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 16th 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 17th 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 17th century.
Arminianism has a new wave, maybe its third wave by the later part of the 17th 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 17th century. You have a serious formulation of liberalism later in the 17th 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 17th 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 17th 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 17th 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 17th 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.
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 sinsAgainst 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 17th 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.
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