Note on italics and emphasis: All appearances of italics in verse citations in this book, whether of Milton’s poetry or the works of other poets, represent my emphases designed to bring out key terms and correspondences among passages. The texts of Milton’s poetry that I follow in the edition of John Carey and Alastair Fowler do not use italic script except in the case of Paradise Lost 5.513–14.
Notes to the Introduction
1. Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 3–4.
2. Does Milton expect the reader of Paradise Lost to know his Poems of 1645 in the same way that Virgil expects the reader of the Aeneid to know and catch echoes of his earlier Eclogues and Georgics? Did he intend, that is, to invent the Miltonist? This book begs the question.
3. Paradise Lost follows traditional epic form and divides into books that can be read for their own internal structure, logic, and coherence. These divisions counter the poem’s narrative exuberance: its action spills over from book to book and only comes to a full stop at the end of book 8 (book 7 in the 1667 version) where, like the Creator-God it describes, the poem takes a Sabbatarian rest; Satan himself takes a seven-day sabbatical before resuming his assault on humanity in book 9. Satan seems similarly to have dropped out of the narrative at the end of book 4, when he flees from Gabriel before the judgment of God; but the dream he has induced continues to operate in Eve’s memory at the beginning of book 5, and Satan soon reappears as the protagonist of Raphael’s narrative of the rebellion and War in Heaven. He is only absent from the poem during its books or book of creation, 7–8, before he definitively exits from its action in book 10, his place taken by his children Sin and Death. The overflowing of its container books by the narrative in Paradise Lost is typically Miltonic and resembles its long verse sentences and their frequent enjambment. Both resemble his writing in the modern Italian sonnet form of Della Casa and Tasso, in which sentences run across the formal divide between octave and sestet, and the couplets in Lycidas that frequently bridge the ending of one verse paragraph and the beginning of the next. On these latter cases, see Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 14–33, 85–88.
4. Frye, “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” in Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, 125.
5. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry.
6. All citations of Milton’s verse, both English and Latin, are taken from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Longmans Annotated English Poets (Harlow, UK: Longmans, 1968). When I refer to Fowler’s notes to Paradise Lost, I am citing from his 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1998), hereafter referred to as PL. Citations from Milton’s prose are taken from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter referred to as CPW. Where the original of the prose is in Latin, the text is taken from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38); hereafter referred to as Works.
7. Ariosto’s passage (especially 17.73.7–8; Orlando furioso [OF]) echoes, in turn, a similar invective in Petrarch’s Triumph of Fame 2.143–45: “gite superbi, o miseri Cristiani / consumando l’un l’altro, e non vi caglia / che’l sepolcro di Cristo è in man de’ cani!” (go your proud ways, wretched Christians, consuming each other, while it matters not to you that the sepulcher of Christ lies in the hands of dogs!). Milton is tapping into a long poetic history.
8. See Davies, Images of Kingship in “Paradise Lost”: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty, 51–88; Davies, 71–72, correctly senses that unity of the devils at 2.495–505 glances at the unity of the Turks under their sultan, but she does not cite the specific allusions to the Camões and Ariosto passages.
9. Milton, in fact, equates Turkish Islam, maintained by force, with Catholicism and, finally, with any state-enforced or pecuniary religion in Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (CPW, 7:318).
10. Bloom, The Map of Misreading, 125–43. See also Teskey, Delirious Milton, 123–27, for the idea that Milton practices a kind of Christian spoliation of classical literary tradition, leaving that tradition defaced and incomplete.
11. Hampton, “ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” 58–82, and, a subsequent version in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France, 35–65.
12. This view of Paradise Lost runs counter to Frank Kermode’s insistence on its tragic effect and its origins as a tragedy. See his essay, “Adam Unparadised,” in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 260–97; see also Wilson, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, 164–206.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Colin Burrow notes how the martial energies and action of book 1 take a “nosedive” in Epic Romance: Homer to Milton, 263–68.
2. On Satan’s most spectacular use of force—his invention of artillery—already as a form of fraud, see Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 131–32.
3. Two notable critical discussions of the catalog are found in Rosenblatt, “ ‘Audacious Neighborhood’: Idolatry in Paradise Lost, Book I,” 553–68, which relates the contagion of idolatry and the need to divorce and separate the impure from the pure to later developments in the Fall of Adam and Eve, and Lyle, “Architecture and Idolatry in Paradise Lost,” 129–55, which traces a narrative progression, a falling into ever worse forms of idolatry in the catalog; Lyle sees the poem taking a more neutral attitude toward the Jerusalem temple itself than the critical one I shall ascribe to it below. See also Broadbent, who emphasizes the anti-Catholic elements of the catalog, in Some Graver Subject: An Essay on “Paradise Lost,” 88–95; Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve, 67–85; Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing, 83–87.
4. On Belial, on Milton’s conflation of Sodom and Gibeah, and on Milton’s intention to write a drama on the Sodom story, see Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 114–55; Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 72–73.
5. Vossius, De Theologia Gentili et Physiologia Christiana, 345–46; Vossius, 346, notes the discrimination that the Greeks made between Comus and Priapus; Fowler indicates Jerome’s commentary in his note to 1.415–17. John Selden discusses Chemos-Priapus in his De Diis Syris, 161; Selden’s work was Milton’s most important source of information about the gods of the ancient Near East.
6. Diodorus Siculus 20.14.4–7 and the passages in Quintus Curtius, Lactantius, and Augustine cited below. On the whole subject, see Warmington, Carthage, 155–62.
7. Biblical references are to the King James Version of the Bible unless indicated otherwise.
8. Curtius, History of Alexander, 1:195.
9. Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Books I–VII, 82. The Lactantius passage is cited by Selden, De Diis Syris, 181–82.
10. Augustine, City of God, 233–34.
11. Blessington, “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic, 6; Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 58–59.
12. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, 120.
13. Rebecca W. Smith, “The Source of Milton’s Pandemonium,” 187–98.
14. In book 2, Mammon proposes that the devils build a “nether empire, which might rise / By policy, and long process of time, / In emulation opposite to heaven” (2.296–98), a Carthage against God’s true and only Rome. For some of the parallels to Virgil’s Carthage that follow, see Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic, 7–8. Charles Martindale criticizes Blessington’s exclusive identification of Pandaemonium with Carthage and Dido in his John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, 4–5.
15. On Michael’s action, see Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 123–24; Fowler on 12.637–38.
16. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Academica, 331–33.
17. Selden, De Diis Syris, 151.
18. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 76–77.
19. Riggs, The Christian Poet in “Paradise Lost,” 32–33.
20. Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 127–28, within his larger discussion, 119–70, of Milton’s use of the Bible’s sacred geography—Mount Zion versus Mount Sinai—in Paradise Lost.
21. See the discussion in Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, 568–74. I am also indebted to an unpublished paper by James Nohrnberg, “Jerusalem Transposed: On the Axes of Western Epic.”
22. Murrin, The Allegorical Epic, 153–71; Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 140–52.
23. Geneva Bible (New Testament), 58 recto.
24. Calvin, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 302.
25. Bloom, Map of Misreading, 125–43.
26. The Miltonic polemic against numbers continues in Paradise Regained; see Quint, Epic and Empire, 325–40. See also Forsyth, The Satanic Epic, 87–90.
27. The model here, as I have argued in an earlier study, is the Iliad where the absence of the sulking Achilles creates a kind of heroic vacuum that is eventually filled with the massed Greek and Trojan forces and the predominance of missile weapons, a threat to the individual heroism that the return of Achilles will restore. See Quint, Epic and Empire, 47–48.
28. Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” in Beyond Formalism, 120–23; Parker, Inescapable Romance, 153–57.
29. Milton gathers the scriptural testimony about devils as well as angels in book 1, chapter 9 of his De Doctrina Christiana; CPW 6:343–50. On the fallen angels’ loss of their names, see Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 67–85.
30. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 95–97.
31. Corbet, Poems of Richard Corbet, 50–51.
32. Augustine, City of God, 235.
33. Nock, ed., Corpus Hermeticum 2: Traités XIII–XVIII; Asclepius, 347; Copenhaver, trans., Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, 90; cited by Augustine in City of God (8.24), 272.
34. Augustine, City of God, 274.
35. What follows takes up the observation of Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” 122: “Thus the whole cycle of to and fro, big and small … is continued when we learn, in the final lines of Book 1, that far within Pandemonium, perhaps as far from consciousness as hell is from the thoughts of the Peasant or demonic power from the jocund if intent music of the fairy revelers, Satan and the greatest Lords sit in their own, unreduced dimensions.”
36. Murrin, Allegorical Epic, 17, invokes the empty inner sanctum of the temple in his analysis of Milton’s depiction of heaven.
37. On Babelic noise in Paradise Lost, see Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics, 14–34.
38. Polybius, Rise of the Roman Empire, 476. See Cowan, “The Clashing of Weapons and Silent Advances in Roman Battles,” 114–17.
39. Ammianus Marcellinus, Historia 16.12.13, in Ammianus Marcellinus, 1:270–71.
40. Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, 199.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. This chapter, as later notes will also indicate, is indebted to the teaching of and conversations with James Nohrnberg, to his unpublished essay, “Jerusalem Transposed on the Axes of Western Epic,” and to his article, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man,” 83–114. For some other treatments of the figure of Ulysses in Paradise Lost, see Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 65–68; Blessington, “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic, 1–18, 50–67; Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition, 131–36; Steadman, Milton’s Epic Characters, 194–208.
2. The fiction of book 2 is further populated—and further unified—by its allusions to later epic voyagers who recall and are modeled on Homer’s Ulysses: Jason in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (2.1016–18); and Virgil’s Aeneas, who also sailed past Scylla and Charybdis, following in the literal and literary historical wake of Homer’s Ulysses. Satan’s fall through Chaos alludes, as we shall see in chapter 3, to Dante’s Ulysses in Inferno 26, his ship swallowed by the sea on his final journey outside the Mediterranean. Satan’s trip to what Beelzebub terms “The happy isle” (2.410) of God’s “new world” (2.403) recalls, too, the Atlantic voyage of Tasso’s knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, to the Fortunate Isles in canto 15 of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (GL): these crusaders are explicitly told that they are sailing, as will the future Columbus, on the westward course that earlier claimed Dante’s unfortunate Ulysses (GL 15.25–32). Critics have further seen in Satan’s trip across Chaos a complex of allusions to Vasco da Gama’s eastern voyage of discovery to India in Camões’s Os Lusíadas around the Cape of Good Hope (4.159–65) in search of a route to India and the Spice Islands Ternate and Tidore (2.636–42); Camões touts his hero as a superior Ulysses from his epic’s third stanza. See Sims, “Camoens’ Lusiads and Milton’s Paradise Lost: Satan’s Voyage to Eden,” in Papers on Milton, 36–46; Quint, Epic and Empire, 253–66. To these versions of Ulysses one may add one more, surprising figure. Satan promises his fellow fallen angels to “seek / Deliverance for us all” (2.464–65). He tells Sin and Death that he comes “to set free / From out this dark and dismal house of pain, / Both him and thee” (2.822–24); he will “search with wandering quest a place foretold / Should be” (2.830–31). The associations with Moses are unmistakable, and they reappear when Satan lets Chaos know that he has been “Wandering this darksome desert” (2.973). As noted in the preceding chapter, hell is a kind of Egypt—or rather the Egypt of the Exodus was a biblical type of hell—and Satan becomes a Moses freeing the devils/Israelites and wandering in the desert, or, in his guise as “spy” (2.970) a Joshua or Caleb sent to spy out (Num. 13:16) the land of Canaan: the latter are recalled again when Satan first looks down in book 3 on God’s creation through an opening compared to the passageway that would in later times open over that Promised Land (3.531). Satan is himself compared in simile to “a scout / Through dark and desert ways with peril gone” (3.543–44), who now eyes “The goodly prospect of some foreign land / First seen” (3.548–49). The alignment of the wanderings of Moses in search of an ancestral homeland with the wanderings of Ulysses was not a commonplace, but it turns up within a few years of Paradise Lost, in the 1656 preface to Abraham Cowley’s Poems. In defending the biblical subject matter of his epic poem, the Davideis, Cowley asks, “Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more Poetical variety then [sic] the voyages of Ulysses or Æeneas?” Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:89. Milton’s fiction, I think, picks up on this suggestion. By effecting a worldly deliverance of his devils and leading them into a takeover of God’s Holy Land, Satan has rewritten the Exodus all too much into a pagan Odyssey. Satan as Moses is one more version of Ulysses in book 2.
3. Unflattering portraits of Ulysses in Greek tragedy (Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Hecuba and Rhesus) precede the censorious Roman view of his Greek guile in Virgil’s Aeneid. Plutarch feels called upon to defend the hero’s actions from his critics in De audiendis poetis [How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poems], 8.
4. On contaminatio, a nonclassical term, and its Renaissance practice, see Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 156–69; but, against my argument, see 40, where Greene distinguishes Milton’s imitation from the contaminatio of a Poliziano.
5. Blumenberg discusses the Ulysses of Dante’s Inferno 26 as the avatar of modernity and its spirit of curiosity and free inquiry in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 338–40.
6. On wandering and wandering thoughts in Paradise Lost, see Parker, Inescapable Romance, 140–41, 156–58.
7. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. Milton’s criticism of the humanistic Ulysses is close to Dante’s condemnation of the hero in Inferno 26. See Mazzotta, Dante’s Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, 65–106: of particular interest for Milton are Mazzotta’s remarks on the circularity that surrounds the existence of Ulysses; see also Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 15–28, 138–51. I will argue in chapter 3 for a textual connection to Dante’s Ulysses in Satan’s fall through Chaos at Paradise Lost 2.927–38.
8. On the demonic council of book 2, see the fundamental discussion by Broadbent in Some Graver Subject, 110–20.
9. The debate between Ovid’s Ulysses and Ajax in Metamorphoses 13 is a master structuring model for the episodes and characters of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the most prestigious among the modern epics preceding Paradise Lost; see Quint, “The Debate between Arms and Letters in the Gerusalemme Liberata,” in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Aftermath; Essays in Honor of John Freccero, ed. Stewart and Cornish, 241–66.
10. See Hardie, “Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid, in Vergil’s “Aeneid”: Augustan Epic and Political Context, ed. Stahl, 243–70, 262–63.
11. Cicero, De Officiis, 115.
12. “Peroratio plàne tragicus es, immo Ajax Lorarius …” Works 7:40.
13. “An Poeta non meministi, cùm de Achillis mortui armis, Ajax & Ulysses contenderent, non Graecos populares sed Troianos hostes ex sententia Nestoris Judices datos?” Works 8:82.
14. “quamquam enim Ulyssem, id est, quàm optimè de patria meritum me esse sane perquàm vellem, tamen Achilleïa arma non ambio; coelum in clypeo pictum, quod alii, non ego, in certamine aspiciant, praeferre, onus non pictum sed verum, humeris portare, quod ego, non alii sentiant, non quaero.” Works 8:84.
15. The posture recalls the paralysis of the seated Lady in Comus and the invitations of Satan to Jesus in Paradise Regained to “Sit down and eat” (2.375) or to sit on “David’s throne” (3.153) and/or “Moses’ chair” (4.219), all Miltonic figures of immobility.
16. See Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 116.
17. Hamlet’s soliloquy is one Shakespearean model. Fowler’s note to 2.146–51 connects Belial’s fear of death and to be “devoid of sense and motion” to the speech of Shakespeare’s Claudio in Measure for Measure 3.1.117–18: “This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod.” I am grateful to Lawrence Manley and Harold Bloom for pointing out to me how Claudio’s entire speech is distributed in the fiction of book 2:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, [penury], and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
(Measure for Measure 3.1.117–31)
Compare Claudio’s dread “to be worse than worst / Of those that lawless and uncertain thought / Imagine howling” (125–27) to Belial’s comments on what would be “worse,” Claudio’s fear of being imprisoned in the winds to Belial’s vision of being the sport of winds, Claudio’s prospect of fiery floods and thicked-ribbed ice, to the landscape of hell described later in the book where the devils at certain revolutions are brought “From beds of raging fire to starve in ice” (2.600). “The pendant world” is the original for Milton’s “This pendent world” at the end of the book (2.1052).
18. The opening of spaces for human choice in Milton’s poetry, including the reader’s choosing among its possible meanings, is the subject of Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs.
19. See Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 86–87, for the general parallel to the council in Iliad 2.
20. Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton, 154–55, 174–77. See Forsyth, Satanic Epic, 110–13.
21. On Thersites, see the studies collected in La Penna, Tersite censurato e altri studi letteratura fra antico e moderno. La Penna points out the connection between Thersites and Virgil’s Drances (113–20), and Milton may here, too, have already intuited this connection in his pairing of the Drances figure Belial with the Thersites figure Mammon.
22. Tasso’s Goffredo wields a golden scepter when he puts down the rebellion of the Thersites-like Argillano in canto 8 of the Gerusalemme liberata (8.78).
23. Rumrich, Matter of Glory.
24. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 110–15. For Milton’s general polemic against human kingship, see Davies, Images of Kingship, and the fundamental remarks of Frye, The Return of Eden, 106–14.
25. Many critics disagree, but they seem to me to be the heirs of a romantic tradition that identified Milton’s revolutionary politics with Satan’s; both regimes and parliaments may, of course, be implicated in the satire. For some more recent views, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660, 442, 452–55; Corns, Regaining “Paradise Lost,” 134–38; Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 199–210; Armitage, “John Milton: Poet against Empire,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, 206–25; Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,” in Milton and Republicanism, 181–205; Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery, especially 55–81. For a discussion of Satan as a modern politician, whether royalist or republican, and the tradition of the parliament of devils in pamphlet literature contemporary to Milton, see Benet, “Hell, Satan, and the New Politician,” in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Benet and Lieb, 98–113.
26. Colin Burrow identifies this model in Epic Romance, 265–66; it was first pointed out to me by James Nohrnberg. The episode is retold in the Rhesus of Euripides. It also stands, as Burrow’s study shows, at the beginning of a whole series of subsequent epic imitations, starting with Virgil’s Nisus and Euryalus episode in the Aeneid. Burrow notes, 67, that Ariosto’s version of the night exploit, modeled on the Nisus and Euryalus episode and its imitation in Statius’s Thebaid (10.346–48), is the episode of Medoro and Cloridano that leads to the love story of Medoro and Angelica, the cause, in turn of Orlando’s madness, and the turning point of the Orlando furioso: “Ariosto makes Virgil’s dead episode thrill with continuing life, and causes the main action of his poem.” Tasso’s version, the celebrated duel between Tancredi and Clorinda in canto 12 of the Gerusalemme liberata, is modeled on Virgil’s episode and a different imitation of that episode in later Roman epic, a vignette of confused identity and patricide in the darkness of night in the Punica of Silius Italicus (9.66–177), and it similarly is the pivotal event of its epic. The wounded Medoro is rewarded by being brought to life and receiving the love of the universally desired Angelica; Clorinda dies, but receives baptism and eternal life before she expires. Milton’s Italian predecessors had thus already made the Doloneia-type episode central to their poem; and Milton’s explicit return to the model of Iliad 10 followed a modern practice that inverted the epic tradition and turned apparent defeat, in this case the Son’s future death, into victory.
27. Burrow, Epic Romance, 266, notes that ancient Homeric scholia that doubted the authenticity of the Doloneia were available in print from 1521 onward.
28. Fowler, note to 4.894.
29. For the version that Enceladus is buried beneath Aetna, see Aeneid 3.578–82; for the version that it is Typhoeus, see Metamorphoses 5.346–58. The Hercules who dies in flames in the Hercules Oetaeus of Seneca is compared to both Typhoeus (Typhon) and Enceladus; see vv. 1732–34. For the conventional pairing of the two giants, see Claudian, De tertio consulatu Honorii 159–61; De sexto consulatu Honorii, praef. 17; Gigantomachia 32–33.
30. Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy, 253.
31. A bill to enforce transportation failed to pass Parliament in 1663; its place was supplied by royal warrant. See Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800, 470–83. For the argument that hell is a penal colony and part of God’s “empire,” see Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism.
32. Fowler, note to 2.628. “How false and vain is this opinion they know well from their own bitter experience who have ever felt the pangs of guilty consciences: they are beset by Sphinxes and Harpies, Gorgons and Chimeras, who hunt their victims down with flaming torches in their hands” (CPW 1:230–31; namque hanc vanam esse & nugatoriam opinionem infoelici nôrunt experentia, quicunque sceleris cujuspiam conscii sibi fuere; quos tunc Sphinges & Haryiae, quos tunc Gorgones & Chimaerae intentatis facibus insequuntur), Works, 12:144.
33. In his Adagia, Erasmus explains the proverbial state of being between Scylla and Charybdis as the acceptance of a lesser evil in place of a greater one or of steering a middle course between two equal dangers; see The Collected Works of Erasmus, 387–89 (adage 4.4).
34. For commentary on the Sin and Death episode, see Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 215–25; Martin, The Ruins of Allegory, 165–67, 182–94; Summers, The Muse’s Method, 32–70.
35. The model of the Telegony for Milton’s Sin and Death is pointed out and discussed by James Nohrnberg, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man,” 22, and by Don Cameron Allen in Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, 298–99. For the myth, see the ancient summary in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, trans. Evelyn-White, 530–31. The detail that the spear of Telegonus was tipped with the sting of a stingray is found in Oppian, Halieutica 2.496–505. See Nohrnberg, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man,” 11n22.
36. Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition.
37. Apocryphal New Testament, 134. Compare Vida’s rewriting of the Gospel of Nicodemus in book 6.198–215 of the Christiad, where the devils, human to the waist, serpents below (209), are so many versions of Milton’s Sin. Milton is also influenced by Spenser’s rewritings of the harrowing of hell in book 1 of the Faerie Queene, especially Arthur’s rescue of the Redcrosse knight from Orgoglio’s castle—the prison of Redcrosse’s own pride—in canto 8, which opens to the horn of Arthur’s squire Timias: “And every dore of freewill open flew” (1.8.5.3); Arthur himself rends the iron door to the seemingly bottomless pit, “as darke as hell” where Redcrosse is imprisoned (1.8.39.5–9) when none of Ignaro’s keys fit the lock. Ignaro, the refusal to recognize one’s own sin, suggests, too, Milton’s key-holding Sin, whom Satan does not recognize. The parody makes Satan the savior of the devils, who, through Sin and the subsequent Fall, will be released from hell to wander over the earth. It is in line with Satan’s parody in book 1 of the awakening of the sleeping dead at the Resurrection: “Awake, arise or be forever fallen” (1.330; Eph. 5:14), when he gets his fallen companions going again. It is also in line with the role of the Moses-like deliverer that Satan also assumes in the poem: see note 2 above.
38. See Lapide, Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, 21:360. “S. Augustinus, Primasius, Ticonius, Viegas, et Ribera, per infernum et mortem metonymice accipiunt diabolum, qui est princeps mortis et inferni.”
39. Ibid., 21:361. “Hucusque Alcazar, Arabicus pro mors, vertit abyssus, quia mors vastissimum habet os et ventrem, quo omnes morientes complectitur, instar abyssi horribilis: ‘Et abyssus,’ inquit, et infernus projecti sunt in stagnum ignis plenum sulphure.”
40. The “loudest vehemence” of Chaos parodies the “sonus tamquam advenientis spiritus vehementis” in the Vulgate Bible’s description of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles in Acts 2:2; we are meant to think of the Spirit brooding over the abyss at the Creation described in the opening invocation to the poem in book 1 (1.19–22) and again in the depiction of the Creation in book 7 (7.233–36).
41. This is not the only myth invoked by Satan’s fall through Chaos; see chapter 3 for the model of the fall of Icarus. Teskey notes that Milton’s Chaos is “a greedy gulf like Charybdis,” in Delirious Milton, 73.
42. The Odyssey parallel is discussed in Gallagher, Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny, 144–48, and by van der Laan, “Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusions and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost,” 48–76. See also Frye, Return of Eden, 99; Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 115–16.
43. Odyssey of Homer, 28.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Metamorphoses 1.750–2.400, 8.183–235; Tristia 1.1.79–91, 3.4.21–30. For some Renaissance examples, see Ronsard, Le Second Livre des Sonnets pour Helene 1.11, “Discours à Monsieur de Cheverny, garde des Seaux de France,” in the second part of the Bocage Royal, 95–108; Cam
es, Os Lusíadas 4.104.1–4; Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI 1.4.33–34, 2.6.11–13, 5.6.18–25. On Icarus as an image of excess and aspiration in seventeenth-century English writing, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 148–53. Late medieval allegorizers of Ovid identified Phaethon’s fall with the fall of Satan; see Davis Harding, Milton and the Renaissance Ovid, 15–16; Mulryan, Through a Glass Darkly: Milton’s Reinvention of the Mythological Tradition, 50.
2. Borris, “Allegory in Paradise Lost: Satan’s Cosmic Journey,” 101–33, has compared Satan’s flight through Chaos to other instances of flight, real, metaphorical, and poetic, in Paradise Lost. He does not note the mythic parallels of Icarus and Phaethon that I explore here; there is nonetheless some overlap in our discussions. Patrick Cheney examines the figure of poetic flight in the case of Spenser in Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career.
3. Segal, “Aeternum per saecula nomen, the Golden Bough and the Tragedy of History: Part II,” 50–52; Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid, 95.
4. Virgil, Aeneid VI, 33; see also P. Vergili Maronis Opera, 2:38, with reference to Virgil’s other use of “remigio alarum,” at Aeneid 1.301, describing the winged flight of Mercury.
5. For the doctrine of the void from antiquity into Milton’s seventeenth century, see Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution.
6. A distinguished exposition of this reading of the relationship of the two poets is found in Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, 157–240. See also Dyson, “Dido the Epicurean,” 203–21, and the critical response to Dyson by Gordon, “Dido the Phaeacian: Lost Pleasures of an Epicurean Intertext,” 188–211.
7. A similar Lucretian reading of the gates of ivory, reached by different arguments, is found in Michels, “Lucretius and the Sixth Book of the Aeneid,” 147.
8. Freccero, Dante, 15–24. Freccero acknowledges his debt to Courcelle, “Quelques symboles funéraires du néoplaonisme latin: Le vol de Dédale—Ulysses et les Sirènes,” 65–93. See also Thompson, Dante’s Epic Journeys. Borris, “Allegory,” evokes similar Platonic flights of the unaided contemplative intellect to gloss bad, satanic flight in Paradise Lost.
9. One can compare the formulation in Ovid’s other retelling of the Icarus story at the opening of the second book of the Ars Amatoria: “Remigium volucrum disponit in ordine pinnas” (2.45); here, too, Icarus is characterized by the audacity of his flight: “Icarus audaci fortius arte volat” (2.76).
10. I have contrasted the voyage of Ulysses, the voyage of Tasso’s boat of Fortune, and the voyage of Columbus in Quint, Epic and Empire, 248–67. The same discussion compares Tasso’s sea voyagers to the Satan who flies through Chaos in book 2 of Paradise Lost. The present discussion offers new interpretations that I think complement rather than contradict the findings in that earlier study.
11. The allegorization of Columbus’s name is elaborated upon in the first chapter of the biography of the explorer written by his son Fernando Colombo (1488–1539), a work that circulated in manuscript form and that was first published in an Italian translation in 1571—the original Spanish version is lost.
If we consider the common surname of his ancestors, we will say that he was truly a dove, because he carried the grace of the Holy Ghost to that New World which he discovered: he showed who was God’s beloved Son to the peoples there who did not know Him, just as the Holy Spirit did in the figure of a dove at the baptism of Jesus by St. John the Baptist; and because he similarly carried over the waters of the ocean, like the dove of Noah’s ark, the olive branch and oil of baptism for the unity and peace that those peoples were to achieve with the Church, because they had until then been shut up in the ark of shadowy darkness and confusion.
See Colombo, Storie del Nuovo Mondo, 23. Tasso reinforces the analogy between the voyage of Columbus and the sea journey of his personified Fortuna through the extended octave-long simile that compares the iridescent dress of the latter to the plumage of a dove—colomba—at canto 15, stanza 5 of the Liberata. The little ship of Fortune travels so fast that it appears to fly—“così la nave sua sembra che vole” (15.14.5): one of Tasso’s models are the semimagical ships of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, which “move swift as thought, or as winged creature” (7.36); one of these, running faster than “a falcon / That hawk that flies lightest of creatures” (13.86–87), carries Ulysses home after his romance wanderings.
12. Tasso’s fiction contains a further, parodic version of Elijah’s chariot, the enchanted chariot on which Armida flies to and back from her island.
Ella su ‘l carro suo, che presto aveva
s’assise, e come ha in uso al ciel si leva.
(16.70.7–8)
Calca le nubi e tratta l’aure a volo,
cinta di nimbi e turbini sonori,
passa i lidi soggetti a l’altro polo
e le terre d’ignoti abitatori;
passa d’Alcide i termini …
(71.1–5)
[She seated herself in her chariot, which she had ready to hand, and, as is its custom, it rises to the heavens. It treads the clouds and cleaves the winds in flight, girded with rain-clouds and loud whirlwinds, it passes the shores subject to the other pole, and the lands of unknown inhabitants, it passes the boundaries of Hercules …]
This magic chariot evokes the flying chariot of Medea, but it just as surely recalls the chariot of Elijah described by Dante in Inferno 26. Surrounded by clouds and whirlwinds in her chariot, which rises to heaven, Armida seems to be another version of the Dantesque Elijah at the moment when his horses reared and rose toward heaven—“quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi”; the prophet, we should recall, ascended by a whirlwind into heaven: “ascendit Elias per turbinem in caelum” (2 Kings 1:11).
Milton had himself evoked the chariot of Elijah in one of his earliest Latin poems, In Proditionem Bombardicam (On the Gunpowder Plot), probably written in 1626. The speaker of the epigram sarcastically addresses Guy Fawkes and asks him whether he intended an evil sort of piety in his attempt to blow up the King and Parliament and to send them to heaven like deathless Elijah.
Scilicet hos alti missurus ad atria caeli,
Sulphureo curru flammivolisque rotis.
Qualiter ille feris caput inviolabile Parcis
Liquit Iordanios turbine raptus agros. (5-8)
[It was I take it, to the halls of high heaven that you meant to blow them up in their sulphurous chariot with its wheels of whirling flame: you meant to blow them up just as that man whose life the fierce Parcae could not harm was swept up from Jordan’s banks in a whirlwind.]
The terms of this early poem return in our episode in book 2 of Paradise Lost when Satan appears to rise through Chaos “as in a cloudy chair [i.e. chariot] ascending” (930) only to start to fall through its depths. The devil is then hurried back aloft by an explosion “of some tumultuous cloud / Instinct with fire and nitre (936-37), natural gunpowder of the type that Satan has earlier, we subsequently learn, dug up out of the substrate of heaven for his canons in the celestial war (6.469-520). Satan is no Elijah, but he is a kind of Fawkes. Milton recalls his own juvenilia as well as the models of Tasso and Dante.
13. See Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius and the ‘Void Profound of Unessential Night,’ ” in Living Texts, ed. Pruitt and Durham, 198–210.
14. I enter here into a much-contested area of Milton criticism: the nature of Chaos in Paradise Lost. It will be clear that my description is close to that presented by Rumrich, “Of Chaos and Nightingales,” in Living Texts, ed. Pruitt and Durham, 218–27. Rumrich is responding to the powerful criticism of Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius,” in the same volume: Leonard emphasizes the horror of Chaos, a literal horror vacui; Rumrich both defends and moves slightly away from his earlier formulation about the goodness of Chaos in Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation; there, 118–33, he understood Chaos to constitute a passive, feminine aspect of God. Rumrich also offers a thoughtful rejoinder to the position of Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, 130–43, who sees the goodness of Chaos fatally compromised by its “tartareous cold infernal dregs / Adverse to life” (7.238–39). These correspond to Lucretius’s “faex” in De rerum natura 5.497, and may be more morally and politically neutral than Rogers suggests. These dregs seem to me to be the stuff out of which God makes hell, his Tartarus (2.858) and Inferno, a frozen “universe of death” (2.622), and thus serve his purpose: nothing is wasted, not even the waste products. I thus disagree with Sugimura’s contention that these dregs are assimilated into Night; Sugimura, “Matter of Glorious Trial”: Spiritual and Material Substance in “Paradise Lost,” 275–76. I agree with Rumrich and others in rejecting the quasi-Manichaean position of Schwartz, “Milton’s Hostile Chaos: … and the Sea Was No More,” 337–74, which assimilates Chaos with evil. Adams, “A Little Look into Chaos,” in Illustrious Evidence: Approaches to English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Miner, 71–89, places Chaos in opposition both to divine and satanic creativity. For a further discussion, see Hunter, “The Confounded Confusion of Chaos,” in Living Texts, ed. Pruitt and Durham, 228–36; Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in “Paradise Lost,” 16–24; Martin, Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphoses of Epic Convention, 186–200; Teskey, Delirious Milton, 65–85. The classic account of the cosmological learning behind Milton’s Chaos is Chambers, “Chaos in Paradise Lost,” 55–84.
15. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 117–18. Lewalski points out the difference between Phaethon’s near destruction of the earth by fire and the final apocalyptic fiery destruction of the earth that will lead to a new creation—this opposition, as we shall see below, is already found in Milton’s Natura non pati senium.
16. Harding, Milton and the Renaissance Ovid, 89–93; DuRocher, Milton and Ovid, 55–56.
17. See the note by Fowler to 6.100–102.
18. For related remarks on the War in Heaven and a return to Chaos, see Lieb, Dialectics of Creation, 118–24.
19. The assonance repeats the pattern already set at greater length in the first shock of the angelic forces encountering one another in battle:
Nor less hideous joined
The horrid shock; now storming fury rose,
And clamour, such as heard in heaven till now
Was never, arms on armour clashing brayed
Horrible discord …
(6.206–10)
20. In the war of the Olympian gods against the Titans, Pan blew on a conch shell trumpet, sending the Titans into panicked flight; on panic terror, see Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 115–46. The similarity to the Gadarene swine is spelled out at the end of Paradise Regained, 4.626–32. Note that there Jesus “all unarmed / Shall chase thee with the terror of his voice.” For the parallel to the sight of Apollo causing the panic of the foes of Augustus at Actium as it is depicted on the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8.704–6, see Quint, Epic and Empire, 41.
21. Hillier makes a similar argument in “ ‘By force or fraud / Weening to prosper’: Miton’s Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism,” 17–38, 31. Von Maltzahn describes the irony of literary history that would see the imitation of the War in Heaven, particularly of its mock-heroic depiction of the devils’ artillery, in poems celebrating the victories of William III and Marlborough; see von Maltzahn, “The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Houston and Pincus, 154–79.
22. The echo is pointed out in Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius,” 200–204.
23. Bush, in his edition of The Complete Poems of John Milton, 52 and 334, notes Milton’s later echo in the War in Heaven at Paradise Lost 6.673 of these lines in Natura non pati senium, and he cites their Ovidian provenance.
24. See DuRocher, Milton among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum, 145–47, for a critical discussion of another Miltonic “denial of Lucretius’s denials,” in this case focused on the wounds that earth feels at PL 9.782 and 9.1000–1004 in the wake of original sin.
25. See De Doctrina Christiana, chapter 13 in CPW 6:399–424; Works 15:214–50. DuRocher, Milton among the Romans, 174, notes the similarity between Lucretian teaching and Milton’s mortalism.
26. Lieb, Dialectics of Creation, 30.
27. For a discussion of Milton’s early interest in the bodily assumption of saints and its relation to his later embrace of mortalist doctrine, see Kerrigan, “The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism,” 125–66.
28. Fowler, note to 6.520–22.
29. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 402–7, 670n38.
30. Du Bartas, La Sepmaine texte de 1581, 7.
31. Sylvester, trans., The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, 1:115.
32. I owe this observation to conversations with Jennifer Clarvoe.
33. For another reading of the figure of Bellerophon that emphasizes the hero’s chastity, see Fallon, “Intention and Its Limits in Paradise Lost: The Case of Bellerophon,” in Literary Milton, ed. Benet and Lieb, 161–79.
34. Horace, Odes and Epodes, 286.
35. Ellen Oliensis, “Return to Sender: The Rhetoric of Nomina in Ovid’s Tristia,” 192n18, notes how Ovid presents himself in the Tristia (1.1.89–90; 3.4.21–24) as a poetic Icarus, whose highflying may have resulted in a fall but who has nonetheless gained a famous name for himself. Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, 294–96, takes up Oliensis’s suggestions; Hardie points out the Horatian intertext of Odes 4.2.
36. There may be an obscene double entendre in this passage, as Milton tells Diodati he is not doing much of anything.
37. Appropriately enough, the Oxford English Dictionary notes the first use of “depressed” with this sense in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), II.ii.6.2, where Robert Burton is translating Cicero on the power of oratory to cure melancholy: “Assuredly a wise and well-spoken man may do what he will in such a case; a good orator alone, as Tully holds, can alter affections by the power of his eloquence, ‘comfort such as are afflicted, erect such as are depressed, expel and mitigate fear lust, anger,’ etc.” Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 2:113. Burton goes on in the next section of his book to praise the remedy of music, including the music of poets like Orpheus, Amphion, and Arion.
38. Compare, too, the music that alleviates the state of the fallen angels in hell in book 1.556–59: “Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage, / With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase / Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain / From mortal or immortal minds.”
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Greene discusses these patterns in The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity, 388, as markers of two insistent dimensions of Paradise Lost that play on verticality and on light and darkness.
2. MacCaffrey, “The Theme of Paradise Lost, Book 3,” in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Kranidas, 58–85. My discussion covers some of the same ground as MacCaffrey’s essay, particularly her discussion on different kinds of vision, though largely to different ends. MacCaffrey emphasizes the difference between vision and the hearing of God’s word, and notes the space that divine dialogue takes up in the episode of Milton’s heaven.
3. Milton appears wistfully to echo On Education when Adam responds to Raphael’s “one first matter all” speech by declaring that the angel has shown him the scale of nature “whereon / In contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (5.510–12). In one sense, he is right: Raphael has shown Adam and Eve how, by analogy with the odors given off by the flowers of a plant, the human body can rise to reason and contemplation itself. But this is not the same thing as forming an idea of an invisible heaven and deity from the created universe. Moreover, Raphael has proposed a possible—“perhaps” (5.496)—human future of participation in angelic food (not exactly contemplation, in any case) and winged travel to heaven that he already knows will not take place because of the Fall. Adam, in fact, immediately follows his words by asking Raphael what he could have meant by “If ye be found / Obedient,” as if to cancel out this idea of contemplative ascent.
4. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, 104.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. The argument that follows shares much with the discussion of accommodation in Madsen’s From Shadowy Types to Truth, particularly where Madsen discusses Milton’s uneasiness about reading the world and Book of Nature in terms of Neoplatonic correspondences (85–144); Madsen may overly emphasize the gap between prelapsarian and postlapsarian experience to explain the discontinuity between created world and Creator. Victoria Silver insists on this discontinuity, perhaps to the point of rending the unity of creation in Paradise Lost in Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony; she questions the monism attributed to Milton on 359–63n12. On the material unity of Milton’s universe, see, among others, Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost,” 192–262; Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 53–82; Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England; Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 103–43.
8. Jackson I. Cope maps out some of the patterns of light in book 3 in a discussion of light and darkness in the larger epic; see Cope, The Metaphoric Structure of “Paradise Lost,” 106–10.
9. Broadbent notes the framing pattern in Some Graver Subject, 157.
10. For the tradition, see Dölger, Sol Salutis.
11. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, 325.
12. Ibid., 337.
13. Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron, Aratus, trans. A. W. Mair and G. R. Mair, 51. The translators are evidently influenced by Milton’s language in book 3.
14. On the Son as feminized moon, see Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 185–86.
15. Many of the solar terms of Elegy V, of On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, and of the discussion of light, sunlight, and darkness in book 3 of Paradise Lost were already set out in one of the very first works from Milton’s pen, the first Latin prolusion presented at Cambridge on Whether Day is more excellent than Night (Works 12:118–49; CPW 1:218–33). For the earth decking herself out for the Sun, and the ubiquity of solar worship, including among the Indians of the New World, see Works 12:139; CPW 1:228. Tillyard further relates Prolusion 1 to the daytime and nocturnal worlds of the L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in The Miltonic Setting, 1–27. There is a special pathos, perhaps recognized by the blind elderly Milton, when he first published this piece of juvenilia in 1674, in its prospect of a realm of darkness, where the eye of the world has been put out, descending back into ancient Chaos. Works 12:142; CPW 1:229–230.
16. One can compare the similar ambition that Milton expressed in the verses of At a Vacation Exercise in the College, originally attached to the sixth of his Latin prolusions, and probably composed just before Elegy V:
the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven’s door
Look in, and see each blissful deity
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings
To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal nectar to her kingly sire;
(33–39)
17. See Pecheux, “The Image of the Sun in Milton’s Nativity Ode,” 315–33; Quint, “Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode,” 195–219.
18. See Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 181–92, on this inspiration as a form of divine impregnation of the poet, made empty and thus feminized by his blindness.
19. Phillips, The Life of Milton, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Verse, ed. Hughes, 1035.
20. Works, 15:28: “INVISIBILIUM saltem nobis, sunt coelum supremum, qui thronus est et habitaculum Dei et coelites sive Angeli.”
21. Baxter, The Life of Faith, 150. For a salutary caution against the uncritical use of Baxter to gloss Milton’s writings, see Rumrich, Milton Unbound, 29–33.
22. For the hidden nature of Milton’s God, and for the closed system of signification that governs Milton’s depiction of heaven, see chapter 6, “The Language of Milton’s Heaven,” in Murrin, Allegorical Epic, 153–71.
23. See especially 1.571–73; 6.791.
24. Samuel, “The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III, 173–202,” 601–11.
25. See Wilson, Mocked with Death, 152–53, 176–78.
26. MacCaffrey, “The Theme,” 61.
27. “I come no spy” (2.970) Satan lies to the personified Chaos in book 2, and goes on to say that he is “Wandering this darksome desert” (2.973) of Chaos itself. See chapter 2, note 2.
28. The Orphic Hymns, trans. Athanassakis, 12–15. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses 4:228, where Apollo declares himself “mundi oculus.” Waddington looks at the tradition and the typology of Christ as the Sun of righteousness in “Here Comes the Son: Providential Theme and Symbolic Pattern in Paradise Lost, Book 3,” 256–66. Waddington’s allegorical reading of the created world seems to collapse what he calls the “pious and conventional distinction between the created and the Creator” (257).
29. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 162.
30. Milton probably has a particular royal hypocrite in mind in his portrait of the false piety of Satan that fools Uriel: Charles I, the same figure he has in mind in his book 4 portrait of a Satan who, if offered an “act of grace,” would “recant / Vows made in pain, as violent and void” (4.93–97), and start his nefarious ways again. He is rewriting his earlier attack on the portrait of the executed king in the hagiographic Eikon Basilike. In Milton’s own response to this piece of royalist propaganda in Eikonoklastes (1649), he had ridiculed Charles’s supposed prayer for the eventual conversion to Protestantism of his Catholic wife Maria-Henrietta, and concludes the chapter:
But what is it that the blindness of hypocrisy dares not doe? It dares pray, and thinks to hide that from the eyes of God, which it cannot hide from the op’n view of man? (CPW 3:422)
In the earlier controversial work, Milton had insisted on the perfect legibility of Charles’s hypocrisy: it would be hard to fool God, if you cannot fool human sight. By the time of Paradise Lost, however, the Restoration had ensued and Eikonoklastes had been burned by the public executioner. Milton had to admit that yes, you could fool all of the people all of the time, and in his poem, he reversed the terms of his earlier tract. Blindness belonged not to the kingly hypocrite but to his subjects, who had welcomed back Charles’s no less hypocritical son and namesake.
31. Third Letter on Sunspots, in the Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 143. In the First Letter, Galileo wrote, “I do not assert on this account that the spots are clouds of the same material as ours, or aqueous vapors raised from the earth and attracted by the sun. I merely say that we have no knowledge of anything that more closely resembles them. Let them be vapors or exhalations then, or clouds, or fumes sent out from the sun’s globe or attracted there from other places; I do not decide on this—and they may be any of a thousand other things not perceived by us” (100).
32. For some rich discussion, along other lines, of the sun in Paradise Lost, see Hartman, “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum,” in Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 124–50.
33. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 38. See PL 5.261–63.
34. Murrin, Allegorical Epic, 160–61, for similar doubts.
35. Compare book 5, vv. 439–44.
36. MacCaffrey, “The Theme,” 80.
37. On the bad winds of Chaos and of the Paradise of Fools, see Lieb, Dialectics of Creation, 30–34. See also Martin, “ ‘What If the Sun Be Centre to the World?’: Milton’s Epistemology, Cosmology and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered,” 231–65, for an analysis of Milton’s confrontation with Dante in the episode.
38. Joseph Addison objected to the episode in The Spectator 297: “I must in the next Place observe that Milton has interwoven in the Texture of his Fable some Particulars which do not seem to have Probability enough for an Epic Poem, particularly in the actions he ascribes to Sin and Death, and the Picture he draws of the Limbo of Vanity, with other Passages in the second Book. Such allegories rather savour of the spirit of Spencer and Ariosto, than of Homer and Virgil.” The Spectator (London, 1712), 4:174; italics in original. See also Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 162–63. The comedy of the passage is defended in Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to “Paradise Lost,” 55–58; Summers responds to Addison whom he cites earlier, 35–36. MacCaffrey, “The Theme,” 76–77, describes the role of the episode in the larger thematic structure of book 3.
39. Ficino, “Concerning the Sun,” chapter 3 in Renaissance Philosophy, 121.
40. Ibid., chapter 6, 128. In chapter 11, 135, Ficino distinguishes divine Light from the “weak mass of the light of the sun,” and attributes to God what was merely a symbolic Platonic principle: “the Soul of the World generates, moves and warms everything by its vital heat.” See also the commentary by Ficino’s follower, Giovanni Nesi, to the Pythagorean saying, “Do not speak against the sun,” in his Symbolum Nesianum; Celenza, Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum Nesianum, 94–97.
41. Martin, “ ‘What If the Sun,’ ” 261–62.
42. The passage appears in chapter 10 of part 1 of De revolutionibus, cited in Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 179–80. Garin shows the provenance of Copernicus’s language from Ficino’s De Sole in “Per la storia della cultura filosofica del rinascimento: Letteratura ‘solare,’ ” 3–16.
43. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 268–69.
44. More, The Argument of Psychathanasia or The Immortality of the Soul 3.3.11.2–3, in The Complete Poems of Dr. Henry More, 77. The passage is cited in Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle, 160. On Kepler, see Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle, 150–54, and Lawson, “ ‘The Golden Sun in Splendor Likest Heaven’: Johannes Kepler’s Epitome and Paradise Lost, Book 3,” 46–51.
45. It might also lead to a non-Christian deism, perhaps an intermediate stop on the way to sheer materialism. Selden’s De Diis Syris, published in 1617 and much reprinted throughout the century, was Milton’s source for knowledge of ancient Near Eastern sun cults; Milton could also have followed the arguments of Gerhard Vossius in the second book of his De Theologia Gentili, which deals with the pagan worship of heavenly bodies. D. P. Walker notes that Vossius, more than Selden, insists that ancient solar cults were not to be read symbolically—in Neoplatonic fashion—but as idolatrous worship of created nature; this seems to be Milton’s position. See Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, 186–87. Walker’s remarks appear in a discussion on the deist Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De Religione Gentilium, published posthumously in 1663. Herbert used Vossius as a source, but in fact defended the symbolic astral religion of the ancients; for Herbert’s remarks on solar worship, see Walker, 177–78.
46. The history of Diodorus Siculus Containing all that is Most Memorable and of greatest Antiquity in the first Ages of the World until the War of Troy, trans. Henry Cogan (London, 1653), 105, cited in Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 167. There is, however, no suggestion in this passage on natural history of the solar cult that Broadbent describes. My discussion is indebted to, even as it revises Broadbent’s bringing together of, the passages of Paradise Lost that refer to the sun. Broadbent argues that the verse of book 3 that describes the visible sun, precisely because it deals with the visible manifestation of a creative potency that Milton could not otherwise depict in his God, is too magnificent and tips the balance of the book, against the poet’s intentions, in favor of a carnal, pagan worldview: “instead of attributing to God, at reverent secondhand, the power and the glory which could not be manifest in Heaven itself, it tends towards a rationalisation of sun-worship.”
47. Julian, Letter 47, to the Alexandrians, The Works of the Emperor Julian, 3:149. Garin, “Letteratura ‘solare,’ ” 5–6, discusses how Julian’s worship of the sun was revived in the fifteenth-century neopaganism of Gemisthus Pletho and in the natural hymn to the Sun of the Neo-Latin poet Michael Marullus; see the commentary by Donatella Coppini in Marullus [Michele Marullo Tarcaniota], Inni naturali, 227–45.
48. See also Julian, Oration 4: Hymn to King Helios, 150a, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, 1:411. Julian may be indebted to Iamblichus, to whom Proclus, in his Commentary on the Timaeus, attributed the doctrine that the moon was the mother of creation in collaboration with the father sun. Proclus, Commentaire sur le Timée, 4:90. In his 1642 Apology against a Pamphlet [Apology for Smectymnus], Milton defends his prayer in section 4 of the 1641 Animadversions (see CPW 1:704–7) as “a hymne in prose, frequent both in the Prophets, and in humane authors” (CPW 1:930). He probably has Julian’s hymns in mind among the latter, especially the Hymn to King Helios; the Animadversions prayer depended heavily on light and sun imagery to describe the Reformation coming to rescue England from spiritual blindness (Julian in the Hymn, 131a, had referred to his own past as a Christian as a time of darkness), and Milton prayed against his country’s backsliding: “O if we freeze at noone after their earely thaw, let us feare lest the Sunne for ever hide himselfe, and turne his orient steps from our ingratefull Horizon justly condemn’d to be eternally benighted. Which dreadfull judgement O thou the ever-begotten light, and perfect Image of the Father, intercede may never come upon us, as we trust thou hast” (CPW 1:705).
49. Satan echoes and epitomizes his longer description of a seemingly—“as seems” (9.105)—geocentric universe in his earlier soliloquy addressed to the earth in book 9:
O earth, how like to heaven, if not preferred
More justly, seat worthier of gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
For what god after better worse would build?
Terrestrial heaven, danced round by other heavens
That shine, yet bear their bright officious lamps,
Light above light, for thee alone, as seems,
In thee concentring all their precious beams
Of sacred influence: as God in heaven
Is centre, yet extends to all, so thou
Centring receives from all those orbs; in thee,
Not in themselves, all their known virtue appears
Productive in herb, plant, and nobler birth
Of creatures animate with gradual life
Of growth, sense, reason, all summed up in man.
(9.99–113)
No sooner does Satan recognize the earth as built by a god, if not God, than he sets it up as a rival to God. His geocentrism is pointedly more materialist and actually less anthropocentric than Raphael’s heliocentric model, which has already conceded that the “bright luminaries” of the solar system are not to the earth “Officious, but to thee, earth’s habitant” (8.98–99). It is Satan who here makes literal the likeness of earth to heaven that Raphael had made iffy: “what if earth / Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein / Each to the other like, more than earth is thought” (5.574–76). We should be suspicious of the devil’s science.
50. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 166.
51. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, on iconoclasm, 116–17. See also Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, and Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. The relationship of Reformation thought and the New Science has been debated since the salvos of Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Theodore K. Rabb has objected that before the mid-seventeenth century, that is, in the period of the New Science’s emergence, scientific discoveries and developments took place and were shared in Catholic and Protestant countries alike; see Rabb, “Religion and the Rise of Modern Science,” 111–26. The relationship of science to Puritan millenarianism is the subject of Charles Webster’s important The Great Instauration.
52. Bacon, New Organon and Related Writings, 1.62; 59; Bacon’s Novum Organum, 235.
53. New Organon, 1.65, 62; Bacon’s Novum Organum, 243.
54. New Organon, preface, 36; Bacon’s Novum Organum, 183. Bacon repeats the idea with identical language in aphorism 1.128, 116; 327.
55. Garin, “La nuova scienza e il simbolo del ‘libro’ ” (1954), in La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano, 450–67, 457; Foucault, The Order of Things.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. At the beginning of Abraham Cowley’s unfinished epic Davideis, Cowley’s Satan, determined to rouse King Saul’s hatred against David, God’s anointed (1.115–16), calls for help from his infernal crew: “dares none / Attempt what becomes Furies?” he asks (1.137–38). The scene imitates the Doloneia in Iliad 10, the same episode that we have seen Milton use both to depict Satan’s volunteering to journey to earth in the council scene in hell in book 2 and for the Son’s volunteering in book 3 to save mankind. There ensues the same silence that is found in both the Greek and Trojan camps in Iliad 10 and in both Milton’s hell and heaven, where devils and angels, respectively, sit and stand mute. Cowley draws this silence out and builds the suspense with further elaboration. At last, a volunteer is found.
The quaking Pow’ers of Night stood in amaze,
And at each other first could onely gaze.
A dreadful Silence fill’d the hollow place,
Doubling the native terror of Hells face;
Rivers of flaming Brimstone, which before
So loudly rag’d, crept softly by the shore;
No hiss of Snakes, no clanck of Chains was knowne,
The Souls amidst their Tortures durst not groan.
Envy at last crawls forth from that dire throng,
Of all, the direfulst; her black locks hung long,
Attir’ed with curling Serpents; …
thus from the accursed crew
Envy, the worst of Fiends, herself presents
Envy, good onely when she her self torments.
(1.145–55, 166–68)
Envy crawls to the fore. Taking credit for Cain’s murder of Abel, for having driven Pharaoh into the Red Sea, and for the rebellion of Korah, Cowley’s Envy now proceeds to the task at hand and enters into the mind of Saul, making him envious of David (cf. 1 Sam. 18:9–10). This infernal council that gets the action going in the Davideis is one more suggestive precedent for Paradise Lost, where Satan will himself volunteer for the dirty warfare of the Doloneia in place of Cowley’s Envy. The difference is slight, however, because Milton’s Satan is the virtual personification of envy. Cowley, Davideis, 7. In Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks 2.1.2, The Imposture, the Satan who sets out to tempt Eve, the “old Python which through hundred throtes / Doth proudly hisse” (58–59; see Paradise Lost 10.529–31) is spurred and characterized by his envy: “His envious hart, self-swoln with sullen spight / Brooks neither greater, like, nor lesser wight: / Dreads th’one, as Lord; as equall, hates another; / And (jealous) doubts the rising of the other” (61–64). Divine Weeks, 1:340.
2. On Satan’s envy, see Revard, “Satan’s Envy of the Kingship of the Son of God: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, Book 5, and its Theological Background,” 190–98, and The War in Heaven: “Paradise Lost” and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion, 67–85; and the recent study of Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 233–64; Kilgour, 232, cites Wisdom 2:23, and more generally opposes satanic envy as a mirror, perverted or revealing, to Milton’s own poetic creativity and emulation.
3. Verbart puts the three passages together in “Milton on Vergil: Dido and Aeneas in Paradise Lost,” 111–26. Both DuRocher and Strier have discussed echoes of Aeneid 1.11 in Paradise Lost 6.788, 9.929–30, and in a third passage (4.118–19) that I do not discuss here. DuRocher, “Passion and Allusion in Paradise Lost,” 124–45; Strier, “Milton’s fetters, or, why Eden is better than Heaven,” 169–97. Neither critic discusses the Father’s echo of the line in bono in 3.216; it is noted by Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation, 3. See also Kilgour, “Satan and the Wrath of Juno,” 653–71.
4. In the invocation to book 9, Milton aligns God’s anger at the Fall—“Anger and just rebuke” (9.10) with the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad (14–15) and rage of Turnus, the second Achilles of the Aeneid (16–17), and then with the divine ire of Neptune in the Odyssey and, finally, of Juno in the Aeneid (18–19).
5. DuRocher, “Passion and Allusion,” 142, “Envy can dwell in heavenly breasts, Satan and his followers show. But such spirits do not remain heavenly for long.”
6. Rosenblatt, “Structural Unity and Temporal Concordance: The War in Heaven in Paradise Lost,” 33–34. DuRocher, “Passion and Allusion,” points out the verbal echo of Aeneid 7.583–84, the clamoring of the Italians for war, “perverso numine,” in spite of divine omens and oracles.
7. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3.9.20–21. See also Fresch, “ ‘Aside the Devil Turned / For Envy’: The Evil Eye in Paradise Lost, Book 4,” in Living Texts, ed. Pruitt and Durham, 118–30.
8. Bacon, Essays, 83.
9. Alciati, Emblemata, Lyons, 1550, 79.
10. The begetting and exaltation of the Son, and its repercussions, are an obligatory topic in criticism of Paradise Lost. For some important discussions, see Revard, “Satan’s Envy” and The War in Heaven; James Nohrnberg, “On Literature and the Bible,” 36–38; Davies, Images of Kingship, 133–63; Nyquist, “The Father’s Word/Satan’s Wrath,” 187–202; Ide, “On the Begetting of the Son in Paradise Lost,” 141–55; Williams, “The Motivation of Satan’s Rebellion in Paradise Lost,” 253–68; Gilbert, “The Theological Basis of Satan’s Rebellion and the Function of Abdiel in Paradise Lost,” 19–42; W. B. Hunter, “Milton on the Exaltation of the Son: The War in Heaven in Paradise Lost,” 215–31, and, against Hunter, Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 155–65; MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry, 79–87; Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 122–29; Labriola, “ ‘Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt’: The Christology of Paradise Lost,” 29–42.
11. See Pitt Harding, “ ‘Strange point and new!’: Satan’s Challenge to Nascent Christianity,” in Uncircumscribed Minds, ed. Durham and Pruitt, 113–28.
12. “Loud o’er the rest Cremona’s trump doth sound” (26), says Milton in “The Passion,” paying tribute to Vida and the Christiad.
13. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Gospel of John, Book 5, 73:482.
14. “Opponitur huic, religionis quam sequimur dissimulatio. Qualis erat Nicodemi.” Works 17:164–65.
15. The Apocryphal New Testament, 101.
16. Citations are taken from Vida, Christiad; translations are my own.
17. Samuel Fallon examines the problem that Milton confronts in depicting an unchanging God operating—through the Son—in time and narrative, principally in connection with the dialogue between God and the Son in book 3, in “Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost,” 48; the problem, he suggests, becomes an interpretative crux for Satan at the moment of the Son’s exaltation in book 5.
18. On Milton’s form of Arianism, see Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Dobranski and Rumrich, 75–92; Gregory Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement,” 354–69.
19. Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Schaff, 10:43.
20. On linear versus cyclical ideas of time in Christian thought and in relationship to Milton’s poems, see Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time, 8–17.
21. For the critical argument that the Son has been begotten as an angel, see Labriola, “ ‘Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt’ ” and “The Son as an Angel in Paradise Lost,” in Milton in the Age of Fish, ed. Lieb and Labriola, 105–13.
22. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 594, Hans Blumenberg remarks on this problem in Christian thought from the beginnings of the religion: “the Hellenistic world had also developed the philosophical critique of the myth of the gods and their ‘stories,’ and for this critique the metamorphoses of myth were in essence a lie, deceitful deception, misuse of the power of a god. He who was supposed to have brought the final truth could not get involved in a dimension of such ambiguity.” Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism is one way out of the dilemma, but it opens up new problems for Satan.
23. See Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), 197–98; Labriola, “The Son as Angel.” I am indebted to discussions with John Rogers on Milton’s Christology.
24. Nohrnberg, “On Literature and the Bible,” 36–38. See the description of the Greek gods in book 1 who are born out of heaven itself: “Titan Heaven’s first born / With his enormous brood, and birthright seized / By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove / His own and Rhea’s son like measure found” (1.510–13). In this pagan genealogy, usurpation is at the basis of rulership, and Satan hopes himself to usurp God’s throne.
25. In Milton’s God, William Empson provocatively asserts that Satan “is talking standard republican theory” when he protests the regency of the Son: “How can one of us justly become King over the rest, and give us laws though we arrange our affairs better without such an institution? And if he could, how could this be an adequate reason … for him to seek to be worshipped as a God, by misusing our customary terms of honour?” (75–76). This will be the question that Adam, as we shall see below, addresses to the earthly conquerors and kings of books 11 and 12 (see 12.64–71). But Empson’s view fails on two counts: like Satan, he treats God as one of those earthly kings, and despite some immediate qualifications, he downplays Satan’s own monarchical ambitions that arise precisely from this category error. The prince of this world does not, pace Empson, repent “for having let himself be adored on the throne of Hell” (76), and he is hardly a “conscientious republican” (77).
26. Although he does not mention envy, Roland Mushat Frye gives a trenchant and memorable account of the nihilism of Milton’s Satan in God, Man, and Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in “Paradise Lost,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the Great Theologians, 21–41.
27. Kerrigan remarks on this passage in The Sacred Complex, 172–73.
28. Bandello, Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, 1:41.
29. Tasso, Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection with the Discourse of the Art of the Dialogue, 162–63.
30. Samuel Taylor Coleridge heard an echo in the Father’s begetting and anointing of the Son (5.600–615) of Duncan’s promotion of Malcolm in Macbeth (1.4.35–42). “Messiah-Satan,” he commented, on the Shakespearean scene that, in a break with the previous tanistry prevailing in Scotland, lifts a son over Macbeth and his fellow thanes. See Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, 192. Like God in Paradise Lost, Duncan promises that this exaltation of his son will be good for everyone: the “honour must / Not unaccompanied invest him only, / But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine / On all deservers.”
31. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 197–98. For a socially conservative consideration of the problem of envy and equality, see Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, 231–56.
32. Simmel, Sociology of Georg Simmel, 197.
33. Bacon, Essays, 84–85.
34. The best and most thorough analysis of the analogy between Milton’s God and earthly king is Davies, Images of Kingship. See also Frye, Return of Eden, 64–71, 108–15; Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems, 33–58; Lewalski, “Paradise Lost and Milton’s Politics,” 141–68; and Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, 86–131. For a discussion of the analogy between courtier and prince/human being and God, see Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy, 51–83.
35. For Milton’s equation of monarchy and idolatry, and for the relationship to rabbinic commentary of his “exclusive” view that republics are the only legitimate form of government, see Nelson, “ ‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen’ and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism,” 809–35.
36. Revard, “Satan’s Envy,” 197: “Ironically enough, Satan’s kingship is not patterned on the real kingship of either Messiah or God, but upon the misconstrued definition of kingship by which Satan has denounced Messiah.” Revard emphasizes the tradition that the envy that caused Satan’s fall was envy of the Son’s kingship more than envy of his Incarnation or envy of the creation of human beings. For a defense of the satanic position that sees God indeed as the type of monarch whom Milton attacked in his republican writings, see Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King.
37. Broadbent describes Mammon as “a plutocrat co-opted to government, wondering what all the political fuss is about.” Broadbent, Some Graver Subject, 117. For Mammon as a type of hardworking New England colonist or Dutch republican, see Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 154–55, 174–77. For the political failure of Mammon’s class, see Dzelzainis, “Milton’s Classic Republicanism,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, 3–24.
38. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641; Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners and vol. 2, Power and Civility.
39. The fight of the underdog David against Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:4–54 directly follows David’s being taking up by Saul as his court harpist, 1 Samuel 16:14–23.
40. See Empson, Milton’s God, 77, on Satan: “We also need to realize that he is a rippingly grand aristocrat.” For a correction of Empson, see Davies, Images of Kingship, 127–63.
41. In Images of Kingship, Davies states that “God is shown as presiding over a court rich in chivalric motifs as an absolute ruler over a rigidly formulated and militaristic hierarchy dressed with medieval splendor according to degree” (129). I think one should remove “chivalric” and “militaristic” from this description. It is not a small quibble: only after Satan’s rebellion, it appears, do the angels become soldiers.
42. This discussion draws on materials in Quint, “Duelling and Civility in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” 231–78, especially 272–74. On the duel, see Kiernan, The Duel in European History; Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France; Erspamer, La biblioteca di don Ferrante: Duello e onore nella cutura del Cinquecento; Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Faction in Friuli during the Renaissance; Peltonen, “Francis Bacon, the Earl of Northampton, and the Jacobean Anti-Duelling Campaign,” 1–28.
43. Carlyle, The Life of Oliver Cromwell, With a Selection from His Letters and Speeches, 126. Bacon specifically addresses the giving of the lie in his The Charge touching duels; see Francis Bacon: The Major Works, 310. For Touchstone, see As You Like It 5.4.50–104.
44. On this distinction and for a fine discussion of courtliness in Paradise Lost, see Schoenfeldt, “ ‘Among Unequals What Society’: Strategic Courtesy and Christian Humility in Paradise Lost,” 69–90, especially 77. For critical reflections on the difficulty of representing worship and the humiliation of creatureliness, see Barnaby, “Cringing Before the Lord: Milton’s Satan, Samuel Johnson, and the Anxiety of Worship,” in The Sacred and the Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Papazian, 321–44.
45. Romei, Courtiers Academie, 147–48. Bacon makes the related argument: “But much more it is to be deplored when so much noble and gentle blood shall be spilt upon such follies, as, if it were adventured in the field in service of the King and realm, were able to make the fortune of a day, and to change the fortune of a kingdom.” Francis Bacon, 305.
46. Fish discusses how this episode already suggests the logic of the War in Heaven in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 173–76.
47. Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 297–304; on the humiliation of the good angels during the War in Heaven, see 277–82. For a discussion of how Milton’s depiction of the War in Heaven takes a generally ironic attitude toward the battles of the English Civil War, see Bedford, “Milton’s Military Heaven Revisited,” 123–48. Of particular interest is Bedford’s discussion on 136–37 of the “Lobsters,” a parliamentary regiment impeded by their full-body armor, at the Battle of Roundway Down; both Milton’s good and bad angels find their armor to be an encumbrance.
48. It may be indicative of Milton’s discomfort with Jesus’s example of the server at table, omitted from his citation of Luke 22 in The Readie and Easie Way, that there are no waiters at the heavenly banquet in book 5 that follows the proclamation of the exaltation of the Son. Everything happens in the passive voice: “all in circles as they stood, / Tables are set, and on a sudden piled / With angels’ food …” (631–33). No one clears or does the dishes.
49. Burrow, Epic Romance, 273; Michael Putnam, “The Aeneid and Paradise Lost: Ends and Conclusions,” 387–410.
50. Compare the parallel evocation of Luke 22:25 to describe earthly conquerors in Paradise Regained 3.81–82: “and must be titled gods / Great benefactors of mankind.” Alexander is alluded to in the following verses 84–87. “Plagues of men” echoes Milton’s First Defense of the English People, chapter 5, which terms Homer’s Agamemnon a plague of his people, “pestem populi.” See CPW 4.441; Works 7.312–13.
51. Milton’s dialogue with The City of God in books 11–12 is understudied; Fowler’s notes make little mention of it. For brief discussions, see Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination, 95–96; Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time, 71–72. For Milton’s interest in the bodily assumption of Enoch in relationship to his mortalist beliefs, see Kerrigan, “The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism,” 125–66.
52. Sallust, 20–23.
53. Augustine, City of God, 57.
54. On the polemic against the linking of patriarchy and kingship in these verses, specifically in response to Filmer, see Patterson, “His Singing Robes,” 191.
55. “This paternal power continued monarchical to the Floud, and after the Floud to the confusion of Babel when Kingdomes were first erected, planted, or scattered over the face of the world; we find, Gen. 10.11. It was done by Colonies of whole families, over which, the prime Fathers had supream power, and were Kings, who were all the sons or grand-children of Noah, from whom they derived a fatherly and regall power over their families. Now if this supream power was settled and founded by God himself in the fatherhood, how is it possible for the people to have any right or title to alter and dispose of it otherwise?” Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy, 7. In his Concerning the Originall of Governments, Filmer takes up Milton’s contention in chapter 1 of the First Defense (CPW 4:327, Works 7:46) that kings and fathers are in fact very different, and that, even if we were to grant the analogy and think of a king as a kind of father, he should be held accountable if he kills his subject—sons. Filmer responds by first insisting that “every King that now is hath a paternall Empire, either by inheritance, or by translation or usurpation, so a Father and King may be all one.” He continues, “A Father may die for the murther of his Son, where there is a superior Father to them both, or the right of such a supreme Father; but where there are only Father and Sons, no Sons can question the Father for the death of their brother: the reason why a King cannot be punished is not because he is excepted from punishement, or doth not deserve it, but because there is no superior to judge him, but God onely, to whom hee is reserved” (19).
56. Another possible reading: in the case of these biblical kings puissant deeds may be admirable when they are accompanied by piety; wealth may be well used when coupled with wisdom. The context of books 11 and 12 makes the ironic, antimonarchical construction of these verses more likely. David and Solomon, the “uxorious king” (1.444), are both subject to unflattering treatment in Milton’s poetry and prose. On the criticism of David in Paradise Regained and its relationship to Stuart propaganda, see Quint, Epic and Empire, 325–34. Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 99–100, 164–65, describes how the comparison of Charles II to Solomon could praise him for his furthering of wealth and trade. For James I and Solomon, see Tate, “King James I and the Queen of Sheba,” 561–85.
57. Summers, The Muse’s Method, 208–10.
58. Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 56.
59. City of God, 482–83.
60. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 207–26, Blumenberg suggests how the modern recognition of the purely material nature of the universe—not divinely disposed for human use and subject to human exploitation—leads to the scarcity predicted by Malthus. The intermediary development in Blumenberg’s scheme is the rise of the modern state, identified with absolutism and given theoretical foundation in Hobbes’s “state of nature.” Here Blumenberg is anticipated by Burckhardt, who described the individualistic culture of Renaissance Italy as the reflection of its new state system. On the zero-sum game structure of this competitive individualism, see Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, 3–35. The history that is inaugurated in Milton’s heaven at the beginning of time is a mirror, this chapter has suggested, of this envious modern age. Milton pushes back against its implications by having Raphael assert to Adam, as we saw in chapter 4, that the universe, at least the part of it that Adam occupies, is made for human beings (8.98–99).
62. Milton describes the personified Wisdom of the book as the sister and playmate of the Muse Urania he invokes in book 7 (9–12).
Notes to Chapter 6
1. The wordplay is already present in Shakespeare; see Sonnet 93. See the commentary of John Leonard to 1.35 in his edition of Paradise Lost, 293, where “dis-Eve-d” would denote Satan’s deprivation of Eve of her immortality, and again, 431, on 10.917. In Paradise Regained, Milton places “Eve” and “deceive” in successive verses three times (1.51–52; 2.141–42, 3.36–37); at the least it is a verbal tic. On the classical “Dis,” the underworld and its king, involved in Milton’s usage, see the excellent chapter in Forsyth, Satanic Epic, 217–38.
2. Gallagher, Milton, the Bible, 49–130, connects the two passage in a chapter devoted to Milton’s response to the tradition surrounding 1 Timothy 2:11–15; Burden, The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument of “Paradise Lost,” 77–89, endorses Paul, who “rightly saw that Adam could not have been deceived at the moment he ate the Fruit” (89). Genesis 3, however, offers little evidence.
3. Ronald Levao describes Milton’s exploration in Paradise Lost of “two of his own most cherished formal and ethical assumptions: that the self can be a ‘true poem, a composition, and patterne of the best and honorablest things’ (Apology for Smectymnus in CPW 1:890), and that such perfection ought to ensure its natural congruence with a virtuous other.” See Levao, “ ‘Among Unequals’: Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy,” 98. Rosenblatt, commenting on the first words of Milton’s Of Education (1644), connects the first sentence of the pamphlet —“no purpose or respect should sooner move us than simply the love of God and of mankind”—to Paradise Lost: “ ‘Faith and virtue’ and ‘love of God and of mankind’ appear in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana (CPW 6:353) as the two commands in paradise beyond natural law: those concerning the tree of knowledge and marriage. These are precise Edenic counterparts to postlapsarian dispensations.” See Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Rosenblatt, 320.
4. Howard, “ ‘The Invention’ of Milton’s ‘Great Argument’: A Study in of the Logic of ‘God’s Ways to Men,’ ” 149–73.
5. Kerrigan, Sacred Complex and “The Irrational Coherence of Samson Agonistes,” 217–32.
6. Kerrigan, “The Irrational Coherence,” 228, suggests that Milton’s poems in the 1671 volume “halve his life, Paradise Regained being, as psychic autobiography, primarily about his youth and Samson Agonistes primarily about his maturity and old age.” My thinking is indebted to the different tracing of Milton’s (psycho)biography in Paradise Regained by James Nohrnberg, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man.”
7. On the dynamic nature of the state of innocence that allows Adam and Eve to develop in virtue, see Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” in New Essays on “Paradise Lost,” ed. Kranidas, 86–117.
8. The dramatic action of the Separation Scene is analyzed by Nyquist, “Reading the Fall: Discourse in Drama in Paradise Lost,” 209–14, and Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems, 94–118.
9. McColley, “Free Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise Lost,” 103–20, subsequently developed in McColley, Milton’s Eve, 172–81; Blackburn, “ ‘Uncloistered Virtue’: Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise,” 119–37; Revard, “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,” 69–78; Ulreich, “ ‘Argument Not Less But More Heroic’: Eve as the Hero of Paradise Lost,” in “All in All”: Unity, Diversity and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Durham and Pruitt, 67–82.
10. In his satirical vignette in Areopagitica, Milton compares the Christian who lets outside authorities determine his belief to a rich man who employs “some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs.” CPW 2:544.
11. On Eve and Abdiel, see Benet, “Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,” 129–43.
12. Campbell and Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, Thought, 60.
13. On the coordination of these episodes in the Faerie Queene, see O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 101–7; see also Watkins, The Spectre of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic, 114–19.
14. Klemp, “Milton’s Pastourelle Vision in Paradise Lost,” 257–71; Paden, The Medieval Pastourelle; Jones, The Pastourelle.
15. Manley, Literature and Culture, 487.
16. On Milton’s continuing concern with the parable of the talents, see Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 29–117.
17. For the tradition of pastoral elegy, see Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton.
18. Kahn offers a reading of these lines and of the antinomies in Comus of “the force of grace and the force of individual virtue” (202) in her chapter “Virtue and Virtù in Comus,” in Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton, 185–208.
19. This self-approval can be linked to the virtuous self-esteem that Raphael counsels Adam to seek for himself at 8.571–72: “oft times nothing profits more / Than self-esteem.” Scodel, Excess and the Mean, 269–84, discusses this passage and others in connection with Milton’s description in The Reason of Church Government of the “honest shame, or call it if you will an esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own person” (CPW 1:841). Scodel traces the classical and Christian traditions of the idea and its role in Paradise Lost, in dialogue and at times in disagreement with Quint, Epic and Empire, 283–99; see also, Guillory, “Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem,” in Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Kendrick, 194–234; and Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. McEachern and Shuger, 258–86. Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (212), argue that Milton fulfills his ambition to fame by denying it to Eve. The action and meaning of Paradise Lost hinge to a large degree on finding a balance between satanic pride on the one hand and, on the other, that “just honoring of ourselves,” which The Reason of Church Government passage declares to be a “principle of all godly and virtuous actions,” second only to the love of God itself.
20. As has been well noted, the cave and its waters recall the cave of the nymphs described in the landscape of Ithaca in the Odyssey (13.102–12) and allegorized by the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry as the entrance by which the human soul enters into material existence, a gateway of birth.
21. See Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 79–81; on God’s seeking glory for himself, 131–46.
22. For the Jesus of Paradise Regained as the new Adam, see Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained, 165–82, 222–27; Frye, Return of Eden, 118–43.
23. On these scenes of lovemaking in Paradise Lost and Iliad 14, see Nyquist, “Textual Overlapping and Delilah’s Harlot-Lap,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Parker and Quint, 355–69.
24. Samson Agonistes, 562–72.
25. Annabel Patterson pointed out to me the correspondence, which I discuss above in chapter 2, p.45, between the description of Belial and the passage in The Reason of Church Government. The accusatory words of the early treatise seem to have haunted Milton.
26. The parallel is noted by Nyquist, “Reading the Fall,” 212.
27. Milton’s potentially contradictory ideas about fame and his desire to affirm in Paradise Regained “the lasting recognition of true merit” were lucidly noted nearly a century ago by Hanford in “The Temptation Motive in Milton,” in John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays by James Holly Hanford, ed. Diekhoff, 253–55. They are forcefully restated by Miller in “Milton’s Paradise Regained,” Explicator 56.1 (1997): 14–17; see also Strier, “Milton against Humility,” 277–78. Other commentators take a softer line: Kermode, “Milton’s Hero,” 325–26; Stein, “The Kingdoms of the World: Paradise Regained,” 114–16; Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 227–56; Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 173–79.
28. These Johannine passages are variously crucial to Milton’s Arian argument for the creation and subordination of the Son in On Christian Doctrine 1.5. See CPW 6:214–15, 220, 230; on the Son’s glorification, see 6:272–78.
29. Virgil’s hymn to Hercules smacks of euhemerism, placed as it is in book 8 in juxtaposition with the later depiction of Augustus at Actium, accompanied by the star of his deified father, Julius Caesar. Earlier in the Aeneid in book 6 (130–31, the Cumaean Sibyl’s description of those sons of gods whose burning virtue has lifted them to heaven [“ardens euexit ad aethera uirtus, / dis geniti”])—a passage that we have seen Milton echo and imitate above in the Mansus, 95–96: “in aethera divum / Quo labor et mens pura vehunt, atque ignea virtus”—and who have been able to descend to and return from the underworld is similarly juxtaposed with Anchises’s later description of “Augustus Caesar, Diui genus” (6.791), whose extension of Rome’s empire outdoes the deeds of the divine sons Hercules and Bacchus (6.801–5). The strong suggestion is that the deification of Hercules and of Augustus is a metaphor for the fame that great conquerors achieve for themselves and that allows them to survive death. That they become the objects of hero and emperor cults would only confirm Euhemerus’s recursive argument that all the gods began as human heroes or kings. Virgil seems indeed to conflate power and fame in his first description of Augustus in Aeneid 1:287, “whose rule will be bound by the Ocean, his fame by the stars” (imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris). Milton will apply these terms to the Son in Paradise Lost: he will “bound his reign / With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the heavens” (12.370–71). This glory is otherworldly and worldly, too.
30. For the first sense of indivisibility, applied to the Genesis marriage formula, “And they shall be one flesh,” see Tetrachordon, in CPW 2:605: “These words also inferre that there ought to be an individualty in Mariage.” For the second sense of an individual person, see Animadversions 13, in CPW 1:712. See Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on “Paradise Lost,” 110–13; Levao, “ ‘Among Unequals,’ ” 94.
31. A defense of Adam against the narrator’s judgment is mounted by James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton, 288–89.
32. Fowler, note to 9.913–16, cites, inter alia, Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, 196. On the sexual intimacy that seems to add a dimension to human marriage for which God or the poet cannot fully account, see Rogers, “Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost.” On the repetition of the Genesis marriage formula, “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” as part of a story of Eve’s (and woman’s) willing subjection to Adam, see Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,” 99–127.
33. Homophrosyne appears only one other place in the Odyssey 15.198, when Telemachus speaks of his concord of mind with Peisistratus, the son of Nestor.
34. Homer, Homeri quae extant omnia Ilias, Odyssea, Batrachomyomachia, Hymni, Poemata aliquot. See Fletcher, “Milton’s Homer,” 229–32.
35. We have observed that the luncheon that Eve serves up to Raphael in book 5 locates this scene of hospitality in the epic tradition.
Whatever Earth all-bearing mother yields
In India east or west, or middle shore
In Pontus or the Punic coast, or where
Alcinous reigned, fruit of all kinds …
(5.338–41)
Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians on the island of Scheria, entertained Odysseus as a guest at a banquet in books 8–12 of the Odyssey; Dido banqueted Aeneas in Carthage on the Punic coast in books 1–3 of the Aeneid; Aeëtes banqueted Jason—although grudgingly—in his Black Sea (Pontic) Kingdom of Colchis in book 5 of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus. Milton indicates these models in reverse order of their dates and succession in the literary tradition that goes back to Homer. The Phaeacian episode of the Odyssey is the most important epic model for books 5–8 of Paradise Lost. Before he narrates the story of his own wanderings to Alcinous and the assembled nobles of Scheria, Odysseus is entertained by the bard Demodocus with three songs—inset poems within the larger epic. The first (Odys. 8.72–82) and last (8.499–366) retell the Fall of Troy and make Odysseus weep at the memory of war. The second (8.266–366) recounts, in a humorous key, the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares and their being caught out and ensnared by the cuckolded Hephaestus. This latter story of immoral behavior among the gods, which inside the poem might make Odysseus think about the possible infidelity of Penelope, created scandal among ancient readers. As was usual in such cases, the episode was allegorized: Heraclitus, the first-century allegorist, declares that it is a cosmogonic fable and that Aphrodite and Ares represent the Empedoclean principles of love and strife through and by which the world was created. Virgil appears to have been aware of this reading. In the fourth Georgic, he depicts the nymph Clymene singing about Mars and Venus—the Roman versions of Ares and Aphrodite—and of the loves of the gods going back to ancient Chaos (Georgics 4.345–47): the history of the world from its creation. More pointedly, Virgil presents a version of Demodocus’s songs in the first book of the Aeneid, in the analogous situation of the reception of Aeneas in Dido’s Carthage. First, Aeneas famously weeps, like Odysseus, when he sees scenes of the Trojan War depicted on the walls of the temple that Dido has built to Juno (Aen. 1.453–93). Second, at the banquet itself and at the end of book 1, just before he retells in books 2 and 3 the travails and journeys that have brought him to Carthage, Aeneas hears the bard Iopas sing of the moon and the sun and the origin of human beings and beasts, of the stars and constellations, a song of didactic cosmogony (1.740–46). Valerius Flaccus condenses his models by describing reliefs on the walls of the Colchian temple that first portray the sun and the moon and then depict, prophetically, the deeds of Jason and the Argonauts both before and after their coming to the realm of Aeëtes (Arg. 5.410–54). What Milton takes from this pattern, established at Alcinous’s banquet and subsequently varied by the ensuing epic tradition, is that the epic banquet scene should contain three elements: on the host’s part two kinds of songs, one of them retelling events of epic warfare, the other a cosmogony; on the part of the guest and epic hero a retrospective narrative of his previous experiences. Milton works his own variation on this pattern and tradition, for his hero Adam is the host, who recounts to Raphael his life story from the moment of his creation to his marriage with Eve (8.249–559), while Raphael the guest tells him first of the epic War in Heaven (5.561–6.912) and then, in a second narrative, recounts the story of the six days of the Creation of the universe (7.110–640). Milton has not only changed who, host or guest, is to tell which kind of story, but he has greatly altered the proportions of the stories themselves. Adam’s previous life has admittedly been a limited one, a matter of weeks, and he takes up only three hundred lines to tell what it takes Odysseus four and Aeneas two whole books to recount. The bard’s songs in Homer, which run from a dozen to a hundred verses, now have expanded: the War in Heaven runs across books 5 and 6 while the Creation takes up book 7. Milton has managed to incorporate both a martial, if at times mock-heroic, epic and a hexameral cosmogonic epic into his larger poem. One reason for this disproportion is ready to hand: the protagonist of both Raphael’s epics is the Son, vanquisher of Satan and demiurge of the universe. At the center of Paradise Lost—especially in the revised twelve-book version of 1674 that we normally read—Raphael’s twin narratives break into the story of the poem’s human hero to celebrate its divine hero, the second Adam. Books 6 and 7 each feature an angelic hymn near their conclusions; book 6 honors the Son (6.886–92), while book 7 moves from hymning the Son (7.566–73) to climax with praise of the Father himself (7.601–32).
36. Milton had aspired to the role of Demodocus since his verses in At a Vacation Exercise in the College, written when he was nineteen:
And last of kings and queens and heroes old,
Such as the wise Demodocus once told
In solemn songs at king Alcinous’ feast,
While sad Ulysses’s soul and all the rest
Are held with his melodious harmony
In willing chains and sweet captivity.
(47–52)
In this instance, too, in the immediately preceding verses, Milton pairs epic heroism with cosmogony as possible poetic subjects: “Then sing of secret things that came to pass / When beldam Nature in her cradle was” (45–46). The third subject Milton announces is theophany or divinity itself.
37. Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 207–62, argues for the literal transmutation of food into thought and poetry in Paradise Lost.
38. The reciprocity between Abraham’s hospitality and divine nourishment is spelled out in the preface, 39–68 to the Psychomachia of Prudentius, which combines the visit of the angels at Mamre with the episode that precedes it, the bringing of bread and wine by the high priest Melchizedek (Gen. 14:18–19), a traditional prefiguring of the Eucharist: “mox ipse Christus, qui sacerdos verus est, / parente inenarribili atque uno satus, / cibum beatis offerens victoribus / parvam pudici cordis intrabit casam, / monstrans honorem Trinitatis hospitae” (59–63; Then Christ himself, who is the true priest, born of a Father unutterable and one, bringing food for the blessed victors, will enter the humble abode of the pure heart and give it the privilege of entertaining the Trinity). Prudentius, Prudentius, ed. Thomson, 1:278–79. In his De Abraham 1.40, Ambrose compares the calf that Abraham serves up to the angels (Gen. 18:7) to the Paschal lamb (12:5–6); see Saint Ambrose of Milan, On Abraham, 22–23; and De Abraham, 2.2:78–81. For similar arguments, including the idea that the three cakes that Sarah bakes prefigure the human race descended from the sons of Noah, which will be “brought together into the one bread of the body of Christ,” see Rabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Genesim Libri Quatuor 2.21, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, 107:551. In a thirteenth-century Psalter, MS. K.26, Saint John’s College, Cambridge, Abraham is depicted offering three bread wafers and wine to the three angels depicted as the Trinity: the caption reads, “De Abraham offerente panem et vinū t[ri]bus angelis.” See Brieger, English Art, 1216–1307, plate 67b. See also Brenk, Die Frühchristlichen Mosaiken in S. Maria Maggiore zu Rom, 61; Brenk acknowledges the Eucharistic overtones of the scene, but argues that they are peripheral to its interpretation.
39. Schwartz, “Real Hunger: Milton’s Version of the Eucharist,” 1–17, argues that Eden offers a version of a lost natural fullness, “materiality without violence and hierarchy” (13), to whose apocalyptic restoration the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (her use of “eucharist” is non-Miltonic), instituted by the sacrifice of Christ, can only point but not fulfill in history; Schwartz corrects the satirical reading by King, “Miltonic Transubstantiation,” 41–58.
40. Satan’s language picks up too, but in a parodic mode, the language of communion. The dream that Satan infuses into the sleeping Eve parodies in advance Raphael’s prediction of a gradual and gradated ascent—as Adam responds to the angel, “By steps we may ascend to God” (5.512)—and substitutes for this long process of physical and mental digestion the quick fix of the forbidden fruit: “Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods / Thy self a goddess” (5.77–78). Satan falsely argues that the fruit forbidden to humans must therefore be a kind of angelic food, “as only fit / For gods” (5.69–70), but that there is no reason it should not be shared: “since good, the more / Communicated, more abundant grows” (5.71–72). The loaded language not only substitutes the forbidden fruit for the communion meal, but it also anticipates Adam’s description of the plenty of Eden that he and Eve are to share with Raphael: “where nature multiplies / Her fertile growth, and by disburdening grows / More fruitful …” (5.318–20). In the story of the War in Heaven that Raphael recounts, communion is parodied in Satan’s naming his royal seat, “The Mountain of the Congregation called” (5.766), but this structure, “as a mount / Raised on mount with pyramids and towers” (5.757–58), suggests the typology of Egypt and Babel, the latter traditionally associated as it is here with the classical giants who piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa. The Tower of Babel is the emblem not of unity but of dispersal and, as book 12 will put it in an echo of this book 5 passage, “the work Confusion named” (12.62). Satan is first introduced by Raphael as “Contemptuous” (5.671), and the pun suggests that the union Satan creates among his crew is their common temptation; Abdiel later speaks of a “contagion” (5.880).
41. For analogous and admirably concise arguments, see Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 105–6.
42. See Fowler’s note to 8.384–89.
43. Levao, “ ‘Among Unequals,’ ” 96.
44. Ibid. On gender hierarchy in Paradise Lost, and more general discussion of the marital relationship and household of Adam and Eve, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean, 255–84.
45. The chapter summary on 1 Corinthians 12 in the 1560 Geneva Bible, “The diversitie of the giftes of the holie God oght to be used to the edifying of Christs Church 12 As the members of mans bodie serve to the use of one another,” along with that Bible’s summary of the whole Pauline letter that describes how Paul “behaved him self skilfully, according to the fundation (which is Christ) and exhorteth others to make the end proportionable to the beginning … seeing they are the Temple of God,” provide the metaphors for the last sections of Milton’s Areopagitica, which proclaim “some new and great period” in the Church. CPW 2:553–70.
46. On Milton’s use of the negative and double negative, see Patterson, Milton’s Words, 165–95.
47. Areopagitica intimates at times that this church is being realized in London itself—“this vast city, a city of refuge,” which, as a kind of New Jerusalem replaces the temple—“I saw no temple therein” (Rev. 21:22), and which is “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). CPW 2:553–54.
48. In an essay that succinctly spells out the case against Adam, John C. Ulreich observes that, in a perfect imitation of the Son, Adam “might offer to die for Eve rather than with her”; “ ‘Sufficient to Have Stood’: Adam’s Responsibility in Book IX,” 41. Choosing to die with her is impressive nonetheless. The superiority of charity—modeled on Christ’s sacrifice for a fallen humanity—over classical heroism is the subject of a brief treatise of Tasso, Della virtù eroica e della carità: Opere di Torquato Tasso colle controversie della Gerusalemme, 11:168–84. For a brief discussion, see Kermode, “The Cave of Mammon,” 80–83.
49. Cf. Aen. 2.744; 4.279–82, where Aeneas respectively confronts the ghost of Creusa who bids him farewell and the god Mercury who tells him he must leave Dido. Aeneas also stands voiceless and with his limbs chilled at Aen. 1.92 (when the storm winds attack his fleet), and 3.29–30, 48 (before the speaking tree Polydorus), but the context of Adam’s beholding the fallen Eve suggests that we think of him as an Aeneas faced with the loss of the women he has loved. On further allusions, which reverse the Virgilian scenarios so that Adam and Eve may remain together, see chapter 7, pp. 219–23.
50. See Benet, “ ‘All in All’: The Threat of Bliss,”; 48–66; McColley, “ ‘All in All’: The Individuality of Creatures in Paradise Lost,” 21–38.
51. In contradistinction to the argument of Schwartz, “Real Hunger,” 14, perhaps applicable to Adam and Eve before the Fall, that gives priority to obedience.
52. Derrida, De la grammatologie, 208, where Derrida discusses writing itself as a “supplement” to the meaning it is supposed to reproduce. I am indebted to Patricia Parker’s development of this Derridean idea into the feminist argument of “Coming Second: Woman’s Place,” in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, 178–233; for Paradise Lost, see 191–201. A similar argument is made by Nyquist in “Gynesis, Genesis, Exegesis and Milton’s Eve,” in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, 159–60.
53. Rogers has described, apropos of the human history narrated in the last two books of Paradise Lost, a double vision of divine constraint and human freedom that nonetheless moves from “the theocentric to the anthropocentric basis of causation” (176) in his chapter “Milton and the Mysterious Terms of History,” in The Matter of Revolution, 144–76. On a Miltonic strain of antinomianism that both leads to the Fall and to postlapsarian freedom, see Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 94–118; Bennett notes, 118, that it is Eve, in the reconciliation of the first couple in book 10, “who ‘takes the lead’ ” into praxis, opening the road to postlapsarian liberty.
54. Parker, “Coming Second.” Nyquist, “Gynesis, Genesis,” contends that Milton’s placement of Adam’s account of the creation of Eve in book 8 of Paradise Lost, four books later than Eve’s own account in book 4, is determined by his desire not “to risk allowing her to appear as the necessary and hence, in a certain sense, superior creature suggested by the logic of the supplement, undeniably set in motion by Adam’s self-confessed ‘single imperfection’ ” (192). I acknowledge the force of this critical observation and I do not question—how could one?—that Paradise Lost articulates a hierarchy of genders; yet, at the same time, I argue that, in a countercurrent of ideas and feeling, Milton gives the last word of the poem to Eve and to the marital love and charity that now seem attached to her rather than to Adam—and sets in motion “the logic of the supplement.” Nyquist notes that in Milton’s Christian culture, “the manifold dynamics of this logic are most clearly at work in hermeneutical reflections on the relations of the New to the Old Testament” (159–60).
55. Johnson, “Milton’s Blank Verse Sonnets,” 129–53, 143–45; Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal of Community.
56. The Ruth echo is noted by Bush, ed., Complete Poetic Works of John Milton, 458; Leonard, ed., Paradise Lost, 452.
57. Eve and Michael’s speeches may be related formally; Johnson, “Milton’s Blank Verse Sonnets,” 134, suggests that Michael’s reply to Adam (12.574–87) is also sonnet-length; he, subsequently, 143–44, connects Michael’s speech to Eve’s final words in the epic.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. In his notes to his edition of Paradise Lost, 428, John Leonard would save appearances by arguing that when “Adam saw / Already in part” of the “growing miseries” consequent on the Fall (10.715–16), he was anticipating them, and that the wording implies that “Sin and Death have not yet entered our universe, and Satan has not yet left it. Satan is still in Paradise, eavesdropping, at the end of book x.” But these growing miseries depend on the actions of Sin and Death and the reaction of God: there would be nothing for Adam to see.
2. Tillyard, “The Crisis of Paradise Lost,” 8–52, 49.
3. The claim of continuity between imperial and papal Rome was long-standing. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 235–91, offers a valuable account of the modern permutations it underwent in the papal ideology of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
4. While Satan’s conferral of “matchless might / Issuing from me” (10.404–5) on Sin and Death recall God’s similar bestowing of power on the Son (3.317–43), his parting injunction, “go and be strong” (10.409), echoes the parting words of Raphael to Adam at the end of book 8: “Be strong, live happy, and love” (8.633).
5. Mary Powell had literally disappeared from sight when she returned to her father’s house. She died in 1652 around the same time that Milton became totally blind.
6. Quintilian singles out the simile to describe the power of his ideal orator in the Institutio Oratoria 12.1.27. For a reading that argues for the ironic cross-purposes of the simile, see Quint, “Virgil’s Doublecross: Chiasmus and the Aeneid,” 273–300.
7. Fowler, notes to 7.210–15 and 10.289–93, comments on the similarity of Virgil’s Neptune to both the pacifying Son in book 7 and trident-bearing Death in book 10.
8. For the parallel to the Son’s restoration, by his command and voice, of the terrain of heaven that the War in Heaven has begun to turn into Chaos, 6.781–84, see chapter 3, pp. 79–80.
9. Tillyard pointed out the relationship between the two scenes of creation in “The Causeway from Hell to the World of Paradise Lost,” 266–70. Lieb offers a rich discussion in The Dialectics of Creation, 172–83.
10. The speech of Calgacus/Galgacus is briefly recalled by Milton in book 2 of The History of Britain; see CPW 5:1.89.
11. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 107, reads the bridge as a triumphal arch, and later, 162–63, notes the contrast of the triumph of the Son to Satan’s aborted triumph. See Davies, Images of Kingship, 9, and, more generally, 89–126; for an earlier version of her argument, see Davies, “Triumph and Anti-Triumph: Milton’s Satan and the Roman Emperors in Paradise Lost,” 385–98.
12. There is still another Caesarian project involved in this complex of images. The Araxes indignant at its bridge in the Aeneid echoes Virgil’s own poetry, his description in the Georgics of the breakwater that Augustus’s general Agrippa built at the mouth of the Lucrine Lake against the sea: “an memorem portus Lucrinoque addita claustra / atque indignatum magnis stridoribus aequor, / Iulia qua ponto longe sonat unda refuso / Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur aestus Auernis?” (2.161–64; or shall I tell of our harbors and the dam joined to the Lucrine, and of the indignant sea that roars greatly, where the Julian waves resound with the noise of the sea being beaten back, and the Tyrrhenian billows are channelled into the straits of Avernus). Milton seems to be recalling these lines in his description of Chaos as a “rebounding surge”—“ponto … refuso”—assailing the bridge that Sin and Death build over it at 10.417. Note the proximity to Avernus (hell).
13. P. Vergilii Maronis Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia, 1359.
14. On the War in Heaven and Virgil’s depiction of Actium, see Quint, Epic and Empire, 41–45; on the dimension of theomachy and gigantomachy in Virgil’s Actium, see Hardie, Vergil’s Aeneid, 97–110.
15. Milton would have known through Suetonius (Augustus 94) of the dynastic myth that Augustus was the son of Apollo. It is not clear that the myth was already current when Virgil wrote the Aeneid. See Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 215–20.
16. In Vida’s Christiad, 6.701–7, the return of Christ to heaven at his ascension is directly compared in simile to a triumph by a victorious Roman consul.
17. See Sims, “A Greater than Rome: The Inversion of a Virgilian Symbol from Camoens to Milton,” 333–44.
18. Compare Paradise Regained 4.184, where Jesus contests Satan’s claim that he has been given the kingdoms of the world, and asserts that the devil has instead usurped them: “Other donation none thou canst produce.” It is the only other appearance of the word in Milton’s poetry. Milton discusses the Donation of Constantine in Of Reformation, CPW 1:552–60, where he includes his own translations of passages from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto that condemn the Donation. See Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 248–54, on the survival of the Donation in papal ideology in spite of its exposure as an eighth-century forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440.
19. Northrop Frye remarks: “The heaven of Paradise Lost, with God the supreme sovereign and the angels in a state of unquestioning obedience to his will, can only be set up on earth inside the individual’s mind. The free man’s mind is a dictatorship of reason obeyed by the will without argument: we go wrong only when we take these conceptions of kingship and service of freedom as social models. Absolute monarchs and their flunkeys on earth always follow the model of hell, not of heaven.” Return of Eden, 111. For the contrast to Dante, see 109.
20. Quilligan observes Satan’s hissing in Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading, 114.
21. Lieb, Dialectics of Creation, 123.
22. On this lore, see Fontenrose, Python, 70–93. For the relation of the tradition of Python to Spenser’s Error, see Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene,” 135–51; Nohrnberg, 145, disscusses Milton’s use of the figure of Python in The Reason of Church Government.
23. The correspondence is noted by Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon in their note to 1.767–75 in their edition of Paradise Lost.
24. When Satan reaches earth in book 4 of Paradise Lost, horror and doubt “from the bottom stir / The hell within him” (4.19–20). There may be another echo here of Virgil’s storm raising the sea “a sedibus imis” that we have seen in the description of the Son calming Chaos at 7.213. Satan would thus contain his own Virgilian sea of stormy passion within him, equivalent to hell, in the same way Adam does, reinforcing the similarity between the two characters in their fallenness. Milton’s description of Adam at 10.718 may itself look back at Virgil’s own internalization of the the storm that opens the Aeneid within its hero, the description of Aeneas in book 8 tossing on a great sea of cares—“magno curarum fluctuat aestu” (Aen. 8.19).
25. Tillyard, “The Crisis of Paradise Lost.” Wilson presents an important rereading of the scene in Mocked with Death, 164–206.
26. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, 117–31; Summers, The Muse’s Method, 178–84; Shuellenberger, “Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism,” 76. For a discussion of the echo of Virgil’s Nisus—“me, me adsum, qui feci, in me convertite ferrum” (Aen. 9.427)—see Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 116–17; Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice,” 362–67; Whittington, “Vergil’s Nisus and the Language of Self-Sacrifice in Paradise Lost,” 586–606. See also Green, “Softening the Stony: Deucalion, Pyrrha and the Process of Regeneration in Paradise Lost,” 9–21.
27. Ronald Levao comments that Adam’s choice to fall with Eve “tests a difficult honesty: our admission that Adam’s choice is one we might not have made. We might well have shrunk under the threat of incalculable Paternal wrath and slunk (to use that Miltonic word) behind the shelter of piety, hoping that if heartfelt motives could not excuse Adam’s disobedience, ignoble ones would not be held against us.” Levao, “ ‘Among Unequals,’ ” 102. For the measured counterargument, see Ulreich, “ ‘Sufficient to Have Stood.’ ”
28. Seneca, Phoenissae 153; Epistulae morales 70.14.
29. I am indebted to conversations with Stephen Fallon and James Nohrnberg, who pointed out this symmetry and its implications to me. Wilson, Mocked with Death, 202, notes how Michael’s promise of a “paradise within thee, happier far” (12.587) echoes not only the “far happier place” (12.464) of the new heaven and new earth of the Last Judgment, but also the annihilation, “happier far / Than miserable to have eternal being” (2.97–98), which Moloch sought in book 2. Perhaps, Sam Bendinelli has pointed out to me, the choice Adam and Eve make to live is not so free. Adam reasons that suicide would lead to further punishment: God would “make death live in us” (10.1028). This possible second death would be the equivalent of what, before the Fall, has been that mysterious thing called death whose “after-bands,” Eve had reasoned earlier as she chose to eat the forbidden fruit, would limit her “inward freedom” (9.761–62). Some degree of coercion, a fear of unknown consequences, remains in place.
30. Annabel Patterson has analyzed how the meaning of death changes over the course of Paradise Lost in Milton’s Words, 94–113.
31. On work in Paradise Lost, see Goodman, “ ‘Wasted Labor’? Milton’s Eve, the Poet’s Work, and the Challenge of Sympathy,” 415–46.
32. For a related discussion of the posture of prostration, see Schoenfeldt, “ ‘Among Unequals What Society?’ ” 69–90.
33. See Tillyard, “The Crisis,” 49–50.
34. The regenerate Adam and Eve are compared at the opening of book 11 to Deucalion and Pyrrha rescued from the universal flood (PL 11.8–15); the book ends with still another rescue from drowning, the survival of humanity, the race of Adam and Eve, in the family of Noah.
35. One can contrast Satan’s first survey and recognition of his new condition in the second death of hell, “where peace / And rest can never dwell” (1.65–66), and his subsequent attempt to get “off the tossing of these fiery waves, / There rest, if any rest can harbor there” (1.184–85).
36. For Eve as Duessa and Una, see Bond, Spenser, Milton, and the Redemption of the Epic Hero, 81–84. The still innocent Eve is implicitly compared to Circe at 9.521–22.
37. Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 205.
38. This comparison of Rinaldo and Armida to Adam and Eve was suggested to me by the late Phillip Damon.
39. “I am with childe, and yive my child his lyf,” pleads Dido to Aeneas in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (1323). She has already abased herself: “She falleth him to fote, and swoneth there / Dischevele” (1314–15); compare Milton’s Eve: “And tresses all disordered, at his feet / Fell humble” (10.911–12); Chaucer, The Workes of Our Ancient and Learned Poet Geoffrey Chaucer, fol. 191v. The last words of Tasso’s Armida, “Ecco l’ancilla tua” (GL 20.136.7) echo the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation; Tasso, as my former student John Hill pointed out to me, may glance at the idea that this rescued Dido figure, too, is in a family way.
41. Goodman, “ ‘Wasted Labor’?,” 432, notes the echo. A full discussion, beginning with the question of why Milton should “translate Aeneas’s last words to Dido in Adam’s first words to Eve?” (112) is presented in Verbart, “Milton on Vergil.” Commentators have seen an allusion to Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne in Metamorphoses 1.514–15; see Green, “The Virgin in the Garden: Milton’s Ovidian Eve,” 911–912. But the form of the question, “Whom fly’st thou?” links Adam’s words more closely to those of Aeneas to the departing Dido.
42. Phillips, “Juno in Aeneid 4.693–705,” 30–33; Quint, Epic and Empire, 111–13.
43. When Adam in book 8 recounts his marriage and the moment when he led Eve to their nuptial bower and first lovemaking, he tells Raphael that “the earth / Gave sign of gratulation” (8.513–14); this happy scene replaces and pointedly contrasts with the first lovemaking of Aeneas and Dido in their cave in book 4 of the Aeneid, where earth and Juno give ominous signs—“dant signum” (4.166)—as witness and wedding matron, the first day of death and beginning of Dido’s tragedy. It is rather when Eve and then Adam disobey and eat the forbidden fruit of book 9 that the earth and nature “gave signs of woe” (9.783) and “a second groan” (9.1001), and with these pangs seem to break their sympathetic relationship with humanity: it is sin, not sexual love, which proves tragic in Paradise Lost, as the poem measures itself against Virgil’s model. Along somewhat different lines, see Verbart, “Milton on Vergil,” 113–14.
44. I owe the observation of this allusion to Madeline Wong, who also points out the earlier passage describing the cohort of cherubim accompanying Michael, “Spangled with eyes more numerous than those / Of Argus, and more wakeful than to drowse, / Charmed with Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reeed / Of Hermes, or his opiate rod” (11.130–33). Their immunity to the power of Hermes-Mercury, Wong argues, suggests the superiority of Milton’s biblical fiction and of his own Mercury-figure Michael over his Virgilian-Homeric model.
45. The “vest” (11.241) of Milton’s Michael follows the gloss of Servius, “Genus vestis,” on Virgil’s unusual word, “laena,” a mantle worn by augurers that may lend the apparition of Mercury something of a prophetic vision. Michael will go on to prophesy the history of history itself. See Virgil, P. Virgili Maronis Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia, 833.
46. Verbart, “Milton on Virgil,” 120. I am grateful to the observations of Alexandra van Nievelt on this passage.
47. Verbart describes the parallel and contrast to Virgil’s episode in Fellowship in “Paradise Lost”: Vergil, Milton, Wordsworth, 240–42. Song, Dominion Undeserved, 109, has noted the allusion.
48. For clearheaded and humane accounts of the mishaps of Milton’s first marriage, read through the evasive prose of the Divorce Tracts, see Patterson, Reading between the Lines, 276–97, and Milton’s Words, 32–53.
49. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, 1031.
50. Ibid., 1032.
51. Ibid.
52. Le Comte, Milton and Sex, 113.
53. Ibid., 37, offers a slightly different series of biographical correspondences to this passage; critics who would like to see none at all are Tillyard, “The Crisis,” 39; and Hanford, “The Dramatic Element in Paradise Lost,” 234.
54. Fowler’s note to 10.898–908 suggests that “even if M. might once have sympathized with Adam’s execrations, here he is more rational—and the exaggerated multiplication of griefs ludicrous.”
55. Euripides, Euripides Poeta Tragicorum princeps in Latinum sermonem conversus, 211. Stiblin continues: “It seems that the poet has indulged his affect (which he often does) and in this place most freely, when he so invidiously drags down poor women. Against this calumny of Hippolytus which thus is not considered, but excessive and inflammatory, one should read Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s book On the Nobility and Excellences of Women. It therefore appears that Euripides should not, on the basis of this passage, be named a misogynist, nor rashly insulted by Aristophanes as an intractable hater of women.” Modern commentators might take note.
56. See Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, 259 and 59–72. The Hesiod passage is noted as an analogue or model for the speech of Hippolytus by David Kovacs in his edition and translation of Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, 185.
57. Panofsky and Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 12–13; 64–65. On the Pandora myth and Paradise Lost, see Revard, “Milton and Myth,” 23–48, 37–44; Butler, “Milton’s Pandora: Eve, Sin, and the Mythographic Tradition,” 153–78.
58. Le Comte, Milton and Sex, 112–13.
59. On Prometheus and Noah, see Allen, Mysteriously Meant, 68, 73, 162; for Prometheus and Adam, see 243, 293; and on Milton’s use of the classical myths, 290–301. For some allegorists, the Prometheus in bono of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.82–84 is the creator of man from an earth that may still retain bits of divine fire in it; others interpret the fire that the Titan steals from heaven as intellectual power and knowledge of astronomy and divine mysteries; the traces of this fire are to be found in poetry, Milton writes to his father in Ad Patrem, 17–23.
60. Vossius, De Theologia Gentili, 142, notes the error of the myth that portrays Prometheus as the son of Japhet, since, Vossius maintains, Prometheus was really a version of Noah himself.
61. Wilson, Mocked with Death, 188.
62. On “grinding,” Milton’s unpleasing euphemism for sexual intercourse, see Patterson, Milton’s Words, 51–53.
63. The association between Tubalcain and Vulcan is made by Du Bartas/Sylvester in the section of the second of the Divine Weeks, “The Handy-Crafts,” devoted to Cain and his metalworking descendants. Tubal(cain)’s fellow workmen at his smithy are Brontes and Steropes (“The Handy crafts,” 525–28), the same cyclopes who labor at the forge of Virgil’s Vulcan in book 8 of the Aeneid (8.423–25). See also Vossius, De Theologia Gentili, 224. For the connection of Vulcan’s artifice and paternity, see 658: “For Vulcan, as we have shown, is the creative fire of the smithy. But it is the instrument of this art: instruments do not pertain to the material, which is called such from mater, but from the efficient cause, as a father (pater).” Vossius does not mention Pandora.
64. Milton may remind us of the identification at second hand, in his comparison of Adam and Eve to Deucalion and Pyrrha at the opening of book 11.9–14. In Ovid’s version of the pagan myth of the Flood in Metamorphoses 1, the Roman poet refers to the couple as Promethides and Epimethida (390), as the son of Prometheus and the daughter of Epimetheus (and hence daughter of Pandora). See Revard, “Milton and Myth,” 42–44.
65. I follow closely the analysis of Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 147–55.
66. So the Levite later says in his own version of the events in Judges 20:5; see the version of Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 5.2.8.
67. Simons “ ‘An Immortality Rather than a Life’: Milton and the Concubine of Judges 19–21;” Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 125–55.
68. Simons, “ ‘An Immortality Rather than a Life,’ ” 155.
69. The evidence that would have been available to Milton was gathered by Lapide in his Commentarius in Iosue, Iudicum, Ruth, IV; Libros Regum et II Paralipomenon. See Lapide, Commentarii in Sacram Scripturam, 2.1:195. “Our translator elongates tiznach, that is she left, for they read tizna, that is, she fornicated. Hence the Rabbis say that she was sent away from the Levite for adultery. But in truth neither the Septuagint, nor the Chaldean, nor Josephus make mention of this crime. The Septuagint translates, she was angry at him, the Chaldean she had contempt for him. Josephus says that she separated from her husband because of his jealousy. It is likely that they had different manners and customs, whence arose strifes, quarrels, and altercations among them, which are frequent among spouses, and for that reason the wife left her husband to go to her parents. This is to be linked to verse 3: her man followed her wishing for a reconciliation.”
70. Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 133–34.
71. Ibid., 154–55.
72. Commentators perceived that the Adam of Genesis 3:12 was blaming God in blaming the woman whom God had given him. In his Commentarii in Pentateuchum Mosis, Lapide writes, “The just man is his own accuser from the beginning: Adam, after his sin full of concupiscence, pride, and self-love, preferred to seek excuses for his sins. Whence he transferred the fault from himself to his wife, and indeed traced it to God himself, who had given him such a wife.” Augustine comments on Adam shifting the blame to Eve out of pride in City of God 14.14.
73. Le Comte, Milton and Sex, 18.
Notes to Chapter 8
1. G. K. Hunter reads a concentric structure in the 1674, twelve-book Paradise Lost; he had the right idea, but, I would argue, the wrong version of the epic: the concentric scheme can be discerned more clearly in Milton’s original plan of the poem in ten books. See Hunter, Paradise Lost, 37–41. On the two centers of the poem, see Summers, The Muse’s Method, 112–46.
2. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene”; and Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, and The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel.
3. For a discussion of the view of world empires from the mount of speculation, see Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 160–77; on Charles II as a new Solomon in the propaganda of his entry into London in 1661, see 99–100. See also Archer, Old Worlds, 88–89. Almansor, king of Morocco, listed in the rulers of the empire at 11.403–4, is almost certainly to be identified with Ahmed Al-Mansur (1549–1603), known as the “Golden” (al-Dhahabi) after he conquered the Songhai Empire in present-day Mali and gained access to its sub-Saharan gold, an epithet that corresponds to the “El Dorado” of Guiana a few verses later (11.411); see Smith, Ahmad al-Mansur: Islamic Visionary, 80, 124. Milton would probably not have known that Al-Mansur compared himself to Solomon; see Mouline, Le califat imaginaire d’Ahmad al-Mansur, 346. Because of his diplomatic negotiations with England, Al-Mansur acquired a place in the Elizabethan imagination; he is the character Muly Mahamet Seth in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and he may be recalled in the Prince of Morocco, who wrongly chooses the golden casket in Portia’s test in The Merchant of Venice; see Ungerer, “Portia and the Prince of Morocco,” 89–126.
4. For the parallel between Eden and the Jerusalem temple, both destroyed, see Rosenblatt, “ ‘Audacious Neighborhood,’,” 553–68, 563–64; Frye, Return of Eden, 141. I am also indebted to the unpublished paper of James Nohrnberg, “Jerusalem Transposed,” cited again below (notes 12 and 23). The comparison of the thunderstruck fallen angels driven by the Son over the verge of heaven to “a herd / Of goats or timorous flock together thronged” at 6.856–57 suggests the parable of Matthew 25:32–34, as well as the episode of the Gadarene swine, possessed by a legion of demons, who charge down a steep place into the Sea of Galilee (Matt. 8:28–33; Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39); they may also recall the sheep and oxen that Jesus drives out of the temple (John 2:14–15).
5. Leonard, Naming in Eden, 51–56.
6. In his discussion of idolatry in book 2, chapter 5 of On Christian Doctrine, Milton cites Deuteronomy 16:21–22, “you shalt not plant a grove [lucum] for yourself near the altar of Jehovah,” and goes on to remark, “Idolatry is described in Isa. lvii.9, etc: getting heated in the groves [lucis].” CPW 6:691; Works 17:134–36.
7. Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney Begun An: Dom: 1610, 186. Cited by Fowler in his note to 1.403–5.
8. On this passage and on the role of place, with its implications for urban settlement—Eden versus Pandaemonium—in the last books of Paradise Lost, see Manley, Literature and Culture, 566–82.
9. The tree is mentioned only one other time in the Bible. Carey, The Poems, 109, suggests a reminiscence of the albaque populus of Horace Odes 2.3.9; this silver poplar, too, is associated with its welcoming shade (umbram hospitalem).
10. Fontenrose, Python, 395–97, 417.
11. Quint, “Expectation and Prematurity.” For the cessation of oracles at the Nativity, Christian poets looked back to Prudentius, Apotheosis 435–43. See Patrides, “The Cessation of the Oracles: The History of a Legend,” 500–507.
12. Nohrnberg, “Jerusalem Transposed.” As Nohrnberg points out, Milton glances at the variant myth that Delos once floated unmoored on the sea before the birth of Apollo, when, according to Callimachus (Hymn 4.53–54), the island grew roots, or, in Virgil’s retelling, the grateful Apollo bound it to the neighboring islands of Mykonos and Gyaros (Aen. 3.75–76).
13. Milton’s only mention of crusading, in his early Apology against a Pamphlet, ties it and his opponent, the remonstrant Joseph Hall, to Catholic violence (CPW 1:896) against fellow Christians, notably to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. See the remarks on Tasso, Ariosto, and Camões as epic poets of the crusade against Islam in the introduction.
14. Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 157, suggests the echo of Marlowe. On Milton’s home, see Nohrnberg, “Paradise Regained by One Greater Man,” 114n53. Jameson asserts that the pendent world that Satan sees hanging from God’s aristocratic heaven “is the market system and capitalism itself.” A sentence earlier, he comments, “Alongside the feudal world of God and his court, of Satan, and his host, Adam is clearly of another species—the commoner, the first bourgeois, that extraordinary mutation which is middle-class man, destined as we know today to be fruitful and multiply, and to inherit the earth.” See Jameson, “Religion and Ideology,” 332. Baldly stated as it is, this observation survives the critique of Jameson’s essay by Goldberg, “The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay,” 514–42.
15. In his extended address to Cromwell toward the end of the Second Defense of the English People (1654), Milton urges the separation of church and state: “Next, I would have you leave the church to the church and shrewdly relieve yourself and the government of half your burden (one that is at the same time completely alien to you), and not permit two powers, utterly diverse, the civil and the ecclesiastical, to make harlots of each other, and while appearing to strengthen, by their mingled and spurious riches, actually to undermine and at length destroy each other. I would have you remove all power from the church (but power will never be absent so long as money, the poison of the church, the quinsy of truth, extorted by force even from those who are unwilling, remains the price of preaching the Gospel). I would have you drive from the temple the money-changers, who buy and sell, not doves, but the Dove, the Holy Spirit Himself” (CPW 4:678).
16. Welch, “Milton’s Forsaken Proserpine,” 527–56, suggests that the Eden washed away at the end of book 11 is the “landscape of literary romance” (555), a mode that Milton is giving up at the end of Paradise Lost.
17. On Vulcan and Tubalcain, see chapter 7, note 63. These remarks, and the general contrast in this chapter between the Pandaemonium raised in book 1 and the Eden destroyed in book 11, are a variation on the observations of Bloom, who sees in the building of Pandaemonium by Mulciber “the anxiety of influence and an anxiety of morality about the secondariness of any poetic creation, even Milton’s own.” Bloom, Map of Misreading, 139.
18. Allen suggests, to the contrary, that Milton wrote Paradise Lost “to reaffirm his faith in the Pentateuch story and to oppose in this fashion the manifold doubts of his age,” in The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters, 39.
19. There is a parallel here, I think, to the argument of Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 144–76, that the last two books of Paradise Lost chart a greater human independence from divine constraint; see Rogers, chapter 6, note 53.
20. See Armitage, “John Milton: Poet against Empire,” 206–25; Quint, Epic and Empire. Michael’s blunt disparagement of empire creates some difficulty for contrary views that would see the Milton of Paradise Lost as favorable to empire and implicated in the history of British colonialism and imperialism (there may be some difference between the poet and the Secretary for the Foreign Tongues of the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments). See Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic; Stevens, “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” 3–21; Barnaby, “ ‘Another Rome in the West’? Milton and the Imperial Republic, 1654–1670,” 67–84; and the essays collected in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Rajan and Sauer.
21. Milton’s phrase contains a reminiscence of Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.11.5.
22. On the condition of Milton’s poetry, mediated by a potentially idolatrous literary tradition, necessarily mediated with relationship to its divine subject, see the eloquent comments of Parker, Inescapable Romance, 135–37. Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 290, notes, “When Paradise is lost, Paradise Lost must be fallen.” Leonard discusses, following and answering earlier critics, the relationship of Milton’s fallen language and tradition to the prelapsarian subject matter of the epic, 233–92.
23. Nohrnberg, “Jerusalem Transposed”; Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, 105n51.