by John Milton
Jewish and Christian theologians have sometimes distinguished the Bible from other Mesopotamian creation myths in which the god-hero defeats a chaos monster, out of whose slain body the world is made; in Genesis, by contrast, the world is initially good, and God affirms its goodness on every day of the creation. Evil appears with the fall of man (Ricoeur 172, 175–210), though of course the enigmatic presence of the snake promises a backstory of some kind. For Ricoeur the matter at stake here is whether religious symbols are recessive, and must always point backward to the defeat of Chaos, or whether they can look toward novel futures, as is apparently the case with the messianic and eschatological strands of Judaism and Christianity. Regina Schwartz, defending Milton’s mythic Chaos, argues that the separation of evil from the Creation is not really true of the Bible, and is patently untrue of Paradise Lost, where Chaos gives Satan his nod of approval. All of God’s revelations, all of Satan’s subsequent defeats, echo the initial triumph over Chaos, and redemption itself is but a repetition of that original victory (Schwartz 8–39; see also Leonard 2000, xx–xxi).
John Rumrich, defending the theological Chaos, notes that the irony of Chaos’s expression of solidarity with Satan lies in the old Anarch’s failure to understand that Satanic evil is rigid, not anarchic, a fixed posture of defiance and disobedience (1995, 1035–44). We see this in Book 10, where Sin and Death are building a bridge through Chaos to link Earth and Hell, and a double-crossed Chaos seethes at this new incursion into his realm:
On either side
Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed,
And with rebounding surge the bars assailed,
That scorned his indignation. (10.415-18)
Chaos, Rumrich maintains, is “a part of the deity, arguably feminine, over which the eternal father does not exercise control, from which, in other words, the father is absent as an active, governing agent” (1995, 1043; see also Danielson 32–57).
Expelled from Heaven, the rebel angels fall for nine days and nights through Chaos to Hell (6.871), which “Yawning received them whole, and on them closed” (6.875). They land on a burning sulfurous lake. After spending another nine days and nights stretched out dazed or unconscious on this lake (1.50–53), they awaken to the baleful prospect of Hell. Milton famously describes it as “darkness visible” (1.63), a place where fire burns without giving off light. Its purpose is not clear to the fallen angels. Among the first topics addressed in Hell is whether the Hell is for punishment or confinement (1.146–52).
In Milton’s day the idea of Hell and its eternal torments was just entering a period of declining popularity among educated Europeans (Walker). Americans in particular, remembering such figures as Jonathan Edwards, tend to associate Puritanism with resistance to this trend. Milton exposes the simplicity of this view. His narrator introduces Hell as a “dungeon” for “torture without end” (1.61–69). But beyond the nine days in burning sulfur, we do not observe much in the way of punishment. To be sure, there are the more or less classical touches of the devils’ periodic exposure to the extremes of ice and fire (2.596–603); the frustrating waters of Lethe, which shrink from seekers of oblivion (2.604–14); the terrifying monsters bred in Hell (2.622–28); the annual metamorphosis of the demons into serpents (10.572–77). But nothing here approaches the individualized tortures inflicted over and over on the inmates of Dante’s Hell. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that Milton’s Hell is inhabited by fallen angels only, whereas Dante’s is peopled. But there is no direct allusion in Paradise Lost to tortures awaiting the damned in the future. William Empson, a critic acutely attuned to the idea of God as torturer, found no evidence of this despicable notion in Paradise Lost: “Milton’s God is not interested in torture, and never suggests that he uses it to improve people’s characters” (273). For Milton, one has the impression, exile from God is the primal punishment, and all others merely the flash points of low imaginations.
As for confinement, the only exit from Hell is through a locked gate. But the key has been entrusted to Sin (2.774–77, 850–53, 871–89). She alone can unlock the gate, and does, and is incapable of closing it. At the end of time, Hell may indeed become a dungeon of torment (10.629–37), the universe’s vacuum-cleaner bag, but in the meantime devils will possess the fallen earth, especially its air. Milton’s Hell is more importantly a spiritual condition. “The mind is its own place,” Satan declares, “and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). It can certainly do the second, as we see in the birth of Sin from the mind of Satan. Out of the “darkness” of a painful headache, “flames thick and fast” appear (2.754): a precise echo of Hell’s “darkness visible.” Even in Heaven, Satan has Hell within him, “nor from Hell/One step no more than from himself can fly/By change of place” (4.21–23).
The first half of Paradise Lost begins with Milton’s search for a Heavenly Muse who was present at the Creation, “and with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss” (1.20–21). Only with this Muse illuminating what is dark in him, raising and supporting what is low in him, can Milton create the poem. The second half of Paradise Lost begins in Book 7 with a direct and expanded account of this miracle. It is the perfect fit between inspiration and subject matter: the metaphorical creation of the poem now recounts the actual Creation. This world, the handiwork of God, was the single greatest stimulus to Milton’s imagination.
We find many examples of this literary excitement in Milton’s treatment of astronomy. He met the blind Galileo in 1638 or 1639, when the Inquisition had confined him to his villa outside of Florence. The “Tuscan artist” is the only contemporary mentioned in the epic. There are three explicit references (1.287–91, 3.588–90, 5.261–63). To these must be added passages that allude to one or another of Galileo’s discoveries, such as newly sighted stars (7.382–84), the nature of the Milky Way (7.577–81), the phases of Venus (7.366), the moons of Jupiter (8.148–52), and the freshly detailed description of the moon (7.375–78, 8.145–48). This fascination extends to other matters concerning the new astronomy of the seventeenth century. Milton returns four times to the question of whether there has been from the beginning, or may be in the future, a plurality of inhabited worlds (2.912, 7.191, 7.621–22, 8.148–52). He leaves open debated matters such as whether the earth rotates on its axis (4.591–95). When he writes of the “three different motions” of the earth (8.130), we can infer a somewhat detailed knowledge of Copernicus (Babb 81–82), the champion of the heliocentric universe, who wrote at length about the three motions (daily rotation, annual revolution about the sun, and the slow movement about the ecliptic, or “trepidation,” causing the precession of the equinoxes).
On the large question of whether to prefer the modern “Copernican” heliocentric model or the ancient “Ptolemaic” geocentric model of the universe, Milton has Raphael, Adam’s first angelic educator, insist on the undecidability of such matters (8.66–178). But it would have been impossible to represent cosmic space with any precision without making a choice, and in point of fact the design of the poem’s universe is Ptolemaic. Earth is the still point of the turning world. The spheres of the moon, sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn turn about a central Earth. Beyond them is the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, so called because they do not appear to change their positions with regard to one another. The ninth is the so-called crystalline sphere, whose vibrations cause the “trepidation” (3.483). Finally, the primum mobile, the outer circle moved directly by God, encases this entire mesh of spheres within spheres.
Did Milton see the heavens through a telescope? Might he, to broach the most exciting thought of all, have looked through Galileo’s telescope? Such speculations, common in the discipline of Milton studies, are inspired by his epic’s unprecedented aesthetics of space. If Milton ultimately sided with the ancients in universe design, his rendering of the great vistas both seen and traversed by space-traveling angels opens a whole new area in modern literary sublimity. “
Milton’s canvas in Paradise Lost is the vastest used by an English artist” (Nicolson 1960, 187). Dante’s universe is finished. Milton’s is a work in progress. The novelties of Earth and Hell have reorganized space itself; more novelties can be anticipated. Novelty in the representation of space is a conscious literary feature of the epic, and stands for its modernity. When Satan throws his shield over his back, Milton interposes, between our mental sight and its object, the “optic glass” of Galileo:
the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. (1.286–91)
Homer had compared the brightness of Achilles’ shield to the moon. Milton switches the focus from brightness, so crucial in Greek poetics, to size, so crucial in his poetics, and relocates the old simile inside the circle of Galileo’s telescope. This invention, he implies, is the only modern device to expand the imaginative range of poetry, to provide a worldly conceptualization of what it means to describe immortals and inquire into the ways of God. Notice how, once Galileo is introduced, the passage forgets Satan and the narrative line of the poem to celebrate the wandering curiosity of Galileo’s viewing and descrying eye. For Milton, the Tuscan artist represents curiosity rewarded: despite Catholic dogmatism, Galileo wanted to see, and he did see, which is what the blind narrator of Paradise Lost seeks in his invocation to light at the opening of Book 3.
Many of the poem’s best sidereal effects derive from what Alastair Fowler calls “an entire fictive astronomy,” whose implications Milton works out “with ingenuity reminiscent of science fiction” (35). Before the Fall, Milton postulates, the path of the sun never deviates from the equator. The axis of the earth is perfectly parallel to the axis of the sun. The sun is always in Aries. There is no precession of equinoxes. Day and night are always of equal duration. There are no seasons. Within the beautiful simplicity of this system, Milton arranges the various journeys and arrivals of his poem. An extraordinary number of important things happen at the four cardinal points of the day, dawn and dusk, noon and midnight (Cirillo 1962).
Allusions to the zodiac and the constellations are often both realistic and symbolic. Milton rarely underlines, rarely sticks an elbow in our ribs. When Satan leaves our world in Book 10, “Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering/His zenith, while the Sun in Aries rose” (328–29), the author expects a very great deal of his reader. She must know that the constellation Anguis, the body of the serpent held by Ophiuchus, lies between the Centaur and the Scorpion. She must recall that, some 5,833 lines ago, Satan entered our world (3.555–61), and Milton described his view in such a way that he must have been gazing out from the head of Anguis. A reader able to put all this together realizes that Satan enters through the head and exits from the tail of the serpent. She appreciates a scatological joke. She is reminded of eating and digestion, which is rather a serious matter in Paradise Lost. She recalls with a dawning sense of complexity that Satan in Eden possesses the serpent through its mouth. And so on. As one of the finest of Milton’s eighteenth-century commentators put it, “A reader of Milton must be always upon duty; he is surrounded with sense, it rises in every line, every word is to the purpose.… All has been considered, and demands and merits observation” (Richardson in Darbishire 1932, 315).
It will not surprise close students of Milton to learn that there is a passage in the poem that apparently calls into question everything we have said about the energy, originality, and sublimity of his cosmos. For what are we to make of Raphael’s dismissive rebuke to the ambitions of astronomers (8.66–178)? God will laugh at their attempts to divulge his secrets. Adam is advised to leave the heavens to their own workings: “be lowly wise” (173). The speech is not, as it has sometimes been taken to be, an all-out attack on the new learning that elsewhere seems to intrigue and inspire the poet. God is in fact pictured laughing at the old Ptolemaic astronomers, adding orbits within orbits and strange counterpressures (“build, unbuild”) in order to make the model fit the appearances (Babb 88):
perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter, when they come to model heav’n
And calculate the stars, how they will wield
The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances, how gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. (8.77–84)
The angel also insists that man is not the only being who must discipline his curiosity; the workings of the universe have been kept secret from “man or angel” (see also 7.122–24). And no doubt Raphael has a point in maintaining that the correctness of this or that celestial picture makes no difference to life on Earth, which must be the focus of our wisdom.
Still, censuring a desire to understand the heavens seems directly contrary in spirit to the passage on Satan’s shield, with its excited shift of focus to the knowledge-hungry eyes of Galileo surveying the moon. Perhaps Nicolson was right in supposing that there were “two persistent aspects of Milton’s personality, one satisfied with proportion and limitation, the other revelling in the luxuriant and the unrestrained” (1960, 186). Then again, it is possible that the dismissal of astronomy belongs not to a conflict between contentment and aspiration but to the structure of aspiration. This divine disapproval could be viewed as a scientific expression of the general sense of trespass Milton encounters when approaching God. “May I express thee unblamed” (3.3)? He cannot reach the heights without taking liberties.
THEOLOGY
Milton’s theology is systematic, Christian, Protestant, and for the most part quite standard. That much is evident from his epic argument, which incorporates the familiar locales, actors, and events of Christian orthodoxy: Heaven, Hell, an almighty and all-knowing deity, hateful rebel angels, benevolent unfallen angels, Adam and Eve, a garden Paradise on Earth, the Fall, Original Sin, the penalty of mortality, and, in prospect, satisfaction of that penalty through sacrifice of God’s only-begotten Son. Indeed, this large conformity has permitted generations of Milton scholars to downplay or ignore his unorthodoxy. Yet, despite the substantially ordinary Christianity of Paradise Lost, Milton did endorse various theological opinions deemed heretical, some criminally so in the view of seventeenth-century civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
A few of these unorthodox beliefs figure crucially in Paradise Lost. Most do not. On the one hand, Milton’s advocacy of adult baptism by immersion, for example, and his rejection of obligatory Sabbath observation, though significant enough in the religious politics of the seventeenth century, do not bear on his epic. Vitalist monism and insistence on creation ex deo, on the other hand, are grand generative heresies foundational to the fictional world imagined by Milton—its spiritual-natural ground rules, as detailed in the preceding section. The three great religious debates of seventeenth-century England, and the heresies that correspond to them, are even more overtly pertinent, especially to the declared intention of the epic narrative to “justify the ways of God to men.” The first of these controversies concerns the means of salvation (soteriology); the second, church government (ecclesiology); and the third, the status of the Son of God (Christology).
Most Christians in a relatively tolerant age would deem Milton’s theological opinions as they relate to the first two of these controversies unremarkable and, in any case, his own business. But his opinions concerning the Son of God still register as heretical according to most Christian sects. They have also been a focus of sometimes heated scholarly controversy for nearly two centuries, since the manuscript of his theological treatise, Christian Doctrine, was discovered in 1823. The longest chapter of the treatise criticizes the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as a logical impossibility devoid of scriptural authority and depict
s the Son as a distinctly lesser God: the first of all creatures, begotten in time, and variously inferior to his father. That Milton’s arguments should therefore be classified as Arian and contrary to Nicene formulations (“true God from true God … of one essence with the Father”) was the seemingly inescapable conclusion endorsed by theologically informed Milton scholars from the time of Bishop Sumner, the original translator of the treatise, through the era of C. S. Lewis and Maurice Kelley in the mid–twentieth century. Orthodox believers who saw Milton as a bulwark of traditional Christianity were discomfited, the unorthodox heartened. Thus in 1826 the American Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing, a forerunner of Transcendentalism, enthusiastically grouped Milton with other celebrated seventeenth-century antitrinitarians: “our Trinitarian adversaries are perpetually ringing in our ears the names of Fathers and Reformers. We take MILTON, LOCKE, and NEWTON, and place them in our front, and want no others to oppose to the whole army of great names on the opposite side. Before these intellectual suns, the stars of self-named orthodoxy ‘hide their diminished heads’ ” (35–36).
Readers who found Paradise Lost nonetheless orthodox comforted themselves with the often repeated observation that before the discovery of the treatise readers better informed theologically than their twentieth-century counterparts failed to suspect Milton’s epic of heresy. C. S. Lewis reasoned that Milton when he composed his epic must have deliberately set aside his theological eccentricities in order to appeal to the majority of Christian readers (90–91). This surmise segued into the still current argument that because the theological treatise is inconsistent with the epic, the former should not be relied on as a guide to understanding the latter (Patrides; Campbell et al. 110).
