Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

Leaving Eden

The first 1667 version of Paradise Lost arranges its ten books in a concentric and symmetrical scheme, outlined in the following table.

1 The building of Pandaemonium; the devils’ future enshrinement; idolatry. Catalog of devils and shrines.	10 (1674 11–12) The leaving of Eden; the cessation of oracles; living temples. Catalog of seats of empire.
2 The devils’s lack of choice. Satan acclaimed.	9 (1674 10) Adam and Eve recover human choice. Satan hissed.
3 The Son’s charity and offer to redeem humanity.	8 (1674 9) The Fall. Adam’s choice to fall with Eve.
4 Eden. Eve’s story of her creation, meeting with Adam.	7 (1674 7–8) The Creation. Adam’s story of his meeting with Eve.
5 War in Heaven. Abdiel.	6 (1674 6) War in Heaven. Son.

Milton’s 1674 revision of the poem into the twelve-book version we now read changes the center of the poem so that books 6 and 7 depict the double heroism of the Son as victor over Satan and as cosmic creator, the actions he will repeat at the end of time in apocalyptic battle and as maker of a new heaven and earth. In doing so, it obscures the earlier pattern, whose center, we observed in chapter 1, pivoted around the character of Abdiel, the lone individual who dissents from his satanic company at the end of the 1667 book 5 and wounds Satan at the beginning of book 6 before yielding place to the greater, if not necessarily more heroic, exploits of the Son. It also obscures other correspondences between books of the 1667 Paradise Lost.¹ When the poem is read from its inside out, books 4 and 7, respectively, contain Eve’s and Adam’s contrasting accounts of the first moments of their creation and of their first meeting and marriage; 3 and 8 juxtapose the Son’s promised redemption of humanity and the Fall of humanity to which it already answers, a Fall in which Adam’s choice to die with the Eve he loves reflects the Son’s greater charity; 2 and 9, as I have argued in chapter 7, differentiate the fallen angels’ inability to die and lack of real alternatives (Scylla and Charybdis) from the real choice between living and dying that Adam and Eve can make—through God’s grace; in book 2, Satan leaves the council hall of Pandaemonium to the “loud acclaim” (2.520) of his fellow devils, in book 9 to their universal hiss. Relatives of classical ring composition, such concentric patterns are a feature of some of the greatest works of Renaissance literature, as Edwin Duval’s studies of the Rabelaisian books and James Nohrnberg’s analysis of the Faerie Queene have demonstrated.²

The correspondence between the outermost of these books of Paradise Lost, between books 1 and 10 or, in the 1674 version of the poem, books 1 and 11–12, concerns the devil’s building of Pandaemonium and Adam’s and Eve’s departure from Eden before it becomes a false temple, that is, a correspondence between the inauguration of Milton’s poem itself and the reader’s leaving its spell. In the catalog of devils in book 1, we are told how the demons created idols and cults by falsities and lies—“gay religions full of pomp and gold” (1.372)—and “durst fix / Their seats long after next the seat of God” (1.382–83), the Jerusalem temple. The parallel catalog of book 11 lists one after another future “seat / Of mightiest empire” (11.386–87) and of gold, the worldly forces that will profane and substitute themselves for the worship of the true God. The empires include “Sofala thought Ophir” (11.400), the realm from which Solomon imported the gold that placed the potential for corruption in the temple from its beginning.³ In books 11 and 12 God closes down Eden lest the devil possess it as well, but as I shall argue below, Eden seems preordained for Satan’s takeover from the moment he jumps over the garden’s wall in book 4, the first pollution by “lucre and ambition” (12.511) of a shrine or church that is too rich for its own good. In book 1 Milton suggests his own complicity as poet in raising the devil; in the last two books he disenchants his epic’s poetic world.

This coda on the final two books of Paradise Lost accordingly itself looks back on the discussion of book 1 in this study’s own first chapter. It suggests that the first and last books framing the epic both share a continuity with Milton’s first great poem, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (the Nativity Ode), and its final section where the newborn true God expels their resident demons from the pagan oracles. The motif of the cessation of oracles, to which Milton also returns at the end of book 1 of Paradise Regained, shapes the double structure of the 1667 book 10, which naturally divided into the 1674 books 11 and 12: Eden as a possible temple and oracular shrine is destroyed in prophecy at the end of book 11 so that the utterance of the true oracle, the Son, his curse against the serpent at the Judgment Scene in book 10, can reecho through Michael’s narrative in book 12. Eden, I shall finally argue, is by the end of Paradise Lost an image of the poem itself, and in the loss of the garden, Milton’s epic depicts the relinquishing of its own imaginative plenitude and riches, the end of epic poetry itself.

Deconsecrated Earth

In his instruction to Michael before he sends the archangel to earth, God spells out this double plan for the last two books of the poem. Michael is first to “drive out the sinful pair, / From hallowed ground the unholy” (11.105–6), then to initiate them into a holiness that lies in the promised Christian future. Adam and Eve, God has earlier stated, can no longer dwell in Paradise because they are now themselves a polluting, fallen human presence:

Those pure immortal elements that know

No gross, no unharmonious mixture foul,

Eject him, tainted now, and purge him off

As a distemper, gross to air as gross,

And mortal food, as may dispose him best

For dissolution wrought by sin, that first

Distempered all things, and of incorrupt

Corrupted.

(11.50–57)

Distempered by sin, man is himself a distemper to the purity of Eden. The passage announces the motif that makes of the last two books a kind of Spenserian Legend of Temperance: the moderation of the appetites, “The rule of not too much” (11.531) that Michael teaches Adam to observe but which original sin has made difficult to follow, whether with regard to the diseases of the body in book 11, “Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve” (11.519; cf. 11.476: “the inabstinence of Eve”) or the maladies of the body politic, kingship and tyranny, in book 12, due to the “original lapse” (12.83) of Adam. This immoderation is characterized by further “unharmonious mixture,” the marriages of the daughters of men with the “grave” sons of God (11.585)—“Where good with bad were matched, who of themselves / Abhor to join; and by imprudence mixed” (11.685–86; cf. 3.456: “unkindly mixed”)—and a further confusion within the civilization of conqueror “giants” to which they gave birth, “Gray headed men and grave, with warriors mixed” (11.662). Michael’s task is thus, on the one hand, to separate the sinful Adam and Eve from the purity of Eden, and near the end of book 11, he foretells Eden’s eventual fate to be uprooted by the Flood; at the end of book 12, the sword of God has already begun to parch the garden’s “temperate clime” (12.636). On the other, God instructs the archangel to “intermix / My Covenant in the woman’s seed renewed” (11.115–16) as he reveals to Adam the Christian history that is to come. This story culminates when “God with man unites” (12.382) in the Son, and it will be the result of the Son’s offer seventy verses earlier in book 11 to “ingraft” (11.35) the sinful works of men and to make the redeemed “one with me” (11.44); Adam and Eve, that is, are to be detached physically from a former holiness in order to be joined in spirit to a future one.

The last two books of the 1674 poem divide accordingly. Once the visions that Michael offers Adam close in book 11 with the washing away of Eden and a new start and covenant for humanity, he turns in book 12 to his second assignment, and in his plainer narration mentions some seven times the judgment-prophecy of the woman’s seed, which will bruise the head of the serpent (12.148–51; 233–35; 311–14; 327; 430–33; 542–44, 600–601). In book 11 humans have mixed their fallen motives and carnal imaginings with the holy, and by its end they have polluted the entire globe. The view from the Mountain of Speculation to which Michael leads Adam is compared to the vision of “all earth’s kingdoms and their glory” with which Satan will later tempt Jesus (Matt. 3:8; Luke 4:5–7). It leads into the resonant list of future empires (11.385–411), associated with golden riches, and of the names and titles of their monarchs (khan, Temir, king, mogul, czar, sultan, negus, Almansor, Motezume, Atalipa). These are balanced at the end of the book by the submersion and wiping out of their antediluvian prototypes, the giant-conquerors who enjoyed “triumph and luxurious wealth” (11.788), the fame and renown that they achieved (11.698–99) perishing with them, along with their names.5 In book 12, God will himself mix with human beings—“God who oft descends to visit men” (12.48)—until, after Nimrod and his ilk again try at Babel to “get themselves a name” (12.45), he decides to limit his presence and “one peculiar nation to select” (12.111) from amid the idolatrous rest. The description of the borders of the land granted to Abraham (12.135–46) with its succession of place-names—“Things by their names I call, though yet unnamed” (12.140), says Michael—is a reduced version and substitute for the earlier catalog of global empires. It is at the end of this humbler description of Canaan, but of names that will really count, that Michael first mentions to Adam God’s covenant and promise of “thy great deliverer, who shall bruise / The serpent’s head” (12.149–50). The lost Eden of book 11 is replaced by the territorially demarcated Promised Land of book 12, before this elect nation and the House of God it builds are themselves corrupted by kingship, wealth, and idolatry—virtual synonyms—and are replaced by the “living temples” (12.527) that are individual believers.

Milton has all along coordinated Adam and Eve with Abraham and Sarah: the first couple hosts Raphael as the later one entertains the visiting God and his two angels at Mamre in Genesis 18. He renews the comparison through allusion. The questions that structure the lament of Eve at the news that they will have to leave Eden,

Must I thus leave thee Paradise? Thus leave

Thee native soil, these happy walks and shades,

Fit haunt of gods?

(11.269–71)

recall the situation and long complaint of Abraham in the Divine Weeks of Du Bartas in Josuah Sylvester’s translation, at the moment when the patriarch answers God’s call and leaves Chaldea for Canaan:

Alas (sayd Abrahm) must I needs forgoe

These happie fields wheare Euphrates doth flowe?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O can I thus my Native soile forsake?

O with what words shall I my farewell take?

Farewell Chaldea, deere delights adieu.

(The Vocation 147–48; 187–89)

Eve’s overhearing Michael pronounce God’s sentence of banishment in “the place of her retire” is itself based on another Abrahamic moment, the same Genesis 18 episode at Mamre, now reutilized as a model for the embassy of a second angel of God. God announces the future birth of Isaac, the child of the promise and God’s seed (Gal. 4:28; Rom. 9:7), and the aged Sarah, concealed behind the tent flap, laughs in incredulity (Gen. 18:9–15). Milton’s double allusion suggests that Eve, for all the grief her lament expresses at leaving her nursery of flowers to whom she has given names (11.273–79), is now destined to leave this dollhouse for real motherhood, in Adam’s words, “Mother of all Mankind” (11.159) and, down the line, as she will realize, of the “promised seed” (12.623). It further indicates that on leaving Eden, Adam and Eve are already entering into a Promised Land. Their later counterparts, Abraham and Sarah, are called away from “his father’s house” (12.121) and from an upbringing in “idol-worship” (12.115). For, hard as it is to believe, Michael says, men had grown so stupid, even while Noah was still alive, “As to forsake the living God, and fall / To worship their own work in wood and stone / For gods” (12.118–20; cf. 1.367–75). Eden was the house of Adam and Eve’s divine Father; now they leave the garden before it can be turned into a sanctuary of idols and demons.

“Fit haunt of gods,” Eve says of their lost home. The prospect that Eden might indeed be haunted prompts God to block access to the garden, “Lest Paradise a receptacle prove / To spirits foul, and all my trees their prey, / With whose stolen fruit man once more to delude” (11.123–25), like the wood enchanted with diabolic spirits in the Gerusalemme liberata that proves an obstacle to Tasso’s crusaders. Both Tasso and Milton are imagining a cross between the mythological dryads who were supposed to have inhabited trees (see GL 18.27) and the darker demons who were the reality beneath those classical nature spirits, the demons whom the Canaanites of the Bible worshipped in the groves on high places. Hosea inveighs against such rites, whether forms of Canaanite religion or contaminated by them: “They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good” (Hosea 4:13). Abraham himself imitated his idol-making neighbors and “planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God” (Gen. 21:33), and such cult centers to the Israelite God were still active when Hezekiah set out to destroy them and give a monopoly of worship to the Jerusalem temple (2 Kings 18:4; 18:22). But nearby the temple itself, book 1 of Paradise Lost records, Solomon had built to Moloch a “grove / The pleasant valley of Hinnom” (1.403–4), that Josiah, later than both Solomon and Hezekiah, would hew down.6 (The “grove” that stood hard by the false temple of Pandaemonium in book 10 [547–72], its fair but ashen fruit a punishment for Satan and his companions, is likely its hellish relative.) Eve herself initiated such idolatrous worship when, after the Fall, she bowed down to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “as to the power / That dwelt within” (9.835–36). In retrospect, there is something ominous in the earlier comparison in book 9 of Eve to “a wood-nymph light / Oread or dryad” at the momentous occasion when she leaves Adam and “Betook her to the groves” (9.386–88), as if her Fall summons such tree gods into being. In attributing such power to the tree, Eve invents idolatry and—according to the influential account of the origins of pagan cult by Augustine in the City of God discussed in chapter 1—would be extending an invitation to Satan’s devils to take the tree over as their “receptacle.” Eden, which Raphael refers to as “this delicious grove, / This garden” (7.537–38), could become itself a demonic grove; George Sandys writes in his traveler’s description of Jerusalem that the grove of Moloch that Josiah would cut down had been “before a Paradise.”⁷ God forestalls the possibility of turning Eden into a false, haunted Paradise.

But it is the fallen Adam, who, in his very piety, may pose the greater danger of desecration to Eden. His own lament at leaving Eden, voiced to Michael, describes his plans, which would have turned the garden into a memorial park.⁸

here I could frequent

With worship, place by place where he vouchsafed

Presence divine, and to my sons relate;

On this mount he appeared; under this tree

Stood visible, among these pines his voice

I heard, here with him at this fountain talked:

So many grateful altars I would rear

Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone

Of lustre from the brook, in memory,

Or monument to ages, and thereon

Offer sweet smelling gums and fruits and flowers:

(11.317–27)

Adam’s project also anticipates Abraham, who would build altars at Moreh—“there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him” (Gen.12:7)—and at Bethel and Mamre (Gen. 12:8; 13:18) before he planted the grove to God in Beersheba. Adam wants to convert Eden into a cult site; he has yet to learn the lesson contained at the end of the book in Michael’s prophecy that Eden will be washed away in the Flood, “To teach thee that God attributes to place / No sanctity” (11.836–37). Michael speculates that if Adam had remained unfallen Eden “had been / Perhaps thy capital seat,” to which his future posterity would have come “From all the ends of the earth, to celebrate / And reverence thee their great progenitor” (11.342–46): the angel indicates just why, after the Fall, Eden cannot be left in human hands. The garden would become a religious center and goal of pilgrimage—Michael pointedly refers to Eden as “this rock” (11.336), but no Petrine church will be built on it. The other “high capital” (1.756) of the poem is Pandaemonium, a combination of the Jerusalem temple and Saint Peter’s in Rome, the latter viewed by Protestants as a profane replacement and continuation of the cult of the Roman capitol—the cult of temporal state power itself in perhaps the supreme “seat / Of mightiest empire” (11.386–87) listed in the ensuing catalog, forty verses later, of the earth’s future kingdoms and their glory that Satan will offer to Jesus (see 11.405–6). Adam’s impulse to decorate his altars with shiny stones, gums, and flowers is the first step to church ornaments that can be confused with the pagan religions, full of pomp and gold—and there are indeed “sands of gold” (4.238) in the streams of Eden. Such ornate houses of worship, in the case of Pandaemonium, turn pilgrimage into tourism directed at the rich artwork rather than the deity—“the work some praise / And some the architect” (1.731–32). Adam is not Mulciber, nor a Michelangelo or Bernini, but his attempt to consecrate Eden through his human means is liable to have the opposite effect, the worship of his own work in wood and stone. Milton comments in De Doctrina Christiana, with a particular eye to Catholics who “call idols the layman’s books” (CPW 6:693, Works 17:142), that “the worship of the true God in the form of an idol is accounted no less grave a sin than the worship of devils” (CPW 6:692; Works 17:140). It is nonetheless the case that Adam’s stones of luster and flowers could be read as a figure for Milton’s poetry itself in relation to its sacred subject.

Adam misses and wants to recapture God’s absent voice. Milton connects the shrine that Eden might become with a particular pagan form of pilgrimage and worship, the cult of oracles. At the beginning of his career, Milton had exploited the tradition that the pagan oracles had ceased to prophecy at the birth of Christ in On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, the great ode that opened the Poems of 1645. The last third of the poem’s Hymn, stanzas 19–27, assimilates the cessation of oracles with the expulsion of the pagan gods, so many demons, from their temples.

The oracles are dumb

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

From haunted spring, and dale

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent,

With flower-inwoven tresses torn

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

(173–80, 184–88)

The first two stanzas of the roll call of defunct and superseded gods pairs Delphic Apollo, excluded from his famous oracle, with everyday nature spirits, elegiacally invoked, but demons nonetheless, leaving the groves they have “haunted”—and Milton probably alludes here to Hosea’s poplar and its good shade, a kind of pagan darkness.9 Virtually all of the dethroned deities of the Ode—Apollo, Peor, Baal, Ashtaroth, Hammon, Thammuz, Moloch, Isis, and Osiris—reappear in book 1 of Paradise Lost in the catalog of demons who will in later times be enshrined under their names. Apollo comes near the end, in the inventory, almost as an afterthought, of the Greek gods, among those “on the Delphian cliff / Or in Dodona” (1.517–18). Reversing the Nativity Ode, the epic’s catalog mentions oracles last: the oracle at Dodona was in an oak or oak grove. It will take the coming of Christ to drive out these demons—although the Nativity Ode simultaneously suggests that they may have crept back into Catholic idolatry. The Jesus of Paradise Regained breaks the Good News to Satan: “henceforth the oracles are ceased, / And thou no more with pomp and sacrifice / Shalt be inquired at Delphos or elsewhere” (PR 1.456–58). Paradise Lost already foreshadows the oracles’ end with the closing down of Eden.

Milton associates Eden with the two most famous oracles of Apollo, Delphi and Delos; Adam and Eve have returned to pray at the place where the Son had judged them, and are compared in simile to Deucalion and Pyrrha, survivors of a universal flood in pagan myth:

the ancient pair

In fables old, less ancient yet than these,

Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore

The race of mankind drowned, before the shrine

Of Themis stood devout.

(11.10–14)

The simile elegantly frames the book, which will end with the biblical Flood and the survival and new start for Noah and his family—perhaps a more ancient fable itself if one accepts a quibble on “these.” But it also suggests a second frame that links Eden to Delphi at the beginning of the book, to Delos at its end. The place of judgment in Eden is a potential site of cult, and indeed the prayers of Adam and Eve are treated as sacrificial offerings, “first fruits” (11.22) by the priestly Son, who proffers them, in turn, to the Father. The fuming “golden altar” at which the Son adds incense to the prayers (11.18) is, however, in heaven. It is not to be confused with an earthly shrine and oracle like that of Themis, consulted by Deucalion and Pyrrha in order to learn how to repopulate the world. This oracle, in most versions of the myth, including its Ovidian retelling in Metamorphoses 1 (316–415), was the oracle at Delphi, which in those days—“tunc,” Ovid says—belonged to Themis before Apollo dispossessed her in order to gain its cult and wealth.10 It is, in fact, Euripides’s account, in a choral ode in the Iphigenia in Tauris, of how Apollo took over the oracle at Delphi and expelled the older nocturnal visions sent by Themis that provided the classical model for Milton’s depiction in the Nativity Ode of Apollo himself and the other oracles and pagan deities being sent packing, in their turn, to be replaced by Christ.¹¹ In Paradise Lost, the Son prophesied as a true oracle at the place of judgment where Adam and Eve now stand—“So spake this oracle” (10.182)—that the woman’s seed shall bruise and be bruised in turn by the serpent. But this oracle spoke once and for all time—it foretells all the future, as the narrator’s ensuing gloss reveals: the course of Christian history up to its apocalyptic end, when the Son will tread Satan “at last under our feet” (10.190). After this divine utterance, Eden falls silent, as will the pagan oracles when the Son next returns to speak truth on earth.

At the end of book 11, Michael foretells how the garden itself, its human inhabitants and potential cult worshippers long since expelled, will be upended in the Flood and carried down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, “And there take root an island salt and bare, / The haunt of seals and orcs, and sea-mews’ clang” (11.834–35). James Nohrnberg has pointed out, in unpublished work to which I am indebted, that Milton alludes here to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which recounts that when Leto sought to give birth to Apollo on Delos, the island feared that the god would disdain its hard, rocky terrain and overturn it: “So, many-footed creatures of the sea will make their lairs in me and black seals their dwellings undisturbed because I lack people” (77–78). Delos obtains from the goddess her oath that Apollo will establish an oracle and temple on its barren earth, before he sets up temples and groves elsewhere—at Delphi, as the hymn goes on to relate in its second part.12 Milton has already identified Eden with Delos in book 5 when Raphael first sees earth and the garden of God from the air as a sea pilot “amidst the Cyclades / Delos or Samos first appearing kens / A cloudy spot” (5.264–65). Here he reverses the order of Apollo’s career in his allusions in book 11, and suggests that Eden suffers the fate that Delos feared for itself, disdained by its deity: fit haunt of seals, not of gods.

Both allusions—to Delphi as shrine of Themis and to Delos as an already rocky and barren isle—evoke these sites before they were to become the oracles of Apollo, before their treasuries would be filled with visitors’ offerings and their temples adorned with sculptures that made them both good places to find ancient statuary, according to the odd Of Statues and Antiquities included in the Columbia Manuscript, along with works of Milton (Works 18: 258–61). The oracles’ treasuries were de facto banks, money changers in their temples, and they were the targets of sacrilegious robbery: the Athenians’ appropriation of the treasury of the Delian league, the plunderings of Delphi by the Phocians, Sulla, and Nero. God moves preemptively so that Eden cannot become an Apollonian oracular site, ordaining the cessation of oracles before oracles will have come into being.

Shrine, oracle, pilgrimage site: Eden is a temple or church that has been desecrated by sin and now risks being further infiltrated by pagan, worldly motives of power and wealth. The garden is closed off and then destroyed at the end of Paradise Lost so that a new Pandaemonium like the one raised at its beginning cannot be built there, a receptacle to foul spirits and a profane replica of itself. Paradise Lost announced this prospect of desecration when it depicted Satan first entering the garden, “at one slight bound,” in book 4; the ensuing simile already anticipates Eden’s demise at the epic’s end.

As when a prowling wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,

Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve

In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold:

Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash

Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,

Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,

In at the window climbs, or o’er the tiles;

So clomb this first grand thief into God’s fold:

So since into his church lewd hirelings climb.

(4.183–93)

The remarkable double simile combines and juxtaposes epic and biblical motifs and allusions. The hungry wolf had described Tasso’s crusader Rinaldo during the eleventh-century conquest of Jerusalem in the Gerusalemme liberata (19.35.1–4). The hero is standing outside the Al-Aqsa mosque, which housed the pagan (Muslim) defenders of the city and which rested on the site of the Jewish temple, “nel tempio che, più volte arso e disfatto, / si noma ancor, dal fondator primiero, / di Salamone” (GL 19.33.2–5; Which burned and builded oft, still keeps the name / Of the first founder, wise King Solomon [Fairfax]). He eventually bursts its doors open with blows of a giant beam against its locks and hinges; a massacre of the Muslims ensues. Satan is a false crusader invading Eden’s sanctuary, and the scenario may suggest the demonic nature of the crusade celebrated by the Catholic Tasso.13 Disdaining the gate of Eden—we only later begin to suspect why when we learn that Gabriel is posted there with the angelic guards (4.542–54) who will catch up to Satan at the book’s end—Satan is further compared to the thief who climbs into the sheepfold in Jesus’s parable in John 10:1–18: Jesus goes on to explain that he himself is the door that leads to salvation (10:9), but “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber” (10:1). Jesus’s parabolic discourse is itself double, and the figure of the thief is succeeded by that of the hireling who, in contrast to Jesus the messianic good shepherd (10:14), neglects the sheep, and “the wolf catcheth them” (10:12). The epic wolf—behind Rinaldo lies Virgil’s Turnus prowling outside the Trojan camp (Aen. 9.57–66)—becomes the wolf of the Christian pastoral metaphor, threatening the sheepfold that is the Church; so, in book 12, the wolf and hireling minister moved by “lucre and ambition” have become one: after the ministry of the apostles, “Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves” (12.508).

The succession of similes and allusive contexts comes—by now we have expected this—at Satan’s expense. They transform him from a superhuman epic hero Rinaldo wielding, in frontal martial assault, a timber that, Tasso says, was taller and thicker than the masts of a Genoese ship (GL 19.36.3–4)—a model for Milton’s earlier comparison of Satan’s spear to “the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast / On some great ammiral” (1.292–94)—to a common thief breaking furtively into a moneyed, citizen household. The drop in poetic diction signaled by “cash” at the end of verse 188 signals something lower than the sermo humilis of biblical language and enacts the devil’s heroic comedown, from force to fraud, a descent, too, in class. Satan’s, we might say, is no longer a class act (or all too typically an aristocratic one, revealed for the low-down looting it is). By the same token, the sequence suggests how the substitution in Paradise Lost of biblical epic and spiritual heroism for military valor, even, or especially, for the Christian crusader warfare of Tasso’s epic, “Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed” (9.28–29), implies both a new bourgeois—as opposed to aristocratic—subject matter and audience. In contrast to the cavalier devil, Adam and Eve and their garden are a model of middle-class domesticity. The simile suggests why, fourteen verses later, Satan’s view of Eden in which is “exposed / In narrow room nature’s whole wealth” (4.206–7) should echo the counting house of Marlowe’s Barabas, the Jew of Malta, which would “inclose / Infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.36–37). Paradise looks a bit like the childhood home of the poet, son of John Milton Sr., scrivener and moneylender. It had been lost in the Great Fire of London one year before the epic appeared in print.14

The substitution of the rich burgher’s house for the humble sheepfold is Milton’s innovation with respect to John’s Gospel. The real treasure of Eden is its human worshippers, like the good shepherd’s flock. But both parts of the double simile suggest that Eden is a church that is already proleptically violated before Satan leaps inside it. Tasso’s Rinaldo breaks down the doors of a “temple” in eleventh-century Jerusalem profaned by pagan rites; in the slaughter that follows “Lavò co ’l sangue suo l’empio pagano / quel tempio che già fatto avea profano” (GL 19.38.7–8; with their heart’s blood the Pagans vile / This temple washed which they did late defile [Fairfax]). Similarly, the figuring of Eden as a cash-rich burgher’s house describes a church that is a sure target for thievish hirelings, whose ejection Milton had proposed in his Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church (1659) through the elimination of tithes. There Milton had repeatedly argued that the Jewish practice of tithing had depended on the existence of a “national church” centered in its capital seat, the Jerusalem temple, and had ceased once the temple was destroyed (CPW 7:282, 289, and 292). That temple was “a den of thieves” in the prophecy of its destruction uttered by Jeremiah (7:11) and cited by Jesus (Matt. 21:13; Mark 11:17, Luke 19:46) as he casts out all who bought and sold there, and predicts that nothing will remain of it: “there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matt. 24:2, Mark 13:2; Luke 21:6). The closure of Eden and its eventual washing away by the Flood removes its latent, linked dangers of pagan idolatry and simoniac wealth, a future state church: God destroys the garden before it can become a temple that will be destroyed again.¹⁵ And again.

Good-bye

This reduction of Eden to an island salt and bare also implies a willed foregoing of the imaginative riches of the poem that has gone before.¹⁶ Satan’s entrance into a wealthy Eden precedes Milton’s luxuriant verse description and creation of the garden, akin to Mammon’s and Mulciber’s (and Milton’s) raising of Pandaemonium through musical exhalations in book 1. Now the lost Paradise that could only be summoned up by poetry has been emptied out as the epic reaches its end. The desolation of Eden coincides with the shift in Michael’s mode of exposition (12.8–11) from the visions that he has presented to Adam to sparer narration, a shift that aesthetically divides the once composite books 11 and 12 (six visions in 11, six speeches by Michael in 12: these suggest a little twelve-book epic at the end of the poem). The visions are begun when Michael instills drops from the well of life into Adam’s eyes. The drops have the effect of curing the spiritual blindness Adam has incurred with the Fall, but when they are applied, he is literally blinded—“enforced to close his eyes” (11.419). We are reminded of Adam’s earlier dream of the creation of Eve in book 8 that: “closed mine eyes. / Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell / Of fancy my internal sight” (8.459–61). Both moments, in turn, recall and enact the divine illumination that the blind poet of Paradise Lost has invoked for himself at the opening of book 3. The visions of book 11 are tagged by such metaliterary markers as the depiction of the invention of the “arts that polish life” themselves in Jubalcain the musician and Tubalcain the metalworker; the modeling of the episode of the warrior giants on the episode of the two cities on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, forged there by the metalworker Hephaestus-Vulcan, with whom Tubalcain was identified and itself a work of art that occasions a passage of ekphrasis within the larger poem of which it seems to be a miniaturized version; and the sequence of the visions, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel and leading to the “triumphs or festivals” (11.723) of the giant conquerors, which recalls the similar shield forged by Vulcan for Aeneas in Aeneid 8, whose sculpted scenes begin with Romulus and Remus and end with the triple triumph of Augustus. Hephaestus, Tubalcain, and Vulcan are other names for Mulciber, the architect of Pandaemonium, whose specter has briefly reappeared and now will be banished, as Michael shifts from the visual to the auditory.17

The cessation with Noah’s Flood of these visions of humanity’s first stage of history consigns them to a poetically fabulous, if also spiritually emblematic or allegorical, status, “fables old”—for who knows what transpired before the Flood?—and it may consign Milton’s fable of Eden and the Fall with them.¹⁸ From hereon, as Michael moves quickly from the story of Nimrod and Babel, where the confusion of tongues similarly ensured the loss of memory that the tower was built to prevent (12.45–47), to the history, on what feels like firmer ground, of Abraham and his descendants up to the Second Coming, the archangel and the poem shift to a simpler chronicle. For a while the words of Michael—“seer blest” (12.553), Adam calls him at the end of the angel’s narration—are still studded with invocations to sight: “I see him, but thou canst not” (12.128); “I see his tents” (12.135); “each place behold / In prospect, as I point them” (12.142–43); “the river Nile; / See where it flows” (12.158). Adam initially responds in similar terms: “now first I find / Mine eyes true opening” (12.273–74); “but now I see / His day in whom all nations shall be blest” (12.276–77). But these figures of seeing soon disappear, as the severer Protestant practice of hearing the word of God replaces visualization, the mode attached to the idols that Catholics call the layman’s books. Michael’s dry narrative has occasioned critical censure, but the impoverishment of its style is Milton’s self-conscious choice, a choice imaged in a salt and bare Eden. It is probably significant that Michael does not show Adam the fate of Eden in a vision but tells him about it: the shift to narration has already begun, and this new mode enacts the aridity it portrays. Noah has built his ark to survive the Flood, but the circus animals have deserted.

Milton thus places the grand epic edifice of Paradise Lost between its idolatrous double, the temple of Pandaemonium, and a desert isle whose bareness is a related, bleaker version of the “universal blank” (3.48) of his poet-narrator’s blindness. From its opening invocation, Paradise Lost has been about the cessation of external oracles and supersession of state temples in favor of an internal shrine: the “oracle of God” (1.12) of the Jerusalem Temple Mount is replaced six verses later by “the upright heart and pure” (1.18) of the individual believer that the Spirit prefers before all temples. So, in the last section of Michael’s narrative, the few endangered true believers have become the Spirit’s “living temples, built by faith to stand, / Their own faith not another’s” (12.527–28). So Michael’s final advice to Adam will return to the catalog of golden, earthly empires in book 11 (all once part, we want to remember, of the same 1667 book 10) and will urge him, in place of “all the riches of this world … / And all the rule, one empire” (12.580–81), and in place of Eden itself, to embrace “A paradise within thee, happier far” (12.587) of spirituality and love. So readers at the end of Paradise Lost walk away from the poem itself, leaving its riches behind for—or making those riches part of—their own inner resources.19

Tied to this final, unequivocal rejection of empire is Milton’s ambivalence toward the power of his own imagination and the wealth of the classical literary tradition that Paradise Lost has housed as treasure in its memory palace.²⁰ Paradise Regained will end with a similar supersession of the temple on which Jesus stands; Samson destroys the profane temple and theater of Dagon at the climax of Samson Agonistes. But these iconoclastic, farewell gestures, like the washing away of Eden, only come at the conclusion of these works, when their poetic achievements are assured: Milton has become the oracle he promised for the man of letters in his early Latin Prolusion 7 at Cambridge—“to be the oracle of many nations, to find one’s home regarded as a kind of temple” (CPW 1:297, Works 12:266; Multarum Gentium oraculum esse, domum quasi templum habere)—but this oracle, too, ceases and its living temple shuts down.²¹ Paradise Lost is not a self-consuming artifact, but it appears to have consumed its tradition and genre: once utilized as the building block of Milton’s inspired poem, epic cannot be salvaged to carry out its former business as usual. As an image of the larger Paradise Lost, Eden is the realization of the opportunity for a true, sacred epic that was already potentially compromised by its own bounty and that will not come again, its riches too dangerous to be left in others’ profane hands.²² That is, the critical chestnut that the epic tradition finishes with Paradise Lost is scripted by the poem itself.

Michael’s prophecy of Eden’s destruction forecloses the epic field to others, as does its primary epic model, the prophecy in Iliad 12 (10–33) that the wide wall surrounding the Greek ships would stand so long as Hector was alive and Achilles was angry—that is, for the duration of the Iliad itself—but that after the fall of Troy the gods would turn the rivers of Ida upon it and wash it out to sea, leaving a sand beach: no later bard would or should be able to revisit this poetic terrain.23 The angelic guard posted by the gate of Eden serves a similar purpose: no one will tread on the sacred ground of Milton’s epic, whether demons or poetic successors—the difference scarcely seems to matter. The original garden will eventually be swept away, beyond recovery. At the beginning of Milton’s epic tradition, the Iliad had warned its readers to beware of imitations. Now Paradise Lost, which tells the beginning and ending of history, contests the priority of the Iliad and takes over its claim to nonrepeatability: Milton would begin and end a literary history as well. Adam and Eve in the poem’s final lines descend from the wealth of Eden to the “subjected plain” (12.640) of plainer style and subject. They have a world all before them, but one of lower generic expectations; the gates of epic close behind them.