Paradise Lost Book lV by John Milton

Paradise Lost Book lV – Tape Transcript of the Lecture

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00RKB0StzHY
Lecture: Professor John Rogers / Yale University

 

It is not until the fourth book of Paradise Lost that we see finally represented before us the Paradise whose imminent lost is heralded so grandly in the poem’s title.  And Milton’s task here is a difficult one.  His task is to represent unfallen Eden, Eden before the fall, to a fallen audience of the 1660s from his own perspective as a fallen man himself – as a fallen poet.  Milton is continually confronting he’s self-conscious about this predicament and continually confronting the challenge posed by this essentially artistic predicament.  But the predicament is not simply, although it is this, an epistemological quandary, a problem about knowledge – how can fallen man know anything about unfallen man.  There is more writing on this question than merely this question of how we can possibly know what it was like in this unknowable state before the fall.  And it is more important than simply that because everything is riding on Milton’s success of his representation of an unfallen Eden. I think the theodicy, the success of Milton’s attempt to justify the ways of God to men is hanging to some degree on the success of his representation of unfallen-ness.  And this is why because only if we can truly see Paradise as unfallen can we really believe that Adam and Eve were in fact perfectly capable of exercising their unfallen wills freely when confronted with the temptation of the fruit.  So even so much as a hint of fallen-ness in a representation of Eden threatens to indict God, threatens to impune God’s justice.  And because God can be said to have caused the fall, if he can be seen to have insinuated into Paradise even the slightest propensity to fallenness the question is an important one.  So to justify fully, the ways of God, this fallen poet has to represent to us, a fallen audience, an Eden that is unmistakably unfallen.  It is a huge challenge.  Though unfallen Eden can’t be like anything we know, it has to be utterly other from everything we are unfamiliar with because of course everything we are familiar with is fallen; so one of the dominant rhetorical strategies of the first two books has to be inverted to some degree in Book lV.  We have spent some time talking about the similes, especially the similes at the beginning of Milton’s poem.  The simile used initially in Paradise Lost is at some important junctures in Book lV especially transformed into what we can think of as a dissimile – I am not sure that that is a real rhetorical term…I didn’t make it up but in any case we’ll use it for lack of a better word.  So a positive simile involves a construction that X is like Y.  A dissimile would pose the opposite – X is unlike Y.  So I am going to ask you to turn to the most famous of these dissimiles in Paradise Lost – line 268 of Book lV.  Milton is forced to describe – what else can he do? – Paradise in terms of all the things that Eden is not.  So he tells us:

Not that fair field                  268
Of Enna…                                269
Nor that sweet grove           272

Of Daphne by Orontes,…     273

Nor that Nyseian isle            275
Girt with the river Triton      276

It is quite a catalogue of things that Eden is not like and the rhetorical mode is necessarily one of negation because of the epistemological and artistic problem of the fallen representation of unfallen-ness.  Look at line 233 this is where I think the problem of a fallen representation of an unfallen state actually really comes to a head.  Milton is describing here the four rivers of Eden

And now divided into four main streams,            233 

Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country whereof here needs no account,    235
But rather to tell how, if art could tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks,   237
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades                      239
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise which not nice art          241
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,        243

The flowers in Paradise are poured forth not by a nice or a fastidious gardener, by fastidious artifice – there is nothing fussy about this garden. Its bounty is nature herself who has poured forth all this profuseness.  Eden is free of any artifice but this lack of art in Eden of course only accentuates the problem that the poet has no choice but to face.  That the poet is under a pressure to describe with what is of course his poetic art that which is essentially indescribable.  And Milton let us know the problem – if art could tell – and that phrase clearly implies that art or even Milton’s art can’t tell us what Eden was like – that Milton’s art can’t represent an unfallen, non-artificial world with the instruments, the tools of fallen artificial language.  And the impossibility that he is facing is nowhere so apparent as it is here in this description of the crispèd brooks of Paradise – Rolling with mazy error under pendant shades – now of course error is one of the most resonant words in the entire poem.  An error is the moral category or we can think of it as the theological category most often applied to the fall and Adam and Eve’s eventual sin.  We might very well wonder why it is that error has crept into Eden before the fall.  Its presence here on some level could be seen as to doom the garden in advance; could be seen as some kind of evidence of a degree of fallenness in this unfallen Eden.  But Milton of course is using the word error in a special sense.  He is doing what he does so often – he employs a word solely to invoke its etymological root sense which in this case simply means wandering.  That the brook here is quite simply not flowing straight; it’s divagating; it’s moving in a curvaceous form.  And Milton is working consciously to exclude the moral significance that this word error had acquired later in its etymological history.  He is attempting to block out the meaning of this word that had crept in as it were after the fall.  There is actually a wonderful book that looks brilliantly at just this phenomenon called Milton’s Grand Style by the great critic Christopher Ricks.  And in that book Ricks argues for the self-consciousness behind Milton’s employment of the original etymological sense of some of the most loaded words in the poem.  And so Milton will remind us of the fall with his use of such a word as error.  But at the same time he is attempting to create in us, and it is a remarkable move, a memory for a time in which a word like error had not yet been infected by its morally pejorative modern connotation. He is reminding us of a time when there was no such thing as moral error.  Not that we can be reminded because we can’t remember, we weren’t around but it is as if a memory is being instilled in us by means of Milton’s poetry.  He condenses into a single word what is essentially the entire poetic problem besetting the description of unfallen Eden.  Milton too manages with a word like this to remind us that we are only seeing the garden after Satan has overleaped its boundary and has become sneaking around.  And we are given no description of Eden, you’ll note, until after the point in the story in which Satan has already entered; crossed the boundaries of Paradise. Look at line 282 – Milton locates the geographical spot on the grove believed to have been Eden but he does that only to remind us that everything that we are seeing is precisely what Satan is seeing. 

Where the Fiend                                                       282

Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living creatures, new to sight and strange:     284

Satan’s presence is important here because he reminds us that we too, are in a position undelighted all delight; we share his pained alienation from the innocence of the garden.  And nowhere is the problem’s representation more urgent and more troubled than in the first view that we are given of Adam and Eve.  There is an extraordinary pressure on Milton as he describes the condition of the unfallen Adam and Eve and that pressure would unquestionably, I think, be felt by the poem’s original readers.  Milton’s description of Adam and Eve and in this respect it is like what I take to nearly every 17^th century description of Adam and Eve – it is necessary a political statement.  It is an account of a first society. And as an account of a first society, Milton’s Eden has to establish something like the ideal against which all current, all fallen societies have to be judged.  So in the 17^th century - a description of man in the state of nature before the onset of any civil government was an essential component of just about any political philosophy.  You couldn’t forward a political vision without forwarding at the same time an image of a society before the onset of the government.  And the most important political philosopher in mid 17^th century England is Milton’s slightly older contemporary Thomas Hobbes and he had founded his vision of politics which was a decidedly authoritarian vision of politics on just such an account of a nearly unrecoverable, unrememberable past.  And so in Hobbes Leviathan, Hobbes conjures an image of the original man in the state of nature that serves as the foundation for his political wisdom, for his truly outrageous thesis that the only viable political institution is that of an absolutist monarchy.  And I say it is outrageous perhaps because it is so incredibly compelling – it is very hard not to be converted to a terrifying form of authoritarianism when you read Hobbes’s iron-clad prose.  So in the famous chapter 13 of the 1^st book of Leviathan  Hobbes describes the riotous mayhem constitutive of life before the onset of political institutions.   And so interesting and importantly, Hobbes is forwarding here a kind of secular argument; this isn’t theological and so he doesn’t return us to the Genesis account of Adam and Eve.  His is the state of nature he tells us is just like the one inhabited…it is America…it’s the one inhabited by the savages of the Americas.  The purpose of the Hobbsian account is directly analogous, I think, to Milton’s purpose in describing Eden.  For Hobbes men in the state of nature are all equal.  The state of nature is an egalitarian one even with respect to sex and Hobbes does everything he can do to demonstrate the dangers of this natural egalitarianism because, Hobbes tells us. all men and women were created equal.  There is no authority to keep them in place, to keep them from what naturally would be a perpetual state of strife.  And so Hobbes explains in Chapter 13 without a common power, (and by common power he means a king, a prince, a tyrant, it doesn’t matter) man is in a state of war, such a war as is of every man against every man.  And the life of the natural man (and this is surely the most famous and most glorious sentence in all of Hobbes remarkable leviathan) is solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short.  So for Hobbes the egalitarianism established in nature is obviously unsatisfactory and has to be corrected and so we have to construct some kind of governmental structure of polity whereby we submit ourselves to an absolute ruler, a monarch, a tyrant, it doesn’t matter.  And Hobbes Leviathan must have been deeply troubling to Milton, who devoted so much of his career to the critique of just the kind of absolutist government that Hobbes is championing.  There are a lot of signs in Paradise Lost that Milton is countering his great contemporary Thomas Hobbes. 

Now one of the advantages of writing about Eden was that a description of Paradise as I have suggested was something like an implicit model for political philosophy.  It is certainly, in Milton’s hands. So Hobbes had used his description of the state of men in the state of nature to forward his authoritarianism.  So Milton has to use his description of the first couple to forward his cause which is essentially that of republicanism or some kind of non-monarchic government.  And Adam and Eve have to be able to form a successful society alone, a successful polity on their own without the dictatorial intervention of any sovereign power.  It is crucial for what Milton needs to argue politically.  So what exactly are Milton’s politics?  It has been a while since we have visited this topic. We haven’t really discussed Milton’s politics since we looked at the 1644 Areopagitica and a lot, I’m sad to say, has changed since then.  In Areopagitica we saw Milton affirm what was essentially the general equality of all human beings.  This was an implicit argument that all individuals have been endowed by God with reason and that they are all equally capable of choosing and reasoning for themselves.  But in the 1650s, Milton had grown considerably less optimistic in his sense of the equality of all men and women.  The average individual in England for Milton at this point didn’t in fact seem to be endowed with quite as much reason and capacity for rational choice as Milton felt that he was capable of. Or as Milton felt that he and his fellow Puritan Revolutionaries were capable of.  So many of Milton’s backsliding countrymen wanted their king back; a devastating cultural fact for Milton.  And so Milton began to develop a new political philosophy and something of an aristocratic philosophy of political society that places superior, more rational, more spiritually minded beings, people like John Milton, at the top of this society and they are necessarily above less rational, less excellent, less spiritually minded beings who are obviously in a lower stratum.  And so Milton’s later political philosophy sketches something like almost a natural hierarchy in which the rational elite are in a position to guide and to offer some sort of authoritative wisdom to the less rational members of the society.  And these less rational members ideally willingly yield to superior wisdom and the reason of the rational elite.  It seems to be this later vision of a kind of a naturally hierarchical society that forms the basis for the first polity which is that of Adam and Eve in Milton’s Eden.  And it goes without saying that the union of Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise is a patriarchal one and the hierarchical division between superior and inferior creatures has been marked almost entirely, exclusively along the lines of gender.  Now Milton as you know has been reviled for his unrepentant patriarchalism of the first couple.   Look at line 299 – one of the most famous lines in the poem.  Milton is talking about the purpose of Adam and Eve’s creation.

He for God only, she for God in him:     299

This is without question a sexist vision of the first polity.  We can say that I think without much hesitation but it would almost be criminal, and I really believe this, to say that Milton’s sexism is simplistic.  It is so complex in fact that Milton has included in his poem a number of competing ways to think about this first society and we actually have passionately expressed before us in Paradise Lost the old Milton, the younger Milton, the much more liberal Milton – that radical egalitarianism that he was able so forcibly and compellingly to voice in Areopagitica.  That voice is audible in Paradise Lost but we also of course have the later Milton, the believer in a hierarchical society.  You can hear these contradictions at work in the poem’s description of this first polity; that of the union of Adam and Eve.  So look at line 288

Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,                288

God-like erect, with native honour clad                
In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,                  290
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine     
The image of their glorious Maker shone,            292
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe but in true filial freedom placed;               294
Whence true authority in men;

Now it certainly strikes me to be the case that this first view that we get of Adam and Eve is an egalitarian one.  They are both in their naked majesty described as lords of all.  But their seeming equality is a source of no small anxiety to Milton.  So we are told almost immediately he can’t take it anymore.  We are told that

…though both                                                              295

Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valour formed,             297
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,

Well up to this point there sex did equal seem and it is here that Milton places an enormous amount of weight on this word ‘seemed’ – one of the most important words in Book lV.  Seemed not equal to whom?  The idea of seeming is always with respect to a perceiver; someone to whom something seems to be this or that.  It is with this word seemed that we are reintroduced to the subject of the fallen perspective of an unfallen scene and reminded that we are not granted anything like the purview of Eden until after Satan has entered the garden.  This description of Eden in Book lV has in fact been merely tracing Satan’s steps and this description of Adam and Eve merely emerges now because this is the scene that Satan happens now to be looking at.  Look at line 285

…where the fiend                                                   285

Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living creatures new to sight and strange:    287

Then you have a colon.  Then after this colon falls this long description of Adam and Eve.  It is just possible to read the entire description of the sexually hierarchized Adam and Eve as an account in something like indirect discourse of Satan’s fallen perspective.  If their sex not equalled ‘seemed’ it’s possible that their sex not equalled ‘seemed’ to Satan.  And it is Satan, of course, we know this already to be the case who is more concerned than any of the other poem’s characters with problems of inequality. So naturally this is going to be the predisposition, the set of concerns he brings to any polity.  It is a fascinating question and there is a considerable debate raging – if you can say that Milton is a rage – a debate among Miltonists on just this question – and it is an interesting one.  Milton’s position at the head of the English literary canon is often associated or has been since the late 70s with his insistent positioning or maybe actually since Virginia Woolf’s writings in the 20s and 30s, is often associated with his insistent positioning of Adam over Eve in Paradise Lost.  And some participants in the debates about the validity of the western literary canon have imagined the effects of sexism in our society, have imagined eradicating sexism in our society by eradicating from college reading lists a sexist poet like Milton.  That argument is made, it is still forwarded today and it’s an argument that poses, as you can imagine, an understandable threat to people like me and admirers of this poet.  And you can imagine the number of Miltonists, he was really quite remarkable, who rallied around the textual suggestion that when Milton said “he for God only, she for God in him’ he doesn’t really mean it.  I think it was in the mid 80s that a critic first hit on the theory that all of the descriptions of Adam and Eve could be seen as merely an exfoliation of Satan’s perspective and there was tremendous joy and excitement in the Milton community.  Once that idea had been floated it’s as if the narrator is just reproducing for us the hierarchical imagination of Satan whose perspective on Adam and Eve is the one we are getting at the moment.  And so we are able to say to ourselves comfortably and complacently that Milton isn’t telling us that the social organisation of Eden is sexist; Milton is telling us that Satan is sexist.  And that patriarchy is essentially satanic rather than Miltonic.  I get depressed when I think of critical positions like this – whether you have the extreme position like Milton as the inventor, the prime perpetrator of misogyny (contempt of women) on one hand or the counter vision of Milton as an early feminist on the other.  The case is obviously more complicated than that and it’s more interesting than that because it is not all that clear just in the passage that we’re looking at; it’s not clear whose voice is actually authorising these lines that authorise the patriarchal perimeters of unfallen society.  Without a doubt we have the narrator speaking here and presumably he is representing something like the official line of the poem but Milton does in fact go out of his way to situate the entire scene as an elaboration of Satan’s perspective.  Both of these things are true and this passage which has absolutely everything to do with what Milton calls ‘establishing the true authority of men’.  This passage refuses to establish its own authority; it refuses to announce itself as the product of either the poem’s narrator or Satan.  It is a moment of textual instability and it reflects the larger political instability that is threatening Eden; threatening the relation between Adam and Eve.  And so it is worth asking ourselves, what is it about Adam and Eve that makes them seem unequal.  Look at line 297

For contemplation he and valour formed,        297

For softness she and sweet attractive grace,

How do we know this?  We know this by their physical differences.  We know it by the appearance of their anatomies and more precisely than that, we know they are different and unequal by means of our perception of their hair

His fair large front and eye sublime declared    299

Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung     301
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:

Milton did wear his hair long but he wants us to know that that was part of the historical record and he was very pleased with that but he always wants us to know that it wasn’t too long.  And it’s the same with Adam who wears his hair unusually long but indecorously long.

She as a veil down to the slender waist            303

Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved       305
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection,…                                                            307

Now, I bet that we can all agree that a description of their hair is not what we were expecting at this moment.  Supporters of patriarchy, or the superiority of men have always enlisted the anatomical differences between the sexes as proof of man’s rightful ability to subject or subordinate women.  A fact central to the patriarchal prejudice, as you can imagine, seems to be the strength differential between men and women.  And so if Milton had imagined a cosmos that privileged physical strength, then we would have no choice but glumly to accept the fact that Adam is indeed superior to Eve.  And you can how an argument like this could have played out in the pages of Paradise Lost.  Milton could have easily argued that human excellence could be determined by the sheer number of shrubs Adam and Eve were able to prune on any given day. And so Adam would be able to prove his superiority but physical strength, and this is important, means absolutely nothing in Paradise Lost.  In fact if anything, Milton is always denigrating the importance of physical strength.  So given that we still have to ask the question – why try to argue for the inequality of the sexes on the basis of hair length?  I presume none of you have had children but you probably still know nonetheless men and women or boys and girls are not born with distinct or distinguishable heads of hair.  At least until male-pattern baldness sets in, the hair of men and women are distinct or distinguishable and if anything male-pattern baldness probably gives women an edge.  And if Milton wanted to use hair as a natural sign of sexual difference, he should be discussing, I would think facial hair.  Adam’s superiority presumably could be evinced by his commanding beard; we could imagine Milton doing that.  Something that Eve lacks by virtue of her anatomy but the hair on the head?  This doesn’t make any sense.  The hair on the head is in fact one of the few anatomical features that is absolutely gender neutral.  Our hair is gendered by the virtue of the barber not by virtue of the creator.  Which brings us to this fact, which we all know, which is what every obstetrician knows, the obvious distinguishing anatomical characteristic is genitalia.  Milton does actually mention Adam and Eve’s mysterious parts but he mentions them only to dismiss their difference.  He may be gesturing to something like – you tell me if this is crazy – a genital difference when he describes Adam’s hair.  ‘His locks manly hung / clustering’ – I don’t think that holds.  The sexual signifier that hangs manly off of Adam’s body and that signifier which has traditionally of course been invoked as a sign of sexual superiority is Adam’s penis.  But Milton alludes to this genital signifier, of difference, their mysterious parts, only to dismiss it.  He chooses instead for the distinguishing characteristic of the sexes a phenomenon that is rooted not in nature but in culture – hairline.  Like Hobbes, Milton is under a tremendous cultural pressure when he describes the earliest state of nature.  The description of nature has to bear the weight of all of the social and all of the political claims that the poem makes.  And the set of social conditions that Milton has to justify and to make seem natural is a particularly tricky one.  Both Eve and Adam have to be seen as absolutely free; each of them has to be capable of exercising reason and making reasonable and rational decisions.  And in this sense Adam and Eve enjoy something like the absolutely egalitarianism world, the structure of the political world that we had seen in a treatise like Areopagitica.  Milton at his most exuberantly liberal but while Adam and Eve enjoy all the rights of an egalitarian society as they do in Paradise Lost, they are not therefore equal.  Adam appears to be superior to Eve and Milton will only tell us that he appears as such.  The narrator cannot make this claim in anything like a more declarative sense.  So on the basis of at least their appearances, the social formation in Eden is strictly hierarchical.  And on some extraordinary level this poem is trying to have it both ways.  So much of the energy of the account of Paradise derives from Milton’s contradictory account of the political structure of Eden.  He applies to the Edenic society of Adam and Eve, what I take to be two irreconcilable modes of social governance.  Eden is once egalitarian, its inhabitants are in naked majesty they are lords of all; both of them; Adam and Eve are entirely free in self-determining.  But at the same time Eden is structured as an aristocracy where the male class is deemed categorically genetically superior to the female class.  It goes without saying that the situation is untenable.  The contradictory social formation of Paradise is inherently unstable and I am convinced that nothing is more important in our understanding of the dynamics of the fall than these principles; the principle that Eve is absolutely free and equally rational, equally capable of rational and virtuous choices but also the conflicting principle that Eve is, to some extent, subject to Adam’s authority. And contradictory political impulses in the poem are brilliantly worked out in the first description of Adam and Eve.  Look at line 305, it is unbelievable.  Look at what Milton is able to establish by way of a description of Eve’s hair.  It is here in a representation of her hair that the nature of the Edenic polity is established. 

Her unadornèd golden tresses wore                 305

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied    307
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,         309
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.                   311

The conflicting politics of Eden are best captured by means of the rhetorical strategy of oxymoron or the contradiction in terms.  Milton packs this description of this first couple’s – this is essentially an erotic play that is being described before us and it is packed with oxymoronic descriptions.  Milton is trying to communicate the incredibly delicate political balance of this hierarchical society.  The society may be hierarchical Milton is telling us but it is not authoritarian.  Eve may be subject to Adam, who holds authority over Eve, but her subjection – because she is free – is required with a gentle sway.  And no sooner does Adam exercise his authority by gently swaying Eve, then she willingly yields to him, exercising her free capacity for consent – her capacity to choose to be swayed by her superior.  So Eve’s hair seems to imply subjection but Eve’s hair also seems to imply freedom and a kind of resistance to subjection.  Eve yields not with submission, Milton would never permit himself to say that; Eve yields with coy submission; she holds something back even as she grants it.  We have detailed before us the endless give and take that this delicate political structure requires.  For Milton, this give and take is not only the basis of a society, it is the basis for eros or sexual pleasure.  With that extraordinary phrase “sweet reluctant amorous delay” Milton is able to pack into three adjectives into one noun the pleasure derivable by both parties in Eve’s exercise of resistance.  But Eve’s coyness isn’t just sexy for Milton, it is also politically meaningful.  From a political perspective her capacity for a kind of reluctance and resistance serves as a guarantee for her capacity for a kind of rational consent.  And it is also theologically resonant; from a theological perspective, Eve’s willingness to resist, to delay constitutes a guarantee of her divinely granted free-will.  Eve cannot be forced to do anything and it’s as if this little dance that they perform in the quotidian life of unfallen Eden.  Eve is practising in a small way for that crucial moment in temptation in which her ability to resist and delay will mean the difference between life and death.

Now we as readers find it difficult, we should find it difficult to find a theory of hierarchy on something so fragile and so easily alterable as hair length.  But what’s even more amazing than that is the fact that the nature of the gendered hierarchy of Adam and Eve isn’t even evident to Adam and Eve themselves.  This blows me away; look at Eve’s first memory in Paradise Lost line 477, Eve is far from being able to recognise Adam’s superiority immediately and Eve there is certainly nothing in the length of his hair that suggests that he might enjoy a kind of authority over her.  In fact to Eve, Adam seems to be a noticeably inferior creature when she compares him to that image of herself – that beautiful and responsive image of herself that she had found in the pool. 

Till I espied thee, fair indeed and tall,      477

Under a platan, yet methought less fair
Less winning soft, less amiable mild,       479
Than that smooth watery image;

It’s like the dissimile of the fair field of Enna, Adam can only be understood by what it is he lacks and indeed it is a lack of anything that is a natural or a self-evident sexual hierarchy that constitutes one of the central problems in Paradise Lost.  Hierarchy is not a natural fact in Paradise.  It is an arbitrarily imposed social institution.  It has been imposed by God but it hasn’t been built into the structure of the natural world.  And it is to Milton’s great credit, I mean this with the utmost seriousness, that he labours to expose the artificial cultural origins of the sexual subjection that at the same time he is championing and celebrating.  Eve has to be told that Adam is her superior and she has to undergo an elaborate process, a complicated process of cultural indoctrination.  Nowhere in the description of Eden are we reminded more forcibly of our incapacity to understand unfallen nature than in Milton’s description of Eve’s hair.  “Her unadornèd tresses were dishevelled but in wanton ringlets waved” Dishevelled and wanton – these seem like extraordinary prejudicial adjectives and they cast a moral judgement, it is seemed to readers from the very beginning, long before she has sinned.  Once again Milton is playing with that analogy.  This is Rick’s point – dishevelled is being used here in its original, literal sense – it literally means hair let down and the ringlets – she is not wearing a bun – are wanton – that they are simply unrestrained.  And the fact that we are so eager as readers to supply a kind of loose or sexual meaning to these words implicates us Milton perhaps is seen to be saying.  And of course it implicates Satan as well.  In the fallen perspective of the ultimately mysterious union of Adam and Eve, we are eyeing them askance and leering at them just as Satan is.  And it is Stanley Fish’s argument, and it is not unconvincing, that Milton’s purpose in employing these loaded adjectives is to force the reader to acknowledge her own fallenness; to remind us all of the inadequacy of our fallen perspective on this unfallen nature.  So we are wrong to import a kind of moral prejudice to the words ‘dishevelled’ and ‘wanton’ but Milton will push it even further.  Eve’s hair is also waving and insinuating and its waving curly motion resembles nothing so much as that other much less noble creature in the garden and that’s of course the serpent.  Look at line 345 where Milton describes the elephant and the serpent

…the unwieldy elephant                                                       345

To make them mirth used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly                           347
Insinuating, wove with Giordian twine
His braided train, and of his fatal guile                               349
Gave proof unheeded;

The braided train of the serpent’s wavy motion resembles nothing so much as the waving braids of Eve’s hair.  And Eve seems to be associated well in advance of the actual temptation with the sly insinuation of the serpent.  An association that can of course can only damage any sense that we have of her unfallen reason and her genuine free-will.  But Milton carefully includes in this description another example of a waving and an insinuating motion in Eden and that’s the elephant’s proboscis.  He’s preface his connection between Eve and Satan here with the inclusion of the elephant.  He wants us to know with this image of the elephant’s light proboscis that the motion of waving and weaving and weaving and insinuating are still in fact entirely innocent and it will only be Satan’s subsequent actions that infect them retroactively, infect them for us.  The problem being exposed once again is the problem of representation.  How can you represent an unfallen state from a fallen perspective?

Figure 1 Rembrandt, Adam and Eve, 1638 http://www.rembrandthuis.nl/index.php?item=150&lang=en

This representation of Adam and Eve was made in 1638 – Rembrandt did this drawing shortly before Milton was beginning to think of Paradise Lost.  And in the Rembrandt representation, this is a devastating critique of 17^th century desire to represent an unfallen Paradise – what we have Milton trying to do.  Like Milton, Rembrandt exposes the impossibility I think of such a representation.  If we read the Book of Genesis, we know that Eve was alone with the serpent and so we are seeing Adam and Eve in this picture presumably after Eve has eaten the fruit but before Adam had eaten it.  Now Adam may not have eaten the fruit but he certainly looks as fallen as Eve – they are equally physically ugly – it seems to me and that is indisputable.  Nasty, brutish and short – it is as if they have crawled out of the pages of the famous chapter 13 of Hobbes’ Leviathan.  Look at Eve’s face, with its broad overhanging brows – she suggests the unevolved state of an upright primate than she does of the glorious and beautiful first human female.  And look at Adam – the presumably unfallen Adam is writhing in a twisted and guilty posture that gives him no moral superiority over Eve whatsoever.  If anything here, Adam’s hair seems more wanton and more dishevelled than Eve’s.  Rembrandt’s Eden must be very humid – there’s a frizzy split end thing going on with both of them – especially with Eve.   At least it is falling rather neatly over her head which can’t be said of Adam.  And of course the primary clue that this representation of Eden is imposing upon unfallen Adam’s sense of fallenness comes from Rembrandt’s shading of their genitals.  And actually in the original you can make their genitalia quite distinctly but they are nonetheless shaded; this is important for Rembrandt.  They are partially hidden by the dark and guilty shadow produced by the serpent.  The serpent, you may or may not have noticed, it is that scaly hideous creature climbing that tree on the right.  Milton had gone out of his way to insist that the genitals of Adam and Eve the mysterious parts were not concealed but then he goes on to censure us his fallen readers for the sense of guilty shame that we bring to any speculation about their mysterious parts.  But it is as if Rembrandt is a step ahead of Milton and he is telling us that there can be no such thing as a just representation of an unfallen nudity.  Our darkened minds will continually shade that nudity with the inescapable shadow of guilt and shame that we have no choice but to bring to questions of sexuality.  Rembrandt joins Milton in representing a scene that seems to lie somewhere – both the Eden of Rembrandt and the Eden of Milton – between a fallen and an unfallen state.  And I think a lot of energy of the Rembrandt drawing derives from his refusal to depict the moral superiority of one sex over the other.  There is no clear demarcation here of a sexual hierarchy or a natural sexual hierarchy.  This Adam doesn’t seem any physically stronger than Eve and if he is to be seen as the greater sex, perhaps it is because he has placed himself in an arbitrarily physical posture of superiority – he’s placed one foot slightly on an elevated plane.  He is trying to get a leg up.  He is compensating perhaps for his lack of a self-evident authority over Eve.  Tradition of course has always insisted and this story that we inherit as children, that Eve seduced Adam into eating the fruit.  Adam would never have fallen if Eve hadn’t tricked him into eating the apple or implored him to join her sin.  But Rembrandt here is refusing to attribute all of the guilt to Eve.  Now it is possible that Adam may be here trying to protect Eve from the fruit with the gesture of his hand but he also might be reaching for the fruit, grabbing it.  It is possible that he’s seizing the fruit just as Milton’s Adam seizes Eve when he finds her by the pool.  So what I am saying is that the suggestion in both Milton and Rembrandt is that the fall had less to do with Eve’s seduction of Adam than the more foundational, or the structural problem of sexual inequality.  The fall starts to look more and more like the inevitable consequence of sexual hierarchy.  I am going to conclude after we take one more final look at the Rembrandt.  At the visual details that Rembrandt forces into a kind of analogous relation.  And in this he is like Milton.  Like Milton, Rembrandt draws into the relation, an analogous relation of the slithery awful serpent and innocent playful winding of the elephant’s proboscis.  And you can see the unwieldy elephant in the lower right-hand corner of the Rembrandt drawing.  But the proboscis and the serpent’s tail are not the only snaky things in Rembrandt’s Eden.  As I mentioned earlier, in the original drawings, Adam’s mysterious part is actually quite visible.  It is nasty, it’s brutish, it’s short, but t’s discernible.  And it is important that it is discernible and through this technique of juxtaposition Rembrandt casts an evil and satanic shadow over this part of Adam’s anatomy; that distinguishing feature of his sex which is the arbitrary signifier of his authority over Eve.  So Adam’s authority here, in its most intimate manifestation, may be as complicit as the serpent in the crime of the fall.  So Satan sees all of this; he sees this weird and bizarrely unstable sexual hierarchy in Milton’s Eden and what does he say at line 521.  Milton has Satan announce that he has ‘Eureka! I know how I am going to do it’.  He has arrived at his scheme to destroy Adam and Eve and he says – just having witnessed all of this –

O fair foundation laid whereon to build       521

Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject      523
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt    525
Equal with gods; aspiring to be such,
They taste and die: what likelier can ensue?     527

Now Milton isn’t eager to join Satan in his claim of God’s injustice but he is willing to expose the inherently unstable foundation of Eden’s sexual hierarchy.  Milton lays the foundation ultimately - I think, we will see as we read Book lX – for our understanding of some of the deepest causes of the fall.

[End of Lecture]

John Milton's Paradise Lost Book lll Lecture Notes

This is a transcript of the video lecture for fellow students studying English Literature in the Renaissance and Restoration.

Title: Paradise Lost Book lll by John Milton

Lecturer: Professor John Rogers / Yale University

Video of Lecture at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U6pf5v_Fkg

 

I want to revisit just for a moment the opening of the Invocation to the Holy Light which is of course at the beginning of Book lll of Paradise Lost.  So this is page 257 of the Hughes and this is how Milton begins the invocation as you will remember:

HAIL holy light, offspring of heaven first-born,
Or of the eternal co-eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed?

Milton had a desire to look at himself unblamed or unblamable for the condition of his blindness.  Milton had for years gone out of his way to justify himself before his nation and before his God.  But that was only one way to read this line, this question, May I express thee unblamed?  Unblamed could just as easily modify the Holy Light being addressed by the poet.  It can correspond to the ‘thee’ as well as to the ‘I’ in this question.  And so it is this alternative syntactical possibility that I want to explore in this lecture.  I’ll be focusing on the status of this poem as an attempt to exculpate not only is poet but this poet’s God.  To render God blameless for the range of losses that this epic so eloquently innumerates.

Dr Johnson’s Life of Milton:

His purpose is the most useful and the most arduous to vindicate the ways of God to man, to show the reasonableness of religion and the necessity of obedience to the divine law.

And Johnson here is clearly thinking of Milton’s ambition of producing a theodicy – an attempt to justify the ways of God to men. He is right to identify Milton’s theodicy is one of the central tasks of the poem.  Milton seems genuinely sincere in wanting to provide a rational and reasonable account of the ways of God but Johnson has got his quotation wrong.  And he may have gotten his quotation wrong because he is not thinking directly of  the Milton but he is thinking of Alexander Pope’s earlier thinking of Milton from Pope’s great poem – The Essay on Man.  Pope gets it wrong as well.  Milton of course doesn’t end the opening invocation to Paradise Lost in Book l with the claim that he will assert eternal providence and vindicate the ways of God to men.  Milton says that he will justify the ways of God to men.  I think it is slight but nonetheless there is a difference between these two words and I think something instructive here about Johnson’s slip and Alexander Pope’s slip a few decades before.  Now when Milton says that he will justify God’s ways, I think he means simply that he will account for the justice of God’s ways.  He will demonstrate their justifiability.  But to vindicate God’s ways – vindicate is a slightly different word although they can certainly be seen as synonyms – is to presuppose from the outset that God is under some suspicion of guilt; that he is assumed to have done something wrong and that it is our job to vindicate him or to get him off the hook.  Milton of course can’t himself and doesn’t rightly use the word ‘vindicate’ – it is too prejudicial.  It seems on some levels to criminalise God’s behaviour in advance.  This is of course exactly what he does not want to do.  That said, it’s on some level impossible for us to read Paradise Lost and not assume that this God requires vindication.  God seems in so many ways to be responsible for the fall and it might even be impossible to read the story of the fall in Genesis and not attribute some of the guilt to the Yahweh who placed the forbidden fruit in the garden in the first place.  Dr Johnson, inadvertently here reveals something about Milton’s poem that Milton himself is perhaps isn’t willing or able to admit.  And that is God appears to be guilty and it’s up to Milton to clear him of any suspicion of guilt. 

So look at the headnote that Milton attaches to the beginning of Book lll, page 257 in the Hughes.  And when Paradise Lost initially appeared, its initial appearance in 1667, these arguments, these headnotes weren’t there.  He added them to a later printing presumably at the request of a printer who thought that the readers needed a little help with the poem.  And you may actually want to think about, it’s an interesting phenomenon, and very little written about, that the general relation between the summarised arguments – they are essentially plot summaries – to the actual story, the actual narrative that follow s in each book.  The beginning of this argument strikes me as a particularly interesting one.  So this is Milton’s argument for Book lll:

God sitting on his throne sees Satan flying towards this world, then newly created; shows him to the Son who sat at his right hand; foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind; clears his own justice and wisdom from imputation, having created man free and able enough to have withstood his tempter;

I am just going to focus on a couple of those clauses.  “Foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind;” then we get Milton’s semi-colon “clears his own justice and wisdom from imputation”.  You kind of get the feeling here that the semi-colon is working as hard as it possibly can to yoke these seemingly conflicting principles together and I’m not sure of the case that any semi-colon is up to such an enormous theological task.  In this formulation, Milton seems to own up on some level to Johnson’s characterization of the theodicy of Paradise Lost as a vindication – God needs to clear his own justice – he needs to clear his name’s innocence because that name has been clouded over with some kind of suspicion.  I take this absolutely seriously that it has to be seen as authentic and sincere Milton’s desire to justify God.  He needs to imagine a God who can’t be held responsible for the fall because only a blameless God could be worthy of Milton’s praise or even worthy of Milton’s interest.  Frankly I think that Milton does a pretty decent job of representing a God who cannot be seen as some kind of guilty co-conspirator in the fall of man.  He does a pretty decent job vindicating God but then when we think about it there are few poets more adept at the art of vindication than John Milton. 

Milton had been practicing the art of vindication, the art of defence, something like the art of criminal defence, all of his life.  We looked last time at the lengths to which Milton went in his poetry and his prose to vindicate himself with regards to his blindness.  But long before that, before Milton’s sight had been cut off, long before his tender orbs of vision had been quenched, to use his poetry, Milton had been exercising his talents in the rhetorical art of self-defence.  In sonnet 7, actually throughout the early works, Milton was defending himself against that fear that God would punish him for waiting so long to begin his career.  That God was angry with Milton, Milton was already 23 years old, and he had so little to show for himself.  And later Milton devoted a good deal of energy to other kinds of defence – he laboured to vindicate the radical Puritan left in England when it was held that they had committed in killing the King.  Raising a hand against God’s anointed monarch and Europe was aghast at the barbaric behaviour of the English revolutionaries so Milton wrote it in Latin for the benefit of the entire European intellectual community.  Two defences of the crime of the regicide.  So he wrote a First Defence of the English People and a work titled The Second Defence of the English People and there is no question that he would have been capable had there been time or had there been interest of writing a third defence and a fourth defence.  The labour of defence, the work of vindication was something that Milton was getting very good at and it really goes to the core of his intellectual temperament. 

Now Milton lays the groundwork for his sweeping vindication of God in the discussion in Book lll between the Heavenly Father and his Son.  And this is essentially the same theology that Milton will established in the theological treatise that he is writing at the same time as Paradise Lost on Christian doctrine.  Now it is important for Milton to establish something like – and this is what he gets to do in the venue of the prose treatise as opposed to the poem – he has the opportunity to establish a theoretical basis for a lot of his beliefs; so a theoretical basis for his vindication of God.  He needs to prove, theologically, not just poetically or narratively that God did not place Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the intent, or with the purpose in mind for punishing them for eating the fruit.  He needs to convince himself and he needs to convince his reader that the fact of God’s foreknowledge of the fall doesn’t in any way cause the fall.  This is a huge worry not just for Milton but for all philosophically minded Christians that the faculty of free-will is a genuine faculty and this is something that Milton really needs to believe.  And it is not just some paper-maché concept pasted together by a cynical and manipulative deity or by a cynical and manipulative poet.  And in order to assert this belief in a genuinely meaningful faculty of free-will, Milton has to tackle head on the theology of his fellow Puritans – the prevailing theology of his fellow Puritans.  Milton has to dismantle, and this is no easy task, the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination.  Now the most prevalent belief amongst Milton’s contemporary Puritans was this belief in divine predestination and nearly all men and women that we can identify comfortably as Puritans embrace the faith in God’s omnipotence  outlined in the works of John Calvin – the 16th century French theologian living in Geneva who insisted that every one’s salvation could be traced back ultimately to the predestinary will of god.  So for Calvin God has not only known since the beginning of time what we will do but God actually causes us, in some sense, to do what we do.  There’s very little space for a meaningful range of free will in a strict Calvinistic system.  And it is God then who is for Calvin, elected in advance who will be saved and who will be damned.  Calvin was justified or he felt he was justified and many of his followers felt he was justified in his assertion of God’s control.  When he read the passage St Paul’s epistle to the Romans. 

Roman 8:29

For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.  Moreover whom he did predestinate them he also called and whom he called, them he also justified and whom he justified he also glorified.

It is devastating bible by verse for anyone committed to a strong stance as Milton was to the doctrine of free-will.  So on some level, at least this passage from St Paul scripture seemed to provide incontrovertible evidence for the fact that God had already predestined the elect – those Christians who had arbitrarily at the very foundation of time been elected for salvation and by extension God had also, and this is also another important component of the Calvin theological system that God had arbitrarily marked another group of men and women for punishment and eternal damnation.  Seems incontrovertible but this course is about Milton and nothing is incontrovertible for Milton and you see him tangle with just this passage from the book of Romans for two solid pages on Christian doctrine and you just have a sense that Milton is saying , ‘This can’t possibly mean what it seems to mean!’  There is a genuine and powerful urgency charging Milton’s – it is like a wrestling match almost with a biblical passage like this.  And so one of the important conclusions that Milton comes to in his wrestling match with scripture is the term ‘elect’ as St Paul uses it in the bible – doesn’t refer to God’s absolute  predestination. 

Hughes Page 921 – Christian Doctrine

I conclude that believers are the same as the elect and that the terms are used indiscriminately

Believers are the elect and because of course we get to choose on some level, we get to choose whether or not we believe, we therefore get to choose, we have some sort of agency whether we or not we are going to be one of God’s elect.  This is one of Milton’s most compelling and really wonderful perversions of mainstream Calvinist theology.  Calvin had insisted in predestination to assert God’s absolute control over his creation and God’s absolute control over that final separation at the end of time between the saved and the damned.  Calvin felt that his theology was the least we owed to the grandeur and the omnipotence of God.  But for Milton to say that believers are the same as the elect is essentially on some level to strip God of that control.  It is as if Milton were defending something like a usurpation of God’s authority and it’s the same strategy you will see Milton employing time and time again.  He is able to take the most depressingly constrictive biblical doctrine and he turns it into a proof.  He turns it into a proof for his faith and man’s absolutely free-will.  And Milton’s philosophy, he is not the only person doing this but he does it with more ingenuity perhaps than just about any one of his contemporaries, is often called Arminianism – named after Jacobus Arminius 16^th century Dutch theologian.  Now I have been speaking about the theology of free will as if it were simply a matter of religious doctrine or exclusively a matter of religious doctrine and of course probably more importantly than any other way it is a matter of religious doctrine but religion, and I think this can be said not just for Milton - it surely can be said for all of us – religion serves a whole range of cultural functions; we saw last time some of the deeply personal uses to which Milton was able to put his theology just as he needs to prove that God’s  omniscience and omnipotence is not a sign of his responsibility of the fall, Milton needed to prove that his blindness wasn’t a sign of God’s punishment of Milton.  That was a personal motivation for some of the theological energies of Milton poem.  But I think more central to Milton’s theology than anything like a personal motivation is Milton politics although the political sphere is intimately intertwined with anything that we would want to think of as personal.  Theology and political philosophy – these obviously seem to us as radically distinct spheres of thought but they are incredibly closely intertwined in the 17^th century.  I think there are all sorts of political and social motivations for Milton’s theology.   There are political and social reasons for the fact that some of the period’s radical intellectuals, like Milton, are beginning to radically assert the importance of man’s free-will and beginning at the same time to diminish the authority that had traditionally in the Calvinistic system been accorded to God.  And I think there is a political significance to the period’s renewed attachment to and investment in the philosophy or theology of Arminius who died at the beginning of the 17^th century. 

Arminianism has a new wave, maybe its third wave by the later part of the 17^th century.  Now as we know from the treatise Areopagitica and for Milton’s regicide writings as well – Milton was establishing himself in the middle part of the century as one of England’s foremost, articulate spokesman for a phenomenal liberalism (anachronistic term).  Obviously the word liberalism hasn’t emerged yet but you have something like a theory of liberalism or at least a theory of libertarianism beginning to assert itself in the middle of the 17^th century.  You have a serious formulation of liberalism later in the 17^th century shortly after Milton dies with the philosopher John Locke who was a great reader of Milton.  
 
Traditional Renaissance political thought was before Locke and I think you can say before Milton, was more or less authoritarian.  It placed a monarch at the top of the society, at the top of the polity and traditional Renaissance political thought needed to imagine that monarch’s control, his ultimate governance over the behaviour and actions of all of the individuals in that society.  This political philosophy invariably asserted the importance of a radical image of centralisation of power.  And it is not really until the middle of the 17^th century that Europeans and it’s not just Englishmen are beginning to articulate any serious alternative to the authoritarian, the centralised model of political organisation.  There are people on the radical left, and Milton is one of them, who begin to posit the idea that the disperse individuals throughout a society can be reasonably depended on to govern themselves.  With sufficient self-control of course such a theory assumes a lot of things.  It assumes a sufficient degree of self-control that every individual would have.  With this self-control rational individuals could organize themselves without a king, without a top-down hierarchical structure of a monarchy.  And this position is most often associated in England at least in the middle of the century with the Levellers – the high-minded intellectuals of the army during the English revolution in the middle of the 17^th century and the Leveller theory of sovereignty is something like an elected sovereignty.  If there is a sovereign that sovereign will be elected or chosen by the people.  The sovereign is not going to be imposed upon the people and election in a lot of ways is not simply a theological alternative to this day it has political resonances as well.  So this brand new ‘liberal’ theology is not only political in nature however it is also economic.  It is precisely this same period, the mid 17^th century when something like a ‘liberal’ market theory of economic exchange is being theorised.  So up until – I’ll give you a brief history  of economic thought in the early modern period up until this point it was assumed that the only efficient way to organise the economic life of a nation was to have the monarch, the sovereign, the authoritarian centre of the government fix prices and to determine the value of currency and in general to oversee the dynamics of just about all economic exchange.  But suddenly, and this really is happening in the 1650s and its happening first in England, a liberal economic theory is coming into view and it was being conjectured that individuals, meaning individual merchants could freely set prices and values according to the law of supply and demand rather than according to the law, the authoritarian law of the king.  And there is a wonderful book on this subject by Joyce Appleby “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.  The argument is essentially that a free market philosophy had simply been unthinkable, the free market philosophy that we take as a given almost, was unthinkable before the middle years of the 17^th century.  So you have these two enormous shifts in which the English intellectuals were thinking about political and also about their economic lives.

It seems to me that it only stands to reason that there is going to be a corresponding shift or some sort of related shift on the level of religious thought.  If individuals are going to be liberated from their earthly monarch, if merchants are going to be liberated from the centralising power of the sovereign in charge of the economy, then individual souls are going to have to be liberated at least to some extent from the predestinary stronghold of the heavenly monarch as well.  As if intellectual life could operate in these huge analogous forms and I think that is one of the functions of Milton’s insistence on his liberal theology of free-will.  It is as if he needs to bring his religion in line with his liberal politics. 

 

Now let’s look at the dialogue in heaven – page 260 in the Hughes Book lll line 93.  It is here in the dialogue in heaven between the father and the son where so many of the tensions between Calvinistic predestination and Miltonic free-will get worked out.  But let me digress for a moment – before we actually look at the dialogue I think it is important to ask why it is and I think people have been asking this question because people have been reading Paradise Lost – why it is that God the Father and God the Son need to be holding a dialogue at all?  What is it that they need to say to one another?  I think we can reasonably ask.  For orthodox Christians in Milton’s time and I think for a lot of orthodox Christians in our time, the Father and the Son are members of what is known as the Trinity.  The Father the Son and the Holy Spirit are paradoxically , according to most Trinitarian thinking, three separate entities but they are also most importantly one unified entity.  And because they are all one and all equally one it borders on almost blasphemy to imagine the father and the son needing to discuss anything.  But Milton realised that and this was an extraordinary bold move on his part.  Milton argued that there was no basis in Scripture for belief in Trinity and people have always known that the word Trinity actually appears nowhere in the Scripture.  And you can see Milton in the Christian doctrine supplying mountains, literally mountains of evidence, of Scriptural evidence to disprove the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  So Milton took very seriously the biblical metaphors the Father and the Son.  The Father and the Son are not the aspects of the same deity, they are literally for Milton a father and a son.  And when God refers in Scripture to ‘my only begotten son’ or to ‘my first begotten son’ he really means it.  According to Milton, the father generates the son, he gives birth to him at a specific moment in pre-creation history.  Milton has been called a subordinationist – he subordinates the Son to the Father because the Son will never be, or not until the very end of time, the Father’s equal.  And so the Son can no way be imagined identical or equal to the father.  Father can when he chooses, and this happens in Paradise Lost, to grant a certain measure power to this Son but the Son in no way possesses any kind of power that hasn’t been granted to him at God’s pleasure.  The Son has nothing like the foreknowledge or omnipotence that the Father has.  Now we see the Son doing things, performing actions in Paradise Lost, for example he is responsible for having created or serving as the vehicle of the creation of the universe, not negligible perhaps, but he can only perform these god-like feats and he can only be called god-like not actually God when the Father permits him to perform such feats.  He needs his father’s permission and like Adam and Eve it is beholden upon the Son to obey the Father.  This is crucial to Milton’s theology.  So look at how all these essentially domestic relations get theologised in the dialogue in heaven.  And the Father speaks in the future tense of absolute foreknowledge because he can.  You are right to think that there is something a little chilling about the father’s discursive manner here.  The way he can shift so easily between the past tense and the future tense.  So this is line 93…

For man will hearken to his glozing lies,                  93

And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall,                95
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his his own? Ingrate, he had of me      97
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.         99
Such I created all the ethereal powers
And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;       101
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.

This little outburst seems incredibly indecorous and inappropriate.  The last line indicates one of the central rhetorical strategies of the Father’s speech.  Look at line 99, there is something liberating about the Father credo here – I created man sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.  This is kind of rousing but the father doesn’t leave it there.  He broaches the subject of the fallen angels and he repeats the same formulation but he repeats it with a difference.  Look at line 101.  He has just discussed both them who stood and them who failed “Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.”  The Father recasts that original statement within a repetitive rhetoric – it is essentially a repetitive rhetoric of tautology  (the saying of the same thing twice in different words) and in so doing he exposes something of the highly schematic nature of his sense of justice.  And this last line is often cited in Milton criticism as a positive example of Milton’s commitment to the doctrine of free-will.  But I don’t really buy it…I’m not convinced by the Father’s statement.  This line may begin with that exuberant adverb “Freely” but the rest of it smacks of something like predestination.  And it is a little depressing.  They stood who stood, and fell who fell.  Is it a stretch to extrapolate from that a parrot phrase like this – the type of person who is created to stand did stand and the type of person who was created to fall did fall.  There is something disconcertingly programmatic about the Father’s repetition here – the repetitiveness of his explanation and the tautological force of this formulation seems to rob the opening word of the line “Freely” and robs it of some of its liberatory energy.  That was the Father’s speech. 

 
Wonderfully the Son seems almost to recoil from the rigidity of the Father’s position and in fact, he seems actually to soften the Father a little.  He asks the Father to show him mercy towards man since man, like the Son himself, is a son of God.  And it is at this point that you get the Father’s condescending claim that he of course knew all along that his Son would be asking for mercy.  And Milton is obliged to make the Father’s omniscient as of course the Father is omniscient.  Although the entire drama of this dialogue is structured as any drama or any dialogue has to be structured to suggest that there are two individuals who are reacting genuinely to one another’s speeches because they don’t know in advance what the other is going to say.  That’s what a dialogue is.  But there is clearly a powerful asymmetry here in this dialogue in that the asymmetry threatens to cast this entire scene into something like a potentially ridiculous light.  But the Son does seem at least to have made a kind of impact on the Father and the Father seems to relent.  And the Father agrees to accept the repentance of Adam and Eve.  So let’s look at line 194 Book lll at the top of page 263 of the Hughes.  The Father promises to show mercy and he promises to permit Adam and Eve a safe journey back into his good graces.

And I will place within them as a guide                     194

My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well used they shall attain,               196
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.

It is as if the Father has been cajoled by the Son; cajoled and nudged to a more linear and to my taste a more palatable form of human progress.  And I think we sigh with relief at the knowledge that all will be well again after the fall.  If we have all the earmarks of a narrative, I’m moving from a beginning, through a middle and towards an end, then we sigh with relief at the knowledge that everything is going to be ok.  But of course this is only momentary.  As soon as the Father has agreed to this concession, as soon as he has promised a safe journey back to God – he adds a condition – and this condition appears at line 203.  He returns to that rhetoric of repetition and equivalence that had marked his earlier speech:

But yet all is not done; man disobeying,     203

Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high supremacy of heaven       205
Affecting godhead, and so losing all,
To expiate his treason hath naught left,     207
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,         209
Die he or justice must, unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay           211
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.

“well used they shall attain, / And to the end persisting, safe arrive.” – it did seem pretty much that all was done.  But..’yet all is not done’ – you can almost hear Milton in this line catching himself and realising that man of course wasn’t redeemed simply because Adam and Eve were repentant, simply because they said they were sorry.  It has the same force as that incredibly startling moment in the Nativity Ode when Milton tells us “But wisest Fate sayes no, / This must not yet be so, “.  Milton just can’t get away  although he certainly gives it a shot, he can’t get away from the unhappy fact that man was not redeemed simply because Adam and Eve said they were sorry.  Man was redeemed through the much more troubling, for Milton, the troubling mechanism of the Father’s sacrifice of the Son.  Milton has successfully avoided finishing his poem about the crucifixion, the poem called The Passion, when he was a young man.  It just went unfinished.  And as you read the dialogue in heaven in Book lll of Paradise Lost, it seems for a while at least, it seems that Milton is able to evade the entire question of the sacrifice one more time…but he catches himself.  ‘But yet all is not done”.  He forces a consideration of the atonement of the crucifixion and it is crucial to understanding exactly how it is that Milton here is imagining the dynamics of the redemption.

So Milton first of all had to reject the orthodox understanding of the Christian redemption.  In the New Testament and for a lot of Christian theologians, the redemption  seems to work along the lines of something like a revenge sacrifice and as cultural anthropologists have taught us, there is something of an intensely primitive logic at work behind the Christian notion of the crucifixion.  One of the Father’s sons Adam has died and so the Father will avenge that death by murdering someone else.  And of course that means murdering another son.  This model of redemption is based on a repetition of the initial crime.  And this logic of repetition I think is largely responsible for that rhetoric of repetitiveness that we hear so often in the Father’s speech.  According to this sacrifice theory of redemption or the atonement, God chooses to sacrifice his Son since someone is going to have to be punished for Adam’s sin – the logic demands that.  But Milton can imagine no aspect of his religion, no aspect of Christianity more barbaric than the image of the Father’s willing sacrifice of his Son.  This would be a God truly unworthy of Milton’s justification and Milton is struggling here, and there are a few of his contemporaries doing the same thing in the 17^th century, he’s struggling to bring together Christianity in line with certain standards of rationality .  As  Doctor Johnson had said – Milton wants to show the reasonableness of religion.  So Milton replaces the sacrifice model of the redemption with something like a satisfaction model of redemption.  According to this way of thinking in Adam’s sin a debt has been incurred and this debt can be satisfied by someone else’s payment.  So revenge is no longer the motive.  It is like an economic desire, simply to balance the books.  There is something impersonal about this new way of imagining the atonement.  And it is here that Milton gives the notion of the Christian redemption its particular Miltonic twist.  Milton’s Father does not willingly sacrifice the Son – it’s magnificent – he simply asks for a volunteer.  And the Son, out of his goodness, volunteers.  He chooses to make himself mortal and it is a perfect example of how Milton has shifted the emphasis away from Christian orthodoxy and forcing the authoritarian image of God’s sacrifice to yield to Milton’s liberal image of a kind of volunteerism or libertarian image of volunteerism.  The Son chooses to humiliate himself and subsequently God chooses to compensate that humiliation with the Son’s supreme exaltation.  You see the extent of this compensation at line 311 in Book lll.

                                                 …because in thee              311

Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt                              313
With thee thy manhood also to this throne;
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign               315
Both God and man, Son both of God and man,
Anointed universal king; all power                                   317
I give thee, reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits; under thee as head supreme                        319
Thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions I reduce:
All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide               321
In heaven, or earth, or under earth in hell,

To reward the Son for having sacrificed himself, the Father is going to give his Son all power.  And this complete, seems like it is going to be a complete transference of power and it is a transfer that will hold until at the end of time there will no longer even be a difference presumably between the Father and the Son because as the Father says in line 341

God shall be all in all.             341

There will be no power differential between the Father and the Son and presumably there will be no power differential between/among any of us.  We’ll all be joined at the end of time in one massive, liberal, non-hierarchical state of harmony.  The image of the ‘all in all’ is Milton’s most exuberant visionary end point.  And it satisfies a lot of Milton’s most liberal impulses and even the authoritarianism’s structure of heaven, and of course Milton’s heaven is as authoritarian as any heaven ever been conceived.  Even it would be transformed into something like a fantasy of egalitarianism – fantasy of absolute equality.  This ecstatic redistribution of power and glory at the end of time can only come about because the Son has so willingly humiliated himself.  He subjects himself to the Father’s wrath. 

 
I think we recognise this gesture, this image of the noble and voluntary self-sacrifice.  This is the matter, this is the image that Milton had established in his defences of his blindness.  Milton had written in the sonnet XXll: To Cyriack Skinner; and he had also written in The Second Defence of the English People that he had willingly sacrificed his sight for the good of his fellow Englishmen.  He lost his eyes overplied in liberty’s defence, my noble task Milton had written in that sonnet.  And in the Second Defence, Milton had explained that he continued to write his regicide treatises despite the advice of his doctors who insisted that he would go blind if he continued.  That’s how important the project was for Milton.  And the sacrifice.  You begin to see a way the two dominant features of Book lll – Milton’s invocation to Light and the discussion of blindness therein and the dialogue between the Father and the Son – they are speaking to one another – they’re functioning in a kind of parallel fashion.  So just as the Son’s voluntary sacrifice will be rewarded with his inheritance.  On some level the heavenly plot of Paradise Lost is essentially an inheritance narrative.  The Son’s voluntary sacrifice will be rewarded with his inheritance of all of God’s power presumably too, Milton’s sacrifice will also be rewarded by God.  It is as if Milton wanted the same compensation of paternal power that the Son had been granted for undergoing his sacrifice. 

The transfusion of divine power that Milton imagines, the transfer of power from Father to the Son – it extrapolated (extend the application) to the situation of the poet and his God would guarantee the inspired success of the poem.  What would that mean?  It would guarantee essentially the status of Paradise Lost as Scripture itself – as something divinely authorised or perhaps even divinely authored.  That at least is related to Milton’s personal concern with his own composition of Paradise Lost.  But this image of a divine transfusion of power or an ultimate transference of power also I think speaks to the political component of Milton’s theology.  You have in this passage an image of a transfer of power from a centralised authority, the creator of the entire universe to the humble individual.  The image supplies the conceptual foundation for Milton’s liberalism.  That form of social organisation whereby power has been shifted away from the centre, away from the monarch and towards the subject.  You will find images of inheritance and transference and of transfusion abounding in Paradise Lost and they crop up in all sorts of venues; often having nothing whatsoever to do with the domestic interactions of the Godhead.  These images prepare us for that beautiful but truly outrageous end point in Christian history that Milton foresees – the one that God had foretold in his speech to the Son.  There will come a point in time in which God shall be all in all. And that’s an idea that works on the level of theology to satisfy  nearly every desire, to satisfy the personal, the social and the political desires of what I think not entirely wrongly think of as Milton’s idea of the liberal Christian.

 

[end of lecture]