Milton became entirely blind in 1652, just a short while before the death of his first wife, Mary Powell Milton, followed six weeks later by the death of their infant son, John. He married again in 1656. In 1658 Katharine Woodcock Milton died of complications arising from childbirth, again followed about six weeks later by the death of their infant daughter, Katharine. The political cause to which Milton had devoted two decades of his life suffered a resounding defeat with Charles II’s ascent to the throne in 1660. Through this time of loss and reversal, Milton kept busy on various prose projects, including his theological treatise Christian Doctrine, a Latin thesaurus, and his History of Britain. He translated a group of Psalms in 1653. He wrote the occasional sonnet. Then, probably before the Restoration, he shook off potential depression, concentrated his powers, and began composing the greatest long poem in the English language. “His great works,” Samuel Johnson declared, “were performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous” (Thorpe 88).
Though Edward Phillips did not mention these dates in his life of Milton, he told John Aubrey that the poem was begun “about 2 years before the king came in, and finished about three years after the king’s restoration” (lxvi). Although Milton associated literary creativity with the temperate Mediterranean climate that had nurtured Homer and Vergil, he himself composed Paradise Lost only during the winter, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. Various secretaries copied it down. Milton’s habit was to rise early in the morning with “ten, twenty, or thirty verses” (Darbishire 73) ready for dictation. If his amanuensis happened to be late, he had a little joke ready, and “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked” (Darbishire 33).
A major poem had long been his chief ambition. As early as At a Vacation Exercise in 1628, the nineteen-year-old undergraduate had magically suspended the expectations of a humorous ritual occasion to evoke the highest raptures of epic, “where the deep transported mind may soar/Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’n’s door/Look in,” and “sing of secret things that came to pass/When beldam Nature in her cradle was.” For a time, as references in Manso and Epitaph for Damon reveal, he considered a specifically British poem shaped from Arthurian materials. Such a work would be “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation” (RCG in MLM 841). We do not know precisely why Milton abandoned this plan. He might have come to feel that a patriotic epic was simply too provincial, or that the choice of an early British king for a hero would commit the work to some degree of monarchism; then, too, he might have realized as maturity settled on him that he could admire Spenser without trying to duplicate his achievement.
The first plans for a work on the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden appear in four outlines for a tragic drama in the Trinity College manuscript (CMS), probably drafted in the early 1640s. The third of these is called “Paradise Lost.” Adam and Eve do not take the stage until after the Fall, presumably because their “first naked glory” (PL 9.1115) could not be accommodated in a fallen theater. In the fourth and final version, which shifts from the outline format to narrative prose, Milton roughs in some features of Paradise Lost. Satan has a new prominence. The work will end with the expelling angel showing Adam a pageant about the fallen world he is soon to enter.
Paradise Lost was published in 1667 by the bookseller Samuel Simmons, whose London shop was near Aldersgate. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York possesses a manuscript of Book 1 of the poem in the hand of a copyist, and corrected by as many as five other hands, that was used to set the type for this edition (see Darbishire 1931 for a photographic facsimile). The contract stipulated that Milton was to be paid five pounds for the manuscript, another five pounds upon the sale of a first edition of thirteen hundred copies, and yet another five pounds upon the sale of a second edition of the same size. The earliest title page of the 1667 quarto identifies Paradise Lost as “A POEM Written in TEN BOOKS By JOHN MILTON.” Sales were apparently sluggish. Through 1668 and 1669, the edition was issued with four more title pages, as Simmons added Milton’s note on unrhyming verse and his prose arguments summarizing the action of the poem book by book. When the first printing finally sold out in April 1669, Milton was paid a second five pounds.
It was perhaps Dryden’s announcement in April 1674 that he would transform Paradise Lost into a heroic opera (this “never acted” opera was published as The State of Innocence in 1677) that led Simmons to print a second and octavo edition of the epic in July 1674. This book contained prefatory poems by Samuel Barrow (in Latin) and Andrew Marvell (in English). The epic was “amended, enlarged, and differently disposed as to the number of books, by his own hand, that is by his own appointment [by someone acting as his agent]” (Edward Phillips in Darbishire, 1932, 75). The shift from ten to twelve books meant dividing the original Book 7 into the new Books 7 and 8, with the addition of four new lines at the beginning of Book 8; the long Book 10 of the first edition was divided into Books 11 and 12, with five new lines at the beginning of Book 12. There were four other major revisions (the reworking of 1.5104–5, the expansion at 5.636–41, the addition of 11.485–87, the alteration of 11.551). The authority of the second edition cannot be doubted in these matters. An unwell Milton made an oral will on or about July 20, 1674, two weeks after the second publication of Paradise Lost, and died on November 9, 1674. The second edition of Paradise Lost was the last printing over which he exerted control.
There are thirty-seven substantive differences between the two editions. In thirteen of these, the quarto text supplies the superior reading; in only eight is the octavo text superior; editors differ over the remaining sixteen (Moyles 22–26). It would seem from this evidence that editors should not, as many have claimed to do, adopt the 1674 octavo as a copy text and automatically follow it with regard to the accidentals of spelling and punctuation (Moyles 28). There are over eight hundred variants of this kind between the two editions. We have treated each as a separate case rather than defer to the rule of the copy text.
Simmons published a third edition in 1678. A printer named Brabazon Aylmer purchased the poem from Simmons in 1680, then sold half of it to a young entrepreneur named Jacob Tonson. He was Dryden’s chief publisher and would become known for his beautiful editions of Shakespeare and Spenser. But Milton was his great love and, happily enough for a businessman, his great moneymaker too. He and Aylmer printed a folio-size fourth edition of the epic in 1688, adding illustrations, a frontispiece portrait of Milton, and an epigram by Dryden in which Milton is said to be the union of Homer and Vergil. Tonson purchased Aylmer’s half of the poem in 1691. He also obtained from Aylmer the manuscript of Book 1 now owned by the Pierpont Morgan Library. For the sixth edition, of 1695, Tonson added 321 pages of explanatory notes by Patrick Hume; no other English poem had ever been so lavishly annotated. Tonson and his family would print Paradise Lost, and other works by Milton, in various configurations again and again throughout the eighteenth century. When asked which poet had brought him the greatest financial profit, Tonson without hesitation replied “Milton” (Lynch 126). He had his portrait painted holding a copy of Paradise Lost.
In 1732 a cantankerous, seventy-year-old academic named Richard Bentley, then England’s foremost classicist and a specialist in textual emendation, published a notorious edition of Paradise Lost. Believing that he had purified textual corruption in classical authors such as Manilius, Bentley brought the same methods to Milton’s modern epic. Blind, Milton was unable to correct wayward copyists. But Bentley, suspecting a more deliberate and insidious errancy, posited the existence of a “phantom” editor. Befuddled by Milton’s learning and linguistic precision, this unknown person rewrote the text to suit his own imbecility. Today the Bentley edition seems a work of glaring subjectivity. Truths about the epic, such as the immense thoughtfulness manifest in its details, do not break into the editor’s awareness because his attention is devoted wholly to his own theory and method. It was hardly a compliment to Milton to suppose that Paradise Lost as readers knew it was a work of genius systematically effaced by the work of a moron. But modern critics such as William Empson, Christopher Ricks, and John Leonard have been inspired by Bentley’s scrutiny of the minutiae of Milton’s style. Textual emendation became the rage in Shakespeare studies in the eighteenth century and is still widely practiced today. The aberration of Bentley’s Paradise Lost aside, it never caught on among Milton’s editors.
The next notable edition was Thomas Newton’s beautiful two-volume variorum of 1749. Its copious and often unequaled annotations were mostly reprinted, with the addition of many new ones, in the 1826 variorum of Milton’s entire poetic works assembled by Reverend Henry Todd. Anyone who becomes seriously curious about the meaning of a particular word or passage in Milton will want to go back to Todd and Newton, and behind them to the first of Milton’s annotators, Patrick Hume. They will also want to explore works such as Jonathan Richardson’s Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734) and James Paterson’s A Complete Commentary with Etymological, Explanatory, Critical and Classical Notes on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1744). There are many subtleties, exactitudes, and points of information in these notes for which we, like other modern editors, have simply found no room.
Among the editions of the last century or so, we were most surprised to discover the sustained elucidation of A. W. Verity, who is largely forgotten today; besides the excellence of their commentary, his notes teem with examples of Romantic and Victorian imitation of Milton and will prove useful in future studies of that subject. In working on this edition, we came to think of Verity as the unknown god of Milton annotation. We also paid especially close attention to the thoughtful notes of Alastair Fowler and John Leonard, and consulted Merritt Hughes, Douglas Bush, Scott Elledge, and Roy Flannagan, among others.
Heaven sits atop Milton’s cosmos. Beneath it lies Chaos. We sense that both of these realms have, so to speak, been around forever. It would be a nice point in Milton’s theology to ask whether Chaos precedes Heaven or vice versa, since the very existence of God seems to require an abode, and therefore a Heaven of some sort, while on the other hand Chaos appears to be the precondition of all creations, including those of the Son, the angels, and Heaven. As the poem begins, these two established cosmic areas have been joined by two new spaces. At the bottom of Chaos stands Hell, the elder of the new realms. Between Heaven and Chaos, suspended on a golden chain affixed to Heaven (2.1004–6), lies the most recent of God’s creations: our Earth, including the planets and stars surrounding it.
Readers of the poem are usually familiar with dualistic visions of Heaven, in which the realm of the divine is carefully separated from such imperfect earthly things as body and alteration. But Milton’s universe is monistic. Everything stems from “one first matter” (5.472). Instead of excluding materiality, pleasure, pain, appetite, sexuality, and time from Heaven, Milton welcomes them in. As on Earth, day and night alternate in Heaven; Heaven’s night is not the darkness of Earth’s but rather comparable to earthly twilight (5.627–29, 645–46, 685–86). Beneath the very Mount of God is a cave “Where light and darkness in perpetual round/Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav’n/Grateful vicissitude, like day and night” (6.6–8). Milton’s God, satisfying an appetite for vicissitude, resides on time.
Angels live large in a Heaven that is vast but not infinite. When Satan leaves the military camp near the deity, he and his followers retreat to the “palace of great Lucifer” in north Heaven (5.760). Apparently, on the model of the court and the country, angels live in estates various distances from the mountainous throne of God. Buildings designed by angelic architects, radiant with gems and precious metals, grace the realm. The orders of angels (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels) were strictly hierarchical in traditional Christian thought. At times in Milton, the terms carry their old hierarchical force, but often they are used interchangeably, as a pool of synonyms for the generic angel. Milton is rather insistent on the point that while likenesses between Heaven and Earth may be necessary fictions, they could also be ontologically sound (5.571–76). “O Earth, how like to Heav’n!” Satan exclaims (9.99). Heaven has vales, streams, breezes, trees, flowers, and vines. The vegetation produces ambrosial food, “the growth of Heaven” (5.635). Heaven and Earth, like spirit and matter or men and angels, differ “but in degree, of kind the same” (5.490).
Although Chaos can be studied in terms of antecedents in classical literature and philosophy (Chambers 1963), its appearance in the epic owes its problematic character to Milton’s theology. Chaos is infinite, and filled by a ubiquitous God who has nonetheless withdrawn his creative will from chaotic matter (7.168–73). None of the categorical binaries established during the creation of Genesis inhere in Chaos. It is neither this nor that, “neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/Confus’dly” (2.912–14); therefore Satan, as he traverses this indeterminate space, confusedly mixes locomotions, “And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies” (2.950). The “embryon atoms” (2.900) of Chaos are “the womb of Nature” (2.911), the pure potential that the Son first circumscribes with golden compasses when creating our universe (7.225–31) and will doubtless use again in creating new worlds (2.915–16). Chaos cannot be good until God has infused it with creative order. It is at least morally neutral, at best thoroughly praiseworthy, as a part of the process by which God makes and sustains all things.
But alongside the language of atomism, Milton gives us a mythic Chaos, personified as the ruler of his realm, or rather its “Anarch” (2.988), since Chaos is by definition without rule. This Chaos, speaking for his consort, Night, and for a shadowy pack of Hesiodic creatures and personifications (2.963–67), expresses his resentment over recent losses (the creations of Hell and our universe) and supports Satan’s mission on the assumption that “Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain” (2.1009). We thus arrive at paradox. Theologically, Chaos is neutral or better. Mythically, in terms of the epic narrative, Chaos is the ally of Satan.
Jewish and Christian theologians have sometimes distinguished the Bible from other Mesopotamian creation myths in which the god-hero defeats a chaos monster, out of whose slain body the world is made; in Genesis, by contrast, the world is initially good, and God affirms its goodness on every day of the creation. Evil appears with the fall of man (Ricoeur 172, 175–210), though of course the enigmatic presence of the snake promises a backstory of some kind. For Ricoeur the matter at stake here is whether religious symbols are recessive, and must always point backward to the defeat of Chaos, or whether they can look toward novel futures, as is apparently the case with the messianic and eschatological strands of Judaism and Christianity. Regina Schwartz, defending Milton’s mythic Chaos, argues that the separation of evil from the Creation is not really true of the Bible, and is patently untrue of Paradise Lost, where Chaos gives Satan his nod of approval. All of God’s revelations, all of Satan’s subsequent defeats, echo the initial triumph over Chaos, and redemption itself is but a repetition of that original victory (Schwartz 8–39; see also Leonard 2000, xx–xxi).
John Rumrich, defending the theological Chaos, notes that the irony of Chaos’s expression of solidarity with Satan lies in the old Anarch’s failure to understand that Satanic evil is rigid, not anarchic, a fixed posture of defiance and disobedience (1995, 1035–44). We see this in Book 10, where Sin and Death are building a bridge through Chaos to link Earth and Hell, and a double-crossed Chaos seethes at this new incursion into his realm:
On either side
Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed,
And with rebounding surge the bars assailed,
That scorned his indignation. (10.415-18)
Chaos, Rumrich maintains, is “a part of the deity, arguably feminine, over which the eternal father does not exercise control, from which, in other words, the father is absent as an active, governing agent” (1995, 1043; see also Danielson 32–57).
Expelled from Heaven, the rebel angels fall for nine days and nights through Chaos to Hell (6.871), which “Yawning received them whole, and on them closed” (6.875). They land on a burning sulfurous lake. After spending another nine days and nights stretched out dazed or unconscious on this lake (1.50–53), they awaken to the baleful prospect of Hell. Milton famously describes it as “darkness visible” (1.63), a place where fire burns without giving off light. Its purpose is not clear to the fallen angels. Among the first topics addressed in Hell is whether the Hell is for punishment or confinement (1.146–52).
In Milton’s day the idea of Hell and its eternal torments was just entering a period of declining popularity among educated Europeans (Walker). Americans in particular, remembering such figures as Jonathan Edwards, tend to associate Puritanism with resistance to this trend. Milton exposes the simplicity of this view. His narrator introduces Hell as a “dungeon” for “torture without end” (1.61–69). But beyond the nine days in burning sulfur, we do not observe much in the way of punishment. To be sure, there are the more or less classical touches of the devils’ periodic exposure to the extremes of ice and fire (2.596–603); the frustrating waters of Lethe, which shrink from seekers of oblivion (2.604–14); the terrifying monsters bred in Hell (2.622–28); the annual metamorphosis of the demons into serpents (10.572–77). But nothing here approaches the individualized tortures inflicted over and over on the inmates of Dante’s Hell. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that Milton’s Hell is inhabited by fallen angels only, whereas Dante’s is peopled. But there is no direct allusion in Paradise Lost to tortures awaiting the damned in the future. William Empson, a critic acutely attuned to the idea of God as torturer, found no evidence of this despicable notion in Paradise Lost: “Milton’s God is not interested in torture, and never suggests that he uses it to improve people’s characters” (273). For Milton, one has the impression, exile from God is the primal punishment, and all others merely the flash points of low imaginations.
As for confinement, the only exit from Hell is through a locked gate. But the key has been entrusted to Sin (2.774–77, 850–53, 871–89). She alone can unlock the gate, and does, and is incapable of closing it. At the end of time, Hell may indeed become a dungeon of torment (10.629–37), the universe’s vacuum-cleaner bag, but in the meantime devils will possess the fallen earth, especially its air. Milton’s Hell is more importantly a spiritual condition. “The mind is its own place,” Satan declares, “and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). It can certainly do the second, as we see in the birth of Sin from the mind of Satan. Out of the “darkness” of a painful headache, “flames thick and fast” appear (2.754): a precise echo of Hell’s “darkness visible.” Even in Heaven, Satan has Hell within him, “nor from Hell/One step no more than from himself can fly/By change of place” (4.21–23).
The first half of Paradise Lost begins with Milton’s search for a Heavenly Muse who was present at the Creation, “and with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss” (1.20–21). Only with this Muse illuminating what is dark in him, raising and supporting what is low in him, can Milton create the poem. The second half of Paradise Lost begins in Book 7 with a direct and expanded account of this miracle. It is the perfect fit between inspiration and subject matter: the metaphorical creation of the poem now recounts the actual Creation. This world, the handiwork of God, was the single greatest stimulus to Milton’s imagination.
We find many examples of this literary excitement in Milton’s treatment of astronomy. He met the blind Galileo in 1638 or 1639, when the Inquisition had confined him to his villa outside of Florence. The “Tuscan artist” is the only contemporary mentioned in the epic. There are three explicit references (1.287–91, 3.588–90, 5.261–63). To these must be added passages that allude to one or another of Galileo’s discoveries, such as newly sighted stars (7.382–84), the nature of the Milky Way (7.577–81), the phases of Venus (7.366), the moons of Jupiter (8.148–52), and the freshly detailed description of the moon (7.375–78, 8.145–48). This fascination extends to other matters concerning the new astronomy of the seventeenth century. Milton returns four times to the question of whether there has been from the beginning, or may be in the future, a plurality of inhabited worlds (2.912, 7.191, 7.621–22, 8.148–52). He leaves open debated matters such as whether the earth rotates on its axis (4.591–95). When he writes of the “three different motions” of the earth (8.130), we can infer a somewhat detailed knowledge of Copernicus (Babb 81–82), the champion of the heliocentric universe, who wrote at length about the three motions (daily rotation, annual revolution about the sun, and the slow movement about the ecliptic, or “trepidation,” causing the precession of the equinoxes).
On the large question of whether to prefer the modern “Copernican” heliocentric model or the ancient “Ptolemaic” geocentric model of the universe, Milton has Raphael, Adam’s first angelic educator, insist on the undecidability of such matters (8.66–178). But it would have been impossible to represent cosmic space with any precision without making a choice, and in point of fact the design of the poem’s universe is Ptolemaic. Earth is the still point of the turning world. The spheres of the moon, sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn turn about a central Earth. Beyond them is the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, so called because they do not appear to change their positions with regard to one another. The ninth is the so-called crystalline sphere, whose vibrations cause the “trepidation” (3.483). Finally, the primum mobile, the outer circle moved directly by God, encases this entire mesh of spheres within spheres.
Did Milton see the heavens through a telescope? Might he, to broach the most exciting thought of all, have looked through Galileo’s telescope? Such speculations, common in the discipline of Milton studies, are inspired by his epic’s unprecedented aesthetics of space. If Milton ultimately sided with the ancients in universe design, his rendering of the great vistas both seen and traversed by space-traveling angels opens a whole new area in modern literary sublimity. “Milton’s canvas in Paradise Lost is the vastest used by an English artist” (Nicolson 1960, 187). Dante’s universe is finished. Milton’s is a work in progress. The novelties of Earth and Hell have reorganized space itself; more novelties can be anticipated. Novelty in the representation of space is a conscious literary feature of the epic, and stands for its modernity. When Satan throws his shield over his back, Milton interposes, between our mental sight and its object, the “optic glass” of Galileo:
the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. (1.286–91)
Homer had compared the brightness of Achilles’ shield to the moon. Milton switches the focus from brightness, so crucial in Greek poetics, to size, so crucial in his poetics, and relocates the old simile inside the circle of Galileo’s telescope. This invention, he implies, is the only modern device to expand the imaginative range of poetry, to provide a worldly conceptualization of what it means to describe immortals and inquire into the ways of God. Notice how, once Galileo is introduced, the passage forgets Satan and the narrative line of the poem to celebrate the wandering curiosity of Galileo’s viewing and descrying eye. For Milton, the Tuscan artist represents curiosity rewarded: despite Catholic dogmatism, Galileo wanted to see, and he did see, which is what the blind narrator of Paradise Lost seeks in his invocation to light at the opening of Book 3.
Many of the poem’s best sidereal effects derive from what Alastair Fowler calls “an entire fictive astronomy,” whose implications Milton works out “with ingenuity reminiscent of science fiction” (35). Before the Fall, Milton postulates, the path of the sun never deviates from the equator. The axis of the earth is perfectly parallel to the axis of the sun. The sun is always in Aries. There is no precession of equinoxes. Day and night are always of equal duration. There are no seasons. Within the beautiful simplicity of this system, Milton arranges the various journeys and arrivals of his poem. An extraordinary number of important things happen at the four cardinal points of the day, dawn and dusk, noon and midnight (Cirillo 1962).
Allusions to the zodiac and the constellations are often both realistic and symbolic. Milton rarely underlines, rarely sticks an elbow in our ribs. When Satan leaves our world in Book 10, “Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering/His zenith, while the Sun in Aries rose” (328–29), the author expects a very great deal of his reader. She must know that the constellation Anguis, the body of the serpent held by Ophiuchus, lies between the Centaur and the Scorpion. She must recall that, some 5,833 lines ago, Satan entered our world (3.555–61), and Milton described his view in such a way that he must have been gazing out from the head of Anguis. A reader able to put all this together realizes that Satan enters through the head and exits from the tail of the serpent. She appreciates a scatological joke. She is reminded of eating and digestion, which is rather a serious matter in Paradise Lost. She recalls with a dawning sense of complexity that Satan in Eden possesses the serpent through its mouth. And so on. As one of the finest of Milton’s eighteenth-century commentators put it, “A reader of Milton must be always upon duty; he is surrounded with sense, it rises in every line, every word is to the purpose.… All has been considered, and demands and merits observation” (Richardson in Darbishire 1932, 315).
It will not surprise close students of Milton to learn that there is a passage in the poem that apparently calls into question everything we have said about the energy, originality, and sublimity of his cosmos. For what are we to make of Raphael’s dismissive rebuke to the ambitions of astronomers (8.66–178)? God will laugh at their attempts to divulge his secrets. Adam is advised to leave the heavens to their own workings: “be lowly wise” (173). The speech is not, as it has sometimes been taken to be, an all-out attack on the new learning that elsewhere seems to intrigue and inspire the poet. God is in fact pictured laughing at the old Ptolemaic astronomers, adding orbits within orbits and strange counterpressures (“build, unbuild”) in order to make the model fit the appearances (Babb 88):
perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter, when they come to model heav’n
And calculate the stars, how they will wield
The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances, how gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. (8.77–84)
The angel also insists that man is not the only being who must discipline his curiosity; the workings of the universe have been kept secret from “man or angel” (see also 7.122–24). And no doubt Raphael has a point in maintaining that the correctness of this or that celestial picture makes no difference to life on Earth, which must be the focus of our wisdom.
Still, censuring a desire to understand the heavens seems directly contrary in spirit to the passage on Satan’s shield, with its excited shift of focus to the knowledge-hungry eyes of Galileo surveying the moon. Perhaps Nicolson was right in supposing that there were “two persistent aspects of Milton’s personality, one satisfied with proportion and limitation, the other revelling in the luxuriant and the unrestrained” (1960, 186). Then again, it is possible that the dismissal of astronomy belongs not to a conflict between contentment and aspiration but to the structure of aspiration. This divine disapproval could be viewed as a scientific expression of the general sense of trespass Milton encounters when approaching God. “May I express thee unblamed” (3.3)? He cannot reach the heights without taking liberties.
Milton’s theology is systematic, Christian, Protestant, and for the most part quite standard. That much is evident from his epic argument, which incorporates the familiar locales, actors, and events of Christian orthodoxy: Heaven, Hell, an almighty and all-knowing deity, hateful rebel angels, benevolent unfallen angels, Adam and Eve, a garden Paradise on Earth, the Fall, Original Sin, the penalty of mortality, and, in prospect, satisfaction of that penalty through sacrifice of God’s only-begotten Son. Indeed, this large conformity has permitted generations of Milton scholars to downplay or ignore his unorthodoxy. Yet, despite the substantially ordinary Christianity of Paradise Lost, Milton did endorse various theological opinions deemed heretical, some criminally so in the view of seventeenth-century civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
A few of these unorthodox beliefs figure crucially in Paradise Lost. Most do not. On the one hand, Milton’s advocacy of adult baptism by immersion, for example, and his rejection of obligatory Sabbath observation, though significant enough in the religious politics of the seventeenth century, do not bear on his epic. Vitalist monism and insistence on creation ex deo, on the other hand, are grand generative heresies foundational to the fictional world imagined by Milton—its spiritual-natural ground rules, as detailed in the preceding section. The three great religious debates of seventeenth-century England, and the heresies that correspond to them, are even more overtly pertinent, especially to the declared intention of the epic narrative to “justify the ways of God to men.” The first of these controversies concerns the means of salvation (soteriology); the second, church government (ecclesiology); and the third, the status of the Son of God (Christology).
Most Christians in a relatively tolerant age would deem Milton’s theological opinions as they relate to the first two of these controversies unremarkable and, in any case, his own business. But his opinions concerning the Son of God still register as heretical according to most Christian sects. They have also been a focus of sometimes heated scholarly controversy for nearly two centuries, since the manuscript of his theological treatise, Christian Doctrine, was discovered in 1823. The longest chapter of the treatise criticizes the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as a logical impossibility devoid of scriptural authority and depicts the Son as a distinctly lesser God: the first of all creatures, begotten in time, and variously inferior to his father. That Milton’s arguments should therefore be classified as Arian and contrary to Nicene formulations (“true God from true God … of one essence with the Father”) was the seemingly inescapable conclusion endorsed by theologically informed Milton scholars from the time of Bishop Sumner, the original translator of the treatise, through the era of C. S. Lewis and Maurice Kelley in the mid–twentieth century. Orthodox believers who saw Milton as a bulwark of traditional Christianity were discomfited, the unorthodox heartened. Thus in 1826 the American Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing, a forerunner of Transcendentalism, enthusiastically grouped Milton with other celebrated seventeenth-century antitrinitarians: “our Trinitarian adversaries are perpetually ringing in our ears the names of Fathers and Reformers. We take MILTON, LOCKE, and NEWTON, and place them in our front, and want no others to oppose to the whole army of great names on the opposite side. Before these intellectual suns, the stars of self-named orthodoxy ‘hide their diminished heads’ ” (35–36).
Readers who found Paradise Lost nonetheless orthodox comforted themselves with the often repeated observation that before the discovery of the treatise readers better informed theologically than their twentieth-century counterparts failed to suspect Milton’s epic of heresy. C. S. Lewis reasoned that Milton when he composed his epic must have deliberately set aside his theological eccentricities in order to appeal to the majority of Christian readers (90–91). This surmise segued into the still current argument that because the theological treatise is inconsistent with the epic, the former should not be relied on as a guide to understanding the latter (Patrides; Campbell et al. 110).
Such claims simply do not hold water. John Toland, writing Milton’s life in 1698, declined to defend Paradise Lost “against those people who brand [it] with heresy” (128), indicating that such complaints were fairly common even before the discovery of the treatise. Unlike Toland, Jonathan Richardson, writing in 1734, says he cannot in good conscience “pass over in silence another conjecture which some have made, … that Milton was an Arian; and this is built on certain passages in Paradise Lost “(xlix). Theologically acute readers like Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) objected to Milton’s account of the Son’s exaltation (5.600–615) for laying, in Defoe’s words, a “foundation for the corrupt doctrine of Arius” (75). A century later, shortly after Christian Doctrine was published, Thomas Macaulay remarked that “we can scarcely conceive that any person could have read Paradise Lost without suspecting him of [Arianism]” (3). Suspicion falls short of conviction, however, and unsupported by the evidence of the theological treatise, the Arianism of the epic is “no other than a conjecture” (Richardson, xlix). The mutedness of the epic’s heretical account of the Son has been persuasively attributed to Milton’s discretion in an intolerant age and the narrative disposition of epic (Rajan 23–31). Milton’s main goal in Paradise Lost is to tell a story, not to argue doctrine.
The challenge to this commonsense observation mounted by W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson was complicated, recondite, and, to the embarrassment of Milton scholarship, highly successful. Hunter originally argued that Milton’s version of the godhead exemplified a not always unorthodox strain of early church opinion, called “subordinationism,” which conceived of the Christian Trinity in terms of Platonic hypostases. Ralph Cudworth does in 1678 use the key term subordination in explaining the beliefs of the “Platonic Christian” and in asserting that such beliefs were consistent with those of “the generality of Christian doctors for the first three hundred years after the apostles’ times” (2:417). This claim is not controversial, but it has no bearing on Milton’s alleged orthodoxy. Like Arius before him, Milton was not a Platonic theologian, not when it came to his insistence on the absolute singularity of infinite God or on the finite existence of the Son. And even if Milton had been one of Cudworth’s Platonic Christians, by the seventeenth century the Platonist version of the Christian Trinity did qualify as heretical. The subordinationism attributed to Milton is in short, per Michael Bauman’s definitive formulation, “not orthodox, and Milton does not teach it” (133). Despite these flaws, Hunter’s argument prevailed for an entire generation, so that in scholarship from the 1970s and ’80s one generally finds the evasive and misleading label “subordinationist” in discussions of Milton’s depiction of the Son.
Less controversial by far are Milton’s opinions on how salvation occurs, perhaps because these opinions are now predominant among orthodox Christians and because Milton’s God himself details them in a plain theological exposition difficult to misconstrue (3.173–202). During Milton’s lifetime the Calvinist theory of salvation, and predestination as its distinctive tenet, reigned in England and especially in the Puritan culture that nurtured the young poet. Opposed to Calvinist orthodoxy was Arminianism, so called after the Dutch clergyman Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), whose deviations from determinist doctrine were condemned at the grand Calvinist council of the early seventeenth century, the Synod of Dort (1618–19). According to articles endorsed at Dort, neither the blessed nor the damned can influence their respective fates. For the sake of his glory, God extends saving grace to a few utterly depraved sinners, thereby expressing his mercy. Also for his glory’s sake, but additionally to exemplify divine justice, God consigns the rest of humanity (a large majority) to eternal torment. As for human liberty, even unfallen Adam and Eve were never free to obey, as Calvin insists: “God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree” (3.23.7).
Arminians, by contrast, held that human beings are created free and, once fallen, receive sufficient grace to effect salvation, provided that they embrace the opportunity rather than reject it. The dependence of such a moral framework on human choice seems to have struck Calvin as a self-evident slight to divine omnipotence, as if “God ordained nothing except to treat man according to his own deserts” (3.23.7). The notion that the deity would leave individual human beings to determine their own fates roused Calvin’s indignation. Four main claims distinguish the Arminians’ “barren invention,” as he called it (3.23.7). First, God’s grace is universal, extended to all humanity. Second, this grace is not irresistible, which is to say, as an anti-Calvinistic Thomas Jefferson insists in his summary of Arminian beliefs, “man is always free and at liberty to receive or reject grace.” Third, as Jefferson continues, divine justice “would not permit [God] to punish men for crimes they are predestinated to commit” (1:554). And last, foreknowledge and causation are distinct, even in a time line created, governed, and immutably foreseen by an omnipotent and omniscient God.
In England before the 1640s, clergy who held Arminius’s heterodox opinions regarding salvation tended to be high-ranking and conservative, adhering to and even embellishing sacramental ritual and set liturgical forms that to Puritan sensibilities smacked of Roman Catholicism. This religiously and politically conservative English clergy presided over a top-down episcopal hierarchy whose regime complemented and reinforced the Stuart monarchy’s civil sway—hence the so-called “thorough” government of church and state during the 1630s, when king and bishop sought to rule without Parliamentary interference. Continental followers of Arminius, by contrast, remained largely Calvinist in devotional culture and practice. Their deviations from Calvinist orthodoxy, moreover, were republican and not authoritarian in their political implications, as Jefferson’s enthusiastic assessment suggests. Yet Arminian English bishops were oblivious to any such implications and, though in the minority, used their power to institute and enforce their cultural and governmental preferences, even when doing so meant outraging consciences or ruthlessly punishing dissent. Such impositions grated on the Puritans, who, regardless of their views on salvation, deplored episcopal pomp, debunked most sacraments, and endorsed plain spontaneity in worship.
During the 1640s, the defeat of the high-church, anti-Calvinist elite and the ready resort of the now predominant Presbyterian faction to its own coercive policies seem to have freed Milton to argue explicitly in behalf of rational choosing and free will. For all his support of the Presbyterian faction against the prelates, Milton had never endorsed predestination. His Arminian tendencies become unmistakable in the divorce tracts and in Areopagitica’s exaltation of rational choice, toleration, and individual accountability. Milton insists that God created man free, and if Adam had not been free, he might as well have been a puppet: “a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions” (MLM 944). By the end of the 1640s, Milton’s contention that the English have every right to try and execute King Charles rests on an anti-Presbyterian first premise, all the more provocative for being presented as a self-evident truth: “No man who knows aught can be so stupid [as] to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself” (TKM in MLM 1028). At this distance, it seems clear that Milton’s breach with the Presbyterians rests on differing conceptions of the dignity of the human subject. By the time he comes to write his epic, choice and responsibility are for Milton the very stuff of human morality and of human desert (Danielson; S. Fallon 1998). Most Presbyterians, by contrast, deemed the ethical categories of choice and responsibility meaningless or wickedly delusional.
In Paradise Lost, it is only to the characterization of Satan and his followers that the language of predestination applies. Hell is thus described as a “prison ordained” to which they have been eternally “decreed,/Reserved and destined” (1.71, 2.160–61). Like stereotypical Calvinists, certain devils spend vast stretches of time debating “of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate/Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute”—i.e., “in wand’ring mazes lost” (2.559–61). Fate is their preferred ideological fiction as they persistently elide their responsibility for rebelling against the only divine right monarch whose legitimacy Milton ever acknowledged. When they debate policy and strategy, they do so in “synods,” a term historically associated with the determinist doctrinal pronouncements of Calvinist and Presbyterian assemblies (2.391).
Even the narrative and dramatic stress placed on Satan’s role and character, which some have deemed disproportionate, is an indicator of Milton’s distance from the determinist tenets of the Presbyterians. The serpent’s temptation is beside the point in Calvinist theology, as indeed is any agency outside God. The Fall is divinely ordained. Calvin’s deity was a volitional black hole, obviating the need for a malevolent opponent who sparks evil. For Milton, by contrast, temptation is an ethical state crucial to theodicy, permitting merit to the creature, as in the case of Abdiel, while at the same time justifying the redemption of humanity: unlike the irreversibly damned rebel angels, “man falls deceived/By the other first” (3.130–31). Most important, the freedom and accountability presumed by temptation prevent humanity’s recriminations against God “as if predestination overruled/Their will” (3.114–15). The justification of God’s ways to men turns out to be largely an Arminian response to the Calvinist insistence on the bondage of the will. Foreknowledge does not predetermine; the choices of unfallen humanity are free: “authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose; for so/I formed them free” (3.122–24). As Perez Zagorin observes, Milton’s “loyalty to the principle of liberty as he understood it was absolute” (114). It was a matter of doing justice to man and God.
To God more than to man, however. Liberty is a state that we ordinarily associate with human beings, but from Milton’s highly theocentric and theodical perspective, freedom is primarily and definitively a quality essential to the nature of God. Only because the human race is created in the image of God is it self-evident that humanity is born free. The only necessity that applies to God is that he not involve himself in contradiction. Any action he takes must therefore conform to the good, goodness being definitive of divine identity rather than a limitation on his freedom. Though raised in the highly Calvinist culture of seventeenth-century London, Milton insists on the freedom allowed humanity in Arminian theology because his God must not be held liable for the sins of humanity, as Calvin’s was. The necessity that God’s deeds be good ones does not wed God to any particular action, however; his “goodness” remains “free/To act or not” (7.171–72). Such freedom holds true even concerning the generation of the Son. God is under no necessity to beget a second divinity; he freely chooses to do so. The Son, in his turn, freely offers himself as a sacrifice on behalf of humanity (3.236–65). Adam and Eve echo and also mediate the praiseworthy choices of the Father and Son when they decide to procreate and so begin the line that will produce their redeemer (10.867–1096). So the theodicy comes full circle, with goodness remaining free at every juncture to act or not.
“The greatest writer who has ever existed of a limited genre”—that is how T. S. Eliot in 1926 described Milton. The initial superlative hints at a magnanimous finish, but Eliot instead concludes by demeaning genre and diminishing his praise: “Instead of poetry, you get genres of poetry” (201). Centuries earlier, Thomas Rymer had also denied the authenticity of Milton’s poetry, snidely describing Paradise Lost as a work that “some are pleased to call a poem” (1678, 143). He even omits it from a summary of English heroic poetry that culminates instead with Davenant’s Gondibert (1651) and Cowley’s Davideis (1656) (1694, preface). Rymer condemns Milton for not being sufficiently generic, whereas Eliot criticizes him for being excessively generic. Their shared disdain may owe less to Milton’s artistic fraudulence than to the not uncommon tendency of lesser artists to mitigate the achievements of greater ones. Rymer is more easily cleared from that suspicion. True to his name, he scorned unrhymed narrative verse as prose, an arbitrary genre distinction but one general at the time as the note on verse affixed to the first edition attests. By contrast, Eliot’s dedication to the proposition that genre is an ersatz proxy for true poetry remains a head-scratcher, even in its historical context.
According to the OED, the term genre did not enter English usage until the nineteenth century. The concept of literary kind had by then already been debated for millennia, however, energetically so during the European Renaissance, when genre was held in very high esteem, not least by Milton himself. His ideal curriculum includes prosody as a necessary technical study, but far above it in real dignity he places the “sublime art” that teaches “the laws” governing “true” poems, whether epic, dramatic, or lyric (Of Ed in MLM 977–78). The reverential diction is telling. Taken together with the related claim that Scripture offers the most perfect instances of the major genres (RCG in MLM 841), it suggests that for Milton, as for Sir Philip Sidney before him, literary genres were divinely authorized modes of mimesis, corresponding to the Creator’s arrangement of reality. Compared with any individual poem, genre was the more real thing, and indeed “the first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost,” according to C. S. Lewis (1).
Eliot’s low regard for genre may have stemmed from discomfort with prescriptive rules for poetry. Milton does insist on “laws” for poems, after all. But his neoclassicism is distinct from the neoclassicism that prevailed in England after the Restoration, Rymer being one of its chief proponents. Through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, Italy was the center of cultural authority in Europe. Its cities “swarmed with critics,” according to Rymer, but as “swarmed” suggests, the Italian critical hegemony lacked uniformity or a common national focus. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the individualism of the Italian swarm gradually gave way to the regimentation of the French. “From Italy, France took the cudgels,” the pugnacious Rymer put it, tracing French ascendancy to Cardinal Richelieu’s amalgamation of cultural with political authority at the increasingly absolutist French court (1694, A2r–v). Milton, however, never acknowledged the cultural turn away from his beloved Italy. His ambitions as an epic poet crystallized during his visit to Italy (1638–39), and his disdain for France was quite general and persistent. His masterworks of the Restoration display a sublime if studied indifference to Gallic dictates, and his conception of literary genre, epic specifically, owes a great deal to the formative influence of sixteenth-century Italians, Torquato Tasso most prominently.
Milton refers to Tasso repeatedly in poems composed during his visit to Italy (see, e.g., Manso), and when in The Reason of Church Government he discusses epic, Tasso alone is named in the company of Homer and Vergil (MLM 840–41). It was Tasso who originally argued that the “laws of poetry” are divinely established realities, “essential and fixed by the very nature and law of things” (Kates 36). A poet did not need to conform to fixed rules derived from authoritative precedent but could instead embody the objectively based laws of poetry according to the judgment of natural reason, judgment informed not only by subjective experience and the efforts of precursors but also by, most crucially for a Christian poet, scriptural revelation. Milton may have adored Homer above all other poets, but to fulfill his own poetic vocation in the genre that Homer epitomized, Milton characteristically believed himself morally obliged to manifest the epic genre on his own terms, taking full advantage of his access to Christian doctrine. In short, the heroic poem as Milton conceived it was more adaptable to the individual poet’s conception of truth than a rote critic like Rymer could stomach.
English critics nursed on Gallic canons early on censured Paradise Lost for its wantonness. John Dennis in 1704 described it as “the most lofty but most irregular poem that has been produced by the mind of man” (bv), and unlike Dennis, who ultimately judges Paradise Lost above the critical law, subsequent neoclassical critics typically laud Milton’s loftiness and rue his irregularities. Milton’s idiosyncratic version of epic defies standard definitions because it is unusually inclusive, almost all-encompassing. Northrop Frye calls it “the story of all things,” yet even that broad rubric seems inadequate (3). The reach of Paradise Lost extends far beyond creation, affording local habitation and a name even to the uncreated realm of the Anarch Chaos and comprising the infinite and eternal together with the finite and fleeting. In its “diffuse” form, epic is the only genre that Milton discusses in The Reason for Church Government for which he cites no scriptural precedent. This tantalizing omission may in part suggest that Milton did not consider any book in the Bible, not even Genesis, both unified and ample enough to qualify.
In her magisterial study of Milton and genre, Barbara Lewalski tracks Milton’s use of virtually every subgenre recognized by Renaissance rhetoricians and deems Paradise Lost “an encyclopedia of literary forms” (125). Jonathan Richardson makes much the same point in defending Milton’s masterwork as “a composition … not reducible under any known denomination,” “the quintessence of all that is excellent in writing” (cxlv, clii). If in its encompassing formal plenitude Paradise Lost violates the “limited genre” defined by neoclassical critics, its promiscuity is nonetheless profoundly classical in spirit. Aristotle himself distinguishes epic from other genres by its capacity to assimilate within a single narrative other modes, such as the dramatic or lyric, and their various subgenres (26). Book 4 illustrates Milton’s singular gift for subduing such multiplicity under a unified narrative arc. The basic story line—Satan’s intrusion into Paradise leading ultimately to his apprehension and expulsion—occasions, among other genre variations, authorial apostrophe, Satanic soliloquy, landscape poetry with features of the country house tradition, various love lyrics, metamorphic tales of origin, evening prayer, and confrontational martial dialogue. Nor was epic originally confined to what Voltaire in his Essai sur la poésie épique defined as “narratives in verse of warlike adventures” (331), which Milton scorned as “tedious havoc” (PL 9.30).
Deriving from the Greek word for “story” or “story-related,” epic seems to have been a broader category for the early Greeks, virtually indistinguishable from what is now meant by narrative in general. Aristocratic martial and amorous encounters are undeniably the stuff of Homeric epic, and of mock epic (Homer is supposed to have composed one of those, too), but Hesiod’s overtly didactic narratives also qualified, as did Orphic poems celebrating religious mysteries. In each case, the bard tells a story meant to epitomize and even justify the supernaturally shaped course of human events. Milton observes the familiar trappings and formal insignia of epic: invocations, extended similes, catalogs, epithets, and the rest. But he does so idiosyncratically, in line with his highly individual Christian faith. The invocations exemplify this characteristic willingness to interpret the “laws” of epic according to his own situation. Embracing and expanding on a liberty asserted previously by Tasso, he uses the invocations as occasions to speak not simply in his own voice but to an unprecedented extent of himself and his anxious situation, “in darkness, and with dangers compassed round” (7.27).
When Aristotle described epic as an inclusive, composite form, he was distinguishing it from drama, the genre that shows rather than tells and brooks no authorial narration. By contrast, the authorial voice in epic sometimes withdraws in favor of storytelling characters involved in dramatic dialogue or lyrical self-expression. Aristotle thought drama the nobler genre, not only purer in mode but also more disciplined in plot than sprawling epic (26). Early modern theorists, however, focused on the magnitude of solitary authorial effort rather than on the purity of the form or concentrated efficiency of the action. The actors in a drama, furthermore, “share the poet’s praise,” as Dryden says (1800, 1:436). Such critics were nearly unanimous in accounting epic, precisely because it is vast, complicated, and solitary in execution, as “the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform” (Dryden 1800, 1:425). Milton, of course, as if to satisfy classical as well as modern standards of preeminence, composed both a capacious epic and a stringent classical tragedy (one never designed for staging or actors’ shares). Still, the most momentous and defining artistic decision he ever made came down to a choice between these two great genres.
When he originally conceived the story of the Fall as the subject of a tragedy, Milton honored the long-standing critical consensus that unhappy events are best reserved for dramatic presentation—an affinity of form and subject acknowledged in the epic’s most genre-conscious moment, the invocation to Book 9. As if to signal this anomaly formally, the same invocation fails to do what invocations by their very name promise they will do: invoke. Acknowledging his dependence on the Muse only in the last line, Milton devotes this “invocation” instead to justifying his deviation from mainline epic into tragedy. For, despite his concessions, Milton clearly thought that in choosing to tell this sad story in the grandest narrative genre, he had made a good trade-off. The story of the Fall allows him, as he indicates in the invocation, to redefine heroism in accordance with his Christian faith (9.13–41). More important, if “an epic poem must either be national or mundane,” as Coleridge claimed, once an author has chosen the mundane, the goal must be to tell a story “common to all mankind” (1886, 240). This is a tall order, but in a Christian culture, the story of Adam and Eve, though tragic, more than fills the bill. Not simply the greatest story ever told, it is every story ever told: Milton’s “Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively,” as Coleridge observed (240). If he could not claim to invent the epic mode, as Homer had, Milton could reinvent it in light of Christian revelation and aspire to include all other epics, all other narratives of any kind.
The other main advantage of arranging the story of man’s first disobedience as a narrative and not a tragic drama was the chance to exploit the single most definitive formal requirement of an epic narrative—that it begin in the midst of things. Milton made much of this opportunity: a titanic Satan and his followers, first rolling in hellfire and then debating revenge, followed by the farsighted judgment of a Zeus-like God and his obsequious adherents in Heaven. Indeed, the opening books are so striking that they have largely determined the poem’s reception in modern times. These books address received traditions of heroic poetry overtly and extensively, and they also contain, according to many readers, the most poetic energy and the thematic designs crucial to the work as a whole.
To revive a thesis that originated in the early eighteenth century and fell out of fashion in the twentieth, we think it likely that Milton’s inspiration for making Satan weltering in Hell his “midst of things” was the pre-Norman, English tradition of biblical poetry, especially the Old English Genesis B, long attributed to Caedmon. No one denies that Milton had opportunity to become acquainted with this and other works in the Caedmon manuscripts, discovered in 1651 by the philologist Franciscus Junius, then residing in London. If Milton was given access to the manuscripts while he was still sighted, he probably took note of the illustrations, including one of the rebel angels plunging headlong into the jaws of Leviathan (below). Scholars have argued, not without evidence, that Milton’s competency in Old English was at best slight and that any acquaintance he might have had with the Caedmon poems, whether in manuscript or in print, would therefore have been superficial and inconsequential. Yet even a superficial acquaintance would have left him aware that Genesis B begins, as Paradise Lost does, with Satan and his thanes rallying in Hell. Furthermore, as French Fogle’s introduction to Milton’s History of Britain observes, Milton’s access to freshly published Old English texts and translations was extensive (Yale 5: xxxvi–xxxvii). The conception of Christ prevalent in England until the Conquest, “which views the cross from the perspective of world history and emphasizes its victorious aspect, the conquest of Satan,” was far more amenable to him than the later emphasis on the sufferings of Christ (Huttar 242).
“Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (1.44–45). (illustration credit itr.1)
While Milton dismissed the monks who wrote the early history of Britain as “ill gifted with utterance” (Yale 5:288), it does not follow that he would have disdained the Anglo-Saxon language. His schoolmaster at St. Paul’s, Alexander Gill, was an advocate of the English vernacular and demonstrably knowledgeable about Old English (Fletcher 1:185). The common complaint that Paradise Lost is replete with Latinisms, an English estranged from its vernacular roots, is unjustified, as Fowler’s edition repeatedly observes. On the contrary, Milton’s English is generally idiomatic. When in 1807 James Ingram translated the first fifteen lines of Paradise Lost into Old English, he left the syntax virtually untouched and required substitutes for ten loan words only (47–48). We think it not only fitting but probable that the catalyst for Milton’s choice of epic subject once he had abandoned the British theme was the coincidental discovery in the 1650s of a native tradition of biblical poetry written before the Conquest.
Paradise Lost is written in unrhymed pentameter lines, or blank verse. Early in the sixteenth century, the Earl of Surrey adopted this form for his partial translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, and toward the end of that century it became the conventional medium of Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare’s plays are primarily written in blank verse. But Spenser had not used it. Milton’s choice of blank verse was a daring one, for at that time there was no long blank-verse poem of much distinction in English or any other language. It was largely because of Milton’s precedent that blank verse established itself as early as James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) as the preferred metrical form for long and ambitious English poems. Wordworth’s The Prelude; Keats’s Hyperion; Tennyson’s The Princess, Enoch Arden, and The Idylls of the King; Browning’s The Ring and the Book; Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna; the long narratives of Edwin Arlington Robinson; sections of Crane’s The Bridge; Stevens’s Sunday Morning and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction; Frost’s Home Burial; and Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells are all written in blank verse.
Milton organized his narrative into verse paragraphs, within which he devised syntactical patterns famous for their length and lucidity. Having freed himself from the ancient bondage of rhyme, he created musical effects with consonance, dissonance, alliteration, repetition, and even the occasional internal rhyme. He particularly excelled in the “turn of words,” as it was called in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—repeating the same words in a reversed or modified order. Dryden tells us that he once looked for these turns in Milton but failed to find them (Essays 2:108–9). In fact the effect is everywhere, as in “though fall’n on evil days,/On evil days though fall’n” (7.25–26), which reminded Emerson of “the reflection of the shore and trees in water” (R. Richardson 318). When the Father announces the forthcoming creation in Book 7, “Glory they sung to the most high” (182), then “Glory to him” (184), the Son who has just defeated the rebel angels, and finally, with a turn of words, “to him/Glory and praise” (186–87). Through creation the Son will “diffuse” the glory of the Father “to worlds and ages infinite” (190–91), and in this very passage we feel that glory has been squeezed from the word glory and diffused from clause to clause. Some of the best-known turns include Eve’s initial infatuation with her image in the pool (“Pleased I soon returned,… Pleased it returned as soon”) at 4.460–65, and Eve’s great love lyric enclosed by the brackets of “Sweet is” and “is sweet” (4.641–56); inside them she lists the same natural beauties twice, once as sweet, once again as not sweet. Addison thought this last “one of the finest turns of words that I have ever seen” (Shawcross 1:142).
Distinguished achievement in sound effects is an excellence that no one has ever seriously denied to Milton. His verse has few rivals in what Hazlitt termed “the adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage” (Thorpe 104). Sometimes the adaptations are relatively simple, like certain film scores. As Satan struggles through Chaos, the verse also seems to have trouble making headway: “So he with difficulty and labor hard/Moved on, with difficulty and labor he” (2.1021–22). When he hears “a universal hubbub wild/Of stunning sounds” (2.951–52), it is clear that universal and wild are ways of defining what the word hubbub, all meaning aside, delivers to us purely through its sound. Stunning sounds echoes the chaotic crack of hubbub, as if sounds had indeed been stunned. Sometimes the adaptation of sound to meaning is wittier, more conceptual. When Satan departs from Pandaemonium, the philosophical devils “reasoned high/Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,/Fixed fate, free will, Foreknowledge absolute,/And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost” (2.558–61). Milton makes the catalog of philosophical concepts into a little semantic labyrinth in which “foreknowledge, will and fate” enough resemble “Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” to make us wonder how they are alike, how not alike. Have we really gone anywhere in moving from one line to the next?
When the poem introduces a distinction, the difference is likely to be taken up, explored, and often complicated by the verse. In Book 4, for example, the narrator reads gender differences from the naked bodies of Adam and Eve, and the result is the greatest politically incorrect passage in English poetry. “For contemplation he and valor formed,/For softness she and sweet attractive grace” (297–98). We can see immediately that alliteration serves Eve. The poetry is already indicating its willingness to interfere with the passage’s legalism, but for now there is no time to explore the bond between Eve and poetic beauty. The law must be pronounced. Adam is formed for God, she for God in him. His forehead and eye “declared/Absolute rule” (300–301).
At this point Milton begins to describe their differing hair treatments, Adam’s first:
Hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust’ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad. (301–3)
The two run-on lines imitate the fall of his hair (Hyacinthine implies that it is black), while the strong end-stop of line 303 puts a limit to its hanging down. But not has an almost corrective force, as if things might have been getting out of hand. They immediately do. Eve’s blond tresses introduce four straight run-on lines, followed by four more end-stopped lines:
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadornèd golden tresses wore
Disheveled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (304–11)
He the cluster, she the vine. He words in their stable sense, words as law, words that set limits; she words as their sense is in transit, disheveled, drawn out variously from line to line, creeping and curling with wanton implication. Syntax flows across the unit of the line. Milton’s verse becomes femalelike in describing femaleness, then arrives at the key word Subjection in line 308, which mates with all the verbs to come. Enjambment stops. We have returned to the matter of the law, but in, so to speak, another semantic universe. Subjection is what is required, what is yielded, what is best received, and again what is yielded. It is their bond, and also their sexual spark. He requires and receives it; she yields and yields it. Lacking compulsion, it is no longer “subjection” in the usual sense but rather her free consent.
This passage begins with the law of gender difference, yet by its end we find that law realized in amorous love and artistic excitement. Eve yields her subjection with “coy submission, modest pride,” both phrases being oxymorons, and the first of them of particular richness in Renaissance love poetry (Kerrigan and Braden 204–18). An oxymoron naturally requires two words, a plus and a minus, a point and a counterpoint. The last line, with Eve-like luxuriance, doubles the oxymoron quotient with four perfect words, oxymoronic in various ways: reluctant crosses amorous, amorous crosses delay, delay crosses reluctant. But all of them and their nest of contradictory combinations are sweet, the very word that Eve will turn so memorably a few hundred lines later, enclosing the couple’s love and their lapsing days of Paradise in its embrace. They will not make love until the end of the day. Eve’s sweet … delay is an oxymoronic union of desire and control, consent and refusal, passion and rule, profusion and limit, fusing the various contraries of the passage. Adam also participates in this knot of contraries. Gentle sway is the first oxymoron of the passage, and links to delay through a delayed rhyme. Of “Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,/And sweet reluctant amorous delay,” Walter Savage Landor remarked, “I would rather have written these two lines than all the poetry that has been written since Milton’s time in all the regions of the earth” (Thorpe 368–69).
Milton’s style marries male and female, “which two great sexes animate the world” (8.151). There is male law. There are requirements, fixed meanings, ripe clusters of sense. But there is energy as well, and the energy in this poetry is female, vinelike, curling here and then back, various in its repetition, paradoxical, nurturing underbrushes of implication that modify and even revise the abstract fixities of law.
Johnson proclaimed that Milton “wrote no language, but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish Dialect” (Thorpe 86). Yet his strictures on Milton are almost always wrong or exaggerated. A recent study such as John Hale’s Milton’s Languages is from the outset friendlier toward the multilingual characteristics of Milton’s style than would have been possible in the confines of Johnson’s linguistic patriotism. Modern statistical studies have demonstrated that the style of Paradise Lost is neither as archaic nor as Latinate as some of its critics have imagined (Boone). Milton is a learned author, to be sure, but a student determined to appreciate at least some of the learning in his language will be not be led away from the genius of ordinary English. T. S. Eliot, writing in the Johnson tradition, emphasized “the remoteness of Milton’s verse from ordinary speech” (Thorpe 321). But in fact Milton’s poetry enriches ordinary speech in new and surprising ways.
Now and then Milton will use a word in its classical or etymological sense, waving aside its derived meaning in English. In “There went a fame in Heav’n” (1.651), fame has its Roman sense of “word spoken.” An imperial Milton banishes the English sense. Similarly, succinct in “His habit fit for speed succinct” (3.643) has the Latin meaning of “tucked under, tight-fitted.” Christopher Ricks has shown that Milton will sometimes insist on the etymological sense when naming an unfallen world in which words with definitions involving immorality are not yet appropriate (109–17). At their creation the rivers of the earth run “with serpent error wand’ring” (7.302), but error in the Latin sense of “wandering” contains no taint of crime or mistake. Words too have their original innocence. In order to grasp this last example, a reader must see that the Latin definition is in meaningful dialogue with the derived sense, and that the rejection of the ordinary English meaning, far from being arbitrary, belongs to the larger significance of the passage.
Milton “was not content,” Walter Raleigh observed, “to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word with two meanings at once” (1900, 209). When the hair of the angel Uriel falls “Illustrious on his shoulders” (3.627), Milton refers at once to the luster or brightness of the hair and the august reputation of the angel. As it approaches Eve in Book 9, the snake is “voluble” (436). In its classical sense, the word denotes the coiling motion of the snake, but in its newer English sense, it announces the serpent’s forthcoming talkativeness (Ricks 108). Beelzebub refers to Chaos as “the vast abrupt” (2.409), where abrupt seems first of all to retain its Latin sense of “broken off, precipitous.” The rebel angels have fallen through Chaos and have some idea of what it means to traverse this abyss of indefiniteness. Whoever enters Chaos breaks off from the stabilities of Heaven and Hell. But the English meanings seem also in play when we note that Milton has transformed an adjective into a noun. Chaos itself will be a constant sequence of abrupt changes, a place where interruption is not a surprise but the norm.
There is a fund of linguistic peculiarities in Paradise Lost. Milton, for example, likes the sequence adjective + noun + adjective, as in universal hubbub wild or vast profundity obscure. He was not the first to try this sequence, but it is a good bet that, wherever we encounter it in subsequent English verse, Milton is probably on the author’s mind; Arnold’s “vast edges drear” in “Dover Beach” hopes to remind us of the seething Chaos of Paradise Lost. F. T. Prince (112–29) discussed Milton’s interest in a related sequence found in Italian verse as early as Dante: adjective + noun + and + adjective, as in “Sad task and hard” (5.564) or “Sad resolution and secure” (6.541). Does the second adjective come in as an afterthought? The task, let us say, is primarily sad, so much so that one forgets for a moment that it is hard as well. Or does the second adjective bear the main emotion? A sad task would be burden enough, but this one is, more important, hard. Milton enjoyed playing with this scheme. He experimented, for example, with distancing the adjectives: “pleasing was his shape,/And lovely” (9.503–4) or “For many are the trees of God that grow/In Paradise, and various” (9.618–19). In place of adjective + noun + and + adjective, he tried noun + verb + and + noun, as in “he seemed/For dignity composed and high exploit” (2.110–11). The poet did not invent a “Babylonish Dialect.” He wrote English with a high degree of originality, and his original poetry sublime unleashes a number of effects that had never been tried before in English verse.
Attacks on Milton’s verse early in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and A. J. A. Waldock sparked a debate that eventually came to be known as the Milton Controversy (Murray 1–12). Although the notion of Milton’s artistic greatness had never before been questioned so systematically, this was hardly an isolated incident. Historically Milton is by some measure the most controversial of the great English poets. He has given rise to an inordinate number of critical debates, altogether too many, in fact, for us to suppose that his poetry is itself innocent of contentiousness. Certainly in his prose Milton liked to mix it up. He was among the greatest controversialists of the day. The decades he spent fighting the wars of truth, Coleridge suggested, added a “controversial spirit” to his youthful character (Thorpe 91). But the early poems are also imbued with the love of argument. When Milton in the first invocation to Paradise Lost refers to “this great argument,” the word argument primarily means “plot,” as in the prose “Argument” or plot summary attached to each book of the epic. Yet the great argument of the plot is wed to an “argument” of another kind, a rational contention, since Milton vows that “to the highth of this great argument” he will, if inspired, “assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men” (1.24–26).
Emerson wrote that no man in literary history, perhaps in all history, excelled Milton in the power to inspire: “Virtue goes out of him to others” (Early Lectures 1:148). No doubt some of the controversies about Milton have not demonstrated much of the poet’s own idealism, but the generally high quality of Milton debates over the centuries is arguably the finest of the poet’s gifts to our culture, as Christopher Ricks has pointed out. It is for good reason that Milton is “the most argued-about poet in English.” He brings out the serious and passionate advocate in us:
Of the needs to which he ministers, one of the greatest is our need to commit ourselves in passionate argument about literature. Not as part of the academic industry, but because literature is a supreme controversy concerning “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (to adopt the words which Matthew Arnold applied to culture). By the energy and sincerity of his poetry, Milton stands—as no other poet quite does—in heartening and necessary opposition to all aestheticisms, old and new. (xi)
Milton’s argumentative art refuses to stay within aesthetic boundaries, however they may be drawn. Virtue goes out of him to his readers. His arguments come to life, and participating in them both pleases and elevates us.
One of the oldest of the Milton debates swirls about the character of Satan. Is he the hero of the epic? Is he so attractive as to upset the standard moral balance of Christianity? The first of these questions is the more easily answered. Early in the poem, Milton deliberately places Satan in the roles occupied by classical epic heroes. He founds a civilization in Hell. He undertakes a long and arduous journey. Compared to Odysseus, Addison observed, Satan “put in practice many more wiles and stratagems, and hides himself under a greater variety of shapes and appearances” (Shawcross 1:152). To some extent, Milton uses his Satan as a diagnostic test of the moral health of classical epic.
In the beginning of the poem especially, Satan exudes glamour. His appearance—huge, ruined, thunder-scarred, darkened, but still able to evoke the memory of his former luminescence in Heaven—makes a tremendous impression. The Satan glimpsed in Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated has, like the cheap special-effects devils of modern supernatural thrillers, massive horns, red eyes, a huge beard, an open mouth filthy with red blood and spewing rancid fumes (4.6–7). As William Hazlitt put it, the Satan of Paradise Lost “has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there.… Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot” (Thorpe 109; see also Newton in Shawcross 2:154). Satan is proud, obstinate, the rebel of rebels. He speaks thrillingly of his “unconquerable will.” For Milton, part of giving the devil his due is having the devil give God his due. Satan several times concedes the omnipotence of his foe. When he finds himself cursing the “free love” God gave to all the angels because it did not prevent him from falling, Satan fiercely, and in the name of truth, recoils on himself: “Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will / Chose freely what it now so justly rues” (4.71–72).
William Blake took the romantic exaltation of Satan to an extreme in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is, because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake was something of a Gnostic, for whom Milton’s God the Father was an evil and inferior God, and his satanic opposition the force of true deity (Nuttall 224). But readers whose imaginations remain responsive to the ordinary polarities of Christianity will probably not leave the poem with the favorable impression of Satan with which they began. As the work continues, they realize that Satan’s cannonlike recoils inevitably issue in a fatalistic resolve to go on being himself and fulfill his initial plan of corrupting mankind. His speeches remake the same decision over and over again. Readers come to understand that conceding the omnipotence of God, far from being magnanimous, is the only way Satan can reconcile his pride with his defeat. Heroic resistance begins to look like habitual stubbornness. Satan would desperately like to believe that he is self-created. But his image of his own greatness is also his enemy, the uncreated Father. Satan sits in “God-like imitated state” (2.511). Declaring that evil is his good, he dreams of sharing “divided Empire with Heav’n’s King” (4.111)—in other words, of being the equal of God in a Manichaean universe.
But Satan’s true God is his own will. Milton always maintained that tyrants were self-enslaved. An unconquerable will sacrifices the willer and everyone under his sway. Most readers, their infatuation with Satan having run its course, savor his final comeuppance in the poem, as his triumphant return to Hell becomes the first of countless annual reenactments of the wicked self-harming travesty he is doomed to think a victory. The attractions of Satan are real, and beguiling, but in the end not so profound as his degradation.
Satan’s heroism, though felt in its highest form by the Romantics, did not die with them and remains a main source of argument in modern Milton criticism. It is crucial, for example, to the middle period of Harold Bloom’s work, which begins with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Hazlitt noted that Milton showed no signs of alarm over a vast literary indebtedness that would have stymied many a lesser poet: “Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer.… The quantity of art in him shows the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition” (Thorpe 101).
Bloom points to a great subtext in Paradise Lost concerning the apparent ease with which Milton masters the anxiety of being belated, preceded, and preempted. Satan is the modern poet (20). God is “cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more” (21). Everything has been done. The world created, the Bible written, the classical epics finished, the romance versions of them already penned by Ariosto and Spenser. What is there to do? To rally what remains, to salvage all creative impulses that are not infected by devotion, while trying to fend off the knowledge that nothing remains, that one will wind up in one God-like imitated state or another. Wallace Stevens’s famous aphorism “The death of Satan was a tragedy/For the imagination” (“Esthétique du Mal”) seems pertinent here. Assuming that his death has occurred, or may soon occur, this reading of Paradise Lost shows the dimensions of the tragedy. For Satan is imagination. Bloom transformed the Satan controversy into a neo-Romantic fable for modern poets.
The arguments set forth in Stanley Fish’s influential Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) are also to a large extent responses to the traditional Satan controversies. The author, a born Miltonist, loves to argue. Fish maintains that it is all right for the most serious readers, for readers in search of the author’s intentional meaning, to allow heroic images of Satan to form in their minds, provided they are willing to sacrifice those images when the intentional meaning of the poem requires it (as it always will). Satan’s attractiveness is not an unconscious or unintended effect of some sort. Milton wanted his readers to entertain false ideas of Satan’s virtue. He deliberately and repeatedly trapped them into doing so, only to correct them in the next phrase or line or passage. Blake responded to attractive cues but refused to obey the corrective cues, and wound up losing touch with the poem. Milton himself is the creator of, and ultimate manager of, the Satan controversy. Fish’s most impressive examples are of course drawn from the glamorous treatments of Satan in the first two books of the epic. The spasmodic self-corrections of his model reader uncannily resemble the recoils of Satan.
While impressed with the neatness of this argument, and the energy with which Fish has defended it, other critics have wondered at the infinite gullibility of Fish’s model reader, who goes through the same experience again and again without learning his lesson, as if reading were less a process of illumination than an obsessive-compulsive ritual. They doubt Fish’s implicit view of Milton as a dogmatist unable to admit to mixed feelings about the devil. They question whether great poetry could be as Pavlovian in its didacticism as Fish implies (Kerrigan 1974, 180n, 1983, 98–99; Rumrich 1996, 2–4, 7–11, 60–64; Pritchard; Leonard 2002).
A related and comparably venerable controversy concerns Milton’s portrait of God. Pope observed that “God the Father turns a School-Divine” (“The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated”). The word school-divine appears in many subsequent discussions of this issue. It means “a medieval scholastic theologian, of the sort that was taught in European universities,” and was not usually a derogatory word, though it does appear to have pejorative charge for Pope. He seems to be referring primarily to God’s speeches during the Heavenly Council at the opening of Book 3, where the Father explains the relationship between freedom and foreknowledge, and the doctrine of the Atonement, in a language compounded of standard theological terminology and statements from Scripture. Some have answered with Addison that in Book 3 the central mysteries of Christianity and the “whole dispensation of Providence with respect to man” are defined with admirable clarity and concision (Shawcross 1:178). Some have maintained that Milton went wrong in the very decision to assign speech to deity, since this procedure will inevitably bring God down to a human level (Wilkie in Shawcross 2:240–43).
But the deeper issue here is not whether God should speak at all and if he must in what vocabulary. Milton’s God, foreseeing the development of human philosophy and theology, anticipates being held responsible for the sins of Adam and Eve. This forethought irritates him:
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. (3.95–99)
The speech implies that man’s theodical attacks continue the faithlessness of the Fall itself. If someone maintains that God did not make him in such a way that he could be responsible for the Fall, he manifests ingratitude. He wants to have been given more from God than mere freedom. He deems his divine endowment not “sufficient.” With regard to the poem’s readers, God is provocative and ill-tempered. “Go on,” he seems to be saying, “blame me. Doing so can only show your fallenness, your faithlessness, your ingratitude, and your utter lack of responsibility.”
The same sort of provocation, daring his audience to disagree or disobey, marks the Father’s words when he is exalting the Son in Heaven. He demands that the angels kneel and “confess him [the Son] Lord”:
Him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed union, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end. (5.611–15)
It is difficult not to be reminded, as we contemplate such a passage, that Milton hated the bullying ways of earthly monarchs. Why did he make the Father, at times, into a threatening king?
Milton would probably have replied that because God is a king, almighty and eternal, no one else can be. For all others sit in God-like imitated state, aspiring to godhead like Satan himself. God’s legitimacy through merit, not birthright, renders all other monarchies illegitimate, all other monarchs pretenders. This helps to explain why a republican like Milton can have a king for a God, but not why his God should be angry and threatening. God is not always that, to be sure, and at one point amuses the Son by acting the role of some chronicle-history Henry IV worried about usurping northern lords (5.721–32). His aims are merciful, and he praises the Son for seizing upon those aims and guaranteeing their future realization (3.274–343). When pretending that Adam does not need a mate, God seems playful, and appreciative of a creature whose freedom and rational self-confidence permit him to disagree with his creator (8.357–448). But as we have seen, Milton’s God has a tough side.
This much can be said. Today we are somewhat embarrassed to think about God in terms of human emotions, unless the emotion in question is love. But the idea of God having in any sense a character—with exasperation, anger, jealousy, and wrath to go along with his love, mercy, and playfulness—probably seems childish or simplistic or even (though we have grown suspicious of this word) primitive. As Milton saw things, however, the portrait of God in the Bible was full of anthropomorphism. No form of divine symbolism can represent God as he is. But in the Bible, God delivered the metaphors through which he wished us to know him. There can be no shame in taking him at his word. “Why does our imagination shy away from a notion of God which he himself does not hesitate to promulgate in unambiguous terms?” (CD 1.2 in MLM 1148). Milton had little interest in the sort of God we sometimes associate with philosophers and mystics, known to us through some esoteric and reason-humbling symbolism. By the same token, he was relatively unexcited by the thought of contemplating the visio dei. His angels seem happiest, like Milton himself, when performing a divinely assigned task.
Both the God and the Satan Controversies animate William Empson’s striking Milton’s God (1960). In the process of indicting Christianity, this book invents a new way to praise Milton, albeit one that he himself would surely have deplored. Christianity, for Empson, is intractably evil. In any telling of the story of the Fall of man, God will in some manner be revealed as the responsible party. Milton was a Christian of uncommon moral sensitivity, and he did virtually all that one could do to improve the faith. There is, as we have noted, no torture. The Crucifixion, though recounted briefly (12.411–19), is hardly the centerpiece of Milton’s religion. Temptation, the act of free moral decision, takes its place. Satan is more sympathetic than ever before. But God the Father is still provocative, still threatening. This portrait, far from being the failure it was conventionally assumed to be on one side of the God Controversy, shows Milton’s honesty. His God manifests the dark impulse to rule, to wield power purely and simply, that the many attractive aspects of Paradise Lost conceal from our view. Dennis Danielson’s aptly titled Milton’s Good God (1982) defends Milton and Christianity against some of the main arguments in Milton’s God.
The third of our controversies, about the character of Eve, first appeared in the feminist criticism of the twentieth century. “For the Romantics,” Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson wrote in 1987, “it was Satan who was oppressed by the author’s consciously held beliefs. In our time it tends to be Eve” (xiv). Satan was the controversy of another day. Feminism has arrived, and it wants to argue about Eve.
Traditionally Milton had received mostly high marks for his characterizations of Adam and Eve. Coleridge thought the love of Adam and Eve was “removed from everything degrading,” the creation of two people who give each other what is most permanent in them and achieve “a completion of each in the other” (Thorpe 96). Their love unfolds without flattery or falsehood. Hazlitt told of some men’s club wit who maintained that Adam and Eve enjoyed only the least interesting of the pursuits of human life, the relations between man and wife. Hazlitt replied with a long catalog of the furniture of fallen life (wars, riches, contracts, et cetera) missing from the supreme pleasures of Eden: “Thank Heaven, all these were yet to come” (Thorpe 111). Extending Hazlitt’s idea that Milton had the power to think “of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him” (Thorpe 98), Emerson praised the poet for giving us a new human ideal: “Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity.… Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait” (Early Lectures 149).
But there was information of diverse sorts suggesting that Milton might have had a grudge against womankind. During the time that he was deserted by his first wife, Mary Powell, Milton wrote four pamphlets arguing in favor of divorce on the grounds of spiritual incompatibility. Mary’s daughters did not get along with his subsequent wives. Now and then the daughters were asked to read to their blind father in languages they could not understand (Darbishire 177, 277). And there were also a few passages in the poetry cataloging domestic unhappinesses with a somewhat unbalanced fervor. Samuel Johnson brought all of these factors together in a memorably pithy sentence: “There appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings” (Lives 1:193).
But through the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries, Milton’s misogynistic streak was usually considered an eccentricity, not a malign preoccupation at the center of his being. At the dawn of the feminist period, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic, maintained that Milton’s patriarchal version of Genesis had from the beginning intimidated and oppressed female writers. He taught that a divine Father and Son had created everything, that Sin was a cursed mother, that Eve was supposed to be obedient to Adam (“He for God only, she for God in him”) but instead was corrupted by the devil (Gilbert 368–82; later in Gilbert and Gubar 187–212). Philip Gallagher objected immediately (Gallagher and Gilbert 319–22) and later expanded his views in the fervently argued Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny (1990).
Joseph Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) showed that, Gilbert and Gubar to the contrary, many women down through the years had been empowered by Milton’s portrait of Eve. Early commentators on Paradise Lost were well aware that a passage such as Adam’s enumeration of marital woes to come at 10.896–908 was forced and gratuitous, since Adam “could not very naturally be supposed at that time to foresee so very circumstantially the inconvenience attending our straight conjunction with this sex, as he expresses it” (Thyer, cited in Todd 3.321). A few passages on a pet peeve were not too high a price to pay for great literature. Most poets had bees in their bonnets. Shakespeare himself never had a good word for dogs and cats. But feminists feared that Milton, whether consciously or not, was the agent of patriarchy or logo-centrism or bourgeois individualism—whatever its name, a large conspiracy of overlapping ideological commitments hostile to women and progressive civilization alike.
The main positions in feminist Milton studies are essentially the same as those adopted in Shakespeare studies, and no doubt in other literary disciplines. Some interpreters found that Milton’s poetry, if read sympathetically, yields meanings surprisingly favorable to women (McColley 1983; Woods). Others of this persuasion explored the possibility that Milton was not primarily threatened by women but in fact identified with them in profound ways (Kerrigan 1983, 184–86, 188–89, and 1991; S. Davies; Turner 65–71, 142–48; Lieb 83–113). Some, by contrast, agreed with Gilbert and Gubar that Milton is irredeemably an obstruction and will have to be cleared away (Froula). There were also those evenhanded souls contending that Milton is pretty much all right so far as he goes, but does not go far enough. James Turner in One Flesh found Milton’s Eden erotically liberating; yet the poem has “two quite different models of the politics of love: one is drawn from the experience of being in love with an equal, … the other from the hierarchical arrangement of the universe, and the craving for male supremacy” (285). Mary Nyquist conceded that Milton seemed progressive in championing companionate marriage based on conversational partnership but warned that a woman content with such by-products of individualism would be settling for too little. The “blear illusion” (Masque 155) of these bourgeois goods prevents women from appreciating the higher truths to their left (99–100, 115–24).
This is still a young tradition. Up to now it has no doubt been too caught up in the barren chore of ideological grading. But the arguments have begun.