasion rather opaque: the separation of “Put” from particle forms like “Put forth” makes some semantic and syntactic sense, and perhaps piety forbids filing “Bliss on Bliss” with instances of mere “Bliss,” but the distinction of “Day” from “Selfsame Day” seems almost logically perverse. Nonetheless, even those apparently arbitrary separations and filiations make sense when we move from the work of compiling the verbal index to the work of using it. Readers who could remember only a snatch of verse, perhaps “selfsame day” or “bliss on bliss,” might consult the verbal index to locate the

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full phrase. We might call the verbal index part of a cultural digestive process: it metabolized the sprawling masterpiece into manageable pieces and helped Milton’s verse pass into common circulation, including his new usages and coinages. The verbal index allowed readers to make the poem’s language their own. In fact, the verbal index helped Paradise Lost not only enter the lexicon but define the lexicon through its pivotal role in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Among Johnson’s key innovations was the use of examples to illustrate correct usage and context. When he dramatically expanded these examples for the landmark fourth edition in 1773, he used the verbal index (as reprinted in Newton’s edition, according to Allen Reddick) to quickly track down suitable passages.33 Paradise Lost became the preferred text not just for Miltonic neologisms, but for ordinary everyday words as well, turning a poem often derided for Latinisms, Grecianisms, and Hebraisms into the gold standard for proper English. Johnson’s reference work represents a subtle sort of commentary on the poem as well. To take Allen Reddick’s example, the illustrations from the poem in the fourth edition’s entry for “sad” are sequenced in a kind of narrative arc, moving from Adam’s reluctant bite of the apple through the lamentations of Heaven, the effects of original sin on the natural world, and Eve’s suicidal despair when she thinks of the curse laid on any children she might have.34 By presenting him with every instance at once, the verbal index allows Johnson to trace the story, or a story, of Paradise Lost in the variations on a single word. The verbal index thus leads Johnson into the sort of close attention to Milton’s diction that would rock Paradise Lost criticism like a depth charge some two hundred years later. When Christopher Ricks took on T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis with Milton’s Grand Style in 1963, he invoked eighteenth-century editors like Richard Bentley, Zachary Pearce, the Jonathan Richardsons, and Thomas Newton as proof that the battle over Milton’s language was older than most remembered.35 He might well have added Johnson and Cruden. As we saw with Johnson’s variations on “sad,” the verbal index is the ideal tool for tracking Milton’s words across the poem, precisely the kind of “cross-reference” that Ricks put back in the Miltonist repertoire.36 In what follows I want briefly to sketch out how the verbal index dovetails with some contemporary versions of critical cross-reference, and how it can point the way to further insights about the poem.

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The simple work of tallying where and how often certain words appear in the poem can help make patterns of language visible, and there is no better case study than the language of visibility itself. David Quint’s reading of book 3 starts with the observation that “light” appears at the very beginning and the very end, as well as at multiple points in between: the narrator invokes “holy Light” in line 1, and Milton tweaks his syntax in the last line to make “lights,” as a verb, the book’s final word.37 The verbal index backs up his point, confirming that “light” and its variants appears more in book 3 than in any other book in the poem—followed closely, it turns out, by book 7, where Raphael relates the story of Creation. Most of the “light” in the latter book shows up in two major clusters, centered around God’s “Let there be Light” on the first day (7.243–60) and the creation of the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day (7.349–86), which turn out to closely echo each other: the fourth day’s work begins, as if in self-parody, with “Let there be Lights,” and appoints those lights “to divide / The Day from Night” (7.339–41), oddly repeating his own work three days earlier when he had “light from darkness by the Hemisphere / Divided: Light the Day, and Darkness Night / He named” (7.250–52). The originary doublings of light with darkness, day with night, and each thing by its appointed name—creation as division, with “divide” and “divides” flanking the line break each time—wind up doubled again by the formula’s near-repetition three days and ninety lines later, retraced like a silhouette. The verbal index can illuminate the wide and intricate patterns that often escape the naked eye: it enables close reading at a distance. The distance spanned by a keyword can be those ninety lines, or the length of the poem—or even across Milton’s oeuvre, as Annabel Patterson has suggested.38 The attention that such a method pays to Milton’s diction is well placed; with it we can see how a word picks up sedimentary layers of connection and connotation, resonates and gathers force. To take one example, the word “snare” first appears at 4.8, where the narrator wishes that a prophet like John the Revelator could have alerted Adam and Eve to “the coming of their secret foe” that they might have “scap’d his mortal snare” (4.7–8). The word does not return until book 10, when Adam blames Eve for his fall: he wishes that her outward shape might warn the creatures of the world of her inner vice, “lest that too heav’nly form, pretended / To hellish falsehood, snare them” (10.872–73) and foretells further “Disturbances on earth through female snares / And strait conjunction with this sex” (10.897–98). Eve then echoes Milton’s phrasing from the divorce tracts, lamenting to Adam that

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she “for thee ordained / A help, became thy snare” (11.164–65). We might compare the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’s “hypothetical” husband, “trained by a deceitful bait into a snare of misery.”39 Finally, “snare” gets its star turn in Paradise Regained, packed five times into four books: here Satan prepares “well-woven snares” for the Son, only to see him name and hence disarm each in turn before tempting the tempter himself into a fatal fall— the Leviathan finally caught on the hook, his “snares” now “broke” (Paradise Regained 1.97; 4.611). Placing these occurrences side by side helps us see that each is already operating at multiple levels, figurative and literal, in different historical moments and even scales of time and place. Satan’s first attack on humankind is paired with his last, and Eve’s temptation of Adam foreshadows marital strife up to and including Milton’s own. Milton’s words run through his works like threads, picking up traction and consequence as they interweave with new contexts and concepts—and if we tug at any moment, we pull on each site where that thread reappears and each strand to which it connects. The verbal index allows us to better trace the fabric.

IV Conclusion: The Index and Its Peers The table, the subject index, and the verbal index make possible different readings of Paradise Lost, from noting hallmarks of epic to collecting lyric moments and tracking keywords, that chime in intriguing ways with eighteenth-century and contemporary critical approaches. They also provide a new context for other techniques and technologies of eighteenth-century reading. We can recognize an index-like and perhaps index-assisted approach, for instance, in what James Boswell called Johnson’s “peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end”: skipping and skimming are by no means new to the smartphone generation.40 Readers without Johnson’s inimitable talent could get their Milton from miscellanies, which regularly included snippets of Paradise Lost from at least 1717 on.41 Perhaps prepared with index in hand, these selections took the “lyric reading” enabled by the subject index one step further and effectively saved readers the trouble of collecting passages themselves. The miscellany hence both extends the logic of the index and potentially replaces it. A similarly ambivalent relationship, by turns complementary and substitutive, holds between indexes and commonplace books, the notebooks in

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which readers would record quotations and scraps of thought for study, reference, and inspiration.42 On the one hand, indexes could serve as scaffolds for commonplacing by allowing readers to find or re-find choice passages, in effect priming the text for collection. On the other, the commonplace book could be understood as a personalized supplement to or replacement for the index: John Locke touts the merits of his “New Method of Making a Common Place Book” in cases “when the Book has no Index, or when the Index is not exact.”43 His “Method,” which involves organizing quotations via alphabetized keywords and even recording authors, titles, and page number instead of transcribing longer selections, produces something like a handwritten master-index, a mammoth finding aid fitted to its owner’s mind like a prosthetic memory. Milton’s own commonplace book takes this one step further, becoming a sort of meta-index: the surviving volume is divided into an “Index Ethicus,” an “Oeconomicus,” and “Politicus,” each further separated into subtopics according to a table at the back (e.g., “De Poeticâ,” “Matrimonium,” “Libertas.”44) Thinking about the commonplace book and the index as mirror images of each other reinforces that the former is already a technique not just for recording but for managing information, and the latter is already guiding what readers will take away. These reference works helped eighteenth-century readers manage the sensory and informational overload that is reading Paradise Lost. These documents gave eighteenth-century readers a solution or alternative to the poem’s relentless, immersive narrative pace. They both reflect and helped shape which aspects of Paradise Lost were most salient to eighteenth-century readers: what they valued, what they discovered, and what they revisited; what they were looking for and what they might have found. When we take seriously the material tools and traces of reading practices as forms of critical engagement, we can deepen our understanding of what our own methods are looking for and finding as well.

c ha p te r eleve n

Political Diplomacy, Personal Conviction, and the Fraught Nature of Milton’s Letters of State Edward Jones I Can the authorship of documents created and approved by government committees be attributed to the individual assigned to translate them into the official language of diplomacy? This question is but one of many that hover around John Milton’s letters of state, but it more than likely accounts for William Riley Parker’s uncharacteristically dismissive statements about not just Milton’s government position as Secretary for Foreign Languages during the Interregnum (“Milton was little more than a translator and interpreter for monolingual bosses”1) but the value of assigning such work to him on the mere chance that he may have translated it (“If one set about seriously collecting on this basis, it should not be difficult to double or treble the now accepted number of letters! And to what end?”2) Given Parker’s prominence in the field of Milton studies at the time, his dim view of this part of Milton’s canon reassured those convinced that critical neglect should continue. However, long before Parker, others, for different reasons, were convinced the letters should never appear in print and made efforts to make sure it did not happen. In the early 1670s, when Milton’s Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, History of Britain, Tetrachordon, Artis logicae, and a second edition of the 1645 Poems were published for the first time or republished, the author’s attempt to see an edition of his public and private letters through the press failed. Only after he replaced his letters of state with his Latin prolusions

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did his Epistolarum Familiarium appear six months before his death in 1674.3 Also thwarted was Daniel Skinner, who having been given two manuscripts from Milton—one comprised of a collection of state papers and a second the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana—tried to have both published by the Dutch printer Daniel Elzevir, most likely selected because his Catalogus Librorum for 1674 announced that Milton’s three Defences and a second edition of the 1645 Poems were forthcoming.4 But others remained steadfast that the state papers would not be part of any revival of interest in Milton. Correspondence over a five-month period from 31 October 1676 through 6/16 March 1677 involving Elzevir, the English Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson, and the Plenipotentiary for the Secretary of State at Nimeguen, Sir Leonline Jenkins, makes clear that the English officials convinced the publisher to return both manuscripts to Williamson who subsequently filed them away in a cupboard in the State Paper Office where they would not be discovered until 1823.5 An excerpt from Jenkins’s letter to Williamson of 6 November 1676 captures a view of Milton’s diplomatic letters that would persist throughout the eighteenth century: I have obeyd yor Orders relating to M. Skiñer … and of the Busines in his Hands.… I was just sending you those unhappy Letters of Milton: but had heard nothg of what you are pleasd to say of a new Edition of those High Treasons, I will rather call them then works.6 If the question of authorship dismayed Parker, the political implications of the letters compelled Williamson and Jenkins to prevent others from reading them, a goal not unlike what Milton apologists in the years to come would successfully accomplish by focusing upon the gratifying accomplishments of his epic poetry and not commenting upon his controversial prose.7 Such views plague the history of Milton’s letters of state and account in no small part for why they remain among the least read, consulted, or understood of all of his writing. Of the three groups with the most interest in considering them—literary critics, archival scholars, and textual editors—the first has largely avoided these texts. Reading the state papers as reflections of Milton’s political views undoubtedly has appeal, and in providing the best historical account of Milton’s secretaryship, Robert Fallon admitted as much although such a line of thinking is not allowed to impede his narrative. From the outset of his

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book, Fallon contends that such readings prove hard to sustain when authorship matters surface: political views expressed in a letter of state that has been created by individuals subjected to committee oversight and revision are hard to assign to one person involved in the process.8 Possibilities still remain, of course, but mitigating factors stand in the way. As Leo Miller has persuasively shown, the Interregnum government that Milton served before, during, and after Cromwell considered the English text of a letter of state the official document.9 Since Milton’s job involved the preparation of a Latin version of the official English original, problems of attribution increase rather than go away because someone other than Milton composed the document from which he fashioned his. Critics encountering such matters have understandably decided to leave them be. More promising, but also not without problems, has been the work of editors and scholars, whose combined efforts have clarified the essential procedures individuals and committees followed during the Interregnum to create letters of state. However, in important studies of Milton’s state papers, John T. Shawcross, Miller, and Fallon depart from the traditional practice of assigning authorship to Milton for all letters for which a draft or copy has been found in his files.10 All three attribute authorship to Milton for various types of documents—letters to heads of state (the most numerous and prominent), letters of credential for English diplomats (the seventeenth-century equivalent of a passport), and international treaties—and all three justify their choices on the basis of evidence found in the historical records of the government (the Order Books of the Council of State), the archival environments in which the letters of state have been located (the State Papers Foreign and Domestic), and in the texts of the letters themselves. In his two Milton bibliographies, Shawcross provides a comprehensive list of state papers associated with Milton and their locations: some definitively verified, others awaiting verification, and still others that have proven to be false leads. In establishing Milton’s involvement with international affairs across the European continent, he encourages others to continue his efforts, validate possibilities, correct mistakes of the past, and remain open to new discoveries, his position on attribution being generous rather than inflexible.11 In contrast, Miller’s attention appears more narrow, local, and particular. He provides the most extensive accounts of the intertextual relationships between the English and Latin texts of state letters associated with Milton. His study of the German diplomat Hermann Mylius’s diary and texts created in the

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process of securing an agreement between the English government and the Count of Oldenburg remains the most enlightening account of not just how diplomacy was carried out during the Interregnum but Milton’s day-to-day participation in it as Latin secretary. Miller’s emphasis upon Milton’s specific use of Latin serves as his foundation for the assignment of authorship.12 Occupying a middle ground between Shawcross’s broad view and Miller’s sharply focused one, Fallon exploits whatever he can to draw pragmatic conclusions about Milton’s authorship of state documents. He cites the Council of State’s Order Books when pertinent information appears in them (better for Milton’s early years of service than later when during the Protectorate he works for Secretary of State Thurloe rather than the Council). Most importantly, he provides the first full accounting of the state letters associated with Milton in the State Papers Foreign, and, finally, he honors Miller’s readings of individual Latin texts as evidence of Milton’s authorship without fully accepting all attributions.13 These three scholars have set the table for future inquiry into Milton’s state papers in one other way: they have located drafts and copies of various state papers to add to a steadily increasing number discovered since the last attempt at an authoritative edition was published by Yale University Press in 1971. The value of their scholarship, made possible in part by the work done earlier in the twentieth century by J. Milton French and Maurice Kelley, has proved complementary to the most recent efforts of Gordon Campbell (who has compiled a chronology with corrected dates of composition for the entire collection of extant letters),14 of Nicholas von Maltzahn (who has extended Milton’s government service into the summer of 1659 on the basis of an order dated 17 June concerning credential documents involving Sweden and a letter to be sent to Milton for translation),15 and of Stefano Villani (who has increased the number and enlarged the context for understanding Milton’s letters to Tuscany by examining seven new letters discovered in the State Archive in Florence).16 The future benefit of all of this work will be the edition of the state papers currently being prepared for the Oxford University Press Complete Works (OCW). Even though the minefield upon which Milton’s state papers rests will never disappear, the large body of source materials now available will inform the OCW edition and allow scholars to follow the progress of each letter from inception to completion. Supporting evidence in each case will vary, and gaps in the historical record for each letter will remain, but the edition will revisit

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the authorship issue by providing for the first time an analysis of the intertextual relationships among the two manuscript and three published collections of Milton’s letters of state. These include (1) the Columbia Manuscript, a hastily created collection of 156 letters replete with Latin abbreviations dated between 20 October 1659 and May 1660 that will be transcribed for the first time; (2) the Skinner manuscript, presumably given to Daniel Skinner by Milton, which consists of 139 letters transcribed in the 1670s before Milton’s death in 1674; (3) the published texts of the 136 letters appearing in the 1676 Literae Pseudo-Senatus Anglicani assumed to be derived from Milton’s files to which Edward Phillips and Daniel Skinner had access through their work as scribes for Milton at different times; (4) the collection of 49 letters of state published as part of Gregori Leti’s Historia, a two-volume biography of Oliver Cromwell published in 1692, the source for these letters being a manuscript possibly given by Milton to the Earl of Anglesey but removed by the licenser Roger L’Estrange before the library was sold after the Earl’s death in 1686; and (5) a collection of 115 letters dispersed throughout the three-volume Literae Procerum Europae by Johann Christian Lünig, which was published in 1712. The variations and omissions regarding dates, headings, and similar details found in both the manuscript and published collections indicate that each was created independently from the others. To the concerns with authorship, Milton’s specific role in the creation of state documents, and his particular use of Latin, the trio of stumbling blocks that awaits any who wish to negotiate the slippery slope upon which this part of Milton’s canon rests, this essay will now turn for purposes of illustration. How to assign the authorship of a letter of state to Milton requires keeping not just the letter in view but his association with it through the creation process. Since he did not have the final say in establishing either the English or the Latin text, attention must be accorded to those who did and what voice, if any Milton had in the process. The diplomatic mission of Hermann Mylius in 1651–52 on behalf of the Count of Oldenburg, a mission in which Milton was centrally involved, provides details like no other event in Milton’s life as a government employee and so can serve such an objective well. To underscore the challenges of authorship and also point to the difficulty of contending that Milton’s political views get articulated in documents he writes for the government he serves, a look at one letter in a series written in response to the Piedmont Massacre in 1655 can satisfy those wishing to concede him both authorship and political conviction and those reluctant to confer either.

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II Who is responsible for the final texts of the state papers and can that responsible party be declared the author? To those studying Milton’s letters of state in the twenty-first century such questions never go away because of what is now known about how those documents were composed and the ever-shifting number of possible parties involved. In the past, others thought differently because of an incomplete or mistaken notion of the composition process. Moreover, evidence supporting the view that the authorship of the state papers had been long ago settled was based upon the conduct of those most likely to know: above all Milton himself, but also Edward Phillips and Daniel Skinner, the two amanuenses known to have had access to the Latin Secretary’s papers. As noted earlier, Milton’s effort in the 1670s to have his public letters published with his private ones met with no success, but the message sent to those who wished to read them could not have been any clearer—the letters were his and he apparently wanted them to be published as such before the end of his life. The posthumous publication efforts by Skinner in 1676 (unsuccessful) and Phillips in 1694 (successful) gave no reason for anyone to suspect the letters were anyone’s but Milton’s. Neither, in fact, ever brought the matter up. However, for scholars to understand how the letters were created, and then realize how that process raised questions about authorship, did not happen for a long time. In the three centuries following their first appearance in 1676, Milton’s state papers were perceived as documents in Latin written by a dutiful government employee who afterward became famous. If commentators offer anything beyond this essential information, it is in relation to the high quality of the Latin, a matter that is assumed rather than displayed by means of close textual analysis. By the time David Masson published his multivolume life and times of Milton in the second half of the nineteenth century, the facade that successfully kept out of view a miscellaneous collection of drafts, copies, and official versions of state documents in English and Latin now widely scattered across England and the European continent remained in place. The distance between the initial possession of these documents by Milton and those who acquire them later (friends, acquaintances, and government officials) was permitted to increase and allow for their suppression, censorship, and, in some cases, permanent disappearance. In the second decade of the twentieth century, efforts to produce the Columbia edition of Milton’s entire body of writing prompted those scholars

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responsible for producing definitive texts of them to ask a question rarely posed in the past: in what way should authorship be defined for works whose final wording had to be approved by government committees, such as the Council of State and the Parliament? To answer this question scholars such as Thomas O. Mabbott, J. Milton French, and Maurice Kelley began investigating the procedures followed by the Interregnum government to create them. In the course of pursuing this matter, they began locating additional papers in foreign and English archives, but their efforts were hampered by their lack of access to original documents in the aftermath of two world wars. While it would take another sixty years before a full accounting of the creation process was made possible by Leo Miller’s discovery, transcription, and translation of the diary of Herman Mylius in the 1980s, the Columbia editors at least changed the issues and questions that those with an interest in this part of Milton’s canon had to consider.

III The day-by-day experiences recorded into the diary of Hermann Mylius concerning his eight-month diplomatic mission to England in 1651and 1652 on behalf of the Count of Oldenburg provide some long overdue answers. They alert scholars to new ways of understanding and analyzing Milton’s state papers because the foundation of Miller’s study consists of original manuscripts. The diary’s narrative revolves around Mylius’s meetings with various individuals, including Milton, who serve in the Commonwealth government; others whom he has known from past trips to England on behalf of his Count; and most tellingly the exchanges of letters he has with all of them. While Mylius’s ostensible purpose appeared simple enough—to secure a position of neutrality for the principality of Oldenburg and renew a prior agreement between England and the German Duchy regarding the collection of tolls involving the Weser and Ems rivers—his ability to achieve that goal turned out to be otherwise. For more than eight months Mylius encountered delay after delay from the Commonwealth’s Council of State that first refused to meet with him because of inappropriately worded credential documents and later rejected phrasing in the settled upon Safeguard deemed of the utmost importance to the Count. As Leo Miller observes, Mylius “finds that to the new self-made men in power he is a bother and an irrelevance.”17 Undaunted, Mylius presses on asking anyone

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who will listen to plead his case with those in power. The extensive record of Mylius’s correspondence transcribed by Miller reveals a man not just skilled as a diplomat, but one sufficiently learned to write letters in German, French, English, and Latin as circumstances warranted. The significance of this long overlooked embassy in 1651 to an English Commonwealth a little more than two years in power derives from the original manuscripts that detail the glacier-like movements of a government intent upon establishing its identity on the European continent. In the midst of accounts providing intrigue and gossip, encounters take place between Mylius the diplomat and Milton the Latin Secretary that indicate the steps each takes in the creation and preparation of a state paper for official approval. For the first time, extant documentary evidence verifies that Milton has been given Latin drafts of Mylius’s Salvaguardia which the diplomat wants back so that he can see Milton’s reactions to them and submit new ones for more criticism: Praevio amplexu matutino, memor hesterni promissi, amanuensem ad impetrandum meae expeditionis proiecta mitto, lecta remittam, et censurae vestrae denuo submittam, veluti me. [Mindful of yesterday’s promise during our morning meeting, I send my amanuensis to get the drafts of my document. Having read them, I shall send them back and again submit them to your criticism, even as [I submit] myself to your distinction, without pretence or petulance.]18 While the diary provides corroborating evidence for Milton’s change of residence in December 1651 and his deteriorating eyesight,19 by far the most valuable material uncovered from the Oldenburg archives consists of preliminary drafts, revised copies, and authoritative copies. Examining these individually and sometimes together reveals a fluid composition process, one that prevents an individual participant such as Milton to have unquestioned control over the state documents he composes. Insofar as the discovery of how the state papers were created provides scholars an entryway to understanding this part of Milton’s canon and in the process correcting years of misconception, the potential impact of the Mylius papers can be nothing short of far-reaching.

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Indeed, Miller seems to hint as much when he identifies as the key document in the Mylius files the one state paper long associated with him, the Recreditif (Parlamentum Reipub. Angliae plurimam salute [Columbia 39]): [I]t was a typical example of Milton’s usual contribution to the composition of the Latin text of the state papers. Its evolution was quite simple, easy to reconstruct, and so in this paper we have a full record, really illuminating the process, such as is not found elsewhere among Milton’s state letters.… It is therefore the most important document among the Mylius papers, the most useful for defining Milton’s exact role in his eleven years as secretary.20 Milton constructs this Latin text from the English original that survives in the Tanner manuscripts (55, fol. 137). The English text can be attributed to Gualter Frost on the basis of extant manuscripts in his hand, and Milton’s text exists in the Columbia and Skinner manuscripts and in the 1676 published Literae. A comparison of all three reveals that some of Milton’s Latin’s phrases and words that exist in the drafts of the two manuscripts in Milton’s possession do not appear in the 1676 texts, those reflecting the final copy approved by the Council of State and Parliament.21 Milton’s government superiors, Fleming and Frost, according to Miller, were responsible for the changes. This valuable information provided about the state papers’ composition process and the vast documentation created by the diplomatic mission of a small German duchy resists a uniform assignment of the language found in Milton’s state papers to him. Instead it appears more prudent to understand Milton’s state papers as the products of a shared or composite notion of authorship. He had a part, but not the only part in creating them.

IV If we turn briefly to the second topic informing this discussion—whether Milton’s state papers reflect his political convictions—the letter to Gustavus Adophus regarding the Piedmont Massacre, Pervenisse Nuper, can profitably address possibilities and pitfalls that can ensue from pursuing such a line of thought. As suggested earlier, each of Milton’s state papers creates its own history as it moves through the composition process. Assumptions and preconceived notions of what a state paper addressing a massacre should say

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need to be put aside; focus should squarely be upon what has been said. In contrast to the eight months it took for the Mylius documents to be approved by the Council of State and Parliament, it took less than a month from the time of the outbreak of hostilities toward the Waldensians for seven letters, all dated 25 May 1655, to be approved by the Protectorate, signed, and sent abroad. Not just Pervenisse Nuper but three other letters deplore the massacre to Protestant rulers; a fifth letter addressed to the Duke of Savoy formally protested the massacre; and the sixth and seventh were sent to Cardinal Mazarin and the French king asking for intervention to stop the persecution. What prevented Mylius from departing from London—the Council of State’s infighting about Oldenburg’s previous associations with Scotland and Charles I—has been replaced by a unified position of opposition. The persecution of fellow Protestants required an immediate, implicitly hostile response, even a call to action by the Lord Protector. But is that what is found in Milton’s state letter? Three drafts of Milton’s Latin texts survive, and all three are virtually the same except for one change. The word Protestantes has been added to the 1676 Literae text to underscore the unity of efforts among all Protestants against their enemies. That it does not appear in either the Columbia or Skinner Manuscripts supports Miller’s view that the published Latin texts found in foreign archives are less likely to be Miltonic while the manuscript collections prove to be more Miltonic because less changed.22 Here appears a simple instance of Milton believing his references to Protestants already sufficiently clear and therefore rendering unnecessary an inclination to repeat a proper noun in a single sentence. The Yale editors, however, deem these three versions “semifinal,” and produce one translation of it as well as another of what they believe is the final Latin version located in SP 96 /6, fols. 212–213. Its text resembles that found in Morland’s History.23 This later version of Pervenisse Nuper adds a full paragraph justifying why the letter has been written, what actions have been taken already concerning the Duke of Savoy, and how unified Christians can be nothing but horrified by this event. A diplomatic letter, of course, is not a poem. The purposes of each may rarely if ever coincide. And so one is not surprised to find differences distinguishing one from the other. Since scholars still lack any kind of evidence that Milton ever created the official English text of a state paper for which he then produced a Latin translation, the assumption must stand that someone else created the base text from which Milton worked. From the outset the

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Latin letter settles upon a formula that includes diction associated with aggression (“exterminari” and “adversariorum”) and disgust (“aberrant” and “odium”), but offset by a carefully finessed tone of restraint. Language found in Milton’s Sonnet 18 in contrast holds little back in describing the plight of the Waldensians; its images are graphic, its invocation powerful; its call for vengeance loud, insistent. The diplomatic letter conveys a controlled intensity as it provides a report of the massacre; it urges consent through an assumption of shared beliefs and an opposition to unjustified violence to others. Such sentiments make better sense in unsolicited letters that wish to bring fellow protestant leaders together to oppose an action taken by the Duke of Savoy but not to initiate anything more than its disapproval. The state paper laments the deplorable state of affairs in the aftermath of atrocious actions, but it first and last seeks unity. The spirit of Milton’s sonnet might very well capture what Cromwell privately believes, but his government document must not strike a note of unrestraint that might be misconstrued by his recipients. The notion of Milton’s political convictions appearing in the state letters is a more precarious assumption, though it can be instructive in a safer way. A comparison of Sonnet 18 to the English drafts of the state letters Milton translates into Latin regarding the Piedmont massacre could uncover the extent to which that original language bears upon what Milton uses for his sonnet. While scholars have compared Milton’s poem with accounts of the massacre reported in English newsbooks that were made available to Samuel Morland (who would deliver a speech to the Duke of Savoy), such efforts need to be expanded to include reports of the event recorded in Italian newsbooks.24 These might prove equally if not more enlightening for Milton’s poem if they turn out to be the source materials he consulted. The likelihood of Milton drawing from multiple sources sounds plausible. It was after all Milton who was described by his predecessor Georg Weckherlin to Mylius as “a sound man, learned in Latin and Greek, and especially Italian.”25 In the end, both examples indicate that there is some good news to share: Milton’s state papers, with proper caution and care, might be taken off life support. There are over two hundred of them that have remained, because of fraught circumstances, in a state of neglect. It is time for such matters to change.

Notes Notes to pages

Introduction Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 50. 2 Samuel Johnson, “Life of Milton,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:183. 3 William Hazlitt, Lectures on English Poets, Lecture 3, in Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ed., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, Ohio: The Press of Case Western University, 1970), 381. 4 See Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 41 and Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36. 5 Throughout the introduction, Milton’s Seventh Prolusion is quoted from The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38) (cited as CM followed by volume and page numbers). 6 Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 65. For more recent assessments of humanist politics, see Anthony Grafton, “Humanism and Political Theory,” in J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9–29 and James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” in Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 118–41. 7 This paragraph and the rest of the survey of the idea of scholarship in Milton’s prose works draw upon Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and

241

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Notes to pages 4–19

Education (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10–90. Milton’s prose, unless otherwise noted, is cited from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers). 8 For more on this context, see Timothy Raylor, “Milton, the Hartlib Circle, and the Education of the Aristocracy,” in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 382–406. For a richly suggestive account of the period between the Cambridge years and the published prose, see William Poole, “‘The Armes of Studious Retirement’? Milton’s Scholarship, 1632–1641,” in Edward Jones, ed., Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21–47. 9 Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 5:511–12. 10 Vincent Blasi, “Milton’s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment” (1995). Occasional Papers 6. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylsop_papers/6. 11 See especially Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–70 and William Kolbrenner, “‘Plainly Partial’: The Liberal Areopagitica,” ELH 60 (1993): 57–78. 12 The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 6, Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, ed. N. H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 459. Chapter 1: High Enterprise: Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts  Sharon Achinstein 1 2 3

4

See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Harris F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956–61) and Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St Paul’s School (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). Timothy Raylor, “New Light on Milton and Hartlib,” Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 19–31; Richard D. Rocher, Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001); Ann Baynes Coiro, “‘To repair the ruins of our first parents’: Of Education and the Fallen Adam,” SEL 28.1 (1988): 133–47; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia,” in Diana Trevino Benet and Michael Lieb, eds., Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 202–19. William Riley Parker, “On Milton’s Early Literary Program,” Modern Philology 33.1 (1935): 49–53; Ernest R. Sirluck, “Milton’s Critical Use of Historical Sources: An Illustration,” Modern Philology 50.4 (1953): 226–31; Jackson C. Boswell, Milton’s Library: A Catalogue of the Remains of John Milton’s Library and an Annotated Reconstruction of Milton’s Library and Ancillary

Notes to pages 19–20

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Readings (New York: Garland, 1925); Harris Fletcher, “Milton’s Private Library—An Additional Title,” Philological Quarterly 28 (1949): 72–76. 5 John Hale, Milton’s Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6 Kathleen Ellen Hartwell, Lactantius and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929); Constance Nichols, “The Edition of the Early Church Historians Used by Milton,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 160–62; George Butler, “Tertullian’s Pandora and John Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Christianity and Literature 52.3 (2003): 325–42; Harry F. Robins, If This Be Heresy: A Study of Milton and Origen (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1963); C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 7 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Use of the Bible in Milton’s Prose (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929); Harris Francis Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1930); Harris Francis Fletcher, Milton’s Semitic Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1926); Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Douglas Trevor, “Milton and Solomonic Education,” in Douglas Brooks, ed., Milton and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 83–104; Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1999); Leonard Mendelsohn, “Milton and the Rabbis: A Later Inquiry,” Studies in English Literature 18.1 (1978): 125–35; Frank Mattern, Milton and Christian Hebraism: Rabbinic Exegesis in Paradise Lost (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009). 8 Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947); R. B. Levinson, “Milton and Plato,” Modern Language Notes 46.2 (1931): 85–91; Herbert Agar, Milton and Plato (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1928). 9 Martin Dzelzainis, “Author’s ‘Not Unknown’ in Milton’s Tetrachordon,” Notes and Queries 45.1 (1998): 44–47; William Poole, “The Armes of Studious Retirement? Milton’s Scholarship, 1632–1641,” in Edward Jones, ed., Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 21–47. 10 See, importantly, Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Angelica Duran, “The Last Stages of Education: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Milton Quarterly 34.4 (2000): 103–17. 11 Cited in Mordechai Feingold, “The Humanities,” in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 211–357 (at 265). 12 See Maurice Kelley and Samuel D. Atkins, “Milton’s Annotations of Euripides,” JEGP 60.4 (1961): 680–87 and John Hale, “Milton’s Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies,” Milton Studies 27 (1991): 23–35.

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13 Feingold, “The Humanities,” 265, 266. 14 Nicholas Hardy, “The Septuagint and the Transformation of Biblical Scholarship in England, from the King James Bible (1611) to the London Polyglot (1657),” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1520–1700, eds., Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 117–30. The distinction, according to Hardy, is whether or not they engaged in the philological and textual work of the scholar—the concern with manuscript transmission and deterioration and canonical authority of various versions. See also Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene, eds., Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 15 Joanna Weinberg and Martin Goodman, “The Reception of Josephus in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of the International Classical Tradition 23.3 (2016): 167–71 (at 170). 16 See the important study by Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) on the relationship between Milton’s commonplace book writings and ideas expressed through publication. 17 See Ruben Sánchez, Jr., Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose (London: Associated University Presses, 1997) and James Egan, “Rhetoric, Polemic, Aesthetic: The Dialectic of Genres in Tetrachordon and Colasterion,” Milton Studies 41 (2002): 97–118. 18 The best of this work, in addition to that of Fulton, Historical Milton, is by Jeffrey Alan Miller, “Milton, Zanchius, and the Rhetoric of Belated Reading,” Milton Quarterly 47.4 (2013): 199–219; Martin Dzelzainis, “Author’s ‘Not Unknown’ in Milton’s Tetrachordon”; Jeffrey Alan Miller, “Milton and the Conformable Puritanism of Richard Stock and Thomas Young,” in Edward Jones, ed., Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72–103; William Poole, “‘The Armes of Studious Retirement’? Milton’s Scholarship 1632–1641,” in Jones, Young Milton, 33–35. 19 Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), leading northern European humanist and biblical commentator. 20 Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 5, The Divorce Tracts, ed. Sharon Achinstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 21 Nigel Smith, “The Uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution,” in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 51–71 and Hardy, “The Septuagint,” on Patrick Young, who worked on a new edition of the Septuagint and whose unfinished notes towards it were published posthumously in the London Polyglot Bible (1657). Hardy’s argument is that the study and translation of the Bible were increasingly becoming a more technical and specialized subject between 1611 (King James Bible) and the Polyglot Bible of 1657. 22 See Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1.

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23 Bentley, Humanists, 8. 24 Valla, On the Donation of Constantine. See also John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90. 25 See also Thomas Fulton, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” in Ann Coiro and Thomas Fulton, eds., Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 87–112. 26 The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 8, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. John Hale and J. Donald Cullington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 27 See Neil Forsyth, “Milton’s Corrupt Bible,” in Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700, 212. 28 Leviathan, ch. 33; cited in Forsyth, Companion, 211. 29 See Phillip J. Donnolly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 169 for what he calls “ontic charity,” reading charitably that is a gift or good for others, though not explicitly dealing with charity in divorce tracts. For reading with “charity,” see Theodore L. Huguelet, “The Rule of Charity in Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” Milton Studies 6 (1974): 199–214 and Jason A. Kerr’s important essay, “De Doctrina and Milton’s Theology of Liberation,” Studies in Philology 111.2 (Spring 2014): 346–74. 30 There are other ways to approach hermeneutics, following on from the reason-versus-faith epistemological arguments as in Stanley Fish’s analysis of Reason of Church Government, in his Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 265–302 and in his How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Gale H.  Carrithers and James D. Hardy, Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994) and see Dayton Haskin’s powerful argument on reading “experientially” in his Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). There is relevance to the questions of Christian and Hebraic interpretation, as explored in Jason Rosenblatt’s masterful Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton ­University Press, 1994) as models of reading, Pauline and otherwise. 31 See Regina Schwartz, “Milton on the Bible,” in Thomas Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 37–54 (at 42). 32 Martin Bucer (1491–1551), leader of the Swiss reformed churches, who was appointed Professor of Theology at Cambridge in 1549, where he died shortly after. 33 James B. Potts, Jr., “Milton and Augustine: The Rule of ‘Charity,’” in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 16 (1990): 101–11. Also Shigeo Suzuki, “Marriage and Divorce,” in Stephen B. Dobranski, ed., Milton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 382–93. 34 See Steven Fallon’s brilliant essay, “The Spur of Self-Concernment: Milton in his Divorce Tracts,” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 220–42.

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Notes to pages 28–35

35 For a comparable story that carefully tracks Milton’s changing attitude towards sola scriptura, see Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 58–76. See also James H. Sims, “Milton and the Bible,” in William B. Hunter, et al., The Milton Encyclopedia and Barbara Lewalski, “Milton, the Bible, and Human Experience,” Topoi 7 (1988): 221–29. 36 See Haskin, Burden, 69. 37 On the matter of “some uncleannesse”: this issue is not in the first edition of the work (1643). Milton glosses Deut. 24:1 and he returns to this interpretative question in Tetrachordon. 38 For example, in his 1643 divorce tract, he notes where he is relying upon Grotius’s interpretations and where he departs (YP 2:330). 39 In 1 Cor. 7:12. It may be helpful to review the various versions and translations Milton had to hand. The Greek word συνευδοκει means, “join in approving, give one’s consent”; rendered by Beza, Novum Testamentum … Annotationes (1598), 2:130, as “quae libens consentiat ad habitandum cum eo”; the Vulgate has “consentit habitare”; the King James Bible: “she be pleased to dwell with him”; Geneva: “if she be content to dwell with him.” Milton may well be using the 1598 edition of Beza’s annotations to the (Beza translated) New Testament, an edition which also includes the Greek and Vulgate versions. 1 Cor. 7:12: (King James Bible): “If any brother hath a wife that beleeueth not, and shee bee pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away”; and compare Geneva: “if she be content to dwell with him.” Another similar issue is over the interpretation of the word “uncleanness.” 40 I owe this point to Martin Dzelzainis whom I thank for heading me in this direction; and see Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law, trans. B. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) for an appreciation of Roman Law as it influenced the development of Hugo Grotius’s natural law thinking. 41 See Nigel Smith, “The Uses of Hebrew.” On increased access to the Bible, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). 42 Mark Vessey, “The Tongue and the Book: Eramsus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament and the Arts of Scripture,” in Hilmar Pabel and Mark Vessey, eds., Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 29–58 (at 51 n9). 43 See Erasmus’ remarks on the genre in ASD 5:2. 44 Tribonianus was putative author of the Justinian Institutes (535), a collection of Roman civil laws. In his divorce writings, Milton tends to rely here and later on the Calvinist commentators on civil law, those proponents of the mos Gallicus, whose humanist methods sought to systematize Roman civil law for

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modern purpose. On Milton’s reading of Justinian, see Martin Dzelzainis, “‘In These Western Parts of the Empire’: Milton and Roman Law,” in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), 57–68. 45 Gerardi Tuningii … in Quatuor Libros Institutionem Juris Civilis (Leiden, 1618), Bk I, title ix, “De Nuptis,” at p. 63. 46 The Pandects were a digest of Roman legal opinions, including those of the jurist Herennius Modestinus (fl. 222–44), which became part of the Justinian Code. Tuningus noted Modestinus added to the definition of marriage, “divini & humanis juris communicato.” Gerardi Tuningii … in Quatuor Libros Institutionem Juris Civilis, Bk I, title ix, “De Nuptis,” at p. 64. 47 On Eph. 5, see Beza, In Sacra Quatuor Evangelica, Enarrationes Perpetuae (Geneva, 1553). 48 See Corpus Iuris Civilis, ed. P. Krueger, T. Mommsen, and R. Schoell, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1954). On Milton’s reading of Justinian, see Dzelzainis, in Parry and Raymond, Milton and the Terms of Liberty. 49 On Arnisaeus, see Martin van Gelderen, “The State and its Rivals in EarlyModern Europe,” in Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath, eds., States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 89 and Martin Van Gelderen, “Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and Republica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650,” in Quentin Skinner and Martin Van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: A Shared Heritage, vol. 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 195–218 (at 209–11). 50 D.  Nicolai Hemmingij… opuscula theologica, ed. S.  Goulart (Geneva, 1586), col. 951: “coniugium est divinitus ordinata, unius maris & unius foeminae, legitime consentientium, in unam carnem, mutui adiutorii causa­ coniu[n]ctio.” 51 See J. B. Bamborough, “Burton and Hemingius,” Review of English Studies 34.136 (1983): 441–45. 52 Johann Gerhard, Locorum Theologicorum cum pro adstruenda veritate … Tomus septimus (Jena, 1620). 53 See Carrie Euler, “Practical Piety: Bullinger’s Marriage Theology as a Skillful Blending of Theory and Praxis,” in Emidio Campri and Peter Opitz, eds., Heinrich Bullinger: Life–Thought–Influence, vol. 2 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2007), 661–70. 54 Nicholas Thompson, “Martin Bucer and Early Seventeenth-Century Scottish Irenicism,” in Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson, eds., The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 167–91. 55 Thompson, in Ha and Collinson, Reception, 173 and George Gillespie, A Dispute against the English-Popish Ceremonies (Leiden, 1637), 4, 20. In his

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1645 Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty (1645), written against the sects, Gillespie cites Bucer; see, e.g., 5, 17. 56 See Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning; Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russel & Russell, 1961) and, more recently (though without Calvin), Emma Annette Wilson, in Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Steven J. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002). Though important revisionism to the Ramist–Calvinist connection is given by Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 108 ff., where Hotson discusses Ramism’s “religious neutrality” (108); Ramism was controversial among Calvinists and Lutherans. 57 See Richard Strier’s brilliant “Milton against Humility,” in The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 248–83, connecting Milton’s defense of human dignity to his theology and hermeneutics. 58 Haskin, Burden, 71–74 discusses the differences between the interpretative principles in these two different title pages. 59 See Huguelet, “The Rule” and Haskin, Burden, 71–74. Scholars disagree over the balance between rationalist and other methods of interpretation proffered by the “rule of charity”; see Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 71–74 and Kenneth R. Kirby, “Milton’s Biblical Hermeneutics in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Milton Quarterly 18.4 (1984), 116–25. 60 On Milton’s use of authorities, see Thomas Roebuck, “Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism,” in Jones, Young Milton, 48–71. Chapter 2: Typology and Milton’s Masterplot Sam Hushagen 1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2007), 1:1–6. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition with commentary cited in the text as “Fowler.” 2 The transferability of the divine spirit is a theme from Numbers, where the Lord “took some of the spirit that was upon him [Moses] and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied” (Num. 11:25). 3 Milton is preceded in calling upon a Judeo-Christian “sanctifying spirit,” set over and against the “falsehoods” of the muses of pagan poetry by Juvencus, in Evangeliorum Libri Quattor. With Jeremiah for his type in his proem Juvencus calls on the river Jordan to “flood my mind with its pure stream, so that I may utter things worth of Christ” (1:26–27). Roger H. Green, Latin

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Epics of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17 writes that Juvencus’ proem elevating the Judeo-Christian muse over the pagan muses is unprecedented among late-antiquity Christian poets including Ausonius and Prudentius. 4 Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 39. 5 Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2006), 104 points out that Milton’s pedagogic poetry privileges “discursive figuration” over “mystical vision.” 6 Charles Singleton, “In Exitu Israel de Aegypto,” in John Freccero, ed., Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 102–21. 7 On the intricate unity of Paradise Lost, see Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 303–39 and 370–409; David Quint, Inside Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 63–92 and 122–52; and Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 121–62. 8 On the balanced structure of Paradise Lost, see James Whaler, Counterpoint and Symbol: An Inquiry into the Rhythm of Milton’s Epic Style (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1956); John T. Shawcross, “The Balanced Structure of Paradise Lost,” Studies in Philology 62 (1965): 696–718; Galbraith Miller Crump, The Mystical Design of Paradise Lost (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), 68–148; Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 63–93. 9 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 1. Quint continues: “The generic expectations of Renaissance epic that looked back to the model of the Aeneid required Paradise Lost to maintain over its vast length not only loftiness of the high style but the semantic density and unity of a lyric” (1). For a demonstration of what Quint describes as the balance of loftiness and density, see his reading of book 3 (93–121). In a canonical series of essays, James Whaler reads Miltonic simile as densely lyrical mini-narratives that participate in and reinforce the epic architecture, in “The Miltonic Simile,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 46.4 (1931): 1034–74 and “Grammatical Nexus of Miltonic Simile,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 30.3 (1931): 327–34. On the density of lyric, see Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 33–38. 10 The argument for the circular structure of the epic, both at the micro level of repeated semantic patterns and at the macro level of cosmic and mythic circularity, is made by Isabel Macaffrey in Paradise Lost as “Myth” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 46–47; Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 152; Northrop Frye writes that the “total action is cyclical in shape” (Return of Eden, 43).

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11 Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, 303–40. On providential circularity as the basis for Milton’s recursive design, see Raymond Waddington, Looking into Providence: Designs and Trials in Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 11–41. 12 So, for instance, Jackson Cope calls it “metaphorical” (The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962]), while Catherine Gimelli Martin refers to Milton’s “ruined allegories,” and Quint, borrowing from Roland Barthes, describes Milton’s “writerly” poem, its “verbal arrangements and thought structures that bind together—in widening configurations—episodes … some assembly required” (2). 13 The anti-trinitarian views of De Doctrina Christiana impute creation and thus linearity to the son, as Samuel Fallon has recently argued. More radically, the evolutionary monism of Paradise Lost extends linearity to divine substance itself. See Samuel Fallon, “Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost,” ELH 79 (2012): 35. 14 God appears as fire in Gen. 15:17; Ex. 19:18; Ps. 104:3–4; Ezek. 1:27. For instances of the holy fire in the exegetical tradition, see Origen Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. Fathers of the Church; v. 71. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 140; Augustine, “The Trinity,” in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 45 (New York: Cima Publishing Company, 1947), 105–6 and 81; and Bede, Homilies on the Gospels, ed. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 2:172. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, ed. R. Payne Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), for instance, in a commentary on Exodus, writes: “For the God of all came down in the likeness of fire on Mount Sinai, and there was a cloud, and darkness, and gloom” (272). 15 “The voice of God they heard / Now walking in the garden, by soft winds / Brought to their ears” (10.97–99). 16 William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 181–92. Kerrigan writes, “Someone partaking of the ‘cheerful ways of men’ would obviously feel less urgency about justifying the ways of God” (182). 17 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) describes this process as “morphological homeostasis, where the slightest variation in any part of an organism is accommodated by variations in all other parts” (152). Thomas Kuhn, “Metaphor in Science,” The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) has referred to a similar process of lexical rearrangement in the sciences: “Words do not, with occasional exceptions, have meaning individually, but only through their associations with other words within a semantic field. If the use of an individual term changes, then the use of the terms associated with it normally

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changes as well” (64). Any addition of a new example or new use of an existing term alters the network of relations between all the terms in the semantic field. 18 Philo (in De Vita Moses, in Philo, vol. 6, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1929), 1.5–7) makes Moses the originator of writing, a Jewish Hermes. Eupolemus picks up on the theme and writes that Moses invents written language, “from whence the Phoenicians learned it, and later the Greeks from the Phoenicians” (431 C). 19 The literature on seventeenth-century typological symbolism is rich. Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) looks exclusively at shorter poems and so the narrative function of typology does not figure into her argument; William G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968) examines the metaphysical implications of typological associations in Paradise Lost (1965); Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) argues that Milton’s typology, and Restoration typology generally, remains allegorical in that the type only becomes significant by reference to the transcendent narrative of divine providence; Catherine Gimelli Martin has persuasively argued that Milton’s monistic metaphysics cast the vertical axis of allegory onto the horizontal, historical plane creating what she calls “ruined allegories.” On typological symbols in other seventeenth century poets, see John D. Walker, “The Architectonics of George Herbert’s The Temple,” ELH 29.3 (1962): 289–305; Valerie Carnes, “The Unity of George Herbert’s The Temple: A Reconsideration,” ELH 35.4 (1968): 505–26; and Paul Dyck, “Locating the Word: The Textual Church and George Herbert’s Temple,” in Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, eds., Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 224. 20 Pauline typology follows Gal. 4:21–31. While Paul uses the language of “allegory,” his emphasis is on the historical narrative of Hagar and Sarah as a prefiguration of subordination to the law as opposed to free, spiritual assent to Christ. 21 Madsen, From Shadowy Types, 113–23; Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 71; Elizabeth Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 65. 22 See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Tertullian “expressly denied that the literal and historical validity of the Old Testament was diminished by figural interpretation. He was expressly hostile to spiritualism and refused to consider the Old Testament as mere allegory; according to him it had real literal meaning throughout, and even where

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there was figural prophecy, the figure had just as much historical reality as what it prophesied” (30). Similarly, Augustine “emphatically rejected the purely allegorical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and rejected the view that the Old Testament was a kind of hermetic book that became intelligible only if one discarded the literal historical meaning and the vulgar interpretation” (39). For an example of allegorical interpretation, see Origen, On First Principles, ed. Paul Koetschau and G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966): “We believe that the prophets were speaking about this heavenly country by means of mystical narratives whenever they uttered prophecies concerning Judaea or Jerusalem, or whenever they declare that this or that kind of invasion had happened to Judaea of Jerusalem” (401). 23 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3 and 30. My view of Miltonic typology diverges from Luxon’s account that the teleological drive of traditional typology makes it only nominally distinct from allegory (Literal Figures, 34–76). 24 Auerbach, “Figura,” 15. He continues: “Since in the learned Greek terminology—in grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, astronomy—schema was widely used in the sense of outward shape, figura was always used for this purpose too. Thus, side by side with the original plastic signification and overshadowing it, there appeared a far more general concept of grammatical, rhetorical, logical, mathematical—and later even of musical and choreographic– form.” 25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 359–60. 26 Macaffery cites Johnson on Milton’s poetics of “retrospection and anticipation” to describe the epic’s pattern. My view departs from the perspective that Paradise Lost conforms to the epic convention of venture and return argued by Macaffery, Paradise Lost as “Myth”; Ferry, Epic Voice, 164; Frye, Return of Eden; John T. Shawcross, “The Balanced Structure of Paradise Lost,” Studies in Philology 62 (1965): 696–718; and Galbraith M. Crump, The Mystical Design of Paradise Lost (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975). On the circularity of the epic nostos, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 35–36. The view that the structure of the epic is circular has come under criticism by Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance, 65, who questions Milton’s utopianism; Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 24 and Teskey, Poetry of John Milton, 317. 27 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 2. Quint’s claim echoes Martin’s point, in Ruins of Allegory, that “Paradise Lost demands the constant forward and ‘back scanning’ that has caused Walter Ong to identify it as the first fully ‘literate’ epic, that is, the first to depart from the concrete hierarchies characteristic of the oral life world” (26). 28 For a view of Paradise Lost as challenging closure while still conforming to conventions of epic containment, see Barbara Hernstein Smith, Poetic

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Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 78–95. Sanford Budick, “Milton and the Scene of Interpretation: From Typology toward Midrash,” in Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Literature and Midrash (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 195 argues that the openness of Milton’s typology exceeds itself and its principles of infinite extension are Midrashic. 29 For a recent example of formalism without containment, see Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 11–23. 30 Milton’s view of history is progressive. Unlike Crump, Mystical, who argues that “In its circularity Paradise Lost represents the teleological promise of eternal good in a world seemingly held in the destructive grip of time” (25), I view Miltonic typology as teleonomic rather than teleological (exhibiting purposiveness but without a predetermined end). For the progressive view of Miltonic history, see Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 81–120; Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance, 65; and Teskey, Poetry of John Milton, 303–39. On Milton’s antiapocalyptic eschatology, see William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 137. 31 Milton referred to him as “Erroneous Origen,” but there are similarities between Milton’s heresies (like materialism) and Origen’s. See Harry F. Robins, If This Be Heresy: A Study of Milton and Origen, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 51 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). Origen, in defiance of millenarianism, writes: “For if the heavens shall be ‘changed,’ certainly that which is ‘changed’ does not perish; and if ‘the form of this world passes away,’ it is not by any means an annihilation or destruction of the material substance that is indicated, but the occurrence of a certain change of quality and an alteration of the outward form” (74–75). 32 Milton’s Prose Works, vols. 3–4, ed. Charles Sumner (London: Bell and Sons, 1911), XXXIII, 488. 33 On the anagogic teleology of Christian epic poetry, see Frye, Return of Eden, 203. 34 On teleonomy, a term from twentieth-century biology, see Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 14. 35 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 29–30. 36 See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 111–146. The literature on the structural integrity of Paradise Lost is as rich as that on its symbolic typology. However, little work has attempted to bring them together. Crump, Mystical, 25–68 follows John Shawcross and Ferry in seeing the basic structure of Paradise Lost as chiastic and circular. From an analysis of structures of repetition and restatement (for instance, antimetabole), he reasons that the structural pattern of the epic is circular, concluding where it begins, with intimations of a post-Apocalyptic heavenly kingdom. Waddington, Looking into Providence,

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102–27 argues for the circularity of providential teleology in Paradise Lost, moving from unity, to disunity, to apocalyptic atonement (renewed unity). 37 On Milton’s insistence on the usefulness of error, see Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 133. Ferry, Epic Voice, 67 points to the central role played by contrast in Milton’s symbolic system. 38 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 87. 39 “All opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest.” Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers), 2:513. 40 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 63–92 contrasts Phaeton, Icarus, Satan, Adam, and Eve to Abdiel, the Son, and Milton himself in a comparison of unsuccessful and successful fliers. 41 Frye, Return of Eden, 42 describes the discussion in terms of an originary and un-ironic Socractic dialogue. 42 Festa, The End of Learning, 104. 43 Sarah Ellenzweig, “Paradise Lost and the Secret of Lucretian Sufficiency,” MLQ 75.3 (2014): 385–409. 44 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–12. 45 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 63 indicates how Paradise Lost coordinates Satan’s fall as a figure for Adam and Eve’s fall, who are the figures for chronologically later iconic falls in the classical tradition, those of Icarus and Phaethon: “They thus provide analogues to the fallen offspring of Milton’s epic, Satan and Adam and Eve, as well as contrasting foils to its good sons, the son of God and Milton, the poet himself.” 46 On the ambiguities that plague Raphael’s discourse as a consequence of the infelicities of accommodation, see Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 105. 47 Frye, Return of Eden, 42; Festa, The End of Learning, 126. 48 Madsen, From Shadowy Types, 87–112. 49 Milton’s monism is a much-treated subject, but the intersection of his metaphysics with his view of history is examined at length in Martin’s Ruins of Allegory, especially 81–120. 50 Stephen Hequembourg explores the relationship of Raphael’s discourse to Milton’s monistic metaphysics as it pivots on the double-edged word, “sapience”: “Monism and Metaphor in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 139–67. Adam and Raphael’s exchange figures prominently in virtually every discussion of Milton’s monism since Coleridge introduced it as his principal example of “esemplastic” imagination in Biographia Literaria.

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See Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 79–111; John Rumrich “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,” PMLA 110.5 (1995): 1035–46; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 103–43. 51 In Of Education, Milton writes: “Our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching” (YP 2:322). 52 On Milton’s Baconianism and his “Baconian critique” of the “diseases of learning,” see Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Rewriting the Revolution: Milton, Bacon, and the Royal Society of Rhetoricians,” in Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, eds., Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 97–125. On intermediate axioms, see Francis Bacon, New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56–58 (Aphorism LXIX–LXX). 53 Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 79–111; P.J. Donnelly, “Matter versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism,” Milton Quarterly, 33.3 (1999): 79–85; Hequembourg, “Monism and Metaphor,” 139–67. 54 Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1936), 115. 55 Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 82. 56 Festa, The End of Learning, 119. 57 For example, in The Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce, Milton suggests that bad reading depraves a text. 58 Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 69. Martin argues later that “the various degrees of matter at work in its root, branch, and flower are harmonized by their common potential either to be ‘Improv’d by tract of time,’ to be ‘deprav’d’ or degraded from good (5:470–97), or to be recuperatively recombined in the ‘pregnant causes mixt’ (2:913) of Chaos” (98). 59 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 63. 60 On “family resemblance,” Teskey writes, “There is no common term present in every member but a more complex continuum of overlapping traits, joining elements that, if considered apart from the system, would have nothing in common” (Violence and Allegory, 41). Each of the scenes of instruction is singular and historically particular in Milton’s epic, but they are linked into a sequence by overlapping figures. Teskey associates this looser (when compared to allegory) network of correspondences with Milton’s Sin and Death. 61 Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile,” 1036. 62 For James Sims, The Bible in Milton’s Epics (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962), 219–37, the simile is the “Miltonic figure” most important to the

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unified thematic structure of the epic because they consolidate the providential narrative. 63 Budick, “Milton and the Scene of Interpretation,” 205. 64 Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance, 128. 65 See Empson, Milton’s God, 138–46. 66 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 192. On “succession” and the relationship between Kant’s aesthetics and his ethics, see John Rawls, “Some Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three Critiques and the Opus Postumum, ed. Eckhart Forster (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 81–113. 67 For an extended analysis of the Miltonic origins of Kantian “aesthetic ideas” and Kant’s view of succession versus imitation, see Sanford Budick, Kant and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), especially 253–300. On Milton’s insistence on discursive knowledge over revelation, see Festa, The End of Learning, 124. 68 As contrasted to Dante’s view—expressed in the “Letter to Can Grande”— that biblical figures (his example is the flight of the Israelites from Egypt in Exodus) read prophetically point to the reabsorption of the soul at the end of history: “the exit of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory” (from Convivio, bk. 2, ch. 1; see Singleton, “In Exitu Israel de Aegypto”; Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, in Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 20 and 112–48; Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 119: “When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes not the container but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs in nature but are the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way.” Where Frye idealizes man out of history, Milton submerges him into it. 69 Teskey’s distinction between transcendence and transcendental is Kantian: “Transcendence and transcendental both take us out of history and out of this world; but transcendence is always turned away from this world and history, while the transcendental is turned towards this world and towards history” (The Poetry of John Milton, 8). 70 Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 68; Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, 2. 71 Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 113. 72 Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance, 128; Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, 14, 3, and 7.

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Chapter 3: The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost  James Ross Macdonald I am grateful for comments from Stephanie Batkie, William Engel, Thomas Festa, John Gatta, Elyse Graham, Paul Holloway, Pamela Royston Macfie, Kelly Malone, Christopher McDonough, and David Quint as this essay developed through many drafts. 1 Avitus, The Fall of Man: De spiritalis historiae gestis, Libri I–III, ed. Daniel J. Nodes (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), 2.412–21. All passages from the poem’s Latin text are quoted from this edition. 2 The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, trans. George W. Shea (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 89. All English prose translations from De spiritalis historiae gestis are quoted from this edition. 3 In a textual annotation, however, Merritt Hughes suggests that this passage may be the source of Satan’s apostrophe to evil: “at least / Divided Empire with Heav’n’s King I hold / By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign” (4.110–12). See John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), 280. 4 Margaret Olofson Thickstun, Milton’s Paradise Lost: Moral Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 5 Thomas Kranidas, “Milton on Teachers and Teaching,” Milton Quarterly 20.1 (1986): 26. 6 J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 134. 7 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 5. 8 Watson Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature, with Translations of the Major Analogues (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 506. Daniel Nodes surveys all these passages as well as other conjectured connections in his introduction to The Fall of Man, 7–10. 9 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 1.106–8. All subsequent passages from Paradise Lost are quoted from this edition. 10 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.95–96; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 82. 11 Thomas Festa draws attention to a passage in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis that presents Eve as the devil’s pupil, suggesting another potential vector for this image. See The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2006), 148. Milton may also have developed the idea from 1 Enoch 7–8, where fallen angels teach human beings a variety of crafts, including enchantment, the making of weaponry, cosmetology, and astrology. For discussion of this possible source, see Grant McColley, “The Book of Enoch and Paradise Lost,” Harvard Theological Review 31 (1938): 21–39 as well as Arnold Williams, “Milton and the Book of Enoch—An Alternative ­ Hypothesis,” Harvard ­Theological Review 33 (1940): 291–99. 12 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.133–37; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 75.

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13 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.172, 180–87; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 76–77. 14 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.324–25; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 79. 15 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.310–14; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 79. 16 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.2; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 80. 17 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.322–23; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 79. 18 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.181–82; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 84. 19 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.162–65; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 83. 20 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.17–19; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 80. 21 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.183–84; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 84. 22 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.194–203; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 84. 23 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.210–11; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 84. 24 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.42–43; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 73. 25 Daniel J. Nodes, Doctrine and Exegesis in Biblical Latin Poetry (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1993), 127. 26 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 3.177–81; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 94. 27 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.39–41; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 80. 28 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 1.314–15; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 79. 29 A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 136. 30 Geoffrey Hartman, “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum,” ELH 36.1 (1969): 174. 31 Ronald W. Cooley, “Reformed Eloquence: Inability, Questioning, and Correction in Paradise Lost,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62.2 (1992–93): 239–40. 32 Emma Annette Wilson, “The Art of Reasoning Well: Ramist Logic at Work in Paradise Lost,” Review of English Studies 61.248 (2010): 67. 33 Kathleen M. Swaim, Before and After the Fall: Contrasting Modes in Paradise Lost (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 19. 34 Swaim, Before and After the Fall, 4. 35 Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia,” in Diana Treviño Benet and Michael Lieb, eds., Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 217. 36 Jeffrey D. Gore, “Obedience in Of Education and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 46 (2007): 21. 37 Neil D. Graves, “Pedagogy or Gerontagogy: The Education of the Miltonic Deity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50.4 (2008): 371. 38 Michael Allen, “Divine Instruction: Of Education and the Pedagogy of Raphael, Michael, and the Father,” Milton Quarterly 26.4 (1992): 118. For Allen, the Father is the poem’s exemplary educator, combining the eloquence and forceful persuasion that appear separately in Raphael’s and Michael’s lessons.

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39 Anna K. Nardo argues that Milton’s angels participate not only as educators but also as students themselves, edified by God directly at heavenly councils and by the reflection of the divine image in unfallen earthly life. See “The Education of Milton’s Good Angels,” in Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham, eds., Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1997), 193–211. 40 Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21. Her italics. 41 John Rogers, “Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 130. 42 Cooley, “Reformed Eloquence,” 247. 43 Lee A. Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension: Aspects of Knowledge in Paradise Lost (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 160. 44 Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, 280. 45 Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension, 162. 46 Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension, 162. 47 Stephen J. Schuler, “Sanctification in Milton’s Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 43.1 (2009): 49. 48 Festa, End of Learning, 148. 49 Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 180. 50 For this argument, see Lewalski, “Milton and the Hartlib Circle,” 203–4 as well as Julian Koslow, “‘Not a bow for every man to shoot’: Milton’s Of Education, between Hartlib and Humanism,” Milton Studies 47 (2008): 24–53. Jeffrey Gore critiques Lewalski’s argument in “Obedience,” 9–10. 51 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers), 2:364. Milton’s italics. 52 YP 2:393–94. Milton’s italics. The bracketed punctuation is supplied by the editor. 53 YP 2:515. 54 YP 2:561. 55 Festa, End of Learning, 5. 56 Schuler, “Santification in Milton’s Academy,” 53. 57 Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension, 148. 58 Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension, 144. 59 Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension, 147. 60 YP 8:144–45. 61 YP 8:391. Milton’s italics. For discussion of the significance of italic type within this text, see Walter J. Ong’s introduction, YP 8:185. 62 YP 8:391–92. 63 YP 8:395. Milton’s italics.

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64 William G. Riggs, “Poetry and Method in Milton’s Of Education,” Studies in Philology 89.4 (1992): 455. 65 Swaim, Before and After the Fall, 127. 66 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.261–70; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 86. 67 Ann Baynes Coiro, “‘To Repair the Ruins of Our First Parents’: Of Education and Fallen Adam,” SEL 28.1 (1988): 139. 68 Coiro, “To Repair the Ruins,” 142. 69 Riggs, “Poetry and Method,” 450. 70 Kranidas, “Milton on Teachers,” 28. 71 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.277–83; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 86. 72 Avitus, The Fall of Man, 2.56–58; Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 81. 73 Festa, End of Learning, 148. 74 Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 254. Chapter 4: “The First and Wisest of Them All”: Paradise Regained and the Beginning of Thinking J. Antonio Templanza John Milton, “Paradise Regain’d, A Poem,” in The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 2, The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4:221–24 (hereafter cited by book and line number). 2 Elizabeth Marie Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 67. 3 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1966), 295. 4 Richard J. DuRocher, “Hermes’s Blessed Retreat: Rival Views of Learning in Paradise Regained,” in Richard J. DuRocher and Margaret Olofson Thickstun, eds., Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason Is But Choosing” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 228, 231. 5 Thomas Festa, “The Temptation of Athens and the Variorum Paradise Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76.1 (2013): 16. 6 Frank Kermode, “Milton’s Hero,” Review of English Studies 4.16 (1953): 328. 7 William G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 85. 8 Cf.: A philosophy whose ultimate principle was the Good was committed as deeply as Christianity to the supreme reality of the moral and religious life. To neither could the ultimate opposition be between knowledge and faith. To both the fundamental antithesis was between merely natural knowledge or the unenlightened conscience and the higher light into which the soul might rise by the Grace of God. Platonism might indeed be called the intellectual side of Christianity. Wherever, from 1

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the author of the Fourth Gospel to St. Augustine, from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, and from Aquinas to Dean Inge, the spirit of Christian theology has been really alive, it has tended to fall back upon Platonism. John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1992), 26. 9 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007). 10 The poem’s refusal to identify Jesus’ crucifixion as the singular act of obedience follows from Milton’s heterodox theological understanding of the Son as a created being. This understanding constitutes the center of his theology and politics. The claim that only the crucifixion satisfies divine justice implies that the Son’s nature, not his actions, forms the basis of redemption. It denies the exemplariness of those actions and renders us passive spectators of our history. Human history thus devolves into a theatrical spectacle where a God-asdirector is the only free (and morally culpable) being in existence. Cf. Gregory Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125.2 (2010): 354–69. 11 Cf.: Moral goodness may be defined as goodness that one ought to choose regardless of one’s natural inclination. But for an unfallen creature, everything that is natural to do is also moral to do. That is why humanity has the naturally opaque commandment about the otherwise desirable fruit and why Raphael goes to earth to explain that, yes, Adam and Eve could choose to eat it. As various Milton scholars have observed, God’s announcement in book 5 is the angelic equivalent of the forbidden fruit. It provides the angels with a similar opportunity to distinguish moral from natural good. John Rumrich, “Of Chaos and Nightingales,” in Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham, eds., Living Texts: Interpreting Milton (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 223. 12 Ryan Netzley highlights the Son’s re-reading of Hebrew scripture as the source of his innovative thinking, and argues that Jesus cares more about the “internal disposition” that emerges from the act of reading than about any information that is contained in such texts: “reading is not primarily valuable for the interpretations and knowledge that it enables, but rather for the habits that it produces.” Ryan Netzley, “How Reading Works: Hermeneutics and Reading Practice in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 49 (2009): 149. 13 Michael Fixler, “The Unclean Meats of the Mosaic Law and the Banquet Scene in Paradise Regained,” Modern Language Notes 70.8 (1955): 575. 14 John Rogers argues that both the Son and Satan of Paradise Regained have forgotten their own personal histories from Paradise Lost—specifically, that the Jesus of the second epic is in fact the selfsame Son who drove the rebel

262

Notes to pages 89–97

angels out of Heaven in the first: “forgotten, that is, in the kenotically amnesiac Son’s case, and repressed, perhaps, in Satan’s.” John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost,” in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 606. 15 Robert B. Pierce, “Reading Paradise Regained Ethically,” Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006): 218. 16 John Milton, “Of Education,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 631. 17 John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 739. 18 I believe Milton’s condemnation of blind faith in Areopagitica is sincere, though he uses the word “heresy” to articulate that condemnation. Later in his life, Milton would reappropriate the concept of “heresy” into the very center of his model of rational belief, but in 1644 the word still has an unequivocally negative connotation. Cf. Janet Mueller, “Milton on Heresy,” in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38. 19 Steven Goldsmith, “The Muting of Satan: Language and Redemption in Paradise Regained,” Studies in English Literature 27.1 (1987): 129. 20 Goldsmith, “The Muting of Satan.” 21 Pierce, “Reading Paradise Regained Ethically,” 218. 22 Kermode, “Milton’s Hero,” 328. 23 John C. Ulreich, “‘Substantially Express’d’: Milton’s Doctrine of the Incarnation,” Milton Studies 39 (2000): 115–16. 24 DuRocher, “Hermes’s Blessed Retreat,” 237. 25 Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice,” 367. 26 Milton, “Of Education,” 631. 27 Netzley, “How Reading Works,” 163. 28 Netzley, “How Reading Works,” 157. 29 Arnold Sidney Stein, Heroic Knowledge: An Interpretation of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), 95. 30 Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 281–82. 31 Patricia R. Taylor, “The Son as Collaborator in Paradise Regained,” Studies in English Literature 51.1 (2011): 194. 32 DuRocher, “Hermes’s Blessed Retreat,” 228. 33 Merritt Y. Hughes, “Introduction to Paradise Regained,” in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 471. 34 Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955), 226. 35 James Nohrnberg, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man: Milton’s Wisdom Epic as a ‘Fable of Identity,’” in Eleanor Cook, et al., eds., Centre and Labyrinth:

Notes to pages 97–109

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Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 104. 36 David Quint, “The Disenchanted World of Paradise Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76.1 (2013): 192. 37 Cf.: “Love of self is the temptation underlying all others in a universe where true agency belongs only to deity, and the only act available to creatures is the (self-diminishing) act of acknowledging dependence on another.” Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 307. 38 Cf.: So, although Jesus is in a unique sense the Son of God, the Messiah, he also embodies Milton’s hope to be a deliverer of his people, and beyond that, a savior for humankind. We might say that Milton is charting the trajectory of his own career as he describes the Son learning (as he does not in the New Testament account) to reject all those he finds undeserving of liberty, to redefine deliverance as something spiritual, and to put off millenarian dreams of a terrestrial redemption until such a time (if ever) when it might be God’s will that they be realized. Achsah Guibbory, “Rethinking Millenarianism, Messianism, and Deliverance in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 48 (2008): 141. 39 Netzley, “How Reading Works,” 151. 40 Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167. 41 William Kerrigan, “Milton’s Place in Intellectual History,” in Dennis Danielson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 258. Chapter 5: Learning, Love, and the Freedom of the Double Bind Gardner Campbell William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), viii. 2 “He pronounced the letter R very hard [Litera canina. A certain sign of a satirical wit. From Jo. Dryden]” (brackets are Aubrey’s). John Aubrey, Collections for the Life of Milton, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 1023. 3 All quotations from Milton’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007). 4 Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 291. 5 See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, with a new Foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),

1

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9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

Notes to pages 109–14 vii–xix and Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, ed. Rodney E. Donaldson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), ix–xix. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 206. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 222. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 1104. I have silently corrected the evident misprinting (duplicated words) in the edition I am working from. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 222–23. Bateson works out a theory of four levels of learning, a theory aligned with Russell’s “logical types,” in “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 279–308. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 202–6. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 208–9. Bateson, “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 252. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 226–27. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 206–7. Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 207. This, of course, is Stanley Fish’s primary argument in Surprised by Sin. What Fish does not consider or account for, however, is the possibility of a double bind eliciting anything other than a kind of irrationalism, an enforced and single-minded piety. There are no higher levels of learning available in Fish’s argument, at least so far as I can detect it. I believe this absence or denial of boundary-crossing into higher levels of learning is at the heart of William Kerrigan’s complaint that Fish’s argument makes mythopoesis generally, and symbols specifically, repetitive and not generative. See Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, 98–99. “What is required if [Paradise Lost] is to be read correctly, that is, not read at all … is that you resist story, not just the story of God-as-cause or the story of the Fall-as-fortunate, but any story, any movement outward from a focus that would only be obscured by any elaboration of it.” Fish, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Surprised by Sin, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), xlix–l. Bateson, “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 280–82.

Notes to pages 114–21

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19 Bateson, “Logical Categories,” 283. 20 Bateson, “Logical Categories,” 286. 21 Bateson, “Logical Categories,” 301. 22 Milton, An Apology … for Smectymnuus, in Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, 850. 23 Bateson, “Logical Categories,” 301. 24 Bateson, “Logical Categories,” 303–5. Here, as elsewhere in this chapter, I cannot do justice to the extent and ramifications of Bateson’s argument. Instead, I merely suggest aspects of his argument that seem to me to illuminate aspects of Paradise Lost most helpfully. 25 Bateson, “Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 170. 26 Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 193. 27 Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 177–93. 28 Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 2000), 361. 29 For the note on the “contemptuous pun,” see Leonard, Paradise Lost, 339. 30 There are many other such puzzles available to Satan in the poem: the ease with which the gates of Hell spring open (Paradise Lost, 2.876–79), the strange case of the stairway to Heaven (Paradise Lost 3.499–525), the surprise of feeling his heart turn good for a moment when he spies Eve working alone (9.455–65). Milton’s description of the last moment aligns well with Bateson’s theory of orders of learning and the apperceptive habits that even now Satan might adopt in the presence of such a disconjunctive moment: “That space the evil one abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good …” (Paradise Lost 9.463–65). The space-time of abstraction in which Satan stands, not unlike what Kerrigan calls the “nunc stans of fateful decision,” is the space created by disconjunction, by play and humor and sacrament and the provocations of temptation and choice, the space within which deutero-learning emerges and operates. See Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, 19. 31 At the end of “Logical Categories” Bateson goes so far as to indicate that the ultimate “context markers” for the ideas of levels and level-crossing themselves may be the result of art itself: “art is commonly concerned with learning of this sort, i.e., with bridging the gap between the more or less unconscious premises acquired by Learning II and the more episodic content of consciousness and immediate action.” In this way, art provides occasions for “learning about the relation between steps of the hierarchy” of the levels of learning themselves. Bateson presents this idea as tentative, however, concluding that there is much more work to be done with the “question … of the status of propositions and ideas collateral to the hierarchy of types.” See “Logical Categories,” 308. 32 I allude here to Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time.”

266

Notes to pages 122–27

33 See Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, 230–35. 34 Compare Bateson’s observation regarding “two aspects of the genesis of a transcontextual syndrome,” a syndrome roughly comparable to what I’m calling “disconjunction”: “First … severe pain and maladjustment can be induced by putting a mammal in the wrong regarding its rules for making sense of an important relationship with another mammal. And second … if this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may promote creativity.” “Double Bind, 1969,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 278. Chapter 6: Revisiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018 Emma Annette Wilson My thanks to David Ainsworth, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, and Russell McConnell for their incisive comments during the preparation of this chapter, and to Kevin Donavan and Thomas Festa for their invaluable feedback during the editorial process, as well as to Charles Durham, Kristin Pruitt, and Kevin Donavan for years of scholarly inspiration and hospitality at the John Milton Conference at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. 1 William Empson, Milton’s God, rev. 2nd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 13. 2 John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of “Paradise Lost,” 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 477. Leonard is comprehensive in his treatment of the principal actors in these traditions; see his discussion at 478 for further details. 3 All quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997). 4 In the early modern period, logical instruction tended broadly to divide into manuals openly declaring an affiliation with Ramist or Aristotelian approaches. The ramifications of this distinction extend beyond the scope of the present chapter, but it is worth noting that there are distinctively Ramist and Aristotelian trends at work within Milton’s character groups in Paradise Lost, and it is the subject of my monograph to engage with some of these ideas and to suggest the ways in which Milton is able to employ both strategies at different times to indicate the theological status of his speakers (e.g., unfallen, fallen, and falling from grace). For an overview of the Ramist tradition, see Walter J. Ong, SJ, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) and a more recent collection, Steven J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds., Ramus, Pedagogy, and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 5 Zachary Coke, The Art of Logick, or, The Entire Body of Logick in English (London: 1653*), 3.

Notes to pages 127–48

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6 Coke, The Art of Logick, 3. 7 John Milton, The Art of Logic, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers), 8:217. 8 Milton, The Art of Logic, YP 8:115. 9 Coke, The Art of Logick, 5. 10 Richard Strier, “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better Than Heaven,” in Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 25–48, 26. 11 Strier, “Milton’s Fetters,” 36. 12 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 39. 13 Milton, The Art of Logic, YP 8:223–231. 14 Strier, “Milton’s Fetters,” 25. 15 Claes Scharr, The Full Voic’d Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in “Paradise Lost” (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1982), 124; Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 291 n165. 16 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), 51. Chapter 7: God’s Grammar: Milton’s Parsing of the Divine Russell Hugh McConnell Quoted from John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998). Subsequent quotations of Milton’s poetry cited in the text will be taken from this edition. 2 Joseph Addison, “No. 315,” Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 141. 3 Addison, Spectator No. 315, 141. 4 Addison, Spectator No. 315, 141. 5 There are two parts to this text. The first is titled “A shorte introduction of grammar generally to be used in the kynges maiesties dominions, for the bryngynge up of all those that entende to atteyne the knowledge of the Latine tongue” (1548) and the second “Brevissima institutio, seu, Ratio grammatices cognoscendae, ad omnium puerorum utilitatem praescripta, quam solam regia maiestas in omnibus scholis profitendam praecipit” (1549). 6 William Lily, A Short Introduction of Grammar Generally to be used in the Kynges Maiesties dominions (Oxford, 1548), A1v. 7 Church of England, Iniunctions geuen by the Quenes Maiestie (London, 1559), C3r. 8 Foster Watson, The Old Grammar Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 74. 9 Nicholas W. S. Cranfield, “Bancroft, Richard (bap. 1544, d. 1610).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); online edition (2008). 1

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Notes to pages 148–59

10 John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: or, the grammar schoole (London, 1612), 70–71. 11 Paul Monroe, ed., A Cyclopedia of Education, vol. 3. (London: Macmillan, 1918), 644 attributes this text to John Brookbank. See Watson, Old Grammar Schools, 270. 12 John Milton, Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (London, 1669), A2. Henceforth cited in text. 13 Lily, Brevissima, 1. 14 Lily, Short Introduction, 18–19. 15 On the matter of height, see also 8.411–13: “To attaine / The highth and depth of thy Eternal wayes / All human thoughts come short, Supream of things.” Again, we see a metaphorical use of “height” to refer to a spiritual and ontological superiority, with God’s “height” in contrast to the shortness of human thoughts. This usage is more clearly metaphorical than the quasi-literal use in Book 3. 16 The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, ed. and trans. William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby, and Thomas Sampson (Geneva, 1560), 284v–285r (Geneva Bible). 17 This appellation appears particularly apposite if we recall the Latin roots of “secret” in secretum which Thomas Thomas’ Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae defines as “A sicret or apart place away from company. A secret thing that one discloseth or telleth to no body, a mistery” (London, 1587), Ggg7r. The word also carries a specifically Christian association, which is explained in Thomas Wilson’s text, A Christian Dictionarie (London, 1612), 431; here “secret” is applied to “Things hid from the vnderstanding of all men, and knowne onely vnto God” and to “Darke things, being hid from naturall men, and hard to be vnderstood without speciall illumination of the Holy-ghost.” 18 Lowry Nelson, Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 41–52. 19 R. M. Fransson, “Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” The Explicator 48.4 (1990): 250; Rosamund Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 37–38. 20 C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 52. 21 David B. Morris, “Drama and Stasis in Milton’s ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’” Studies in Philology 68.2 (1971): 207–22 (at 214). 22 Morris, “Drama and Stasis,” 214. 23 Lily, Short Introduction, 18. 24 See for example, most famously, Isa. 9:6: “For vnto vs and Childe is borne, & vnto vs a sonne is giuē: & the gouernement is vpō his shulder, & he shal call his name Wonderful, Coūseller, The mightie God, The euerlastīg Father, The prince of peace” (Geneva Bible, 286r).

Notes to pages 160–64

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25 Rosalie L. Colie, “Time and Eternity: Paradox and Structure in Paradise Lost,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23.1–2 (1960): 128–29. 26 This idea might just possibly call to mind childhood jokes that ask, “Where does an 800-pound gorilla sleep?” Chapter 8: Raphael’s Peroratio in Paradise Lost: Balancing Rhetorical Passion in Virgil and Paul Joshua R. Held I would like to thank audiences at Stockholm University/Swedish Royal Academy and the Murfreesboro Milton Conference for their responses to earlier versions of this essay. I am also grateful to Sarah Van der Laan for help with multiple earlier drafts. 1 William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 147. See also A. J. A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 42. Regarding Empson’s position here as it relates to the history of Milton criticism, see John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of “Paradise Lost,” 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 629–31. 2 Empson, Milton’s God, 151. 3 See Kimberly Johnson, “Raphael’s ‘Potent Tongue’: Power and Spectacle in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 46.4 (2012): 205–18 and Michael Allen, “Divine Instruction: Of Education and the Pedagogy of Raphael, Michael, and the Father,” Milton Quarterly 26.4 (1992): 113–21. 4 Respectively, see Thomas A. Copeland, “Raphael, the Angelic Virtue,” Milton Quarterly 24.4 (1990): 117–28 and Margaret Olofson Thickstun, “Raphael and the Challenge of Evangelical Education,” Milton Quarterly 35.4 (2001): 245–57. 5 N. K. Sugimura, “The Question of ‘What Cause?’: Storytelling Angels and Versions of Causation in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 3–27. 6 Peter C. Herman, “‘Whose fault, whose but his own?’: Paradise Lost, Contributory Negligence, and the Problem of Cause,” in Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 49–67. 7 See Clay Daniel, “Milton’s Neo-Platonic Angel?” Studies in English Literature 44.1 (2004): 173–88 and Eric Charles Reeves, “‘Lest Wilfully Transgressing’: Raphael’s Narration and Knowledge in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 34 (1997): 83–98. 8 On the transition from the term “passion” to “emotion,” largely in the nineteenth century, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Although I generally distinguish “emotion” from “passion” to retain historical specificity, some overlap among “emotion”-oriented terms was already occurring in Milton’s time, and had been occurring in antiquity.

270

Notes to pages 164–68

9 Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers), 2:527. 10 For a relatively recent account of Milton’s learning, see Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2006). 11 On the structure of a classical oration, see Thomas Habinek, Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 41 and Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 221–22. 12 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3:17 (6.1.1). 13 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 3:23 (6.1.11). 14 Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese (1926; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 466–69 (3.19) (1419b). 15 Cicero, De oratore, trans. H. Rackham and E. W. Sutton, 2 vols. (1939; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1:435/434 (English/Latin) (2.77.311). On emotional appeals in Aristotle and Cicero, see Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1989). 16 Cicero, De partitione oratoria, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 353/352 (16.56, 55). 17 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 3:43 (6.1.51). 18 See Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 19 Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, reviews of Shore’s Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, Renaissance Quarterly 63.3 (2013): 1144 and Lynch’s Milton and the Politics of Public Speech, Renaissance Quarterly 66.3 (2016): 1211–12. 20 On classical rhetoric in the Prolusions in particular, see John K. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing in the Genres 1625–1632 (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005). 21 See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 397–95 (3.9) (1409a–1410b). 22 I usually refer to the figures, tropes, and schemata verborum using their classical names, as given in Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Various English approximations exist for these terms, including some available to Milton, such as those in Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553). 23 Regarding Aquinas and Aristotle on this point, see Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 77–80. 24 See, for instance, Samuel Rutherford, A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London, 1649), 3: “the conscience in Adam … before the fall was in a great perfection.” See also Nathanael Vincent, A Heaven or Hell upon Earth: or, A discourse concerning conscience (London, 1676), 74.

Notes to pages 168–71

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25 Herman, “Whose fault,” 63; Sugimura, “The Question,” 16. 26 Allen, “Divine Instruction,” 116. 27 Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 216. Allen, “Divine Instruction,” 116. Copeland, “Raphael, the Angelic Virtue,” 125. For a similar caveat, more recent and more qualified, see Joe Moshenska, “‘Transported Touch’: The Sense of Feeling in Milton’s Eden,” ELH 79.1 (2012): 9 and 26n27. 28 YP 7:264. 29 See Gordon D. Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, New International Biblical Commentary (1988; repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), 13 and Norman Hillyer, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992), 12. 30 See Colin Brown, ed., The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1975), s.v. Guard: phylassō (2:134) and See: blepō (3:515, 517). 31 John Calvin, The Institvtion of Christian Religion, trans. T[homas] N[orton], 2 foliations (London, 1561), 1 fol. 56r (1.15.8). I cite Calvin’s original text, by volume and column, from Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt Omnia, ed. Giulielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, 58 vols. (vols. 29–87 of Corpus Reformatorum) (1863–1900; repr., Bad Feilnbach: Schmidt Periodicals, 1990), 3:229. For discussion of this and other relevant references to the passions in Calvin, see Kyle Fedler, “Calvin’s Burning Heart: Calvin and the Stoics on the Emotions,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2002): 141–42 and 159n37. 32 Calvin, A Harmonie vpon the Three Euangelists … Whereunto is also added a Commentarie vpon the Evangelist S. Iohn, trans. E[usebius] P[aget] (London, 1584), 270 (pagination for John); Latin from Corpus Reformatorum 23:266 (comment on John 11:33). 33 For the improved translation of indidit, “implanted,” see Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, 22 vols. (first published for the Calvin Translation Society [1840s–1850s]; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), 17.2.441 (comment on John 11:33). See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries, 60 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81), 1.97.2 and Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Facvlties of the Soule of Man (London, 1640), 63. 34 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, vol. 1 of Luther’s Works, gen. ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. George V. Schick (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 166. See also Luther’s 1525 treatise De Servo Arbitrio and Knut Alfsvåg, “Luther on Necessity,” Harvard Theological Review 108.1 (2015): 52–69. On the difference between Aristotle and Luther regarding the fall, see Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56. 35 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in Generall (London, 1604), 7.

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Notes to pages 171–75

36 J.-F. Senault, The Use of Passions, trans. Henry Carey Earl of Monmouth (London, 1649), frontispiece (frontispiece by William Marshall). 37 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10–11; Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 11. 38 See Francis C. Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 25–34. 39 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 4.778–92; the Latin text is cited from Aeneid, ed. G.P. Goold, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. Goold (1935; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.560–70. 40 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 200–221 (2.5–6) (1382a–1385a). 41 On Virgil’s appeal to the judgment, see David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 126. 42 See Henrietta Holm Warwick, Vergil Concordance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), s.v. Demens; and Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, ed. D. P. Simpson (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), s.v. Demens. 43 See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 200–209 (2.5) (1382a–1383a) and Aristotle, Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (1927; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 23 (6.2–3) (1449b). 44 Gilbert Highet, Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 113. 45 Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in Epic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 115. I am indebted to Sarah Van der Laan for the reference to Wofford and some of the formulation of this paragraph. 46 For recent attention to Paul by important theorists, see, for instance, Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). The work of these theorists has been applied to Renaissance English literature by scholars such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21–48 and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 219–46. For a comprehensive overview of Paul’s use of classical rhetoric, see R. Dean Anderson, Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul, 2nd ed. (Leuven: Peeters, 1999). 47 See Ben Witherington III, The Paul Quest: The Renewed Search for the Jew of Tarsus (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 89–129; Ryan S. Schellenberg, “Rhetorical Terminology in Paul: A Critical Reappraisal,” Zeitschrift

Notes to pages 175–78

48

49

50

51

52 53

54 55 56

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für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Älteren Kirche 104.2 (2013): 177–91. See Jeffrey T. Reed, “Using Ancient Rhetorical Categories to Interpret Paul’s Letters: A Question of Genre,” in Stanley E. Porter and Thomas H. Olbricht, eds., Rhetoric and the New Testament: Essays from the 1992 Heidelberg Conference (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 304. Laurence L. Welborn, “Paul’s Appeal to the Emotions in 2 Corinthians 1.1–2.13; 7.5–16,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82.1 (2001): 31–60. See also Paul and Pathos, ed. Thomas H. Olbricht and Jerry L. Sumney (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2001). The English (King James Bible) and Greek (International Bible Society text) are cited here and elsewhere—except where noted—from, respectively, Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London, 1611) and The Interlinear Bible: Hebrew–Greek–English, 2nd ed., gen. ed. Jay P. Green (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986). Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 817 and Andrew T. Lincoln, “‘Stand Therefore …’: Ephesians 6:10–20 as Peroratio,” Biblical Interpretation 3.1 (1995): 99–114. Lincoln explicates his position more broadly in Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word Books, 1990), 429–60 (on Eph. 6:10–20). See Peter O’Brien, Ephesians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 461 and The New International Version. See Archibald T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, 6 vols. (1933; repr. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1960), 4:549; T. K. Abbott, The Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, International Critical Commentary, 5th ed. (London: Clark, 1946), 31 (in Eph. 1:19); and Markus Barth, Ephesians, Anchor Bible, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 761. YP 7:264. On the biblical and classical consonance on standing firm in Paradise Regained, see Forsyth, “Having Done All to Stand: Biblical and Classical Allusion in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 24 (1985): 199–214. Jeffrey R. Asher, “An Unworthy Foe: Heroic ἔθη, Trickery, and an Insult in Ephesians 6:11,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130.4 (2011): 729–48. For the Roman legionnaire as a possible model in Ephesians 6, see Edgar Krentz, “Paul, Games, and the Military,” in J. Paul Sampley, ed., Paul in the GrecoRoman World: A Handbook (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 378n106. See F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 403. For the passive voice, see Clinton E. Arnold, Ephesians, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 442; Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998), 590; and Hoehner, Ephesians, 820.

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58 English and Latin cited, respectively, from St. Joseph Edition of the New American Bible (1970; repr. New York: Catholic Book Publishing, 1992); and Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Würtemburgische Bibelanstalt, 1975). 59 See New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982) and New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011). 60 See Michael E. Gudorf, “The Use of πάλη in Ephesians 6:12,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 (1998): 331–35. 61 Lincoln, “Stand Therefore,” 108–9. 62 Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 854. 63 Rudolf Schnackenburg, Ephesians: A Commentary, trans. Helen Heron (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991), 271; Best, Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians, 590. 64 See New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, s.v. Strength: kratos (3:716) and Might: dunamis (2:604–6). 65 See New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, s.v. Love: agapaō (2:538–47) and Love: phileō (2:547–51). 66 See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 193–201 (2.4) (1380b–82a); Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, 353; and Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 22. 67 Calvin, A Commentarie vpon S. Paules Epistles to the Corinthians, trans. Thomas Timme (London, 1577), fol. 198r (comment on 1 Cor. 16:14). Latin from Corpus Reformatorum 49:571. 68 YP 2:236. 69 Joshua R. Held, “Eve’s ‘paradise within’ in Paradise Lost: A Stoic Mind, a Love Sonnet, and a Good Conscience,” Studies in Philology 114.1 (2017): 171–96. 70 Michael Schoenfelt, “‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost,” in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43–67 (at 46). Chapter 9: Euphrasy, Rue, Polysemy, and Repairing the Ruins Emily E. Stelzer 1

Except where otherwise noted, quotations from John Milton’s poetry are taken from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003) and quotations from his prose works are taken from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) (cited as YP followed by volume and page numbers). 2 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 294.

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3 Early modern medicine provided causal links between bad eating, bad digestion, and bad eyesight, links supporting the connection Milton draws between Adam and Eve’s eating of forbidden fruit and the weakening of their eyesight. (The connection is extrabiblical, as Genesis 3 mentions the opening of the eyes but does not explain this particular consequence of disobedience as an ironic loss of ocular power.) In Tobias Venner’s respected medical treatise Via Recta Ad Vitam Longam, first published in 1620, “dimnesse of the sight” is among the list of ailments the body is susceptible to if it fails to digest food properly and excrete its excesses. In a significant personal letter (28 September 1654) to an Athenian friend, Leonard Philaras, Milton reveals concern that his own loss of sight was due to toxic vapors arising from indigestion (YP 4:867–70). Milton vehemently attacked the idea that his blindness was divine punishment for defending the regicide, explaining his loss of eyesight as a patriotic sacrifice in Sonnet XXII (“Cyriack, this three years’ day …”) and in the Second Defence (YP 4:584–91); nonetheless, the letter to Philaras reveals Milton’s suspicions of a less heroic, more physiological cause underlying his loss. In Paradise Lost, however, the consequences of sin include physical impairment of vision as well as mental and spiritual blindness. 4 Cf. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Structure and Symbolism of Vision in Michael’s Prophecy, Paradise Lost, Books XI–XII,” Philological Quarterly 42.1 (1963): 27. 5 Lewalski, “Structure and the Symbolism,” 25–35. 6 Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 211. 7 Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination, 211. 8 Cf. Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination, 200. 9 Later in book 3 the angels identify God the Father as “fountain of light” (Paradise Lost 3.375). 10 Henry Lyte, A New Herball, or Historie of Plants (London, 1586), 46, 296, 297. 11 See Horace Mallinson Barlow, Old English Herbals, 1525–1640 (Oxford: Bale & Danielsson, 1913), 1. 12 The vertues and proprytes of herbes the whiche is called an herbal (1525), s.v. ruta. 13 An Anonymous Life of Milton, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 1042; John Aubrey, Collections for the Life of Milton, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 1022. Cf. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 259–60; Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211–12, 231–32; W. H. Wilmer, “The Blindness of Milton,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 32.3 (1933): 305. Seatoning, as Barbara Lewalski explains, “involved piercing the skin just below the hairline, passing

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through the holes a hot cautery with a diamond point and then a needle with thread dipped in egg white and rose oil” (259–60). 14 Edward Phillips, The Life of Milton, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 1034. 15 Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination, 35. 16 Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick (London, 1671), 99. 17 Sir Thomas Elyot, Castel of Health (London, 1539), 16b. 15a–b. The inclusion of fennel in the list of eye-brightening herbs reminds us that Milton’s serpent claims the forbidden fruit is eye-opening and compares it to “sweetest fennel” (Paradise Lost 9.581). This is another exquisite Miltonic choice, for in the early modern period fennel was an emblem for flattery. See OED s.v. fennel, def. 3. 18 Elyot, Castel of Health, 15a–b. 19 Jon S. Lawry, “Euphrasy and Rue: Books XI and XII, Paradise Lost,” Ball State University Forum 8 (1967): 5, 6. 20 Charlotte Otten, “Homer’s Moly and Milton’s Rue,” Huntington Library Quarterly 33.4 (1970): 363–66. For scholarship connecting Homer’s moly to Milton’s haemony, Otten directs the reader to Edward S. Le Comte, “New Light on the ‘Haemony’ Passage in Comus,” Philological Quarterly 21 (1942): 283–98, and Thomas P. Harrison, Jr., “The ‘Haemony’ Passage in Comus Again,” Philological Quarterly 22 (1943): 251–54; see also Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 132. 21 Otten, “Homer’s Moly and Milton’s Rue,” 363, 368; cf. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (London, 1963), 186–87, 194. 22 Lyte, A New Herball, 298; John Parkinson, Teatrum Botanicum (London, 1640), 134, 870. 23 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 10.329. 24 Otten, “Homer’s Moly and Milton’s Rue,” 369; Rahner, Greek Myths, 202. 25 Otten, “Homer’s Moly and Milton’s Rue,” 369. 26 Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 477, 910–12; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78–80; Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Bell & Daldy, 1863), 72–77; cf. Otten, 370. 27 Otten, “Homer’s Moly and Milton’s Rue,” 365. 28 Lyte, A New Herball, 47. 29 Wendy Furman-Adams, “Jane Giraud’s Ecofeminist Paradise Lost,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 248. 30 Furman-Adams, “Jane Giraud’s Ecofeminist Paradise Lost,” 248–49. 31 Furman-Adams, “Jane Giraud’s Ecofeminist Paradise Lost,” 239. 32 Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination, 182.

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33 Nicholas Culpeper, The English-physicians dayly practise. Or, Culpeper’s faithful physitian. Teaching every man and woman to be their own doctor (London, 1680), 6. 34 Lyte, A New Herball, 295. 35 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. John Bostock (London: Richard Taylor and William Francis, 1855), 19.45. Bostock’s note indicates that Pliny’s chapter on rue is indebted to Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 7.5. 36 Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The Evil Eye: An Account of this Ancient and Widespread Superstition (London: John Murray, 1895), 343–48. 37 Quoted in Adolph Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1909), 418. The benediction is partly quoted by Hugo Rahner, who cites Franz’s work, in Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (London, 1963), 188. 38 Armando Magghi, Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001), 108 and 108n33. 39 Hamlet 4.2.175–76. Quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: Norton, 2016). 40 Richard II, 3.4.104–7. Shakespeare frequently mentions rue in its emblematic role as “herb of grace.” Reminiscent of Ophelia, Perdita in the guise of a shepherdess presents rue to Polixenes and Camillo in The Winter’s Tale: “For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep / Seeming and savor all the winter long. / Grace and remembrance be to you both” (4.4.74–76). In All’s Well that Ends Well, a clown refers to the story of King Nebuchadnezzar’s transformation with puns on Herb of Grace / Grass (4.5.14–18). The word “grace” could also refer to the “virtue,” power, or efficacy of a plant. Thus, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet affirms, “Oh, mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities” (2.2.15–16). So also, the friar explains, these plants can do harm, the pharmakon serving as a poison as well as a medicine. For Shakespeare, rue is semantically powerful as a herb of grace associated with sorrow and regret, a word employed more often for its emblematic powers rather than its botanical ones. 41 Lyte, A New Herball, 297. 42 Elworthy, The Evil Eye, 346. 43 The Great Herball (London, 1539), cap. 166, s.v. Eufragia/eufrace; Lyte, A New Herball, 46. 44 Gloss from the Longman edition of Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997). 45 Gloss from the Longman edition of The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968). 46 Lyte, A New Herball, 46. 47 Liddell, Scott, and Jones. Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), s.v. εὖ definition A.I and φρήν definitions I.2 and I.3; Liddell and Scott.

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An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), s.v. εὖ definition 4. 48 Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. εὔφραστος, and Liddell, Scott, and Jones. Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. εὔφραστος and s.v. φράζειν, definitions I.2 and I.2b. 49 For the key observation that through homophonic possibility euphrasy could denote poetry, I am originally indebted to David Oliver Davies (University of Dallas). 50 Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.5.6 (Bekker number 1407b12). 51 See OED, s.v. Hellespont. 52 Thomas Newton, Paradise Lost with Notes of Various Authors (1749), 2.252, quoted in John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of “Paradise Lost,” 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47. 53 Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 58. 54 Quoted in Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 65, and discussed in Leonard, Faithful Labourers, 47. 55 Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 57–58. 56 Raleigh, Milton, 209; quoted in Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 63. 57 See Addison’s characterization of the pun as “false wit” in The Spectator 62. See also Simon J. Alderson’s “The Augustan Attack on the Pun,” EighteenthCentury Life 20.3 (1996): 1–19. For Milton’s application of satire and polemic in Paradise Lost, see John N. King’s Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 58 In the Norton critical edition of Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 396. 59 Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 67. 60 See, for a few examples: Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 108–11; Susannah B. Mintz, Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 61–64; Blaine Greteman, The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 176; David Quint, Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 177–79; Diane Kelsey McColley, “The Individuality of Creatures in Paradise Lost,” in Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, eds., All in All: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999), 21–38; Richard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 92. See also Dobranski’s excellent study of the images of Adam’s and Eve’s hands, “Transported Touch,” in Milton’s Visual Imagination, 135–52. 61 For example, Fish, Surprised by Sin, 131–36; Arnold Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on Paradise Lost (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), 63–74, 91; Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 110–13, 125–26, 148–49; Ferry, Epic Voice, 168–78.

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62 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.1.10, wherein he cites Augustine, De utilitate credendi, book 3, and Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis christianae fidei, prologue to book 4. All three passages refer to the several senses in which sacred scripture may be interpreted, although each author lists those senses differently. For Aquinas, scripture has a historical or “literal” sense and a “spiritual” sense, the latter divided into the allegorical (when an Old Testament passage serves as a type for a New Testament passage), the moral or tropological (when a passage signifies what a reader ought to do), and the anagogical (when the passage’s meaning relates to eschatology and eternity). The literal sense may also be separated into three senses, à la Augustine, who divides the various meanings carried by Old Testament passages into the historical, etiological, analogical, and allegorical senses, the first three considered to be “literal” and the last “spiritual”; Hugh of St. Victor more simply lists the historical, the allegorical (which for Hugh of St. Victor, Aquinas mentions, includes the anagogical sense), and the tropological senses. Cf. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato, 3rd ed. (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 149. 63 While Dante is credited with applying the medieval theories of scriptural polysemy to his secular (but highly religious) Commedia, the letter to Can Grande della Scala explains these senses with an example drawn from scripture rather than from Dante’s poem: To elucidate, then, what we have to say, be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, “of more senses than one”: for it is one sense which we get through the letter, and another which we get through the thing which the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the second allegorical or mystic. And this mode of treatment, for its better manifestation, may be considered in this verse: “When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judea became his sanctification, Israel his power.” Now if we attend to the letter alone, the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us. Translation by Charles Singleton, from Singleton, Dante’s Commedia: Two Kinds of Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 87. Milton, of course, was also drawn to figurative readings of the story of the Exodus in Paradise Lost (e.g., 1.304–13, 338–43). 64 While some critics have emphasized these meanings as contradictory or conflicting alternatives, others have emphasized the way different meanings work together as parts of a central vision or project. Thus, Ann Davidson Ferry

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argues that multiple meanings in Milton’s poetry do more than indicate his penchant for Latinisms, wordplay through puns, and manipulation of syntax: “The double references of Milton’s diction are traditional and he uses them in traditional contexts, as metaphors expressing the unity of divine truth.” Ferry explains the dual meanings of “lot,” “place,” and “situation,” one spiritual and one physical and spatial, as “identical … interchangeable terms” revealed “in a single metaphor.” In book 1, for example, Satan is in a dismal situation in two different but mutually supportive senses. Ferry further asserts that “The ritualistical repetitive use of words with more than one reference to express divine unity of vision is the most important characteristic of the narrator’s metaphorical style in Paradise Lost.” Milton’s Epic Voice, 98; see also 99–101. The idea of polysemy supporting textual coherence is heir to the hermeneutical tradition advanced by Thomas Aquinas, who saw coherent meaning in both the visual and the verbal. In response to the question “Whether in scripture a word may have several senses?” Aquinas answers, “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.” The modern literary scholar might consider curious the ideas that only God can invest meaning in things rather than words, and that only in the science of interpreting scripture ought one look for signification in things. Yet Aquinas’s defense of meaningful images well accords with Milton’s poetic style, where imagery influences and supports the written message. Stephen Dobranski has shown how “Milton depends on … imagery to advance his poem’s narrative and express his theological beliefs.” Milton’s Visual Imagination, 3. (The same, of course, may be said of Milton’s diction, for, to quote Anne Davidson Ferry again, Milton’s stylistic devices are “organic expressions of the speaker’s great Argument” (99).) Milton and Aquinas also share an approach to finding meaning in the visual through a doctrine of typology: “The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be themselves types of other things. Thus, in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn.” Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.1.10. While Milton cannot be said to depend on Aquinas as an authority in many religious, political, and philosophical matters, this medieval hermeneutical approach provides one possible explanation for how polysemy may support a coherent and yet complex encounter with the poem. 65 The polysemy of Aquinas and Dante does suggest that the individual meanings of a particular passage might be ranked, with the anagogical sense predominating, although always grounded on the literal (Aquinas, Summa

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Theologica 1a.1.10). Similarly, in Paradise Lost, Michael privileges the allegorical meaning over the literal in foretelling the transition from “imperfet” Law to “a better Cov’nant,” from “shadowy Types to Truth” (12.300–303). 66 Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 109. 67 Milton’s Familiar Letters, trans. John Hall (Philadelphia: Littell, 1829), 69–70. Emphasis added. 68 See John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 173; see also Juliet Lucy’s helpful “Chronology of Milton’s Major Works” appended to Stephen B. Dobranski, ed., Milton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 489–97. Chapter 10: Paradise Finding Aids Nicholas Allred [Alexander Cruden], A Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: Innys and Browne, 1741), iii. 2 John Milton, Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books, 6th ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1695). 3 Thomas Newton, “Preface,” Paradise Lost. A Poem, in Twelve Books (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper), 1749, unpaginated [B1V]. 4 [Jonathan Swift], A Tale of a Tub (London: John Nutt, 1704), 139. 5 This makes the table theoretically compatible with any twelve-book edition, but since it begins on the verso of the last page of Book 12 it was almost certainly sold separately; future versions of this finding aid would use page numbers of the editions to which they were appended, driving home that this was a proprietary feature. 6 As mentioned above, the “Table” would (with expansion and reorganization) become an “Index” by 1711; I use the terms “Table” and “Index” to more conveniently distinguish the earlier from the later version, not to posit a categorical separation of reference genres in the period. Indeed, the largest sense of “Index” would apply to all three. 7 John Gay, “The Shepherd’s Week” (London: Ferd. Burleigh, 1714). 8 Blackmore, Eliza: An Epick Poem (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1705). 9 Pope, Guardian no. 78, in The Guardian (London: J. Tonson, 1714), 1.329–33. 10 For the significance of these Spectator papers to the development of English literary criticism, see Denise Gigante, “Milton’s Spots: Addison on Paradise Lost,” in Ann Baynes Coiro and Blair Hoxby, eds., Milton in the Long Restoration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7–21. 11 Addison, Spectator no.321, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3.170. 12 Addison, Spectator no. 303 (Bond ed.), 3.91. 13 Addison, Spectator no. 303 (Bond ed.), 3.90. 14 Addison, Spectator no. 303 (Bond ed.), 3.91. 1

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Notes to pages 216–21

15 John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, 9th ed. (London: Tonson, 1711). 16 See Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 521–30; and Jackson, Dickinson’s Mistery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), among other works. 17 Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 201–6 (at 202). Culler here riffs on Alice Fulton’s distinction between fiction and poetry. 18 George T. Wright, “The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems,” PMLA 89.3 (1974): 563–79 (at 565). See also Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 283; and Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), 260. 19 Fish is refreshingly explicit about this assumption of a rigidly linear reading, which others too often take for granted: see Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967), 23. 20 For the temptation of plot (chiefly apropos of Paradise Regained), see How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). John Leonard notes that early readers were not so ignorant of Satan’s attractions as, for instance, C. S. Lewis makes them out to be, but in his study we can still trace a relative lack of emphasis on Satan as an interpretive problem prior to the Romantics. Eighteenth-century critics by and large found Satan interesting and even central, but don’t seem to have considered his allure a threat to Milton’s stated aims. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 393–410. 21 James Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile,” PMLA 46.4 (1931), 1034–74 (at 1050); Paradise Lost 1.204. 22 Fish, Surprised by Sin, 36. 23 Fish, Surprised by Sin, 36. 24 Fish, Surprised by Sin, 36. My thanks to Sierra Eckert for helping me clarify my thinking here, and throughout this essay. 25 Job 41:1 (King James Bible); John Mayer, A Commentary Upon the Holy Writings of Job, David, and Solomon (London: 1653), 224. See also Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), though Mayer attests that it endured longer than Schmitt indicates. 26 Gérard Genette, “The Architext,” trans. Jane E. Lewin, in Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 17–30 (at 24). 27 In the words of Suzanne Langer, “In reflecting on lyric expression in the light of other literary work we shall find … [that] the rhetorical form is a means of creating an impersonal subjectivity, which is the peculiar experiential illusion of a genre that creates no characters and no public events.” Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), 260.

Notes to pages 221–27

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28 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 18. 29 Olaudah Equiano [alt. Gustavus Vassa], The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, ed. Werner Sollers (New York: Norton, 2001), 83–84; quotes Paradise Lost 2.233–40. 30 Eric B. Song, Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 154; quotes Paradise Lost 2.379. 31 [Alexander Cruden], A Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: Innys and Browne, 1741), iii. 32 Alexander Cruden, A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament (London: 1738); attribution in Alexander Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary, rev. ed. (London: 1813), 11.93. 33 Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 106. 34 Reddick, Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 125. 35 Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 13–14. 36 See Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 138–47. 37 Quint, Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 93–121. 38 Patterson, Milton’s Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 39 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 880. 40 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 52–53. 41 Louise Curran, “Reading Milton in Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellanies,” Eighteenth-Century Life 41.1 (2017): 32–55. 42 Contemporary scholarship on commonplacing dates to Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78; the work of Ann Blair, Ann Moss, and William Sherman has been crucial in this revival as well. 43 John Locke, Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1706), 324. 44 A Common-Place Book of John Milton, ed. Alfred J. Horwood (London: Camden Society, 1876). A marginal reference to a “Theological Index” suggests he kept at least one more notebook. The classic study of Milton’s commonplace book is Ruth Mohl’s John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969) and, more recently, Thomas Fulton’s Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), especially ch. 2, “Combing the Annals of Barbarians” (38–81).

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Notes to pages 229–30 Chapter 11: Political Diplomacy, Personal Conviction, and the Fraught Nature of Milton’s Letters of State Edward Jones

William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2:945. 2 Parker, Milton, 2:1014. 3 As the printer Brabazon Aylmer’s note to the readers of the Epistolarum Familiarium explains: “Facta spes erat aliquandiu, Lector Benevole, fore ut hujus Authoris Epistolae cum Publicae tum Familiares, uno volumine excudendae mihi permitterentur. Verum de Publicis, postquam eos, per quos solos licebat, certas ob causas id nolle cognovi, concessa parte contentus, Familiares tantum in lucem emittere satis habui.” [It was my hope for a while, gentle reader, that I should be allowed to print this author’s letters, both public and private, in one volume. But after I found out about the public ones that those men by whom alone permission could be given did not want to give it, I considered it enough, content with the permission given, to bring only the private ones to the light.] (“Typographus Lectori,” in John Milton, Epistolarum Familiarium, 1674, sigs. A3–A3v). For a convenient listing of the licensing and publication dates for Milton’s work in the early 1670s, see Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1997), 210–17. 4 For a transcription of the Latin catalog entry followed by an English translation, see The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 5:68. 5 The original manuscripts of eight of the sixteen letters can be found in the Dutch archives, two are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, one is in the National Archives in Kew, and the other five appear to be in private hands. Eight of the sixteen have been printed in Sumner’s 1825 Latin and English edition of the De Doctrina Christiana published by Cambridge University Press; six others appear in W. Douglas Hamilton’s Original Papers Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Milton (London, 1859), and David Masson mentions three in The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time, 6 vols. (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1859–94). 6 The National Archives, SP 84/203, fols. 105–6. For additional comments on this correspondence, see John T. Shawcross, “A Survey of Milton’s Prose Works,” in Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, eds., Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 348–49 and John T. Shawcross, “A Contemporary Letter Concerning Milton’s State Papers,” Milton Quarterly 15.4 (1981): 119–20. 7 For a concise overview of how later commentators insisted upon a distinction between Milton’s character and his writings in order to elevate or devalue his 1

Notes to pages 230–32

8 9

10 11

12

13

14 15

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achievements, see P. J. Klemp, “Critical Responses, 1825–1950,” in Stephen B. Dobranski, ed., Milton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 130–42. Favorable comments on Milton consistently emphasized his great accomplishments as a poet and left unremarked any writing (such as his letters of state) that concerned the politics of his times. Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), vii–xi. That the Interregnum government gave priority to documents created in English for international diplomacy informs the central premises of ­Miller’s books on Milton’s involvement in the diplomatic objectives of Hermann Mylius and the English negotiations with the Dutch, both of which took place in the early 1650s. See Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York: Loewenthal Press, 1985) and Leo Miller, John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992). See Shawcross, “A Survey of Milton’s Prose Works,” 348–63; Fallon, Milton in Government, 220–28; and Miller, “Establishing the Text of Milton’s State Papers,” TEXT 2 (1985): 181–86. Shawcross’s two pre-twentieth-century bibliographies on Milton are essential for anyone interested in working on his letters of state. See Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624–1700 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984) and Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1701–1799 (ITER and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2009). The eighteenth-century bibliography is available only online. This concern recurs throughout Miller’s books on the Oldenburg Safeguard and the Anglo-Dutch relations in the early 1650s (cited above) as well as in many of his essays on individual state papers that are listed in Calvin Huckabay, John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography, 1968–1988, ed. Paul J. Klemp (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996) and Calvin Huckabay and David V. Urban, John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography, 1989–1999, ed. David V. Urban and Paul J. Klemp (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2011). Prior to publishing Milton in Government, Fallon reported on documents he discovered in the State Papers Foreign in “Miltonic Documents in the Public Record Office, London,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 82–100 and “Filling in the Gaps: New Perspectives on Mr. Secretary Milton,” Milton Studies 12 (1979): 165–95. See Campbell, A Milton Chronology, 98–184 to follow the documentation of the eleven years of Milton’s government service and revised dates for his state letters based upon the most recent published evidence. This evidence, housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, appears in MS Rawlinson C.179, p. 81.

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Notes to pages 232–39

16 A full account along with a reproduction of the texts of the new letters appears in Stefano Villani, “La lettere di Stato inglesi scritte al Granduca di Toscana tra il 1649 e il 1659 e tradotte in latino da John Milton,” Archivio Storico Italiana 166.4 (2008): 703–66. 17 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 2. 18 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 131. 19 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 123–24 and 281. 20 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 259. 21 See Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 259–63. 22 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 261. 23 Samuel Morland, The History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valley of the Piedmont (London, 1658), 554–55. 24 See Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) and Esther Menascé, “Milton e i Valdesi: Segnalazione di una fonte del sonetto sul ‘massacre,’” Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi 88 (1967): 3–40. 25 Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 54.

Contributors Scholarly Milton

Sharon Achinstein is Sir William Osler Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) and Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (2003) and co-editor of Milton and Toleration (2007). Her edition of Milton’s writings on divorce for the Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Milton is forthcoming. Nicholas Allred is a doctoral candidate in English at Rutgers University. His dissertation project takes drinking as a test case for the role of “bad habits” in eighteenth-century British conceptions of fictional character. Gardner Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has published essays on Milton, Renaissance literature, film, new media, and teaching learning technologies. His latest project is a monograph whose working title is “‘The Public Debut of a Dream’: Doug Engelbart and the Augmentation of Human Intellect.” Kevin J. Donovan, Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, co-directed with Charles W.  Durham and Kristin A.  Pruitt the biennial Conference on John Milton from 1991 to 2015. With Thomas Festa he co-edited the collection Milton, Materialism and Embodiment, and with Christopher J. Wheatley he co-edited the anthology Irish Drama of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. He has published articles in English Literary

287

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Scholarly Milton

Renaissance, Studies in Bibliography, New Hibernia Review, and other journals and in edited collections on Ben Jonson. He also wrote the “Survey of Interpretive Criticism” for the New Variorum Shakespeare King Lear, edited by Richard Knowles, and is associate editor of the volume. Thomas Festa is Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is the author of The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006; repr. 2014) and co-editor of Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: One First Matter All (2017) and Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (2012). Joshua R. Held is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity International University and director of the honors program at the undergraduate division, Trinity College. He has published articles in Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Henry James Review, Victorian Review, Arthuriana, and Studies in Philology. He is presently at work on a book that highlights the bold conscience in Renaissance English literature, with a focus on William Shakespeare and John Milton. Sam Hushagen is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Washington. He has served as assistant editor at Modern Language Quarterly, and has been a Joff Hanauer Fellow in Western Civilization. His research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and visual culture, the history of science and philosophy, and poetics. Edward Jones is Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University and the editor of Milton Quarterly. He has edited two essay collections: A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts: A Festschrift for Gordon Campbell (2015) and Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620–1642 (2013). He is currently editing Milton’s Letters of State for the Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Milton. Russell Hugh McConnell is a Lecturer at Southern Methodist University. His essays have appeared in Renaissance Papers and New Readings of The Merchant of Venice.

Contributors

289

James Ross Macdonald teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary Humanities program at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His essays have appeared in Studies in Philology, Spenser Studies, and most recently Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England. Emily E. Stelzer is Associate Professor of Literature at Houston Baptist University. She is the author of Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton’s Philosophy of Eating (2018). J. Antonio Templanza is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is currently completing a study of Milton’s relationship to the history of science, titled Know to Know No More. Emma Annette Wilson is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. She is co-editor of Ramus, Pedagogy, and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World, and The European Contexts of Ramism, and has published on the workings of logic in the writings of Milton, Marvell, Marlowe, and Jonson.

Index Scholarly Milton

A Breviate of our King’s whole Latin Grammar 148–49 Addison, Joseph The Spectator 146–47, 203, 210, 213–16 Adolphus, Gustavus 237 Ahier, Joshua The Elements of Logick 127 Alighieri, Dante Commedia 42, 187, 204 Letter to Can Grande Della Scala 204, 256n58, 279n63 Allen, Michael 71, 163, 168–69 Allen, Woody Annie Hall 37–38 Animadversions upon Lillie’s Grammar 148 Aquinas, St. Thomas 170, 204 Aristotle 166, 171–73, 180, 201 Arminian theology 205 Arnisaeus, Henning 36 Ascham, Roger Scholemaster, The 196 Asher, Jeffrey 177 Aubrey, John 107, 194 Auerbach, Erich 44–46, 251–52n22

Augustine, St. 204 Avitus, Alcimus Ecdicius De spiritalis historiae gestis 61–73, 78, 80–81 Bacon, Francis 4, 50, 96 Bancke’s Herbal 193, 197 Bateson, Gregory 109–22, 265n31, 266n34 Ben Gersom 29–30 Bentley, Richard 58, 209, 224 Best, Brian S. 178 Best, Ernest 178 Beza, Theodore 30, 34 Blackmore, Richard 212 Blagrave, Joseph Astrological Practice of Physick 194 Blake, William 116 Bodleian Library 22 Boethius 195 Boswell, James 226 Brinsley, John Ludus Literarius 148 Bruce, F. F. 178 Bucer, Martin 38–39 Budick, Sanford 57–58

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292

Scholarly Milton

Calvin, John 30, 36, 170, 180 Carey, John 199 Caspari, Fritz 3 Chaplin, Gregory 95 Ciampa, Roy E. 178 Cicero 37, 167, 180 De oratore 165 Coiro, Ann Baynes 79 Coke, Zachary 127 Coleman, Thomas 33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 45–46 Comenius, Jan Amos 4, 76, 80 Conti, Natale 195 Cooley, Ronald 69 Copeland, Thomas 169 Cowper, William The Dying Negro 221 Cromwell, Oliver 231, 233, 238–39 Crucifixion 87, 261n10 Cruden, Alexander Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures 223–24 Culler, Jonathan 217 Culpeper, Nicholas The English-Physicians Dayly Practice 194, 197 Danes, John A Light to Little 148 Daniel, Clay 164 Denham, John Cooper’s Hill 221 Dioscurides 195 Dobranski, Stephen 190, 194, 196 double bind theory 109, 120–22, 266n34 Downame, George 77 DuRocher, Richard 84, 94 Dury, John 76 Edwards, Karen 72 Eliot, George 1–2 Eliot, T. S. 110, 224 Elyot, Sir Thomas Castel of Health 194

Elzevir, Daniel 230 Empson, William 125, 143, 163 Equiniano, Olaudah Interesting Narrative 221–22 Erasmus 22–23, 30, 32, 35 Eton 22 Euripides 20 Evans, J. Martin 62 Fagius 30, 34 Fallon, Robert 230–31 Fallon, Steven 28, 191, 193 Feingold, Mordechai 20 Fenner, Dudley The Artes of Logike and Rethorike 128 Festa, Thomas 51, 75, 76, 81, 84 Fish, Stanley 49, 81, 98, 126, 218–19, 264n16 Fitzgerald, Robert 173 Fixler, Michael 88–89 Fowler, Alastair 42, 51, 131, 199 free will 128, 136, 142 French, J. Milton 232, 235 Frost, Gaulter 237 Frye, Northrop 42 Fulton, Thomas 21 Furman-Adams, Wendy 196 Gale, Theophilus 20 Galen 195 Gay, John 212 Genette, Gérard 220 Gerard, John Herball 193, 195 Gerhard, Johann 37 Giraud, Jane Flowers of Milton 196 Goldberg, Jonathan 193 Gore, Jeffrey 70 Granger, Thomas Syntagma grammaticum 148 Graves, Neil 71 Grete Herball 194 Grotius, Hugo 26, 29, 30, 34

Index Hall, Joseph 36 Hardy, Nicholas 20–21, 244n14, 244n21 Harrison, Thomas P. 195 Hartlib, Samuel 4, 76 Hartman, Geoffrey 68 Hazlitt, William 1 Heidegger, Martin 100, 104–5 Heinsius, Nicholas 20 Hemmingsen, Neils 36 Heraclitus 195 Herman, Peter C. 163, 168 Highet, Gilbert 173 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan 24 Hoehner, Harold W. 175 Homer 83, 177, 195, 212–15, 218 Hoole, Charles The Latine Grammar Fitted for the use of Schools 148 Hugh of St. Victor 204 Hughes, Merritt 97, 193 Huish, Anthony Priscianus nascens 148 Hume, Patrick Annotations on Paradise Lost 2, 193, 202, 209 humor 107 Indexes to Paradise Lost 209–27 Jackson, Virginia 217 Jacobus, Lee 74, 77 James, Susan 171 Jenkins, Sir Leonline 230 Johnson, Kimberly 163 Johnson, Samuel 1, 210, 226 Dictionary 224 Jones, Bassett Herm’aelogium148 Jonson, Ben 131 Josephus 29 Kahn, Victoria 128 Kant, Immanuel 41, 57, 59 Kastan, David Scott 197

293

Keats, John 207 Keckermann, Bartholomäus 127 Kedermister Library 22 Kelley, Maurice 235 Kermode, Frank 85, 93 Kerrigan, William 104, 107, 122, 191, 264n16 Kimchi 29–30 Kirkconnell, Watson 63 Kranidas, Thomas 80 Landor, Walter Savage Imaginary Conversations 203 Lawry, John S. 195 Leavis, F. R. 224 Le Comte, Edward S. 195 Leonard, John 119, 125, 146, 193, 199 L’Estrange, Roger 233 Leti, George Historia 233 Lewalski, Barbara 70, 84, 96, 169 Lightfoot, John 33 Lily, William Short Introduction of Grammar 147, 149, 158 Lincoln, Andrew T. 176, 178 Locke, John 227 Lucretius 49 Lünig, Johann Christian Literae Procerum Europae 233 Luther, Martin 37, 171, 257n11, 272n34 Lynch, Helen 166 Lyte, Henry A New Herball 193, 195–97, 200 Mabbott, Thomas O. 235 Madsen, William 86 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 232 Marshall, William 171 Martin, Catherine 52, 58 Masson, David 234 McLuhan, Marshall 38 metacomunicational experiences 110, 113–14, 118 Miller, Leo 231–32, 235, 237

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Scholarly Milton

Milton, John Accidence Commenc’t Grammar 147, 149–50, 154–62 Apology for Smectymnuus, An 206 Areopagitica 5–8, 22, 48, 76–77, 90, 164 Artis plenior logicae (Art of Logic) 77, 125–43, 229 Colasterion 33 Commonplace book 3, 4, 21–22, 33, 227 Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings 7 De Doctrina Christiana 24–25, 27–28, 31, 46, 230 Defensio secunda 207, 230 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The 21, 25–26, 28, 33–34, 180, 226 Elegia Prima 7 Epistolum Familiarium 230 History of Britain 229 Il Penseroso 200 Judgment of Martin Bucer, The 28, 33, 37–38 L’Allegro 200 Letters of State 229–39 Letter to Leonard Philaras 194, 206–7 Maske, A (Comus) 195 Of Education 4–5, 7, 31, 62, 76, 90, 114, 207 Of Reformation 24 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (Nativity Ode) 84, 150, 152–62 “On the New Forcers of Conscience” 36 Paradise Lost 1–2, 5, 41–59, 61–81, 85–89, 93, 102–3, 107–8, 112–22, 125–43, 145–52, 161, 163–71, 175, 180–82, 185–93, 197–207, 209–27 Proposalls of certaine expedients 8 Pro se defensio 230 Paradise Regained 20, 83–105, 226, 229 Poems 229–30 Prolusiones (Prolusions) 3–4, 7, 166, 229–30

Pro populo anglicano defensio (Defense of the English People) 20, 230 Readie and Easy Way 166 Samson Agonistes 229 Seventh Prolusion 3–4, 7 Sonnet 7 (“How Soon Hath Time”) 207 Sonnet 18 (“Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints”) 239 Tetrachordon 26, 30–35, 37, 39, 229 Treatise of Civil Power, A 170, 177 monism 50–51, 58, 120 Morland, Samuel 238–39 Mylius, Hermann 231–33, 235–39 Netzley, Ryan 95, 100 Newton, Thomas 197, 202, 209–10, 224 Nohrnberg, James 97 Nuttall, A. D. 68, 75 Ong, Walter J., SJ 127 Orgel, Stephen 193 Orwell, George 1984 122 Paget, Dr. Nathan 194 Parker, William Riley 229–30 Parkinson, John Theatrum Botanicum 193 Paster, Gail Kern 171 Patterson, Annabel 225 Paul, St. 44, 164, 170–71, 175–81 Pearce, Zachary 224 Phillips, Edward 194, 233–34 philology 22, 28, 30–31, 33 Piedmont Massacre 233, 237, 239 Pierce, Robert 93 Plato 4, 28, 70, 83, 85, 100, 260–61n8 Pliny Natural History 195, 197 Pope, Alexander 212–13 Pope, Elizabeth 84 Potts, John 28 Pound, Ezra 137 Prins, Yopie 217

Index Quint, David 42, 46, 48, 52, 97 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 165–66 Rahner, Hugo 195 Raleigh, Walter Alexander 202 Ramism 38, 77–78, 126–27, 266n4 Reddcik, Allen 224 Reed, Jeffrey T. 175 Reeves, Eric Charles 164 Renaissance humanism 3–4, 19, 29, 126, 241n6 Renaissance moral philosophy 3 Reynolds, Edward A Treatise on the Passions 170 Richardson, Jonathan 224 Ricks, Christopher 202–3, 224 Riggs, William 78, 80 Rivetus 34 Rogers, John 73 Rumrich, John 191 Rutherford, Samuel Lex, Rex 36 Salmasius 20 Saville, Henry 20 Schellenberg, Ryan C. 175 Schoenfeldt, Michael 182 Schuler, Stephen 75, 77 Schultz, Howard 97 Scriblerians 210 Selden, John 20, 34 Shakespeare, William 198, 207 Shawcross, John T. 193, 231 Shore, Daniel 166 Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth 106 Skinner, Cyriack 194 Skinner, Daniel 233–34 Snackenburg, Rudolf 178 Socrates 70, 83–85, 102–4 sola scriptura 22, 24 Song, Eric 221 soteriology 94 Spencer, Thomas The Art of Logic 127 Stein, Arnold 96

295

Stoicism 101 Strier, Richard 130 sublimity 146 Sugimura, N. K. 163, 168 Swaim, Kathleen 69, 78 Swift, Jonathan 210 Taylor, Patricia 96 Teskey, Gordon 42, 44–45, 58, 193 Thickstun, Margaret Olofson 62 Tonson, Jacob 209, 211–16, 223 Tuningus, Gerardus 35–36 Tyacke, Nicholas 36 Typology 41–59, 251n19 Ulreich, John 93–94 Use of the Passions, The 171 Valla, Lorenzo 20, 23–24 Vendler, Helen 221 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1741) 209–10, 222–24 Villani, Stefano 232 Virgil 164, 215 Aeneid 171–75, 218 Vossius, Isaac 20 Weckherlin, Georg 239 Welborn, Laurence 175 Westminster Assembly, the 33–34, 37, 39 Whaler, James 53, 219, 249n9 Williamson, Sir Joseph Wilson, Emma Annette 69 Wissenschaft 21 Witherington, Ben 175 Wofford, Susanne 174 Wright, Thomas The Passions of the Mind in Generall 171 Wyer, Robert Knowledge, Properties, and the Vertues of Herbes 194 Young, Patrick 20 Zwingli, Huldrych 36