Their Maker's Image: New Essays on John Milton [1 ed.] 9781575911663, 9781575911526

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Their Maker’s Image

Their Maker’s Image New Essays on John Milton

Edited by

Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press

© 2011 by Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp. All rights reserved. For authorization to reproduce materials in this book, by print or digital means, whether for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, contact the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-1-57591-152-6/11]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Their maker’s image: new essays on John Milton / edited by Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57591-152-6 (alk. paper) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674 —Criticism and interpretation. I. Fenton, Mary C., 1959– II. Schwartz, Louis. PR3588. T48 2011 821` .4—dc22

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This volume is dedicated in loving homage and fealty to Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt.

In Memoriam Richard J. DuRocher 1955–2010

Contents

List of Abbreviations

9

Acknowledgments

11

Introduction MARY C. FENTON AND LOUIS SCHWARTZ

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“Tears such as Angels weep”: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost RICHARD J. DUROCHER Satan’s Envy and Poetic Emulation MAGGIE KILGOUR

23 47

Waking Leucothea: An Unexplored Homeric Allusion in Paradise Lost SARAH VAN DER LAAN

63

Self-sacrifice and Heroic Martyrdom in the Aeneid and Paradise Lost DAVID J. BRADSHAW

81

God as Geometer and Architect in Paradise Lost THOMAS FESTA

93

Lycidas beyond Words: Nonverbal Signs and Material Pages in the 1645 Poems R ANDALL INGRAM

117

How Milton’s Education at Christ’s College, Cambridge Influenced Logical Styles in Paradise Lost EMMA ANNETTE WILSON

133

“Thou art sufficient to judge aright”: Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica DAVID AINSWORTH

147

The Son’s Bounded Solitude in Paradise Regained SAMUEL SMITH

161

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CONTENTS

Restoration Polemic and the Making of the Papist Milton NATHANIEL STOGDILL

177

Notes on Contributors

191

Index

193

Abbreviations

CE

Milton, John. The Works of John Milton. Edited by Frank A. Patterson et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38.

FQ

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. In Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton. New York: Longman, 1977.

PL

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. In The Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998.

PR

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. In The Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998.

YP

Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Edited by Don M. Wolf et al. 8 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82.

Chapter 3, 5, 7, Other Primary Texts Cited Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alistair Fowler. 2nd ed. New York and London: Longman, 1998.

Chapter 3, Other Primary Texts Cited Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. Homer. Odyssey. Edited by W. B. Stanford, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1959.

Chapter 4, Other Primary Texts Cited Virgil. Aeneidos. In P. Vergili Maroni Opera, edited by R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. In The Complete Poetry of John Milton, edited by John T. Shawcross. New York: Doubleday, 1963. 9

10

ABBREVIATIONS

Chapter 6, Other Primary Texts Cited Milton, John. Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (London, 1645). [references to 1645 Poems are to this book]

Acknowledgments

WE WISH TO THANK WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY’S Department of English and the excellent staff at Hunter Library; The University of Richmond’s Department of English and the excellent staff at Boatwright Memorial Library. We are especially grateful to the anonymous reader for Susquehanna Press who made very helpful comments and suggestions on the early draft of the manuscript. We are also grateful for the editorial assistance we received from WCU graduate students Heather Williams, Russell Conover, and Rain Newcomb. Finally, we thank the proofreader and editors at Susquehanna University Presses for their excellent work. We also thank the University of Pittsburgh Press for the following permissions:

“ ‘Tears such as Angels weep’: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost” by Richard J. DuRocher from Milton Studies 49, edited by Albert C. Labriola, © 2008. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. “Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusion and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost” by Sarah Van de Laan from Milton Studies 49, edited by Albert C. Labriola, © 2008. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Portions of “ ‘Thou art sufficient to judge aright’: Spiritual Reading in Aeropagitica” by David Ainsworth first appeared in Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, by David Ainsworth, © 2008. Reprinted by permission of Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

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Introduction MARY C. FENTON AND LOUIS SCHWARTZ [T]hen there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas 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. —Areopagitica

AT THE HEART OF THE BIANNUAL CONFERENCE ON John Milton in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, stands a collegial community of scholars and writers, “searching, revolving new notions and ideas.” Their homage and fealty are to the life and work of John Milton—and to each other. Since 1989, Charley Durham, Kristin Pruitt, and Kevin Donovan have organized and led the twoand-a-half day gathering of scholars from around the world, providing a generous (and generative) space for airing ideas, working out intellectual passions, and creating and maintaining important professional and personal relationships. The conference has also, perhaps more than any other professional venue in the field, invited papers not only from established and accomplished Miltonists, but from graduate students and emerging scholars. Careers have been both sustained and built. The same can be said of the eight Susquehanna University Press collections edited by Kris and Charley over the years, several of which have either won awards or contained awardwinning essays, and all of which continue to be cited regularly by scholars in the field. Each volume has presented revised and expanded versions of papers originally delivered at the conference, and some of the scholars whose work first emerged in the earlier volumes have now become established themselves. Kris and Charley accomplished all of this in part by acting in accordance with a number of unspoken commitments and rules, including a decision not to publish the same author more than twice, and to produce collections that reflect the variety of approaches and interests on display at each meeting of the conference. We have tried to honor this tradition. Thus, the ten essays we have selected (from the more than seventy presented at the 2007 Conference on John Milton) reflect an array of approaches as well as a number of both familiar and not-so-familiar names.

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Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton, in other words, constitutes our own act of homage and fealty to the makers of the Conference—Charley, Kris, and Kevin. We hope it presents a fitting image of what their intellectual and collegial generosity has made possible. *********

The quotation we have taken for our title comes from book 11 of Paradise Lost (line 515), as part of the difficult conversation that Adam and Michael have after the vision of the Lazar house. In response to the image of disease and human suffering presented in the vision, Adam laments that humanity was ever created if its only fate is to suffer so horribly, and he wonders why humans cannot simply retain their “Divine similitude,” exempt from the pain of physical disintegration. Michael explains that the human ability to reflect the “Maker’s Image” depends on their obedience to Him, rather than to their own appetites. The image of the divine forsook them when, in serving appetite, they disfigured their own “likeness,” a failure in a sense not just to revere God, but to revere their own resemblance to him. This moment is a typically mixed call to both the humility and the self-concern it takes to pay full homage and fealty to something understood as both external and integral to the self. Punning on different senses of “like,” and suggesting how intricately resemblance and desire are entangled for Milton, Michael’s admonition promises dreadful consequences for those who mistake the call of what is within as a call to pursue only what the embodied self alone likes. The reward for following the inner likeness properly, however, is the power to make manifest divine beauty itself in human form. The essays in this volume, each in their own ways, engage with Milton’s ideas about the creative outcomes of such homage and imaging. Some reflect on Milton himself as “maker,” a creator and re-creator— sometimes a smasher—of inherited images. Others consider what is at stake in the act of reading or receiving Milton’s own creations. Still others track the way both the human and the divine authors themselves get imaged in the works. Several of the essays do all three at once. The first four essays consider these matters by paying attention to Milton’s remaking of classical sources in Paradise Lost. The next three essays each address the act and the implications of making something material—a world, an elegy, or an epic. The final three essays, all in different ways, deal with how images of the self are made and reconstructed in the processes of reading and writing. At the end of her essay on the role played by invidia in Paradise Lost, Maggie Kilgour remarks on a beautiful moment in a classic work of criticism by Michael Lieb. It is a moment when the critic is so moved with admiration for his

INTRODUCTION

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subject that “for a moment” all threat of “envy disappears, as emulation, praise, and creativity all merge triumphantly.” At their best, each of the essays in this collection strives toward such a moment of “expansive generosity” in the face of something strange or previously unexplained in Milton’s work. They are also responses to an invitation from Kris, Charley, and Kevin to come together and talk about whatever it is that might seem urgent or interesting to a reader of Milton. We hope that together they represent, in turn, an invitation of their own, and that they inspire future acts of homage and productive argument. *********

The opening essay of Their Maker’s Image, representing an esteemed and established critical voice in Milton studies, is an expanded version of Richard DuRocher’s keynote address from the 2007 conference: “‘Tears such as Angels weep’: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost.” The essay makes an important contribution to recent and ongoing discussions about the character of Milton’s God, and more directly, about the idea of a “passible God,” one who experiences and expresses powerful emotions, especially anger. DuRocher frames his discussion of the passions with attention to three key allusions in Paradise Lost to Vergil’s famous question about Juno’s rage in the Aeneid: “tantaene animis caelestibus irae” (1.11) [Is there such anger among celestial spirits?]. He argues that the three allusions create “a kind of triptych of artistic responses to, or variations upon, Vergil’s original question.” Drawing on both classical and Christian thought about the passions (he makes a special case for the importance of Lactantius’s tract, The Wrath of God), DuRocher argues that Milton affirms the worth of the passions “dramatically and centrally by exploring their workings in both human and divine hearts.” He concludes by noting that for Vergil, “unresolved suffering or passion” on the part of both gods and human beings served as a “fascinating focus or trigger for epic conflict.” For Milton, these striking moments of unnerving emotion are all directed toward the ultimate revelation of God’s providence. Milton’s epic plot, like Vergil’s, is in other words triggered by difficult, even negative, emotions, but Milton’s has a positive and productive TELOS: the affirmation of a divine justice balanced with mercy. DuRocher’s essay ends with an examination of how Satan manipulated Eve’s understanding of God by substituting a vision of divine envy for Vergil’s original portrayal of divine wrath. Maggie Kilgour’s “Satan’s Envy and Poetic Emulation” offers a complementary reading of the epic that responds to and expands upon DuRocher’s discussion of the emotions by asking readers to consider, specifically, how the emotion of envy not only makes Satan himself “tick,” but how in impelling Satan to rebellion, envy

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sets the entire plot of Paradise Lost in motion. While Christian tradition has tended to treat envy as primarily negative, Kilgour reminds us that the emotion had important positive valences in the classical traditions upon which Milton also drew. She skillfully examines the classical poetic treatment of invidia (especially as it appears in Ovid), showing how it provided Milton with a complex and nuanced approach to the relationship between envy and creative emulation. She suggests, especially in her reading of the allegory of Sin and Death, that creativity and envy are so “dynamically entwined” for Milton that they are often as difficult to discriminate from one another as the good and evil that leaped into the world together from the rind of one apple tasted. Kilgour claims, however, that Milton wished to “train his readers in the fine and endless art of subtle discrimination,” and her essay takes that challenge seriously, revealing what Milton saw as the creative powers hidden in what we usually think of as “invidious.” The next two essays each consider the importance of ignored or underappreciated classical allusions in Paradise Lost and offer important insights, not only into the possible meanings of Milton’s text, but also into our understanding of his practice with the figure of allusion. In “Waking Leucothea: An Unexplored Homeric Allusion in Paradise Lost 11,” Sarah Van der Laan provides an original account of how allusions to the Odyssey frame the redemptive plot of Paradise Lost, lending authority to Milton’s Arminian argument. After discussing how book 3’s opening scene “imitates and revises the opening of the Odyssey,” Van der Laan argues for the theological import of the Miltonic narrator’s allusion to Homer’s Leukothea in his description of the penitent Adam and Eve. Van der Laan surveys Leukothea’s importance in earlier discussions about Homer’s understanding of the relationship between the human and divine, showing that the commentaries widely understood the Odyssey as a text presenting human free will as heroic, acting in “partnership with the divine.” She argues that “the reappearance of Odyssean material” in Paradise Lost’s book 11, at the transitional point from a scene of divine council back to the human scene of the penitent Adam and Eve, “invites us to return to the divine council of book 3” and “to read the two councils against each other.” In Van der Laan’s account, the framing comparison allows us to see more fully how the events of books 10 and 11 “fall into place” in ways “consistent with both Arminian theology and the human dignity—even heroism—we seek in epic.” She concludes that the allusion also “prompts the reader to explore the Odyssey for illustrations of and reflections on the reader’s own salvation,” suggesting finally that the allusion allows us to imagine as heroic our own “efforts to understand and participate in the divine project” God has designed for humanity. Her reading inspires appreciation for the larger argument about the surprising way Homer was used in the seventeenth century to gloss theological debates.

INTRODUCTION

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David Bradshaw’s essay, “Self-sacrifice and Heroic Martyrdom in the Aeneid and Paradise Lost,” also looks at the poetic sources Milton used and fused in making his epic. Bradshaw shows how Milton made use of Vergil’s story of Nisus and Euryalus to differentiate between a “selfabnegating sacrifice that serves the public good” and a “self-serving abandonment of duty that gratifies personal desire.” Bradshaw’s close textual analysis centers on two scenes in Paradise Lost: the Son’s offer to stand in place of humankind in order to expiate our capital punishment (3.203– 71) and Eve’s plea that she suffer the sentence of death in place of Adam (10.909–46). Bradshaw asks provocative and open-ended questions about why Milton engaged the Aeneid. Did he do so to present a radical revision of what he denigrates in Vergil as less heroic than the “Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” of which he, instead, claims to sing? Or did he do so, as Bradshaw asks, only to reconfirm misgivings that Virgil himself entertained about counterproductive behavior? The next two essays concern themselves with how things are made, and then with the artistic and theological implications of that making. First, Thomas Festa, in “God as Geometer and Architect in Paradise Lost,” places Milton’s account of divine creativity in the larger intellectual context of seventeenth-century attempts to confront ancient questions concerning “space, time, and causation” in new ways related to contemporary “discoveries in mechanistic philosophy.” Festa claims that Milton’s assimilation of “two distinct but related traditions of thought: one that represent[ed] God as a geometer and another that depict[ed] him as an architect,” participated in the “massive scope” of such contemporary inquiries. Festa’s etymological analyses, as well as his inquiries into contemporary theological, philosophical, and iconographic discourses, provide rich insight into Milton’s poetic choices. His essay both raises and answers significant questions about the tensions at play between the imperatives of theodicy and poetics, as well as the various contradictions and inconsistencies that many critics have found in Milton’s epic. Festa concludes that “the Creator’s attributes together form a composite whole, but [that] the representation this composite offers is at times vertiginous, dissonant, unaccommodating—and in need of elaborate justification.” Regarding the making of a material object of a very different sort, Randall Ingram’s “Lycidas beyond Words: Nonverbal Signs and Material Pages in the 1645 Poems” considers some of the nonverbal, not necessarily authorial features of Milton’s first published collection of poems that have as yet been unremarked upon in the criticism. His thoughtful inquiry asks important questions about just which bits of data can and cannot be said to be significant in the literary analysis of an early modern book of poems. Beginning with the assumption that “the intelligibility or unintelligibility of bibliographic features depends on the interpretive frame through

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which the details are viewed,” Ingram makes a number of fascinating and original observations about the way in which Lycidas was placed on the printed pages of the 1645 volume, paying special attention to the significance of the last eight lines that appeared originally on a separate, final page, followed by the first blank leaf to appear in the volume since its title page. Ingram reminds us of the collaborative nature of seventeenth-century printing and also makes a strong case for how an old printed text, in collaboration with an attentive and historically informed modern reader, might be said to “make meaning not only through its verbal details, but also through the nonverbal details of its material setting.” Ingram engages with the strangeness of what has become deceptively familiar, and with how one can bring a new (or recovered) framework to bear to make possible a new understanding. Emma Annette Wilson’s “How Milton’s Education at Christ’s College, Cambridge Influenced Logical Styles in Paradise Lost” addresses Milton’s role as both reader and writer in the process of making his epic poem. Wilson accentuates the role that Milton’s early studies in logic played, and she argues that a pragmatic understanding and application of logical methods and texts helps reveal Milton’s rhetorical strategies in characters’ speeches of Paradise Lost. She focuses on Michael and Satan at the start of the war in heaven (6.262—95), analyzing their contrasting rhetorical performances by drawing on what a typical seventeenth-century student would have been taught to do and notice. Using a range of print and manuscript sources, including such paratextual materials as student marginalia, Wilson provides a lively and instructive account of how Milton’s training in logic and rhetoric formed the foundation for the way he used language, specifically Ramist logical figures, to express the “theological status” of these two main angels in Paradise Lost. The final three essays in the collection pay close attention to how the self may be perceived, made, or remade—in what or whose image, with what intention or goal—in the process of reading, writing, and contemplation. In “‘Thou are sufficient to judge aright’: Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica,” David Ainsworth accentuates the transformations that reading makes possible in the spiritual formation or reformation of the individual. While Ainsworth also argues for the subversively radical and revolutionary function of Milton’s tract, he more importantly concentrates on how Milton argues that licensing endangered the process of what he calls “spiritual reading”: “a strenuous and rigorous form of worship, founded upon the belief that the Spirit within reveals the truth of all texts only to a reader who reads carefully and critically.” Ainsworth urges modern readers not to conclude that “Milton’s decision to subordinate civil liberty to faith in the divine” was “a dismissal or rejection of either books or of the value of liberty.” Instead, he suggests that Areopagitica offers a

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“dynamic vision of reading, writing, and publishing,” in which books act as “prophesies and propitiations” on behalf of their authors and “intermediaries” for their readers, increasing their “fitness” and “sharpening their receptiveness” not only to the “divine Spirit,” but to the requirements of their own liberty. The making of the spiritual self in both individual and communal contexts is, in Ainsworth’s interpretation, the ultimate aim and responsibility of reading. Also focusing on self-identity, self-construction, and self-knowledge, Samuel Smith’s “The Son’s Bounded Solitude in Paradise Regained” contributes not only to recent critical conversations about the nature of Jesus’s redemptive role, but to discussion about the role of relationships. In his emphasis on the ways in which the Son’s time in the desert prepares him for his “difficult and sacrificial work as the suffering Savior of humankind,” Smith accentuates the importance and the very nature of the Son’s solitude, reminding readers that solitude is a humanist virtue and thus how solitude becomes the way in which Milton establishes Jesus’s “full humanity.” Smith utilizes John Barbour’s consideration of Augustine’s Confessions as a useful paradigm for talking about—and discriminating between—the modes of solitude that Barbour calls either “bounded” or “unbounded.” Smith distinguishes Adam’s “unbounded” solitude in Eden from Jesus’s solitude in the desert, which is instead “bounded” by space, time, and other relationships. He argues that the “discipline of bounded solitude” provides for Jesus “the deep silence” out of which emerges the “still, small voice” of his Father’s full intentions. Smith also presents a new reading of Jesus’s relationship with his mother, suggesting that the reunion promised by the poem’s fi nal lines will bring “the Son’s bounded and beneficial solitude to a close” by rejoining him with “his human community fully prepared to begin his redemptive mission.” Finally, Nathaniel Stogdill’s “Restoration Polemic and the Making of the Papist Milton” offers a fascinating new perspective on the strange afterlife of Milton’s reputation as a polemicist in the religious and political turmoil of the period following his death. That such a staunch antiCatholic as Milton should later be branded as a papist is an odd thing, but true nonetheless, and Stogdill traces the sometimes bizarre story of how the meaning of Milton’s name underwent a series of changes as it got buffeted from one side to the other in the course of later religious and political controversies. Stogdill shows how this was especially the case in the wake of the Popish Plot, when Milton’s earlier “associations with the political and religious turmoil of previous decades aligned him with what seemed to some a crypto-Catholic threat to an uncertain succession and fragile social order.” A “papist Milton” came to seem “an especially effective and flexible metaphor for the dangers of dissent” themselves. Stogdill

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provides a glimpse of an interestingly unstable moment in the making of what would only later be stably codified as “the Miltonic.” The homage and fealty of these essays is not to any particular or received notion or idea of what Milton can be said to mean, but to the kind of rigorous and imaginative intellectual work that expands our sense of what might be said in that regard. The authors in this collection have tried “all things” to find what might compel reasoned “convincement”—even if and when it has meant altering a meaning that at some earlier point seemed fixed and certain. That such tasks are by their nature incomplete (at least “in this world”) is all to the good, making for both a lively world and a lively, ongoing conversation. It is, in fact, faithful to the communal pursuit of truth, in all of its frictions, complexities, and changing configurations, that Milton urged us so powerfully to pursue and for which the Conference on John Milton has always stood. The essays in this volume, furthermore, whether conceived originally in collegial conversation or in the musing and searching context of a classroom discussion, were ultimately given shape by each author alone under studious lamps. The conference is the place where the products of such “bounded solitude” have regularly ventured out to discover or return to a community of like (and unlike) minds, the “nice and subtle happiness in the choice of [our] associates” that Kris Pruitt, Charley Durham, and Kevin Donovan have made possible every two years. And since there is no reason for such associations simply to end after a few days in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, we hope this volume can at least give the conversations that went on at the 2007 conference some ongoing life. It is, in any case, in that spirit that we look forward to the next conference and the next volume.

Their Maker’s Image

“Tears such as Angels weep”: Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost RICHARD J. DUROCHER

SERVIUS, IN HIS FOURTH- CENTURY COMMENTARY on the Aeneid, declared the genre of Vergil’s poem to be heroicum, or, as we would say, epic, for this reason: “It is heroic because it consists of divine and human characters, containing truth mixed with fiction.”1 Thus it was perhaps inevitable that Milton, in his heroic poem containing representations of God, angels, and human beings, would have depicted his divine characters anthropomorphically–that is, in recognizably human form. It is a short step from there to depicting those spirits anthropopathetically–that is, as displaying recognizable human emotions. My essay seeks to prove that, far from denying, avoiding, downplaying, or explaining away the epic tradition’s reliance on the passions, Milton designed his epic to extend and accentuate this feature of the genre. Let me spell out the following three distinct yet interlocking claims that I aim to substantiate in what follows. First, through a series of allusions to the Aeneid, Milton emphasizes the analogy between his God and Vergil’s impassioned gods, particularly Juno, thus forcing readers to observe the similarities and isolate the differences between these deities. Second, the character called God in Paradise Lost, who is at times an angry God, a wrathful God, an “incensed Deity” (3.187), as well as a loving Father, is always and everywhere a God of emotion, and in Michael Lieb’s term, a “passible” God.2 Third, while the emotions that we see God display in the poem are recognizably human, God’s emotions, lacking the imperfections of fallen agents, are superior in quality to ours. These “uncontaminated” or “perfected” emotions of God appear both in the character of the Father and of the Son, the “Divine Similitude” who best expresses God, and best mediates between human beings and God. De Doctrina Christiana’s chapter on God, entitled “De Deo,” articulates and defends this particular notion of divine passibility. With its distinctive mélange of literalist biblical hermeneutics, insistence on the concept of accommodation, and affirmation of divine passibility, the chapter might be summarized as follows: God feels, and he feels better. Similar affirmations of the passions appear both in Paradise Lost and in Milton’s other works. My concern throughout this essay is to show that Milton affirmed the worth of the passions, and that in Paradise Lost, he dramatically and centrally does so by exploring their workings in both human and divine hearts. 23

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At the start of the Aeneid, Vergil poses a question the rest of his epic will explore: “tantaene animis caelestibus irae” (1.11).3 (Is there such anger among celestial spirits?; cf. Allen Mandelbaum’s blank verse version: “Can such resentment hold the minds of gods?”).4 For Vergil, this question arises from Juno’s destructive and all but unrelenting wrath directed at Aeneas and the Trojans. As Vergil reminds his readers in the verse paragraph following this question, Juno had reasons for opposing Aeneas that we can categorize as historical and mythological. Historically, Juno was associated with Carthage, where she was worshipped and identified with Tanit, the supreme Carthaginian deity.5 Moreover, Juno envisioned an empire that would patently threaten Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. Juno “tenditque fovetque” (1.18)–she intends and favors—Carthage to be this empire’s capital city. No less significantly, Juno also figures in the mythological legend known during the Renaissance as “the judgment of Paris.” In the Aeneid, Vergil writes that Juno feels the “iniuria” (1.27) done to her by Paris, because that son of Priam awarded the title of “the fairest” to Venus, rather than to Juno or Minerva. While this motive may seem petty, it certainly accounts for Juno’s hostility toward Paris and the rest of the Trojans, and doubly so toward Aeneas, both a Trojan and the son of Venus. Hera, Juno’s Greek equivalent in the Iliad, likewise lends supernatural support to the Achaeans and opposes the Trojans. Certainly these motives explain why Juno stirs up a storm to wreck Aeneas’s fleet in book 1 of the Aeneid. Inexplicably yet illustrative of Vergil’s opening question, Juno reiterates her intense enmity throughout the work. For example, she calls on the fiends from the underworld, Allecto and the Dirae, to destroy the peace treaty between Trojans and Latins in the latter half of the epic, even when such a peace would serve her own interests. As late as the final book of the Aeneid, Vergil’s opening question remains unanswered. Indeed, it returns in an anguished outburst by the Vergilian narrator in book 12, as the native Latins and immigrant Trojans are slaying each other in combat: Quis mihi nunc tot acerba deus, quis carmine caedes diversas obitumque ducum, quos aequore toto inque vicem nunc Turnus agit, nunc Troius heros, expediat? tanton placuit concurrere motu, Iuppiter, aeterna gentis in pace futuras? (12.500–504) What god can now unfold for me so many horrors, who in song can tell such diverse deaths, and the fall of captains, whom now Turnus, now the Trojan hero, drive in turn across the field? Was it your will, Jupiter, that with such a shock nations should clash that in the future would dwell in everlasting peace?

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Knowing that Rome and Carthage will continue to battle in a series of bloody wars, Vergil’s readers would find adumbrations of recent history in the bloodletting between Turnus’s and Aeneas’s armies. As even Jupiter has proven unwilling or unable to quell Juno’s rage, Vergil’s divine machinery leaves one wondering why the high gods mindlessly allow such human tragedy. As Richard Strier has recently observed, in Paradise Lost, Milton repeatedly broods upon and refers to Vergil’s resonant question—“Is there such anger among celestial spirits?”6 Vergil’s question first reappears in Milton’s comments on Satan’s Mount Niphates speech in book 4 (114–28). In this passage, the Miltonic narrator not only specifies the vehement passions Satan undergoes as ire, envy, and despair but also labels them as “distempers foul” and “perturbations.” The Vergilian echo comes in the narrator’s final comment: “For heav’nly minds from such distempers foul / Are ever clear” (4.118–19). In other words, to answer Vergil, truly heavenly spirits are not plagued by the kind of perturbations Satan has just demonstrated. Echoing Vergil’s question a second time during Raphael’s account of the war in heaven, Milton makes the angelic narrator pause to ask: “In heav’nly spirits could such perverseness dwell?” (6.788). In this context, the question underscores the perverse response of the rebel angels, who envy rather than admire the Son’s renewal of the war-torn face of heaven. Finally, Milton recalls Vergil’s question a third time in book 9 by having Satan echo and adapt it during his temptation of Eve. After a series of questions about the command not to eat the fruit, Satan asks: “Or is it envy, and can envy dwell / In heav’nly breasts?” (9.729–30). Thus, in sequence, these three allusions begin with one in which Milton as narrator points out Satan’s emotional corruption; continue with a second in which an interior narrator, Raphael, echoes Vergil’s amazed wonder at the perverse passions of heavenly spirits; and conclude with one in which Satan slyly shifts the focus of Vergil’s question so as to impugn God’s motives. Thus, Milton’s allusions constitute a kind of triptych of artistic responses to, or variations upon, Vergil’s original question. In addition to being inherently interesting, Milton’s allusions to Vergil raise several wide-ranging issues. One is the general role of Vergil’s Aeneid in Milton’s epic. To put it plainly: Why should Milton refer to the Aeneid at all? Does his poem depend in some sense on Vergil’s? To begin to address this issue, let us first recognize the mixed, intermingled quality of Miltonic allusion generally. While the presence of Vergil’s epic is palpable and strong, a variety of other voices and texts–from the ancients to Milton’s contemporaries, from Genesis to Galileo–vie for the reader’s attention. In the three passages under consideration, the allusions to Vergil are “wov’n close” (sonnet 11, line 2) with other texts, including chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah, Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, the Psalms, Quintus Curtius’s History of Alexander, Homer’s Iliad, and Spenser’s Faerie

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Queene. In light of the multivalent or promiscuous quality of Miltonic allusion, some critics might question whether it is worthwhile to isolate a single dyadic relationship—Milton and Vergil. Nevertheless, the pattern of allusions to the Aeneid suggests something distinctive about Milton’s literary engagement with Vergil. Beyond the allusions I will closely examine, scholars could point to others, among them, Aeneas’s descent to Avernus in Aeneid 6, recalled in Milton’s announced descent to Earth under Urania’s tutelage in the proem to book 7 of Paradise Lost. Since, in his head note on “The Verse” added in the fourth issue of Paradise Lost in 1668, Milton names Homer and Vergil as precedents for his use of “heroic verse without rhyme,” those writers deserve to be seen, at the very least, as technical models for Milton’s poetic practice. I side with critics who have seen Milton’s relationship with Homer and Vergil as more than that, specifically as a competition for lasting fame or a debate over what actions or passions readers should most value. Consider the jaunty conclusion of Samuel Barrow’s Latin poem “In Paradisum Amissam,” written for the second edition of Paradise Lost in 1674: “Anyone who reads Milton’s poem,” he writes, “will think Homer sang only of frogs, Vergil only of gnats.”7 This is a playful assessment of Milton’s putative superiority to his epic precursors. More seriously, Barrow reminds us of the fame that has come in his day to be associated with Homer and Vergil, a fame that he believes should now pass to Milton for his epic achievement. In other words, Vergil and Homer possess cultural capital in 1674, and Milton enters this economy by out-valuing them. Because Barrow writes his tribute in Latin hexameter verse, he seems to regard Vergil, more than Homer, as Milton’s main competitor for poetic fame. One way that Barrow seeks to value Milton over his rivals in the epic genre is by emphasizing Paradise Lost’s encyclopedic reach as “the story of all things,” as Northrop Frye has argued.8 Another way is by celebrating the superiority of the passions Milton celebrates: the “passion and rage” of the warring rebel angels are easily outdone, in Barrow’s phrase, by the “reconciling love towards men garnered in Christ” (Fowler’s translation, 52–53). My sense of what underlies Milton’s emulation of Vergil is that the Roman poet had done something in epic that was extremely useful for Milton: he had created an epic in which unrelenting passion is what the poem is all about. Of course, poets since Homer had represented their characters as seething with emotion: the first word of the Iliad is Μήνιν, or “wrath,” as the theme of that epic is the wrath of Achilles. By the end of the Iliad, Achilles, having achieved revenge for what he regards as an insult, gives up his wrath. Yet I would argue that Vergil radically transforms Homeric passion by showing his characters, despite their best efforts, ultimately succumbing to their passions. W. R. Johnson, in his book Darkness Visible, contrasts Homer’s and Vergil’s treatment of emotions by comparing

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two scenes: Homer’s episode from Odyssey 8, which shows Odysseus weeping as he hears the bard in King Alcinous’s palace singing part– Odysseus’s part–of the Trojan epic cycle, and Vergil’s celebrated episode from Aeneid 1 in which Aeneas weeps to see, in the temple Dido has built to Juno, monuments representing events from the Trojan War. Johnson masterfully differentiates between these two scenes: In the scene in the Odyssey, the hero’s tears are a means to an end: not only does Odysseus’ attempt to hide his tears say something about him as a human being, it also says something about him to Alcinous. In short, we share with Alcinous the sight of Odysseus weeping, so that his tears become a part of the narrative structure. In Vergil’s scene, on the other hand, the particular tears of Aeneas serve to emphasize what is in fact the artistic content of this scene, namely, lacrimae rerum. [For Vergil] the emotions of the characters are not ways of revealing the characters, who, in turn, reveal the muthos in their words and actions; here both characters and muthos exist to reveal emotion and meditations on emotion.9

The bitter ending of the Aeneid, likewise, is less a revelation of Aeneas’s character or of the founding of Rome than of passion itself, at once intense, unrelenting, and self-destructive. Seeing that Turnus is wearing the belt of his fallen young friend, Pallas, Aeneas sacrifices Turnus, slaughtering him out of frustration and anger: in Vergil’s words, “furiis accensus et ira / terribilis” (12.946–47), ablaze with fury, and terrible in his wrath. R. D. Williams points out that readers fully expect “pius Aeneas” to show mercy to Turnus, both because of Vergil’s frequent reminders of his hero’s concern for piety and honor, and because of the background scene at the end of the Iliad, in which Achilles relents and returns Hektor’s body to his father.10 While Aeneas may be justified in sacrificing Turnus, Vergil chooses to end his poem not on a note of reconciliation—which Jupiter and Juno have achieved in heaven by this point—but with an eruption of vengeance, resulting in tragic loss. It is this Vergil, the poet who showed the human cost of epic warfare, whom I believe Milton recognized, imitated, and struggled to outdo in Paradise Lost. When in the proem to book 9, Milton highlights what is new and distinctive about his epic, he does so by contrasting his emphasis on “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (9.31–32) with the emotional architecture of Homer’s, and especially Vergil’s, epic arguments, describing “the rage / Of Turnus,” “or Neptune’s ire or Juno’s” (9.16–18). Milton thereby acknowledges that these passions have endured in the epic tradition, even as he argues that the Christian forms of emotion make his epic more heroic than those of the pagans. As critics have observed, Milton turns inward, interiorizing the often-external focus of earlier epic narratives.11 In so doing, Milton advances the epic not by denying the presence

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of ire or rage among his characters but by re-presenting these emotions as motives that need to be “rightly tempered,” or brought under the subject’s control. Moreover, the passions, no longer seen as solely valuable in themselves, are redirected in Milton’s epic toward a worthy goal. As the chief example, the Son displays fortitude and patiently accepts the promise of martyrdom in order to redeem humankind. To the extent that they are able, both Adam and Eve and readers of Paradise Lost are called to practice fortitude and patience, to accept “suffering for Truth’s sake” (12.569), and, if necessary, martyrdom. Intertwined with our sense of Vergil as a presence within Milton’s epic come questions about the extent to which Milton respected or was open to the pagan classics generally, questions scholars have addressed either biographically, or culturally, or in more theoretical terms through concepts such as “allusion” or “intertextuality.” In an article entitled “Allusion” in the March 2007 issue of PMLA, Gregory Machacek attempts to reconcile the more traditional study of allusions and echo (traceable back at least as far as Macrobius’s cataloguing of Vergil’s borrowings from Homer) and the poststructuralist concern with intertextuality, held to be a constitutive feature of all texts and thus unconcerned with authorial guidance.12 Such a reconciliation does not seem viable, however, for the reason that a genuine belief in intertextuality would eliminate authorial agency in the intentional verbal signaling of one author (if there were “authors”) to another. The historical term used during the European Renaissance for one writer’s verbal echoing of another, imitatio, seems to be the most useful and appropriate term to describe Milton’s verbal interactions with Vergil. Certainly Milton was trained, from his days at St. Paul’s School, to imitate the words, meter, and literary form of various precursor texts, the preponderance of them in Latin, and the lingua franca of seventeenthcentury Europe. In his groundbreaking study, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, Thomas M. Greene maps the literary uses of imitatio during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, France, and England. “Imitatio,” Greene writes, “was a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground; it contained implications for the theory of style, the philosophy of history, and for conceptions of the self.”13 Under the umbrella of imitatio, Greene identifies a range of more or less significant practices, from simple copying of another writer’s words to far more searching interactions. At first sight, Paradise Lost appears to involve the simple and pejorative imitative posture Renaissance rhetoricians such as Poliziano called contaminatio, the random and injurious openness of a work to earlier texts. On reflection, however, Greene argues, Milton’s allusions embody a strategy Greene calls “heuristic imitation,” in which allusions overtly announce “their derivation from the subtexts they carry with them, but having done

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that, they proceed to distance themselves from the subtexts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed.”14 Although Greene does not supply a Miltonic example of heuristic imitation, one that readily comes to mind is the allusion to Homer, lovingly recalled but then severely qualified, in Milton’s account of the fall of Mulciber: Men call’d him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the Crystal Battlements: from Morn To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summer’s day; . . . thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before. (1.740–48)

While Milton’s belief in scriptural veracity makes the Homeric account of Mulciber chronologically erroneous, the vibrancy of Homeric narrative, closely imitated in these lines, enjoys an extended life through Milton’s allusion. Overall, through the far-reaching strategy of heuristic imitation, Greene writes, “the text [becomes] the locus of a struggle between two rhetorical or semiotic systems [two eras or two civilizations] that are vulnerable to one another and whose conflict cannot easily be resolved.”15 Milton’s allusions to Vergil involve just such an uneasy conflict between two mundi significantes, two signifying worlds. Having considered Vergil’s role in Milton’s epic and the nature of the poets’ interaction, the last broad issue this essay addresses is how Milton understood and regarded the emotions. Milton’s prose works can help orient us toward his poetic representations of the passions. Areopagitica provides clear evidence of Milton’s basic stance toward them. In opposing those who “complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress,” Milton argues that rational creatures need to be free to choose, even in the face of what he calls “a provoking object.” Milton’s brooding over temptation generally and Adam’s sin specifically show the relevance of this argument to Paradise Lost. The argument in Areopagitica leads to an overarching view of the “passions” in the following ringing, rhetorical question: Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of vertu? (YP 2:527)

Thus, the passions are divine endowments with the potential to lead to human moral good. The challenge, of course, is how to temper the passions without succumbing to them. The Reason of Church Government

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tells us that the tempering of passion falls under the province of poetry, specifically that poetry has the power “to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune” (YP 1:816–17). Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes tells us that “the passions” are not to be suppressed but instead “reduce[d] to just measure” (Hughes, 549) by seeing or reading them “well imitated” through the literary medium of tragedy. In these passages, Milton treats the “passions”–together with the “affections”–as desires or mental states that are potentially dangerous but ultimately controllable. Properly managed, they are even such stuff as virtue is made of. Milton does not draw a clear line between the affections and the passions as different entities. In thus using the terms interchangeably, he varies from thinkers following Thomas Aquinas, whose model of the soul contrasted the passions as movements of the lower, or animal, soul, with the affections, which were believed to be acts of the higher or rational soul.16 Milton obviously applied to his poetry much of what he learned about the passions from his personal relationships–particularly, one imagines, from the periods of trial and confusion he experienced. Taking a variety of biographical approaches, scholars have offered searching readings of Milton’s idiosyncratic tempering of the passions.17 Together with his personal experience, Milton may have learned about the passions from his reading about this subject. In Areopagitica, Milton describes “the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read” (YP 2:517). Indeed, Milton did not make a systematic study of the passions but gathered his thoughts about them from a variety of texts. From both ancient and contemporary authorities, Milton had available a variety of learned schematizations of and speculations on the passions. Aristotle’s schematization in book 2 of the Rhetoric is the point of origin for many later discussions. Among the Romans, Lucretius’s De rerum natura provides not only an atomic physics but also a comprehensive “therapy of desire,” in Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, for how to manage the passions in order to enjoy a complete, relatively untroubled life.18 Other writers deal more narrowly if deeply with a single passion, as does Seneca, the Roman playwright, who wrote a complete treatise entitled “De ira” on wrath. In his opening summary, Seneca describes wrath as being essentially violent and having its being in an onrush of resentment, leading sages to call it “a temporary madness.”19 Yet other texts with which Milton was familiar emphasize the positive status of wrath. Perhaps chief among them is the tract by the fourth-century North African church father, Lactantius, entitled De ira dei (On the Wrath of God). We know that Milton read Lactantius, and, as I hope to show, Milton’s treatment of this emotion in Paradise Lost closely parallels Lactantius’s arguments in this tract. In general, the “authorities” on the passions or affections available to Milton based their claims about the emotions either on Aristotle or other writers,

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whose accounts were not scientific or experimentally based. One exception is that Milton may have read and made some use of René Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, published in 1649, which is among the first works to use a physiological base for its psychology. But the scientific study of the emotions as a secular phenomenon did not begin in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century.20 For Milton, the “passions” and the “affections” were inextricably bound up with Christian theology and belief. For this reason, stressing Milton’s affinities with the modern scientific method is unlikely to deliver a complete, accurate understanding of his epic. While I will for convenience use the single, modern, secular term “the emotions” to refer to the passions, affects, and feelings, Milton always represents those entities within the sacred context of Judeo-Christian theology, speculation, and belief.21 Logically, a key text deserving attention in this regard is Milton’s treatise, De Doctrina Christiana. Various “affections” and “passions” are discussed throughout the tractate, often in positive ways. De Doctrina Christiana not only lists fear, for example, as essential to devout affection for God but also includes a chapter on how to regulate or control the affections. Perhaps the most significant discussion of the feelings appears in book 1, chapter 2, the chapter entitled “De Deo.” Granting that God is beyond human comprehension, Milton acknowledges that we will nonetheless form mental images of the deity. Thus, he recommends that the “safest” way to proceed is “to form an image of God in our minds which corresponds to his representation and description of himself in the sacred writings” (YP 6:133). According to De Doctrina Christiana, then, our best way is to “form our ideas [about God] with scripture as a model, for that is the way in which he has offered himself to our contemplation” (YP 6:134). Taking this approach, Milton urges that we accept scripture’s portrayal of a fully passible God, a God of feeling: Affectus enim in viro bono boni sunt et virtutibus pares, in Deo sancti: si post sex dierum operam quieti refici, Exod. Xxxi.17. si metuere indignationem ab inimico. Deut. Xxxii.27. dicitur Deus, credamus dolere quod dolet; credamus eo refici quo refectus est; id metuere quod metuit, non esse infra Deum. (DDC 1.2; CE 14:34)22 For the affections which in a good man are good, and are equal to virtues, in God are holy. If after the work of six days it is said of God that “he rested and was refreshed,” Exod. 31.17, if it be said that “he feared the wrath of the enemy,” Deut. 32.27, let us believe that it is not beneath the dignity of God to grieve for what he grieves, or to be refreshed by what refreshes him, or to fear what he fears.

The God revealed in scripture is, as De Doctrina Christiana shows, a God who experiences a variety of emotions, including grief and fear. God, this

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passage asserts, not only possesses all the affections that a good human being does, but in God’s possession, these virtues become holy. According to this argument, the affections are both affirmed and sanctified. This same paragraph from De Doctrina Christiana, however, includes two caveats or qualifications to guide one’s understanding of God’s emotional life. The first caveat has to do with anthropopatheia, “a Figure that attributes those things to God which bee proper to men, as in humane affections senses or members”:23 Hic igitur Ανθρωποπαθεια (quam figuram Grammatici ad excusandas poetarum de suo Iove nugas olim excogitarunt) Theologis, opinor non est opus; scriptura sacra sine dubio, hoc satis cavit, ne quid vel ipsa indecorum aut indignum Deo scriberet, vel Deum de semetipso loquentem induceret. (CE 14:32) In my opinion, then, there is no need for a Theologian to employ Anthropopatheia, a figure invented by the Grammarians to excuse the nonsense of the poets in time past about Jove; without doubt sufficient care has been taken that the sacred scriptures contain nothing unsuitable to God or unworthy of him, and that God says nothing that detracts from himself.

A sense of how the “grammarians” or classical scholars used the device “to excuse” the pagan gods is needed to grasp Milton’s attitude toward anthopopatheia. For example, Porphyry, the third-century scholiast, defended Homer from an objection raised by an unknown critic. Homer sang that the god Ares, sitting on high Olympus, was unaware that his son had been killed in battle. Porphyry responds: The question is asked how Ares, inasmuch as he is a god, didn’t know about his son. The answer is that in Homer the gods, being understood in physical terms, appear in human guise; for differing from men only in their immortality, they are subject to the same passions.24

In light of such defenses, it is strange that Milton’s passage rejects the trope of anthropopatheia as irrelevant or unnecessary, in the author’s view, to depictions of God in scripture. In its very structure, the sentence from De Doctrina contrasts the inappropriate anthropopatheia, better used to explain away the pagan poets’ absurdities about the pagan gods, with the appropriate approach to God taken in the Bible, which, Milton alleges, needs no such assistance. Milton’s dismissal of anthropopatheia, John Carey notes, runs counter to the acceptance of the device by both Calvin and Ames.25 Both reformers find anthropopatheia consistent with the notion of accommodating divine mysteries to human understanding. Given Milton’s affirmation of the existence and goodness of God’s affections

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in the passage examined above, how can Milton now declare this trope unnecessary? Michael Lieb solves this dilemma elegantly by recognizing a paradox: “Milton appears initially to dismiss the notion of divine passibility,” Lieb writes, “only afterward to reintroduce it in another form.”26 What remains to be seen is how Milton both rejects anthropopatheia and yet affirms divine passibility. The second caveat or clarification Milton offers regarding God’s emotions in scripture has to do with accommodating the necessarily flawed nature of fallen minds. After emphasizing the sufficiency of scripture, Milton warns that an interpreter’s imperfection may lead us to misconstrue God’s passibility: Si poenituit Iehovam quod hominem fecisset Gen. vi.6. et propter gemitum eorum Iudic. ii.18. poenituisse credamus; modo id in Deo, ut solet in hominibus, ex imprudentia natum ne putemus: sic enim de se ne nos opinemur, ipse cavit, Num. xxiii.19. Deus non est homo qui mentiatur, aut filius hominis, quem poeniteat. (CE 14:32–34) If “it repented Jehovah that he had made man,” (Gen 6.6) and that “he repented on account of their groanings,” (Judges 2.18) let us believe that he did repent. But let us not think that what is called “repentance” when applied to God arises from lack of foresight, as in men; for he has warned us not to think about him in this way: (Num. 23.19) “God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent.”

This second caveat is far more clear than the first. It accords with De Doctrina Christiana’s overarching hermeneutic in the chapter “De Deo,” that states when we speak of “knowing God,” such knowledge must be understood with reference to imperfect human comprehension. Knowing God fully is beyond human thought and imagination. The limits of human understanding and human language are related; both are well displayed in the passage quoted above. Having admitted those limits, Milton nevertheless insists that God is “of that form which he attributes to himself in Holy Writ,” (YP 6:136), a form complete with feelings. The specific point of the passage is clear: if scripture says that God “repented,” then we are to believe that God truly repented, even if we struggle to understand repentance in this divine way, whereby God’s feelings exist without human faults such as limited foresight. The implications of this argument are applicable to Milton’s portrayal of God in Paradise Lost. First, it is not beneath the dignity of Milton’s God to express emotion generally. Second, if the emotion accords with virtue, such as righteous anger against wrongdoing, God’s possession of that emotion makes it not only morally good but also spiritually “holy.” Thus it is accurate to speak of the emotions God expresses as both genuine and, at

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the same time, “perfect” versions of these feelings as experienced by the fallen. As Neil Graves puts it: “God is as passible, it seems, as man, albeit that his passibility is untinged by the negative–and therewith the postlapsarian–which infuses these emotions when experienced by man.”27 In fact, Milton warns, if fallen readers attribute to God any negative aspect of the emotion, then they are reading scripture erroneously, reading in human faults to God. This would be a case where the notion of anthopopatheia is wrongly applied. Third, to the extent that a human being truly reflects a God-like emotion, that human emotion is likewise good. None of these implications, by the way, assumes that Paradise Lost amounts to sacred scripture or should be read as pure theology.28 Since Milton believed that God as described in scripture possesses emotions, however, it is reasonable to expect the same to be true of the God we meet in Milton’s epic. *********

With the poet Vergil and the theologian behind the De Doctrina Christiana as our guides, let us now turn to Milton’s poetry itself. The first passage in Paradise Lost alluding to Vergil’s question occurs after Satan’s highly charged and revealing speech atop Mount Niphates in book 4. The narrator observes: Thus while he spake, each passion dimm’d his face, Thrice chang’d with pale, ire, envy, and despair Which marr’d his borrow’d visage, and betray’d Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld. For heav’nly minds from such distempers foul Are ever clear. (4.114–19)

The narrator’s overview reveals the suspect nature of Satan’s emotional changes. As a cherub, Satan’s complexion should be red, so the triple change to pale indicates both a physical and moral “distemper.” Appropriately enough, Hughes cites Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy, which according to the theory of humors explains how a “perturbation” like anger can drain blood from the face.29 But this humoral and moral reading of Satan’s emotions, though apt, does not tell the whole story, for there are two allusions to earlier epics embedded in the passage. First, as indicated, Milton’s lines echo, and seem to answer, Vergil’s opening question about the passions of heavenly spirits. Yes, Milton suggests, heavenly minds do have affections, but they “are ever clear” from—that is, they do not have—such “distempers” or “perturbations” as Satan displays here. The “heavenly” spirit Uriel, who

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has overseen this revelation of Satan’s “mad demeanour” (4.129), can verify that Satan is disturbed. Thus, Milton’s immediate response to Vergil is to deny that Satan’s insane display or Juno’s tantrums represent a truly heavenly mode of being. In short, this allusion represents a strong corrective on Milton’s part toward Vergil. The Miltonic narrator, rather comfortably in this instance, treats “distempered” emotional experience as a state from which heavenly minds are “ever,” or always, “clear.” I say “comfortably” because the narrator seems to have forgotten his observation a few hundred lines earlier, following the dialogue in heaven, that the Son had “discerned” or read “the strife / Of Mercy and Justice” in his Father’s face (3.406–7). A reasonable solution to this contradiction would be to regard the emotional “strife” the Father undergoes as a positive, beneficial emotional struggle, as God seeks to balance the competing goods of Mercy and Justice, Love and Law. By contrast, Satan’s emotional “distemper” reflects a “mind diseased,” to echo a famous Scottish thane, referring to his hand-wringing wife.30 While recalling Vergil’s question, however, Milton’s passage also alludes to a second epic precursor, an allusion that complicates a simple, one-dimensional reading. Although the narrator’s comment on Satan’s distemper glances at the Aeneid, the whole passage closely imitates Spenser’s lines in The Faerie Queene describing Prince Arthur at a crucial juncture: Thus as he spake, his visage wexed pale, And chaunge of hew great passion did bewray; Yet still he stroue to cloke his inward bale, And hide the smoke, that did his fire display. (1.9.16.1–4)31

Out of context, the mention of “great passion,” “smoke,” and “fire” might lead readers to judge Arthur’s passion as the kind of “distemper” Satan displays. But what Arthur’s change of face reveals, as Una rejoices in pointing out in the stanza’s conclusion, is his blushing acknowledgement of true love for the “happy Queene of Faeries” (1.9.16.6–9). Though he strives to conceal it, this passion of Arthur’s for the Faerie Queene is an unqualified good. The effect of Milton’s allusion to Spenser’s depiction of Prince Arthur is to sharply contrast Satanic and Arthurian passion. Certainly Satan’s soliloquy shows no such love as does Arthur, indeed no such positive passion for anyone. “Supreme in Misery,” as Satan calls himself, his overriding passion in the Mount Niphates speech might be seen as self-loathing, given his perverse and self-destructive rejection of his just place in a beneficent universe.32 Yet another possibility is to take the allusion as a subtle signal that, while Satan’s emotional displays do him no credit, revelations of “great passion,” on the part of a heroic figure

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such as Spenser’s Arthur, are not merely admissible but actually constructive for good agents in Milton’s poem. For example, in their discussion of love in book 8, Raphael affirms to Adam the presence of passionate love among the faithful angels. More than that, Raphael celebrates love between angels as being superior to the human variety: “Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st / (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy / In eminence” (8.622–24). In short, and consistently with Milton’s affirmation of God’s passibility, Raphael tells Adam: Yes, angels love, and we love better. As for the fallen angels and Satan in particular, one of their great torments is to be forever removed from the possibility of love. The notion of full, even extreme emotion, as a valid part of a good agent becomes a reality in the war in heaven in book 6 of Paradise Lost. After two days of fruitless struggle between Satan’s and Michael’s forces, the Father directs the Son to put on his “Almighty Arms” and end “this great War, since none but Thou / Can end it” (6.702–3). The Son first declares himself pleased to do his Father’s will, predicting that all strife shall end in love. But the Son concludes the colloquy by expressing his emotional stance toward God’s enemies in the present: But whom thou hat’st, I hate, and can put on Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on, Image of thee in all things. (6.734–36)

These lines echo Psalm 139:21–24: Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.33

These verses, the last four of the psalm, resonate with several points the Son is making, points that are central to my argument. First, the psalmist’s opening rhetorical questions indicate that this servant of God feels that it is appropriate to direct strong, even extreme emotions toward God’s enemies. Second, the psalm describes a kind of perfection of emotions typically deemed suspect (hatred, grief), since God’s enemies have become his. Finally, the speaker returns to the opening theme of the psalm, God’s perfect knowledge of him, and invites the one who knows him perfectly to inspect and judge him. That invitation to judgment focuses on the speaker’s inner state, his “heart” and “thoughts.” While post-Cartesian readers are apt to read “heart” and “thoughts” as separate and compartmentalized,

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the psalmist’s use of both terms rhetorically indicates instead God’s comprehensive knowledge of his complete being.34 Milton’s passage does not repeat the psalm’s mention of even a rhetorical separation between heart and mind; instead, Milton stresses the Son’s complete emotional fidelity to the Father, whether in hatred or “mildness.” In sum, the Son’s declaration that he is the perfect “image” of the Father “in all things” echoes and improves upon the psalmist’s aspiration to a perfect emotional responsiveness to a searching God. And his perfect imaging expressly includes the Father’s passions. A roughly parallel argument to Psalm 139, with its lyric expression of justifiable and divine hatred, is advanced by Lactantius in his treatise, The Wrath of God. Writing in the early fourth century, Lactantius opposed both the then current Epicurean view of God as being in a state of apathy, completely aloof from the world, and the Stoic belief that God possesses the milder affections, such as kindness, but not the so-called irascible passions such as anger. Lactantius refutes both doctrines by insisting on the undivided nature of God. God’s loving of good things, he argues, is inseparable from his hatred of evil. You cannot have one without the other. Specifically, Lactantius writes, God’s anger is a consequence of his kindness (chap. 6.70). Rather than being a mark of weakness in God, anger is inextricably bound up with God’s providence, His concern to reward and uphold justice, Lactantius argues. Thus, God is moved to kindness when he sees just things done, and to wrath when he beholds unjust deeds. “For it is not right for Him,” Lactantius reasons, “when He sees such [evil] things being done, not to be moved and to rise up in vengeance against the criminals and to destroy those baneful and harmful ones, in order to have regard for all the good” (16.97). Finally, Lactantius points out, the God who holds power must also possess wrath: Let each one consult his own feelings. He will understand immediately that no one can be subjected to authority without anger and chastisement. Where there is not anger, there will not be authority either. But God has authority; therefore, it is necessary for Him to have wrath also, on which authority rests. (23.114)

This argument supports Milton’s approach in depicting God’s anger toward Satan’s rebellion. Moreover, it merits consideration by critics like Neil Forsyth, who finds inexplicable Milton’s formula of “hate in Heav’n,” and Michael Bryson, who finds fault with Milton’s God for directing his wrath against Satan’s rebellion, in what Bryson regards as an act of tyranny.36 By directing readers to see the connection between divine anger and authority, Lactantius helps us not only to resolve apparent anomalies in the scriptural portrayal of God but also to avoid partial moral evaluations.

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As Milton’s narrative proceeds to show the confrontation between Satan’s army and the Son, Milton again echoes Vergil’s question about the passions of the heavenly spirits. Though in our last look at the Son the theme of heavenly hatred was dominant, here the Son’s benign power over Creation commands attention, and Milton places it at the center of Raphael’s narrative: Before him [the Son] Power Divine his way prepar’d; 780 At his command the uprooted Hills retir’d Each to his place, they heard his voice and went Obsequious, Heav’n his wonted face renew’d, And with fresh Flow’rets Hill and Valley smil’d. This saw his hapless Foes, but stood obdur’d, 785 And to rebellious fight rallied thir 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’obdúrate to relent? 790 They hard’n’d more by what might most reclaim, Grieving to see his Glory, at the sight Took envy, and, aspiring to his highth, Stood reimbattl’d fierce, by force or fraud Weening to prosper, and at length prevail 795 Against God and Messiah, or to fall In universal ruin last, and now To final Battle drew, disdaining flight, Or faint retreat. (6.780–99)

There is a kind of Ovidian dimension to Milton’s narration here, as we kaleidoscopically move from the happily upturned hills, to the flower power evidenced in the smiling “Hill and Valley,” to the grimmer visages of Satan’s “obdúrate” army. In the midst of this rapid sequence of images comes the narrator’s resounding echo of Vergil: “In heav’nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell?” Raphael’s question diverges from Vergil’s concern with wrath: Milton identifies the fallen angels’ response as a case of perversity. Indeed, their perverseness is manifold. The Son’s beneficent power to bring the fallen angels back to their former place in heaven (evidenced in the happily restored topography) should be apparent to them. Instead of agreeing to undergo a similar restoration, however, Satan’s warriors “take envy” at the sight of the Son, “grieving to see his Glory,” and they insanely expect to “prosper” in a final battle. The perversity of Satan’s warriors choosing to go to war under these conditions receives further reinforcement in the form of an additional echo of Vergil, who uses the dismissive phrase perverso numine, or “a perverse power or will,”

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to explain the onset of “unholy war” between the Latins and Trojans in Aeneid 7: ilicet infandum cuncti contra omina bellum, contra fata deum perverso numine poscunt. (7.583–84) At once, despite the signs and oracles of gods, through some perverted power all ask for unholy war. (Mandelbaum, 181–82)

The contrast Milton’s description offers between the Son’s emotional state and that of the fallen angels is sharp and revealing. For the present battle, the Son has “put on,” in Milton’s phrase, God’s hate and terror toward his enemies. Thus the heavenly wrath that Vergil had wondered at is brought into Milton’s scene, but in the channeled, chastening form of the odium Dei. The Son, whom Milton celebrates in book 3 as the embodiment of “unexampl’d love,” “Love nowhere to be found less than Divine” (3.410–11), changes his normally benign countenance to “terror” and “wrath” only as he confronts the hard-hearted and reprobate. Likewise, Satan’s troops set their posture for combat, as they “stood reimbattl’d fierce,” but their emotional rigidity belies their brave faces: “hard’n’d more by what might most reclaim.” Theologically, the discussion of “hardening of the heart” in De Doctrina Christiana emphasizes the perversity of persisting in sin. It is the sinner, rather than God, who brings about this hardening, Milton points out. For his part, God insists on his own good and just commands: “The means he uses are just and kindly, and ought rather to soften the hearts of sinners than harden them” (YP 6:336).37 When free agents do persist in sin, however, as Harold Skulsky points out, God abandons them to their self-inflicted hardness.38 Overall, Milton treats hardening of the heart, in Stephen Fallon’s fine insight, as “a kind of homeopathic punishment for the rejection of God.”39 To that theological argument, it may be worth adding the psychological point that “hardening of the heart” involves a failure of emotional responsiveness, a kind of affective fixity or numbness. This point touches on a major concern of William Fenner, the Puritan theologian trained at Cambridge University, in his book A Treatise of the Affections (London, 1642). Fenner’s treatise takes the form of a series of closely argued sermons on Col. 3:2: “Set your affections on things that are above, and not on things which are on the earth.” In particular, Fenner urges his audience to embrace the notion of emotional volatility, which he inventively recasts as a happy paradox, a “blessed weaknesse” in human nature enabling sinners to avoid the ultimate spiritual death of despair.40 The fixed posture of Satan’s crew only appears to be the virtue of heroic warriors; in reality, it externalizes their inner despair.

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As one of the highest beings in the created universe, however, Satan, even in despair, sometimes shows glimpses of his better nature. When he looks out upon his assembled legions in book 1, “Thrice he assay’d, and thrice in spite of scorn, / Tears such as Angels weep, burst forth” (1.619–20). Barbara Lewalski compares Satan’s situation with that of Aeneas in book 1, who, looking out on the African coast, laments that he has brought his followers thus far, only to have them shipwrecked—and, as he believes, destroyed—on a foreign shore.41 There is a verbal link present in Milton’s numerical echoing of Aeneas’s dark lament: “o terque quaterque beati, / quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis / contigit oppetere!” (1.94–96). [O thrice and four times blessed, those who met death before their fathers’ eyes beneath the high walls of Troy!] In the early 1960s, Sir Herbert Grierson and John Peter debated whether Milton’s lines about “Tears such as Angels weep” amounted to great poetry or digressive verbiage. Grierson applauded the verse, asking: “Is there even in Shakespeare a greater moment?” Peter replied, coolly, that Milton was all too willing to stray from his main themes to tell us about the substance and properties of angels.42 The link between Satan and Aeneas, two leaders keenly aware of their own responsibility for their followers’ suffering, supports Grierson’s sense of the sublimity of Milton’s line. Milton’s keen attention to the passions, even among the residents of hell, makes such sublime poetry possible. The final allusion to Vergil’s question appears in book 9, during Satan’s temptation of Eve, where Satan’s echo of Vergil is of a piece with his strategy of echoing but twisting the meaning of words used elsewhere in the poem by others. Just as Satan’s question about eating—“And what are Gods that Man may not become / As they, participating God-like food?” (9.716–17)—recalls but blurs Raphael’s account of how “time may come when men / With Angels may participate, and find / No inconvenient Diet” (5.493–95), his later question about envy echoes the narrator’s earlier allusion to Vergil’s line, putting a new spin on it: Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heav’nly breasts? these, these and many more Causes import your need of this fair Fruit. Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste. (9.729–32)

The culmination of Satan’s temptation, these words amount to an impassioned peroration. Vergil’s question provides a fit emotional background for Satan’s show of outrage and surprise that heavenly beings could be so crafty as to envy Eve’s state. The new spin comes with Satan’s substitution of “envy” for Vergil’s irae, or “wrath,” and this substitution is revealing in several ways. Certainly Satan wants Eve to see God as inventing the prohibition, in Henry

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Lawrence’s words, “because hee would have none so great and so happy as himself.”43 The irony, of course, is that Satan, not God, has demonstrated envy of Eve and her state since his arrival in Eden. Moreover, with the echo of the Vergilian question from book 6 in mind, we might also be reminded of Satan’s warriors, who so perversely responded with envy to the appearance of the restorative Son. Envy can dwell in heavenly breasts, Satan and his followers show. But such spirits do not remain heavenly for long. The question Vergil poses at the start of his epic—“tantaene animis caelestibus irae”—arises because of Juno’s unrelenting anger, directed against all that Aeneas represents for the founding of Rome. To this question Vergil finds, in the words of R. D. Williams, “only imperfect and groping answers.”44 Servius the grammarian put the problem this way: “If Aeneas is a just man, why does he suffer from the hatred of the gods?”45 Vergil, in other words, upholds two conflicting absolutes: the piety of his hero, and the compelling force of divine anger. If this is a recipe for a muddled theology or worldview, it nonetheless makes for powerful poetry. What Vergil shows, from the beginning to the unsettling end of the Aeneid, is that unresolved suffering or passion can serve as a fascinating focus or trigger for epic conflict. Milton likewise felt the strength of that motive and embodied it in his heroic narrative, through means such as the series of allusions we have traced. But Milton underscores his differences with Vergil: chiefly, that his heavenly spirits, the Father and the Son above all, direct their passions, even their hate, toward the work of justice. Without diminishing the actual existence and power of passion, Milton made it express, on the positive side, his providential God’s anger at wrongdoing, and on the negative side, the recalcitrant sinners’ denial of justice. Milton appears to have shared Servius’s concern to reconcile divine passions and human suffering. Both writers might have assented to the prayer with which Servius’s contemporary, Lactantius, concludes his work on divine wrath: If we believe that God is always present in [the temple of our hearts], God to whose divinity the secrets of the mind lie open, let us so live that we may always find Him being merciful to us and never dread Him in His being angry with us. (116)

NOTES 1. Servius, Servii in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, ed. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (Leipzig: B.G. Turner, 1881–1902), 1.4.4–6. For ancient critics’ defenses of the mingling of divine and human persons in epic, see D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), especially 35–44. 2. Quotations from Milton’s poetry are taken from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957); quotations from Milton’s English prose are taken from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton,

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ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as YP; quotations from Milton’s Latin prose are taken from The Works of John Milton, 18 vols. in 21, ed. Frank A. Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38), hereafter cited as CE. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Lieb refers to the “passibility of God” throughout Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), particularly, “The opathetic Deity,” 127–62. I am indebted to Lieb’s exemplary scholarship and argument in my essay, which pursues passion in Milton in ways that extend and complement Lieb’s. 3. Vergil, from The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. R. D. Williams, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1973). Quotations from the Aeneid are taken from this edition; all translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own. 4. The Aeneid of Vergil: A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1971), 1. 5. See Williams, Aeneid of Vergil, 1:159, note to Aeneid 1.15–16. 6. Richard Strier, in “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden Is Better than Heaven,” Milton Studies 38, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 186, briefly discusses these three Vergilian allusions and posits a fourth: Satan’s statement that he once believed “Liberty and Heaven / To Heav’nly Souls had all been one” (6.164–65). Strier calls this the “most distant” of the allusions to Vergil’s; I find no allusion to Vergil in these lines. 7. Both Milton’s head note on “The Verse” and Barrow’s Latin poem, together with an English translation that I quote in my text, are included in Alastair Fowler’s edition John Milton: Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1997). 8. Northrop Frye, “The Story of All Things,” 3–31, in The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965; repr. 1975). 9. W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 101. 10. Williams, Aeneid of Virgil, note on Aeneid 12.887, 2.503. 11. The classic study of this inward turn is by Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). For a recent extension and refinement of Martz’s thesis, see Anthony Low, “The Fall into Subjectivity: Milton’s ‘Paradise Within’ and ‘Abyss of Fears and Horrors,’” 205–32, in Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003). 12. Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA 122.2 (March 2007): 523. 527. 13. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 2. 14. Ibid., 40. 15. Ibid., 46. 16. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21. 17. To the classic studies in this vein by William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell, 2nd ed, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993) and William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), one might add the following recent essays, which offer nuanced approaches to Milton’s management of his own passions: Amy Boesky, “The Maternal Shape of Mourning: A Reconsideration of Lycidas,” Modern Philology 95,4 (1998): 463–84; John Rumrich, “The Erotic Milton,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41,2 (1999): 128–42; and Stephen M. Fallon,

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Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 18 Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially 43–47 and 484–510. 19. Seneca, “De ira,” in Moral Essays, trans. J. W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 107. 20. Looking back from the modern perspective, psychologists typically cite either Charles Darwin or William James as the beginning point of scientific study of emotion. For example, see Randolph R. Cornelius, The Science of Emotion: Research and Tradition in the Psychology of Emotion (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 9–12. A watershed event in the history of approaches to the emotions occurred in Scotland between roughly 1820 and 1850. At the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Brown, doctor of medicine and professor of moral philosophy, gave a series of talks, posthumously published as Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820). In his quest for scientific rigor, Brown rejected the two traditional terms passions and affections deriving from reformed Scholasticism in favor of a new term meant to describe the secular psychology phenomenon of feeling: this term was emotion. Brown likewise rejected the commonsense early modern assumption that the mind contains a number of powers or faculties (such as the will, reason, etc.). When one studies the feelings, Brown wrote, one fi nds no such faculties but only a succession of different mental states, which one can then name and study empirically. Accordingly, Thomas Dixon explains, “[b]y around 1850, the category of ‘emotions’ had subsumed ‘passions,’ ‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ in the vocabularies of the majority of Englishlanguage psychological theorists” (98). For a fuller account, see Dixon 98–134, on whom my summary is based. 21. A number of scholars have begun to explore Milton’s understanding of and representation of the emotions in his works. One valuable approach is to consider the passions under the rubric of rhetoric: see, for example, Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001); Robert Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), especially 110–16, 173–78. Another valuable approach reads Milton and other early modern literature in light of classical treatments of the emotions, such as that of the Stoics: see, for example, Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially 253–84. See also, Michael Schoenfeldt, “‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43–67; and Margo Swiss, “Repairing Androgyny: Eve’s Tears in Paradise Lost,” in Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton, eds. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 261–83. While distinct from these studies, my essay is informed by all of them; what distinguishes my essay may be my concern to link the strands of literary and intellectual history of the passions through a balance of contextualization and close reading of Milton’s poetry. 22. The literal translation that follows is my own. Although the Columbia edition of Milton’s works includes Bishop Sumner’s English translation of De Doctrina Christiana, and John Carey’s English translation appears in the Yale edition of Milton’s prose, neither of these translations is reliable in all cases. For example, in the cited passage Carey translates the Latin word affectus as “states of mind,” which is clearly a more comprehensive

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notion than the context, describing specific affections that God experiences, can support. In Rethinking Milton Studies: Time Present and Time Past (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 103–121, John T. Shawcross provides several examples of untenable translations by both Sumner and Carey. Accordingly, Shawcross gives this sage warning: “The text [of De Doctrina Christiana] is in Latin and demands a reading of the Latin, not of some translation,” 122. 23. William Ames, Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1643), cited in YP 6:134 13. 24. Porphyry, Quaestiones Homericae (Homeric Problems), ed. Schrader (Leipzig: B.G. Turner, 1880–82), on Iliad 13.521, 2.186.9–11; cited in Feeney, The Gods in Epic, 48. 25. Carey, YP 6:134 13. Neil Graves, in “Milton and the Theory of Accommodation,” Studies in Philology 98,2 (2001): 266–68, discusses Milton’s uncharacteristic break with Ames, Wollebius, Luther, and Calvin on the concept of anthropopatheia. 26. Lieb, Theological Milton 145. 27. Graves, “Milton and the Theory of Accommodation,” 267–68. 28. As Jonathan Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734; facsimile repr., New York, 1970), 293, memorably put it: “It must be remembered Milton is Writing a Poem, not a System of Divinity or Philosophy . . . Though as he has Always the Scripture in View, his Muse is Divine, but she is Also a Muse.” Leslie Moore discusses Richardson’s criticism of Paradise Lost in Beautiful Sublime: The Making of “Paradise Lost,” 1701–1734 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19–32, 69–76. 29. Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems and Major Prose, note to Paradise Lost 4.115–120, 280. 30. Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 5.3.42. 31. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, in Spenser: Poetical Works, J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt, (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 46. 32. For further exploration of Satan’s self-loathing, see William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: The Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), especially 286–89; and John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of “Paradise Lost” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially 41–51. 33. All quotations from the Bible are taken from The Holy Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), a facsimile reprint of the Authorized Version of 1611. 34. The Vulgate Bible argues against setting these objects in opposition by rendering them as “cor meum” and “sensa mea”—the latter substantive term in its meaning of “feelings” or “affections” (Lewis and Short) overlapping with the similar significance of the former term. See Biblia Sacra, (The Vulgate Bible), ed. A. Conlunga and L. Turrado (Madrid: Bibliotecha de Autores Cristiaños, 1977), 574. 35. Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, The Wrath of God, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 54, gen. ed. Roy J. Deferrari, trans. Sister Mary F. McDonald (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1965. 36. Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 27: “The anthropopathetic and anthropomorphic terms in which the monarchical, militaristic God of the ‘traditional Christian’ is conceived are those of the human imagination, ‘which is the devil’”; Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 194–95, cites Lactantius’s rebuttal of Epicurus’s claim that the gods pay no attention to humankind but Forsyth balks at the corresponding Miltonic demonstration of “hatred in Heaven” as a sign of God’s concern. 37. Departing from my usual practice of providing my translations from De Doctrina, I use Carey’s translation here both for its accuracy and to avoid the appearance of special pleading on the topic of hardening of the heart.

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38. Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in “Paradise Lost” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 204. 39. Stephen Fallon, “Milton’s Arminianism and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41,2 (1999): 120. 40. William Fenner, A Treatise of the Affections (London, 1642), 48. 41. Barbara Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 57. 42. My account of the Grierson-Peter exchange follows the account given by Frank Kermode in The Living Milton (London: Routledge, 1962), 81–83. 43. Hughes, Paradise Lost 9.703–9, 394. 44. Williams, Aeneid of Vergil, 1:159. In addition, Williams contrasts Vergil’s failure to respond to this question with Milton’s more satisfying theodicy. 45. Servius, Servii inVergilii Carmina Commentarii, 1.4.9. In “Virgil and the Mystery of Suffering,” American Journal of Philology 90,2 (1969): 161–77, Francis A. Sullivan, explores the idea of suffering in the Aeneid and other classical texts.

Satan’s Envy and Poetic Emulation MAGGIE KILGOUR

RICHARD DUROCHER’S fine examination of the role of classical allusions in Milton’s treatment of the passions in Paradise Lost. While DuRocher is particularly interested in anger, and especially the problem of God’s anger, he also notes how Milton foregrounds the envy of Satan. The deadly sin plays a central role in Satan’s rebellion: at the vision of the Son’s “begetting” Satan is instantly,

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fraught With envie against the Son of God, that day Honourd by his great Father, and proclaimd Messiah King anointed, could not beare Through pride that sight, & thought himself impaird. (Paradise Lost 5.661–65)1

In book 6, the Son’s appearance in the extravagant chariot of paternal deity similarly infuriates the other devils: They hard’nd more by what might most reclame, Grieving to see his Glorie, at the sight Took envie, and aspiring to his highth, Stood reimbattell’d fierce, by force or fraud Weening to prosper, and at length prevaile Against God and Messiah. (PL 6.791–96)

Feelings of envy first trigger and then consolidate Satan’s rebellion; envy thus helps set the plot of the poem into action, as it does again in Paradise Regain’d, in which the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God at his baptism leaves Satan once more “Thunder-struck” (PR 1.36) and “With wonder, then with envy fraught and rage” (PR 1.38). Milton’s emphasis of Satan’s envy has generally been understood in its Christian context, in which envy is among the most serious of the deadly sins. Although pride is usually considered the worst, envy gives it a run for its money. In Wisdom 2:23, infernal envy brings death into the world; Saint Cyprian therefore argues that “Envy is the Root of all Wickedness” 47

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whose “Origin is to be Traced to the Devil.”2 For Saint John Chrystostom, envy tears apart the unity of the body of Christ; for Aquinas, it is a sin against the Holy Ghost.3 Generally speaking, it seems the opposite of Christian charity and love.4 Like DuRocher, however, I am interested in the way in which Milton’s representation of emotions leads him to draw on classical traditions. I trace Satan’s envy to the representation of phthonos and invidia/ livor in ancient Greece and Rome as well as to its vital, if vituperative, legacy in Renaissance England. Given the infamously competitive nature of classical writers, it is hardly surprising that, beginning with Hesiod, the destructive force of envy is a common subject of poetry.5 Poets were in the habit of asserting their own moral authority against the envy of others.6 In encomiastic poetry especially, the generous and creative praise of the poet is contrasted with the begrudging and destructive response of the invidious. Yet from the start, this relation of opposition is problematic. For Milton, the depiction of Satan as envious will become a means of meditating on his poetry and its relation to both good and evil. *********

Envy and creativity have long been associated, typically as opposites locked in a constant battle. From Pindar on, envy is represented as the antithesis of poetic creativity: where poets produce and create, the envious consume and destroy. Complaints about envy as the enemy of true genius appear especially at times of aggressive poetical and political competition; they are therefore widespread in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan writers depict themselves as constantly battling against the forces of invidia in a courtly world in which, as Spenser laments: each one seeks with malice and with strife, To thrust downe other into foule disgrace, Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise That best can handle his deceitfull wit, In subtil shifts, and finest sleights devise, Either by slaundring his well deemed name, Through leasings lewd, and fained forgerie: Or else by breeding him some blot of blame, By creeping close into his secrecie; To which him needs a guilefull hollow hart, Masked with faire dissembling curtesie, A filed toung furnisht with tearmes of art, No art of schoole, but Courtiers schoolery. (“Colin Clouts Come Home Again,” 690–702)7

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Poets who defend themselves against such vicious attacks generally suggest that they themselves are free from this vice. Ben Jonson begins his famous poem to Shakespeare by claiming freedom from envy, and throughout his works he attacks the envy of others. Envy is often projected onto the poet’s perennial opponent, the Critic who, unable to create himself, destroys the work of others. This tradition begins with the figure of Momus and is still going strong in Swift’s grotesque Goddess, Criticism.8 The relation between envy and creativity is, however, a complex one. For Aristotle, envy (phthonos) is related to but contrasted with creative emulation (zelos). Both are responses provoked by the success of another, particularly, someone who is close to us, a peer: “So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves: we compete with our rivals in sports or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying, Potter against potter.”9 Both emulation and envy are thus forms of competition, though one is positive, the other negative.10 Drawing on this distinction, Saint John Chrysostom differentiates “wholesome rivalry, imitation without contention” that binds us to each other and to God, from infernal envy that is “the root of all evils” and that divides us from each other.11 Emulation is active; it makes us transcend our own limitations to become creative in our own right. Envy is associated with inertia and melancholy; it is thus usually represented as dark (playing on livor, which also means bluish colour) and sluggish. It is therefore especially common in those who aspire to wisdom and knowledge and who are by definition prone to sloth and black bile.12 So Burton will later see it as a particular danger for scholars: caveat lector.13 Moreover, while emulation is creative and productive, envy is only destructive.14 Traditionally it is represented by biting snakes and barking dogs (recalled in the Blatant Beast). However, while Envy originally aims at destroying the creations of others, it ultimately turns back on itself to become self-consuming. Spenser’s Enuie: feedes on her owne maw vnnaturall, And of her owne foule entrayles makes her meat; Meat fit for such a monsters monsterous dyeat. (Faerie Queene 5.12.31, 7–9)15

Enuie is said to “murder her own mynd” (FQ 5.12.33, 5); according to Burton, too, the envious man will “eat his own heart” (Burton 1.263). Envy drives people to suicide, usually by hanging or self-strangulation. It is also frequently described as gnawing, tearing, wounding, and sometimes bursting inside those who give into it.16 Saint Basil thus says that “phthonos consuming the soul in its agony is like the vipers who come into the

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light of day by gnawing through the belly of their mother.”17 This image of a perverse birth, in which creatures prey on their own creator, sounds familiar to anyone who knows Milton’s Sin, who, as we shall see, similarly suggests a circular form of production that becomes self-consuming. While envy and emulation have similar origins, they thus appear clearly differentiated as destructive and creative forces. In practice, however, they can be hard to tell apart. In the Renaissance, emulation is used rather loosely and can be a synonym for both imitation and envy, as Cooper’s definition of the verb aemulor suggests: “With a certayne enuy and ambition to indeuour to passe & excell an other man: to folowe, or study to be like an other: to imitate or counterfaite.”18 Envy seems especially hard to exclude from artistic imitation, with its inevitable mixing of identification and rivalry. G.W. Pigman III thus argues that Renaissance emulation consisted of “admiration for a model joined with envy and contentiousness” as “Envy, contentious striving, jealous rivalry cling to aemulatio.”19 For René Girard, envy is the name Shakespeare gave to what Girard calls “mimetic desire.”20 The closeness between envy and emulation suggests one reason why this is a vice of urgent concern to artists, copying and striving to surpass each other. Additionally, envy and creativity in general seem disquietingly less opposites than different names for the same force. Envy is associated with vision; invidia is etymologized as coming from videre, and so envy is connected to the concept of the evil eye, and is often represented as looking aslant as it views another’s good.21 In Dante’s Purgatorio, the envious have their eyes sewn shut so that they can learn to see again in a more charitable fashion. The envious are morally blind.22 The association of envy with vision shows its proximity also to love, associated, especially in the platonic tradition, with the eyes.23 However, envy is a sin that also makes us see things that are not in fact there;24 it is thus similar to the power of imagination.25 Moreover, appropriately for writers specifically, it is not just a visual sin but also a verbal one. Spenser’s Envy attacks the poet’s wit using his own powers, words, against him: eke the verse of famous Poets witt He does backebite, and spightfull poison spues From leprous mouth on all, that eer writt. (FQ 1.4.32, 6–9)

Envy leads to the perversion of poetic language into Sclaunder, whose speech Spenser describes: Her words were not, as common words are ment, T’expresse the meaning of the inward mind,

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But noysome breath, and poysnous spirit sent From inward parts, with cancred malice lind, And breathed forth with blast of bitter wind; Which passing through the eares, would pierce the hart, And wound the soule it selfe with griefe unkind; For like the stings of Aspes, that kill with smart, Her spightfull words did pricke, and wound the inner part. (FQ 4.8.26, 1–9)

Sclaunder is the power of language gone wrong, just as Envy is creative energy that has become destructive.26 For Spenser, as other writers, the attack against the envy of others plays an important part in poets’ self-definitions, by showing what the poet is not. Envy is the enemy and antithesis of true poetic genius and creativity. Yet, as I have suggested, it is also frequently seen as a property of genius and poetic ambition, inherent especially in all forms of imitation. Poets who attack the envy of others sound suspiciously bitter and invidious themselves; for some of his contemporaries and for later critics, Jonson will become the epitome of envy, especially towards the creative genius of Shakespeare.27 Often the strategy of self-definition by contrast seems fueled by the very energy it repudiates. Classical writers thus wonder whether even the gods can be free from this vice. In the Timaeus, Plato claims that the divine creator lacked envy because “He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they should be.”28 The original creator wanted to inspire emulation, not envy. However, despite Plato’s assertion, even Greek gods are often represented as having phthonos.29 It is commonly argued that when phthonos refers to gods it has a different meaning from when it is applied to humans.30 This semantic difference itself suggests a fundamental difference between the human and the divine realms. Divine and human phthonos are related only through opposition: in Pindar, especially, the phthonos of the gods is a principle of justice that asserts itself when humans, driven by phthonos in the form of envy of the gods, try to rise above their allotted places. Yet this distinction between divine and human forms of phthonos is as slippery as that between zelos and phthonos.31 When Milton’s Satan tempts Eve to question the prohibition of the tree, he echoes a traditional suspicion of divine motives: “is it envie, and can envie dwell / In Heavn’ly brests?” (PL 9. 729–30). As DuRocher notes, Satan is echoing Aeneid 1.11, in which Virgil refers to the wrath of Juno. The substitution is important not only for what it reveals about Satan’s character, but as an interpretation of the character of Virgil’s Juno, suggesting that her anger is itself fuelled by envy. Juno’s deep invidiousness is made

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explicit by Ovid in Fasti 1.265–66 where she appears as “Saturnia... / invidiosa” [Saturn’s envious daughter.]32 *********

In Paradise Lost, however, it seems easy to dismiss Satan’s suggestion that God envies his creations; it seems so clearly the result of the rebel angel’s own diabolical and invidious perspective, which causes him to project his own envy upon his enemies. Milton’s God, like Plato’s, seems above envy; he instead encourages emulation so that others may be like him. He is a creative force who inspires praise that enables his creatures to themselves become creative: the first and last days of creation and the prospect of the incarnation evoke praise from the unfallen angels (7.252–60, 7.601–34, and 3.344–415); Adam and Eve praise God’s creative energy when they rise every morning (5.153–208). A chain of divine creativity emanates from and returns to God, ultimately including the poet himself, who praises God and, especially, the achievements of the Son. In Satan, however, God’s divine creativity inspires not emulation but envy. Appropriately, envy appears first with the manifestation of the Son, God’s creative and creating form, emerging first at the moment of his begetting (5.661–65), and then in the war in heaven (6.791–93).33 Anne Barbeau has shown how the Son’s appearance in the war in heaven is described in images of fertility, which give precedence to his “creative and restorative powers” even in battle.34 Envy is triggered again at the sight of Eden, God’s newest creation (3.553; 4.115; 6.900; 9.175, 254, 264, 466). Envy inspires Satan not to create, but to try to destroy the creations of others. Like other forms of envy, satanic energy is self-destructive, as at the sight of the impressive chariot of paternal deity (whose multiple eyes might offer an alternative model of seeing to that of Satan’s invidious vision) the devils hurl themselves into hell. Satan’s envy thus is both generated by and set in opposition to the creativity concentrated in and expressed by the Son. But it is also contrasted with the creative energy of the poet himself. As classical writers had asserted their own moral authority in opposition to the invidious nature of others, Milton uses Satan in order to define his own poetics, and to suggest his own lack of envy in the creation of a poem that imitates and celebrates God’s original creation of the world. Milton’s awareness of the traditional antagonism between poetic creativity and envy is evident in all his writings.35 The poet’s fear that the envy of others will inhibit his career is signaled by the choice of epigram for the 1645 Poems: “Baccare frontem / Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro” [wreathe my brow with foxglove, lest his evil tongue harm the bard that is to be,] taken from Virgil, Eclogue 7.26–27.36 In “Ad Patrem”

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105–10, Milton claims to rise untouched above the aspersions of envy and calumny, and in the Italian “Sonnet 6,” he describes himself as “d’invidio sicuro” (9) from both within and without. In 1646, Milton sends his volume of poetry to John Rouse in the hope that it will be safe from “invidia” (“Ad Joannem Rousium” 75–76). In his early polemical works, too, Milton claims to be free from feelings of envy himself and from being its victim. In The Reason of Church Government he insists that “neither envy nor gall hath enterd me upon this controversy.”37 Envy is the property of his enemies, such as Salmasius who in the 1651 Defensio is derided for being “born only to pull apart or copy good writers.”38 In Paradise Lost, envy also plays a central role in defining the poet and his poem. While Satan envies and tries to destroy God’s creations, Milton’s narrator suggests an alternative model of creative emulation. Inspired by God’s original creativity to write the poem, he constantly pays homage to his original. In contrast to Satan, who denies his debts to his divine source, presenting himself as “self-begot, self-rais’d” (5.860) and producing Sin on his own, the narrator insists on his need for the Muse and divine inspiration, and hopes that the poem reflects God and not its human author. While he writes in “solitude,” he hastens to add that he is “not alone” (7.28) and acknowledges that his poem will fail: “if all be mine, / Not Hers who brings it nightly to my Ear” (9.46–47). His voice merges with the angelic praise of God’s creative energy and especially that of the Son in Paradise Lost 3.372–415. Maureen Quilligan suggests further that the poet similarly highlights his relation to his human sources through allusions and so distinguishes himself from the satanic. So, for example, she suggests that “in predicating Sin’s character on Errour’s, he avoids making Satan’s mistake: he pays due respect to his original, to Spenser.” Milton’s creativity is safeguarded by his “great saving humility.”39 Satanic envy is answered by the poet’s admitted emulation of not only God but his human originals. Still, the acknowledgement of sources does not necessarily imply humility towards them. Claiming to “soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount” (1.14–15), Milton especially has often been described as “the most competitive of poets”40 who, correcting the errors made by the pagan poets he imitates, tries to “overgo” his sources—not only pagan writers, but nearer contemporaries like Shakespeare and Spenser. For Hesiod and Aristotle, Milton’s competitive streak would be a sign of the creative force of emulation, which spurs artists on to great achievements. At the same time, traces of the conventional representation of envy hover around the presentation of Milton’s narrator. The speaker’s blindness identifies him with the traditional representations of invidia and specifically with the mis-seeing Satan.41 As the narrator approaches the story of creation in book 7, the parallels with Satan seem particularly pronounced,

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suggesting that for the poet the subject of the divine creativity that he emulates triggers twinges of envy. The poet first represents himself as the implicit victim of slander, one who is: fall’n on evil dayes, On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round. (7.26–28)

The word fall’n has of course ominous resonances in this particular poem, even when used in this apparently neutral sense. At the same time as the narrator presents himself as an innocent victim, he hints at the potential for his own culpability. In book 7, the direct imitation of God’s originary creativity opens up the possibility of the narrator’s poetic and spiritual error. The speaker shows his fear of falling in his poetic journey from heaven to earth and asks the Muse for guidance: Least from this flying Steed unrein’d, (as once Bellerophon, though from a lower Clime) Dismounted, on th’ Aleian Field I fall, Erroneous there to wander and forlorne. (PL 7.17–20)

In Iliad 6.200–02, Bellerophon’s attempt to see the stars (from which Adam will be discouraged in book 8) is an act of hubris punished by the gods with blindness and exile. In Isthmian 7, moreover, Pindar sees Bellerophon as an overreacher whose fate he wants to avoid; he expresses his own hope that if he accepts his station he shall not be troubled by the phthonos of the gods. Bellerophon is specifically the opposite of Pindar, someone who, driven by human phthonos, refuses limitations. Like Pindar, Milton appears to use Bellerophon to provide a contrast to himself and his creative poetics. However, the choice of Bellerophon over more common figures for overreaching like Icarus or Phaethon is noteworthy.42 Bellerophon is a complex figure. Although he is an image for excess ambition, he is also connected to virtue and, through Pegasus, the Muses: he is a young man who rejects lust for chastity, who becomes the victim of envy and slander, and who ends up blind, wandering, and, in Petrarch’s description, “ipse suum cor edens” [eating his heart out]43—as the envious are described. Milton has chosen an ambiguous figure whose story also seems most relevant for his own. Similarly, in describing himself as “In darkness, and with dangers compast round” (PL 7.27), the narrator makes us recognize his likeness

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to Sin, who in book 2 describes herself as “With terrors and with clamors compasst round” (2.862). Sin’s particular terrors are, of course, her own creations, the hell-hounds who prey upon her. With her endlessly destructive fertility, she is a horrifying image of creativity gone wrong, production that has become self-consuming. In his depiction of Sin, Milton is imitating many classical and recent sources, most notably Ovid’s Scylla and Spenser’s Errour. These figures, however, themselves look back to Ovid’s gleefully gruesome representation of Invidia in Metamorphoses 2, which gave the familiar iconography of pthonos/invidia a particularly lively form for later writers. His Invidia is found eating snakes in a chilly, foggy black cave. Pale, squintyeyed, and with rotten teeth, she moves sluggishly and groans when she sees the splendor of Minerva who has come to summon her (2.773–74); venom flows from her tongue and gall from her breast (2.775–78). Her body reveals both her baneful influence and its ultimately suicidal tendencies: “carpitque et carpitur una / supplicumque suum est” (2.781–82) [She gnaws and is gnawed, herself her own punishment].44 Ovid’s Invidia anticipates many other characters in the Metamorphoses who are symbolically or literally self-consuming: Narcissus, Tereus, Erisycthon, as well as Scylla. Moreover, Invidia is the first of four allegorical figures in the Metamorphoses, through which Ovid meditates on his own poetic creation and especially the act of representation as the metamorphosis of abstract concepts into embodied figures.45 Ovid draws attention to his own implicit relation with this hideous force, by shaping a parallel between Invidia’s possession of her victim, Aglauros, and artistic creation: Invidia “inspirat. . .” (2.800) Aglauros, filling her mind with images (798–805).46 Eaten away by her own imagination, Aglauros becomes “signum... exsangue” (831) [a lifeless statue]. The scene is a parodic version of the process of inspiration and artistic creation, like Satan’s possession of the snake in Paradise Lost (9.187–90). Moreover, as Alison Keith notes, Ovid’s figure is an imitation of Virgil’s Fama in Aeneid 4.47 The rewriting makes us consider the relation between Invidia and Fama, or Rumour, who will appear explicitly in Metamorphoses 12.39–66, as the last of Ovid’s four allegorical figures.48 In Virgil, Fama is a double of a poet whose job is also to spread stories. By doubling this figure, Ovid characteristically comments on the nature of his own art; the appearance of Invidia at the moment in which Ovid is revising Virgil suggests wittily that all creative imitation may conjure up the ghastly form of envy. As critics have noted, Ovid’s four figures were influential on later allegorical practice.49 As a source for representations of envy, too, Ovid’s Invidia seems at least a distant progenitor of Milton’s allegorical Sin. But as this suggests, Sin has almost too many origins and looks back to too many models and traditions. The proliferation of possible sources draws

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attention to her story as an exercise in and meditation on poetic creativity, and especially creativity born from imitation. For Colin Burrow, the meaning of Miltonic Sin is revealed by the fact that she is “the most wearisomely derivative figure in Paradise Lost.”50 For a poet, sin is sterile copying that has become drained of artistic energy and originality. Moreover, sin is the place where creativity turns into envy: where Satan turned from emulating God to envying him. Milton’s merging of the classical poetical topos of phthonos/invidia with the Christian moral tradition of the vices is thus part of his representation of the origins of evil in the perversion of divine creativity. Moreover, it enables him to acknowledge the dangers in his own poetic creation. As I have shown, poets traditionally defined their own creativity against its opposite, envy. But this conventional strategy of differentiation reveals the underlying likeness that binds creative emulation and invidious rivalry. Rather than clearly asserting the poet’s difference from his demonic double, Paradise Lost challenges us to consider seriously how we can tell the two apart. The difference between Satan and the poet may lie in the simple fact that Satan’s actions are destructive and, like all kinds of envy, self-destructive; the poet, however, creates the poem, his active emulation of both God and his classical sources. The anxiety of the invocation to book 7 is transformed into the glorious celebration of Genesis in the scene that follows, as Milton turns the stark Biblical account into an illustration of how God’s original creativity can inspire endless and deathless poetry. Milton is true to the outline of Genesis while bursting into what Michael Lieb describes as “an exuberance of detail that is reinforced by a verse symphonic and bounteous in its effects. The entire account reverberates with a sense of excitement, a sense of energy being released and exulting in its own volition. All creatures glory in the creation; all creatures instinctively celebrate the creative act.”51 Lieb’s passage itself bursts with an expansive generosity that shows the ongoing contagion of creativity transforming even that most infamously invidious of creatures, the critic. For a moment, envy disappears, as emulation, praise, and creativity all merge triumphantly. But creation is of course not the whole story of Paradise Lost as the envy of Satan does spread destruction to the world. The first vision of the consequences of the fall that Michael later shows Adam, after all, is that of his son Cain slaying his brother Abel, out of the “envie” (12.456) that is now a part of all mortal creation.52

NOTES Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to McGill’s Faculty of Arts for support that enabled the preparation of this paper. Thanks also to Tara Murphy whose beady (not evil) eye and level head kept me from falling into error (or gnawing at my own limbs).

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1. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Milton’s works are from The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998). All future citations from Paradise Lost will be denoted by PL and followed by book and line numbers; similarly, all citations from Paradise Regain’d will be identified by PR. 2. Cyprian, “Treatise X: On Jealousy and Envy,” in Treatises of Cyprian, trans. Ernest Wallis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867, Christian Classics Ethereal Library), http://www. ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf05.iv.v.x.html. Bacon also sees envy as “the vilest affection, and the most depraved, for which cause it is the proper attribute of the devil,” Francis Bacon, “Of Envy,” 22, in The Essays; or, Counsels, Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18–22. 3. John Chrystostom, “Homily 31 on First Corinthians,” Homilies on First Corinthians New Advent, sec. 4, www.newadvent.org/fathers/220131.htm, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. 2.2,q.14,art.2; see also 2.2.q.36,art.3 on the nature of envy more broadly. Augustine also tentatively suggests that envy is the unpardonable sin: “Maliciously and enviously to assail brotherly love after having received the grace of the Holy Spirit—perhaps this is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin which the Lord says will never be forgiven in this world or in the world to come.” See Augustine, De Sermone Domini in Monte, 1.22.75, quoted in Anthony K. Cassell, “The Letter of Envy: Purgatorio XIII–XIV,” Stanford Italian Review 4, no.1 (1984): 5–22. 4. In his treatment of the vice, Gower draws on this convention: “Agein Envie is Charité” (book 2, line 3173), Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway, vol. 2 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 140; see also Cassell 7–8, esp. n7. The opposition between envy and Christian charity is reworked in humanist terms so that, as David Cast notes, “envy, in the language of the humanists, is a failure of humanity, a distortion of what all human relations, at their finest, can be.” The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 6. 5. Glenn Most, “Epinician Envies,” in Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, ed. David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 123–42. Most notes the significant absence of any interest in envy in Homer. 6. Most, “Epinician Envies,” 128–33; Matthew W. Dickie, “The Disavowal of Invidia in Roman Iamb and Satire,” in Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, ed. Francis Cairns (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981), 183–208; Patricia Bulman, Phthonos in Pindar (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); A. M. Keith, The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 127–31. 7. Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. Ernest De Sélincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 307–68. See also Ronald Bond, “Supplantation in the Elizabethan Court: The Theme of Spenser’s February Eclogue,” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 55–65; and “Invidia and the Allegory of Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos,’” ESC 2 (1976): 144–55. 8. Jonson’s Poetaster opens with the figure of Envy, who represents the invidious critic; see Ian Donaldson, “Looking Sideways: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Myths of Envy,” in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, ed. Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 241–57, esp. 242. On Momus, see Natale Conti, Mythologiae, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, vol. 2 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 882–83. Conti uses Momus, the embodiment of “criticism by fault-finders and envious people,” as a foil for his own kind of criticism, protesting that “a true sign of a wise and honourable man is that he has the kind of generous spirit that rejects the slanders of stupid, really contemptible fault-finders” (Conti, 883). Swift’s invidious goddess appears in the Battel of the Books where she is represented with:

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Eyes turned inward, as if she lookt only upon herself: Her Diet was the overflowing of her own Gall: Her Spleen was so large, as to stand prominent like a Dug of the first Rate, nor wanted Excrescences in forms of Teats, at which a Crew of ugly Monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful to conceive, the bulk of the Spleen encreased faster than the Sucking could diminish it. (387) See “The Battel of the Books,” in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), 373–96. 9. Aristotle, Rhetoric, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princton University Press, 1984), 2.10, The saying Aristotle cites is from Hesiod: “And potter too is angry with potter, and builder with builder, and beggar begrudges [phthonéei] beggar, and poet poet.” “Works and Days,” in Selections: English and Greek, trans. Glenn W. Most, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) lines 25–26. 10. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.10, 2.11. As Most notes, this distinction also appears in Hesiod, for whom “there is also a good Eris, a source of competitive strife, a positive economic principle which stimulates men to emulation, rivalry, and ultimately the production and accumulation of wealth” (Most, 130); Hesiod thus puts envy at “the very centre of the account of the fundamental conditions of human existence” (ibid., 130). According to Hesiod, “This Strife is good for mortals” (“Works,” 24) as it makes them productive workers; it is distinguished from more destructive forms of conflict. 11. Chrystostom, “Homily 31,” 7, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210231.htm. 12. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.10; and Problems, 30.1. 13. Robert Burton, “Digression on the Misery of Schollers, and Why the Muses are Melancholy,” Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 302–37, esp. 309, and n5, 308. See also “Envy, Malice, Hatred, Causes,” ibid., 263–65. 14. As Matthew Dickie, who has written more essays on the topic than seems really healthy for any critic, suggests, “Invidi are not spurred to action by the sight of another’s success. They are marked by torpor and inertia. They do not then try to emulate those for whom they feel invidia. Invidia gives rise to basically destructive impulses and not to emulation” (“Invidia,” 202). 15. All citations from The Faerie Queene are from Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 1977). In future references this text will be identified as FQ, and followed by book, canto, stanza, and line numbers. 16. See especially Katherine M. D. Dunbabin and M. W. Dickie, “Invidia Rumpantur Pectora: The Iconography of Phthonos/Invidia in Graeco-Roman Art,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 26 (1983): 7–37. 17. Basil, “Homily 11,” quoted in Dunbabin and Dickie, “Invidia Rumpantur Pectora,” 15n.51. 18. Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britanniae, fac. ed. (1565; repr., Menston: Scolar Press, 1969); quoted in Bond, “Supplantation in the Elizabethan Court,” 147. 19. A. W. Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” RQ 33 (1980): 1–32; 4, 24. As Pigman wryly notes also, writings on imitation tend themselves to be rather competitive, and “often exhaust themselves in vindictive and ferocious ad hominem polemics” (1). For the proximity of envy and emulation generally, see also R. B. Gill, “The Renaissance Conventions of Envy,” Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979): 215–30, esp. 221–24; Vernon Guy Dickson, “‘A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant’: Emulation, Rhetoric, and Cruel Propriety in Titus Andronicus,” RQ 62, no. 2 (2009): 376–409. 20. René Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Girard argues that at its most extreme, mimetic desire becomes the desire for evil (296), a claim I think Milton would have understood.

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21. Whitney’s emblem, Inuidiae descriptio, explains this for the benefit of the slow: “What meanes her eies? so bleared, sore, and redd: / Her mourninge still, to see an others gaine.” Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, ed. Henry Green (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 94. See also Ronald B. Bond, “Vying with Vision: An Aspect of Envy in The Faerie Queene,” Renaissance and Reformation 8, no.1 (1984): 30–38, esp. 31–32. 22. Pietro di Dante’s commentary on Purgatorio 13 explains the punishment through the assumed etymology: “Invidia facit, quod non videatur, quod expedit videre; ed ideo dicitur invidia, quasi non visio” [Envy causes that which should be seen not to be seen. And therefore it is called invidia, almost as if to say, nonvision]. Quoted from Inferno 2: Commentary, trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 213. 23. Bacon also notes this similarity between love and envy: “There be none of the affections which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch, but love and envy. They both have vehement wishes; they frame themselves readily into imaginations and suggestions; and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of the objects” (“Of Envy,” 18). The essay after “Of Envy” is thus appropriately, “Of Love.” 24. See for example Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. Martin Ferguson Smith, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3.74–77. 25. See also Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198–99. 26. See also Anne Lake Prescott, “Sclaunder,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 632–33; and Ronald B. Bond, “Envy,” ibid., 248–49. 27. On Jonson, see Donaldson, “Looking Sideways,” 241–57; in general see also Gill, “The Renaissance Conventions of Envy,” 221–24. There are many examples especially of invidious sounding denouncers of invidia among the satirists of the 1590s, notably Marston; John Skelton’s poem “Against Venomous Tongues” also seems inspired by a remarkable outburst of venom. 28. See Plato, Timaeus, 29e, 30a; The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); also Edward B. Stevens, “Envy and Pity in Greek Philosophy,” AJP 69, no. 2 (1948): 171–89, esp. 175–76, 184. 29. As Most notes, the phthonos of the Greek gods distinguishes them from the jealous Judeo-Christian god (Most, “Epinician Envies,” 125–27). The words used in Vulgate are zelotes and aemulator. Both appear in Exodus 34:14: “noli adorare deum alienum. Dominus zelotes nomen eius, Deus est aemulator.” In fact, “aemulator” is used more frequently and suggests the precise nature of God’s jealousy: it is for imitation. 30. See especially Bulman, Phthonos in Pindar, 9, 31. 31. On the envious nature of Greek gods, see Most, “Epinician Envies.” 32. Cited from Ovid’s Fasti, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Sir James George Frazer (London: W. Heinemann, 1959). The envy of Juno, and indeed all the gods, is a dominant theme in the Metamorphoses especially. 33. Stella P. Revard, “Satan’s Envy of the Kingship of the Son of God: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, Book 5, and Its Theological Background,” MP 70, no. 3 (1973): 190–98; and Anne T. Barbeau, “Satan’s Envy of the Son and the Third Day of the War,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 13 (1977): 362–71. 34. Barbeau, “Satan’s Envy,” 364. 35. John Hale briefly notes the theme in Milton’s early poetry. See Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92–93. 36. Milton omits the previous line in which the speaker hopes his invidious enemy will burst with venom: “invidia rumpantur” (26).

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37. The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Marion Wolfe, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 806. 38. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, trans. Donald C. Mackenzie, in Complete Prose, vol. 4, no. 1, 324. In Areopagitica, Milton associates envy with censorship and the prevention of creative productions, noting that before the advent of the Inquisition, “no envious Juno sate cros-leg’d over the nativity of any mans intellectuall off spring” (Complete Prose, 2.505). 39. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 90. These days, of course, Milton’s spiritual safety may be in the hands of editors who may or may not footnote sources. 40. Balachandra Rajan, The Lofty Rhyme: A Study of Milton’s Major Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 128. 41. While Cheryl H. Fresch’s reading of Satan’s envious glances as Milton’s exploration of the concept of the evil eye seems at times overly literal, she notes well how this enables Milton to indicate the limited perspective of the narrator; see “‘Aside the Devil Turned / For Envy’: The Evil Eye in Paradise Lost, Book 4,” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 118–30. 42. On Milton’s use of Bellerophon as part of his complex and divided self-representation, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 223–29. 43. Petrarch, De secreto conflictu curarum mearum, book 3, in Opere, ed. G. Ponte (Milan: University of Mursia, 1968) iii, 548, quoted in Marianne Shapiro, “Perseus and Bellerophon in Orlando Furioso,” MP 81, no. 2 (1983): 109–30: 116. For traditional summaries of the story of Bellerophon see Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Francis George Whitbread (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 82–84; and Conti, trans. Mulryan and Brown, 2: 824–28. 44. Metamorphoses, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: W. Heinemann, 1916). 45. On Ovid’s personifications, see Denis Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 242–47; and Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 231–37. On the representation of Envy and the theme as a whole in Metamorphoses 2, see Keith, Play of Fictions, 124–32. 46. Compare also with Metamorphoses 8 where Ovid’s second allegorical figure, Fama, appears to Erysicthon, “seque viro inspirat” (819) [and filled him with herself]. 47. Keith, Play of Fictions, 131. Ben Jonson certainly saw the connection between these two figures, which he positions symmetrically at the beginning and end of the Poetaster. The play opens with a mock exorcism of the figure of Envy, who appears brandishing vipers in the hopes of working the audience up against the play, only to be defeated by the entrance of the Prologue. While this cartoon figure is easily bested, in the play proper the forces of envy continue to threaten the world of poetry, and in fact destroy Ovid. They even imperil Jonson’s own ideal, Horace: at the very moment Virgil reads to Augustus his description of Fama as a “monster” “covetous of tales and lies” (Poetaster, 5.2.84, 96), Lupus and Tucca, the characters who incarnate Invidia, enter the scene. Brought to life, Virgilian Fama is Ovidian Invidia. See Ben Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 48. On Fama in Virgil and Ovid, see Philip Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 273–80, and “‘Why is Rumour Here?’: Tracking Virgilian and Ovidian Fama,” Ordia Prima 1 (2002): 67–80.

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49. In the 1720s George Sewell noted the broad lineage: “Those Shadowy Beings, as they have been lately properly termed, which abound in Spenser, Milton, (and I might go back to Chaucer) are mostly owing to Ovid. Spenser in particular is remarkable for imitating the Exuberance of our Poet in all his Creatures of Fancy.” Ovid’s Metamorphoses vol. 1 (1724), iii. Quoted in Colin Burrow, “‘Full of the Maker’s Guile’: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid,” in Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 271–87, 284. 50. Collin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 269. For a different reading of Sin as “consciously derivative” see John M. Steadman, “Tradition and Innovation in Milton’s ‘Sin’: The Problem of Literary Indebtedness,” Philological Quarterly 39 (1960): 93–103, 101. Steadman argues that Sin shows how Milton uses “an entire tradition, as well as the specific precedents of Ovid, Fletcher, and others, to make it convincing” (103) but also to show his own innovations, an argument recalled by that of Quilligan. 51. Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in Paradise Lost (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 56–57. See generally his splendid description of the scene, 56–63.

Waking Leucothea: An Unexplored Homeric Allusion in Paradise Lost SARAH VAN DER LAAN

1669, M ATTHEW POOLE PUBLISHED HIS SYNOPSIS criticorum aliorumque S. Scripturae interpretum, a wide-ranging synthesis of English and Continental biblical commentaries.1 Poole’s four large folio volumes proceed verse by verse through the Bible, compiling copious glosses on virtually every verse from all sides of the era’s religious controversies. To explain the mention in Genesis 2:9 of the enigmatic “arbor scientiae boni et mali,” the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Poole quotes Hugo Grotius, Nicholas of Lyra, the Jesuits Jacques Bonfrère and Menochius of Pavia and Tirinius of Antwerp, and the reformers Paul Fagius and Henry Ainsworth, as well as editions of the Bible by Sebastian Munster (in Hebrew and Latin), the Dominican scholar Pagnini (Latin), and the Calvinist Johannes Piscator (German). But mixed in among this impressively ecumenical group of authorities is a quotation from the Odyssey: Telemachos’ statement that “kai oida hekasta, / Esthla te kai ta chereia: paros d’eti nêpios êa” [And I know each thing, the good and the worse: formerly I was still an infant.]2 Poole uses Telemachos’s self-assertion to support his reading of the tree as one that leads men to distinguish good from evil. His practice finds counterparts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the Odyssey, editions whose glosses and commentaries use Homer’s text to engage contemporary theological controversies. It also illuminates John Milton’s use of Odyssean allusions in Paradise Lost, published in the same city just two years earlier. Allusions to the Odyssey permeate the frame of the human, redemptive plot of Paradise Lost: the heavenly negotiations in books 3 and 11 that present the critical ethical issues in the story of human fall and redemption to come. Through these allusions, Milton explores the balance of human struggle and prevenient grace in the repentance of sin and moral growth. These allusions inform the poem’s argument that human free will acts together with divine grace to effect salvation, and their primacy privileges the Odyssey as an interpretive tool for understanding the process of redemption in Paradise Lost. Homer’s poem becomes the subtext for Milton’s most explicit articulations of his theodicy and of the relationship IN

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between the divine presence and fallen humanity. By thinking in Odyssean terms, he argues not just for the operation but also for the necessity of moral effort in salvation. In drawing on the Odyssey to illustrate an Arminian view of salvation, Milton participates in Renaissance practices of reading Homer for insight into religious matters and to fuel the fires of religious polemic. The Odyssey thus lends its authority to a particular model of Christian salvation, a model that stands at the heart of one of the great Protestant doctrinal controversies of the seventeenth century: the conflict between orthodox Calvinists and Arminians. Rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which implied the utter helplessness of human virtue against a preordained fate, followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius developed the doctrine of conditional election: God selects for salvation all those who persevere in their Christian faith and, to make faith possible, extends his grace to all humankind. Some choose to accept that grace and are thereby saved; others reject it and are damned. Faith, not predestination, becomes in the Arminian view the criterion for salvation; divine grace becomes resistible, its acceptance a matter of human choice rather than divine gift.3 Milton explores this Arminian view of the interaction of human free will and divine grace as he revises the opening of the Odyssey in Paradise Lost 3 and, later, as he illustrates this model of human salvation in Paradise Lost 11 with an allusion to the nymph Leukothea’s role in rescuing Odysseus from shipwreck. Critics have long noted that the Father’s first speech in the divine council in Paradise Lost 3, especially lines 96–99, is modeled on Zeus’s first speech in the divine council that opens the Odyssey. In fact, much of the divine council of Paradise Lost 3—the framing device that tells us not only what is to happen in the rest of the poem and far beyond its confines, but also how to interpret the ethical consequences of that action in postlapsarian history—is modeled closely on the divine council of Odyssey 1, which performs a similar function.4 The Son’s striking description of divine grace as “the speediest of thy winged messengers” provides an example of both these structural parallels and the theological interpretations that the allusions invite. In her second speech, Athene proposes that Zeus send Hermes, the winged messenger god, to order the nymph Kalypso to free Odysseus from his bondage on her island; in his second speech, the Son proposes that the Father should grant his grace to fallen humanity in order to free him from eternal death. Like Athene, the Son recommends the use of a divine messenger, traveling on wings, to begin the redemptive action under discussion. He does so at a moment in the council’s structure precisely analogous to the moment at which Athene suggests Hermes, creating a parallel—one of many—between the narrative structure of the two divine councils. But the description of grace in

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Homeric terms does more than simply provide a structural analogue to the predecessor poem. Seen in its context in the Father and Son’s discussion of grace, this apparently glancing allusion in fact helps to shape the reader’s concept of divine grace. The Father first broaches the topic of grace and free will: Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely vouchsafed; once more I will renew His lapsèd powers, though forfeit and enthralled By sin to foul exorbitant desires[.] (3.173–77)5

The Father goes on to invite a volunteer to die for humanity, but the Son begins his reply by returning to the question of grace: Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace; And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of thy wingèd messengers To visit all thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought, Happy for man, so coming; he her aid Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost[.] (3.227–33)

The subtle likening of divine grace to Hermes—and specifically to his role as a winged messenger, planned in Odyssey 1 and performed in Odyssey 5—illustrates the essentially Arminian view of free will presented in Paradise Lost. Hermes’ descent to earth forces Kalypso to accept the gods’ decision that Odysseus must be allowed to leave Ogygia. However, Odysseus must still do everything from felling trees for a raft to sailing across the open ocean himself. Lest these seem simple tasks for a hero as clever as Odysseus, we should remember that when he leaves Ogygia, he does not know either where he is or where he is going. He simply sets forth on the open ocean, trusting to his wits and his seamanship to capitalize on the opportunity that, unbeknownst to him, the gods have created for him. Hermes’ intervention in Odysseus’s homecoming is certainly necessary, but it does not instantaneously resolve the problem of that homecoming. Instead, through Hermes, Zeus creates an opportunity for Odysseus to use his own powers to take his next step homeward. Grace, the Father’s “winged messenger,” plays a similarly enabling but inconclusive role in Milton’s theology. Dennis Danielson explains that the first three lines of the Father’s speech set forth “both the decisive character of the will and the instrumentality of grace—central points ... of Arminian

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teaching.”6 In other words, both Calvinist and Arminian thought insisted upon the sufficiency of grace alone for salvation. Calvinism, however, taught that divine grace was irresistible, while Arminianism held that grace could be resisted. Human free will therefore becomes the decisive factor in the Arminian model of salvation: each individual must choose to accept the prevenient grace freely and fully offered by God through Christ in order to benefit from it. This Arminian formula explains the Father’s puzzling statement that humankind will be saved “who will, / Yet not of will in him, but grace in me.” An individual must will salvation in order to achieve it, but equally, the agent of that salvation must be not the individual’s will but prevenient, sufficient, yet resistible grace. The allusion to a dramatic Odyssean passage provides an accessible illustration of the roles that divine grace and human free will play in salvation—not just of the absolute insufficiency of human free will on its own, but of the critical work free will must nevertheless do. Without allegorizing Homer, Milton adopts Odysseus’s homecoming as a metaphor for the spiritual homecoming that awaits the Christian faithful.7 He uses it to explore and to illustrate the relationship between divine grace and human free will, and to underscore their mutual interdependence in the process of human salvation. The divine council of Odyssey 1 thus becomes for Milton a moment in a critically important and authoritative predecessor text that considers a similar problem from a similar ethical viewpoint. Framing the postlapsarian ethical problems of Paradise Lost in Odyssean terms indicates that the solutions or remedies for these problems will also be similar, that the Odyssey offers useful models for the readers of Paradise Lost as they cope with these problems in their own experiences. By turning to the Odyssey for its model of the interaction of divine grace with the freely willed faith and moral struggle of humanity, Paradise Lost reinterprets the active fortitude of Odysseus and his active struggle to forge an alliance with the gods as heroic virtues for a Christian readership. In doing so, Milton engages in practices of reading the Odyssey for theological reflection that have largely slipped from view. Milton’s own quotation of the Odyssey in De Doctrina Christiana has often been noted, though not its full ramifications for an Arminian view of salvation. As he attacks the concept of reprobation that forms half of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, he quotes Zeus’s first speech of the Odyssey, the same speech on which the Father’s first speech is based: difficulty mostly arises when no distinction is made between a decree of reprobation and that punishment which involves the hardening of a sinner’s heart. Prov. xix. 3 has an apt comment: man’s foolishness leads him astray, and his spirit is roused in indignation against Jehovah. For those who believe in a decree of reprobation do, in fact, accuse God, however strongly

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they may deny it. Even a heathen like Homer emphatically reproves such people in Odyssey, I.7: They perisht by their owne impieties.

—and again, through the mouth of Jupiter, I.32: O how falsly men Accuse us Gods as authors of their ill, When by the bane their owne bad lives instill They suffer all the miseries of their states— Past our inflictions and beyond their fates.8

Milton complains of the injustice of his fellow seventeenth-century Protestants and then conflates them with the original audience of the Odyssey by noting that Homer “emphatically reproves such people.” The ingrates of Homer’s cosmos are still very much alive in Milton’s; they still have a lesson to learn from Homer as well as from Milton. Even non-Christians (“Even a heathen like Homer”) can understand the injustice of blaming divine powers for human misfortunes. Such injustice should therefore strike true Christian believers all the more forcefully. Milton does not grant Homer any particular insight; on the contrary, he becomes simply a representative pagan. Nevertheless, the passage finds Milton putting the Odyssey to work in the service of Christian doctrinal argument as a legitimate source of illustration and court of appeal for his own interpretation of the Bible. When Milton refutes the doctrine of reprobation by referring in the same paragraph to a scriptural locus and to a Homeric quotation, therefore, he uses the Odyssey to press an Arminian point against Calvinist orthodoxy. The apparently inferior status of the Odyssey as a poetic, classical work serves not to undermine but to enhance the theological point he makes. Homer’s very status as a pagan author strengthens Milton’s point by demonstrating just how self-evident it is. The Odyssey functions here as an example for Milton’s readers of how to think about the relationship between humans and God, an example all the more powerful precisely because it does not draw its authority from one Protestant sect or another. By acknowledging the Odyssey’s religious difference even as he insists on its importance for Christian theology, Milton avoids the traditional Christian defense of classical literature: the argument that the great pagan epic poets had been granted limited glimpses of Christian revelation. Instead, he turns the focus of the argument squarely back onto each individual’s responsibility for his or her own behavior and thoughts; he redefines the issue as a universal ethical problem rather than a sectarian controversy. The Odyssey becomes a key text for Milton to articulate and think through problems of human free will and the power of men and women to affect their fate for good or ill.

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In similar fashion, as Paradise Lost distinguishes itself from the Odyssey by emphasizing its Christian religious content, its framing narrative draws Milton’s poem closer to its predecessor. The choice of the Odyssey’s narrative frame as a template for the narrative frame of Paradise Lost emphasizes the fundamental similarities between the ethical problems that the two theodicies and the two sets of divinities confront. Through these framing devices, both poems adopt at the outset similar positions regarding the relationship of divine and human beings and the knowledge and understanding humans may have of the gods, and Paradise Lost does so in the terms established by the Odyssey. Paradise Lost 3 thus suggests that though the religious contexts in which human beings experience divine providence may vary wildly in content and veracity, something fundamental in human experience does not change. The council scene renews a lesson of the Odyssey: each individual must still struggle to embrace responsibility for his or her own actions and judgment in a world in which divine presence and justice seem at times inaccessible. Milton’s scene emphasizes the similarities in the two poems between the disturbingly partial knowledge that postlapsarian humankind may have of divine motives and plans, the expectations and burdens placed on each individual in his or her relationship with the divinity of their cosmos, and the imperative to be actively good rather than to abstain passively from evil. The Odyssey becomes a text that offers Milton’s readers “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase—material for useful ethical, theological, and practical reflection.9 In its look forward to postlapsarian human existence, to the beginning of history, the presence of the Odyssey in the frame of Paradise Lost may even offer a form of Christian consolation to Milton’s readers. Seth Schein has noted that while the Iliad imagines a world in which the divine and the human mingle readily, the divinities of the Odyssey have largely withdrawn from the earth.10 If the Olympians of the Iliad fight for or through their chosen human champions, the Olympians of the Odyssey choose rather to observe from afar and to intervene only at critical moments, often in disguise and often (at least initially) without the knowledge of the human beings they aid. The divine council of Odyssey 1 reveals the preparation of just such an intervention, without Odysseus’s knowledge. Just so, the divine council of Paradise Lost 3 looks forward to a time when God and angels will no longer walk alongside humans in recognizable form—when men and women, like Odysseus, will journey alone over rough seas without a palpable divine presence to guide them. Nonetheless, even before that time has arrived, a crucial intervention is already being prepared to bring them to a safe harbor. As the Father looks ahead to the Odyssean phase of Adam’s, and humanity’s, experience, he prepares Odyssean protections for humankind. By foregrounding the Father’s complaints about ungrateful postlapsarian humanity, and by setting out to effect a homecoming for the fallen

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long before the Fall has taken place, the poem’s narrative structure looks forward to the aftermath of that catastrophe. The divine council and its Odyssean substructure alert the reader to look for ethical instruction—for the exemplarity that is the avowed function of epic poetry—past the Fall, to Adam and Eve’s attempts to cope with the new moral uncertainties of their fallen state and the radically revised terms of their relationship with the Father. Indeed, another Odyssean allusion mediates a transition from the next major discussion of grace and free will in heaven to its realization in Eden: the appearance of the Odyssean nymph Leukothea in answer to Adam’s prayers at the beginning of Paradise Lost 11. This allusion marks a transition not just from the divine to the human level of narrative, but from abstract ethical debate to action, from theory to practice. Book 11 opens with a renewal of the discussion on grace and free will begun in book 3—a discussion that has become urgent, now that the Fall has occurred. The narrator then returns us to earth by describing the dawn of the first day following the Fall and Adam and Eve’s subsequent reconciliation: Meanwhile To resalute the world with sacred light Leucothea waked, and with fresh dews embalmed The earth, when Adam and first matron Eve Had ended now their orisons, and found, Strength added from above, new hope to spring Out of despair, joy, but with fear yet linked[.] (11.133–39)

Patrick Hume, in his 1695 edition of Paradise Lost, identifies Leucothea as the goddess of the dawn found in Cicero and Lucretius. He then adds that “Homer makes her a Sea-Nymph, and a Friend to Saylors. Day-break, is a Darling no less at Sea, than on Shore.”11 More recently, Alastair Fowler has also recognized this as an allusion to the Odyssey, noting that Leucothea is appropriately invoked here because she saves Odysseus.12 But naming her here does more than simply personify the dawn or imply a saving presence already at work in the lives of Adam and Eve. Homer’s Leukothea rescues Odysseus from the storm sent by Poseidon to torment Odysseus as he sails away from Kalypso’s island at last: The daughter of Kadmos, sweet-stepping Ino called Leukothea, saw him. She had once been one who spoke as a mortal, but now in the gulfs of the sea she holds degree as a goddess. She took pity on Odysseus as he drifted and suffered hardship, and likening herself to a winged gannet she came up out of the water and perched on the raft and spoke a word to him:

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“Poor man, why is Poseidon the shaker of the earth so bitterly cankered against you, to give you such a harvest of evils? And yet he will not do away with you, for all his anger. But do as I say, since you seem to me not lacking in good sense. Take off these clothes, and leave the raft to drift at the winds’ will, and then strike out and swim with your hands and make for a landfall on the Phaiakian country, where your escape is destined. And here, take this veil, it is immortal, and fasten it under your chest; and there is no need for you to die, nor to suffer. But when with both your hands you have taken hold of the mainland, untie the veil and throw it out in the wine-blue water far from the land; and turn your face away as you do so.”13 (5.333–50)

Leukothea offers the protection of her immortal veil to save Odysseus as he drifts, literally rudderless, on the stormy sea; and that storm is sent by Poseidon to punish further Odysseus’s attack on the Cyclops Polyphemos. Adam and Eve, spiritually adrift after the emotional storm following the Fall that marks their departure from the state of innocence, find comfort in the dawning of a new day. That comfort, which coincides with Leucothea’s appearance, reflects the arrival on earth of the “prevenient grace descending” announced by the narrator at the beginning of book 11 and the signs, both spiritual and physical, of divine forgiveness. On the surface, these parallels are not exact. Agency in the salvation of the shipwrecked lies in Homer with Leukothea, but in Milton with the Father through the Son. Milton’s Leucothea enters the poem at the moment that Adam and Eve, having finished their first postlapsarian prayers of contrition and repentance, receive new strength, hope, and joy in return. Leucothea seems to be a comforting manifestation of divine grace, rather than an agent of salvation herself. While Homer’s Leukothea actually mitigates the suffering and penance directed at Odysseus by an angry god, Milton’s Leucothea seems merely to bring a sign that the Father has tempered his own sense of outraged justice with mercy. But this apparent difference points to a deeper similarity between the two passages. Although Adam and Eve, like Odysseus, enjoy divine protection, they too must swim for it. Odysseus can only win his safe landing on Scheria by struggling to keep afloat for two days and two nights. He floats with the help of Leukothea’s veil, but the veil does not substitute for the efforts he must make to come ashore. In a similar vein, Adam and Eve gain the Son’s ear and his eventual intercession with the Father on their behalf through their spontaneous, unsought offerings of prayers and contrition. Although divine grace and mercy sufficient to effect their

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redemption are already available to them—as the pluperfect “prevenient grace descending had removed / The stony from their hearts” (11.3–4, italics added) demonstrates—they must still show actively, through prayer and contrition, their desire to accept it. Human salvation, in Paradise Lost as in the Odyssey, depends on a certain amount of human effort, joined to the infinitely more efficacious workings of grace. The Homeric figure evokes a divine partnership with humankind; her presence also reminds the reader that each individual must work to supplement the saving grace that he needs, but that will not substitute for his own agency in his salvation. The Odyssean allusion thus encodes, again in the guise of classical epic rather than Christian theology, a crucial tenet of Milton’s Arminianism: his emphasis on the power of humanly willed and consciously chosen faith to effect salvation. The fact that the encoding allusion is to a classical epic whose cultural and literary authority are as orthodox as they can be draws once again upon that authority to buttress its own claims, using the Odyssean subtext to confer an extra dash of legitimacy on this Arminian (and therefore heterodox) belief. Milton was not alone in using Leukothea to think about the interaction of divine grace and free will. Translations and paratextual commentaries suggest that Leukothea’s brief appearance was often read for insight into the relationship between divine and human powers. Among these are two possibly known to Milton: Jean de Sponde’s extensively annotated parallel-column Greek-Latin edition of Homer’s works, published in Basel in 1583, and George Chapman’s 1616 translation of Homer.14 De Sponde’s edition provided the most copious Latin commentary on Homer in the late Renaissance; the work of a Calvinist-educated Huguenot who later converted to Catholicism, it shares some doctrinal sympathies with Milton’s own writings. De Sponde’s was also the principal edition Chapman used to produce his translation. These two works thus offer a sense of the range of readings available to at least some of Milton’s readers. Chapman translates Leukothea’s speech to Odysseus as follows: Why is Neptune thus In thy pursuite extremely furious, Oppressing thee with such a world of ill, Euen to thy death? He must not serue his will, Though tis his studie. Let me then aduise, As my thoughts serue; thou shalt not be vnwise To leaue thy weeds and ship, to the commands Of these rude winds; and worke out with thy hands, Passe to Phæacia; where thy austere Fate, Is to pursue thee with no more such hate. Take here this Tablet, with this riband strung, And see it still about thy bosome hung;

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By whose eternall vertue, neuer feare To suffer thus againe, nor perish here. But when thou touchest with thy hand the shore, Then take it from thy necke, nor weare it more; But cast it farre off from the Continent, And then thy person farre ashore present.15

While Homer has Poseidon angry with Odysseus but explicitly not planning (or perhaps unable) to kill him—ou se kataphthisei (5.341) [he will not destroy you]16 —Chapman sees Poseidon pursuing Odysseus “even to thy death”: “tis his studie.” Chapman’s Poseidon sounds much more like Milton’s Satan, plotting the death and destruction of a hated divine favorite: “Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return, / Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed” (4.533–35). Death, not discomfort, is the risk Chapman’s Odysseus runs at Poseidon’s hands. This marks a significant shift in the context of the scene from its Homeric original. And the help Leukothea offers Odysseus changes accordingly. Homer’s Leukothea offers Odysseus her krêdemnon, a head-covering for a woman or female goddess (5.346); Lattimore’s “veil” is an accurate translation. Chapman’s Leukothea, by contrast, offers a “tablet.” His innovation wrenches the text away from the original, substituting a small, hard, flat object—which Chapman himself glosses in the argument to the book first as a “jewel” and then as an “amulet”—for Homer’s soft cloth.17 But a tablet is most commonly either for writing upon or already inscribed; it implies words.18 Leukothea’s gift to Odysseus thus acquires a hint of the gift of the Word itself. Chapman’s translation of cheiressi neôn epimaieo nostou (5.344) [swimming with your hands strive for the shore] as “worke out with thy hands” also emphasizes the work Odysseus must do to save himself. And the language Chapman gives Leukothea—“eternal virtue,” “perish”— has the ring of seventeenth-century writing about salvation. So too does the rephrasing of the reassurance she offers Odysseus; the simple factual statement “oude ti toi patheein deos oud’apolestha” (5.347) [there is no cause for you to fear to suffer or to die] becomes in Chapman’s translation an imperative: “never fear.” Taken together, the cluster of phrases suggests a change of register from heroic narrative to religious exhortation. The switch from factual to emotional reassurance, from logic to faith, suggests that Chapman sees this scene not as a simple sea rescue but as a divine intervention in that most allegorical of scenes, a virtuous everyman adrift on the tempestuous sea of life. Not every seventeenth-century reader or translator shared Chapman’s bent for allegorizing Homer, but his treatment of this episode reveals that it could be understood as an emblem of the relationship between humanity and God in human salvation. As in the Father’s famous formula—“Man shall not quite be lost, but saved

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who will, / Yet not of will in him, but grace in me / Freely vouchsafed” (3.173–75)—that relationship involves mutual effort. The deity provides the means of salvation, but an individual must contribute his or her share of labor in order to benefit from it. The relevance of this relationship to Leukothea’s intervention becomes more explicit in de Sponde’s commentary on Odyssey 5, which may well lie behind Chapman’s presentation of Leukothea. Commenting on Zeus’s declaration that Odysseus shall come back by the convoy neither of the gods nor of mortal people, but he shall sail on a jointed raft and, suffering hardships, on the twentieth day make his landfall on fertile Scheria at the country of the Phaiakians who are near the gods in origin, and they will honor him in their hearts as a god, and send him back, by ship, to the beloved land of his fathers (5.31–37)

de Sponde writes, Hoc ex falsa illa ueterum doctrina pendet, posse aliquid homines sine Deorum auxilio: quod id circo Vlyssi non adesse uult Iupiter, nimirum in ipso nauigationis principio, ut submonet Eustathius. Nam nullus aut Deorum aut hominum dicitur Vlyssem a Calypsus insula ad Phæacas transmisisse. Alioqui in media nauigatione Leucothea Vlyssi affuit, & a Phæacibus ad Ithacam homines eum deduxerunt [italics added].19 This hangs on that false doctrine of the ancients, that men can do anything without the help of the gods: that for that reason Jupiter wishes not to help Ulysses, doubtless, at the beginning of his voyage, as Eustathius hints. For no-one either of the gods or of man is said to have conveyed Ulysses from Kalypso’s island to the Phaiakians. On the contrary, in mid-voyage Leukothea assisted Ulysses, and men brought him from the Phaiakians to Ithaka [italics added].

De Sponde reads this episode as engaged with the problem of the coexistence of human agency and divine grace. He presents Leukothea as an example of divine assistance to humans, and he clearly sees her assistance as necessary for Odysseus to land safely on Scheria. Her appearance thus becomes an important moment in the poem’s engagement with the broader issue of human agency. De Sponde approaches that question from an opposite perspective to Milton’s: his concern is not whether there is space for free will in a divinely ordered universe, but whether a worldview that draws on anthropocentric

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classical beliefs gives sufficient credit to divine power. He therefore places greater weight on the other side of the balance, stressing the fallacy of the belief that humankind can achieve a safe homecoming wholly unaided by divine power. Yet he does not tilt that balance all the way toward the divine; in the commentary he claims not that Leukothea saves Odysseus, as he does in his argument to the book, but that she assists him—and that is perhaps the most active of the possible translations of adsum, the Latin verb de Sponde uses.20 Odysseus still has to do some, if not most, of the work of saving himself. De Sponde’s reading of this passage not only locates it in the same theological debate that Milton’s allusion does, it adopts an essentially similar position in that debate. De Sponde’s comment demonstrates that this passage of Homer was read to illuminate the relationship between divine and human will. Milton’s allusion to Homer’s Leukothea may thus be read as a reflection on, or even an intervention in, this debate. In such a reading, Leucothea’s unexpected arrival at this crucial juncture emphasizes both the activity of divine grace in human affairs and the necessity for human belief in that grace and willingness to accept it. She recalls the partnership of human will and divine intervention that the Odyssey depicts. A similar partnership, the active human acceptance of divine gifts, informs the model for Adam and Eve’s relationship with the Father and Son in their fallen state. Additional support for this reading of Leukothea comes from further afield: Lodovico Dolce’s L’Ulisse, an influential 1573 translation of the Odyssey into the Italian ottava rima of epic romance. Dolce prefaces each canto, as he calls the books of the Odyssey, with allegories similar to those he crafted for midcentury editions of the Orlando furioso. Of Leukothea, he writes, In Levcotea, che da il modo à Vlisse di salvarsi, si nota, che Dio non abbandona mai chi uuol far bene: e se bene gli auuengon molti accidenti e trauagli causati da gli auuersarij della salute nostra, non gli mancono ancora de’mezi da poterne uscire, & andar al lito notando, cioè saluarsi con la fatica, & essercitio delle buone operationi.21 In Leucothea, who gives Odysseus the means of saving himself, we see that God never abandons one who wishes to do well: and even if many hardships and travails caused by the adversaries of our welfare arrive, he will not lack the means of emerging from them, and coming to shore by swimming, that is by saving himself with effort, and the exercise of good works.

Dolce reads the Odyssey more allegorically even than Chapman, and his emphasis on good works reveals an explicitly Catholic, anti-Protestant theological stance. Yet he too sees in this episode a space to debate the coexistence of human free will and divine grace. Moreover, he presents

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Leukothea’s role in terms fundamentally similar to those of de Sponde and Milton: Leukothea’s encounter with Odysseus illustrates the joint divine and human endeavor necessary to accomplish salvation. God provides the tools for salvation, but human beings must work with those tools, expending their own efforts to arrive safely at the shore. Clearly this reading enjoyed broad currency across confessional lines; Homer provided congenial material for a wide range of theological speculation. This agreement across a spectrum of critical approaches to Homer also suggests that the boundaries between the explicitly allegorical and the not-allegorical in Homeric interpretation were more permeable than we might suppose. Milton’s use of Leukothea in Paradise Lost reflects this flexibility. Although Milton does not present his Leucothea as a personification of divine grace, he is not above drawing on a tradition of Homeric interpretation that includes such allegorical readings. His Leucothea is not an allegory, but the work she does in the text benefits from the existence of an allegorical tradition of reading Homer. This allusion also interweaves Homeric material with more familiar theological imagery. Milton’s Leucothea arrives to cover the earth “with fresh dew.” Dew is a common image for divine grace in seventeenth-century devotional writing and religious poetry. To cite just one example, John Donne, rejecting the serpent’s claim on fallen humanity, insists that because he repents his sins, “I am made up of the water of Baptism, of the water of Repentance, of the water that accompanies the blood of Christ... Jesus... I am a drop of that dew, that dew that lay upon the head of Christ not Dust.”22 Donne presents dew as both the instrument of regeneration and the gift of grace. His image of fallen humanity, who arrive at that gift through repentance and an approach to the divine through faith in Christ, closely parallels Adam and Eve’s early postlapsarian experience in Paradise Lost. They fight, repent, reconcile, remember the promise of eventual salvation through the Son, and reconcile themselves to God—and Leucothea arrives to scatter the morning dew. She becomes the bearer of divine grace: not a personification of grace, but an allusion who reminds us of the terms on which that grace is granted. Her role here recalls the similar role she plays in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, where she is included among the mythological figures whom the Attendant Spirit invokes as he summons Sabrina.23 Sabrina herself has been read as either a representation of divine grace or a conduit for its transmission to the Lady. Like the Leucothea of Paradise Lost, she appears in response to human solicitation of the divine, and she intervenes so that characters may free themselves from the snares of sin and desire. Invoking Leukothea to call divine grace down to earth, Milton imagines her once again as a figure who can provide divine grace to humans willing to actively seek and accept it. Recognizing this allusion, and reading it as a gloss on the respective roles the human and the divine take in salvation, smoothes a difficult

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passage that has troubled many readers.24 The Father describes Adam and Eve’s repentant prayers in book 11, immediately before Leucothea’s appearance in the text, as entirely his own doing: He sorrows now, repents, and prays contrite, My motions in him, longer than they move, His heart I know, how variable and vain Self-left. (90–93)

Having watched Adam and Eve come through the great postlapsarian trial of their argument, reconciliation, and resolution to seek divine forgiveness, we are now told that one major aspect of their triumph is due entirely to the Father’s agency. Adam and Eve reach an understanding of their fallen relationship to the Father only through his “motions.” Denying Adam and Eve the credit for this accomplishment undermines the other part of their achievement: their realization that they have failed each other and require each other’s help in their newly fallen state. This discovery of the depth of their need for each other reminds them of the Son’s promise of redemption, which in turn leads them to recognize and draw strength from their near-total dependence on divine help and mercy.25 Questioning their agency in the latter recognition undermines our belief that they are responsible for the former discovery. As Paradise Lost returns to the human sphere, Leucothea enters the poem. And with her enter the associations of human agency in salvation. The allusion to Leucothea thus qualifies the Father’s claims by restoring the necessity of human free will to the text. It supplies a missing term in the Father’s description of Adam and Eve’s repentance, reminding us that although they need divine grace (the Father’s “motions”), they also need to accept those motions. From the Father’s point of view, human free will, although genuinely free and genuinely willed, is still feeble and fickle, unable to do much without the assistance of divine grace. From the earthly point of view, human free will, although feeble and fickle, is still genuinely free and genuinely willed, dependent on divine grace for effect but necessary nonetheless. Each position is implied in, and consistent with, an Arminian interpretation of grace. The Odyssean allusions in Paradise Lost explore both the vital role of free will in human salvation and the utter insufficiency of that will alone, without the help of divine grace. They thus offer a perspective on humanity’s relationship to the divine that differs from that of Michael’s lessons in the poem’s final books. The reappearance of Odyssean material in the transition from the divine council of book 11 back to the human sphere invites us to return to the divine council of book 3, to read the two councils

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against each other. Doing so softens further the Father’s harsh judgment on Adam and Eve. The Father’s own description of Adam and Eve’s behavior in book 11—“He sorrows now, repents and prays contrite”—chimes with his earlier description of what will happen after the Fall: I will clear their senses dark, What may suffice, and soften stony hearts To pray, repent, and bring obedience due... And I will place within them as a guide My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear, Light after light well used they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive. (3.188–97)

Following the cue of the Odyssean allusions to place these two councils in dialogue with each other, it becomes clear that the Father’s problematic speech in book 11 develops a darker view of the theory of book 3 as it is put into practice. The “motions” the Father locates in Adam and Eve can be identified with the gift of conscience. An explanation of the events of Paradise Lost 10–11 thus falls into place, one consistent with both Arminian theology and the human dignity—even heroism—we seek in epic. Adam and Eve receive the gift of prevenient grace, which first enables their spiritual growth. Through their moral struggles during their argument and reconciliation, they begin that growth; through their own efforts, they finally arrive through repentance at the ability to accept that grace. They are far from having completed this growth, as Adam’s difficulties with Michael’s lessons indicate. Nevertheless, they have begun to forge a partnership with God that will see them safely home. Their repentance secures to them the psychological and spiritual benefits of a continued, though altered, relationship with the divine. Both the terms of that relationship and the process by which it is forged are characterized through reference to Leucothea. Up to this point, the interaction of grace and free will in human salvation has been discussed on the divine level only, in councils between the Father and the Son. Now Adam and Eve, too, discourse on their redemption. The moment that mediates that shift alludes to Odysseus’s one encounter on his journey with a divine being who comes to his aid and spells out the terms on which she will aid him.26 Leucothea appears in the text at the moment when Adam grasps the need to take responsibility for his own salvation, to understand the actions that will be required of him and to seek to perform them. At this moment, Adam and Eve have entered into a sphere in which they can and must develop ethically in order to keep up their pact with the Father. Even more importantly, they realize this fact.

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This Odyssean allusion guides Adam and Eve to understand their new relationship with the divine presence in their lives. Taken together with the earlier patterns of allusion to the Odyssey in book 3, it also prompts the reader to explore the Odyssey for illustrations of and reflections on the reader’s own salvation. Milton constructs his model of human salvation through an allusive relationship with a text that presents human free will and an active partnership with the divine as heroic qualities, harnessed for heroic endeavors. His Odyssean model of salvation therefore enables us to see as heroic our efforts to understand and participate in the divine project for humanity. The struggle not just to endure hardship but to strive actively toward salvation thus becomes an active form of Christian heroism, a complement to martyrdom for the reader who finds himself in a world where the moment to lay down one’s life for a principle has passed and the challenge is not to die gloriously but to live well.

NOTES 1. Matthew Poole, Synopsis criticorum aliorumque S. Scripturae interpretum, 4 vols. (London: Typis J. Flesher & T. Roycroft, 1669). 2. Poole, Synopsis criticorum, 1:B6r. The Homeric passage quoted is Odyssey 18.228–29. The translation and transliteration are my own. In his commentary on the tree, Poole also quotes Euripides, Zeno, and Plutarch. 3. See Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 70–82, for an overview of core Arminian beliefs and points of divergence from Calvinist orthodoxy. For a more detailed study of Arminius’s thought and that of his followers, see Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1971). Maurice Kelley’s This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s “De Doctrina Christiana” as a Gloss upon “Paradise Lost” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941) remains the standard book-length study of Arminian thought in De Doctrina Christiana. 4. For discussions of the relationship between speeches in the two divine councils, see Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 99; Francis Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 37, 47–48; Georgia Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 75; Barbara Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 115; Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6. For a full reading of the structural and verbal parallels between the two council scenes, see Sarah Van der Laan, “Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusions and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 49, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 49–76. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed., (New York: Longman, 1998). All references to Paradise Lost are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 6. Danielson, Milton’s Good God, 82. See also Maurice Kelley, “The Theological Dogma of Paradise Lost, III, 173–202,” PMLA 52 (1937): 75–9.

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7. A long tradition of reading this homecoming allegorically did exist, but Milton never implies that Homer himself intended any such commentary or that Homeric characters can be straightforwardly identified with theological concepts. For this tradition of Christian allegorical readings of the Odyssey, see Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. Brian Battershaw (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), chap. 7. 8. John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 6:202. 9. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 300, argues that a work of literature “is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it. Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary.” The situation I take Paradise Lost to explore through the Odyssey is nothing less than the pattern of fallen human experience itself. 10. Seth L. Schein, introduction to Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14. 11. Patrick Hume, “Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost,” in The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London, 1695), 294. 12. See Fowler’s notes on this passage in his edition of Paradise Lost, cited above. 13. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperCollins, 1975), 5.333–50. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the Odyssey are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 14. Homer, Homeri quae extant omnia, ed. Jean de Sponde (Basel, 1583); George Chapman, The Whole Works of Homer (London, 1616). For Chapman’s use of de Sponde, see Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 96–97; and Millar MacLure, George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 171. 15. Chapman, Whole Works of Homer, H4v–H5r. 16. Homer, Odyssey, ed. W.B. Stanford 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1959). All references to the Greek text of the Odyssey are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text; the transliterations and translations are my own. 17. Chapman, Whole Works of Homer, G6r. 18. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. s.v. “tablet,” 1.a–c, all carry connotations or explicit denotations to this effect. Defi nition 1b, “A slab or panel, usually of wood, for a picture or inscription,” goes on to mention a “votive tablet: an inscribed panel anciently hung in a temple in fulfilment of a vow, e.g. after deliverance from shipwreck or dangerous illness.” Classical votive tablets offered to a protective god by survivors of shipwreck would have been familiar from Horace, Odes, 1.5.13–16, in which the speaker compares his situation after the end of a tempestuous love affair to the survivor of a shipwreck offering his sea-drenched clothes as a “tabula votiva,” a votive tablet, in the temple of Poseidon. 19. De Sponde, Homeri quae extant omnia, ff3v. 20. Adsum most frequently signifies “to be present,” as opposed to sum, “to be.” 21. Lodovico Dolce, L’Ulisse (Venice, 1573), C7v. 22. John Donne, “An Anniversary Sermon preached at St. Dunstans, upon the commemoration of a Parishioner, a Benefactor to that Parish,” The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols., (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 10:187.

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23. John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (New York: Longman, 1971), line 874. In his notes on this line, Carey glosses this as an allusion to the Leukothea of Odyssey 5. 24. Thomas M. Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 407, objects to this passage as “anticlimactic.” Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God, 88–90, attempts to resolve Greene’s objections by reading an Arminian approach to grace and free will into the end of book 10 and beginning of book 11. But Danielson avoids the passage that so troubles Greene, which is harder to explain away through an Arminian reading. 25. Jun Harada, “The Mechanism of Human Reconciliation in Paradise Lost,” Philological Quarterly 50 (1971): 543–52. See also Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “Eve and Dalila: Renovation and the Hardening of the Heart,” in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, ed. Joseph Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 171–72; Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 32, 210–12; and Barbara Lewalski, “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” in Milton Studies 6, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 3–20, all of whom grant Eve a crucial role in the process of bringing about human reconciliation with the Father. 26. Odysseus does have further such frank discussions with Athene after his safe return to Ithaka, but not during his wanderings.

Self-sacrifice and Heroic Martyrdom in the Aeneid and Paradise Lost DAVID J. BRADSHAW

of personal voice into his heroic poem seems a radical departure from classical epic convention, Milton would have been thoughtfully responsive to the episodes of the Aeneid concerning Nisus and Euryalus. When Vergil concludes comment on these figures, he somewhat uncharacteristically enters the poem to promise, through the agency of his verse, immortality to the Trojan youths whose heroic endeavors have gone all awry (9.446–49).1 Yet, no doubt, Milton was attracted to these figures for reasons other than Vergil’s blending of lyric elegiac lament into epic narration. By engaging the Vergilian model at any number of junctures in Paradise Lost, Milton, as Richard DuRocher perceptively notes, invites readers “to undertake hermeneutic and epistemological labor” in assessing how what is newly presented may be understood in conjunction with complex and sometimes conflicted traditions.2 Milton’s allusion to the Nisus-Euryalus story is designed to lead a reader toward an essential moral. In considering Milton’s allusive bonding with Vergil, we labor to differentiate between self-abnegating sacrifice that serves the public good and self-serving abandonment of duty that merely gratifies personal desire. By giving to the Son of God a distinctive locution that echoes the dying plea of Nisus and by having Eve subsequently repeat this phrasing, Milton further discriminates his singular vision of epic virtue, “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (9.31–32) from Vergil’s.3 Two episodes illustrate Milton’s intertextual negotiation here: the Son’s offer to stand in place of all humankind in order to expiate their capital punishment (3.203–71) and Eve’s plea that she suffer the sentence of death for Adam (10.909–46). These scenes set self-sacrificing love and humility against heroic self-assertion and quest for fame. The personalities of Nisus and Euryalus receive initial development during the footrace at the funeral games for Anchises (5.286–361). Euryalus is the attractive ephebus [young protégé] just entering manhood, Nisus an older comrade distinguished by his worthy love [amore pio 5.296] for the youth and by his bad luck [he is infelix 5.329]. While leading in the race, Nisus himself slips, yet, even in falling, remains concerned for his young AS THE POET WHOSE PROJECTION

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friend’s success, and he deliberately trips up his closest rival, thereby ensuring that Euryalus will win the competition. That Nisus loses his footing as he runs through the blood of sacrificial victims points toward his own subsequent determination to sacrifice his life, and in emulating Vergil, Milton could, as he projects the blood-ransom by the Son of God, count upon readers to recall the contextual details that adumbrate the fate of Nisus. What commands immediate attention in the vignette, however, is Nisus’s apparent devotion to Euryalus, his eager willingness to subordinate self so that the beloved comrade might enjoy happy success. Less prominent points in the episode are, additionally, pertinent to the subsequent careers of the two friends and also underscore Vergil’s critical characterization of their emotional impetuosity, their youthful desire for recognition (in sharp contrast, in the ensuing competition [5.362–484], with the reluctant veteran Entellus’s indifference to awards), and their infelicity combined with a lack of clear competence and mature strength. Readers next encounter the two friends when the issue concerns actual martial prowess rather than games rehearsing such skill (9.176–503). With Aeneas away from a dangerously besieged camp, Nisus—aroused by a yearning for heroic fame that Vergil describes in 9.185 as dira cupido [a fierce craving]—proposes to slip through enemy lines to inform the absent leader of present dangers. Euryalus insists upon sharing in the expedition, and the two are commissioned to carry out the plan. In passing through the Rutulian ranks, however, overwhelmed by caedis cupido [a lust for killing] (9.353), they elect to pause and slaughter a number of the sleeping enemy.4 Vergil presents such action as a needless deviation from their mission. Redirected to get beyond the foe’s lines, the two nonetheless stop to pillage the encampment and thereby put before the realities of duty a hankering after spoils that would attest their heroic prowess.5 Endangered by the digression from their mission, they are ultimately discovered because a plumed helmet Euryalus has taken reflects the moonlight, betraying his presence to a detachment of enemy reinforcements. Once detected, they are themselves killed, loyal to one another but neglectful in fulfillment of their commission. Even in praising them, Vergil presents the young men as blameworthy in their obsession with spoils and in their bloodlust. In this way, Vergil accentuates the counterproductive nature of excessive desire for fame and also the destructive quality of that emotional selfabsorption that proves culpable in other figures.6 Milton engages the second Nisus-Euryalus narrative (and, by implication, the first) when the Son of God implores the Father to punish him rather than Adam and his progeny: Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;

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Account mee man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glorie next to thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleas’d, on me let Death wreck all his rage. (3.236–41 italics added)

These words call up the entreaty Nisus makes following their slaughter and despoliation of the group of sleeping Rutulians, as he sees Euryalus captured and about to be dispatched by the forces of Volcens, an ally to the Latins: “me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, o Rutuli! mea fraus omnis” “On me, on me, here I am who have done the deed, turn sword on me, o Rutulians! let the transgression be all mine.” (9.427–28 italics added)

The enemy will not heed Nisus’s distracted plea that he serve as ransom for his beloved comrade by becoming a sacrificial substitute: Volcens slays Euryalus, and Nisus, in turn, fights his way through the troops to kill Volcens and then to die upon Euryalus’s breast. Of course, Nisus’s action seems admirable, and, of course, it is wrong—strategically (militarily) wrong because it is ineffectual. It is morally wrong because it involves abandonment of higher, more comprehensive duties. Undetected by the Latins, Nisus elects not to escape but makes, instead, the hopeless gesture of dying with his friend. By having the Son’s words evoke the intensely dramatic situation that Vergil presents, Milton juxtaposes the genuine caritas of the Son of God with the cupiditas of Nisus. Nisus’s character and the nature of the futile sacrifice he makes following his desperate appeal underscore the disinterested love and efficacious action of Milton’s divine heroic martyr. The contrast established with Nisus’s plea also helps determine how readers will construe the subsequent seeming-heroic petition Eve makes after she and Adam have fallen, as she vainly seeks to assume sole responsibility for their mutual sin (10.923–26). The most obvious difference between Nisus’s willingness to serve as sacrifice and the Son’s volunteering to stand as blood ransom is that Nisus’s offering of himself proves ineffectual. He cannot redeem, cannot save his comrade. His words and actions register as mere gestures, empty, unsound. By contrast, the Son’s pledge to provide surety for humankind and his subsequent fulfillment of this pledge constitute, for Milton, the definitive reality of being, providing the basis for restored spiritual life.

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Nisus does nothing for Euryalus; the Son, on the other hand, rightwises and revives all humanity, “dead in sins and lost” (3.233). Milton, however, remains ever concerned with inwardness:7 that intention does not culminate in achievement is less important than that proper disposition govern action. However, the figure of Nisus allusively implicated in the Son’s call to let wrath be visited “on me, on me,” shows his disposition as pointedly not proper, and indeed, deficient. It is not, as Vergil makes clear, simply that Nisus fails in a foolhardy effort to save Euryalus. Were it so, the obsessive devotion to another might seem simply an expression of unreflecting love. More significant, instead, is that, in revealing himself to Volcens’s men, Nisus forsakes his responsibility to the greater good, heedless of the consequences to all his other comrades: the safety of the returning Aeneas and the preservation of the entire Trojan garrison depend upon Nisus’s escaping to warn the absent leader of danger and thereby ensure his safe arrival to lift the siege.8 By appropriating but slightly displacing the verbal echo, Milton underscores the Son’s contrasting attitude, and the Son’s willingness to die marks the register of Eternal Providence committed to the salvation of the greater whole, of all, indeed, who would be saved. Where Nisus’s action puts at risk those to whom he is responsible, the Son’s action redeems not just from risk but from ruin those for whom he assumes ultimate responsibility. Milton’s contextual correspondences between Nisus and the Son also juxtaposes their attitudes toward fame or glory as well as the nature of the love that motivates each one. Nisus passionately fixates upon securing glory. The dira cupido [the fierce craving] that drives him (9.185) carries negative connotations, suggesting excess and self-absorption, while the battle-readiness he proclaims (9.184–87) displays an undirected, a constitutional restlessness wanting purpose. Nisus confesses to coveting praise (9.194–95), which, while not unusual in the heroic tradition, still appears somewhat disaffecting in its egocentricity. Vergil also presents him as seeking fame exclusively, for Nisus assigns Euryalus the material rewards for their exploit (9.194), while he wants Euryalus to survive him so that he may be assured of a friend’s paying funerary honors at his tomb (9.213–15). By contrast, in the Son, “Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds” (3.312). “Freely put[ting] off” the glory that he enjoys next to the Father, the Son “will leave / [The Father’s] bosom” (3.238–40) as he forgoes partaking in divine relationship and in divinity itself in order that his redemptive love might save humankind.9 Such love, “By name to come call’d Charitie,” the soul, as the archangel Michael asserts, of all other virtues (12.584), is distinguished by its divesting, its emptying of self for others. This self-abnegation is quite the opposite of Nisus’s desire as he frantically pleads to die for Euryalus. Although his relationship to Euryalus, described as an amor pius (5.296),

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might be initially associated with the quintessential Roman virtue, pietas, it has become for Nisus self-indulgently obsessive rather than socially and publicly responsible, another cupido or uncontrolled yearning bound tight with his other cravings for glory and for slaughter.10 Unable to separate Euryalus from himself, he encourages the youth to mirror him in aspiration and action. Euryalus offers such an intense narcissistic reflection that Nisus, in choosing to die with him, might seem to anticipate Milton’s Adam as he resolves to die with Eve by joining her in sin: if Death Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life; So forcible within my heart I feel The Bond of Nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our State cannot be severd, we are one, One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self. (9.953–59, italics added)

No more than Adam can restore the fallen Eve can Nisus procure Euryalus’s freedom. Instead, each elects to die with an alter ego whose very likeness to self reveals the egocentric nature of desire. It is not with Adam, however, that Paradise Lost presents a secondary allusive parallel to Nisus. Rather, Eve’s prominent phrasing recalls both the Son’s words and, behind them, Nisus’s plea.11 Following their judgment by the Son, and Adam’s repudiation of her, Eve responds to Adam’s prideful anger with love and humility: both have sin’d, but thou Against God onely, I against God and thee, And to the place of judgment will return, There with my cries importune Heav’n, that all The sentence from thy head remov’d might light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Mee mee onely just object of his ire. (10.930–36, italics added)

More than fifty years ago, Joseph Summers judged Eve’s speech of reconciliation “the turning point” of the epic, for in her words, readers “hear the fullest human expression of the will to redemptive love.”12 “[T]he whole truth,” Summers goes on to remark, is “that Eve is also the embodiment of humility and of uncalculating love, that she is the mother both of the highest perfection of human love and, justly, of the Divine Redeemer— whereby all men are blessed” (183). Her offer to assume the burden of primal guilt must, of course, be acknowledged as unacceptable, for Eve is

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but “the shadowy type,” where the incarnate Son is the true reality of love that redeems all humankind.13 This fact underscores the dynamics of “ransom theology” the Father articulates in the council in heaven (3.129–265). However, all is, for Milton, as ever in the “great task-maisters eye,” and more important than the effective result is the disposition that leads to Eve’s offer of expiation. That is, God’s understanding of one’s intention as properly disposed is more important than the result or success of one’s actions. Here, the allusive juxtaposition with Nisus accentuates the nature of Christian love. Not an expression of narcissistic obsession and selfaggrandizement but an unaffected and all-unreserved concern for Adam’s spiritual wellbeing, Eve’s willing devotion of self stands apart from the Vergilian source it so distinctly echoes. In this way, Milton thereby reinforces the interior intentionality of his heroic virtue over that of his classical predecessor. Both authors, however, employ the key narratives in similar fashion, for both the Nisus-Euryalus foray and Milton’s allusive recasting of Nisus’s final plea in the Son’s and Eve’s petitions to sacrifice self for others, stand as signally important because they epitomize defining patterns of action in each epic. With the Trojan youths, Vergil recapitulates what is universally culpable in unreflective heroic action, even as he presents those who prove blameworthy as nonetheless meriting compassion in their flawed humanity. Milton delineates what is normatively virtuous, reconfiguring the situation Vergil has presented as emotionally conflicted into one that is intellectually unambiguous yet resonant with promise of spiritual renewal and transformation. The self-absorbed concern for fame, that dira cupido that motivates him, Nisus calls a fire the gods have ignited in his mind [dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt] (9. 184), and this burning passion flares into deranged, nonproductive brutality. Nisus’s words and ensuing deeds lead readers to look before and after: his obsession with a self-validating heroic disposition enacted in bloodlust both recalls and anticipates attitudes of other figures whose temperaments Vergil presents as wrongheaded because they give way to emotional chaos and resist establishing and maintaining life-sustaining order. (See notes 4, 5, and 6). The actions of Juno consist in such passions ( furor, ira: ungoverned rage and wrath), and those over whom she exerts influence—Dido, Amata, Turnus—exhibit an inability to control their passions, a susceptibility to (self-)destructive violence. Vergil presents Aeneas himself as having once partaken of such inappropriate absence of restraint. Telling Dido of the night when Troy was sacked, Aeneas describes himself as mindlessly enraged, dominated by destructive passion that seemed its own justification, engaged in violence that lacked directed, sustained purpose: “crazed, I seize weapons; while there is no sense in weapons, my spirit yet burns to gather a group

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for war . . . rage and wrath overwhelm my mind” [arma amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis, / sed glomerare manum bello… ardent animi; furor iraque mentem / praecipitat] (2.314–17). Aeneas at Troy seems little different from Nisus and Euryalus invading the Latin camp, for Vergil describes Nisus also as crazed [amens] (9.424) and inflamed [ardentem] (9.198), one whose mind is so perturbed he cannot care for peace or quiet [mens agitat mihi, nec placida contenta quiete est] (9.187), while he presents Euryalus as internally set afire and raging uncontrollably [incensus et ipse / perfurit] (9.342–43). Vergil makes Trojan incapacity to govern self overtly evident in the two youths, but, by deliberately associating imagery, he reciprocally implicates the Aeneas who has earlier reacted with frenzied emotion in the midst of battle. Indeed, Aeneas, as he subsequently fights to avenge Pallas’s death and especially as he confronts the fallen Turnus, appears to revert to this earlier self, caught up in the anarchic passion and aggression he has been striving to subdue, internally as well as externally. As he stands over the once arrogant but now defeated Turnus who supplicates him for mercy, Aeneas relapses from being that ideal Roman whom his father Anchises has charged him to become: having warred down the arrogant, Aeneas should spare the defeated as he establishes the custom of peace [pacique imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos] (6. 852–53). Yet he shows no clemency, and the language Vergil employs to recount Aeneas’s concluding actions rehearses vividly those qualities least approved throughout the narrative. Pallas’s baldric that Aeneas sees on the petitioning Turnus’s shoulder registers as a memorial of savage grief [saevi doloris] (12.945), recalling the counterproductive susceptibility to excessive grieving most marked in Juno yet evident also in Dido, Amata, and Turnus. Aeneas’s being aflame with rage and dominated by terrible wrath [ furiis accensus et ira / terribilis] (12. 946–47) calls up the repeated imagery of fire associated with antagonism to stable progress. Further, it conjoins for the final time in the poem the acosmic principles of furor and ira that have informed not only the exploits of Nisus and Euryalus but also the actions of all others, human and divine, who have opposed movement toward the civilized virtues of ordered rule, clemency, and peace. Such clear association with the exploits of the Trojan youths does underscore what is deplorable in Aeneas’s dispatching Turnus, yet the appreciative regard with which Vergil endorses the personal love of these friends, especially the self-sacrifice of Nisus, also informs readers’ responses to Aeneas as well as to others who must contend with personal commitments at odds with public responsibilities. In promising to erect to the love of Nisus and Euryalus a monument more lasting than Roman bronze (9. 446–49), Vergil makes readers’ responses to Nisus and Euryalus complex, generating ambivalence, evoking sympathy for them even

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as he ensures that such sympathy will cohere with a critical judgment keenly sensitized to their shortcomings. With them as with others, he disposes readers to embrace a polarity of attitudes in active engagement with the story. He prevents easy approbation or condemnation of characters whose situations prove the complexities of ascertaining what right action is and how to commit oneself to it.14 For Vergil, the persistent inability to master passions in order to ensure personal self-control and ordered civic peace seems the result of an acosmic principle at the heart of the universe as well as in the hearts of heroes. What he questions at the commencement of the poem he answers through the trajectory that moves Aeneas away from prospective happy resolution to actual tragic conclusion: destructive anger does, in fact, dwell in celestial spirits (1.11), and it spreads outward, deranging human attempts to foster secure societies and dynamically fruitful interpersonal relationships. For Milton, however, the distinctive cosmic principle is providentially loving, creative, and restorative; he builds upon the Augustinian notion that the characteristic action of divinity is to bring good out of evil: “his evil / Thou usest, and from thence creat’st more good” (7.615–16). If Vergil makes the self-absorbed passions of Nisus and Euryalus symptomatic of pervasive self-destructive tendencies shared by all, Milton moves from allusive association with these Trojan youths to suggest how self-sacrifice can redeem and renovate a fallen past and thereby foster the recovery and enhancement rather than the erosion of a full humanity. When Milton has the Son of God echo Nisus’s plea to serve as sacrificial substitute, the larger context involves more than restoration to spiritual life alone. Milton does show the Son’s effectual sacrifice leading to life, whereas Nisus’s futile offer results in death. However, more crucial in the Son’s saying “Account mee man” (3.238) are the consequences of this substitutionary identification. The Father projects an end time when, as a result of such sacrifice, humankind will be united with the incarnate redeemer who will “Reign / Both God and Man” in a radically transformed paradise wherein “God shall be All in All” (3.315–16, 341). The Son’s forfeiture of life ultimately leads to an essential amplification of being, a re-creation of the human race into something altogether different, something greater, so that, as the Son subsequently asserts, “Mankinde” may enjoy a “better life,” “dwell[ing] in joy and bliss, / Made one with me as I with [the Father] am one” (11.38, 42, 43–44). That divinity will bring good out of evil is a repeated affirmation, first made by Satan (1.162–65), parodically imitated by Mammon (2.257–62), enunciated by the Father (3.298), extolled by the angelic choir (7.186–91, 615–17), and exultantly celebrated by Adam (12.469–78, 565–66). The Son’s self-abnegation in sacrifice undertaken to renovate humanity provides the originating instance of such providential care. It renders real and

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affecting the assertion Milton advances: true heroism consists in “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (9.31–32). The mighty acts of God in history that Michael reveals to Adam in books 11 and 12 repeat this archetypal act of divine grace as God consistently redeems and redirects fallen humanity, both before and after the passion of the Messiah. In Eve’s desire to undergo Adam’s punishment, however, readers may most easily recognize how the Son’s willingness to sacrifice self for others epitomizes all appropriate, properly disposed action. Eve provides the secondary allusive evocation of Nisus’s plea that he expiate Euryalus’s transgressions.15 However, in Milton’s poem, Eve’s petition instead more conspicuously correlates with the Son’s. Though she is unconscious of any association and incapable of becoming the legitimate sacrificial substitute that the Son can be, Eve does nonetheless effect in Adam some measure of the spiritual renewal that attends the Son’s efficacious redemption. She entreats Adam that, “While yet we live, scarse one short hour perhaps, / Between us two let there be peace, both joyning” (10.923–24), and, following her supplication that she take on herself all consequences for their mutual sin, Adam moves away from vindictive rancor, first toward reconciliation with her and then toward reestablishing proper relation with God. By her willingness to suffer for him, she prompts him toward spiritual renewal: if she has inaugurated the fall, she also seems to initiate redemptive virtues. Her contrition “in Adam wraught / Commiseration” and “his anger all he lost” (10.939–40, 945). Her willingness to sacrifice self prompts him to remember and appreciate the providential care in the judgment passed upon them (10.1046–61), and helps him resolve to acknowledge their sinfulness and consequent need for forgiveness so they can humbly sue for pardon (10.1086–96). The love Eve shows Adam serves as a type of the Son’s love, and as such, carries some of the regenerative power of the antitype. Even as the Son’s actual sacrifice will result in spiritual enhancement and redirection, so, too, does Eve’s offer of sacrifice lead Adam away from egocentric despair toward apposite moral development. If those who respond to the Son’s love become “refin’d / By Faith and faithful works” in “the renovation of the just” (11.63–64, 65), Adam, responding to Eve’s love, acquires the purified disposition requisite for a life of faith-filled dependence upon providence. In a proleptic imitatio Christi, Eve moves Adam closer to a recuperated imago Dei. Milton’s emulation of Vergil, however, in his epic’s allusive bonding with the Nisus-Euryalus episode, accentuates the virtues of self-abnegation and humility epitomized by the Son and exemplified by Eve. What remains provocative, even problematic, may be the larger question of why Milton, here as elsewhere, engages the Aeneid in such a way that promotes his own model of patient, self-sacrificing Christian heroism and yet

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simultaneously calls attention to rash and wrongheaded behavior, about which Vergil himself clearly registered misgivings. If Vergil attends to the complex relationship between intention, passion, action, and outcome at the basis of heroism in his epic, Milton complicates even further what it means to be obedient to divine will and how one can best labor patiently for others and sacrifice one’s own desires to the dictates of Providence.

NOTES 1. Vergil, Aeneidos, in P. Vergili Maroni Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). All references to the Aeneid are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Richard DuRocher, Milton among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 162. The classical tradition of emulation was well established by the Alexandrian writers of the third century BC. In Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), Charles Rowan Beye summarizes the aesthetic expectations that the Alexandrian school would have held for Vergil’s time; see, especially, 192 and 228. On early modern poetic imitation, see Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, (Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; 1570 New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), chap. 1; Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); and David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Milton would have known the traditional considerations of Vergil’s engagement with Homer, especially Donatus’s assessment of the Aeneid and Servius’s and Macrobius’s inventories of Vergil’s allusions to the Homeric texts. He was probably also familiar with I. C. Scaliger’s emphasis upon Vergil’s consciously distinguishing himself from Homer, a view also set forth by la Cerda, whose edition and commentary Milton may have used. See Juan Luis de la Cerda, P. Vergilii Maronis Priores Sex [Posteriores Sex] Libri Aeneidos: Argvmentis, Explicationibvs Notis Illvstrati (Lvgdvni: Sumptibus Horatij Cardon, 1612–1617). The following modern studies of Milton’s engagement with the classics have been particularly useful: C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1945); Davis P. Harding, The Club of Hercules (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962); Janette Richardson, “Virgil and Milton Once Again,” Comparative Literature 14, no. 4 (1962): 321–31; Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); K. W. Gransden, “Paradise Lost and the Aeneid,” Essays in Criticism 17, no. 3 (1967): 281–303; J. H. Collett, “Milton’s Use of Classical Mythology in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 85, no. 1 (1970): 88–96; Francis Blessington, “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); Claes Schaar, The Full Voic’d Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in “Paradise Lost” (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1982); Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1986); Barbara Pavlock, Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); William Malin Porter, Reading the Classics and “Paradise Lost” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Patrick J. Cook, Milton, Spenser, and the Epic Tradition (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996). 3. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1963). All references to Paradise Lost are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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4. This caedis cupido [bloodlust], it should be remarked, is the very passion that leads Turnus, in the ensuing action, to neglect to open the enemy gates once he gains entry to the Trojan camp, an action that, if taken, Vergil notes, would have doomed the Trojan cause utterly (9.756–61). 5. Here, again, there is an anticipation both of Turnus in his prideful wearing of Pallas’s war belt, the action that ultimately dooms him, and of Camilla as well, who is led to her death because she burns with desire for spoils [ femineo praedae et spoliorum ardebat amore] (11.782). 6. There are a number of studies that explore the relevance of the Nisus-Euryalus narratives to the larger poem. See George Duckworth, “The Significance of Nisus and Euryalus for Aeneid 9–12,” American Journal of Philology 88, no. 2 (1967): 129–50 for helpful thought concerning how the conflict of values in the episode anticipates and informs subsequent action. A. J. Boyle offers instructive commentary about Nisus’s obsession with fame in “The Meaning of the Aeneid: A Critical Inquiry, Part II,” Ramus 1 (1972): 113–51. Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the “Aeneid” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) offers extended analysis of the Nisus-Euryalus episode designed to underscore the parallels, both contextual and verbal, between the two Trojans and Turnus. Pavlock, Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition supplies an incisive consideration of the intertextual richness of the Nisus-Euryalus story. 7. While critical attention traditionally has been given to Milton’s recurring emphasis upon interiority, that promise that Michael affords Adam of “A Paradise within thee, happier farr” than the physical Eden (12.587), some recent approaches to Milton have pointed consideration to Milton’s attachment to physical place and his prizing of exteriority. See, for example, Mary Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 8. What distinguishes Nisus’s dilemma—the tension between personal desire or happiness and public responsibility—is a recurring concern, perhaps the dominant theme of the Aeneid. Susan Ford Wiltshire offers a most pointed critical examination of this theme in Public and Private in Vergil’s “Aeneid”(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). 9. The problematic issue of kenosis or the divesting of divinity undergone when the preexistent Logos becomes flesh stems from Paul’s assertion in Philippians 2:7 about the emptying out of Godhead that Christ willingly endures in order to save humankind. The niceties of theological discriminations concerning kenosis and incarnation might have led Milton toward what would be understood as heretical stances: Socinianism, Nestorianism, Arianism. John Shawcross sees Milton as “on the verge of Nestorianism” but as “hedg[ing]” away from such heresy. See John Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 257. Michael Lieb has, at different times, offered helpful commentary on the pertinence of kenotic theology to Milton’s thought: “Milton and the Kenotic Christology: Its Literary Bearing,” English Literary History 37, 342–60; “The Kenotic Christology,” in The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1989), 38–52; Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). The last-mentioned study engages readers with kenotic concerns in an oblique fashion as Lieb turns attention to the heresies of Socinianism and Arianism. Also helpfully instructive in its clarity about incarnation is an article by Albert C. Labriola, “Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt: The Christology of Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 15, ed. James Simmonds (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 29–42. 10. Putnam, in The Poetry of the “Aeneid,” comments that “furor and cupido, madness and lust, stand out in the narrative as concepts to which the pair were excessively addicted” (57). Boyle, in The Meaning of the “Aeneid,” finds in “the thoughtlessness (immemorem, 373) and mindlessness (amens, 424)” of Nisus and Euryalus “the psychological corollaries

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of [a] naïve drive for glory” (85). Pavlock, in Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition, judges that, at the “extreme moment of crisis [his proffering of himself as sacrificial substitute], Nisus still thinks essentially of his own glory” (95). 11. Milton does have Adam, in a soliloquy, employ a similar phrasing: see 10.831–33. In these words, however, Adam is complaining of his situation, not nominating himself as the expiatory substitute for his partner. 12. Joseph Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to “Paradise Lost” (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1981, 1962), 183–84. Kristin Pruitt; Gender and the Power of Relationship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), offers informed comment about this passage (68–73) and also supplies an extended reference to critical commentary on Eve’s role in effecting reconciliation with Adam (171–72, n. 14). 13. The basic assumption of Christian soteriology is that only the self-sacrificing love of the Son can prove ultimately efficacious in redeeming others. However, through her “magnanimous, Christlike offer,” as John Tanner notes, Eve prompts Adam toward the “remorse-slaying faith” that is the necessary human complement to divine self-sacrifice: John Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of “Paradise Lost” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 127–29. At this juncture, in seeing Adam’s salvation as the single desideratum for her existence, Eve becomes the human embodiment of that divine love that Diane McColley defines in terms of an outgoing toward another: “Caritas is the outward-reaching love that cherishes the immortal well-being of every person”: Diane McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 188. 14. In Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s “Aeneid” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), W. R. Johnson offers a sustained and probing meditation upon problematic ambiguities in the theodicy that Vergil undertakes in the Aeneid. Johnson’s study led to a major redirection of scholarly work on the Aeneid. 15. Blessington, “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic, has noted (55) that Milton associates Eve with Nisus and Euryalus by flower imagery that recalls Vergil’s plangent simile of the drooping poppy, used to describe the death of Euryalus (9.433–37), but he suggests that Milton’s direct address to Eve (9.404–11) more tellingly connects her to the youths because it repeats Vergil’s dramatic movement from detached narrator to the personal voice in deep sympathy with his subjects (94). Curiously, Blessington does not mention the allusive engagement with Nisus’s wish to undergo the punishment to be meted out to Euryalus.

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THROUGHOUT THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH century, European think-

ers sought new answers to fundamental questions about space, time, and causation—solutions to ancient problems that would hold up to the recent discoveries in mechanistic philosophy. Some questions seemed destined, as it were, to draw more fire than others, touching as they did upon other sensitive realms of grave theological and political import. For instance, the question of whether determinism or freedom could be said to govern human action or thought, elicited ingenious, if protracted, debates in England and elsewhere on the Continent. Abstruse though such ideas as the coexistence of free will and determinism may seem to be, they nonetheless occupied a central place in the metaphysics of the seventeenth century. Lest we too cavalierly dismiss these ideas as quaint museum pieces, they set the stage for subsequent Western thought concerning the nature of selfhood and of political subjectivity. Thinkers as diverse and influential as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz were all “compatibilists”: all agreed that it is logically compatible to be free and causally determined at the same time.1 This emphasis on logical compatibility gained new force from the application of geometrical method to speculative metaphysics, a trend in seventeenth-century thought with implications for all branches of philosophy.2 If all philosophy should aspire to the demonstrable proof of a theorem on the model of Euclidean geometry, then the fetters of the traditional inductive method of Aristotelian science might be unlocked quickly and efficiently. Logic itself might be shriven of its chains of mere syllogistic verbiage. No longer would the mind be bound merely to the senses as the source of insight into the physical universe, and no one would claim that an appeal to the senses could prove a theorem false. Instead, reasoning would have to follow from the given premises that underlay the demonstration. Yet there can be little doubt that the major thinkers of the seventeenth century still occupied a theistic universe, whatever their faith may have been regarding human powers of ratiocination. Creation might be recast in the light of new science, but the God of the philosophers remained a creator and lawmaker nonetheless. How could these disparate beliefs about 93

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freedom and determination, human reason and divine omniscience, causation and teleology, be reconciled? Could systematic approaches to such conundrums reveal anything greater than the limitations of the human intellect? If so, what would this say about the relationship of the human mind to that of the Deity? How might the mind of God, in its infinite variability, be represented as an idea available for the sake of instructing a fallible and perhaps restricted creature? Milton’s epic takes on the massive scope of such inquiry in its depiction of Creation. The image of the Creator engendering the universe assimilates two distinct but related traditions of thought: one that represents God as a geometer, and another that depicts him as an architect. Tensions and contradictions emerge for readers, however, when we attempt to disaggregate some of the traditions of thought that run through the epic—in particular, the metaphysical and logical analyses upon which its argument rests. Resituating the text’s ideas in relation to Milton’s contemporary intellectual context, at times more explicitly engaged elsewhere in Milton’s corpus, reveals some of the complexities of Milton’s image of the original creative act. The epic’s solutions to the paradoxical and mysterious problems of free will, determinacy, and causation appear, replete with apparent contradictions, in a single image from the colloquy of Raphael, the affable archangel, and his charge, the unfallen Adam. When, in book 7 of Paradise Lost, the Son of God ends the discord of “troubled waves” and creates the universe out of Chaos, Raphael uses the common analogy of God wielding a pair of compasses to describe how the “world unborn” came into being: Then stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand He took the golden compasses, prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O world. (224–31)3

The image is generally held to derive from Proverbs 8:27, where Wisdom says, “When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.” A more tenuous suggestion links the image to the Wisdom of Solomon 11:20: “thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”4 These two scriptural texts fostered diametrically opposed intellectual traditions common from the early Middle Ages onward in representations of God with compasses. Because the two most influential ways of seeing this image of the Creator shaping the universe come down to us today as

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related meanings of a shared image, the separate sources in scripture, with their distinct philosophical and lexical resonances, require further elucidation in order to make clear the traditions Milton received and manipulated. One interpretation, which finds its primary support in the passage from Proverbs, presents God as a craftsman shaping the preexisting substance of the universe. The other interpretation, supported by the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, presents God as a geometer disclosing the form of created matter.5 The connection between God as a craftsman and the passage from Proverbs seems explicit: the Deity wields a tool commonly associated with the building trade. However, the relationship between God as a geometer and the verse from the Wisdom of Solomon remains implicit. William Bedwell, author of De numeris geometricis (1614), rehearses the commonplace, showing how the apocryphal passage had been conventionally aligned with the depiction of God the geometer: “Plato saith, That God doth alwayes worke by Geometry, that is, as the wiseman doth interpret it, Dispose all things by measure, and number, and weight.”6 Here, we see the Platonic and the scriptural traditions harmonized, as if Plato and “the wiseman” Solomon articulated the same idea differently. Nonetheless, the two traditions move in opposite directions: the craftsman imposing form on what is already there; the geometer inventing ontological distinction through spatial individuation and abstraction. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. As the connections to craft and geometry make clear, the two represent analogously the operations of inductive and deductive reasoning: craft is aligned with induction, and geometry is aligned with deduction. The interplay of these traditions occurs under the syncretic surface of Milton’s verse, as we shall see, in an image fraught with conventional associations. The implied analogy between forms of design and modes of logic is one such convention that has always been understood as having been, in Raphael’s phrase, “So told as earthly notion can receive” (7.179). “Architect,” a word that derives from the Greek architekton, is itself compounded from words that together mean “first or lead builder or craftsman” (archi [first or lead] and tekton [builder]). The word “architect” is thus cognate with the concept of “the origin” (arche) by way of the verb “to begin or take the lead” (archein), a connection that clearly implies the Creation as the architectonic moment, the origin. The word architekton appears just once in the Greek New Testament, where the “master builder” is not God but rather Saint Paul speaking of himself, which the Geneva gloss expands to render the apostles the “chiefe builders” of the church.7 Nor does architekton apply directly to God in the Septuagint, though the translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek do use the word to figure the “cunning artificer,” a representation of abilities with which the Deity could endow the people of Israel, or of which he could deprive them.8 The depiction of God as architect, therefore, does not derive

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philologically from scripture, even if the connection is implied in the verse from Proverbs quoted above. For just this reason, Voltaire’s Pococurante in Candide scorns Milton as “That crude imitator of the Greeks who gives such a distorted view of the Creation and, where Moses shows the Eternal Being producing the world with the spoken word, has the Messiah take a great big compass out of a tool chest in heaven and start drawing a plan.”9 Uncharitable though it may be as a dismissal of the epic, Voltaire’s sardonic discomfort with Milton as an “imitator of the Greeks” distorting scripture underscores the way the philological roots of the figure carry philosophical implications more classical than biblical in origin. The word “architect,” of course, can figuratively mean, “One who designs and frames any complex structure,” as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records, “esp. the Creator; one who arranges elementary materials on a comprehensive plan.”10 There is indeed something that becomes intelligible in the figurative “structure” or building of the universe implied in the image—what Kojin Karatani has discerned as a “will to architecture,” or an obsession with metaphors of construction, edifice, and design as a means of stabilizing and grounding intellectual systems in the West at least since the time of Plato.11 As Milton’s friend and sometime benefactor, Sir Henry Wotton, explained in his Elements of Architecture (1624), the principal aim of an architect should be “the Designment and Idea of the Whole Worke, and his truest ambition should be to make the Forme, which is the nobler Part (as it were) triumph over the Matter.”12 Although there are sources and analogues for the image of the Deity as an architect or a geometer running back to Plato’s Timaeus (34a–b, 53c–56c) and Aristotle’s comment on the Platonists in De Caelo (279b3), the first pictorial representation we have of God with compasses comes from the Eadwi Gospel Book, written in Winchester around AD 1025.13 The most revealing image along these lines is, however, an illumination to Genesis from a French Bible moralisée of the thirteenth century (fig. 1). This medieval image of the Deity represents the traditional iconography of the Son of God as Creator, as Milton does.14 There are clear parallels between Raphael’s account in book 7 of Paradise Lost and the medieval image, the clearest being the pictorial method of representing God as himself “uncircumscribed” (170). In a visual pun of sorts, the Deity’s foot (as opposed to the compass’s foot) extends beyond the frame of the medieval illustration. It is as if he were retracting himself or stepping away, retiring himself, as Raphael says of God the Father (7.170); no frame, not even the one within which the Deity frames the universe, can contain him entirely. Since at least the twelfth-century hermetic Book of the XXIV Philosophers, there has been a commonplace association between “God the true Eternitie,” as William Typing put it in 1633, and “an intellectual spheare, whose Center was every where, but without circumference, because he

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Figure 1. Thirteenth-century illumination to Genesis from a French Bible moralisée.

was the beginning and ende of all things.”15 The motif may also be connected to a restriction of the Deity’s omnipotence, if it seems necessary that he employ a worldly instrument to act upon matter in the Creation. Alternatively, the use of the instrument may suggest a contradiction of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo through the primordial coexistence of the Creator and matter, since the image implies that matter existed formlessly before God used the compass to shape it.16

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In another striking example of the image contemporary with Milton, in the emblem that adorns the title page of Athanasius Kircher’s booklong effort to undo the confusion of tongues after Babel, Polygraphia nova et universalis (Rome, 1663; fig. 2), the Deity’s hand reaches out of a cloud with a compass and, having inscribed the circle of creation,

Figure 2. Title page of Athanasius Kircher, Polygraphia nova et universalis (Rome, 1663).

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lifts the inscribing foot as if withdrawing over the motto Omnia in vno sunt / & in omnibus vnum (All are in one / & one in all). Like the printer’s mark adopted by Christophe Plantin in sixteenth-century Antwerp, which featured Plantin’s motto Labore et Constantia (by labor and constancy) over a hand with a compass emerging from a cloud, the emblem on Kircher’s title page emphasizes the metaphoric unity among forms of creation. The image itself evidently became a time-honored commonplace of thought, ready to hand and appropriated for very different ends in the depictions of the monk who illuminated the Bible moralisée, the Jesuit polymath Kircher, and Milton. If God the architect is the builder of the universe, giving form to the formless matter at Creation and thereby investing all with an inductive design, then God the geometer is the rule giver who deductively orders Creation according to a higher law outside of the bounds of the rules he imposes. Again, this representation opens another perspective on the same act by emphasizing different attributes of the Deity. Yet an architect must, of necessity, be to some extent a geometer, while a geometer need not be limited by the rule-bound pragmatism of an architect. Sir Thomas Browne explains the extenuating circumstances of omnipotence through the image of God as a geometer: God is like a skilfull Geometrician, who when more easily, and with one stroke of his Compasse, he might describe, or divide a right line, had yet rather doe this in a circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art: yet this rule of his hee doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question his power, and conclude he could not. (Religio Medici, 1.16)17

The geometer here figures as one who has the power to thwart expectations based on “forelaid principles of his art” and to “pervert” rules in order to tame intellectual hubris and make human beings more acquainted with divine “prerogative.” The compass, so often a symbol of design and order in representations of God as the “master builder,” becomes yet another enigmatic emblem of capricious omnipotence when viewed from within the circumscribed limits of human perception. Among seventeenth-century thinkers, G. W. Leibniz most powerfully explains the attributes of the Deity according to this distinction between the geometer and architect and most intricately explores its pathways. Leibniz, therefore, proves most helpful in reconstructing the intellectual context for Milton’s representation of God with compasses. Although there is, to my knowledge, no direct line of influence between the two thinkers,18 their independent uses of the parallel traditions indicate the extent to which ideas of God as geometer and architect mingled in the minds of early modern thinkers.

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The problem of harmonizing apparent oppositions, such as the differing representations of the Deity as geometer and architect, exercises Leibniz as a result of his premise of universal harmony. Everything in Leibniz’s system must be internally consistent, such that everything attributable to the Deity may finally be shown to be reasonable. Because Leibnizian universal harmony is “a unity in multiplicity,” the harmonization of microcosm and macrocosm becomes fundamental to his understanding of causation. Likewise, because psychology mirrors cosmology in Leibniz’s conception of universal harmony, it should come as no surprise that “[p]erception for Leibniz is simply the expression of the many in the one.”19 Thus the bifurcated perception of the Creator as geometer and architect becomes a harmonious expression of different divine attributes, not an opposition, according to Leibniz’s system. This depiction of the Creator occupies a central place in Leibniz’s mature philosophy, from the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) all the way through the Monadology (1714). According to the earlier of these works, the principles of divine perfection enable one to say “that he who acts perfectly is like an excellent Geometer who knows how to find the best construction for a problem.” However, the passage also says that at the same time, God is “like a good architect who utilizes his location and the funds destined for the building in the most advantageous manner, leaving nothing which shocks or which does not display that beauty of which it is capable.”20 In this formulation, the architect is the practical craftsman who drafts plans to create the most beautiful structure possible, while the geometer takes in the whole spatial field, as it were, and systematizes. In the Monadology’s concluding sections, Leibniz again turns to the image of the architect to flesh out his analogy for the harmony of efficient and final causes. In terms ultimately derived from Aristotle, Leibniz coordinates the primary and prior sources of change: an “efficient cause” of a house’s existence would be, for example, the construction crew that builds it; whereas a “final cause” of a house’s being would be shelter from the elements, the future end or purpose for the sake of which a house is built.21 As Aristotle’s analysis shows, there are several causes of the same thing, and Leibniz employs this analytical scheme to elaborate the roles of the Deity in his metaphysical system. This preestablished harmony between modes of causation implies a further harmony between the natural order in total, or the physical mechanism of nature, and the moral realm of grace: that is, between God considered as architect of the mechanism of the universe, and God considered as monarch of the divine city of spirits. It can also be said that God as architect fully satisfies God as lawgiver. Thus sins must carry their penalty with them through the order of nature, and even in virtue of the mechanical make-up of things.22

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As section 90 of the Monadology makes clear, God the architect is identified with “the efficient cause of all our being,” but this is merely one aspect of God’s will and being. For God is also the final cause who freely chose this world from an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of laws, who therefore creates the “geometry” according to which “architecture” functions. Beforehand, the architect constructs on what is the most advantageous plot. In teleological perspective, the geometer, like the monarch and lawgiver, finds the most just or best possible solution for a problem. Thus, the actions of human agents operate on both levels simultaneously, so that moral consequences are inextricably linked to physical actions. Yet individual decisions, while perhaps inclinable towards the good, emerge out of contingent circumstances not limited by God’s immediate determination. In other words, God does not will evil from human beings, but evil still may prevail through concomitance, that is, because it is connected with greater goods that are outside of the agent’s will. God possesses an antecedent will as well as a consequent will, and there is a “primitive antecedent will” as well as a “final decisive will” at either temporal extreme. In between is what Leibniz calls “the mediate will,” which may bring about unhappiness or sin as a result of a greater good that exists beyond the purview granted to the mediate agent. The difficulty that this system presents for human comprehension, Leibniz admits, is that “one can esteem fittingly the good things done by God only when one considers their whole extent by relating them to the entire universe,” a feat one imagines is beyond the capacity of most mere mortals.23 Leibniz’s entire dispute in the correspondence with Arnauld, which emerged over thesis 13 of the Discourse, turns on this point: that God chose to create a particular Adam out of “an infinity of possible Adams,” with an eye toward the implications for all of Adam’s posterity and all its actions. In this, God’s particular intentions differ from the general and more comprehensive intention, “as the situation of a city regarded from a particular point of view has its particular geometric plan. These various intentions all express the whole universe in the same way that each situation expresses the city.”24 Every divine intention expresses a particular relation to all others, so that all interlock in a concert of harmonious occurrences chosen among infinite possibilities but not, that is to say, necessitated. Therefore, the actual created universe may be imagined at the apex of a pyramid that becomes ever more beautiful as one ascends, but which possesses no base—only a proliferation of halls “descending to infinity” and representing the endless number of possible worlds from which God chose to create the best of all. Once again, only in teleological perspective, according to Leibniz’s Theodicy, may the actual world be perceived as optimal; in process, the universe might instead seem merely “good.”25 That is to say, if

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God the architect antecedently wills the arguably good, God the geometer consequently wills only the best. Leibniz’s reasoning in this way allows for God’s general intention to trump each particular one—for the “final cause” to determine the course of the “efficient cause”—so that God’s consequent will for the best is permissive of sin. According to Leibniz, this is true even if God’s antecedent will is for the good. The apparent paradox may, therefore, be represented once more through the analogy of the architect and the geometer. The contingent and mechanistic appearance of causality in the order of nature is the domain of the architect, which is at times compromised on behalf of a greater moral good. This compromise issues from the higher logic of grace, the final cause, which is the domain of the geometer and lawgiver. The configuration of God’s general intention occurs teleologically and may not be susceptible to the same causality as the physical realm. For Leibniz, universal harmony dictates that the voluntaristic (will and action), cognitive (perception and focus), causal (physical causality and purpose), and moral (nature and grace) layers of the universe all exist in harmonic coordination. For this reason, there is no such thing as a “miracle.” Instead, there are innumerable contingencies that occur in the realm of nature to make a phenomenon such as the parting of the Red Sea possible at a specific time and place.26 In the best of all possible worlds, as in a geometrical proof, occurrences in the physical realm that do not correspond to a strict construction of logical causality, whether a “sin” or a “miracle,” must ultimately bear a rational explanation once the harmony of the physical and the moral realms is given. Although both Leibniz and Milton employ the dual figure of the Creator as geometer and architect in order to explore the workings of creation, Milton amplifies the apparent discord that Leibniz harmonizes. Where Leibniz resolves contradictions perceived in the moral logic of the universe by folding them, one by one, into his system, Milton raises questions and intensifies doubts about the adequacy of rational systems to explain divine justice. Representing the Deity through images and metaphors from architecture and geometry, Milton reveals tensions within his theology that contrast with the harmonies of Leibnizian metaphysics. Almost as consistently as God orchestrates the harmony of will, cognition, causality, and morality in Leibniz’s system, the Deity in the epic introduces dissonance and asymmetry, through which Milton focuses our attention on problems in its theodicy. Milton refers explicitly to God as an architect twice in Paradise Lost.27 In each instance, the usage clearly demarcates a boundary, what Raphael nicely terms the “just circumference” of Creation (italics added). The first boundary is physical, when Raphael, having been instructed to visit Adam and Eve, arrives at the self-opening gate of heaven “On golden

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hinges turning, as by work / Divine the sovereign architect had framed” (5.255–56). The second boundary is figurative, when Adam asks whether he inhabits a Ptolemaic or Copernican universe, and Raphael calls God “the great architect” who “Did wisely to conceal” answers to such questions (8.72–73). In both cases, the architect’s work serves as an antecedent expression of the divine will—here, Leibniz and Milton seem to agree— so that the design manifests God’s provident foresight in structuring reality with such precision.28 But for Leibniz, the architect has intricately structured the mechanism of the universe in a way that human reason can comprehend, whereas for Milton, the architect figures what is walled off from human understanding. Arranging “elementary materials on a comprehensive plan” (OED, def. 2), the architect’s plan, in its all-encompassing extent, defies human comprehension. The history of the word architect enlivens the sense of its application to Milton’s God: the OED gives a rather late and intriguing date for the entry of this usage into the English language in the anonymous pamphlet A Seasonable Speech, Made by a worthy Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, concerning the other House, March 1659: In a word, sir, it is a House of so incongruous and odious a composition and mixture, that certainly the grand Architect would never have so framed it, had it not been his design as well to shew to the world the contempt he had of us as to demonstrate the power he had over us.29

In this sense, then, the architect is the plotter of future deeds, the one who demonstrates power and even contempt in the way that he imposes a predetermined order on indeterminate matter. Applied to God the Creator in Milton’s epic, this definition seems quarrelsome as it begs the question by implying a “comprehensive plan” one would want to establish in a close reading of the text rather than simply assume. (God is the architect because he has a plan; God has a plan because he is the architect.) Is Milton’s God an architect if he does not predetermine the flow of contingent occurrences, as the Father suggests in book 3’s famously tendentious (and perhaps pseudoexplanatory) explanation of the relation between foreknowledge and causality? [I]f I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown. (3.117–19)

Knowing about and intentionally causing to happen are of course separate claims about God’s action or inaction, and the question circles round to

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the idea of necessity and contingency in Creation. In Milton’s prose, most notably De Doctrina Christiana and Art of Logic, the difficulty presented by this distinction is more easily overcome than in the narrative context of the poem. In his logic text, Milton distinguishes between all things being “certain” according to divine foreknowledge, and the same things being “necessary” or predestined outcomes of divine action (YP 8:229). Following Arminius, and before him Erasmus and Aquinas, Milton secures human freedom of will by limiting the effect of foreknowledge, which “exists only in the mind of the foreknower” and therefore “has no effect on its object. A thing which is going to happen quite freely in the course of events is not then produced as a result of God’s foreknowledge, but arises from the free action of its own causes, and God knows in what direction these will, of their own accord, tend” (YP 6:165).30 So the separation of divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence seems, in the prose, anyway, to allow for a reasonable theological explanation. Nevertheless, while I would not go as far as William Empson and suggest that this speech reveals God’s mendacity, I would say that it begs the question of design and intention.31 When an omniscient deity says, “if I foreknew” (italics added), and in the next breath speaks of the Fall having “proved certain” whether foreknown or not, clearly some problem of representation obtrudes.32 It sounds like God claims to have no knowledge of his own foreknowledge. The problem with such a suggestion, which the analysis in the theological prose escapes more readily than the dialogue in the poetry, is that a tonal range accrues to the verse. And the epic speech emits this tone, so often remarked by readers, in a way and at a moment that seems designed to draw attention to itself, perhaps even to influence our interpretation of the Father’s argument. At the very least, the Father sounds a curiously obscure note when he says “if,” since this must mean either that Milton does not want to presume to know what God knows in his representation of the Father, or that God, for some reason known only to him, will not deign to admit foreknowledge. Moreover, in the arc of the epic’s narrative, God’s equivocal “if” is revealed to have been obfuscating all along, particularly when the Father says to the assembled angels that they should not be dismayed by humanity’s Fall, “Which your sincerest care could not prevent, / Foretold so lately what would come to pass” (10.37–38). In a very astute annotation to the passage that begins by noting “unforeknown” as a Miltonic coinage, John Leonard remarks that: In his anxiety to acquit his foreknowledge, God now says that the Fall would have been certain even if he had not foreknown it. This statement can only damage God’s (and M[ilton]’s) theodicy, for it inadvertently concedes that the certainty (not just the possibility) of the Fall is grounded in something other than divine foreknowledge.33

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I would separate Milton’s God’s theodicy from Milton’s own theodicy. The Augustinian pattern for explaining the ways of God to men by claiming the privation of good, and therefore the nonexistence of evil except as an instrument of hidden good, is not consistently applied throughout the epic. The simpler orthodox formulations blurted out almost as a reflex to the presence of evil by both the epic voice and God the Father are called into question by alternative theodical narratives, such as the “rumor” abroad in heaven that humanity has been created perfectible (not perfect), in bodies capable of turning “all to spirit” such as Raphael suggests to Adam (5.497). This Irenaean theodicy is incompatible with the Augustinian privatio boni, and the coexistence of both narratives in the rumor-mill of heaven calls into question the validity of the orthodox story. Sometimes, as in book 1, the narrator’s interpolation appears as an evident mirroring of Satan’s imitative reversal (compare 1.162–66 and 1.210–20), where the narrator’s Augustinian theodicy echoes in simple reversal Satan’s earlier claim to thwart just such reasoning; and note that it is Satan who introduces this pattern of justification by way of his rebuttal. The narrator seems to imitate Satan, even as he seeks to reverse him.34 Milton’s embedding of a simple theodicy within a more complex theodicy, like the appearance of equivocation in God’s “if,” may be rewritten as a consistent theological argument, but the poem invites questions by virtue of the logic of this structure. When we see the Father explain the justness of his system of justice, we may wonder whether the architect has indeed framed everything optimally in advance, or whether we must await a reconstruction of the laws that govern action from the teleological perspective of the geometer. Put differently, the evasiveness of the architect raises questions about the “givens” in the geometrical proof of God’s justice. The image of God as a “master builder” underlies the whole cosmology laid out by Raphael in books 7 and 8 of the epic, the sublime magnificence of what is suggestively perceived by the naked eye as much as the conceptual design that exceeds the grasp of human intellect (according to the archangel, anyway). God’s embryonic universe occupies a tiny fragment of the womb of Chaos, and the circumference of Creation seems to impress upon all created things a kindred circularity. For example, a related circle35 appears at the close of the sixth day of Creation, when the Son ascends through heaven “to God’s eternal house” (7.576) along A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear, Seen in the galaxy, that Milky Way Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest Powdered with stars. (7.577–81)

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Here, the Son of God climbs heavenward through a cosmos described by way of the galaxy, so that Galilean astronomy coexists with the supernatural agency of Creation and the traditional religious iconography. In this compressed image, the circularity of the Milky Way bears the stamp of the Creator, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, again echoing the scriptural source for God as an architect, Proverbs 8:27. In the verse “he set a compass upon the face of the depth,” the word translated into English as “compass” is in the Vulgate gyrus, which means “an abstract circle.”36 In this and similar descriptions, the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence both become predicates of the Creator: And for the heaven’s wide circuit, let it speak The maker’s high magnificence, who built So spacious, and his line stretched out so far; That man may know he dwells not in his own; An edifice too large for him to fill, Lodged in a small partition, and the rest Ordained for uses to his Lord best known. The swiftness of those circles áttribute, Though numberless, to his omnipotence, That to corporeal substances could add Speed almost spiritual. (8.100–110)

If there is a suggestion that the Creator is rigidly methodical in this depiction of building the universe, it is, of course, attributable to Raphael in context. The “line” is, like the compass, an instrument of measurement, though builders who employ this device (used as a level) are working a practical art, like a poet crafting a line. Raphael does not repeat his description of the Maker with his “golden compasses” from book 7, but instead sets forth a humbler, more directly and unambiguously architectural image when he is at pains to partition Adam’s curious mind from what God “Ordained for uses to his Lord best known.” An instrument that symbolizes the architect’s omniscience, the “line” divides absolutely what only it can measure. The immensity of space, says Raphael, bespeaks the Creator’s “high magnificence,” yet the architect extended the cosmos “That man may know he dwells not in his own” edifice, but God’s. If Raphael depicts the omniscience of the Deity through static architectural imagery, the archangel represents divine omnipotence through the geometrical image of spherical motion in space. The attribute of omnipotence, no less bewildering to comprehend than omniscience, attaches to the movement of the heavens along the circuit of their orbital course, indeed so much so that speed becomes “almost spiritual,” which is as measureless

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a designation as the “numberless” spheres. Just as the omniscient architect establishes the antecedent design of space, the omnipotent geometer lays the consequent foundations of time and motion. In the demonstration of God’s omnipotence, however, Raphael seems more willing to allow for accommodation to Adam’s perspective, “Admitting motion in the heavens, to show / Invalid that which thee to doubt it moved” (8.115–16). Raphael sets up a contrast between heavenly “motion” and Adam’s having been invalidly “moved” to doubt, so that geometrical example will instruct morally. Because time and motion correlate to change, whether physical or moral, Raphael is more willing to fit his description of the geometer’s omnipotence than the architect’s omniscience to human scale. Milton, employing both traditions of craftsman and geometer, throws light on the analogy between circumscription, boundedness, and logic as the “omnific Word” inscribes his circle with the compass God has ready in his mysterious “store.” The Father apparently has enigmatic spatial and temporal devices “in store” when the poet greets the Son’s arrival in heaven with a parenthetical conundrum: “(for he [the Father] also went / Invisible, yet stayed, such privilege / Hath omnipresence)” (7.588–90). Now, as De Doctrina insists about the divine attribute, “Our ideas about the omnipresence of God, as it is called, should be only such as appear most reconcilable with the reverence we ought to have for him” (YP 6:144).37 This might perhaps solve the local problem. But in this, as in other paradoxical comments adduced throughout the poem, we wonder why Milton feels compelled to make the point at all, since its appearance seems chiefly to spark the question the comment is putatively designed to answer. Yet this is just to touch the surface of the image, since God’s “store” must also, necessarily, include Chaos, an “uncreated” extension of his substance. Chaos, whose consort is Eternal Night, is “Anarch,” which means, as John Rumrich observes, that “the eternal night of chaos lacks a beginning as well as governance.”38 We might say that Chaos is the anarchitect. The inclusion of Chaos in Milton’s cosmos implies that God is not so much an architect or craftsman as he is a geometer abstracting and individuating from his own substance in order to create. Both representations of the Deity exist in the epic, but, like the alternative theodicies, or the alternative cosmologies left without authoritative resolution,39 the point lies further on: it is the inability to decide, itself, that speaks most clearly to Milton’s engagement with the issue. We must look to the more local context of each representation in order to evaluate its specificity and determine whether Milton implies that it has a truth-value independent of the narrative context. In Milton’s God’s volatility, one might say, resides his most beguiling power, and he is pointedly inconsistent in tone. Raphael’s description of God as omniscient architect and omnipotent geometer invites further thought about God’s circular reasoning in his

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self-justificatory rhetoric. Especially in relation to omniscience, where the archangel is unwilling to yield, do the thought-nullifying images actually settle anything? Like Milton’s parenthetical comment on God’s omnipresence, the image of God as a circumference-less and omnicentric circle takes away what it seems to give by extending a visual analogue only to undermine it as a theoretical nonstarter. Such a gesture calls attention to a certain short-circuit, if you will, in the capacity of human reason to comprehend the matter. And this circuit of thought, I would argue, makes us reflect again on the way God’s logic often appears to be so circular in the epic, especially when he explains his own actions—perhaps in the manner of what Nietzsche called circulus vitiosus deus, or God the vicious circle.40 The failure of logic to capture adequately the workings of divine providence relates to God’s uncircumscribed nature, though one cannot help but wonder, as Nietzsche clearly does, what room this partitioning leaves for rationality in theological debate. Milton concedes, “certainly theology will discuss providence better than logic will” (YP 8:229). Milton is emphatic on this point in his own Art of Logic, published in 1672 but for the most part written, according to Walter Ong, between 1641 and 1647, with some later additions creeping in before publication (YP 8:146–47). Milton states up front that he will resist the incursion of theology into his methodized logic (YP 8:208, 211), but he then bursts out with utterly theologizing intrusions such as the italicized “Here let the Theologians take notice” following the Antitrinitarian sentence, “things which differ in number also differ in essence, and never do things differ in number without also differing in essence” (YP 8:233). Again, it seems natural enough to wonder how such a statement might apply to Creation, where Aristotle’s criterion for the fallacy of circular logic seems employed: does “the same predicate belong to subjects which are identical”?41 In his appendix to the Art of Logic 2.4, Milton turns to the petitio principii fallacy (“seeking or petitioning the premise”), to counsel his readers how best to avoid such problems of predication, the chief of which is called “conversion,” or “the transposition of the predicate of one enunciation into the place of the subject with a view to proving another enunciation which results from that transposition or conversion” (YP 8:338). This appendix we know to be Milton’s own creation because, as the Yale editors point out, this text is neither in Ramus nor in Downame, his two principal sources. The “terms” of conversion, Milton tells us, “should not be figurative, as in Bread is the Body of Christ” (YP 8:339). The second aspect of the conversion fallacy to be avoided, he goes on to say, “is that nothing be mutilated, as in Someone sees the blind man, therefore the blind man sees someone, for here the blind man is not the whole predicate, but rather sees the blind man” (YP 8:339). By this mode of conversion, God creates the world, and therefore

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the world creates God as a distinct entity; or man creates God, and therefore God creates man. Milton’s God employs this fallacy, however, in a way that is as intimate to his own identity as Milton’s use of his blindness to explain the conversion-fallacy. Given that Milton makes the plainly contradictory claim in his preface to the Art of Logic that he will refrain from appeals or applications to theological argument, we may justly turn Milton’s logic back on his God and observe the circularity of his reasoning, how his explanations are classic (even textbook!) examples of begging the question. To look into ultimate origins is, perhaps inevitably, to court the petitio principii fallacy. One choice example will briefly illustrate how posing the problem in this way holds a particular structural significance for reading the epic, though many other examples might be adduced. When the Father decides at the end of the second “day” of the war in heaven that “War wearied hath performed what war can do” (6.695), he then proclaims to the Son: Two days are therefore past, the third is thine; For thee I have ordained it, and thus far Have suffered, that the glory may be thine Of ending this great war, since none but thou Can end it. (6.699–703)

Problems of predication and agency radiate from the passage: “I have ordained it,” the Father says, though “none but thou / Can end it.” In other words, he seems to say, I made it so you would win the war, because no one but you can win it. Lest we should let the Father too easily off the hook, Milton makes sure to point out the breaks in logic with the causal connectives “therefore” and “since.” Even if we overlook the highly problematic use of “days” to describe the passage of time in eternity here or in 5.579–82 (and Fowler’s notes), “therefore” does not signal the introduction of a cause for the specific duration God has chosen. According to the architect of the war in heaven, change seems to transpire without an efficient cause. Similarly, the word “since” does not introduce an explanation that could resolve all ambiguity about his reasoning. The final cause, or purpose, of the war becomes apparent when the Son moves to “end it,” but the geometer’s ruling looks arbitrary behind its veil of logical language, as if the givens could stand in for the proof. Because God ordained victory “for” the Son, “since none but thou / Can end it” (italics added) cannot be anything but a circular argument, a tautology stretched out over time: a self-fulfilling predicate. The clause, “that the glory may be thine,” as the Father says to the Son, seems again less logical than “[so] that” would

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imply, when the Father tells him to ascend “my chariot” and to bring forth “all my war” with “My bow and thunder, my almighty arms” (6.711–13). The Son responds circularly—which is perhaps even visible in the typographical placement of two Os in the first line (with the assonant “thrones” hinting at the Spirit): O Father, O supreme of heavenly thrones, First, highest, holiest, best, thou always seekst To glorify thy Son, I always thee, As is most just. (6.723–26)

This hermetic circle is “just” as the circumference of Creation is “just,” yet not in a way we can conceptualize beyond a kind of recursive structure. Milton’s God cannot but beg the question where mortal logic is concerned. Like Achilles’ pursuing Hektor “Thrice fugitive about Troy wall” (9.16), the circuit of divine thought leads from the intrusion of the illogical, what Aristotle in the Poetics 24 calls to alogon, to its symmetrical closure with the end of the war, where ho logos vanquishes the rebellious angels to hell.42 Milton shows God’s incomprehensibility by human measure, but thereby also exposes God to the accusation of irrationality. The former is Milton’s apparent intention, while the latter is a disquieting effect. Milton’s God is both architect of logical design and geometer who abstracts from himself the circumference of reason. As divergent thinkers such as Milton and Leibniz realized, the logic or illogic of the Creator has profound consequences for any attempt to understand his Creation morally. Ultimately, no one could mount a proper defense of God’s justice in the face of earthly suffering and loss without committing to a view of the universe as logical. Beneath such logic, causality must be operative, or else the theory being offered would have to finesse the contradiction between the fact of evil and an attribute of the Deity that ought to counteract the problem. Often thinkers in the classic age of theodicy confronted the trilemma—God is good; God is omnipotent; yet evil exists—by differentiating among divine attributes. Perhaps the problem of evil could be solved by claiming that God is omniscient without being omnipotent? Perhaps God purposefully limited his own omnipotence when he decreed freedom of will? In the clockwork universe of Leibniz, harmony describes the relationships among all things and coordinates their proportion—their number, weight, and measure. The divine architect and geometer become symmetrical representations of the Deity’s complementary attributes. Suffering is the sufferer’s just dessert, even where an immediate rationale does not present itself. In his epic theodicy, Milton likewise suggests a multiple perspective on the divine attributes

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and on causality through images of geometer and architect, but his assertion of eternal providence confronts the questionable justifications of the ways of God without resorting to convenient moral harmonies. For the poet of Paradise Lost, the Creator’s attributes together form a composite whole, but the representation this composite offers is at times vertiginous, dissonant, unaccommodating—and in need of elaborate justification.

NOTES 1. Robert Sleigh Jr., Vere Chappell, and Michael Della Rocca, “Determinism and Human Freedom,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2:1195–278. Tad Schmaltz, “The Science of Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Donald Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–63 and 169n23, disputes the classification of Descartes as a compatibilist and instead sees his position as libertarian and therefore closer to that of Nicolas Malebranche. On the politics of individual identity in relation to this issue, see Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 79–80. The outstanding article on Milton and compatibilism is Stephen M. Fallon, “‘To Act or Not’: Milton’s Conception of Divine Freedom,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49,3 (1988): 425–49, which argues that Milton subscribes to Thomistic “conditional necessity,” and that his God thereby escapes the categories of necessity and contingency. William Kerrigan, “Milton’s Place in Intellectual History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 253–67, derides the tendency of some intellectual historians to reduce ideas to museum exhibits of which they become “annotating curators” (255–56, 258), and Kerrigan associates Milton with an impassioned but unconscious compatibilism, though he does not use the term (259), while Catherine Gimelli Martin, “‘What if the Sun Be Centre to the World?’ Milton’s Epistemology, Cosmology, and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered,” Modern Philology, 99,2 (2001): 231–65, assails “the tendency to regard Milton’s thought as a quaint museum piece, or a missing link cast off from the ‘great chain’ of vital Western ideas” (233). 2. See Nicholas Jolley, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Rutherford, 95–135, esp. 96–102. Probably the most accomplished manifestation of this development was Spinoza’s Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677). A reverse direction of influence, from ethical to epistemological foundations, was of course also operative. On the limitations of the geometrical approach to epistemology and the persistent interrelation of demonstrative and “moral certainty” in seventeenthcentury science, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 205–211. Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–13, 57, 60–63, 66–76, describes a “geometric turn” in which literary and scientific theories of knowledge converged in England to offer moral insights during the later sixteenth century, when geometry was held to be a practical and socially useful if still prescientific mode of knowledge. 3. Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998). All references to Paradise Lost are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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4. Wisdom of Solomon 11:20 is the verse so adroitly echoed in the last couplet of Marvell’s commendatory poem for the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost: “Thy verse created like thy theme sublime / In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.” This wittily parallels godlike poet and divine creator. Marvell’s poem is on pages 53–54 of Fowler (italics added). This and all otherwise unidentified citations of scripture follow The Bible: Authorized King James Version, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5. Evgeny A. Zaitsev, “The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry: From Euclid and Surveyors’ Manuals to Christian Philosophy,” Isis 90,3 (1999): 522–53, esp. 535–46. 6. Quoted by C. A. Patrides in a footnote in his edition of Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 80; Patrides misdates the work to 1636 and does not cite a page number. Plutarch attributes the statement to Plato in Symposiacs, 8.2, trans. P. Holland (London, 1603), 767: “How Plato is to be understood, when he saith: That God continually is exercised in Geometry.” Cited by L. C. Martin in a note to the same passage in his edition of Religio Medici and Other Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 294. 7. The New Testament locus is 1 Cor. 3:10; see Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), s.v. “architekton” The Geneva gloss on the verse is quoted from the most fully annotated version (London, 1599). 8. The Septuagint uses the word, translated as “the cunning artificer” in the KJV, at Isa. 3:3, and in Exod. 35:35. Cf. 2 Macc. 2:29 in the KJV: “master builder.” 9. Voltaire, Candide and other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73. 10. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v., “architect,” def. 2. Although for obvious enough reasons not noted in the OED, this is substantially the same definition as that employed in the classic philosophical assault on the idea of divine justice by David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), pt. 1, 68–69. 11. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso, ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 5–14. This sweeping study by the foremost Japanese literary critic of his generation is particularly valuable for its insights into European obsessions with construction, precisely because its author inhabits another distinct tradition with radically different emphases and assumptions. 12. Quoted by Richard J. DuRocher, Milton among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Infl uence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 81. 13. Zaitsev, “Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry,” 536, 540. 14. Compare, for example, Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis, 48–58, in which the Son is called the Creator, since one is to read the opening chapters of Genesis in the spiritual sense. 15. William Typing, A Discourse of Eternitie (Oxford, 1633), 5, quoted and contextualized by Edward W. Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), 14 and 220n14, as well as, more generally, throughout his introduction, 1–17; see also the reference in n 36 below. 16. Zaitsev, “Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry,” 538. Milton, we know from De Doctrina Christiana 1.7, explicitly rejected the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo; see Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 6:307: “since no agent can act externally unless there is something, and something material, which can be acted upon, it is apparent that God could not have

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created this world out of nothing.” All references to the prose are to this edition and are cited in the text as YP. 17. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1.16, in Major Works, ed. Patrides, 80. 18. There is a titillating possibility that Milton and Leibniz knew (or at least knew about) one another through their mutual friend Henry Oldenburg—now most famous as a founding member of the Royal Society who in 1662 became its fi rst secretary and went on to found its Philosophical Transactions. But it is unlikely that their shared interests and acquaintances would have put the two men in direct contact so late in Milton’s life. Milton had known Oldenburg since his appearance as an envoy representing Bremen to the English Parliament. Oldenburg arrived in London in summer of 1653, but Milton’s first correspondence with him to survive dates from 6 July 1654. Milton was still in touch with Oldenburg at the decade’s end, but their contact had become much less frequent; moreover, none of Oldenburg’s vast surviving correspondence mentions Milton as a poet. However, we know that Oldenburg remained friendly with Milton and acquainted with his writings as late as 4 February 1671 from a letter written to Oldenburg by John Beale, and from Oldenburg’s memorandum of 12 December 1670, in which he says he will send a copy of Milton’s History of Britain to Francis Vernon in Paris. This means that there was at least a brief period of overlapping acquaintance. Leibniz was first put in touch with Oldenburg in the summer of 1670, having been introduced in a letter by the diplomat Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, who served the Elector of Mainz at this time along with Leibniz. After a stimulating visit to London in January of 1672/3, during which Leibniz exhibited his calculating machine and met several luminaries from the English scientific community, Oldenburg secured Leibniz’s election to the Royal Society on 9 April 1673. For the biographical details and the story of the friendships, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 303, 332–33, 336–37, 344–45, 372; and Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49, 53, 16, 223–29, 293. See Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1997), 155 and 211, for the chronology of their letters. Another, more remote connection between Milton and Leibniz is suggested by Richard H. Popkin, “The Dispersion of Bodin’s Dialogues in England, Holland, and Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49,1 (1988): 157–60, who credits Milton with the circulation of Bodin’s Heptaplomeres on the Continent through his friend John Dury, in exile in Cassel as the guest of the Landgrave of Hesse in the early 1660s. The manuscript, first copied in Paris by Oldenburg and circulated among his friends in England and Holland, apparently reached the hands of Leibniz and others, who were preparing a copy for publication around 1673, and correspondence between Boineburg and Hermann Conring in 1662 indicates that Milton had sent the manuscript to an unnamed person. 19. Mark Kulstad, “The One and the Many and Kinds of Distinctness: The Possibility of Monism or Pantheism in the Philosophy of the Young Leibniz,” in Leibniz: Nature and Freedom, ed. Donald Rutherford and J. A. Cover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 20–43 (quotations at 21 and 20). 20. G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, in Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery, rev. Albert R. Chandler (1902; repr., La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990), sec. 5, pp. 8–9. God also becomes a householder, machinist, and author as this passage continues. 21. I paraphrase Aristotle, Physics, 2.3 (194b), in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 241. 22. G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), sec. 87, 89, pp. 286, 293. 23. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard, ed. Austin Farrer (1951; repr.: La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), sec. 119, 189–91 (quotation at 191).

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24. Leibniz to Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, 12 April 1686, and Leibniz to Arnauld, 14 July 1686, in Correspondence with Arnauld, 80, 79, 128–29. 25. Leibniz, Theodicy, sec. 416, 23, pp. 372, 137. 26. See Rescher’s commentary on 289, 292, and 303 of his edition of the Monadology. 27. The word also attaches to Mammon, “architect” of Pandaemonium (1.732), and more importantly to Satan in Sin’s praise of his “magnific deeds” after the Fall: “Thou art their author and prime architect,” she says (10.354–56). In Eikonoklastes, Milton employs the word figuratively to speak of the English people as a self-determining polity: not as “a race of Idiots, whose happiness and welfare depended upon one Man,” but instead a nation of the virtuous who “need not Kings to make them happy, but are the architects of thir own happiness” (YP 3:542). 28. Milton’s basic accord with Leibniz on this point becomes most visible in De Doctrina Christiana, where Milton argues for an integral view of the divine will: “It is absurd, then, to separate God’s decree or intention from his eternal resolution and foreknowledge and give the former chronological priority” (YP 6:154). Their agreement on this point seems ultimately to derive from a shared source in Saint Thomas Aquinas, who differentiated the antecedent and consequent effects of the united divine will: “This distinction must not be taken as applying to the divine will itself, in which there is nothing antecedent or consequent, but to the things willed... [W]hatever God wills absolutely takes place; although what He wills antecedently may not take place.” See Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 19, art. 6, in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 204–5. However, the temporal crux dismissed as “absurd” in De Doctrina Christiana, the matter of the “chronological priority” of foreknowledge and intention, has greater staying power in the epic than the tract implies. 29. Wing S2998; Thomason E.974[6], 2. Also reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, ed. John J. Malham and William Oldys, 12 vols. (1744–46; repr. London, 1810), 6:533, which is now freely available online in a searchable text through Google Books. 30. See Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 19, art. 3–10, Summa Contra Gentiles, 2.23 and 29, quoted, explained, and applied to Milton’s thought in Fallon, “‘To Act or Not,’” 438–44; Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 66–73, 84–96; and Arminius, The Writings of Arminius, trans. James Nichols and W. R. Bagnall, 3 vols. (1825; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1999), 1:298. Modern editorial commentary on this speech customarily harmonizes the poetry with the passages I cite from Milton’s prose, or comparable ones: see especially, Fowler, 174–75, and The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 364, 482, and 1158. 31. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 145–46. 32. I have discussed God’s “if” elsewhere, in The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2006), 120. 33. John Leonard, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998), 747. 34. Clearly this is a problem with complex implications outside the scope of the present essay, but it requires further study. On the distinction between Augustinian and Irenaean traditions, see John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 253–61. Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 164–72, thinks through the implications of Hick’s schema and provides a nuanced account of Milton’s fusion of the two traditions, although he ultimately sees Milton as more consistent than I do. Richard Strier, “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better than Heaven,” Milton Studies 38, ed. Albert C. Labriola and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 169–97,

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critiques Milton’s theodicy by showing the way in which deliberative reasoning remains central to Milton’s rationalist justification of God’s ways, which he argues puts strain on the aesthetics of the depiction of heaven. Strier’s analysis diagnoses inconsistencies of representational quality that I read as part of a strategy to allow for multiple and contesting versions of justification to appear in the epic. 35. For a learned traditional reading of God’s “golden compasses” as a symbol of cosmic and cosmological harmony, see Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 41–42, 50, 258–59 nn. See further DuRocher, Milton among the Romans, 74–93, for an insightful discussion of the relationship between Vitruvius’s work on architecture, its role in Milton’s practical pedagogy, and the depiction of architectural imagery in the epic. For DuRocher, God circumscribing the universe with “golden compasses” casts God as divine architect and is thus “the central reflection” of “geometrical anthropomorphism” (86). 36. For the Vulgate term, see Fowler’s note, 402. Karsten Harries, “The Infi nite Sphere: Comments on the History of a Metaphor,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13,1 (1975): 5–15, points out that the traditional pseudo-Hermetic image of God as a sphere whose center is nowhere and circumference everywhere becomes the metaphor by which the theological transforms into the cosmological, that the two forms of speculation mirror one another, and that the metaphor presupposes an understanding in a thinker like Nicholas Cusanus that cleared the conceptual way for the Copernican revolution to become possible. On Milton’s knowledge of Galilean astronomy, see Marjorie Nicolson, “Milton and the Telescope,” ELH 2 (1935): 1–32, reprinted in Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 80–109; for this passage as “Galilean,” 102 and n. 37. For a profound investigation of the consequences of omnipresence for early modern thought, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 23–116. 38. John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141. 39. It may be that in this case, as is suggested by the phrase “To save appearances” (8.82), Milton is following the ancient tradition of “preserving the phenomena,” the practice rendered in this phrase from Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s “De Caelo” of allowing a multiplicity of alternative explanations by disregarding the question of their physical reality. See Edward Grant, “Late Medieval Thought, Copernicus, and the Scientific Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23,2 (1962): 197–220; and Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagnination, 15–16. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (1966; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1992), sec. 56, p. 258. 41. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.16 (64a), in Basic Works, ed. McKeon, 93–94. Aristotle’s depiction of the fallacy is the first recorded in Western logic. 42. Aristotle, Poetics, 24 (1460a), ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 122–23. My thought about Achilles and Hektor as an allegory of Western logic is indebted to Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 173–74.

Lycidas beyond Words: Nonverbal Signs and Material Pages in the 1645 Poems RANDALL INGRAM

1638, WHEN IT WAS FIRST PRINTED, LYCIDAs has appeared in countless editions, anthologies, and, lately, web pages. If Milton might be surprised by an online “Milton Reading Room” that is not a room at all, he would not be surprised by his poem’s mobility. Milton lived in what Peter Beal has described as a “notebook culture,” an environment where texts moved from one collection to another and from one medium to another.1 Moreover, like many of his contemporaries, Milton was a perceptive reader of both texts and their material contexts, both poems and poems’ settings. Milton’s successors have not always shared his awareness of how a poem might make meaning not only through its verbal details, but also through the nonverbal details of its material setting. The interaction of one of the most important material settings of Milton’s career, Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), and one of his most important poems, Lycidas, leads me to reflect on what has been neglected in the analysis of Milton’s poetry and what may be negligible. As one consequence of that reflection, this essay does not purport to offer a fresh reading of Lycidas as it is usually understood, that is, as a portable set of signs that can change locations without changing meaning. Instead, this essay examines the 1645 Poems as a meaning-making context that provides often-overlooked evidence to support some important readings of Lycidas and, in fact, provides more evidence than Miltonists have usually been willing to analyze. At first glance, it may be difficult to believe that any evidence offered by the 1645 Poems has been overlooked because Miltonists have for decades scrutinized the volume’s details. Verbal evidence has received intense attention, even when it appears among the bibliographic features that Gerard Genette has identified as paratexts, features such as title pages, prefaces, and titles.2 For instance, the title of the book’s first poem is printed thus: “On the morning of CHRISTS / Nativity. Compos’d 1629.”3 The two words “Compos’d 1629” have sparked pages of speculation.4 Are these words a boast that Milton wrote this audacious poem at twenty-one? Do they refer to Henrietta Maria’s miscarriage of 1629 or to her pregnancy of SINCE

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1629–1630 that culminated in the birth of the future Charles II? Or do they comment on the ongoing controversy over the celebration of Christmas, celebrations permitted in 1629 but banned by 1645? As much as responses to these questions vary, the debate itself indicates a general consensus that the printed words of Poems matter, even when those words are distinct from Milton’s poetry. The nonverbal elements of Milton’s fi rst volume of poetry have seemed much less important, perhaps because those elements cannot be traced to Milton’s agency and perhaps because Poems is understood to have communicated to its audience exclusively through words. The volume’s frontispiece is a clear exception, a picture seemingly worth thousands of words.5 Yet the scrutiny of William Marshall’s frontispiece may be an exception that affi rms the general principle: the frontispiece is the volume’s fi rst contribution to the construction of the author, and it is linked to a fi rst-person quatrain in Greek that seems to extend the author’s voice into portions of the book usually given over to the mechanics of the printing house. With these apparent connections to the author’s writing self, Marshall’s frontispiece is a particularly safe, mostly nonverbal element of Poems. It offers signs of authorial intervention into the appearance of the physical page, and it includes a brief poem considered so authoritative that it is included, severed from Marshall’s engraving, in editions such as The Riverside Milton.6 Countless other nonverbal elements of Poems, such as printers’ ornaments and decorative capitals, have been catalogued by Harris Francis Fletcher, but these marks have seemed to need only to be listed according to the standards of descriptive bibliography.7 They have not seemed relevant to the book’s larger design. The intelligibility or unintelligibility of bibliographic features depends on the interpretive frame through which the details are viewed, and I view those details through the frame of my 1996 Milton Studies essay, “The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645).”8 That essay argues that Poems of 1645 does not simply project the future career of a “rising poet,” as Louis Martz influentially claimed.9 Instead, according to the essay, Poems shows Milton’s “gradually and grudgingly” abandoning the pretense of oral performance and settling for the reproduction of his work in print, but only after sabotaging print’s iconic potential, most obviously in the Greek quatrain beneath the frontispiece portrait, and only after idealizing orality and its promise of presence.10 To support its claims, “The Writing Poet” offers a close reading of Milton’s Nativity Ode as resisting its medium and imagining the profoundly greater authority of heavenly song. It then examines the acceptance of writing in the Latin poems. Those poems emphasize their place in a network of written texts and ascribe powerful song not to

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the poems’ first-person speakers but to figures such as Leonora and, in the volume’s final poem, Damon. The essay notes that to construct a narrative of a rising poet, Martz reads the volume backwards, beginning his discussion with the Latin poems and ending it with the Nativity Ode. “The Writing Poet” thus offers a counter narrative for Poems, a story of a poet who does not view his first book only as a triumph but also a regrettable, if inevitable, compromise. Unlike many readings of Poems, the 1996 essay does not consider Lycidas in any detail. Like many readings of Milton’s books and other early modern books, the essay limits itself to verbal evidence. Yet Lycidas fits the overall pattern described by the 1996 essay, and, in turn, the essay provides a frame for rendering the material setting of the 1645 Lycidas newly relevant. *********

The penultimate text of the English poems, Lycidas is preceded by a paratextual note nearly as well known as the poem itself: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height” (D5r). Scholars have regularly explicated the note’s second sentence, absent in the 1638 Justa Eduardo King Naufrago and present in both the 1645 and 1673 Poems. But the fi rst sentence, reproduced in all three versions of Lycidas printed during Milton’s lifetime, stands out as a claim of individualized speech or song, depending on defi nitions of “monody.” The term “monody,” Clay Hunt explains, came to Milton through both literary and musical sources so that monody represented to Milton a form capable of uniting text and sound.11 Bridging art forms and media, within Poems, Milton’s monody is a printed text that promises oral performance grounded in a specific individual: “the Author bewails.” J. Martin Evans accordingly responds to the opening of Lycidas as the audible performance of “John Milton himself”: “The voice we hear at the beginning of the poem is, unmistakably, the voice of John Milton himself, agonizing over his poetic immaturity, showing off his classical learning, recalling with evident nostalgia his days as a student in Cambridge.”12 As Evans’s response shows, the note to Lycidas promises the speaking or singing or bewailing of Milton-as-author, and consequently, some of the most compelling readings of Lycidas, including Evans’s, have placed the poem in the context of Milton’s biography. But where the claims to orality in the Nativity Ode might be periodically interrupted, Lycidas ends the singing suddenly and finally, in last lines that Evans has justly called “one of the most extraordinary moments in English poetry”:13

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Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Okes and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray, He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills, With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay: And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, And now was dropt into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (186–93)

This final verse paragraph has seemed so extraordinary largely because it abruptly shifts the poem’s genre, as Evans points out: What cannot be found in the eclogues of Virgil, or in the eclogues of any other poet for that matter, is authority for the generic transformation that accompanies the change of tense in the final lines of Lycidas. For Milton’s unexpected introduction of a third-person narrator at the end of a first-person poem violates one of the oldest and most fundamental covenants governing the writer’s relationship with his reader: the implicit understanding that the genre of the work will remain constant, that a play will not turn into an epic halfway through, or vice versa.14

Critics have agreed that this shift represents a pivotal point not only in Lycidas but also in Milton’s career. Some, like Evans, have argued that these final eight lines show Milton’s withdrawing from the pastoral mode in preparation for the epic, a step signaled in part by the eight lines’ adopting ottava rima, which Evans describes as the verse of “Christian epic” as written by Ariosto and Tasso.15 In Evans’s reading, if Milton is not immediately rising, he is nonetheless anticipating his rise. Often isolated as a central moment in Milton’s ascendancy, Lycidas signifies differently in its varying material settings, including its place on the pages of the 1645 Poems. The final eight lines of the poem distance poem from song, for example, by using two strategies that recur in the last of the English poems, A Mask, and throughout the Latin poems: the lines put song into the past and attribute them to a singer who is not the narrator—”Thus sang the uncouth Swain.” Still, critical descriptions of the change in this passage cling to images of orality. For instance, despite his cogent analysis of the disruption in the final eight lines of Lycidas, Evans locates the authority of those lines where he located the authority of the opening lines, in individualized oral performance, “in Milton’s mouth.” 16 But the material setting of Poems puts these eight lines securely in the domain of the printed book, especially when nonverbal evidence is taken into account. According to a recent essay, Shake-speares Sonnets of 1609

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offers an instructive parallel to Milton’s Poems of 1645. Coleman Hutchison’s essay, “Breaking the Book Known as Q,” analyzes the significance of page breaks in the 1609 sequence, “how the quarto’s breaks, breaches, fissures, disruptions, and interruptions matter.”17 Hutchison acknowledges that reading page breaks “might seem at first unusual, dubious, or even nonsensical” but insists that the seeming oddity of his method is contingent: “Not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice, a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not.”18 Hutchison’s citations from scholars who have emphasized the interaction of material setting and literary text, scholars such as Roger Chartier, D. F. McKenzie, Randall McLeod, Margreta de Grazia, and Peter Stallybrass, erect a conceptual, rhetorical framework for Hutchison’s claim that, especially in printed books of poetry, page breaks can be as significant as textual elements such as line breaks. Hutchison takes the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s sonnets as his example, but other early modern volumes of printed poetry also point toward the significance of page breaks and other nonverbal data. Another book printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, James Shirley’s Poems & c. of 1646 shows how Milton’s collaborators activated a range of signs, both verbal and nonverbal. The volume shows Raworth’s preference, common among early modern printers, for ending poems at the ends of pages. It also shows a playful awareness of how early modern poetic texts might hover among possible media; in this book, “A Catch,” which later appears as a song in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain, becomes a rebus, with images of dice replacing words. The page breaks of Poems & c. also offer significant interruptions: when Shirley’s “Epithalamium” concludes by confessing the inadequacies of verse, the page also ends, inserting a pause before the volume resumes the reproduction of yet more verse. Stephen B. Dobranski observes that Raworth’s concern with aligning poems and pages may have involved Raworth and her collaborators in the arrangement of Milton’s 1645 Poems, usually considered an authorial prerogative. This material consideration troubles aesthetic readings of the volume. Rather than analyzing the words of contiguous poems for echoes and connections, Dobranski suggests, critics might instead measure them as units of print. Dobranksi provides several of many possible examples: “‘On Shakespear. 1630’ appears directly after ‘Song on May Morning’ on B6r perhaps because it allowed the compositor to begin ‘On the University Carrier’ at the top of the next page, and not because of their chronology or Milton’s grand design for the book. In like manner, the title and the first two lines of ‘Upon the Circumcision’ follow ‘On Time’ because the introductory notes for poems such as Lycidas or Arcades would not have fit on

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the bottom of B2v.”19 Where critics approach poems as texts, Raworth and her associates seem often to have approached them as objects for exercises in spatial manipulation. Yet these laborers also show their sensitivity to the language of the poems they set in print; a number of page breaks appear at significant shifts in the poems. One such break appears at a climactic moment of “At a solemn Musick” (fig. 1). The fi rst part of the poem on B3v devotes sixteen lines to imagining “That undisturbed Song of pure content” and ends with the hope “That we on Earth with undiscording voice / May rightly answer that melodious noise” (lines 17–18). Turning the page to B4r disturbs the “undisturbed Song” and complicates the brief hope: As once we did, till disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made. (19–21)

Figure 1. Poems, 1645, pp. 22–23.

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A literary critic could not have placed this page break more effectively, marking as it does the turn from prelapsarian to postlapsarian. Placing the page break here means that “undisturbed Song” and “disproportion’d sin” are not available to view at the same time, thus giving material form to the poem’s central tension.20 Here and elsewhere, the 1645 Poems, like other volumes prepared by Raworth, exploits the rich interplay of literary text and material object. To return to Lycidas, Milton’s pastoral elegy is separated from Arcades not only by a page break, but also by a rule, the bordering line at the top of the page (fig. 2). The boundary mark would seem to be redundant, because the page break separates Arcades from Lycidas. And indeed, in every other case, such as the printing on facing pages of “On the University Carrier.” and “Another on the same” page breaks sufficed; there was no need to add the rule (B5v–B6r) (fig. 3). The appearance of the rule before Lycidas might affirm the traditional view of Lycidas as a particularly important poem, distinct from the rest of the collection. Yet the rule also takes up space, pushing the text of the poem farther down the page so

Figure 2. Poems, 1645, pp. 56–57.

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that the page break can come immediately after the repeated exhortation “Begin” (line 17). The paratextual note, of course, fills even more white space and pushes the text still further onto succeeding pages. As a comparison, the protracted, widely spaced title of “On the University Carrier.” seems designed to help fit that poem on a single page. The narrower spacing and varied font sizes of the note to Lycidas also help match the text of the poem proper to a specific space. With these elements of formatting, the producers of Poems could use words as both linguistic and bibliographic codes, simultaneously conveying information about a poem and positioning it. Miltonists have extensively and justifiably examined the words of the note preceding Lycidas, but those words also have a nonverbal function, occupying space to situate the poem. By pushing the text of Lycidas farther down the page, the opening note prepares the volume for a page break more spectacular than any discussed by Hutchison: the fi nal eight lines of Lycidas are printed alone on a page (fig. 4). The pivotal fi rst page break after line 17 completes the poem’s formal beginning (“Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the

Figure 3. Poems, 1645, pp. 28–29.

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Figure 4. Poems, 1645, pp. 64–65.

string.”) and sets up seven uniform pages in a standard format, twentyfour verse lines each. This uniformity, enabled by the spatial placement of the note, in turn enables the climactic page break before the fi nal verse paragraph. That the abrupt shift of these eight lines has been so thoroughly discussed with no reference to how the volume’s materializes the abrupt shift reaffi rms a central point made by Hutchison and others: that modern readers neglect how the media signify in transmitting early modern texts. In this case, the separation is emphasized by the change in signatures; the rest of Lycidas is printed on signatures D5r–D8v, while the fi nal eight lines are printed on E1r. E1v is blank, so it is omitted from facsimiles such as Fletcher’s Illinois facsimile. In an early modern book preoccupied with the struggle against its own medium, however, the interposition of a blank leaf, the fi rst since the title page, is significant, the empty page suspending the flow of Milton’s verse for the fi rst time and rather obviously demarcating “fresh Woods, and Pastures new.” Much in the way that the sudden adoption of ottava rima provides a distinctive poetic form for the elegy’s fi nal eight lines,

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E1 provides for them a distinctive material form. On E1r, notice the outsized signature mark “E,” by far the largest in the volume, placed within ornamental borders. These ornaments are the fi rst to appear within the collection proper. By contrast, the next work in the volume, A Mask, is heavily ornamented, so that beginning with E1, the volume foregrounds its status as a decorative object. At E1r, the ostentatious signature mark sandwiched in ornaments is an obtrusive reminder of the printing house, a bibliographic parallel to the rupture of the fi nal eight lines. Both codes, both the abrupt introduction of a third-person narrator and the corresponding break to a leaf showing off its materiality, assert a new, jarring set of rules under which readers are no longer allowed the pretense of imagining themselves auditors. Before this point, the swain had been willing to comfort himself and his audience with pretenses of song and of recovering a body lost at sea: “For so to interpose a little ease, / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise” (lines 152–53). (And it is remarkable that for all of the frequently derided artificiality of Lycidas—talking rivers, for example—the speaker seems compelled to apologize for imagining Edward King’s body recovered, apparently the poem’s grossest lapse in verisimilitude.) Both the text and the material setting of the poem’s fi nal eight lines stop the dallying. There is no body present, not Edward King’s corpse and not Milton’s mouth. This is a book, after all. The interaction between a poem and its material setting on E1r signals a turn in Poems, textually and ontologically. E1r falls at the physical halfway point of the English poems; it is the first page in the second half of the octavo. After E1, Poems is limited to describing rather than performing song. The volume settles into its status as a book immediately, with a title page for A Mask appearing on E2r, followed by letters from Henry Lawes and Henry Wotton attesting to the great value of the masque as a written object. Lawes received so many requests for it that “the often Copying of it hath tir’d my Pen” (E3r). Wotton describes his first encounter with A Mask as a quirk of seventeenth-century publication; he claims to have first “view’d” A Mask as a work misplaced by a stationer into a volume of works by Thomas Randoph (E4v). Full of songs as A Mask may be, Poems emphasizes that the performance of those songs has passed and that A Mask exists now as a manuscript circulating among friends, as a printed work tucked at the end of Randolph’s Poems of 1638, and ultimately in Milton’s Poems as a work fixed within familiar bibliographic practices, behind its own title page and commendatory letters. The shift to describing the songs of others or a narrator’s past songs fits more comfortably within a printed book than previous claims to oral performance had. As the volume continues, the Latin poems likewise gesture toward absent performances. Given what Walter Ong has called the “chirographically

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controlled” nature of Learned Latin, the descriptions of song in Latin seem perfectly suited to a printed book.21 Within this arc from the Nativity Ode to the Latin poems, E1 is a momentous point, even if its design cannot be attributed to a single agent. *********

What a single agent can achieve, however, is often said to be a major theme of Lycidas. The poem’s first speaker begins by fretting over his abilities and then gives over the elegy to a debatable number of additional speakers. The elegy’s final voice speaks the eight lines printed on E1r of Poems, the uncertain source of the lines paralleling the uncertain source of the bibliographic effects on the page. Writing of these eight lines, Stanley Fish claims that “the crucial thing about these lines is that there is no one to whom they can be plausibly assigned.”22 As Fish reads the poem, the process of attributing voices to speakers ends with these lines, as the poem subsumes individual discourse to a chorus. In the end, according to Fish, “Milton silences himself.”23 Having materialized on E1r the anonymity that Fish describes, the obtrusive white space of E1v materializes this silence. Fish’s analysis of Lycidas thus provides another frame through which the nonverbal details of Poems become significant. Of course Fish does not cite these details as evidence to support his argument, anymore than I cited them in my 1996 essay. Citing page breaks as evidence could appear, in Hutchison’s words “unusual, dubious, or even nonsensical.” And indeed, a shorter version of this essay met with polite, understandable skepticism at the 2007 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Broadening the scope of analysis to include nonverbal features involves obvious risks; a blank page is a perfect space on which to project one’s preconceptions. But ignoring these features risks forfeiting the sensitivity to media evident in Milton’s Poems and many other early modern books. Poems fantasizes about joining the angelic chorus, from the Nativity Ode to the final vision of Damon’s singing in heaven; the volume worries about the materials of writing in “The Passion” (“The leaves should all be black wheron I write, / And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white” [lines 34–35]); then it resigns itself to paper in Latin poems such as Ad Patrem: Sed tamen haec nostros ostendit pagina census Et quod habemus opum charta numeravimus ista. (lines 12–13) (Nevertheless this page displays my resources, and all my wealth is set forth on this paper.)24

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These instances and others in Milton’s first book of poetry point to a broader pattern. Because the verbal elements of Poems direct attention to the volume’s nonverbal elements, analyzing page breaks, signature marks, and ornaments complies with the poems’ clear directives. Perhaps, then, that these details are so routinely overlooked is itself “unusual, dubious, or even nonsensical.” Reading more attentively means approaching Lycidas as something other than a stable set of portable signs, which might slip essentially unchanged from the 1638 Justa Eduardo King to the 1645 Poems to the 1673 Poems to countless editions and anthologies. In other areas of literary study scholars have begun to account for how materiality signifies and have begun to consider “How to Read a Page,” the title opening chapter of George Bornstein’s Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. By following poems by Keats, Yeats, and Gwendolyn Brooks through a series of reprintings, Bornstein analyzes how “any material page on which we read any poem is a constructed object that will encode certain meanings even while placing others under erasure.”25 Based on these examples, Bornstein contends that studying a poem in its varied material states is not simply a useful antiquarian exercise but is an important recognition that these varied material states may in fact yield varied poems: Tracing the multiple sites of the poem reveals alternate material components of meaning. Those meanings are carried by bibliographic codes as well as by linguistic ones, which is why paying attention only to the words in reprintings erases other meanings. Further, studying texts only in our contemporary reprintings erases the original historicized meanings of the poems and renders even readings that aspire toward the historic or political only a back-projection of an illusory politics fantasized in the present. As opposed to such single-text notions, studying any one material page should remind us of the other material pages that might have been presented instead. The poem, then, exists in multiple versions, several of which can claim authenticity or authorization and can modify contemporary constructions of meaning.26

Understood as Bornstein suggests, Lycidas is not one poem but multiple poems because of its multiple reproductions. Even if those reproductions were linguistically identical, words such as “Yet once more” shift in meaning in 1638, 1645, and 1673, and the words’ varied reprintings contribute to that shift. Consequently, a reading purportedly of “Lycidas” might fit one materially specific Lycidas better than another. For instance, Fish’s claim that “Milton silences himself” finds more support in the 1645 Poems than in the 1673 Poems, where there is no climatic page break and no blank leaf between Lycidas and A Mask. Indeed, in the 1673 Poems, the final sixteen lines of Lycidas and the opening lines of A Mask are printed on two sides

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of the same leaf, F2r–v, with no intervening empty space and no prefatory matter, so that Milton’s words continue uninterrupted. Unlike the 1673 Poems, then, the 1645 Poems dramatically supports Fish’s argument. But claiming such support entails accepting the particularity of Lycidas and, in Bornstein’s terms, reading a page. Bornstein further makes clear that declining to read a page is not a neutral act, but instead indicates a politically resonant rejection, often unexamined, of an object assembled by dispersed agents in favor of a transcendent text originating in the author. As it avoids one form of historical specificity, this rejection paradoxically embraces others, such as the historically specific belief that printed books are poetry’s natural home and as such merit no special examination. But early modern books generally and the 1645 Poems especially do not share that assumption. Consequently, the Lycidas of 1645 not only weighs the efficacy of poetry, but also the efficacy of poetry in print. If Lycidas has been traditionally understood as an exploration of vocation, in the 1645 collection it might also be understood as searching for an appropriate medium for that vocation. This search may be insignificant and even invisible to critics who expect to find poems primarily in printed books. For such critics, a seventeenth-century poet, like a twentieth- or twenty-first-century poet, would naturally map a career in books, the first of which predictably projects the poet’s rising. Bornstein’s discussion of modern poetry challenges Miltonists to reconsider these simplistic expectations and to reconsider “alternate material components of meaning” in older and possibly more alien early modern books. With portraits of the poet, blurbs praising the volume, and deliberate arrangements, early modern books can be deceptively familiar, like false cognates in language acquisition. In 1996, I never thought to examine the page breaks and ornaments of the 1645 Poems, just as I never thought to look up the word “formidable” in high-school French. As a result, “The Writing Poet” now seems incomplete, limited to the words of Milton’s first book and oblivious to such details as page breaks and printers’ ornaments. Such insensitivity is common, and indeed, some Miltonists may consider such “alternate material components of meaning” irrelevant to the reading of Milton’s poetry, despite indications that these components have been thoughtfully designed and deployed. About a decade ago, for example, in a post to the Milton-L electronic discussion list, John Leonard expressed doubts about the close-reading of bibliographic features and likened such readings to “those old teenage parties where people used to sit around finding hidden meanings in the covers of Beatles albums.”27 By contrast, Milton’s iconoclasm sensitized him to the perils of materializing his poetry—the perils, that is, of making books idols—and made him the astute analyst of the material book evident in Areopagitica, Eikonoklastes, and the 1645 Poems. If our insensitivity hardens, and if we choose to

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overlook the ingenious interactions between early modern poetic texts and their settings, early modern books could become more distant from us and less intelligible to us, like the covers of Beatles albums, barely visible on the display of an iPod.

NOTES 1. Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,1993), 131–147. 2. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. John Milton, Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (London, 1645), A1r. All references to the 1645 Poems are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 4. For a survey of readings of this bibliographical detail, see James Dougal Fleming, “Composing 1629,” Milton Quarterly 36,1 (2002): 20–33. 5. The frontispiece of the 1645 Poems is one of the most frequently analyzed bibliographical features of seventeenth-century England. For some important discussions, see Louis L. Martz, Milton: Poet of Exile, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 31–38; Leah Marcus, “Milton as Historical Subject,” Milton Quarterly 25,1 (1991): 120–27; Gary Spear, “Reading before the Lines: Typography, Iconography, and the Author in Milton’s 1645 Frontispiece,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,1993), 187–94; and Elizabeth SkerpanWheeler, “Authorship and Authority: John Milton, William Marshall, and the Two Frontispieces of Poems 1645,” Milton Quarterly 33,4 (1999): 105–14. 6. Described as “a rather cruel joke,” the Greek quatrain is reproduced with the title In Effigiei eius Sculptor in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 245. 7. For Fletcher’s catalogue of nonverbal details in the 1645 Poems, see Harris Francis Fletcher, introduction to Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, in John Milton’s Compete Poetical Works, vol. 1, ed. Harris Francis Fletcher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943), 151–52. 8. Randall Ingram, “The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song” in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645),” Milton Studies 34 (1996): 179–97. 9. Martz, Poet of Exile, 31–59. 10. Ingram, “Writing Poet,” 180. 11. Clay Hunt, Lycidas and the Italian Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 169–170. 12. J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 109. 13. J. Martin Evans, “Lycidas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed., Dennis Danielson, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50. 14. Evans, Miltonic Moment, 108. 15. Evans, “Lycidas,” 50. 16. Ibid., 115. 17. Coleman Hutchison, “Breaking the Book Known as Q,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association 121,1 (2006): 33–66, 34.

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18. Ibid., 34, 62. 19. Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96. 20. For an analysis of this poem and its tension, see Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 308–312. 21. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 113. 22. Fish, How Milton Works, 279. 23. Ibid., 280. 24. Milton, Poems, p. 64, D8v. Translation from The Latin Poems of John Milton, trans. Walter MacKellar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930), 143. 25. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. John Leonard, e-mail to Milton-L discussion list, 1999 October 29.

How Milton’s Education at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Influenced Logical Styles in Paradise Lost EMMA ANNETTE WILSON

SOMETIME AROUND 1630, PETER GUNNING sat hunched over Bartholomew Keckermann’s Systema Logicae.1 He was reading this while at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge as part of his undergraduate studies, and like a good keen student, he vigorously underlined passages for emphasis in its first volume. He numbered different points in the margins to jog his memory, and he provided Greek monikers for Latin definitions. Then he came to volume 2, and, even more dishearteningly it seems, volume 3, at which point his keen and detailed notes dwindle to the odd strike in the margin and brief underlining. Rather than contemplate different types of enthymeme, Peter evidently dreamed idly of playing a game of cards, sketching a spade in the margin where his academic notes should have been. In studying early modern logic, Peter Gunning was entirely typical of all students in the seventeenth century: logic was the key subject of university education in England at this time, acting as the foundation for all other study. Logic furnished the fundamental principles of all discourse by controlling first the selection of material to be discussed, and second, the stylistic structures used to present that material. As such, logic in the seventeenth century governed both the ways people wrote and also the ways they read and understood texts. A pragmatic understanding of early modern logic is therefore necessary for twenty-first century readers who wish to perform historically appropriate stylistic analyses. In this essay, I will engage with the praxis of early modern logic in order to apply its principles to an analysis of Milton’s style in Paradise Lost. In particular, I will examine the intellectual disparities and conflicts that Milton expresses in the clashing logical strategies at work in Michael’s and Satan’s speeches at the beginning of the war in heaven (6.262–95). My analysis demonstrates that theirs is not merely a battle of arms or even of rhetorical flourishes, per se, but when considered in light of early modern logic, a fundamental a battle between the forces of reason. The angelic antagonists’ different logical strategies reveal just how deeply Milton’s literary choices were informed by his own education in logic at St. Paul’s School and at Christ’s College, Cambridge. This is true 133

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not only for the language and arguments he gives to his characters, but also of his choice to create such a multivocal epic.2 The discursive theories that seventeenth-century students in England studied, both those reluctant dragons such as Peter Gunning who yearned for a break, and more assiduous scholars such as Milton who even went on to write his own Art of Logic in the 1640s when acting as a tutor to his nephews, are crucial for understanding the angelic rhetoric in Paradise Lost.3 Printed textbooks from the period, especially Keckermann’s Systema Logicae and John Seton’s Dialectica, which were ubiquitous in the Cambridge curriculum when Milton studied there, along with the marginal and paratextual evidence left behind in those texts by seventeenth century readers, provide the basis for a Geertzian “thick description” of early modern reading and study habits. Representative evidence culled from literally hundreds of such surviving texts suggests how these methods were really approached and absorbed both as writing and reading strategies in the period. A verstehen understanding of early modern logic reveals that critical endeavors, led by Walter J. Ong and Mordechai Feingold, have tended to characterize this discipline as intellectually redundant. These scholars portray logic not as not as an active tool of rational inquiry, but instead as one of the last remnants of an outmoded medieval system of pedagogy simply waiting to be swept away by New Science.4 However, because logic texts from the period demonstrate the pivotal place that this subject held within early modern intellectual culture, it is imperative, therefore, to call on the texts themselves rather than to rely on critical transmission of their mechanisms. Milton’s Art of Logic, for instance, is a highly typical text, despite being printed comparatively late in the seventeenth century: in this period, quite literally hundreds of different logic textbooks were available and in common usage but are overwhelmingly homogeneous in the principles they set forth.5 Early modern students read such texts in a syncretic fashion, but I will focus on the pedagogical content of Milton’s own manual to represent this way of approaching, understanding, and discussing any and every subject in the early modern period. In his Art of Logic, Milton situates logic at the heart of all learning and, significantly, art: “But of all the arts the first and most general is logic, next grammar, and finally rhetoric, since reason can be used, and even used extensively, without speech, but speech cannot be used at all without logic” (YP 8:216).6 Milton here indicates logic’s centrality both within a pedagogical environment and also in general. In early modern logic texts, the terms logic and dialectic are used fairly interchangeably, but Milton states a preference for the word logic, which he defines as “the art of reasoning well” (YP 8:217). He argues that logic is derived from the Greek λογος (logos), meaning “reason,” while dialectic stems from the Greek διαλέγεσθαι (dialegesthai), meaning “the art of questioning and answering,

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that is, of debating” (YP 8:217–18). Therefore, logic is the more general of the two terms according to Milton, and he emphasizes the significance of logic as an ars ratiocinandi (YP 8:214). This wide-ranging conception of logic as an all-encompassing discipline crucially emphasizes its role in all forms of discourse and does not simply confine it to controlling the overtly combative or disputative. According to this definition, all articulations are subject to the rules of logic, first as it finds material to comprise them, and second, as it sets that material in the most coherent way possible as discourse. This is an important discrepancy between early modern logic and current conceptions of the role and mechanisms of both modern scientific and also modern philosophical logic. Further, it serves to remind us of the importance of seeing this discipline as it is put to practical use by early modern authors in their texts. How did an early modern writer or reader go about their logical inquiries? The first task was to turn to the loci (commonplaces) to gather all of the potentially useful pieces of material potentially relevant to the matter proposed for discussion. Having done so, a Ramist logician such as Milton would then set about analyzing all of this material, assigning it to the appropriate logical aspects of the matter at hand: for instance, which items belonged to the cause; which to the matter, form, and end of the subject in question; which were its adjuncts; what it might be compared to in order to illuminate the discussion; and so on. This was accomplished by a process of dichotomous division that separated out all of these elements according to their logical function, thereby rendering a clear breakdown of the given subject. For Ramists, this process began by considering “the first, [i.e. the most fundamental] of all arguments... cause” (YP 8:221). As the cause enables things to exist, this is not unexpected (YP 8:222). Discovering the cause of a thing, invention, is the process by which Ramist methodus functions (YP 8:222). Ramists view the development of causal logic as follows: “the first genus of cause consist[s] of efficient cause and matter; the second, consisting of form and end, follows, namely because it is later in time” (YP 8:231). “Efficient cause” is defined as “the cause by which a thing is or is brought about,” whilst its partner “matter” is “the cause out of which a thing is” (YP 8:223, 230). The combination of these causes produces “an effect,” or “that which exists by reason of its causes” (YP 8:239). Students such as our annotator Peter Gunning would frequently come across examples taken from classical or theological sources, and this suggests the critical and exegetical potential of this art. A popular Ramist text by Dudley Fenner, for example, used the following example from Genesis to demonstrate different types of logical cause for the reader: “The Lord God also made man of the duste of the ground; and breathed in his face the breathe of life, and the man was a

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liuinge soule.”7 Fenner explains that by applying logical principles correctly within this statement, readers could deduce that “God... is the making cause of man, and did make him, by breathing the breath of life, which was the forme into that of the duste, whiche was the matter.”8 In doing so, readers would have reached a full and clear logical comprehension of the statement presented. Having followed this same course of training in logic, from its most basic to its most sophisticated level, Milton was likewise equipped with the tools for both understanding and expressing the monumental subject matter of Paradise Lost. As he states in his Art of Logic, “as causes give existence to the effect, so the effect has its existence from its causes, that is, it exists as from the agent, out of matter, through its form, and on account of its end. An effect therefore argues causes and is in turn argued by them” (YP 8:239). By examining both causes and effects, readers perform a Ramist logical appreciation of a chosen subject, and this type of early modern reading strategy underlies discursive strategies at work in Paradise Lost. Michael and Satan’s discourses in the war in heaven reveal in significant ways how Milton draws on all of his educational training to present two radically different logically adept opponents, each attempting to outdo the other with opposing logical strategies. *********

Before addressing the two warring angels, I will address one further specific academic practice for which seventeenth-century students at Cambridge relied on their logical training because it too provides a crucial context for Michael and Satan’s stylized war of reasoning: the practice of debating in utramque partem. This was the final test for any Bachelor of Arts’ candidate, which required that he had to appear twice in the public schools at the university as an opponent for a cause, and twice as a defendant. Clearly, it served as an exacting test of whether a student had managed to develop a sufficiently orderly mind to enable him to martial arguments on both sides of a dispute to equal and hopefully winning effect.9 This “Janus-faced” skill resonates and gets applied to its fullest artistic extent in the multivocal unfallen and fallen angelic conflict in Milton’s epic, where each side of the contention argues logically and adroitly for their own party. While it may seem that this examination training was merely an artificial exercise of theory, forever trapped in the ivory towers, handwritten marginalia and paratextual apparatus from seventeenth-century student logic manuals indicate that indeed, it was not. Rather, student practice from this period indicates how central logic was as a deep-seated way of thinking, something that ranged far beyond the confines of a page of

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syllogistical rules. Although Milton’s own texts are not known to survive, the examples I include here represent the common annotative practices in these manuals: they offer a lens into early modern thinking processes, ones present and visible not only in Milton’s Art of Logic, but characteristic of and formative in the dynamics of Paradise Lost. While there was a plethora of logic textbooks available to students in this period, Bartholomew Keckermann’s Systema Logicae (1620) and John Seton’s Dialectica (1631) were two of the most popular. Joseph Mede, Milton’s tutor at Christ’s, notes in his account books the purchase of Keckermann by many of the students matriculating. While Mede’s records tend towards the eclectic—for instance, Milton is not mentioned, and entries vary between one line of matriculation fee and lists of woes such as payments for medication for broken legs and smashed window panes—Quentin Skinner likewise notes the comparatively frequent inclusion of Keckermann.10 It is not insignificant that all the texts discussed here were owned and scrawled upon by Cambridge students who were contemporaries, or near contemporaries, of Milton, and both the printed content and the annotators themselves present a notably united front as they work through the different stages of logical instruction. On a bibliographic level, all the books are small octavo volumes, making them both highly portable and also cheap to buy, meaning that the majority of students could possess a copy that they could have close to hand at all times. Much of the marginal material appears unsurprisingly to be written as an aide memoire. Even in more lightly annotated texts, marks are made to draw attention to certain passages,11 which implies that their owners likely intended to reread these texts and probably jogged their memories by way of marginal annotation. Cambridge student Peter Gunning owned two of the texts I examined, and in both, he wrote out in full quotes alluded or referred to by the logic textbooks either in the margins or as intra linear notes. His was a relatively popular technique and can be found in many of the books. In Gunning’s initial, keen notes to Keckermann, he wrote short marginal reference notes indicating the subject of that section of the text. For example, he notes that one part concerns “generalis logi / cae diuisio”; likewise, he notes later that the passage concerns “definitio concepto simplicis.”12 Similarly, he makes cross-references to other pages within the text, presumably again as an aide memoire. A 1631 edition of John Seton’s Dialectica has a notable bibliographic configuration helping its readers to make such annotations, as it was printed with a single blank page between every printed page, thereby purposefully providing a space for hand-written notes. One particular annotator made good use of this provision, writing lengthy notes on almost every blank page. One of the notes on just such a leaf discusses the term “dialectic,” just as Milton does in Art Of Logic: “Dialectica dicta

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απο τω διαλεγεσθαι hoc est a | disserendo”(YP 8:217–18).13 Most of the lengthy notes this annotator makes on the blank pages are explicatory remarks on various aspects of logic, which function as a crib sheet for the text he reads, effectively creating his own condensed adaptation of the logic text. Another popular form of student annotation in Ramist logic texts is the use of hand-written bracketed tables. In one logic text from 1628, the annotator wrote nothing—except a single, lengthy bracketed table that broke down the concepts of a proposition, syllogism, and universal and specific definitions into dichotomous notes as a means to analyze and understand these terms. The recurrence of dichotomous analysis of ideas by students is significant in indicating a way of thinking very specifically historically located within the development of logic and logical analysis. Of further importance is that this is the same logical operation at dynamic work in the angelic speeches in Milton’s epic. *********

From Peter Gunning’s reluctant struggle through syllogistical strife, let us turn to examine early modern logic in full battle in Paradise Lost, in the combative literary styles of Michael and Satan in the war in heaven. Even the initial speeches at the outset of the war in heaven reenact the debates in utramque partem engaged in by B.A. candidates at seventeenthcentury Cambridge: the logical progressions made in Michael and Satan’s speeches at their confrontation demonstrate two very different ways in which logic could be used as a discursive strategy. The difference in logical approach between the unfallen and fallen angel here indicates not only a stylistic distinction between the two, but more importantly, their different theological status. Michael remains the recipient of divine grace, and as such, he retains the ability to employ logic with startling clarity. Thus, he creates highly systematized chains of reasoning that elaborate on the cause, matter, form, and end of his subject in straightforward order in accordance with Ramist method. Conversely, Satan’s fall from grace also incurs a fall in his logical ability: he does not follow Michael’s divine example of presenting his subject in an overtly methodical, logically systematized manner. This is not to say Satan’s speech does not rely on logic as its basis: all speech is ultimately subject to logic, but quality and effectiveness are determined by whether or not one makes good, clear use of this art. Satan’s speech represents a convoluted and contorted version of Ramist logic, although in many ways Satan manages to wield this logic rhetorically to serve his own manipulative ends. Yet, applying Ramist logic as an index for the arguments and strategies at work within both the unfallen and fallen angels’ speeches of Paradise Lost brings to light the

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depth of Milton’s rhetorical style and its crucial role in underpinning and cementing the epic’s ideological and theological arguments. Michael’s speech presents a textbook example of a clear and methodical application of Ramist logical principles: Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt, Unnamed in Heaven, now plenteous, as thou seest These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all, Though heaviest by just measure on thyself And thy adherents: how hast thou disturbed Heaven’s blessed peace, and into Nature brought Misery, uncreated till the crime Of thy rebellion! How hast thou instilled Thy malice into thousands, once upright And faithful, now proved false. (PL 6.262–71)14

As Milton states in his Art of Logic, “the first of all arguments is cause” (YP 8:221), and as Michael addresses Satan, his speech maps out the “cause” underlying the rebellion by Satan’s crew as he describes Satan immediately as the “Author of evil.” In other words, Michael instantly identifies Satan as the primary cause for this rebellion. Further, in placing his description of Satan at the beginning of the sentence, Michael aligns his syntax with his logic, strategically placing the primary logical cause in a primary syntactical position. Having established Satan logically and syntactically as the primary efficient cause of his crew’s rebellion and the war in heaven, Michael proceeds to discuss the “matter” that supports his case. He cites “These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all,” contrasting “Heaven’s blessed peace” that has been “disturbed” by “Misery” and “rebellion.” In doing so, Michael outlines efficiently the form that this matter has taken (the “rebellion”), and the “end” of all of these things, which has been to disturb heaven and introduce “Misery.” As he does so, he redoubles the emphasis on Satan’s role as the primary efficient cause, stating that “Misery” was “uncreated till the crime / Of [his] rebellion.” Michael also embarks on a further causal inquiry when he asks “how” Satan has done this: “how hast thou disturbed / Heaven’s blessed peace,” and further still “How hast thou instilled / Thy malice into thousands?” In each instance, Michael uses dichotomous division to illustrate the changes heaven and Satan’s crew have undergone: the “peace” of heaven is wracked with “Misery,” and while the crew members were “once upright / And faithful,” they are “now proved false.” However, Michael does not permit Satan to answer these questions. Instead, Michael switches subjects to command the fiend to leave heaven permanently:

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But think not here To trouble holy rest; heaven casts thee out From all her confines. Heaven the seat of bliss Brooks not the works of violence and war. Hence then, and evil go with thee along Thy offspring, to the place of evil, hell, Thou and thy wicked crew; there mingle broils, Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom, Or some more sudden vengeance winged from God Precipitate thee with augmented pain. (6.271–80)

Here once again, Michael creates a dichotomous division between “Heaven the seat of bliss” that will not “Brook. . . the works of violence and war” with the “place of evil, hell.” He presents Satan and his “wicked crew” with two options: either to go to “hell” where they belong, or else to be struck either by Michael’s “sword” or by “some more sudden vengeance winged from God.” Thus Michael’s speech follows a clear logical path, moving from efficient cause, to matter, to form and end, presenting neat dichotomies between heaven and hell, giving these as the two options between which Satan and his crew had chosen. In constructing Michael’s line of argument this way, Milton employs the rhetorical technique of suasoriae as support and structure for his logical stratagem. Thus, although in the early modern period the provinces of logic and rhetoric were fiercely debated, Milton’s text demonstrates the ways in which the two disciplines intermingle and work in tandem to build a solid, clear, and persuasive argument in a literary text. In contrast to Michael’s orderly methodical progression, Satan’s speech follows a much more convoluted and digressive logical path. He opens thus: “Nor think thou with wind / Of airy threats to awe whom yet with deeds / Thou canst not” (6.282–84). At the beginning of his response to Michael, rather than identifying a prime cause, Satan denies that there is one, as he warns Michael not to think his “airy threats” will have any effect. He makes convoluted use of dichotomous division in arguing that Michael’s threats will be ineffectual because thus far his “deeds” have not had any effect. In doing so, rather than moving methodically from cause and matter to form and end, Satan jumbles these aspects of his argument together, as the end “to awe” is besieged on both sides by the ineffectual “threats” and “deeds.” Although Satan’s logic may not be as smooth as Michael’s, it does, nonetheless, embody his own intent and purpose: he uses it in a rhetorical way to make the “threats” and “deeds” encircle the end of Michael’s quest, “to awe” the wicked crew. In this way, Satan makes very different pragmatic and moral use of the logical skills Michael deploys.

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Satan continues this convoluted logical approach in the rest of his speech: Hast thou turned the least of these To flight, or if to fall, but that they rise Unvanquished, easier to transact with me That thou shouldst hope, imperious, and with threats To chase me hence? Err not that so shall end The strife of which thou callest evil, but we style The strife of glory: which we mean to win, Or turn this heaven itself into the hell Thou fablest, here however to dwell free, If not to reign: meanwhile thy utmost force, And join him named Almighty to thy aid, I fly not, but have sought thee far and nigh. (6.284–95)

Like Michael, Satan poses a question he does not allow to be answered, as he asks Michael if there is any cause, “That thou shouldst hope... To chase me hence?” Yet where Michael’s speech proceeded by a neat skein of dichotomous analyses, Satan up-ends the process by asking first if Michael has “turned the least of these / To flight.” This would be a form of material proof from which he might hope to “chase” Satan from heaven. Further, as he describes those from his crew who have fallen under Michael’s attacks rising “Unvanquished,” Satan heaps up dichotomies as if to bury the “end” of Michael’s quest (to “chase” Satan from heaven). While in Michael’s speech, the end cause existed with the support of preceding ideas, here Satan’s customary copia of descriptions overwhelm the “end” cause. Even the additional description of Michael as “imperious,” and acting “with threats” places a strain on the “end” cause, thereby defeating it. A notable feature of Satan’s dichotomies, compared to Michael’s, is the way in which, rather than leading to a conclusion, they tend to circle back upon themselves: the “strife” called “evil” by Michael is countered by that which Satan and his crew call “the strife of glory,” which they will either “win” or “turn this heaven itself into the hell” that Michael “fablest” in which they will “dwell free” if they cannot “reign.” These repeated changes in direction typify Satan’s speech, as does his mingling of cause, matter, form, and end. The war between Michael and Satan’s logical strategies exemplifies how Milton assimilated the academic debates in which he participated as part of his fi nal examinations at Christ’s College into his poetic text, in this case within the war in heaven. Satan’s speech imitates and resembles the speech of a respondent, defeating his opponent, or in its wilder syntax, a speech

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of a prevaricator, conducting a licensed interruption to proceedings at the debate.15 To conclude the logical opposition of these two stylistic camps, let us allow Satan to take to center stage, demonstrating the full extent to which Milton manipulated and wielded the logical rules and commonplaces from his formal education: If thou beest he; but oh how fallen! how changed From him, who in the happy realms of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright: if he whom mutual league, United thoughts and counsels, equal hope And hazard in the glorious enterprise, Joined with me once, now misery hath joined In equal ruin: into what pit thou seest From what height fallen, so much the stronger proved He with his thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire arms? (1.84–94)

As he addresses Beelzebub, the full effect of Satan’s fall both on his rational ability becomes instantly evident in the way he struggles to identify his right hand man and also in his style of speech. For although he begins causal inquiry, asking, “if thou beest he,” he skips over the orthodox steps of outlining cause, matter, form, and end. Instead of an orderly procedure through such formalities, rather, Satan collapses and assumes all of these ingredients, and so proceeds to fling them at his audience in a complex comparison of opposites. It is important to note that he retains the logical custom of proceeding by dichotomous division, contrasting the present “fallen” and “changed” state of his companion with his past glory “in the happy realms of light” where he “didst outshine / Myriads though bright.” In this opposition, the stretched rhyme of “light” and “bright” jangles against the serious tenor of Satan’s matter, further accentuating the division between these two states. Satan’s dichotomous opposition is not laid out as cohesively as the arguments presented by Michael: he does not make a methodical presentation of cause, matter, form, and end. Rather, his discussion is besieged by minute details of logical adjuncts as he details how Beelzebub was coerced to join forces with him by “mutual league,” “united thoughts,” “counsels,” “hope,” and “hazard.” These multiple adjunctival details delay the progression of Satan’s speech. Even on a microcosmic level, it is not enough for Satan to say that Beelzebub used to “outshine” many spirits. He adds that these spirits were also incredibly “bright.” Such accumulation of

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detail prevents Satan’s logical discussion from advancing in the same linear way that Michael’s balanced phrases do. This is not to say Satan does not imply the primary cause of his and Beelzebub’s current position: the reason for their fall into the “pit” of “ruin” is implicitly their “glorious enterprise.” However, whereas when Michael employs comparatives, he does so to elucidate his discussion: here, Satan’s contrast between his past and present state provides two opposing images. These are not absolute opposites in a logical sense, in that neither one eliminates the other: rather they exist as contraries. But because they are so dissimilar, neither one is effective in arguing the other. Far from illuminating his discourse, Satan’s employment of logical techniques makes his purpose less clear to his audience. This marks a symptomatic change that his intellect has undergone following the fall: he has lost not only the name that he once bore in heaven but likewise his logical ability and clarity. In many ways, this is the ultimate extrapolation of Milton’s own logical training and adeptness, as he draws on his pedagogical training to present his readers with equally convincing stylistic embodiments of unfallen and fallen voices in his epic, using logic as his weapon and ally in this discursive war in utramque partem. This brief analysis makes clear that speakers from heaven and hell (or those on their way there) employ logic very differently. Both use the same building blocks, but in radically different ways. Certainly across the epic as a whole, Satan’s usage tends to be far more jumbled and confused than the clear, systematic logical progression of the unfallen angels’ speeches. Such distinction embodies Milton’s own ability to debate in utramque partem as he was taught both at St. Paul’s School and at the university.16 Using his different characters in Paradise Lost, Milton succeeds as both opponent and respondent. The logical differences between speakers represent their opposing theological status, either of one subject to or barred from divine grace. Clearly the epic bears witness to how logic adheres in Milton’s poetic practices and how his early training in the rules, skills, and arts of logic and rhetoric endured and later armed him with their tools which he applied with great versatility and dexterity in Paradise Lost—a far cry from Peter Gunning, who sat doodling spades in the margins of his book.

NOTES 1. Annotations by Peter Gunning in copy Hh.16.5 of Bartholomew Keckermann, Systema Logicae Tribus Libris (Hanover: Peter Antoine, 1620), St. John’s College Library, University of Cambridge. 2. Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948);

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Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956); Quentin Skinner, “The Generation of John Milton,” in Christ’s: A Cambridge College over Five Centuries, ed. David Reynolds (London: Macmillan, 2005): 41–72. 3. Although unpublished until 1672, Milton probably wrote the Art of Logic in the 1640s when he was acting as a tutor to his nephews; the following articles offer insight into the debates on the dating of this work: R. Dahlø, “The Date of Milton’s Artis Logicae and the Development of the Idea of Definition in Milton’s Works,” Huntington Literary Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1979): 25–36; John Walker McCain, “Milton’s Artis Logicae,” Notes and Queries 164 (1933): 149–50. 4. Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Mordechai Feingold, “The Humanities,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): 4.211–358; Mordechai Feingold, “English Ramism: A Reinterpretation” in The Influence of Petrus Ramus, ed. Mordechai Feingold, Joseph S. Freedman, and Wolfgang Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2001): 127–76. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present (1990): 30–78, 30, give an indication of the wide-ranging application of logic in their account of “the activity of reading in its historical and cultural contexts,” including what books were read, and how they were approached and physically used. Likewise, Gilbert Ryle, “Thinking and Reflecting” in Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1971): 1.465–79; and Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Fontana Press, 1973): 3–30, show how immersion into the culture being studied, including observing the last minute details of every possible aspect of life therein, provides a usefully “thick description” of culture that helps to establish a verstehen understanding of cultural workings and pragmatic operations. My own approach to understanding how Milton first encountered and absorbed logic is critically informed by such immersive techniques: I examined hundreds of hand-written annotations on logic textbooks from the 1500s and 1600s. This intensive and extensive study exposes the readers’ physical and intellectual processes, and by using these texts as objects, my analysis illuminates the mental habits of both reading and of writing that early modern logic imbued in its students and practitioners. 5. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the different aspects and strategies at work within early modern logic. However, this was a period in which logic and rhetoric battled for supremacy, each one drawing strong support and antithesis in good measure. Ramist logicians argued that logic governed the inventio and dispositio of subjects while rhetoric consisted of elocutio and pronuntiatio, and given Milton’s own logical affiliation to Ramism in his Art of Logic (1672), these are the divisions to which my essay adheres in its analysis. Milton’s text is based on that of Petrus Ramus, the controversial French logician and pedagogue sometimes depicted as trying to overthrow Aristotle. Yet close examination of overtly Ramist or overtly Aristotelian texts reveals that in fact the differences lay primarily in structure and order rather than in actual intellectual content. Milton’s decision to base his text on Ramist principles almost certainly stems from his affiliation at Christ’s College: the work he uses as a direct template for his own was by George Douname, a fellow at Christ’s, and Milton’s is by and large a fairly traditional, unoriginal adaptation of this text. The role of Christ’s College in English Ramism is well known. In sum, Laurence Chaderton lectured on Ramist theories at Cambridge between 1568 and 1577 but was not published on the subject. Gabriel Harvey is probably the most famous proponent of Ramism and eloquence in Cambridge in the early modern period; see Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford:

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Clarendon Press, 1979); and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986): 184–88. William Perkins graduated from Christ’s in 1581 and wrote a treatise on preaching using Ramist logic; George Downame was elected fellow at Christ’s in 1585 and wrote commentaries on Ramus in Latin which appeared in Frankfurt in six different editions between 1601 and 1631. William Ames produced a Ramist approach to the use of logic in preaching, Philosophemata (1643), and his Ramist commentaries appeared in at least four different editions published in Leyden (1632), Amsterdam (in 1651 and 1658), and at Cambridge (1646). William Chappell was elected fellow at Christ’s in 1607 and became Milton’s tutor when he arrived at university. See Fletcher, Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2:34–39 for further details of Chappell. See Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1956), 221, for an overview. For early modern Ramist texts discussing this question, see, for example, Petrus Ramus, The logike of the moste excellent P. Ramus Martyr trans. by Rolland MacIlmaine (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1574), Br; John Milton, Art of Logic, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. by Don Wolfe, (London: Yale University Press, 1982), 8:219; regarding the role of rhetoric, see Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588): A2r. For critical discussions on the conflict between logic and rhetoric in the early modern period, see Pierre Albert Duhamel, “The Logic and Rhetoric of Peter Ramus,” Modern Philology 46, no. 3 (1949): 163–71; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, Ong, Ramus, Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 6. John Milton, Art of Logic, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe, 8 vols. (London: Yale University Press, 1982), 8:216. All references to Art of Logic are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text as YP. 7. Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Retorike [sic] (Middelburg: R. Schilders, 1588), A6r. 8. Fenner, Artes of Logike and Retorike, A6r. 9. The ability to debate a question or subject matter in utramque partem or from any side was the ultimate test of a student’s logical ability; for further discussion, see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Skinner, “Generation of John Milton,” 65; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; and Walter J. Ong, “Tudor Writings on Rhetoric, Poetic, and Literary Theory,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971) 48–103, 65. For discussion of the moral and ethical questions raised by attaining the logical and rhetorical ability to argue a question from both sides, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 20–22. 10. Joseph Mede, unpublished Notebooks, II.129r; II.131r-v; Skinner, “Generation of John Milton,” 60; Keckermann (1571–1609) was a schoolmaster at the gymnasium in Danzig who produced significant numbers of influential pedagogical texts, including his Systema Logicae, which proved popular among university students. The average cost of this text was around nine pence. 11. The annotator in John Seton, Dialectica (London: Stationer’s Society, 1617) in the Rare Books Collection of the British Library, copy RB 23 a 47 (1) used crosses and double hash lines in the margin to do this; the annotator in Bartholomew Keckermann, Systema Logicae Tribus Libris (Hanoviae: Petrus Antonius, 1620) in Old Library, St John’s

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College, Cambridge, copy Hh.16.5, also employed marginal crosses and frequent underlining within his text. 12. Keckermann, Systema Logicae, copy Hh.16.5, 3; 8. 13. John Seton, Dialectica (Cambridge: 1631) in Old Library, St. John’s College, Cambridge, copy Kk.13.1. 14. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998). All references to Paradise Lost are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 15. See Fletcher, Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2:60, 2:262, for more information on the role of the prevaricator in final examinations at the University of Cambridge in the early modern period. 16. See Felicity Henderson, “Putting the Dons in their Place: A Restoration Oxford Terrae Filius Speech,” History of Universities 16, no. 2 (2000): 32–64.

“Thou art sufficient to judge aright”: Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica DAVID AINSWORTH

THE TREMENDOUS EXPLOSION OF PRINT materials during the early 1640s demanded some response, and Parliament reacted by passing the Licensing Order of 1643. While those with the power to grant licenses had changed from the court of Star Chamber established by Charles to officials appointed by the Long Parliament, the basic objective remained the same: constrain and contain revolutionary and radical ideas in order to promote stability. But for John Milton, this particular form of stability was synonymous with servility. Thus, in Areopagitica, Milton coupled an argument for the liberty to read all texts with an imperative for critical interpretation, not only attacking the Licensing Order and defending a free press, but establishing the theoretical foundations for what I will here call “spiritual reading.”1 Although he does not define this “spiritual reading” directly in Areopagitica, Milton does provide in the treatise his first full account of the kind of reading he will both demonstrate and require directly in his other texts. By spiritual reading, I mean reading understood as a strenuous and rigorous form of worship, founded upon the belief that the Spirit within reveals the truth of all texts only to a reader who reads carefully and critically. In many of his works, Milton performs such spiritual reading as a model for his readers to follow, or writes in a way designed to provoke his readers into their own acts of such reading. In Areopagitica, however, Milton concerns himself, primarily, with books themselves. Spiritual reading both requires readerly fitness and helps to produce it, with books functioning as the means to spiritual ends, the objects through which spiritual readers may exercise their devotion. Areopagitica focuses, in the context of its immediate occasion, on convincing Parliament that any book can occasion that fitness, an emphasis that leads him to remain somewhat vague about how that reading actually works. Milton avoids discussing the full implications of his strenuous and radical mode of reading, however, for rhetorical reasons, lest he turn Presbyterians in Parliament against his more immediate argument. While he does not avoid controversial positions, he concentrates on criticizing prior restraint and on establishing the virtues of allowing people to read freely not on the exact procedures he believes spiritual readers should employ. 147

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Particularly in recent years, critical conversation about Areopagitica has focused largely, though not exclusively, on whether the tract can properly be situated within a broader liberal tradition or whether it represents a sharply limited defense of liberty grounded upon the demand that readers subject themselves to divine authority. Even nuanced examinations of Milton’s tract sometimes subordinate Milton’s religious faith to the political significance of his attack on licensing.2 Sharon Achinstein’s Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, for example, acknowledges the centrality of books and reading to Areopagitica but accentuates their political usage— books as elements of the public sphere—and thus Achinstein sees Milton’s objective as creating conscientious readers who can be good citizens. She does not discuss how such readers can also be good Protestants.3 By focusing on how licensing endangers the process of spiritual reading, a process of faith and devotion, I will demonstrate, however, that Milton’s concern for liberty arises directly from his understanding of readerly fitness and its importance as an expression of devotion to God. Milton’s oft-cited plea to Urania to find a “fit audience” for Paradise Lost is typically invoked to stress the limited and elite quality of that audience, but it also suggests that Milton understands poetic interpretation as exercise (7.31). Indeed, Areopagitica suggests that a hermeneutic struggle with any text may help readers to render themselves “fit.” The aesthetic and political aspects of Milton’s argument, then, should not be prioritized above the spiritual imperatives of the tract. Nor should Milton’s decision to subordinate civil liberty to faith in the divine be seen as a dismissal or rejection of either books or of the value of liberty.4 The concept of faith as a process is hardly unique to Milton, however. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, for example, offers a model of virtue and faith as things formed and maintained over time, not as simple traits that one either possesses or lacks. Milton understands faith as a constant struggle, a series of conscious choices, an internal combat between humanity’s innate sinfulness and the desire to accept God’s renovation. That struggle takes place internally, but it also takes place universally. As Michael Lieb points out in Poetics of the Holy, “Milton’s view of the holy is all encompassing.”5 In Areopagitica, the strenuous reading of books takes its place alongside traditional modes of worship as a means of expressing devotion to God as well as a means of spiritual exercise.6 A book represents an externalization of the process of choice between good and evil; reading books thus associates the author’s choices and the reader’s, although the reader must be critical of what the author has to say. The book thus becomes a locus for both collaboration and conflict. That conflict carries itself out in part, as Milton notes, because the Fall left the knowledge of good and evil intermixed in human experience. On that account, Milton presents the conflict between good and evil in

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the fallen world as a call to arms to good Protestants, a call to exercise themselves through confrontation and struggle with evil. He locates that struggle within the spiritual reader who wrestles with books: He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. (YP 2:514–15, italics added)7

Milton likens purifying trial both to combat and to a race. Both metaphors emphasize the activity that “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue” avoids. Fitness and exercise produce and maintain an athletic prowess vital both to warfare and to the race for the “immortall garland.” Fitness comes from strenuous effort and purifying confrontation with “what is contrary.” Furthermore, readers fight the wars or run the races of interpretation on the fields that books provide for them. While a demoralized army might refuse to take the field of combat, even an eager reader can be denied the field of interpretative combat through licensing, which intervenes before the reader can demonstrate either cowardice or courage. Licensing cancels the race before it can even start. If one instead takes the 1644 edition’s version of the above quotation, which reads “wayfaring” instead of “warfaring,” then Milton’s message remains one of fitness through trial, but with a different emphasis.8 Instead of emphasizing the confrontational virtue of a Christian who ventures into the world to combat vice, the 1644 version of the passage presents Christian experience, which includes reading all sorts of books, as a purifying journey through a world of “triall.” The “wayfaring” version does not disarm the passage of its adversarial flavor but lends greater resonance to the text’s subsequent reference to Spenser’s Guyon, whose own journey culminates in the destruction of the Bower of Bliss. “Wayfaring” thus suggests a comparison with the journeys of the knights in The Faerie Queene. More particularly, “wayfaring” prioritizes the interior struggle against vice by displacing the combat of “warfaring” into the impure reader. Rather than a combat against an externalized vice, “wayfaring” instead points to an interior struggle provoked and intensified through travel. Both meanings seem operational here, however, given that “impurity” exists within all readers, and either version of the passage presents a fitness earned only through constant struggle against that “impurity.”9 Milton advocates an active and critical mode of reading, one that can purify the self, but not without great effort. And books provide the field

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of combat for that effort, while also offering that exposure to foreign or challenging ideas that a “wayfaring” Christian might seek. Just as travel may produce an interior conflict between what one believes and what one encounters, so too do books force readers to rethink what they think to be true by confronting them with alternative forms of understanding. Milton declares Spenser “a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas” (YP 2:516) because his poetry can show readers ways to triumph in the internal struggle between vice and virtue. By sharing Guyon’s personal journey with readers, Spenser illustrates how temperance requires knowledge and demonstrates the process of struggle and discernment.10 Through the medium of the book, readers can share in Guyon’s education and his travels, fighting within themselves as they confront in their reading the same temptations that Guyon confronts. In addition, liberty of interpretation facilitates the kind of active reading that provides such “exercise” and “trial.” Active spiritual reading means readers must pick sides and must choose between tempting alternatives. Milton presents such active reading as a moral imperative: Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read. (YP 2:516–17)

Milton, thus, presents the benefit of what he terms “promiscuous” reading. Any worldly text must partake of the vices of the fallen world and of the book’s fallen author.11 Therefore, no worldly text can be free of vice or error, and all texts must be vigorously surveyed and scanned by their readers in order to detect such flaws. Through such means, readers develop a fuller understanding of virtue and can use texts to test, and ultimately to confirm, the truths to which they ultimately assent. Since all human readers are fallen, they can only hope to succeed at such a task through the support of the Holy Spirit, which operates within all believers. Milton alludes to this support in discussing the vital need for the liberty to read and interpret: “liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarify’d and enlightn’d our spirits like the influence of heav’n” (YP 2:559). Reading thus becomes a sacred act if performed properly, opening spiritual readers to the divine influence of the Spirit within. Milton emphasizes the work of that same Spirit in the writing process when he discusses the danger that a deceased author’s work might be censored “if there be found in his book one sentence of a ventrous edge, utter’d in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictat of a divine Spirit” (YP 2:534). Milton never explicitly ties the Holy

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Spirit to reading in Areopagitica, although frequently such a connection is implicit. Perhaps, as I suggested earlier, he did not want to appear too radically religious, or perhaps he wanted to avoid a counterargument on the grounds that a censor guided by the Spirit could do God’s work through the Licensing Order. Certainly, Milton’s own prose possesses the kind of zeal he praises here. In any event, as Milton repeatedly stresses, spiritual reading requires a willingness to withstand “dust and heat.” Spiritual reading can be “right reading” only because of the Spirit within, but only a strenuous effort at reading allows readers contact with that Spirit. Like salvation, true spiritual reading depends upon God but remains conditional. Just as an unrepentant person can neither expect salvation nor claim upon repenting that his repentance causes his salvation, unfit readers lack the inspirational guidance necessary for godly reading. Fit readers, like zealous writers, must strive in the hope of being granted divine guidance, knowing that they can only meet the minimum conditions under which God will step in to grant them success. Much like the loyal angels fighting the war in heaven in Paradise Lost, spiritual readers must struggle even though they cannot triumph without God’s aid. If Milton’s spiritual reader actively scans error to confirm the truth, then the nature of that truth must shape the process of spiritual reading that uncovers it within a text. Areopagitica establishes Milton’s understanding of truth, in part to justify the continued availability of false texts, but more broadly, to demonstrate how difficult it is to determine a truth. A reader’s understanding of the truth cannot advance without much weighing and choosing between competing claims. Readers must discern in order to choose, but must also choose in order to refine their discernment: Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie. (YP 2:543)

Here Milton relates the strenuous process of spiritual reading to water flowing, like “a streaming fountain” of truth. Like fitness, knowledge and faith are not possessions that one can claim and clutch. They are not products, but continuing processes. Truth likewise manifests itself to us as a process and can become heresy if accepted without question from a human agent, whether a prelate or a Presbyterian member of the Westminster Assembly.12 In effect, such a truth becomes an idol, as though it were not merely presented, but actually created by a single human being or a

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particular human institution. Assent to such a truth is actually, however, assent to the power and authority of the human beings who assert it and not to the truth itself. Real truth, on the other hand, not only flows from the Spirit within, but more importantly, can become known only through a constant testing on the part of the believer. Real belief, in other words, depends fundamentally upon the process of discovering, discerning, and confirming.13 All beliefs arrived at without such a process are false. Those who hold even a “true” belief reached through uncritical or servile procedures, like the prelatical compulsion and ritual Milton derides in his antiprelatical tracts, become “heretick[s] in the[ir] truth.” Milton also famously compares truth to Osiris, declaring that “truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master,” only to be hewn “into a thousand peeces” and “scatter’d to the four winds” (YP 2:549). Spiritual readers hunt for truth within texts, gathering up her pieces, and their holy hunt, that process of reassembling the truth, will not be complete until Christ returns.14 Though Milton does not refer directly to books and reading here, the implication remains clear: “Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint” (YP 2:549–50). The book is the “place of opportunity” in this example, and licensing would interfere with the search for truth within books that constitutes the main object of spiritual reading. As a fountain, truth must keep flowing instead of being allowed to stagnate; as a body it must be reassembled in a process that remains incomplete until God completes it at the Second Coming. So far, the aspects of Milton’s model we have discussed emphasize the internal nature of the search, but the Osirus passage also emphasizes its collective nature. Each spiritual reader may uncover new pieces, but the assembly of “the body of Truth” requires collective activity: “To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportionall) this is the golden rule and makes up the best harmony in a Church” (YP 2:551). Such harmony, then, requires the gradual—and as we have seen, openended—coming together of different but concordant pieces or parts of “the body of Truth” as they are discovered or confirmed by individual believers gathered together for that purpose. It is no coincidence that in the very next paragraph Milton should ask the members of Parliament to “consider what Nation it is wherof [they] are, and wherof [they] are the governours,” a nation in the vanguard of the wider process of the Reformation (YP 2:551). He is ultimately concerned about the constitution of Christian communal life in its widest sense. A few pages later, in another famous passage, Milton suggests that the creation of such a community entails another gradual and equally open-

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ended process. He attacks those who seem to believe that such acts of creation can and should happen without dissentions and disagreements: as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. (YP 2:555)

On its surface, this process appears unlike the reconstruction of Truth’s body. Truth began as an undivided whole, her members torn asunder to be reassembled later. The believers in the above passage, on the other hand, construct their Temple from “quarry and timber” that must fi rst be cut and crafted into pieces of the right shape and size before they can be put together. However, to the extent that the Temple, in this passage, is a figure for the group of believers who constitute a church—or who constitute Christendom as a whole—the “contiguous” pieces represent the particular beliefs or doctrines of each of those believers or of each sect to which they adhere. If in the Osiris passage, believers reassemble the body of Truth, here the pieces of that body are being gathered by those who are themselves represented as parts. In using both metaphors, Milton, in other words, invites comparison between Truth’s pieces, which are gathered collectively by dedicated believers, and these stones, the people who both create and constitute the earthly institution or institutions of Christian communal life. As we have seen, Milton introduces the figure of Osiris immediately before declaring that the people of England, through their studies and through the favor of heaven, are decreed by God to play a key role in the Reformation. Therefore, the same people whose inventive wits seek out the parts of Truth, so long as their searches remain unhindered, are also those who will produce the “schisms” and “dissections” that will make possible the building of the new “Temple” in which all Christians can live and worship God according to the dictates of the spirit. Believers themselves are the Temple, and they also build it. The search for Truth and the construction of the Temple, in other words, run parallel, the stones and mortar fitting together according to the same principle that in the Osiris passage permitted Truth’s parts to be reassembled harmoniously. That principle is, after all, not only “the golden rule” that dictates the proper proportions of a whole, the ratio of one physical part to another, but

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also, in the ethical sense, the one that regulates relationships between individual believers—a principle rooted in love. As my comparison, I hope, illustrates, the relationship between the two metaphors functions precisely, but in an open-ended, poetic fashion. Like both Truth and Temple, the two figures cannot be “united into a continuity,” at least not in this world, and it is important to note that Milton never completely reconciles them, nor does he offer a description of what he thinks either will look like when complete. The dissimilitude of the two figures, however, remains “brotherly,” each revealing one aspect of a full truth that Milton is at pains to remind us remains just beyond the horizon of his ability to figure. In Areopagitica, Milton chiefly concerns himself with the process of the search for truth, with the unfettered building of the Temple, not the precise characteristics of its final shape. Milton does not claim to know that final shape. He does, however, claim that its “gracefull symmetry” can be found in the “brotherly dissimilitudes” that themselves reflect and represent the free expression of faith. Belief in God, like belief in a truth, relies upon an independent process of inquiry, but neither God nor truth can be fully comprehended by any fallen human being or fallen human creation (including the tract itself). Graceful disagreement between believers who only hold parts of the truth, then, properly reflects the golden ratio and rule that commends the structure, assuring believers that what they build will remain in harmonious proportion, even in the face of (and perhaps even because of) the conflicts that inevitably arise in the process. In a fallen world, a world where Truth cannot be made whole and the Temple of the Lord can only be “contiguous,” the exercise of individual conscience in the strenuous process of spiritual reading is necessary to both the process of uncovering Truth’s pieces and of building God’s Church.15 As all of this makes clear, Areopagitica presents the discovery of truth as a process parallel to the process of reading (one that indeed reflects back on his readers’ experience of the tract itself). Milton declares, in fact, that God chose England to be the place where such reading and discovering has been taking place: For when God shakes a Kingdome with strong and healthfull commotions to a generall reforming, ’tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is, that God then raises to his own work men of rare abilities, and more then common industry not only to look back and revise what hath bin taught heretofore, but to gain furder and goe on, some new enlightn’d steps in the discovery of truth. For such is the order of Gods enlightning his Church, to dispense and deal out by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain it. (YP 2:566)

The strong medicine of books, which contributes to the individual health of readers, also contributes to the health of nations. The fitness of England,

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then, as God’s nation and a source of enlightenment for God’s church, relates directly to those “men of rare abilities, and more then common industry” whose readerly fitness renders them both wayfaring and warfaring Christians. Areopagitica calls upon godly Christians to read and write with “more then common industry” and to take “some new enlightn’d steps in the discovery of truth.” Milton declares London “a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty,” a “shop of warre” where some muse and search out “new notions and idea’s,” and “others [are] as fast reading, trying all things” (YP 2:553–54). Only a range of opinions facilitates the fight: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” (YP 2:554). The strenuous process of spiritual reading provides the means through which God’s truth can be discovered within even “the drossiest volume” (YP 2:521). Milton here avoids identifying the seductive “sectaries and false teachers,” not because he fears doing so, but because his polemic relies upon his confidence in those “men of rare abilities” whom God raises up to combat them. Those advocating censorship worry too much about corruption when they should instead see the existence of false teachers as an opportunity to further “the discovery of truth.” Milton writes Areopagitica to defend a general process of discovery and interpretation that he sees as central to the act of faith, not to defend any specific doctrine. Indeed, while Milton unabashedly promotes or defends his own ideas in many of his other works, he does not point to his earlier antiprelatical or divorce tracts in Areopagitica as examples of the sort of writing that must be permitted. He concerns himself instead with defending a series of processes—reading, writing, searching out the truth, reforming the church—while leaving the details of each process vague so as to maximize common ground with his readers. In other words, Milton avoids precisely defining spiritual reading here because he wants to safeguard his reader’s liberty to engage in it. A very specific defense of or an attack on a particular doctrinal point would have risked alienating his audience or demonstrating to them the dangers involved in allowing free publication. A reader willing to agree that free discourse may advance the search for Truth may not agree that, say, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce advances that search, so Milton concerns himself with the former even though his argument could be used to sustain the latter. The vital spiritual and civil role spiritual reading plays in Milton’s London explains Milton’s specific concern about the “manifest hurt” licensing would do to the process of authorship and printing, if adopted (YP 2:530). If industrious English authors labor to produce the healthful medicine of books, then licensing both interferes with those labors and treats those authors like the “children and childish men” who Milton says lack the

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ability to read properly (YP 2:521). Milton relates the writing and printing process to the process of education and intellectual maturity, ultimately relating the free composition and publication of ideas to the rise of Protestantism while suggesting that licensing serves the same ends as those of the Inquisition. Writing and printing, then, become part of Milton’s metaphor for the development and maturation of faith, the movement from the implicit and servile faith of the papists to the free and liberating faith of English Protestantism.16 In describing the process of writing, Milton does not neglect its collective and communal character, stressing both the exceptional industry writing requires and the danger of treating “men of rare abilities” like children: When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditats, is industrious, and likely consults and conferrs with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be inform’d in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him; if in this the most consummat act of his fidelity and ripenesse, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerat diligence to the hasty view of an unleasur’d licencer, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferiour in judgement, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing, and if he be not repulst, or slighted, must appear in Print like a punie with his guardian. (YP 2:532)

Milton fully justifies the offense he takes at the thought of a potentially “younger” licensor intervening at the last moment in a strenuous process of composition, which in itself represents “fidelity and ripenesse.” The contrast between the fully realized maturity of the author and the potential youth of the licensor parallels the contrast between the fully ripened process of a diligent author and the “hasty view” of an overtaxed official. Furthermore, the author’s consultation “with his judicious friends” contrasts with the unwelcome and injudicious intervention of the licenser, whose guardianship over the text belies the industry and maturity that produced it.17 Indeed, since the “fidelity” of the hypothetical writer Milton refers to applies as much to God as to the task of writing itself, the licensor interferes with, perhaps even ruins, an expression of faith. Licensing cannot preserve people’s faith if the very procedure of licensing spoils an extended act of faithful devotion. The licensor’s interference ruins the entire writing process at the moment of intercession: “what if the author shall be one so copious of fancie, as to have many things well worth the adding, come into his mind after licencing. The Printer dares not go beyond his licenc’t copy” (YP 2:532). Milton declares, with the air of some personal experience, that even “the best and diligentest writers” may add material, “and that perhaps a

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dozen times in one book” (YP 2:532). The smooth insertion of new text previously arranged between writer and printer must now, however, wait for the approval of an unneeded and possibly incompetent middleman. All the vibrancy of copious fancy becomes crushed beneath the heavy yoke of the licensing act. The author must “trudge to his leav-giver,” with Milton adding that the original licensor must “be found, or found at leisure” (YP 2:532). The productive and necessary labor that began the writing process grinds to a halt under the burden of such unnecessary and even harmful drudgery and haste, both of which cheapen the mature product of the author’s efforts and infantilize the author himself. The scornful term “pupil teacher,” which Milton uses a few lines later, suggests that licensing would subject all writers to a harmful and tyrannical custodianship, one that will undermine their ability to convince readers that they have any authority of their own: “I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructer that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist” (YP 2:533). And these tyrant licensors will proceed, furthermore, to throttle all the life out of the books these authors write. In a passage that returns us to Milton’s famous earlier characterization of books as “not absolutely dead things” (YP 2:492), he suggests again that such tyrants actually murder books, destroying the lively and rigorous process of composition that they represent and embody and spoiling the preserved results they contain: If the work of any deceased author, though never so famous in his life time, and even to this day, come to their hands for licence to be Printed, or Reprinted, if there be found in his book one sentence of a ventrous edge, utter’d in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictat of a divine Spirit, yet not suiting with every low decrepit humor of their own, though it were Knox himself, the Reformer of a Kingdom that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost, for the fearfulnesse, or the presumptuous rashnesse of a perfunctory licencer. (YP 2:534)

Not only does this passage demonstrate Milton’s concern for preserving the inspiration of the spirit, as I discussed earlier, but it also argues that licensing risks halting a progressive process of inspiration. Playing here on the word “sense,” Milton argues that licensing will deprive “all posterity” of the feeling for or appreciation of the work of even a writer like Knox, as well as the meaning of the words that he wrote. If readers lose the “sense” of what someone like Knox wrote, they may lose an opportunity to appreciate not just Knox as a human author but the divine Author who inspired his work. Nor could readers be inspired by Knox’s writing to “gain furder and goe on” (YP 2:566). Milton’s earlier comment about killing books, which concludes that killing a book “slaies an immortality rather then a life” (YP 2:493), points

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directly towards the writing and publication processes that licensing promises to disrupt. The book stands as end result or product of the writing and printing process, but it also contains within itself the essence of that which created it. The obvious parallel here is that of the divine essence contained within each human being, the “ethereall and fift essence,” which books also contain as “the breath of reason it selfe” (YP 2:493). As God breathes life—spiritus—into each human being who then partakes of the divine essence, so do those involved in a book’s creation breathe reason into it, granting it a metaphoric equivalent of their own divine essence: the divine twice removed. Those involved in a book’s production breathe into that book a representation of their own vibrant search for the truth. Books can instruct their readers, acting as teachers or conveyers of truth. But books also embody an act of the author’s devotion. If a zealous author, perhaps moved by the divine Spirit, composes a book through the exhaustive process of revision and publication, then that book itself represents the author’s offering to God. If the author is both prophet and priest, then the book represents both prophecy and propitiation.18 Obviously, not all authors or publishers hold that the search for truth is their highest ideal. On the other hand, an author may mean to express a truth and get things terribly wrong. Milton’s declares, however, that even bad books help uncover the truth to fit readers. Licensing poses a threat because it interferes with the production of books in a way that spoils the process no matter how the book was composed. Presumably, even the life within a book composed with an erroneous concern for the truth possesses the potential to provoke readers along in their processes of discovery. Certainly books with more evil or seductive intentions can still be important for those processes of trial and discernment I discussed earlier in this essay. Milton offers a dynamic vision of reading, writing, and publishing that configures the triangular relationship of reader, author, and text along the lines of the faithful soul’s relationship with God through the Spirit within. Spiritual readers interpret books with the aid of that Spirit as divine intermediary, and books themselves work as intermediaries between readers and authors. The act of reading, then, if performed properly, permits the book to act as an intersection between the devotion of its author and the devotion of its reader. And proper reading increases readers’ fitness, sharpening their receptiveness to the divine Spirit within them while strengthening their faith and understanding. Areopagitica thus anticipates Milton’s famous plea to Urania at the opening of Paradise Lost’s book 7 to help him find a fit audience for his poem, however small it may be. Poetry’s power, as Milton presents it in Areopagitica, occasions fitness without precluding the exercise of free choice or proscribing the liberty that makes that fitness meaningful. A poem such

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as Paradise Lost can thereby encompass both its author’s and its readers’ own processes of faith. It is the product of and a episode in both the author’s and the reader’s quests for self-purification, inviting the inspiration Milton invokes, while transcending the imperfections and impurities of those who receive it. Composition, printing, and reading together constitute a contentious and collaborative process, involving both the reassembly of truth in the world and the kind of devotional faith that invites God to write upon believers’ hearts. The poem’s “master spirit,” then, possesses multiple authors, as Milton relies upon the heavenly muse to illuminate the darkness within him and then attempts to reinscribe inspiration within text, catching within the vial of his book a prismatic fragment of the truth. That fragment, in turn, must be coaxed forth from the text through the struggles of each individual reader, and out of that fragment comes the broader spectrum of truths produced by those readers’ interpretations. The poem provokes a rich and open process of faith within its readers, one flavored by Milton’s own process of faith but generated as a collaboration between author, text, reader, and that internal Spirit that may speak within them all. The metaphor of writing as faith operates in tandem with the challenge to read and interpret, as both extend spiritual understanding. Milton cannot simply infuse readers with his own faith, but the “master spirit” of his poem, like a muse, can inspire faith in his readers, and it is the liberty that Milton defends in Areopagitica that allows this collaborative and contentious process of faith to happen and to continue.

NOTES 1. See also Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161–201; and Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chapter 1. 2. See also Thomas Fulton, “Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology,” ELR 34, 1 (2004): 42–82. 3. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–67. 4. Stanley Fish, for example, has argued that Areopagitica warns against an idolatry of the book by tempting us towards that very thing. See Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 190–205. I argue here that Milton presents books as means to a holy end, which deflects the danger of idolatry in that a means of worshipping God can only become idolatrous if it becomes an end in itself. 5. Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 39. 6. Lieb’s discussion of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in Poetics of the Holy, 32–33, suggests that sacraments become “insignias” of deeper religious mysteries but must not be worshipped as if they themselves possess “the efficacy of that which is sacred.” See also John D. Schaeffer, “Metonymies We Read By: Rhetoric, Truth and the Eucharist

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in Milton’s Areopagitica,” Milton Quarterly 34, 3 (2000): 84–92, which argues that the Eucharist can be mapped onto Milton’s metonymic structures in Areopagitica. I see a less direct comparison than Schaeffer does, and, unlike him, I argue that Milton sees truth as generated through a process of contention and consensus. 7. All citations from Milton’s prose are from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–83), hereafter cited as YP. 8. As Ernest Sirluck explains in his note, “The printed text has wayfaring. All four presentation copies have the y crossed through in ink and an r written above it.” This revision is generally but not universally accepted as authoritative (YP 2:515). 9. Balachandra Rajan discusses this passage in relation to tolerance and globalization in an essay in Milton and the Climates of Reading, ed. Elizabeth Sauer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 135–50. 10. See also James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), especially 180–87. Turner also notes that “Poetic apprehension is a problematic and strenuous vehicle of truth” (185). 11. The special case of the Bible need not be entirely pure, either, as it has been entrusted to worldly guardians and agents. 12. Parliament agreed to form an Assembly of Divines in 1641, and that assembly first met in 1643, dominated by Presbyterians. Milton explicitly addresses his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to the Westminster Assembly, as well as to Parliament, but clearly suspects that the assembly plans to force its conclusions on other believers. Certainly the response to Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce gave Milton no reason to feel encouraged. See further Arthur Edward Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 68–70, and G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? England 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially 62–69. 13. Truth, for Milton, thus reveals itself through a readerly process of proairesis. See also Mary F. Norton, “The Praxis of Milton’s Truth: Proairesis and Qualification in the Civil Liberty Tracts,” Milton Quarterly 28, 3 (1994): 47–56. 14. See also John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158–59. 15. Stevie Davies uses this passage to argue that Milton allows that “a coherent ‘spirituall architecture’ may be made out of incoherencies,” while Mary Norton argues that it encapsulates the idea of fractals as a form of order that appears complex. See Davies, Milton (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 38–40, and Norton, “‘The rising world of waters dark and deep’: Chaos Theory and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 32, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 98–99. 16. See also Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade, and Dobranski’s article on Areopagitica, “Letter and Spirit in Milton’s Areopagitica,” Milton Studies 32, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 131–52. 17. Chapter 27 of De Doctrina Christiana defines Christian liberty in part as the service of God through the guidance of the Spirit after being made men instead of children. Milton’s caution here about treating authors like children thus points towards a fundamental violation of Christian liberty in the licensing act. 18. See Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 46–52. Although Lieb focuses on poetry, not prose, as sacred expression, most of his points here seem applicable to prose works as well, at least in the broad sense in which Areopagitica treats books.

The Son’s Bounded Solitude in Paradise Regained SAMUEL SMITH

PARADISE R EGAINED ELABORATELY DEVELOPS THE biblical Gospels’ compressed, even minimalist, account of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, and in this way, Milton presents spiritual and political lessons to his readers. The “kingdoms’ of the world” temptation, for instance, extends over the middle two books of the brief epic and is delineated and amplified in the combative dialogue between Jesus and Satan. N. H. Keeble has shown how Milton applies this midrashic strategy of retelling not only to the action of the poem, but also to its setting: Milton enlarges the desert “from a circumstantial detail to a resonantly significant part of the poem’s design.”1 Similarly, Milton takes the implicit fact of Jesus’s solitude in the Gospel narratives and develops it into a crucial component of his own temptation narrative. While the gospel texts make clear that Jesus goes to the desert alone, and that he remains alone for at least forty days while or before he is tempted by Satan, the Gospels have little to say about why Jesus chooses this solitude or why such solitude provides the necessary context for temptation. Milton does not let such suggestive omission pass and instead invests Jesus’s solitude with particular significance: the nature and purpose of God’s Son’s solitude supports and complements the nature and purpose of the Son’s spiritual and redemptive work on behalf of humanity. Thus, Milton assigns to the Son a very human solitude that provides the uninterrupted time and quiet space needed for discerning and determining how best to fulfill his mission as God’s Messiah, and for preparing for encounters with temptation. Milton’s apparent understanding of the Son’s solitude, however, has recently been challenged by Thomas Luxon’s reading of the Son’s solitude in Paradise Regained as the same solitude experienced by Adam in Eden before Eve’s creation in Paradise Lost.2 Luxon identifies the “solitude” that the Son seeks to “converse / With” (1.190–91)3 when he enters the wilderness as “the very condition the God of Genesis 2:18 deemed ‘not good’ for man.”4 Indeed, Luxon continues, “Milton depicts the Son of God as lacking the constitutive loneliness by which Adam chiefly distinguished himself from God—he is just fine alone; he needs no partner in conversation, not a woman, not a man, and certainly not Satan”; thus the Son lacks “Adam’s ‘single imperfection.’”5 In Luxon’s reading, the Son displays a “manly liberty” achieved only in solitude by “the king of heaven, the Son 161

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of God,” as if such liberty could be achieved only by a deity. Luxon thus implies that the Son’s humanity is alien to Adam’s—that the Son finds ease in the very solitude that makes Adam anxious: “the Milton who desired citizenship in the kingdom of heaven wound up imagining his perfect man as solitary.”6 But to regard Milton’s Son as solitary in this way, and to equate the Son’s solitude as the same as Adam’s in Eden before the creation of Eve, is to neglect important contexts for understanding the Son’s solitude. Further, Luxon’s reading conflates the two different kinds of solitude—in both nature and purpose—experienced by the Son and by Adam: a fundamental category mistake, confusing what I will identify as the bounded solitude of the Son with the unbounded solitude of Adam.7 Such a reading acknowledges the markers Milton provides for establishing the full humanity of the Son and which emphasize that everything the Son accomplishes in Paradise Regained, he accomplishes as a human.8 I will argue that the Son’s solitude is neither a divine nor even a necessarily heroic condition. Milton accentuates an altogether human solitude when he sends the Son into the desert alone to face Satan’s temptations. The Son’s solitude in the brief epic may be aligned with seventeenthcentury discourse about human solitude and its purposes. Milton’s contemporary, Abraham Cowley (one of Milton’s favorite poets),9 asserts the value of solitude both for identifying the quality of the individual capable of enjoying such solitude and for enhancing the life of such an individual. For Cowley, neither a “Fop” nor a man of understanding “who has set his heart much upon the world” will grasp the benefits of solitude.10 The “fit though few” who are able to retreat for a time from human society “must have enough knowledge of the World to see the vanity of it, and enough Virtue to despise all vanity”; such select individuals must have minds free from all passions, “for how is it possible for a Man to enjoy himself while his Affections are tyed to things without Himself?”11 Cowley’s remarks serve as an incisive gloss on Milton’s Jesus, for Cowley further insists that the solitary man must also “learn the Art and get the Habit of Thinking,” for “Cogitation is the thing which distinguishes the Solitude of a God from a wild Beast.”12 Like Milton, Cowley blurs the line between the solitude of a deity and the solitude of a creature made in the Deity’s image. The younger Milton had also expressed such attitudes toward solitude. In his seventh Prolusion, for example, he speaks of “the lofty solitude” Prometheus found in the Caucasus mountains, “where at last he became the wisest of gods and men” (YP 1:289).13 Milton also identifies the significant connection between solitude and growth in wisdom within his own experience: “There I too, amid rural scenes and woodland solitudes, felt that I had enjoyed a season of growth in a life of seclusion” (YP 1:289). This prefigures and resonates in the solitude that “Il Penseroso,” celebrates and cherishes, where a “rapt soul” (40) joins “calm Peace, and

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Quiet” (45) with “Spare Fast” (46) to make “The Cherub Contemplation” (54) and “mute Silence” (55) her companions. “Som still removed place” (78) or “som high lonely Towr” (86) provide the setting for a solitude that could enable the speaker to “attain / To something like Prophetic strain” (173–74). Further, the Elder Brother in A Mask will assert that anyone who seeks a certain kind of solitude acts wisely: And Wisdoms self Oft seeks to sweet retired Solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in the various bustle of resort Were all to ruffl’d, and sometimes impair’d. (375–80)

Indeed, Milton consistently asserts that any person wishing to become a true hero must make periods of solitude and contemplation part of his personal discipline. He states in The Reason of Church Government, for instance, “but if it be at all the worke of man, it must be of such a one as is a true knower of himselfe, and himselfe in whom contemplation and practice, wit, prudence, fortitude, and eloquence must be rarely met, both to comprehend the hidden causes of things, and span in his thoughts all the various effects that passion or complexion can worke in mans nature; and hereto must his hand be at defiance with gaine, and his heart in all vertues heroick” (YP 1:753). Such consistent declarations about contemplative solitude provide important insight into the Son’s solitude in Paradise Regained. Yet and still, the Son’s solitude, while very much a human endeavor, is also rooted in biblical models for solitude, which perhaps transmute Milton’s youthful, more Neoplatonic understandings of solitude. While the Son has no precedent for the redemptive work he must accomplish as the Savior of humankind,14 the solitude that he seeks to “converse / With” (1.190–91) when he enters the wilderness does have precedents: it is neither unique nor beyond human capability. Both his solitude and its accompanying fast repeat the experience that two of his prophetic predecessors underwent as preparation for their respective missions. That is, the Son’s forty-day fast in solitude establishes him in solidarity with two of his heroes: Moses and Elijah. Satan’s initial assault on the Son insinuates the singularity of the Son’s isolation, asking him what ill chance hath brought thee to this place So far from path or road of men, who pass In Troop or Caravan, for single none

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Durst ever, who return’d, and dropt not here His Carcass, pin’d with hunger and with droughth? (1.321–25, italics added)

In what will become the pattern of the ongoing discourse between Satan and the Son, the Son discovers this to be a lie, for in fact there has been a human who “single” dared enter this wilderness and did not drop “here His Carcass.” After citing and remarking on Moses’ forty-day fast in the mountains, the Son reminds Satan that Elijah also performed the same feat in this very desert: “And forty days Eliah without food / Wandred this barren waste, the same I now” (1.353–54). Satan admits to this truth when he returns the next day, including Elijah in a list of those whom God took care of as they wandered this desert: and that Prophet bold Native of Thebez wandring here was fed Twice by a voice inviting him to eat. (2.312–14)

While, of course Satan now uses this truth to question God’s providence toward the Son, Milton has nonetheless clearly identified the Son’s solitude with that of Elijah and Moses.15 But how, precisely, do we understand this particular kind and caliber of solitude? A useful paradigm for talking about—and discriminating between— differing solitudes can be found in John Barbour’s illuminating consideration of Augustine’s Confessions. In The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography, Barbour demonstrates that Augustine, while dramatizing his own solitude “as bounded and supported by relationships with others,” emphasizes the benefits of solitude for the demanding intellectual and spiritual work of “gathering, collecting, and recollecting” memories and thoughts in a way that enables the solitary human to return to human society refreshed with understanding, purpose, and direction.16 Barbour thus distinguishes between “bounded” and “unbounded” solitude, a general distinction that also effectively identifies the difference between the “bounded” solitude of the Son in Paradise Regained and the “unbounded” solitude of Adam before the creation of Eve in Paradise Lost. Thus, apart from Adam’s uniqueness as the original human, “solitude is always bounded, both temporally and spatially, by relatedness to other persons.”17 Barbour states that “the boundaries of solitude are spatial, or relational, as well as temporal,” and so “solitude is a moment within the plot of a larger narrative and a situation located within a web of human relationships.”18 Barbour’s distinction helps us to identify an absolutely essential aspect of the Son’s solitude in the wilderness before

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he confronts Satan: his solitude serves as a critical moment within the plot of the larger narrative of Milton’s brief epic. This solitude, in turn, serves as a moment within the plot of the Gospels’ larger narrative that delineates Jesus’s ministry, passion, and resurrection. We can best begin to understand the bounded nature of the Son’s solitude by comparing it in specific contexts with the unbounded nature of Adam’s solitude before Eve’s creation in Paradise Lost. As the first human, Adam experiences his solitude as an absolute and potentially permanent condition imposed on him by his Creator. This absolute solitude registers deeply for Adam after he has completed his task of naming the animals: “but with mee / I see not who partakes” (8.363–64). He asks God, “In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?” (8.364–66). Since he has never had any conversation with other humans, Adam experiences his solitude as a general (not specific) absence of company. He knows he needs companionship, but he cannot specify who or what can best meet his need—only who or what does not meet his need (God, animals). Thus, the solitude from which Adam seeks release is both involuntary and utterly absolute; without divine intervention, Adam’s solitude will remain permanent. Furthermore, Adam can identify no purpose for his human solitude, except in hindsight when God makes him aware that he was testing Adam’s self-understanding to see if he could recognize his need for an equal, a companion “fit to participate / All rational delight” (8.390–91): Thus farr to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d, And finde thee knowing not of Beasts alone, Which thou hast rightly nam’d, but of thy self, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My Image, not imparted to the Brute, Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike, And be so minded still; I, ere, thou spak’st, Knew it not good for Man to be alone, And no such companie as then thou saw’st Intended thee, for trial onely brought, To see how thou could’st judge of fit and meet (8.437–48)

Here God elides the most obvious reason for why it is not good for Adam to be alone (in the sense that none of the animals Adam names are alone): Adam cannot fulfill the command to “be fruitful and multiply” without a sexual mate. Milton emphasizes Adam’s need for a companion who can provide both intimate conversation and necessary help in caring for Eden’s garden. He presents a test of or trial for Adam’s self-knowledge:

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can Adam discern his own needs, his own purposes as a creature made in God’s image? While the Son must also discern his purpose—as God’s chosen Messiah—his situation and task are quite different from that of the first man. Firstly, unlike Adam, the Son is under no obligation to “be fruitful and multiply.” Secondly, the Son has enjoyed significant human companionship at the moment he enters the desert wilderness. The “complaint” the Son might bring before God at this juncture in his life would be markedly different from the one Adam has made after observing the pairing of the animals as he named them, and to which God responds. God’s creation of Eve puts an end to Adam’s unbounded solitude. Milton’s Son, in contrast, experiences solitude of a very different kind: a bounded solitude that is voluntary, relative, temporary, purposeful, and very much—to repeat Barbour’s germane words—“a moment within the plot of a larger narrative and a situation located within the web of human relationships.” Like the Jesus in Luke’s gospel, the Son in Paradise Regained is led by “the Spirit” (1.189), which he experiences as “some strong motion” (1.290), into “the bordering Desert wild” (1.193).19 While his character and ethos lead him to follow this calling, clearly the Son could choose to resist this inward prompting. He enters the wilderness voluntarily, therein choosing this solitude. Milton’s narrator makes clear that the Son does so with the intent and purpose of discerning how to fulfill his mission as the Savior of humanity:20 Mean while the Son of God, who yet some days Lodg’d in Bethabara where John baptiz’d Musing and much revolving in his brest, How best the mighty work he might begin Of Saviour to mankind, and which way first Publish his God-like office now mature. (1.183–88)

His need to contemplate and consider this leads him to choose what Mary Beth Long identifies as a “beneficial” solitude, clearly quite different from Adam’s undesirable solitude, which Long calls a “solitude of lack.”21 The Son, One day forth walk’d alone, the Spirit leading; And his deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude, till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entred now the bordering Desert wild, And with dark shades and rocks environ’d round, His holy Meditations thus persu’d. (1.189–95)

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This is not the unbounded solitude that Adam experiences, but instead resonates as the desirable solitude that the Elder Brother in A Mask had presented and praised as an act of wisdom (375–80). Wisdom is indeed what the Son deploys to vanquish “hellish wiles” (1.175), and the temporary solitude of the wilderness provides the Son with the time and solitary space needed to process the “holy Meditations” and “deep thoughts” that will clarify his purpose and mission as the Savior of humanity—what precisely it means to be God’s Son. In effect, he uses this bounded solitude to do the kind of intellectual and spiritual work that Augustine associates with such solitude, the kind of work Milton had described in his opening paragraph of the first chapter of The Reason of Church Government. One of the primary communal boundaries Milton provides for the Son’s bounded solitude is his relationship with his mother, Mary. In pursuing his provisional solitude, the Son proves to be as much the son of his mother, Mary, as he is the Son of his heavenly Father. Mary enjoys the same prominence in Milton’s brief epic as she enjoys in Luke’s Gospel, and many commentators of Paradise Regained have reflected on Mary’s significance in Milton’s poem. Mary Fenton points out that the Son’s humanity requires that he “be located in real places,” and the home that Mary provides for Jesus “frames and anchors his physical and spiritual journeys.”22 Mary thus gives both boundary and context to the Son’s solitude, and as Fenton notes, she “grounds Jesus in his human reality, recounting the real places they have been and lived: the stable in Bethlehem, Egypt, and finally Nazareth which ‘Hath been our dwelling many years’ (2.80).”23 Milton’s audience, familiar with the gospel tradition, knows that these many years of dwelling with Mary account for the first thirty years of Jesus’s life. Thus Joan Malory Webber argues that Mary “is the nurturing woman who helps Jesus to know himself, and helps to keep us from thinking of Jesus as either incomplete or aggressively masculine.”24 In fact, Mary supplies the foundational material for the Son’s meditations in his solitude. The lengthy passage of indirect discourse from Mary that the Son recites in his opening soliloquy (1.229–58) makes clear that he has needed his mother to tell him about the circumstances of his birth and the fact of his divine paternity. He knows he is the Messiah and God’s Son because Mary tells him so: For know, thou art no Son of mortal man, Though men esteem thee low of Parentage, Thy Father is the Eternal King, who rules All Heaven and Earth, Angels and Sons of men, A messenger from God fore-told thy birth Conceiv’d in me a Virgin, he fore-told Thou shouldst be great and sit on David’s Throne, And of thy Kingdom there should be no end. (1.234–41)

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Mary’s oral text prompts Jesus to search the written texts for further understanding: This having heard, strait I again revolv’d The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am. (1.259–63)

The voice from heaven the Son hears at his baptism confirms his mother’s previous testimony and also serves as a prompt to begin his messianic task. Importantly, it is not new revelation: But as I rose out of the laving stream, Heaven open’d her eternal doors, from whence The Spirit descended on me like a Dove, And last the sum of all, my Father’s voice, Audibly heard from Heav’n, pronounc’d me his, Me his beloved Son, in whom alone He was well pleas’d; by which I knew the time Now full, that I no more should live obscure, But openly begin, as best becomes The Authority which I deriv’d from Heaven. (1.280–89)

In fulfilling her role as the mother of Jesus, Mary gives him the knowledge he needs to understand himself and his mission. But Mary has done more than simply give Jesus information he needs to consider in his solitary contemplations. While Jesus receives his divine nature from his heavenly Father, he also shares his earthly mother’s humanity and personal character—an indication of how her mothering and companionship has nurtured and shaped him over the many years they have lived together, preparing him for his extended period of bounded solitude in the wilderness. In his discussion of Milton’s theanthropos, John Rumrich argues that Mary has “been the medium for much of Jesus’ selfconsciousness.”25 Rumrich finds support for this conclusion in two ways. First, the “seamless fit” in Jesus’s opening soliloquy of Mary’s remarks about Jesus’s paternity and mission—his “most consequential meditations indicates that she has intimately influenced his developing sense of identity.” Rumrich therefore argues that Mary is “evidently the single most influential person in his psyche.”26 It is also significant, I would add, that while Milton’s Jesus has clearly conversed much with his mother, the text does not indicate he has had conversation with his Father. As a second

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source of support for his argument about Mary’s significance, Rumrich identifies a similar character trait shared by mother and son marked in a “pivotal narrative transition”27 in book 2: Thus Mary pondering oft, and oft to mind Recalling what remarkably had pass’d Since first her Salutation heard, with thoughts Meekly compos’d awaited the fulfilling: The while her Son tracing the Desert wild, Sole but with holiest Meditations fed, Into himself descended, and at once All his great work to come before him set: How to begin, how to accomplish best His end of being on Earth, and mission high. (105–14)

For Rumrich, this “meditative echo” between mother and son indicates that “[t]he holy thoughts that nourish him, the self into which he descends, and his conviction regarding his ‘mission high’ are largely a maternal inheritance.”28 In other words, this Son whom David Loewenstein calls a “deeply introspective Jesus,”29 derives his introspective nature and sense of purpose and mission from his mother. Hence, Rumrich presses the importance of Jesus being as much the son of his mother as of his heavenly Father—theanthropos. It is very much worth considering a complementary question to one which Rumrich finds common in early modern curiosity about the implications of the Christ child’s divine paternity: “did Mary’s baby look like his Father?”30 Whose character and behavior does the Son share? Arguably, the Son is as much Mary’s as God’s. Like Mary—“this is my favour’d lot, / My Exaltation to Afflictions high; / Afflicted I may be, it seems, and blest; / I will not argue that, nor will repine” (2.91–94)—Jesus will accept his God-ordained destiny to suffer without argument: What if he hath decreed that I shall first Be try’d in humble state, and things adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence, Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting Without distrust or doubt, that he may know What I can suffer, how obey? (3.188–94)

The patience Jesus exemplifies here may be considered as yet another inheritance from his mother, as she illustrates this great virtue in the close

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of her own meditation: “But I to wait with patience am inur’d” (2.102). Further, as John Shawcross has pointed out, Milton further connects Jesus and Mary by identifying their common “meekness.”31 The temperament Mary imparts to her son includes the inclination to retreat to solitude in order to contemplate and determine one’s life purpose. Through Mary, Milton suggests that women can also desire moments of bounded solitude: it stands as a human need shared by both sexes.32 As with his relationship with his mother, the Son’s solitude is also bounded by his relation to the human community he has selected to share in his messianic work. Milton takes care to remind us that Jesus does not pursue his salvific mission and the establishment of his kingdom alone. While he does triumph over Satan’s temptations alone, the Son needs a community in order to fulfill his Father’s will that he redeem humanity. The paradise the Son regains by vanquishing temptation is only one step in that journey.33 When the Son hears his Father’s voice at the baptism, he knows the time has come, “that I no more should live obscure, / But openly begin, as best becomes / The Authority which I deriv’d from Heaven” (1.287–89). The Son recognizes that solitude is not his destiny, and Milton reminds us in the opening of book 2 that the Son will spend much of his time in companionship with his disciples, “Plain Fishermen” (27) who lament the temporary disappearance of the Son before affirming their patience and faith in God’s providence (they also serve by standing and waiting). Like Mary, the disciples have patience, hope, and deep trust in God’s providence to unite them in a community of faith with the Son: But let us wait; thus far he hath perform’d, Sent his Anointed, and to us reveal’d him, By his great Prophet, pointed at and shown, In publick, and with him we have convers’d; Let us be glad of this, and all our fears Lay on his Providence; he will not fail Nor will withdraw him now, nor will recall, Mock us with his blest sight, then snatch him hence, Soon we shall see our hope, our joy return. (2.49–57)

Readers familiar with the Gospel texts, as Milton’s original readers certainly were, remember that at this point, although Jesus inclines toward beneficial, self-sustaining solitude, he often chooses human society, which the Gospel texts clearly identify as a mixed society.34 By including the disciples in his own poetic narrative, Milton reminds us that, subsequent to the Son’s stay in the wilderness and his temptation by Satan, in his human relations, the Son’s behavior acknowledges the truth spoken by the God of Genesis 2:18: it is not good for a human to

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be alone. But that aloneness does not equate with the solitude the Son embraces in Paradise Regained. To be alone is not the same as Adam, the sole human, being lonely. At the moment in his life where Milton places him in the narrative, the Son has much to resolve and consider, “such thoughts / . . . as well might recommend / Such Solitude before choicest Society” (1.299–302). As such, the solitude Milton presents in his brief epic simply does not address what Luxon has identified as “the constitutive loneliness by which Adam chiefly distinguished himself from God.”35 The Son simply never experiences that kind of unbounded solitude. Instead, he has been much enmeshed in human relationships from the moment of his birth until the moment he enters the desert, and after he leaves the desert, he will continue in those relationships until he experiences the deep solitude of the cross. The Son’s very human solitude is fi nally marked by the way Milton chooses to close Paradise Regained: “hee unobserv’d / Home to his Mothers house private return’d” (4.638–39). In his textual note on this line, Roy Flannagan remarks that Milton presents the Son “returning home to his mother, reiterating the importance of his humanity and his relationship with his human family as well as with his Father.”36 As Hugh MacCallum observes, this not only reminds us of the Son’s humanity, this also “suggests a return to the circle of human affections.”37 Reflecting on the experience the narrative has presented to readers, Richard DuRocher imagines a “quiet reunion” between a mother who has demonstrated “an emotional equipoise matching that of her son” (and has surely been “emotionally tried” during the time of that son’s long absence) and a son who returns from what has clearly been a stressful, “harrowing experience.”38 When he returns home to his mother, the Son’s bounded and beneficial solitude comes to a close, and he rejoins his human community fully prepared to begin his redemptive mission.39 While the text of Milton’s poem ends here, the volume in which it appeared does not. I believe the Son’s solitude has ramifications for the protagonist of the dramatic text that borders or bounds the brief epic that the Son inhabits. As many Milton scholars have argued, including Joseph Wittreich, John Shawcross, and Stephen Dobranski, we do well to read the Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in relation to each other, as Milton offers them to readers as a single bound text.40 While Milton’s Samson shares with Paradise Regained’s Son the solitariness of being “elect above the rest” (Paradise Lost 3.184), Samson’s experience of solitude is quite different and instructive. Like the Son, Samson soliloquizes in solitude before he encounters those antagonists who will give him the opportunity to work his way toward and into wisdom through dialogic argument. However, the bounded solitude in which we find Samson at

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the beginning of the poem proves neither voluntary nor instructive; Samson’s spirit grinds in despair even as he grinds at the mill. However one reads Samson’s final act in the Temple of Dagon, it might be agreed that the Samson we meet at the beginning of Milton’s poem has in no way displayed the capacity or inclination for solitude that the Son shares with other elect figures like Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist. His failure to seek the benefits of bounded solitude has been a major shortcoming on Samson’s part and partly marks his failure as God’s deliverer before the action of the dramatic poem even begins. It may be precisely because Samson previously viewed and understood himself as autonomous from both his community and his God that he has made the crucial mistakes that leave him “eyeless in Gaza” (41), “a moving Grave” (102) who labors now at the Philistine mill. The Son’s use of a bounded and beneficial solitude to prepare himself, both for discerning the exact nature and purpose of his mission as God’s Messiah and in resisting the temptation to establish God’s kingdom by following any path other than the path of suffering and crucifi xion,41 contrasts strikingly with Samson. That is, the text exposes the absence of any evidence that Samson has ever availed himself of similarly productive and contemplative solitude. Milton’s implicit contrast between the two protagonists of these paired poems prompts us to ask “what if Samson had followed Moses and anticipated Elijah, taking the time to be alone and carefully think through precisely how he should fulfill his mission as Israel’s deliverer?” Perhaps he might have known something closer to the success of the Son who, rooted in the strength and wisdom he derives from the contemplative work enabled by his bounded solitude in the wilderness, manages in the fullness of his humanity to regain “lost Paradise” (4.608). The Son’s solitude in the wilderness proves crucial to the work he both performs and prepares for as he awaits God’s providence and encounters Satan’s persistent assaults on his patience and faith. Milton’s readers cannot be expected to imitate the Son’s particular deeds in this poem, like standing on the Temple pinnacle, but they can imitate the Son’s faith and obedience, his patience and heroic fortitude, and they may come to this through the discipline of bounded solitude. Solitude may provide the deep silence that is the ground of illumination,42 as Elijah was illuminated by the “still, small voice” of God in the silence that followed the turmoil of wind, earthquake, and fire he encountered at the end of his own forty-day period of fasting and solitude (1 Kings 19:12). Like Elijah, the Son has utilized his bounded solitude to achieve a sufficient understanding of what God requires of him as the Messiah. But the benefit of solitude’s illumination—particularly the self-knowledge and self-control it fosters—serves every human:

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Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King; Which every wise and virtuous man attains. (2.466–68) Solitude is indeed the ground on which any human—including God’s Messiah—can cultivate “a paradise within thee, happier farr” (PL 12.587).43

NOTES I am grateful to colleagues whose critical but generous and encouraging responses made this essay possible: Rich DuRocher, Mimi Fenton, Louis Schwartz, and especially Rebecca Buckham, whose companionship best addresses my own solitude. 1. N. H. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42, ed. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 88. 2. Thomas H. Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 181–192. 3. All quotations of Milton’s poetry are taken from The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and are cited parenthetically in the text. 4. Luxon, Single Imperfection, 186. 5. Ibid., 188–89. 6. Ibid., 192. 7. Luxon also commits the fallacy of the non sequitur when he assumes the Son’s unique status and mission renders his solitude unique (192); as I will show, the Son shares his extended solitude with the prophets Moses and Elijah. 8. Irene Samuel, “The Regaining of Paradise,” in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 111–34. The work that Milton attributes to the Son in his temptation is not accomplished by his divinity but by his humanity: this includes the “work” of solitude. 9. William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 584. 10. Abraham Cowley, “Of Solitude,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 78. 11. Ibid., 79. 12. Ibid. 13. All quotations from Milton’s English prose are taken from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1953–83), hereafter cited as YP. 14. Regina M. Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42, ed. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 30. 15. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises,” 103, notes that seventeenth-century commentaries on the temptation narrative generally identified the desert as the same place where Moses and Elijah endured their own trials. 16. John D. Barbour, The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 38, 39. 17. Ibid., 7.

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18. Ibid., 38. 19. The Son’s identifying this as “some strong motion” provides a subtle marker of his humanity and humility; he does not presume to identify this motion as “the Spirit”—that comes to us from the narrator. Mary Fenton argues that “the bordering Desert wild” (1.193) becomes the place where Jesus cultivates a new Eden, displaying his rootedness in the land. Grafting her insight, I suggest that the Son’s bounded solitude mirrors this bounded place: as the Son cultivates a new Eden in the desert, so he cultivates his messianic character and purpose in his solitude; as the Son is rooted in the land, so his solitude allows him to become fully rooted in doing the will of God. “The purpose of the wilderness as a dwelling place ‘fittest’ for a spiritual sojourner” marks it as a place fit for the work of bounded solitude. Mary C. Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 173. 20. Irene Samuel, “The Regaining of Paradise,” and Regina Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” both argue convincingly that the Son has no questions about his identity. He knows he is the Messiah, but he does not yet know precisely how to fulfill his messianic task—except to utterly obey the will of his Father. It is that will which he seeks to discern in his solitude. See also Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “Of Paradise Regained: The Interpretation of Career,” Milton Studies 24, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 253–75. 21. Mary Beth Long, “Contextualizing Eve’s and Milton’s Solitudes in Book 9 of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 37 (2003): 102. My essay might be considered as one which takes up Long’s invitation “to begin filling in the many gaps in the scholarship in this area [of Milton and solitude],” to begin “map[ping] out the whole range of Miltonic solitudes” (112). I also find it interesting that the Son’s solitude most clearly correlates to Eve’s solitude (Long’s paradigm for “beneficial” solitude)—especially to that moment of solitude that Long overlooks: when Eve leaves Adam and Raphael in conversation to attend to her flowers and garden. Like the Son, Eve appears to be an introvert on the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator scale (Adam is clearly an extrovert), and she prefers one-on-one conversation with her most intimate other. 22. Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope, 176. 23. Ibid. 24. Joan Malory Webber, “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 14, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 19. 25. John Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos: The Body of Christ in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42, ed. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 62. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 255. Loewenstein identifies the Son’s solitude and interiority with Quaker responses to the Restoration, offering a political and historical context for what I identify as the Son’s “bounded” solitude. 30. Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos,” 59. 31. John T. Shawcross, Paradise Regain’d: Worthy T’have Not Remain’d So Long Unsung (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 63. 32. This renders Thomas Luxon’s claim that the Son’s solitude denotes a “real manliness” that “is not human” tenuous at best. See Luxon, Single Imperfection, 192.

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33. In vanquishing temptation, the Son shows the way to “internal” regeneration, or sanctification; “external” regeneration, or justification, will be provided through the crucifixion and resurrection. See Hugh McCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 58. 34. There are numerous instances of Jesus living in community with others in the Gospel texts, beyond the obvious community of his twelve disciples, but I would highlight three in particular. First, the obviously close relationship between Jesus and the family of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary of Bethany, especially as we see in John 11, where Jesus responds to the death of Lazarus with grief and compassion. Second, the arrival of Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome to the grave of Jesus on the first day of the week to anoint him with spices; their interaction with the disciples after they discover the disappearance of Jesus’s body from the tomb clearly marks their participation in the small community that gathered around Jesus. Finally, and perhaps most intriguing in relation to Milton’s poem, the incident in Mark 3.31–35 when Jesus’s family arrives at a place where Jesus is speaking to a full house and inquires after him. When Jesus is told of their asking for him, he replies, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then looking to his listeners, who surround him, Jesus says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (New Revised Standard Version). In other words, anyone who joins Jesus in doing the will of God is family as far as he’s concerned. This suggests that the “Mother” of Jesus extends beyond Mary, and if Milton has such a text in mind at the end of his poem, Jesus’ return to his mother’s house suggests a larger community than just Mary. This reading would lend complementary support to Gary Hamilton, “Paradise Regained and the Private Houses,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 239–48. 35. Luxon, Single Imperfection, 188. Contrary to Luxon’s thesis, the Son’s bounded solitude in Paradise Regained tells us very little about Milton’s understanding of marriage and friendship. It is not about recovering what is “manly,” but recovering what is human. The Son’s solitude is a very human solitude that enables him to achieve a human victory (by wisdom and obedience) over the temptation to distrust God and presume an autonomy he does not have. 36. Flannagan, The Riverside Milton, 782, italics added. 37. McCallum, Milton and the Sons of God, 228. 38. Richard DuRocher, “‘Neither disheartened nor dismay’d’: The Patient Son in Paradise Regained,” in Passionate Milton (unpublished manuscript). 39. John Shawcross, Worthy T’have Not Remain’d So Long Unsung, views this as a “period of transition as he leaves his parochial obscurity to begin a public life” (81), a “rite of passage . . . necessary to life, to growing up” (83). I find this compatible with my reading of the Son’s solitude. 40. See, for instance, Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr., “‘Strange Text!’ Paradise Regain’d . . . to Which Is Added Samson Agonistes,” in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 164–94, and John T. Shawcross, “The Genres of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes: The Wisdom of Their Joint Publication,” Milton Studies 17, ed. Richard S. Ide and Joseph Wittreich (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 225–48. More recently, Stephen B. Dobranski, “Text and Context for Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes,” in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes, ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 30–53. 41. John Coffey, “Pacificist, Quietist, or Patient Milton? John Milton and the Restoration,” Milton Studies 42, ed. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein (Pittsburgh:

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University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 163. See also Peggy Samuels, “Labor in the Chambers: Paradise Regained and the Discourse of Quiet,” Milton Studies 36, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 153–76, whose succinct description of the Son’s articulation of his embeddedness in both public and communal life as he performs his “quiet labor” in the solitude of the desert resonates with my own perception of the Son’s bounded and beneficial solitude. 42. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 340, identifies “an implied equation between illumination and science.”

Restoration Polemic and the Making of the Papist Milton NATHANIEL STOGDILL

M ILTON HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF England’s most fervent spokespersons for anti-Catholic and antimonarchical sentiments. He represented these antipathies early and throughout his career, and they are widely reiterated in critical studies of the literature, history, politics, and religion of the seventeenth century. Most modern scholars accept these positions as fundamental to understanding the body of Milton’s literary and political works, and in doing so assume Milton’s contemporaries did as well. Yet, even as Milton issued some of his most earnest pleas against the tyranny of both kingship and Rome, accusations that he was a Catholic sympathizer began to appear in polemical tracts. These charges emerged with new vigor and purchase following the Popish Plot, as Milton’s associations with the political and religious turmoil of the previous decades aligned him with what seemed to some a crypto-Catholic threat to an uncertain succession and a fragile social order. Milton and the papacy were convenient bugbears for those looking to blame social unrest on nonconformity. Polemicists fused these two figures amid the shifting debates of the Restoration, finding the papist Milton to be an especially effective and flexible metaphor for the dangers of dissent.1 This unlikely polemical tradition that aligned Milton with the papacy cannot be accounted for completely in terms of the doctrines and casuistry of antipopery. Anthony Milton’s careful study of the tense intersections of the Reformed and Roman Churches in Stuart England illustrates that the parameters of antipapal discourse and rhetoric were closely tied to debates over the character, obligations, and loyalties of an English subject. The terms of antipopery shifted as they were redeployed as epithets in various debates about the English subject’s responsibilities to his conscience, king, God, state church, and to the international Protestant cause.2 The discourse was just as unstable within these categories as it was between them. Henrician apologists developed a rhetoric of antipopery to justify the autonomous civil authority of the English monarchy, and Elizabethan propagandists elaborated England’s anti-Catholic legacy as an important characteristic of national identity. Antipopery rhetoric was turned against the monarchy when the Jacobean and Caroline courts seemed to be 177

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cultivating Catholic sympathies, and the crown found itself a victim of the very propaganda it had produced two generations earlier. The discourses of “popery” and “antipopery,” in other words, had a variety of unpredictable valences, most of which had no religious implications. What should therefore not surprise is that when Restoration polemicists leveled their charges against Milton their criteria for popery were as inconsistent as their attacks were vitriolic: each new accusation elaborated and qualified its predecessor, pointing to an increased willingness to experiment with the limitations of inherited social categories. This reiteration and reconstitution of a papist Milton signals an anxiety over the apparently irreconcilable social categories represented by Milton and the papacy. They no longer seemed to mark stable and distinct identities.3 Milton issued the charge of popery with characteristic boldness in his own poetic and polemical writings, exploiting the flexibility of the epithet to accommodate the different claims of sedition he leveled against his opponents. He indeed staged popery in all of its valences throughout his literary and political career, its meanings shifting as his arguments shifted to decry various cultural manifestations of tyranny and idolatry. For example, the sycophantic and opportunistic episcopacy in The Reason of Church Government renews Henrician anxieties about Rome’s surreptitious undermining of royal power: the central image of the tract’s conclusion features the prelacy, armed with shears, threatening to trim away the power of a sleeping, regal Samson.4 In Areopagitica, Rome stands as an image of an intellectual tyranny that threatens the freedom of inquiring minds: Milton grants freedom of expression for even fractious dissenters, excepting only Catholics who are disqualified as slavish adherents to a Rome that “extirpats all religions and civill supremacies.”5 In response to the enhanced and apparently uncompromising royal authority of Personal Rule and the Romish elements of Laudian ceremony, Milton combined antimonarchical and anti-Catholic rhetoric. He thus established a trope to which he returned throughout his career as he produced propaganda for the Protectorate and wrote against the restored monarchy: in Defensio pro populo Anglicano, he answers the arguments of Salmasius by dismissing the persistent royalist apologist as a papist, and he renders Satan as an unmistakably popish monarch. Milton’s antipapist sentiment was obvious to his contemporaries as he continually reconstituted and reiterated “popery” to signal new varieties of sedition in different arguments and arenas. In the examples given above, for instance, Milton alleges popery to decry a prelatical threat to the established monarchy, an unquestioning obedience to a dogmatic authority, the fervent defense of the recently displaced monarchy, and the inherent tyranny of kingship. He blasted his opponents with charges of popery so frequently, in fact, that his name itself developed into an

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epithet for all iconoclastic Puritan dissenters. In the 1670s, champions of Uniformity seized on this metonymic Milton, using it as a polemical tool for denouncing their nonconformist opponents. Sharon Achinstein provides a useful example as she remarks on how Milton’s reputation was used to enhance the perceived radicalism of Marvell: according to The Transproser Rehears’d, “there are many Miltons in this one Man” and he was a “Martin-Mar-Prelate, a Milton”; likewise, Samuel Parker warns in A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpos’d, “your Collection will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as any we meet with in the writings of J. M. in defence of the Rebellion and the Murther of the King.”6 This conversion of Milton’s visible attacks into an epithet for nonconformist sedition indicates a willingness on the part of Restoration minds to think of social movements metonymically. Polemicists were able to condense and simplify the complexities of groups and doctrines into a representative personality. Milton’s affiliations with social institutions and discourses eclipsed his biographical and historical person. As a metonymic figure, he was regarded as part of the social fabric’s mythology rather than as an historical figure moving through it. This figurative Milton stood in for social forces, both embodying and expressing the institutions and discourses with which he was associated. Milton’s name overwrote the shorthand of institutional categorization and became the categorizing means to express the institutions he defined. As such, he became a social form in the Restoration mind that served as a substitute for the particular institutions and discourses he represented. Considered as a social form, Milton as metonymy was open to late seventeenth-century reform as a kind of institution himself. Through the very rigor and visibility of his attacks on Rome, Milton inadvertently became a force and figure of the institutional tyranny he decried. Notably, the first printed accusation pointing to Milton as a papist appeared when disenchantment with the social forms and reforms Milton championed had intensified. On the eve of the Restoration, The Character of the Rump (1660), a relatively short but potently vitriolic and sometimes scatological tract, suggested that Milton and other supporters of the commonwealth were in league with the pope. The tract likens the Rump Parliament to “the hinder part of the many-headed Beast, the Back-door of the Devils Arse a Peake” that owes “its first being to the Pope” and is perpetuated by republican supporters of the commonwealth. Further, Milton is cast as “their Goos-quill Champion, who had need of A Help meet to establish any thing, for he has a Ramshead, and is good only at Batteries, an old Heretick both in Religion and Manners, that by his will would shake off his Governours as he doth his Wives, foure in a Fourtnight.”7 The pamphleteer links the pope, the father of the commonwealth, “who that time made the Devil a Cuckold,” with Milton, “the parent that begot his

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late new Commonwealth.” In this way, the pamphlet returns to the Tudor polemic of patriotic antipapacy as an endorsement of English monarchy. With the Restoration at hand, the antimonarchical Milton was out of popular political opinion and became victim to some of the same anti-Catholic accusations he had leveled against royalist sympathizers. Repudiation of the Interregnum experiments, and their most visible champion, became state endorsed after the Protectorate dissolved. Despite his blindness and friendships with members of the newly restored government, Milton was considered a sufficiently dangerous social force for the restored government to imprison him. Giddy royalist propagandists, whom Milton in his bluster had hectored during the Interregnum, now deployed his own protean epithet against him. The Character of the Rump’s accusations of popery, however, are a function of Milton’s associations with sectarianism and the perceived fractiousness it created, not his adherence to Catholic doctrines. That is, the accusation of popery reflects his political activities, not his specific religious affiliation.8 Milton and his cohort are caricatured in the idiom of set-piece stereotypes used to blast religious and political sectarians: they are sodomites, divorcers, cuckolds, and heretics. The vision of interlocking and indistinguishable groups of dissenters—papists, puritans, parliamentarians, Commonwealthsmen—illustrates the view of many conformist apologists who grouped together all forms of dissent. This imprecise understanding of sectarianism allowed discrete groups to crosscontaminate each other in the minds and rhetoric of these single-minded propagandists and their sympathetic readership. Thus, association with one sect meant taking on others’ attributes, the variety depending on the propagandist leveling the accusations. Milton’s reputation as a nonconformist of many stripes implicated him as a papist as well; in this regard, Milton was simply a papist by association. But the link between sectarianism and the social threats Rome represented has a more substantial legacy than innuendo. In order to strengthen the Church of England in the face of burgeoning Catholic power on the Continent, Elizabethan and Jacobean casuists sought to consolidate the English Protestant community and to position it against Rome. The demand for Protestant unity superseded doctrinal rigidity and led pragmatically minded conformists to advocate for toleration of the more mild nonconformists. But reluctance and false starts blunted these attempts at accommodation, and half-hearted initiatives to force conformity ignited noisy debates from the puritan minority. Exasperated conformist apologists blamed English Protestant disunion on these unruly nonconformists, arguing that they diminished the potency of English Protestantism, making it more vulnerable to international and domestic Catholic threats. Thomas Nashe had issued this charge against the puritan rabble as he

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represented the state church amid the furor of the Marprelate controversy, and Dryden later reiterated the charge in “The Medal” and “Religio Laici.” This model worked better as propaganda than as a sound account of the politico-poetic landscape, requiring intellectual and evidentiary blurring when applied to real scenarios. Nonetheless, this link between nonconformists and papists persisted in the minds and polemics of conformist writers throughout the century. The nonconformist Milton, who so prominently argued with apologists for the Church of England from the early 1640s until the end of his career, served as an attractive and available target for propagandists looking to reassert the necessity of conformity in the wake of the Protectorate’s failed policies of religious toleration. To make its case for Milton’s collusion with Rome, The Character of the Rump foregrounds his status as a prolific polemicist as much as his association with the republican and puritan causes he advocated in his writings: “Goos-quill Champion” leads the list of sectarian stereotypes used to characterize him. Recent critical analyses of oath making and oath taking during the seventeenth century indicate that casuistical evasion of loyalty oaths, and the conformity they sought to enforce, were regarded as extensions of crypto-Catholic resistance. Perez Zagorin notes, for instance, that after the explosion of state loyalty oaths in the sixteenth century, English Catholics more readily, if unevenly, approved of certain forms of dissembling as acceptable tools to avoid the obligations of state oaths. When puritan and parliamentarian casuists began to adopt similar arguments to justify the loosening of obligations to the church and monarchy, polemicists for conformity responded that such arguments strengthened the English Catholic cause: if puritan dissembling was legal, so was Catholic dissembling.9 The slick arguments of nonconformist casuists came to be identified with the subversive doctrines they advocated. As David Martin Jones argues, casuistry relies on a subject that decides on its own and develops a “language of self-understanding” incompatible with the institutionalized loyalty that state oaths were supposed to ensure.10 At the Restoration, nonconformists were linked with prewar Catholics through their use of casuistry to justify their dissembling and noncompliance. Their flexible, sometimes contradictory arguments were offered as evidence that their consciences had been eroded by zeal.11 The heft and complexity of Milton’s polemical arguments thus gave his writing the flavor of subversive and Romish casuistry. It hardly mattered that Milton trumpeted antipapist sentiment if he continued to denounce and renounce like a papist. Though the turn of anti-Catholic rhetoric against the new political and religious dissidents—republican nonconformists—had purchase in early Restoration polemic, The Character of the Rump remained the only accusation of popery against Milton for nearly twenty years. The lack of any

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response to the charges presented in the pamphlet suggests that it was perceived as nothing more than a morsel of defamatory vitriol and that it got lost in the more substantial social commentary offered at the Restoration. Propagandists may also have been reluctant to turn anti-Catholic slurs against Milton while he was still living: even though he required a helpmeet, he still packed a powerful pen. Moreover, in the years immediately following the king’s restoration, the court seemed to be endorsing a politics of reconciliation rather than polarized extremism. For instance, in August 1660, Charles II proposed, and the Convention Parliament passed, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, restricting Restoration reprisals to those who had direct involvement in the regicide, effectively pardoning the general majority of republican dissenters. The king’s largess, however, was short lived, and as official treatments of dissent began to shift with the unstable social realities of Restoration culture, the specter of a papist Milton reemerged. The Clarendon Codes, and specifically the Act of Uniformity (1662), did a great deal to make the more extreme view of nonconformity official policy by indiscriminately excluding all dissident groups from the church. Radical puritans were lumped together with Catholic recusants in a single legal category. And this categorization was not simply a matter of legislative uniformity: as the mainstream within the church began to recognize Catholic sympathies within the royal family and at court, the old anxiety over a Catholic threat was renewed, and so was its accompanying anti-Catholic rhetoric. Many, including Dryden, renewed the argument that dissent and fractiousness weakened the church, making it more vulnerable to Catholic attacks. Dissenters were seen to be in league with Rome. Titus Oates’s fictional, but widely believed account of a Popish Plot whipped this anti-Catholic sentiment into a furor and escalated the Exclusion Crisis. When Oates published A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot (1679), a piece of propaganda released to legitimize his claims, he named Milton as a papist. In this climax of national anti-Catholic sentiment, and with Milton dead and unable to rebut, the charges against him came with renewed vigor. Oates constructs his accusations against Milton using the same rhetoric as The Character of the Rump: the characteristics of his popery are based on his associations with sectarians and his bold polemics, which Oates claimed had interrupted efforts at Protestant unity. Oates prominently emphasizes Milton’s affiliation with regicides, a particularly potent and flexible charge during the Exclusion Crisis and a nearly inexhaustible theme for propagandists attempting to validate claims of sedition. In his dedicatory epistle to Charles II, who reportedly laughed at his initial charges, Oates urges the emergency of the papist threat by recalling the regicide, and Milton’s role in it:

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The Popish Lord is not forgotten, or unknown, who brought a Petition to the late Regicides and Usurpers, signed by Five hundred principal Papists in England; wherein was promised upon condition of a Toleration of the Popish Religion here by a Law, their joint resolution to abjure and exclude the Family of the Stuarts for ever, from their undoubted right to the Crown. Who more disheartened the Loyalty and patience of your best Subjects, than their confident Scriblers White and others? And Milton was a known frequenter of a Popish Club. Who more forward to set up Cromwell, and to put the Crown of our Kings upon his head, than they?12

In the following year, at least three other polemical tracts reference directly or quote Oates’s characterization from A True Narrative, one of which was subsequently translated into French. This widespread reiteration of Oates’s unfounded and poorly justified accusation validated it, and polemicists began to speak of Milton as a renowned papist. The perceived emergency of the Catholic threat and the versatility of the charge of popery distanced Milton’s posthumous reputation from the biographical and doctrinal realities of his life. Effectively dislodged from the biographical man, Milton’s reputation became increasingly subject to the exigencies of the ideological battles of the Restoration. This increased enthusiasm for charges against Milton signals a new willingness to reconceptualize Milton as a controversial figure in the context of shifting historical contingencies, but it also suggests a shift in how the Catholic threat was conceived and constructed during the Exclusion Crisis. New representations of the papist Milton, insofar as he was an emblem for Catholic sedition, can help trace modifications in the popular understanding of the Catholic threat. One of the primary anxieties driving Oates’s fiction is that the Catholic threat can be undetectable. Dissembling, after all, was integral to English Catholicism. In the libelous arena of Restoration polemic, the lack of clear evidence for Catholic sympathies on the part of someone accused of them not only failed as an exculpatory measure, it provided proof that he or she was particularly adept at the Catholic practice of deception. Oates mentions Milton as a Catholic conspirator, a “known frequenter of a Popish club,” who participated in a pact between Rome and the late regicides to displace the Stuart line and reinstitute English Catholicism. By suggesting that the real threat came from the scheming of crypto-Catholics, Oates’s narrative recalls the nearcataclysm of the Gunpowder Plot and the very real hazards posed by a subterranean Catholicism. Robert Hancock’s Loyalty of Popish Principles Examined (1682), a spin-off from Oates’s True Narrative, enhances Oates’s accusations, explaining that Milton’s heterodox and heretical opinions would have been less curious if he had professed his popery: “If Milton (the great Oracle of one of the Factions) had owned himself to be Papist, there had been no reason to wonder at the Impiety of his Doctrines, which

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he either did, or might have learned from the Popes and greatest Divines of the Roman Church.”13 Hancock thus turns the antipapist argument on its head: he begins with the assertion that, doctrinally, Milton was a papist, but his equivocation renders him an ambiguous crypto-Catholic whose advertised Protestantism sits uncomfortably with his certain impiety. A characterizing function of Miltonic popery is to deny itself. For Hancock, the “wonder” that this denial provokes represents a deliberate strategy to create uncertainty about Rome’s antimonarchical agenda by deflecting blame onto Protestant reformers: “[He], with his usual confidence, acquits the Popes, and charges his Antimonarchical principles on Luther, Zwinglius, Calvin, Bucer, Martyr, Pareut, and all the Reformed Divines.”14 As such, Milton fits the paradigm of the secret Catholic who, in disguising his anti-Protestantism, implements a broader antiestablishmentarian agenda to discredit and dismantle the English monarchy and the state church. Oates’s and Hancock’s accounts foreground another strand of latecentury popery applied to Milton: obscurity. Because dissembling was so closely linked with Catholic casuistry, any perceived ambiguity or obscurity in a text could seem to some the markers of its author’s Catholicism. We cannot forget that there is much in Milton that may have puzzled his contemporaries. Jason Rosenblatt reminds us that the discontinuities between volume 1 and volume 2 of the Yale edition of Milton’s prose take most readers off-guard.15 A Restoration readership decades removed from the historical contingencies in which Milton wrote some of his most definitive polemic would have encountered the same struggles tracing doctrinal consistency across his work. In addition to his exasperating erudition, the positions Milton asserts with authoritative boldness in his poetry and polemics are open to later qualifications and contradictions, which he asserts with the same characteristic boldness. That is, as he worked through his notions of state power, religious liberty, ecclesiology, and soteriology, he took up contradictory positions and left little room for his previous assertions: for example, the concern he expresses for his regal Samson at the end of The Reason of Church Government sits uncomfortably next to the Nimrod episode of Paradise Lost. The Character of the Rump ignores historical and biographical explanations for this sort of contradiction in order to paint Milton as a capricious contrarian: “he is so much an enemy to usual practices, that I believe when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a Cart, he will petition to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a Wheel-barrow[.]”16 Apparent inconsistencies rendered the doctrinal Milton a powerful but ambiguous force that unsettled royalists, parliamentarians, papists, conformists, and sectarians alike. Milton’s social and intellectual indecipherability forced his contemporaries to contend that he operated according to a protected and uncontrollable set of motivations that refused to be translated into public discourse where it

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could be monitored. This uncomfortable sense of Milton indeed lined up neatly with the characteristically Catholic mental reservation that the state attempted to control with such legislation as the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, which required that oaths of conformity be sworn without equivocation and with words taken in their “usual meaning.”17 Milton’s indecipherability pointed to more than just popish equivocation; it also characterized in general the variegated Catholic identity that some polemicists constructed for him, and it helps to explain why attempts to cast Milton as a Catholic took place even as he was being decried for his extremism as a puritan dissenter. His puritan distaste for Romish invention, tyranny, and idolatry seemed to confirm the very principles he himself attacked. In a work designed to account for the monarchy’s triumph over nonconformists, and dedicated to James II, John Northleigh comfortably groups Milton with puritan dissenters, calling him one of “those Epidemick and most damnable Quacks of the Kingdom.”18 These aggressive proclamations of Milton’s puritanism did not curb representations that identified him as Catholic. Rather, with a wink at their readership, propagandists exaggerated the context of his puritanism in order to enhance their papist portrait. The appearance of Defensio pro populo Anglicano among the list of works by prominent puritan authors ordered to be burned in Oxford in July 1683 for being “false, seditious, and impious . . . Heretical and Blasphemous, infamous to Christian Religion, and destructive of all Government, both in Church and State” prompted accusations of popery.19 Edward Pettit found in this declaration material to include in his Visions of Government, a fictionalized exposé of “The Antimonarchical Principles and Practices of all Fanatical Commonwealths-men, and Jesuitical Politicians.” In a Dantean tour of the Restoration’s political and religious landscape, Pettit relates an allegorical version of the book burning at Oxford, wherein he groups the mainly Protestant authors together with an anonymous crowd of Jesuits: “At our first entrance, how wonderfully was I surpriz’d to see Hobbs and Baxter, Knox and Buchanan, Hunt and Gilby, Milton and the Jesuits, sitting all together like friends, but in a very disconsolate posture!” 20 In this vision, Milton and his Catholic acquaintances are “Fanatical Wizards, who are in pain, whilst their charms of Rebellion are burning.” As the narrator learns this, an anonymous “Physician” throws open the door to a courtyard, wherein the narrator and his guide, Seignior Christiano, witness a “great Fire” of burning books. The remainder of the episode is spent interviewing these figures after they have been administered a cordial of “Impudence, Contradiction, and Obstinacy” that causes them to make conciliatory apologias for their previous religious and political dissent.21 The tract clearly offers an allegorical lampoon of the ideological back pedaling of certain disenfranchised dissidents. Even as Milton’s reputation as an antipapist was circulated and

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disputed, polemicists asserted his intimacy with Rome, easily grouping him with insurrectionary Jesuits in a single sociopolitical allegory. Pettit’s Visions of Government represents another variation on the link between puritan sectarians and crypto-Catholics unified in their shared nonconformity, but his account is unique in its own fictive awareness: it is as much vision as it is polemic. Pettit forms his narrative around historical facts—such as the 1683 Oxford book burning—but he employs a sensational fictional framework that elaborates upon these facts. Historical and biographical realities are useful to Pettit insofar as they can be converted into more flexible fictional forms and distorted to serve his propagandistic argument. The ease with which Pettit stages Milton in his ostensible fiction foregrounds the very fictiveness of the previous claims for Milton’s popery. None of the polemicists mentioned above is making the simple and absurd argument that Milton was an actual practicing Catholic. In fact, a great deal of contemporary polemic emphasized Milton’s antipopery, including Marvell’s infamous An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, which appeared just two years before Oates’s True Narrative had reignited the popish accusations against Milton.22 Rather, their arguments rely on social tropes for Catholicism: religious and political nonconformity, threats to Protestant unity, polemical casuistry, menacing indecipherability, and hypocritical puritan zealotry. In order to make these arguments, they had to distort the literal meaning of Catholicism—adherence to the doctrines of the Roman church—by invoking its alternative social meanings. In a culture that remembered and reiterated Milton’s strong anti-Catholic sentiment, the idea of “popery” had to take on the flexibility allowed by figurative associations in order to be used as an effective epithet. Within the fictional framework of propaganda, where the charges against Milton were less accountable to standards of proof and falsifiability, the figurative meanings of “popery” could work alongside the literal meanings, blurring the distinctions between “Catholic-like” and “Catholic.” To construct authority for their claims, polemicists resorted to a strategy of literariness to prevent their audiences from taking their claims literally. Nonetheless, in the face of this fundamental fictionality, these renderings of Milton as a papist became more than fodder for partisan polemicists and began to carry the weight of “true account” that their authors promised in their prefatory material. Although the fictional foundations of Milton’s Catholic reputation were essential to the success of the libel, a reference to that reputation does appear—if only briefly and amid stronger and more popular opinion—outside of the contentious and overwrought public sphere of propaganda. In a diary entry dated 1698, Zachary Merrill mentions several of Milton’s widely known professional and literary achievements, and that he died a papist: “Milton a good Grammarian a

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schoolmr, he practis’d the Doct Divorce upon his own wife, at last taken to be under Secretary to Oliver, vindicated the Cutting of th Head agt Salmasius, for wch never call’d to Account, but He had a brother that was a Papist, and he (‘twas that) dyed one.” 23 Even if this entry does not reflect a widespread contemporary belief that Milton was a practicing papist, it does signal that Milton’s reputation as a papist existed outside the vexed arena of polemical exchange. While the polemics that influenced Merrill might have been constructed out of political exigencies that accelerated after Milton’s death and peaked during the Exclusion Crisis, there is no political payoff when Merrill reiterates their charges in his diary. His account relies on its own form of authorization independent of public opinion. Merrill values the fictionalized Milton constructed in Restoration polemic as well as the biographical Milton grounded in the facts of his public career. This portrait folds Milton’s figurative Catholicism back into his private biography, creating a hybridized figure that Merrill accepts as historically valid. Attention to the Restoration’s political environment, and to popery’s alternative meanings and implications during the period, help the polemical tracts make sense to a modern audience, but claims of Milton’s popery outside of a public, political context are more problematic. How did the tenuous claims of polemical rhetoric get transformed into a biographical fact readily and casually accepted by Milton’s near-contemporaries? One explanation is, of course, that Merrill’s entry is singular, and it represents a unique gullibility on Merrill’s part, rather than a larger social phenomenon. This, however, seems unlikely: what little evidence we have suggests that Merrill had the background of someone fully able to recognize, understand, and approve of Milton’s nonconformity.24 Perhaps, on the other hand, it was the very fictive nature of this particular brand of propaganda, rather than its believability, that made it seem like a fact. Any actual attempt to authenticate Milton’s Catholicism would have been extinguished by his popular legacy as a strident antipapist. Dismissed as fiction, however, these accounts could have operated independently of the supervision of official record or memory, allowing them to proliferate, expand, and insinuate themselves into public, and then private, understanding. If so, the fictive status of the attacks may have given them a viability that extended beyond simple believability. Through the repetition of their fictions, Milton’s opponents were able to create and nurture a defamatory biographical fact that would have been untenable just two decades earlier. Merrill’s entry may, finally, hint at the source of the phenomenon itself. Free from the polemical realm’s demands to fictionalize, Merrill’s entry stands as an observation, not an accusation. For Merrill, Milton’s popery was simply known, a biographical fact equivalent with his tenure as Latin

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Secretary. This assumption highlights exactly how tenuous and contrived some of these accusations of popery were, particularly the extrapolation that Milton’s anti-Catholic sentiment is evidence of his crypto-Catholic sympathies. We can acknowledge, and his contemporaries would have agreed, that crypto-anything is an unlikely category for Milton. He was included in Merrill’s diary because, even twenty-five years after his death, he could not be ignored. I would like to suggest that this prominence itself may have helped construct his Catholic legacy. The celebrity that prompted Merrill to include Milton in his diary also helped define the popery Merrill found notable. For Milton and his contemporaries, Rome’s restrictions on conscience characterized its tyranny. The immediate threat was not an impending invasion by a Catholic army; it was the intellectual servility imposed by forced adherence to papal doctrine. This characterization of Catholicism as a restriction on liberty was particularly durable, persisting in the face of contradictory historical realities: in spite of the loyalty of English Catholics to the monarchy during the Civil War, royalist and republicans alike sustained the link between Catholicism and arbitrary or absolutist rule throughout the Restoration.25 In this respect, to be a papist meant to be a formidable social figure who denied liberty of conscience. The terms of popery, in other words, are grounded in force of personality. Milton’s visibility as an agitating nonconformist and supporter of the regicide, coupled with his polemical hectoring, qualified him as a papist in this sense. Milton’s detractors emphasize his demanding indomitability in their characterizations of his Catholicism: he “is good only at Batteries,” is affiliated with a regicidal cabal of “confident Scriblers,” and in his capacity as a “great Oracle” he exonerates Rome “with his usual confidence,” only to choke on his own “Obstinancy” after the Restoration. For the loyalists that he targeted in his polemic, Milton was an unsuffering and insufferable spokesperson for parliamentary and puritan reform, whose confident pleas for toleration seemed themselves a tyranny. The prominence and forcefulness of his advocacy transformed Milton the celebrity apologist into a metonymic substitute for the reformist doctrines and disciplines he championed. His character alone channeled the multifarious dissent that had dogged loyalists for decades. By the time his opponents began to charge him as a papist, “Milton” had become a social form that signified a particular brand of institutional values and practices, rather than a social person who simply advocated for those values and practices. His name was fast accumulating the daunting meanings that the eighteenth century would eventually refer to as the “Miltonic.” As a social form, Milton was subject to the revisionary efforts of royalist polemicists seeking to deconstruct the forms and figures of the Protectorate and reclaim control over the imagery of national identity

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and political loyalty. Looking to exert control over the perceived rigidity of the republic, for example, royalist writers enthusiastically rewrote Cromwell’s iconographic masculine authority as feminine and tyrannical incontinence.26 Similar revisions of his “Goos-quill Champion” were inevitable. The Character of the Rump offers the richest example of this iconographic renovation of Milton, dismantling his social identity like the body of a Petrarchan mistress. In this characterization, Milton is reduced to a disjoined assemblage of stereotypes—cuckold, heretic, regicide, supporter, divorcer—and he is thereby disarmed. Fractured, he gets reduced to a cowardly champion fighting his battles with quills, impotently reliant on attendants in his blindness. By also leveling charges of popery against Milton, these Restoration polemicists were attempting to dissolve the foundation of Milton’s indomitable reputation as an unimpeachable puritan regicide. Each new accusation of popery redefined the terms of his sedition in ways that were based on Milton’s reputation but that also experimented with the flexibility of the epithet “papist” in order to discover weaknesses in his legacy. For these insistent polemicists, Milton’s popery is nonfalsifiable. As they have redefined it, popery both characterized and was a characteristic of the Miltonic. But in order for this unlikely marriage to hold, the two categories had to collapse into each other: Milton had to be redefined in order to be Catholic, and Catholicism redefined in turn. The two categories lost their essential meanings in order to take on more historically specific and potent social ones. By combining two oppositional social forms—Milton and Rome—Restoration polemicists demonstrated the fundamental inadequacies of both as stable forms of social categorization.

NOTES It is hard to imagine how this project could have been possible without John Shawcross’s invaluable bibliography or the kind and expert encouragement of Reid Barbour, Megan Matchinske, and Ruth Salvaggio. 1. This essay is part of a larger project in which I look to the institutional failures that followed the Civil War as a prompt for certain English subjects to rethink the fundamental relationships that determined social identity. These pages begin a section in which I consider polemical biographies as attempts to experiment with the real consequences of putting to use a flexible and fictionalized identity when coherent social representation was no longer necessary or expected. 2. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3. By alternating between the terms “papist,” “Catholic,” and “Romish,” and their various forms, I do not attempt to distinguish stable meanings in their muddled and inconsistent uses among Milton’s contemporaries beyond their usefulness at indicating a loose association with the perceived religious and political doctrines of the Catholic Church in England and abroad. I do make an effort to retain the terminology used by each author

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when discussing their claims, but beyond this loose adherence, I take as much liberty with these terms as the authors addressed in this essay. 4. John Milton, Reason of Church Government, vol. 2 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82). All references to Milton’s prose come from this edition, and hereafter will be cited as YP. 5. YP 2:565. 6. Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 156. 7. Character of the Rump (London, 1660), 2–3; A2. 8. Here and throughout, I dismiss as red herrings the possible biographical confusion with his Catholic-convert brother, Christopher, and the distortion of his time in Italy. The emphasis on Milton’s polemical writings and political career in each of the accounts indicates a broader context for these accusations that cannot by accounted for by these narrow, albeit convenient, explanations. 9. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 229. 10. David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 10. 11. Ibid., 175, 190. See also Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 12. Titus Oates, A true narrative of the horrid plot and conspiracy of the popish party (London, 1679), 2, 3. 13. Robert Hancock, The Loyalty of Popish Principles Examin’d (London, 1682), 32–33. 14. Ibid. 15. Jason Rosenblatt, “Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 126. 16. Character of the Rump, 3. 17. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 212. 18. John Northleigh, The Triumph of our monarchy, over plots and principles of our rebels and republicans, being remarks on their most excellent libels [etc.] (London, 1685), 9–10. 19. The characterization of books ordered to be burned at Oxford is drawn from James Wright, A Compendious View of the Late Tumults & Troubles in this Kingdom by Way of Annals for Seven Years (London: Edward Jones, 1685), 178. The list of authors whose works were ordered burned included Andrew Fletcher, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, and Thomas Hobbes. 20. Edward Pettit, Visions of Government (London, 1684), 148–9. 21. Pettit, Visions of Government, 149–50. 22. Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (Amsterdam, 1677). 23. Zachary Merrill, diary entry, 1698, Rawlinson MS D.1120, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.. 24. Merrill appears to have been the son-in-law and school usher to the ejected minister and schoolmaster, Samuel Odgen. 25. Jones, Conscience and Allegiance, 185. 26. Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 136.

Contributors

DAVID AINSWORTH, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama, is the author of Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (2008). His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as SEL, Modern Philology, and the Journal of British Studies. DAVID J. BRADSHAW, Professor of English and Classical Literature at Warren Wilson College, is coeditor with Suzanne Ozment of Voice of Toil: Nineteenth-Century British Writing about Work (1999). His essays on Early Modern and Classical Literature have appeared in such journals as Mid-Hudson Language Studies and in several collections. RICHARD J. DUROCHER was Professor of English at St. Olaf College and the author of Milton and Ovid (1985) and Milton among the Romans (2001). His articles on Milton, Marvel, Marlowe, Ovid, and Virgil have appeared in such journals as Milton Studies, Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, and Comparative Literature Studies. THOMAS FESTA, Assistant Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006). His articles on Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Augustine, and Dante have appeared in such journals as Studies in Philology, English Language Notes, Milton Studies, Shakespeare Yearbook, and The John Donne Journal. R ANDALL INGRAM is Professor of English and E. Craig Wall Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Davidson College. His essays on Milton and other Early Modern English poets have appeared in such journals as SEL, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Milton Studies. MAGGIE KILGOUR, Molson Professor of English Language and Literature McGill University, is the author of From Communion to Cannibalism: an Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (1990) and The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995). Her essays on Milton, Ovid, and nineteenth century fiction have appeared in such journals as Texas Studies in Literature and Language, European Romantic Review, Studies in Philology, ELR, and Milton Quarterly. 191

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SAMUEL SMITH is Professor of English at Messiah College. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Milton Studies, Kritikon Litterarum, and Christian Scholar’s Review. NATHANIEL STOGDILL is completing a PhD in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His dissertation is entitled, The Experiments of Defeat: Royalist Disillusionment and the Development of Flexible Social Identity in Post-Civil War England. SARAH VAN DER LAAN, Assistant Professor at Indiana University, is currently at work on What Virtue and Wisdom Can Do: Homer’s Odyssey in the Renaissance Imagination, a book-length study of the reception of the Odyssey in Renaissance Europe. Her article on Milton and Homer appears in Milton Studies. EMMA A NNETTE WILSON is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Western Ontario. Her essay, “The Art of Reasoning Well: Ramist Logic at Work in Paradise Lost,” recently appeared in The Review of English Studies.

Index

A Achinstein, Sharon, 148, 159 n. 3, 179, 190 n. 6 Adam, 14, 116, 19, 28, 36, 52–56, 68–70, 74–78, 81–85, 88–89, 92 nn. 11 and 12, 94, 102, 105–7, 161–62, 165–66, 171 Ælfric of Eynsham, 112 n. 14 Ainsworth, David, 18–19, 147–16 Ainsworth, Henry, 63 Allen, Don Cameron, 79 n. 14 Ames, William, 32, 44 n. 23, 145 n. 5 Aquinas, Thomas, 30, 57 n. 3, 104, 111 n. 1, 114 nn. 28 and 30 Ariosto, Ludovico, 74, 120 Aristotle, 30, 49, 53, 58 nn. 9 and 12, 93, 96, 100, 108, 110, 113 n. 21, 115 nn. 41 and 42 Arminianism, 16, 64, 66, 67, 71, 76, 77, 78 n. 3, 80 n. 24, 91 n. 9 Arminius, Jacobus, 64, 104, 114 n. 29 Arnauld, Antoine, 101 Arndt, William F., 112 n. 7 Ascham, Roger, 90 n. 2 Augustine, St., 19, 57 n. 3, 88, 105, 164 Ayers, Michael, 111 n. 1 Alymer, G. E., 160 n. 12 B Bacon, Francis Sir, 57 n. 2, 59 n. 23 Bangs, Carl, 78 n. 3 Barbeau, Ane T., 59 nn. 33 and 34 Barbour, John, 19, 164–65, 173 nn. 16 and 17 Barbour, Reid, 189 Barker, Arthur Edward, 160 n. 12 Barnes, Jonathan, 58 n. 9 Barrow, Samuel, 26 Basil, Saint, 49, 58 n. 17 Bauer, Walter, 112 n. 7 Bedwell, William, 95 Beal, Peter, 117, 130 n. 1 Bellerophon, 54, 60 n. 42 Berley, Marc, 42 n. 11

Beye, Charles Rowan, 90 n. 2 Bible, the, 32, 44 n. 33, 63, 66, 160 n. 11; Colossians, 25, 39; 1 Corinthians, 112 n. 7; Exodus, 112 n. 8; Genesis, 25, 56, 63, 96, 97, 112 n. 14, 135–36, 161, 170–71; Gospels, 161, 165, 170, 175 n. 34; Isaiah, 25, 112 n. 8; John, 175 n. 34; I Kings, 172; Luke, 166, 167; Mark, 175 n. 34; Phillipians, 91 n. 9 Proverbs, 66, 94, 95, 96, 106; Psalms, 25, 36, 37; Versions of, Bible moralisée, 96, 97, 99; Eadwi Gospel Book, 96; Geneva, 112 n. 7; Greek New Testament, 95; Hebrew, 95; KJV, 112 n. 8; Septuagint, 112 n. 8; Vulgate, 44 n. 34, 59 n. 29, 106, 115 n. 36, 115 n. 36; Apocrypha: 2 Maccabees, 112 n. 8; Wisdom of Solomon, 47, 94, 95, 112 n. 4 Blessington, Francis, 78 n. 4, 90 n. 2, 92 n. 15 Bodin, Jean, 113 n. 18 Boesky, Amy, 42 n. 17 Bond, Ronald, 57 n. 7, 59 nn. 21 and 26 Bonfrère, Jaques, 63 Book of the XXIV Philosophers, 96 Bornstein, George, 128–29, 131 nn. 25 and 26 Bowra, C. M., 90 n. 2 Boyle, A. J., 91 nn. 6 and 10 Bradshaw, David, 17, 81–92 Bright, Timothy, 34 Brown, Thomas, 43 n. 20, 99, 112 n. 6, 113 n. 17 Bryson, Michael, 37, 44 n. 36 Buckham, Rebecca, 173 Bulman, Patricia, 57 n. 6, 59 n. 30 Burke, Kenneth, 67, 79 n. 8 Burrow, Colin, 56, 61 nn. 49 and 50 Burton, Robert, 49, 58 n. 13 C Cain, Tom, 60 n. 47 Calvin, John, 32, 64, 66, 67

193

194

INDEX

Campbell, Gordon, 113 n. 18 Character of the Rump, the, 179–82, 184, 189, 190 nn. 7 and 16 Carey, John, 32, 43 n. 22, 44 n. 25 Cassell, Anthony K., 57 n. 3 Cast, David, 57 n. 4 Cavendish, William, 121 Chandler, Albert R., 113 n. 20 Chapman, George, 71–72, 79 nn. 14, 15, and 17 Chappell, Vere, 111 n. 1 Chappell, William, 145 n. 5 Charles II, 118 Chartier, Roger, 121 Christopher, Georgia, 78 n. 4 Chrysostom, St., John, 48, 49, 57 n. 3, 58 n. 11 Cicero, 69 Clark, Donal Leman, 143 n. 2 Cockcroft, Robert, 43 n. 21 Coffey, John, 175 n. 41 Collet, J. H., 90 n. 2 Condren, Conal, 190 n. 11 Conley, Thomas M., 145 n. 5 Conti, Natale, 57 n. 8, 60 n. 43 Cook, Patrick J., 90 n. 2 Cooper, Thomas, 50, 58 n. 18 Cornelius, Randolph R., 43 n. 20 Cowley, Abraham, 162, 173 nn. 10, 11, and 12 Curtius, Quintus, 25 Cusanus, Nicholas, 115 n. 36 Cyprian, St., 47, 57 n. 2 D Dahlø, R., 144 n. 3 Danielson, Dennis, 65, 78 nn. 2 and 6, 111 n. 1, 114 n. 34 Dante, 50 Dante, Pietro di, 59 n. 22 Davies, Stevie, 160 n. 15 de Grazia, Margreta, 121 de la Cerda, Juan Luis, 90 n. 2 de Selincourt, Ernest, 57 n. 7 de Sponde, Jean, 71, 73–75, 79 nn. 14 and 19 Death, 16 Della Rocca, Michael, 111 n. 1 Descartes, René, 31, 93 Dickie, Matthew W., 57 n. 6, 58 nn. 14 and 16

Dixon, Thomas, 42 n. 16, 43 n. 20 Dobranski, Steven, 121, 131 n. 19, 159 n. 1, 160 n. 16, 171, 175 n. 40 Dolce, Ludovico, 74–75, 79 n. 21 Donaldson, Ian, 57 n. 8, 59 n. 27 Donne, John, 75, 79 n. 22 Donovan, Kevin, 13–15, 20 Downame, George, 108, 145 n. 5 Dryden, John, 181, 182 Dury, John, 113 n. 18 Duckworth, George, 91 n. 6 Duhamel, Pierre Albert, 145 n. 5 Dunbabin, Katherine M. D., 58 n. 16 Durham, Charles, 13–15, 20, 60 n. 41 DuRocher, Richard J., 11, 15, 23–45, 47, 48, 51, 81, 90 n. 2, 112 n. 12, 115 n. 35, 171, 173, 175 n. 38 E Eden, 19 Elijah, 172, 173 n. 7 Empson, William, 104, 114 n. 31 Erasmus, 104 Evans, Martin J., 119–20, 130 nn. 13–16 Eve, 16, 17, 28, 40–41, 51–52, 69–70, 74–78, 80 n. 25, 81–85, 88–89, 92 nn. 12 and 15, 102, 162, 164, 165 F Fallon, Stephen, 39, 42–43 n. 17, 45 n. 39, 60 n. 42, 111 n. 1, 114 n. 30 Farrer, Austin, 113 n. 23 Feeney, D. C., 41 n. 1, 44 n. 24, 60 n. 45 Fegius, Paul, 63 Feingold, Mordechai, 134, 144 n. 4 Fenner, Dudley, 135, 145 nn. 7 and 8 Fenner, William, 39, 45 n. 40 Fenton, Mary C., 91 n. 7, 167, 173, 174 nn. 19, 22,and 23 Festa, Thomas, 17, 93–115 Fish, Stanley, 127–29, 131 nn. 20, 22, and 23, 159 n. 4, 176 n. 42 Flannagan, Roy, 57 n. 1, 130 n. 6, 171, 173 n. 3, 175 n. 36 Fleming, James Dougal, 130 n. 4 Fletcher, Harris Francis, 118, 125–26, 130 n. 7, 144 n. 2, 145 n. 5, 146 n. 15 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 43 n. 21 Forsyth, Neil, 37, 44 n. 36 Fowler, Alastair, 69, 78 n. 5, 79 n. 12, 111 n. 3

INDEX

Fresch, Cheryl H., 60 n. 41 Frownce, Abraham, 145 n. 5 Frye, Northrop, 26, 42 n. 8, 78 n. 4 Fulton, Thomas, 159 n. 2 Funkenstein, Amos, 115 n. 37 G Galileo, 25 Garber, Daniel, 111 n. 1 Geertz, Clifford, 134, 144 n. 4 Genette, Gerard, 117, 130 n. 2 Gill, R. B., 58 n. 19, 59 n. 27 Gingrich, F. William, 112 n. 7 Girard, René, 50, 58 n. 20 God (the Father), 14, 17, 19, 23, 31–34, 36–41, 47, 52, 56, 64–68, 70, 74–75, 86–89, 93–95, 102–11, 114 n. 32, 165–67, 170–72 Gower, John, 57 n. 4 Grafton, Anthony, 144 n. 4, 145 n. 5 Gransden, K. W., 90 n. 2 Grant, Edward, 115 n. 39 Graves, Neil, 34, 44 nn. 25 and 27 Greene, Thomas, 28–29, 42 nn. 13, 14, and 15, 80 n. 24, 90 n. 2 Grierson, Sir Herbert, 40 Grotius, Hugo, 63 Gunning, Peter, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 143, 143 n. 1 H Hale, John, 59 n. 35 Hall, Marie Noas, 113 n. 18 Hamilton, A. C., 58 n. 15, 59 n. 26 Hamilton, Gary, 175 n. 34 Hancock, Robert, 183–84, 190 n. 13 and 14 Harada, Jun, 80 n. 25 Hardie, Philip, 60 n. 45 and 48, 61 n. 49 Harding, Davis P., 90 n. 2 Harries, Karsten, 115 n. 36 Harvey, Gabriel, 144 n. 5 Henderson, Felicity, 146 n. 16 Hermes, 64–65 Hesiod, 53, 58 nn. 9 and 10 Hick, John, 114 n. 34 Hobbes, Thomas, 93 Holland, P., 112 n. 6 Homer, 16, 25, 26, 27, 54, 63–78, 79 nn. 7, 13, 14, and 16, 80 n. 26 Horace, 60 n. 47, 79 n. 18

195

Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 145 n. 5 Huggard, E. M., 113 n. 23 Hughes, Merritt Y., 44 n. 29, 45 n. 43 Hume, David, 112 n. 10 Hume, Patrick, 69, 79 n. 11 Hunt, Clay, 119, 130 n. 11 Hutchison, Coleman, 121, 124–25, 127, 130 n. 17, 131 n. 18 I Ide, Richard S., 175 n. 40 Ingram, Randall, 17–18, 117–31 J Jardine, Lisa, 144 n. 4, 145 n. 5 Johnson, W. R., 26–27, 42 n. 9, 92 n. 14 Jolley, Nicholas, 111 n. 2 Jones, David Martin, 181, 190 nn. 10, 11, and 25 Jonson, Ben, 49, 51, 57 n. 8, 60 n. 47 Juno, 23, 24, 41, 51, 59 n. 32, 86 Justa Eduardo King Naufrago, 119, 128 K Kahn, Victoria, 145 n. 9 Karatani, Kojin, 96, 112 n. 11 Keckermann, Bartholomew, 133, 134, 137, 145 n. 10, 146 n. 12 Keeble, N. H., 161, 173 nn. 1 and 15 Keith, A. M. 57 n. 6 Keith, Alison, 55 Kelley, Mark R., 174 n. 40 Kelley, Maurice, 78 nn. 3 and 6 Kent, David A., 43 n. 21 Kermode, Frank, 45 n. 42 Kerrigan, William, 42 n. 17, 44 n. 32, 111 n. 1 Kilgour, Maggie, 14, 15–16, 47–61 Kircher, Athanasius, 98–99 Knott, John R., 160 n. 14 Knox, John, 157 Konstan, David, 57 n. 5 Kulstad, Mark, 113 n. 19 L Labriola, Albert C., 91 n. 9 Lactantius, 15, 30, 37, 41, 44 n. 35 Lares, Jameela, 43 n. 21 Lattimore, Richmond, 72, 79 n. 13 Lawes, Henry, 126 Lawrence, Henry, 40–41

196

INDEX

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 93, 99–103, 110, 113 nn. 18, 19, 20, 22, and 23, 114 nn. 24, 25, and 26 Leonard, John, 104–05, 114 n. 33, 129, 131 n. 27 Leukothea, 16, 69–77, 80 n. 23 Lewalski, Barbara, 40, 45 n. 41, 78 n. 4, 80 n. 25, 113 n. 18 Lieb, Michael, 14, 23, 33, 42 n. 2, 44 n. 26, 56, 61 n. 51, 91 n. 9, 148, 159 nn. 5 and 6, 160 n. 18 Locke, John, 93 Loewenstein, David, 169, 174 n. 29 Long, Mary Beth, 166, 174 n. 21 Low, Anthony, 42 n. 11 Lucretius, 30, 59 n. 24, 69 Luxon, Thomas, 161–62, 171, 173 nn. 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7, 174 n. 32, 175 n. 35 M Machacek, Gregory, 28, 42 n. 12 Mack, Peter, 145 n 9 MacCallum, Hugh, 171, 175 nn. 33 and 37 Mackenzie, Donald C., 60 n. 38 Macrobius, 28, 90 n. 2 MacIlmaine, Rolland, 145 n. 5 Malham, John J., 114 n. 29 Mandelbaum, Allen, 24, 39, 42 n. 4 Marcus, Leah, 130 n. 5 Maria, Henrietta, 117–18 Marshall, William, 118 Marston, John, 59 n. 27 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 111 n. 1 Martin, L. C., 112 n. 6 Martindale, Charles, 90 n. 2 Martz, Louis L., 42 n. 11, 118–19, 130 nn. 5 and 9 Matchinske, Megan, 189 Marvell, Andrew, 112 n. 4, 179, 186, 190 n. 22 Mary 168–71, 175 n. 34 Mazzeo, Joseph, 80 n. 25 McCain, John Walker, 144 n. 3 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 80 n. 25, 92 n. 13 Mede, Joseph, 145 n. 10 Menochius of Pavia, 63 Merrill, Zachary, 186–88, 190 nn. 23 and 24 Michael 14, 18, 77, 84, 89, 91 n. 7, 133, 138–43 Milton, Anthony, 177, 189 n. 2

Milton, Christopher, 190 n. 8 Milton, John, works of: “Ad Joannem Rousium,” 53; “Ad Patrem,” 127–28; “Another on the Same,” 123Arcades, 121; Areopagitica, 13, 18, 29, 30, 129, 147–59, 178; Art of Logic, 104, 108–9, 134–36, 137–38, 145 n. 6; “At a Solemn Music,” 122–23; De Doctrina Christiana, 23, 31–33, 39, 66, 104, 107, 112 n. 16, 114 n. 28, 160 n. 17; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the, 155, 160 n. 12; Eikonoklastes, 114 n. 27, 129; “Il Penseroso,” 162–63, “Lycidas,” 17, 117– 30; Mask at Ludlow Castle, a (Comus), 75, 80 n. 23, 120, 126, 128–29, 163, 167; “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 117, 118–19, 127; “On Shakespeare,” 121; “On the University Carrier,” 121, 123, 124; “On Time,” 121; Paradise Lost, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25–30, 33–41, 42 n. 7, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59 n. 33, 63–66, 68–71, 74–78, 84–86, 88–90, 92 nn. 12 and 15, 94–96, 102–11, 134, 137–43, 146 n. 14, 148, 151, 158–59, 161–62, 164–66, 173, 184; Paradise Regained, 19, 47, 161–73; Poems (1645), 17, 52, 117–30; Poems (1673), 119, 128, 129; Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 53, 60 n. 38, 178, 185; Prolusion 7, 162; Reason of Church Government, the, 29–30, 53, 60 n. 37, 163, 167, 178, 184, 190 n. 4; Samson Agonistes, 30, 171–72, 178, 184; “Song: On May Morning,” 121; Sonnet 6, 53; “Upon the Circumcision,” 121 MacKellar, Walter, 131 n. 24 McKenzie, D. F., 121 McLeod, Randall, 121 Momus, 49 Montgomery, George R., 113 n 20 Moore, Leslie, 44 n. 28 Moseley, Humphrey, 121 Most, Glenn, 57 nn. 5 and 6, 58 n. 9, 59 n. 31 Munster, Sebastian, 63 Murphy, Tara, 56 N Nashe, Thomas, 180–81 Nicholas of Lyra, 63 Nicolson, Marjorie, 115 n. 36

INDEX

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 108, 115 n. 40 Nisus and Euryalus, 17, 81–87, 89, 92 n. 15 Northleigh, John, 190 n. 18 Norton, Mary F., 160 nn. 13 and 15 Nussbaum, Martha, 30, 43 n. 18 O Oates, Titus, 182–84, 186, 190 n. 12 Oldenburg, Henry, 113 n. 18 Oldys, William, 114 n. 29 Ong, Walter, 108, 126–27, 131 n. 21, 134, 144 n. 4, 145 n 9 Osirus, 152–53 Ovid, 16, 38, 52, 54, 59 n. 32, 60 nn. 44–48, 61 nn. 49 and 50 P Pagnini, Santes, 63 Parker, Samuel, 179 Parker, William Riley, 42 n. 17, 173 n. 9 Paster, Gain Kern, 43 n. 21 Patrides, C. A., 112 n. 6 Pavlock, Barbara, 90 n. 2, 91 n. 6, 92 n. 10 Pearson, Roger, 112 n. 9 Peter, John, 40 Pettit, Edward, 185–86, 190 nn. 20 and 21 Petrarch, 60 n. 43 Pigman, G. W., 50, 58 n. 19 Pindar, 48, 54, 59 n. 30 Piscator, Johannes, 63 Plantin, Christophe, 99 Plato, 51, 52, 59 n. 28, 95, 96, 112 n. 6 Plutarch, 112 n. 6 Poliziano, 28 Poole, Matthew, 63, 78 nn. 1–2 Popkin, Richard H., 113 n. 18 Porphyry, 32, 44 n. 24 Porter, William Malin, 90 n. 2 Prescott, Anne lake, 59 n. 26 Pruitt, Kristin, 13–15, 20, 60 n. 41, 92 n. 12 Purkiss, Diane, 190 n. 26 Putnam, Michael C. J., 91 nn. 6 and 10 O Quilligan, Maureen, 53, 60 n. 39 Quint, David, 90 n. 2 R Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 80 n. 25

197

Rahner, Hugo, 79 n. 7 Rajan, Balachandra, 60 n. 40, 160 n. 9 Ramus, Petrus, 108, 135–36, 138–39, 144 n. 5, 145 n. 5 Randolph, Thomas, 126 Raphael 36, 38, 40, 56, 94–94, 102, 107 Raworth, Ruth, 121–23 Raymond, Joad, 159 n. 1 Rescher, Nicholas, 113 n. 22 Revard, Stella P., 59 n. 33 Richardson, Janette, 90 n. 2 Richardson, Jonathan, 44 n. 28 Rosenblatt, Jason, 184, 190 n. 15 Rowe, Katherine, 43 n. 21 Rumrich, John P., 42 n. 17, 107, 115 n. 38, 168–69, 174 nn. 25–28, 30 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 174 n. 20 Rutherford, Donals, 111 n. 1, 113 n. 19 Rutter, keith, 57 n. 5 Ryle, Gilbert, 144 n. 4 S Salmasius, 178 Salvaggio, Ruth, 189 Samuel, Irene, 173 n. 8, 174 n 20 Samuels, Peggy, 176 n. 41 Satan 18, 25, 34–36, 38–41, 47–48, 51–56, 65, 72, 88, 105, 114 n. 27, 133, 136, 138– 43; in Paradise Regained, 161–62, 170 Sauer, Elizabeth, 160 n. 9 Scaliger, I. C., 90 n. 2 Schaeffer, John D., 159 n. 6 Schein, Seth L., 79 n. 10 Schmaltz, Tad, 111 n. 1 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 43 n. 21 Schwartz, Louis, 173 Schwartz, Regina, 173 n. 14, 173 n. 20 Scodel, Joshua, 43 n. 21 Seigel, Jerrold, 111 n. 1 Seneca, 30, 43 n. 19 Seton, John, 134, 137, 145 n. 11, 146 n. 13 Servius, 23, 41, 41 n. 1, 45 n. 45, 90 n. 2 Sewell, George, 61 n. 49 Shakespeare, William, 40, 44 n. 30, 51, 53, 120–21 Shapin, Steven, 111 n. 2 Shapiro, Marianne, 60 n. 43 Shawcross, John, 42 n. 17, 44 n. 22, 90 n. 3, 91 n. 9, 170, 171, 174 n. 31, 175 nn. 39 and 40, 189 Shifflett, Andrew, 43 n. 21

198

INDEX

Shirley, James, 121 Shugar, Debora K., 43 n. 21 Sin, 16, 50, 53, 55, 61 n. 50, 114 n. 27 Singleton, Charles, 59 n. 22 Sirluck, Earnest, 160 n. 8 Skelton, John, 59 n. 27 Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth, 130 n. 5 Skinner, Quentin, 137, 144 n. 2, 145 nn. 5, 9, and 10 Skulsky, Harold, 39, 45 n. 38 Sleigh Jr., Robert, 111 n. 1 Smith, Martin Ferguson, 59 n. 24 Smith, Samuel, 19, 161–76 Son, the (in Paradise Lost), 19, 25, 37–39, 47, 52, 64, 70, 74–75, 81–88, 94, 109–10; as Jesus in Paradise Regained, 19, 47, 161, 163, 166–68, 171–72, 173 n. 8, 174 n. 19, 175 nn. 33 and 34 Spear, Gary, 130 n. 5 Spenser, Edmund, 25–26, 35, 44 n. 31, 48–51, 53, 57 n. 7, 58 n. 15, 148–50 Spinoza, Baruch, 93, 111 n. 2 Stallybrass, Peter, 121 Steadman, John M., 61 n. 50 Stern, Virginia F., 144 n. 5 Stevens, Edward B., 59 n. 28 Stogdill, Nathaniel, 19–20, 177–90 Strier, Richard, 25, 42 n. 6, 114 n. 34 Sullivan, Francis A., 45 n. 45 Summers, Joseph, 85, 92 n. 12 Svendsen, Kester, 115 n. 35 Swift, Jonathan, 49, 57–58 n. 8 Swiss, Margo, 43 n. 21 T Tanner, John S., 44 n. 32, 92 n. 13

Tasso, 120 Tayler, Edward W., 112 n. 15 Teskey, Gordon, 78 n. 4, 115 n. 42 Tirnius of Antwerp, 63 Turner, Henry S., 111 n. 2 Turner, James Grantham, 160 n. 10 Tyacke, Nicholas, 144 n. 4 Typing, William, 96, 112 n. 15 V Van der Laan, Sarah, 11, 16, 63–80 Vergil, 15, 17, 23–29, 34–35, 38–41,47, 42 nn. 3, 4, 6, and 10, 45 n. 44, 51, 52, 55, 60 nn. 47 and 48, 81–92, 120 Vickers, Brian, 145 n. 5 Voltaire, 96, 112 n. 9 von Boineburg, Baron Johann Christian, 113 n. 18 W Webber, Joan Malory, 167, 174 n. 24 Whitbread, Francis George, 60 n. 43 Whitney, Geffrey, 59 n. 21 Williams, R. D., 27, 41, 42 nn. 3, 5, and 10, 45 n. 44 Wilson, Emma Annette, 18, 133–46 Wiltshire, Susan Ford, 91 n. 8 Wittreich, Joseph, 171, 175 n. 40 Wolfe, Don Marion, 60 n. 37 Wotten, Sir Henry, 96, 126 Wright, James, 190 n. 19 Z Zagorin, Perez, 181, 190 nn. 9 and 17 Zaitsev, Evgeny A., 112 nn. 5, 13, and 16 Zeus, 64–65