Milton's Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration

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MILTON’S SCRIPTURAL REASONING

John Milton’s major poems have long provoked wide-ranging judgments about the purposes of his biblical engagement. In this elegant and insightful study, Phillip Donnelly transforms our common perceptions about Milton’s writing. He challenges the traditional assumption that the poet shared our modern view that reason is a capacity whose purpose is to control nature. Instead, Milton’s conception of reason – both human and divine – is bound up with a poetic sense of difference, a capacity for being faithful to a goodness and beauty that survives the effects of human frailty in the Fall. Providing fresh new readings of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, Donnelly gives us important new perspectives on Milton’s aesthetics, theology, and politics. phillip j. donnelly is Associate Professor of Literature in the Honors College at Baylor University, where he teaches in the Great Texts Program and the English Department.

MILTON’S SCRIPTURAL REASONING Narrative and Protestant Toleration

PHILLIP J. DONNELLY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521509732 © Phillip J. Donnelly 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-50823-3

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-50973-2

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Preface and acknowledgments Abbreviations and editions

page vii x

 Introduction: Scriptural reasoning



part i scriptural reasoning in milton’s prose  Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



 Monism and Protestant toleration



part ii biblicist rhetoric and ontology in paradise lost 

Part II introduction  Divine justice and divine filiation



 Divine kingship



 Rational battle



 Rational allegory and gender



part iii biblicist poetics and hermeneutic ethics 

Part III introduction  Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



 Paradise Regained as rule of charity



v

vi

Contents

 Samson Agonistes as personal drama



Notes Subject index Index of Scripture references

  

Preface and acknowledgments

This study began as an attempt to correct an error in my previous treatment of Milton in Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish. In order to investigate Fish’s general theoretical claims, my analysis had, for the sake of argument, granted his interpretation of Milton as a matter of course. As a result, however, Rhetorical Faith ended up characterizing Milton as a modern rationalist who tended toward a quasi-Cartesian view of reason as a form of mastery. My argument had also, consequently, misconstrued Milton’s biblical hermeneutics. Only through a careful study of the hermeneutics implied by the biblicism in Milton’s major poetry did I begin to appreciate why my previous characterization of Miltonic reason had been more misleading than helpful. As my new investigation unfolded, however, I realized that many Milton critics, most notably those who had set themselves in direct opposition to Fish, also shared the assumption that “reason” is necessarily a form of mastery, rather than a capacity for peaceful participation in a reality whose goodness is a gift. As a result, many critics, in arguing against Fish and contending that Milton does not share in the modern view of reason, end up imputing to Milton a contrasting insistence upon the primacy of chaos or indeterminacy. In both cases, however, there is a tendency to assume that sheer necessity and arbitrary randomness exhaust the available alternatives in Milton’s view of reality. In effect, Milton’s biblicist appeal to the polysemic unfolding of ratio, whether in his prose or poetry, often gets reduced to a modern instrumental rationality. This instrumental reason, in turn, is alternately interpreted either as a capacity for coercive certainty (understood as prediction whose purpose is to control matter and overcome chance) or as a capacity for arbitrary randomness (understood as a causeless “freedom” of “conscience”). Against both such alternatives, I contend that Milton views reason as the poetic gift of peaceful difference and that he does not share in the modern assumption that reason is intrinsically coercive. vii

viii

Preface and acknowledgments

Part I considers a selection of Milton’s prose and explains how his view of divine and human reason relates to his account of what is real (ontology) and his view of ethics and Protestant toleration. Part II explains how the biblicist unfolding of reason in Paradise Lost is an attempt to reveal that the origin, or arch¯e, of created being is a peaceful gift for the good of others – what I call “ontic charity.” In effect, the biblicism of the first ten books of Paradise Lost emphasizes the way that Divine Reason gives rise to the “ontic charity” of created being in which human reason may, or may not, fittingly participate. Part III focuses on the last two books of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, showing how their contrasting respective modes of biblicism each disclose various ways that the “ontic charity” revealed by the Son can inform “ethical charity,” or action guided by the restoration of “right reason” in humans. The research and writing involved in this project, at various stages, benefited from the institutional and financial support of the University of Ottawa, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Texas Tech University, and Baylor University. This work also received financial support from the Baylor University Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The origins of this study are uniquely indebted to the combined influence of two very gifted scholars with whom I have had the privilege to work: David Jeffrey and Nicholas von Maltzahn. This book would not exist apart from their personal support, generosity, and erudition. The audacity of my historical argument is indebted to David Jeffrey’s wide-ranging work on the engagement of biblical hermeneutics throughout English literary history. That this study focuses on Milton owes largely to the encouragement and support of Nicholas von Maltzahn. Intellectual debts to other Milton scholars will become evident as the argument unfolds, but I should acknowledge from the outset that the work of Stanley Fish also helped me to journey from critical theory to Milton studies and that the critical disagreement between John Rumrich and Stanley Fish has been singularly instructive for me. I hope that my attempt to improve upon both of their arguments will be understood as the expression of gratitude that it is. Although any remaining errors are entirely my own, this project benefited greatly from the help of those who read and commented on parts of the manuscript at various stages: Joe Barnard, Katie Calloway, Susan Col´on, Frans De Bruyn, Steve Evans, Feng Wei, Jeff Fish, Barry Harvey, Dora Hawthorne, Maurice Hunt, Graeme Hunter, Neil Johnston, John R. Knott, Mike Linnen, Greg Maillet, Robert Miner, Scott Moore, Stephen

Preface and acknowledgments

ix

Prickett, Max Steinke, Paul Stevens, Amy Vail, and Daniel H. Williams. This study also benefited at various stages, directly and indirectly, from the help of graduate research assistants provided by the Baylor University English Department: Evan Getz, Sarah Jones, Heather Michael, and Lori Tubbs. My gratitude to my parents, Gordon and Patricia Donnelly, for their many years of support in countless ways has continued to deepen during the years that I worked on this study. I am also grateful for the lasting personal influence and support of my sisters, Crista Santos, Cheryl Emanuels, Cindy Dontigne, Debbie Sukkau, and Barb Michaelson. My father-in-law, Peter Siska, has given many kinds of practical help, for which I am very thankful. This book would not exist without the enduring benefits given to me in my wise friend, Dale Affleck. To Ruth, Rachel, and Joseph Donnelly I am especially thankful for their love, their smiles, and the gift that they are to their parents. Finally, words cannot express the depth of my gratitude to Nicole Donnelly for her trust, her fidelity, and her love that are rooted in the Love that moves the sun and all the stars. Chapter  incorporates selected material from my article, “The Teloi of Genres: Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana” from Milton Studies , c . Chapter  presents a revised form of my ed. Albert C. Labriola,
article, “Paradise Regained as Rule of Charity: Religious Toleration” from c . Both articles are used by Milton Studies , ed. Albert C. Labriola,
permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Abbreviations and editions

Quotations and citations of Milton’s poetry are from the The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). CPW Works

Complete Prose Works of John Milton,  vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, –). The Works of John Milton,  vols., ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, –).

Quotations from Milton’s English prose or from English translations of his Latin prose are from the Yale edition. Latin quotations are from the Columbia Works. In cases where I cite an introduction or annotation to the Yale edition, I name the editor, followed by CPW, volume number and page. Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version () with lightly modernized spelling.

x

chapter 1

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning

What does John Milton’s poetry actually do with Scripture? Insofar as the major poems of his maturity all present adaptations of biblical narrative, the theological aspects of Milton’s poetry might seem unavoidable. Theologically oriented studies of Milton tend not to focus, however, on the biblical intertextuality whose weave makes up his poetic matter and form. This recurring biblical intertextuality is central to what I call Milton’s “scriptural reasoning.” Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are each unique in how they respectively engage biblical intertexts; yet they all seem intended to provoke re-readings of various biblical passages, opening up interpretive possibilities, even aporias, that might otherwise remain unnoticed. In this respect, each poem offers an implicit instance of biblical interpretation. By means of such poetic elaboration, these works offer not merely eisegetic speculation but an active interweaving of widely varying biblical texts, the interpretive effects arising from the fact that the poems are not themselves Scripture. The very mode of poetic-imaginative discourse, as such, thus serves to foreground the interpretive action involved in any reading of biblical texts. At the same time, Milton’s mode of engagement with Scripture in his major poems also seems to parallel one of the hermeneutic ambitions of the Miltonic De Doctrina Christiana: that his own words would be glossed by the biblical text, rather than vice versa. In this respect, Milton’s poetry often seems intended to do both less and more than interpret a given biblical passage, by driving seventeenth-century English readers back to those biblical writings, but with the ability to hear and read them anew. In unfolding how Milton’s mature poetry embodies such biblicism, I argue that he also draws upon a specific account of “reason” which is distinct from the modern (and postmodern) view that reason is intrinsically coercive. By “coercive” I do not mean that modernity views reason as destructive, but that its presumed function is predictive calculation for the purpose of controlling objects in the world. 



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

This study considers Milton’s biblical “reasoning” under three different aspects which stand in contrast to the modern view of reason. The term indicates, first, the discursive relationships within a network of specific claims that Milton engages in various ways: claims regarding what is real (ontology), claims about human nature (anthropology), and claims concerning human virtue (ethics) and civil society (politics). The present chapter outlines briefly a few of these main claims and their relationships, as they embody this “discursive” sense of “reasoning.” In a second sense, which might be called “Christo-poetic,” “reasoning” also indicates the indirect ways that Milton deploys Scripture to intimate how the above network of claims is intrinsic to the whole form and content of divine self-revelation. This divine self-revelation is most apparent for Milton in the Son of God, the embodiment simultaneously of Divine Reason and Rhetoric. Chapter  addresses Milton’s Christology in detail, but we should understand from the outset that Milton interprets the incarnate Logos (both Ratio and Oratio) of John  as the gift of peaceful difference. Milton locates “reason,” in this Christo-poetic sense, at the center of his intertextual engagement of biblical narrative. Milton uses the term “reason” in a third sense, which might be called “ethico-cognitive,” to indicate action taken by the human faculty of “right reason,” or conscience. Milton acknowledges that such a faculty may be corrupted, but its regeneration, in his view, is the basis for the very possibility of human participation in the divine life. Milton’s explicit appeal to this latter sense of reason is a central element in the network of claims noted above. Part I of this study (Chapters  and ) focuses upon the ways that these different senses of “reason” – discursive, Christo-poetic, and ethico-cognitive – inform Milton’s prose writing. In Parts II and III (Chapters  through ) I argue that these different senses of “reasoning” are woven together in Milton’s major poems to embody “scriptural reasoning” in its fullest sense: in the modes of intertextuality by which he juxtaposes different biblical narratives, images, and themes, but also in the polysemic appeals to divine, angelic, and human ratio figured through his biblicism. In effect, his mature poetry models a kind of biblical intertextuality that unites literary means and ends in a fruitful tension, in order to show the extent to which divine love can be intelligible to finite human beings as a gift that is neither merely coerced order nor chaotic. By deploying such intertextuality to present a Christocentric reading of the overarching biblical narrative, Milton’s major poems offer an open-ended meditation on the relation between the divine Word as written text and the divine Word as living person. Amid the theological and

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning



political consequences of nominalism, Milton’s poetic biblicism attempts to circumvent the tendency of modern reason to render divine love as either sheer necessity or merely arbitrary will. The larger argument of this book is that the very modes of biblical intertextuality in Milton’s mature poetry embody his belief that “reason,” divine and human, is the poetic gift of peaceful difference. In other words, Miltonic “reason,” in this fullest sense, is a capacity for faithful otherness, or “troth” (peaceful difference), that is simultaneously creative (poetic) and freely self-donative (gift). As such, reason enables human participation in a goodness and beauty that precedes and shall outlast the effects of the Fall. The aim of this first chapter is to identify and connect in an introductory way some of the key points in the network of claims that makes up the “discursive” sense of reasoning described above – the connections between ontology, anthropology, ethics, and politics. Taking initial points of departure from a comparison between Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and some of Milton’s claims in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, I contend that Milton’s writing inhabits an account of reason that contrasts sharply not only with Hobbesian philosophy but also with some aspects of Reformed theology. Before considering that network of arguments, however, we must first address some recent critical trends that could disable readers from even apprehending my argument. The final section of this chapter provides a detailed overview of the book which, in order to be understood clearly, necessarily follows the engagement of these critical trends and the unfolding of Milton’s discursive arguments. modern reason and milton studies The unique character of the argument here risks misunderstandings that could arise from two main sources: from general assumptions regarding “reason” that are common in critical discourse today, and from the effects that those assumptions have had on the practice of Milton criticism in particular. The general risk of misunderstanding arises from the fact that much critical practice today inhabits a specific (though seldom acknowledged) story regarding the history of “reason.” That story is partially suggested by the common critical use of the epithet “logocentric.” By using that term to designate, in effect, a continuous tradition which deploys reason as a necessarily coercive suppression of Dionysian chaos, or “freedom,” such common usage reveals the presumption of a simple two-fold historical narrative. The first aspect of that narrative is a tendency to treat Christian accounts of reason as a species of popular Platonism. The second aspect is



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

to subsume both the Christian and Platonist senses of reason within the modern account of reason, understood as a calculative function the purpose of which is to enable mastery over “nature” or fortune. To tell the larger story of exactly how the claims of Christianity became subsumed within the imperatives of Enlightenment rationalism is not our present concern. My point here is simply that Milton did not participate in modern assumptions regarding the function and purpose of human reason. He was obviously alert to the challenges posed by the account of reason embodied by, for example, the writings of Machiavelli, Descartes, or Hobbes, but Milton’s prose and poetry indicate a consistent rejection of such a view. Thus, when I refer in the following chapters to Milton’s account of “reason,” I do not impute to him a Cartesian certainty. At the same time, to argue that Milton is not a modern rationalist does not imply that he advocates merely the chaotic opposite to such control. This study presents, in effect, a rhetorical account of the biblical polysemeity used to depict reasoning in Milton’s prose and poetry. As such, the intelligibility of my argument requires that readers at least hold in question the modern account of reason that we might otherwise presume, according to which difference is necessarily violent. Only then can Milton’s view of reason as peaceful difference even begin to appear as a possibility. Let there be no misunderstanding on this point, however: my claim is simply that in order to understand Milton’s writing we need to avoid imputing to him a modern view of reason. Such a claim does not require that we agree with Milton in order to understand him; while challenging readers, for the sake of historical understanding, to hold in question some specific assumptions that we might normally fail to notice, the argument makes no claim regarding the truth or falsity of those assumptions. In addition to precluding the very appearance of divine ratio as the gift of peaceful difference, the assumed binary opposition between coercive reason and chaotic freedom leads critics to characterize Milton as either an authoritarian or an advocate of radical indeterminacy (or as negotiating between the two poles). There are few topics in Milton studies upon which there is less critical consensus than the attempt to characterize Milton’s view of “reason.” Milton has been described as an epistemological rationalist who is skeptical of all sensory knowledge, an advocate for the “instrumentalization of thought” that entails the “removal of the transcendental imperative,” a logician participating fully in the reductive tendencies of Ramist method, a nominalist practitioner of a paradoxical baroque rationalism that celebrates irreducible indeterminacy, and an adherent to the metaphysical realism of earlier Christian humanism which opposed the predominant

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning



nominalism of the period. Although each of these characterizations gets at some aspect of Milton’s writing, they all tend to be shaped by the alternation between describing Milton’s view of reason as either authoritarian or indeterminate. According to John Rumrich, the most influential authoritarian version of Milton, which he calls the “Invented Milton,” is a variation of the “neoChristian” Milton criticized by William Empson. The “Invented Milton” usually involves three elements: (a) a tendency to downplay the heretical elements in Milton’s writing that were part of his attempt to make the Christian God less apparently obnoxious (or at least less manifestly evil); (b) a resulting tendency to miss the extent to which Milton’s Paradise Lost is a “sincere” theodicy the outcome of which is not merely presumed; (c) the characterization of the Miltonic narrative voice as an overbearing pedant whose didactic aim is repeatedly to “surprise” readers with the discovery of their own fallenness. Against such an “Invented Milton” has arisen what Peter C. Herman calls the “New Milton Criticism,” which emphasizes the role of “indeterminacy,” “chaos,” or “incertitude” in Milton’s poetry and prose. After pointing out, correctly in my view, that Milton does not insist upon modern certainty, or clear and distinct ideas, these critics go on to argue for the reverse mirror-image of Milton as a champion of indeterminacy. From their assumption that reason – under the rubric of “coherence” or “consistency” – is necessarily coercive, the New Milton Critics deduce that Milton rejects such constraints and favors instead an indeterminate “freedom.” Any suggestion that Miltonic “freedom” is not a synonym for “randomness” may then be immediately interpreted as a tacit return to the authoritarian Milton, thereby inscribing the binary as a totalizing account. In this way, the recent critical attempt to privilege a Dionysian Milton over an Apollonian modernity simply assumes (rather than proving) and reinforces the very binary opposition that I shall argue Milton rejects. If we do not presume that Milton’s biblicist rhetoric inhabits such a binary opposition between chaos and coercion (considered ontically), or radical doubt and certainty (considered epistemically), each of the three elements listed above by Rumrich which he uses to characterize the “Invented Milton” appears much differently. Thus, for example, one might agree with Empson that Paradise Lost grapples with divine justice in such a way that leads Milton to ideas often deemed heretical, but Empson’s influence upon “New Milton Critics” has tended to obscure the important rhetorical difference between heresy and apostasy. Although the former may, in a biographical sense, result in the latter, heresy and apostasy, considered as



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

rhetorical modes, face in opposite directions. The rhetorical orientation of writers who are labelled “heretics” by others, because they self-consciously introduce doctrinal novelty, typically aims to alter what constitutes the faith, often by affirming other elements of the faith that they continue to share with implied readers. By contrast, the rhetoric of an apostate may be just as biblicist, but it aims to persuade readers to abandon faith altogether. Heretical rhetoric appeals to shared premises of any given faith in order to change how those shared premises are interpreted; by contrast, apostate rhetoric attempts to show the untenability of even those most basic elements of the faith. The very question of which contrasting rhetorical end is being served on a given occasion will not even appear, however, if we fail to notice that these two modes of biblical intertextuality are different. Indeed, so-called “heretics” typically understand themselves to be more devoted to God than their opponents. The larger point here is that the tendency to miss the difference between heresy and apostasy results from the dominant critical habit of subsuming both terms within the motions of “freedom” (Dionysius), which is presumed to be constitutionally opposed to the coercive restrictions of “orthodoxy” (Apollo). By questioning this binary, we open the possibility of imagining how Milton could understand his own theological reflections as rooted in good faith, despite being deemed “heretical” by others; that is, as heresy but not necessarily apostasy. In a comparable way, we may agree with Rumrich that Paradise Lost is a “sincere” theodicy, but we need not presume that radical doubt (if possible) is the only alternative to a rigid orthodoxy. We may, instead, ask whether Milton’s questioning of divine justice is rooted primarily in ontic or epistemic concerns. Is Milton’s theodicy sincere because he believes that God really is (or could be) unjust, or because humans are finite? By eliding the distinction between claims about a given reality (in this case, divine justice) and claims regarding what humans can know about that reality, such an approach tends to reduce any epistemic uncertainty into an ontic claim about the doubtfulness of the reality discussed. Milton may indeed be raising questions about either issue in Paradise Lost – the reality or the intelligibility of divine justice – but a continual conflation of the two will render any suggestion of creaturely limitation as a necessary flaw in Milton’s “God.” Finally, while the New Milton Critics rightly reject Stanley Fish’s image of the Miltonic narrator in Paradise Lost as an overbearing pedant, to emphasize mere indeterminacy or uncertainty per se as the center of Milton’s poetics is to presume that the categories of coercion and chaos exhaust Milton’s account of reality. If we react to the authoritarian Milton

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning



of modern certainty with an emphatic but vague “uncertainty,” we risk missing the difference between a skepticism that is the rejection of faith and a questioning uncertainty that is actually the occasion for any genuine faith. In this way, my larger argument here is not a refutation of the New Milton Criticism; rather, it extends what is best in such criticism, even as it describes the limitations that such criticism shares with much of so-called “neo-Christian” criticism. My argument corroborates the recent emphasis upon interpretive openness in Milton’s writings, but my analysis goes beyond the New Milton Criticism by setting Milton’s poetic strategies in the context of his biblicism. In that context, we can begin to understand how Milton’s “poetics of incertitude” can arise from his attempt to imitate biblical form, but also how such incertitude could be part of Milton’s attempt to let Scripture gloss his own writing. The fact that Milton’s poetic refusal to bind Scripture could itself be interpreted as a kind of “radical doubt” that rejects faith altogether is one of the ironies of Anglo-American culture today, in which people espousing religious faith so often deploy terms and attitudes closer to Cartesian certainty than to faith seeking understanding. To open authentically the questions arising from Milton’s view of reason thus requires, not the impossible modern pretense to view reality from nowhere, but that we hold in question the account of reason presumed by many analyses of Milton’s writing. Distinct from but related to these competing accounts of reason are contrasting accounts of what is real. Throughout this study, I use the term “ontology” in this general sense, to indicate “an account of what is real,” and not specifically to indicate only a traditional branch of metaphysics. I should also clarify here that I distinguish between “ontology” and “ontic” in a non-Heideggerian sense, to indicate merely the difference between “the study of being” and “being” respectively. In evaluating the view of reason that various critics impute to Milton, I show how their arguments presume what John Milbank calls an “ontology of violence.” I should emphasize that such a demonstration of argumentative presuppositions regarding what these critics take to be Milton’s view of reality (ontology) implies nothing about the personal beliefs of any given critic regarding ontology. Likewise, the fact that none of these critics advances any explicit claims about ontology is not relevant to my argument. Our concern here is with the ontology (account of reality) that these critical arguments impute to Milton, typically by means of their assumptions about the character of reason. An explicit disavowal of, or disregard for, metaphysical doctrine does not keep critics from imputing to Milton assumptions about what is



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

real. Thus, for example, in arguing against those critics, like John Dryden, who attempt to “cancel Miltonic ambiguity,” Joseph Wittreich makes no explicit claims regarding ontology, but simply presumes that the only alternative to the determinacy of Enlightenment rationalism is to “reclaim Paradise Lost as a poem of proliferating contradictions.” Although I agree strongly with Wittreich’s larger claim that Milton’s epic should be taught as a perspectival “battleground of intellectual paradigms,” Wittreich’s mode of argument assumes that the alternation between determinacy and indeterminacy exhausts the possible options regarding how to interpret reality in the poem. As a result, his characterization of Paradise Lost tends not to permit questions such as: (a) whether the poem might imply any degree of resolution to some of the intellectual battles that it presents; or (b) whether some contradictions in the poem might be more important than others; or (c) whether presumptuous Enlightenment certainty is the only alternative to accepting contradictory strife itself as the authoritative meaning of the poem. As any reader of Areopagitica could appreciate, Milton understood strife to be an unavoidable part of life in a fallen world, but he did not mistake that condition as the necessary reality for which humans are made, originally or finally. Ultimately, I contend that the most noble and generous aspirations of Wittreich’s New Milton Criticism, which aims to “dislodg[e] commonplaces” and to open “seemingly closed systems,” will be fulfilled only by going beyond the binaries of coercion versus chaos, or constrained versus unconstrained thinking. Such binaries inhabit an ontology of violence: that is, they presume that reality consists merely of either compulsion or its absence. What I mean by an “ontology of violence” is, in some respects, comparable to the way that Michel Foucault describes “power”: By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms to ensure the subservience of the citizens to the state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another.

Although “power” is distinct from all these things, it is also the reality that gives rise to them. Instead, Foucault posits that power is a “multiplicity” of immanent “force relations” and “processes” which form into both “systems” and the contradictory “violence” that opposes such systems, as well as “strategies” which end up “embodied in the state apparatus.” In effect, he describes a pre-political reality: that is, an ontology, and specifically an ontology of force relations that gives rise to the compelled order of the

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning

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social systems and to the random forces of disorder and contradiction. The key point here is that my argument deploys the phrase, “ontology of violence,” in a manner similar to Foucault’s notion of “power”: to indicate not political oppression or its opposing “violence,” in Foucault’s sense, but the assumption that reality, in whatever form, is reducible to compulsion, or “force relations.” Against such a view, Milton posits that reality, both divine and created, is a gift of charity relations. Of course, the very possibility of a true gift, of genuine self-donation for the good of an other, is what an ontology of violence emphatically denies by reducing all giving to a function of compulsion. Nevertheless, such is Milton’s position, I contend, and our limited aim here is to disclose it as his view, despite the critical tendencies that would preclude its appearance. Political implications do, of course, arise from Milton’s ontology, just as they do indirectly from an ontology of violence, as with Foucault’s notion of “power”; such political implications, however, are not always linear or immediately transparent. Beyond such general difficulties, readers who inhabit a modern binary view of reason and of Milton studies risk misconstruing some of the details of my analysis. Such risk is well illustrated by Peter Herman’s recent summary of the differences between the “Old” and the “New” Milton studies. According to Herman, the paradigm of the Old Milton studies involves three key claims: () “Milton is a poet of absolute, unqualified certainty”; () “Paradise Lost coheres”; and () “the critic’s task is to make the poem cohere.” Against such an emphasis upon “coherence” Herman argues, as we have noted, for the central place of “indeterminacy,” an ontic category which he seems to treat as a synonym for epistemic “incertitude.” We should notice, however, that Herman’s ensuing argument actually goes on to discuss three distinct, if potentially related, kinds of “coherence”: () the coherence of Paradise Lost specifically; () the intertextual relationships between various works in Milton’s corpus; () the relationship between Milton’s biography and the claims advanced in his published writing. Although these different aspects of “coherence” may be connected in critical arguments, as they are in Herman’s case negatively, these topics are not necessarily dependent upon one another. One could, for example, argue for the coherence of Paradise Lost, but insist on pivotal discontinuities in Milton’s corpus and/or biography. More importantly, to point out that there is a “consistency” between the claims advanced in any two different Miltonic texts does not entail or presume a “static” Milton whose politics or beliefs never changed. One may even go so far as to argue, on the basis of such textual similarity, that Milton continued to hold a specific

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

position on a given issue without ever implying that such a consistency applies even to other passages in the same texts, not to mention the rest of the Miltonic corpus. Against the binaries that tend to shape Milton criticism, I must therefore point out that my argument here does not entail that Milton’s texts always and everywhere advocate the same view of reason that he unfolds in his mature poetry. Likewise, the network of claims that I delineate below connects some of the rhetorical, logical, and exegetical threads that appear in Milton’s writing, but this specific set of claims and their relations does not pretend to exhaust the meanings of Milton’s poetry or prose. Most importantly, we may point out the logical relationships among these claims without implying that either Milton’s biography or his corpus (intertextually or intratextually) is free from logical contradiction or from the fissures of fallen language. Thus, we may argue, along with John Rumrich, that Milton’s “ethics and social agenda” and his “artistic and aesthetic expressions imply each other,” without positing a belief in the “Invented Milton,” or in the comparable “Whig Milton,” whose life and writing are presumed to be free of contradiction. Rather, amid Milton’s widely ranging audiences, occasions, and rhetorical cross-purposes, there are also some variously and partially repeated arguments and animating principles whose implications he draws out across texts. Our focus here is upon those connections rather than upon the numerous disconnections that are obviously worth critical attention. Thus, to argue, as I shall, that on a given topic Milton makes the same claim in two different texts does not presume or imply a static Milton. Indeed, if Milton were to present the very same argument to the House of Commons in the s and in the s, such a “static” repetition of claims could, in fact, indicate a complete reversal in his thinking, if not a desire for martyrdom. What we actually find, however, is that the shifts in Milton’s prose styles and modes of argument reveal an increasingly subtle sensitivity to the assumptions and expectations of those he aimed to persuade. Moreover, I contend that the author of Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio was capable of employing either logical consistency or contradiction when it suited his rhetorical aims. Thus, in the same way that, for example, Herman’s argument for Milton’s “poetics of incertitude” asserts that there is a continuity between Milton’s mode of critique in Areopagitica and a radicalization of that mode in Paradise Lost, my argument here delineates some selected continuities in Milton’s writing, amid both intratextual and intertextual ambivalences and unresolved tensions. The interesting critical questions arise, of course, from debates

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regarding what one takes to be Milton’s rhetorical aim(s) on any given occasion. milton’s discursive reasoning In order to clarify initially the logical relationships among the network of claims that we shall explore in the chapters that follow, we shall consider a text that makes explicitly the same kinds of connection that Milton often leaves implicit: Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (). In making the case that a person should subscribe to the religion of his sovereign, whatever that religion may be, Leviathan displays a lucid implacability. Hobbes exemplifies how a series of arguments can lead from an ontology to an anthropology and an account of human reason, and ultimately to an account of civil society and church–state relations. Beginning with the premise that all reality consists of matter and the motion of matter, Hobbes deduces that all human judgments concerning “good” or “evil” per se are reducible to personal “desire” or “aversion” respectively, both of which arise from such material motions. Likewise, Hobbes defines “reason” as “nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting [sic])” (). He further deduces that, given such a combination of desires and aversions in a “state of nature,” humans must necessarily and naturally be in a state of war against one another (–). The social contract – or the covenant constituting any civil power – is accordingly the only means by which humans are able to escape their natural condition in which life is otherwise “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (). Hobbes allows for a notion of “justice” but argues that such justice, based on convention, depends upon the existence of the social contract; neither justice nor injustice predates the humanly fabricated existence of a “common [civil] power” (, –). Once a civil authority has been constituted, one may then practice justice by keeping covenants (–). Thus, covenants necessarily involve the use of reason for adding and subtracting the definitions of those terms involved in the contract; nevertheless, because “Covenants without swords are but Words,” civil authority, and hence justice, according to Hobbes, depends intrinsically, indeed “naturally,” upon the capacity to deploy brute force. In making these arguments, Hobbes clarifies that what he means by “right reason,” as a moral guide, is ultimately reducible to calculative reason. As we shall see, the profound differences between what Hobbes and Milton each mean by “reason,” in this ethical sense, arise from the contrasting stories that they tell about the origins of civil society. Because, according to Hobbes, “good” can only mean what one desires (), and the

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distinction between “right and wrong” depends constitutionally upon the social contract (–, cf. –), “right reason” means exclusively the proper functioning of the faculty for adding and subtracting definitions in the pursuit of one’s desires (). Such practice will, according to Hobbes, result in knowledge of truth, if one begins with “first definitions and settled significations” and then “proceeds from one consequence to another” (). Thus, when Hobbes appeals to the “rule of Reason,” he means simply the use of deductions that follow logically from the impulse to self-preservation, an impulse which Hobbes silently transforms into a negative obligation (, cf. –). On the basis of his account of the sovereign civil authority, because there is no sovereignty other than that which is rooted in coercion, Hobbes contends that the “Church” is “the same thing as a Civil Common-wealth, consisting of Christian men; and is called a Civill State”: Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake the Lawfull Sovereign. [ . . . ] [There is] no other Government in this life, neither of State, nor Religion, but Temporall; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawfull to any Subject, which the Governour both of the State, and of the Religion, forbiddeth to be taught: And that Governour must be one; or else there must needs follow Faction, and Civil war in the Common-wealth. (–)

Given the assumption that there can be only one sovereign authority, and that based on coercion, Hobbes argues for a kind of civil religion. Although his argument for the supremacy of civil authority is arguably the main telos of Leviathan, Hobbes cannot stop at that point; he must go on in the last two books to provide a guide to biblical interpretation in order to underwrite his account of civil religion. In this way, Hobbes’s argument progresses explicitly from an ontology (matter and motion), to an anthropology, to a social ontology, to an account of politics and ethics, to a justification for the subordination of all public religious practice under one civil authority. Most importantly, however, in order to make his claims regarding the origins of civil society, Hobbes must tell a story regarding the transition from life in a “state of nature” to life in a commonwealth, a story whose truth claims must occupy an unspecifiable status between historical contingency, scientific universality, and etiological myth. Hobbes’s argument exemplifies how, by means of such a story, one can deduce from a given ontology (reality is matter and motion) the conclusion that violence is an unavoidable human necessity and that civil and religious authority should ultimately be united in the state.

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Although Milton nowhere unfolds all of the premises and implications of his arguments in one place or in the systematic way that Hobbes does, Milton often draws implicitly upon some of the same logical connections between ontology, anthropology, and politics that Leviathan makes explicitly. The key points that begin Milton’s argument in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates () demonstrate, not that he always held the same political views, but that he understood the logical and rhetorical importance of the connections between some of these same ideas that Hobbes engages, even if Milton typically ran those connections in the opposite direction. Milton may have encountered a previous version of Hobbes’s social contract narrative in De Cive (), but my comparison does not presume such a direct engagement. Rather, my point here is that Milton was alert to this kind of argument and its implications. Milton’s main explicit argument in The Tenure is that a king who becomes a tyrant may indeed be “lawfully depos’d and punish’d” because a king’s authority is deputed to him from those governed. Lest his argument be dismissed as “learnt in corners among Scisms and Heresies,” Milton insists that the only authorities upon which his argument draws will be “Mosaical, Christian, Orthodoxal, and which must needs be more convincing to our Adversaries, Presbyterial” (CPW iii:). In this way, Milton shows his grasp of the rhetorical need to base arguments upon some sense of shared convictions. In the ensuing course of making his constitutional argument aimed at a Presbyterian audience, however, Milton also demonstrates his understanding of the relationship between reason (in an ethico-cognitive sense), freedom, politics, and biblical narrative. Milton begins The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates by appealing to “reason,” understood as a moral faculty: If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed non can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence. (CPW iii:)

In one sense, Milton’s appeal here is utterly conventional: reason, understood as “right reason” or conscience, enables humans to actualize the good for which they are made. Milton makes similar use of “reason” throughout his prose. In this account, enslavement to appetites arises when people refuse to follow the guidance of reason. Similarly, Milton contrasts

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“freedom” with “licence” because he means by “freedom” the capacity to practice the virtues that embody human flourishing. Because Milton is concerned here with specifically civil liberty, he presumes that the absence of bodily constraint is an aspect of freedom; unlike Hobbes, however, Milton does not, here or elsewhere, reduce the whole of human freedom to such absence of constraint. More importantly, because Milton links reason to an understanding of the human good, he does not equate freedom with “indeterminacy.” The presumed sense of moral reason here is neither subjectivist nor totalizing. The subjectivist claim to define one’s own morality, which Milton refers to as “licence,” is simply a misidentified form of slavery, well known to any advertiser. Likewise, although right reason might provide general knowledge regarding, for example, what constitutes temperance, Milton does not presume that such knowledge is the determinate end of moral discourse. Such knowledge is rather the starting point for deliberation about particular actions. Such deliberation arises not only in forensic cases wherein one attempts to determine, for example, “who in particular is a Tyrant” (CPW iii:), but also in an individual’s decisions about future actions. In a manner also comparable to that of Hobbes, The Tenure appeals to a story about the origins of the social contract that gives rise to civil society. Unlike Hobbes, however, Milton explicitly invokes the biblical story that he shares with his Presbyterian opponents as a polemical context: [A]ll men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all creatures . . . Till from the root of Adams transgression, falling among themselves to doe wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and joyntly to defend themselves. (CPW iii:–)

In one sense, both Milton and Hobbes describe the social contract as arising from the need for self-preservation. It might seem that Hobbes’s account simply presents a secularized version of original sin. When Peter Herman refers to the above passage from The Tenure as presenting a “Hobbesian state of nature,” he seems to be interpreting Hobbes in just such a manner. But Hobbes actually presents something close to the opposite of the doctrine of original sin, insofar as such a doctrine presumes the goodness of creation. For Hobbes, intersubjective goodness depends upon the social contract which, in turn, arises in response to natural and blameless originary violence. Hobbes thus hypostatizes the violence and strife that Milton would locate among sin’s consequences. For Hobbes, violence is

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intrinsic to human nature; for Milton, violence results from and constitutes a corruption of human nature which was created for participation in a goodness that predates and outlasts the entrance of evil into human history. The above passage from The Tenure (CPW iii:–) also alludes to Milton’s recurring claim that “reason” is what Genesis : describes as the “image of God” in humans. This ethico-cognitive sense of reason which enables humans to apprehend reality in the world, as well as the appropriate ethical responses to creation, derives, according to Milton, from the way in which humans are made in the divine image. As we shall see in the next chapter, this same faculty also, in Milton’s account, makes possible the human understanding of Scripture. There are other aspects to Milton’s anthropology and his faculty psychology that we shall consider below. The key point here, however, is that, against the Hobbesian interpretation of “right reason” as “correct calculation” aimed at achieving a “good” of exclusively human fabrication, Milton views reason as the image of God, which enables humans to participate in the ontic goodness of creation. In order to complete this introductory account of the relationships between some of the key claims in Milton’s writing, we shall move beyond The Tenure and say more about Milton’s ontology and his arguments for what I call “Protestant toleration.” According to Milton’s ontology, what is real in creation is rooted in the gratuity of divine goodness. As if intended specifically to counter a Hobbesian ontology of morally neutral matter in motion, De Doctrina Christiana posits that even the materia prima of the cosmos, considered in itself, is good. Although Paradise Lost does not present an account of matter that is identical to the theological treatise, nowhere does Milton suggest that unfallen creation is anything other than good. Individual existents are both real and good as a result of divine gift, and they consequently merit in the gift of themselves a certain ethical regard and treatment. On this basis, Milton contends that the human ability to embody and know goodness, individually and socially, does not require the Fall. Thus, the root difference between Hobbes and Milton is the difference between imagining that strife is reality, indeed the basis for goodness, and imagining that humans were made to embody a good that does not necessarily depend on violence. Let there be no misunderstanding here: Milton is not a pacifist. He obviously allows a legitimate role for coercion in the ordering of any given civil society in a fallen world. He does maintain, however, that the consequences of the Fall cannot ultimately be overcome by the deployment of an opposing coercion. In short, for Milton, because the Fall was a contingent event,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

evil and violence are not ontically necessary. He views coercive civil power as part of the supplementary character of violence in a fallen world – not something intrinsic to the good of human nature. Because he views the coercive power of the state as a stop-gap measure to address the effects of the Fall, Milton insists that the defeat of sin in human history cannot be achieved by means of state-sponsored conformity to particular religious practices or beliefs. In this way, Milton’s and Hobbes’s respective accounts of ontology (in relation to the good) connect directly to their contrasting accounts of the relationship between civil and religious authority. Moreover, they both make these connections by means of a story regarding the origins of civil society – in each case a story that involves a specific interpretation of Genesis . We might think that Milton’s insistence upon the contingency of the Fall would be a theological commonplace, except for the fact that his arguments often developed in reaction to Presbyterian Calvinism. I contend that Milton discerned in Hobbes’s political analysis a cynically reduced version of arguments advanced by Milton’s theological opponents. Although neither Milton’s Episcopal nor his Presbyterian opponents espoused Hobbes’s mechanism, Milton understood that their arguments for state-supported religious conformity among Protestants ultimately drew upon some key shared assumptions. Milton’s prose characteristically advances two claims against such coerced religious conformity: he argues that such practices betray a trust in one’s own works to effect personal salvation (effectively denying the Protestant principle of salvation “by faith alone,” sola fide); or he argues that such coercion reveals a perverted understanding of sanctification, which mistakenly allows the “indifference” of certain actions to one’s salvation to legitimize their regulation by the state. Although English Protestants of Milton’s day would obviously deny any suggestion that they had abandoned sola fide, they frequently made arguments for religious conformity on the grounds that certain temporal actions were “indifferent” to one’s eternal salvation. Those who justified religious coercion among Protestants by appealing to “things indifferent” (adiaphora) were, in Milton’s account, agreeing in practice with the Hobbesian claim that there is really only one “Lawfull Sovereign”: the one that governs civil affairs. The crucial link to which I draw attention here is that both Calvinist and Hobbesian arguments for religious conformity involve the claim that, in effect, the Fall and/or its consequences are unconditionally necessary. Hobbes’s argument illustrates how political doctrines follow from the assumption that violence is intrinsic to human nature. Calvinist theology, by contrast, ostensibly grants the biblical claim that creation (including

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human nature) was initially good. The problem, however, in Milton’s view, is that the Calvinist account of predestination tends to view the subsequent entrance of evil into human history as an unavoidable result of divine will. According to Calvin’s Institutes: “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it.” For Milton, such an interpretation of predestination (and divine sovereignty) risks negating creation’s initial goodness, by making evil and its consequences unavoidable. Thus, according to Milton’s critique, both Calvinist theology and Hobbesian philosophy legitimize state-sponsored coercion of religious conformity among Protestants; but, more importantly, they both do so as a result of similar assumptions regarding the necessity of evil. In effect, for Milton, the Calvinist allowance that civil authority may govern the sphere of actions that make up temporal sanctification (as distinct from eternal justification) amounts, in practice, to the same as Hobbes’s insistence that there is only one “Lawfull Sovereign.” The Calvinist account of the Fall also demonstrates, however, that Hobbes’s story about the origin of civil society and his consequent claims regarding the unity of civil and religious authority may not necessarily be opposed to the biblical story of the Fall, but may be construed as a very specific interpretation of that story. If one allows that true worship (sanctification) can be coerced, one tacitly assumes a Hobbesian ontology of violence because, rather than viewing the Fall as a contingent event in an otherwise peaceful creation, the Calvinist tendency to depict God as determining the Fall seems to permit the use of similarly coercive determinations to remedy its effects. Thus, the pivotal connection between thinking that the Fall is necessary and endorsing religious coercion among Protestants is ontology: the de facto assumption that evil and strife are intrinsic to reality. At one level, Hobbes and the Presbyterians might seem to argue for religious coercion in very different ways: Hobbes proceeds by denying any distinction between civil and religious authority, while the Presbyterians typically argued for religious conformity on the basis of distinguishing between those two kinds of authority. They share, however, the unifying assumption that reality (whether divine or human) subsists in “power,” understood not primarily as the ability to do good but as the ability to impose one’s will on others by force. This point is crucial: Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration are not an attempt to establish what I have called “peaceful difference.” Rather, “peaceful difference” describes that ontology and anthropology which the politics of a fallen world generally denies but which the person and work of the divine Logos uniquely reveals. Considered in itself, Protestant toleration is for Milton a political argument

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advanced in a world whose redemption is not yet complete and where civil authority remains rooted in compulsion. As such, Protestant toleration cannot establish the real “peace” in “peaceful difference”; it argues, however, for a limit on civil power that would allow Christian practices to reveal a public peaceful alternative to the ontology of violence that is generally presumed. Those practices involve not simply a featureless “agreement to disagree,” but the active embodiment of virtues such as love, joy, peace, or patience, known as “the fruit of the Spirit.” Milton’s concern is that Protestants who use civil authority to enforce religious conformity among themselves deny in practice the reality and redemption of human goodness in Christ. As a result of the theological situation described above, one of Reformed theology’s persistent challenges was to present an account of divine sovereignty that avoided the intellectual appearance of God as a tyrant. Insofar as early modern theology generally shared with Hobbes the inherited nominalist reduction of reason to sheer necessity, the only alternative to violent randomness appeared to be coercive control. In effect, the Calvinist emphasis upon the determinate character of divine sovereignty tended to be paired with the assumption that to posit any human “freedom” that would make divine action ethically intelligible to humans would necessarily introduce randomness, or a loss of divine sovereignty. Moving between these Reformed versions of “the true” and “the good” (Calvinist doctrine versus Arminian ethics), what drops from consideration is “the beautiful” – that is, the opportunity to understand the cosmos as a freely ordered gift that is neither random nor necessary. Although critics commonly emphasize Milton’s opposition to Calvinism, such an observation is incomplete in two respects. At one level, to characterize Milton’s rejection of Calvinism as primarily an emphasis upon indeterminacy or uncertainty simply relocates him on the other side of the coercion–chaos binary, thus implying that coercion is indeed the only alternative to chaos. Second, a mere rejection of Calvinism does not account for Milton’s continued positive insistence upon the core Reformed doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura. Milton’s poetic biblicism becomes, I contend, the means by which he remains true to, indeed radicalizes, his Protestant beliefs, while overcoming what he saw as those flaws in much of Reformed theology which continued to legitimate religious coercion among Protestants. As early as the s Milton addressed in his published writings the classic Protestant challenge of how to interpret Scripture in the absence of an authoritative interpretive tradition. One common response to that challenge was to invoke an interpretive “rule of faith” (analogia fidei) which

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was, in effect, a substitute for tradition that offered an intersubjective means to deliberate between competing interpretive claims. In practice, however, the exact content of such a rule proved notoriously difficult to stabilize, as it was variously defined according to specific doctrine, to ancient creeds, or to received doctrine in general. According to Dayton Haskin, the Protestant failure to agree upon a “rule of faith” to guide the interpretation of Scripture proved to be “the Achilles’s heel of Protestant hermeneutics.” While Milton was alert to that interpretive challenge, he did not view the “rule of faith” as an insurmountable problem. In effect, for Milton, the doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura constituted in themselves the basis for wide-ranging and capaciously united disagreement on any number of further topics. As far as Milton was concerned, as long as an interpretation of any given passage did not entail salvation by works or deny the authority of Scripture, the wide range of disagreements possible within those parameters revealed the strength rather than weakness of Protestant hermeneutics. Moreover, Milton linked his account of biblical interpretation with two other issues that he saw as no less, if not more, urgent: the tendency for the Protestant account of divine sovereignty to make God appear as a tyrant, and the failure of Protestants to tolerate theological or ecclesiastical differences among themselves. By the time he completed Paradise Lost, Milton came to view appeals to the overarching biblical story as the most effective way to unite Reformed principles into a biblicist “rule of faith” that was neither simply private musing nor a premature closure of debate or inquiry. In the course of delineating the above connections between Milton’s ontology, his view of reason as a faculty, and his view of the relation between civil and religious authority, we have begun to discern also the central role of biblical narrative in his polysemic sense of reason. Milton was interested in how readers interpreted not only Genesis  but the whole of biblical history, which raises one further key point that needs to be clarified at the outset of this argument. Throughout this study I refer to an “overarching biblical story,” or a “larger biblical narrative,” which I treat as a synonym for “biblical metanarrative.” In order to avoid misunderstanding, I tend not to use the latter phrase much in the chapters that follow. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard famously observed that postmodernity is characterized by an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” insofar as there is no longer any “grand narrative” that is able to legitimate the functional rationalism of modern science. We should notice, however, that the metanarratives to which Lyotard refers are specifically Enlightenment narratives, whether Kantian or Marxist, Psychoanalytic or otherwise. Most

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importantly, the crisis of narrative coherence in so-called postmodernity arises precisely because of a continued modern assumption that reason is mastery aimed at predictive control. In this respect, the “overarching biblical story” that Milton engages and adapts in various ways is specifically not an Enlightenment story, because it does not concern the unfolding of an instrumental rationality, as do modern metanarratives. Instead, Milton often appeals to typology as a way to unite disparate biblical texts into a story that recounts Creation, the Fall, and the variegated redemption history that precedes final glory. The interpretive crux of that redemption history is the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and final return of Christ. Milton uses typology to interpret key moments in the overarching biblical story but also deploys the overall shape of that story, and the relation between its components, as a guide for interpreting specific passages. Yet again, typology is not the unfolding of a modern rationality, for it makes no claims to human mastery or predictive control. As a result, if we project a modern view of reason onto Milton, we will also tend to misconstrue typology as a failed attempt at a predictive metanarrative – simultaneously indicted as totalizing in ambition and yet inadequate as a modern explanation. Milton’s use of typology, however, never aims at such totalizing explanation; rather, it proffers a sufficient apprehension of reality for the exercise of faith. In his poetry, and to a lesser degree in his prose, Milton rhetorically uses the biblical metanarrative to present a Christian ethos that addresses specific actions, but without relieving readers of their responsibility to connect that story and its ethos to the particularities of their own lives. Parts II and III of this study explore how Milton uses the indirection made possible by this overarching biblical story to transpose the above network of claims into terms that are inseparable from the very matrices of Protestant biblical interpretation. an approach to scriptural reasoning Having considered how Miltonic reason stands apart from modern assumptions and how it informs his ontology, his anthropology, and his theology, only now do we have a sufficient basis for a succinct and plausible account of this book’s larger argument. What I have presented thus far is a brief description of the network of discursive claims that we shall trace in Milton’s writing; the task of Chapters  and  (Part I) is to provide the details regarding both the evidence for and the relations among these claims in Milton’s prose. If Milton does not simply ignore the modern account of reason, how do his explicit treatments of “reason” as a topic address modern

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assumptions about it? Chapter  addresses that question by focusing on the role of “reason” in Milton’s educational preoccupations of the s. I demonstrate how his Ramist logic text, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio (), relates both to the educational program that Milton outlines in Of Education (), as well as to the mode of educational reading that he proposes in Areopagitica (). At the same time, in Areopagitica we encounter the most sophisticated early example in prose of Milton’s attempt to achieve what might be called “deep rhetorical” effect through indirect appeal to the overarching story of Scripture. By situating these three prose works in relation to one another, I show that Milton brings into question the most characteristically modern aspects of Ramism because he presumes an ethico-cognitive sense of reason in which he locates the source of both the logical and rhetorical arts. How exactly does Milton’s account of reason support his arguments for Protestant toleration, and how do those arguments relate to his ontology? Chapter  addresses these questions by considering the relationship between Milton’s account of “matter” in De Doctrina Christiana and his arguments for Protestant toleration in A Treatise of Civil Power (). Milton had a career-long interest in persuading Protestants that they should not subject one another to legal penalties because of religious differences. To avoid misunderstanding here, I use the term “Protestant toleration” to indicate Milton’s arguments for limited religious toleration among Protestants. Milton is obviously not interested in what we would call “religious toleration.” We may, of course, reject his arguments or view them as woefully incomplete because they do not extend toleration beyond Protestants. The aim here, however, is to understand the specific suasive means and ends sought in Civil Power, rather than to focus on those arguments which the tract fails to make. Ultimately, Chapter  argues that a correct account of “conscience” or “right reason” in Civil Power is central to understanding the relationship between Milton’s monism and his arguments for Protestant toleration. Part II (Chapters –) explores Milton’s poetic biblicism in the central books of Paradise Lost. In each chapter, we consider how Milton transforms and interrogates particular biblical passages at the same time that the very weave of his narrative adaptation also engages the various meanings of “reason” outlined above (discursive, Christo-poetic, or ethico-cognitive). Chapter  focuses upon the combination of biblical intertexts that Milton uses to depict the Son of God in Book  of Paradise Lost. Rather than asking what this passage of the poem suggests directly about the characterization of God, for example, I ask what the indirect engagement of biblical texts

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implies about the relation between the Father and the pre-incarnate Logos. Ultimately, Milton’s biblicism embodies an interpretive openness that is pivotal to his depiction of the divine ratio as peaceful difference. If violence is ontically not necessary in Milton’s account, why does he place an epic battle – the war in heaven – in what is arguably the architectural center of Paradise Lost? Chapter  begins to address that question by focusing on the event that ostensibly provokes Satan’s rebellion: the Father’s announcement of the Son’s anointing as king over the angels. By explaining how the description of events leading up to the war in heaven constitutes a narrative interpretation of Psalm , I contend that the central place given to the Son’s anointing is intrinsic to the epic’s treatment of divine justice: the event shows that divine justice will not appear if one assumes that Divine Reason (the Son) and the created reality that he enables are intrinsically coercive. Chapter  completes the discussion of the Son’s kingship by focusing on the war in heaven, as recounted by the angel Raphael. The argument traces how the inset narrative’s framing and its engagement with biblical intertexts combine to render the harmony of creaturely freedom and divine love intelligible to finite humans. In this respect, the typological dynamics of the poetry become formally inseparable from the epic’s treatment of divine justice. The very mode of biblicism is crucial to these books of Paradise Lost because it allows Milton to locate at the center of his epic a contest between those who view reason as coercion and cunning and those who view reason as peaceful difference. This architectural arrangement, however, creates serious difficulties for the poem’s ostensible treatment of divine justice and goodness. One challenge is to avoid inscribing the strife of that contest itself as primary reality. A further challenge is to depict the divine response to such freely chosen creaturely violence without suggesting either that God is incapable of responding adequately to violence (flaccid mercy without justice) or that such violence is itself intrinsic to divine nature (simply Zeus). The intertextual biblicism of Raphael’s inset story and its relationship to the larger poem allows Milton to address both of these challenges in a necessarily indirect way. Chapter  focuses on the account of the Fall and its immediate consequences in Books  and  of Paradise Lost. Milton consistently invokes and then frustrates the customary allegorical interpretations of the Fall which had described that event using the categories of faculty psychology, and specifically the faculty of reason. In those books of Paradise Lost, Milton’s double insistence upon individual responsibility and mutual dependence arises from the epic’s typological embodiment of divine love. The biblicism of Paradise Lost brings into question modern gender discourse, both

Introduction: Scriptural reasoning

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egalitarian and patriarchal, by redefining the arch¯e, as it were, in patri-arch¯e. I argue that critical treatments of gender in the epic will be mistaken to the extent that one presumes that reason is sheer necessity rather than peaceful difference. The final three chapters that make up Part III of this study consider, in turn, Paradise Lost Books –, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. In each case, the very form of the poem raises the issue of biblical interpretation by variously foregrounding questions about the relationship between biblical stories and the immediate world of the reader. Each text implies a different relationship between its own story and the biblical metanarrative. The final books of Paradise Lost present, in effect, a summary of the whole of biblical history as an inset narrative within its epic dilation of Genesis . Paradise Regained presents just one moment in the gospel narratives, Christ’s temptation, but with numerous typological connections between the main narrative and the larger biblical story. In Samson Agonistes, Milton carefully places any specific understanding of the larger shape of the biblical narrative that typology makes possible beyond the horizon of expectations available to characters inside the poem. In all three of these works, the varied reconfigurations of typology enable the contrasting kinds of engagement with the overarching biblical story. In each case, the very mode of engaging the biblical metanarrative enables specific implications regarding the ethical practice of charity, most notably as it touches upon religious coercion among Protestants. In none of these imaginative works do we find an argument for such toleration; readers looking for Milton’s version of such direct arguments could obviously consult A Treatise of Civil Power, or Of True Religion. Rather, in view of such arguments advanced by Milton’s prose (Part I of this study) and the ontology implied by his biblicist poetics (Part II), we can understand how these texts address specific issues raised by the English practice of coercing religious conformity. Why does Milton place at the end of Paradise Lost what amounts to a verse paraphrase of the whole of biblical history? Chapter  considers how the last two books of the epic weave Milton’s indictment of religious coercion among Protestants into the very fabric of biblical history. Critics often cite typology as the link between the final two books and the rest of the poem, but Milton’s typological recapitulation of the biblical metanarrative is also integral to the poem’s engagement of Protestant toleration. In these final books, Milton poses for his seventeenth-century English readers a dramatized, rather than merely dialectical, choice between either tolerating disagreement among Protestants or abandoning their own understanding of Protestant faith. These final books indict specifically

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

those who would use the state to coerce doctrinal uniformity regarding the Trinity. Chapter  begins by asking why Milton took such strong exception to those who viewed Paradise Lost as superior to Paradise Regained. In short, he understood the common basis for such a comparison to rely upon a fundamental misreading of the first epic. Paradise Regained foregrounds the relationship between biblical hermeneutics and ontology that remains largely implicit in the first  books of Paradise Lost, but which informs the overt treatments of religious coercion in the final books. In this way, Milton offers Paradise Regained as a correcting interpretive guide to those who had mistaken Paradise Lost as a valorization of epic violence. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Paradise Regained functions as an interpretive “rule of charity” with respect to Paradise Lost, by offering a more explicit statement of the relationship between the biblical metanarrative and the charitable ontology that informs Paradise Lost. Yet if Paradise Regained embodies such a revelation of this alternative to modern ontology and ethics, why was it paired in publication with Samson Agonistes which presents such a blood-soaked hero? Chapter  shows how Milton’s biblical tragedy offers both consolation to persecuted Dissenters in Restoration England and a prophetic warning to the Anglican state-church hierarchy. Against those who mistake the tragedy for a defense of religious violence, Milton advances his aims of consolation and warning through the work specifically because the play abjures any simplistic suggestion that readers should literally imitate Samson’s actions. In this way, Samson Agonistes does not argue for Milton’s well-known and oft-repeated claims regarding Protestant toleration; rather, presuming the truth of such arguments, the tragedy explores the varied ways in which faithful Dissenters may, in good conscience (right reason), respond to persecution by a state-sponsored church.

part i

Scriptural Reasoning in Milton’s Prose

chapter 2

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading

If Milton does not share in the modern assumption that reason is reducible to coercion, or the sheer necessity of calculation, where, beyond The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, do we find evidence that he held an alternate view? This chapter and the next focus on a selection of Milton’s prose, showing how those writings embody his view that “reason” (human and divine) is the poetic gift of peaceful difference. The argument in this chapter considers the educational connections between what is probably Milton’s most frequently read English prose work, Areopagitica (), and one of his least read Latin prose works, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio (). Both of these texts, through their respective treatments of “reason,” engage the pedagogical means and ends described in Of Education (, repub. ). At the same time, Areopagitica presents an early example of Milton’s rhetorical appeal to the biblical metanarrative which, in Of Education, he refers to as “the story of Scripture” (CPW ii:). This story arises from and reveals the interaction between divine and human reason; however, as we noted in Chapter , this story is specifically not a modern metanarrative in that it does not pretend to offer predictive mastery over fortune; the story begins with the goodness (not neutrality) of creation, and therefore it does not participate in those problematics arising from the modern fact–value distinction. Most importantly, because that biblical story begins in gratuitous creation and culminates in beatific participation, it allows unity and difference to be understood together, not through an alternation between Apollonian certainty and Dionysian chaos, but through the beauty of harmonious alterity. By situating Of Education, Areopagitica, and Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio for mutual illumination, we can begin to understand how Milton depicts the interpretive action of reason – in an ethico-cognitive sense – as the capacity for creative difference that is, despite the warfaring condition of the fallen world, in itself peaceful. Although Milton published his introductory logic text only in , the evidence supports the consensus that it was written in the mid-s. Artis 

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Logicae was therefore likely composed within a few years of Areopagitica’s publication in . John Connor argues that after the Restoration Milton came to reject the rhetorically oriented program in Of Education and that the revision and publication of Artis Logicae in  reveals Milton’s “logical turn” away from such public discourse toward an “inviolable interiority.” Such an attempt to pit the allegedly private logic text against the publicly oriented educational treatise is doubtful, however. Connor concedes that the logic text was “most probably written in the s for the pedagogical purposes outlined in Of Education” but maintains that it “underwent close revision in the s.” If that is the case, however, and Milton had come to privilege a silent logic over a public rhetoric, then such a claim would apply equally to Of Education’s republication in . The fact that the  Of Education retains the rhetorical orientation of the previous edition casts doubt on any attempt to set a “rhetorical” Milton of the s against a supposedly “logical” Milton of the s. All three of these texts – Artis Logicae, Areopagitica, and Of Education – bear a close proximity in their composition during the s, while the logic text and the educational treatise bear a further proximity in their publication during the early s. Yet the fact remains that Artis Logicae and Areopagitica could hardly be more different from one another. There is, of course, no reason to expect any similarity between an introductory logic text intended for adolescent boys and a political tract ostensibly addressed to Parliament. The obvious point of intersection, however, is that both works explicitly and centrally address the topic of reason – although they address that topic in very different ways: in Areopagitica we meet a rhetorical style that seems to make the most of indeterminacy and metaphorical obscurity; in Artis Logicae we encounter reason as an apparent tool of pedagogical efficiency, the rationality of clear and distinct ideas without ambiguity. At the same time, given the place of Ramism in the constitution of modernity, any account of Milton’s engagement with modern rationalism must address his relation to Ramism and must therefore consider his own Ramist logic text, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio. My argument here takes as a point of departure Milton’s account of educational means and ends in Of Education, in order to situate his view of the faculty of reason and the study of logic within his larger educational aims. We shall then consider Areopagitica’s depiction of educative reading through “triall” “by what is contrary,” before focusing finally on how Milton’s logic text challenges or departs from Ramist norms. Ultimately, I contend that Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio resists the reductive tendencies of Ramism; moreover, such resistance arises from Milton’s assumption that the ethico-cognitive sense of “reason” may

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



encompass the art of logic without being reducible to it. These instances of Milton’s prose work, ranging from the s through the s, variously reiterate his view that the faculty of reason is the divine image by which humans participate in knowledge, love, and genuine delight. educational reading After Milton initially states, in Of Education, that the goal of learning is “to repair the ruins of our first parents,” he goes on to draw upon the customary Reformed distinction between justification and sanctification, or faith and works, in order to present his account of the means by which that repairing happens. Such restoration is brought about, he says, “by regaining to know God aright [justification], and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue [sanctification], which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” (CPW ii:–). As in various other prose works, Milton here uses the terms “knowledge of God” and “love of God” as synonyms, respectively, for “faith” and “works,” or “justification” and “sanctification.” The particular locution “out of” – as in, “out of that knowledge” – proves to be crucial. In Milton’s account, the right relation between faith (knowledge of God) and works (love of God) constitutes authentic Protestant belief. We shall consider the implications of this claim further in Chapter , but Milton’s oft-repeated point is that saving faith (justification) results in works (sanctification), although such works cannot be the cause of salvation. In this respect, Milton views education as part of sanctification – that is, part of training in virtue that does not cause but follows from saving faith. Moreover, he does not propose that “education” per se can ever remedy the effects of the Fall, apart from saving knowledge of God. Similarly, when Milton later describes the public and private virtues that should result from following his educational program, and the ensuing benefits to the nation, he does not mistake those results for the ultimate goal of education. To mistake such public benefits for education’s purpose would confuse the visible signs of sanctification with the goal of knowing God. The most crucial point here, however, is that Milton presumes that formal education is not a cause of salvation but an aid to sanctification. Given this relation between educational means and ends, we should notice how Milton locates the study of logic among the various means available as aids to the cultivation of virtue (or sanctification). Milton’s proposed curriculum sequence generally follows what his readers would have expected in progessing through the trivium, moving from grammar



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

to logic to rhetoric – but with one important difference. In effect, Milton postpones the study of formal logic until the final stage of education – where it is immediately treated as part of rhetoric. Instead of making the study of logic occupy the majority of training between “grammar” and “rhetoric,” the middle phase of his curriculum is characterized by the study of ethics. As he explains, after completing elementary studies, or grammar school training, “yeers and good generall precepts will have furnisht them more distinctly with that act of reason which in [Aristotle’s] Ethics is call’d Proairesis [decision or “moral choice”]: that they may with some judgement contemplat upon moral good and evill” (CPW ii:). Such “knowledge of vertue” and “hatred of vice” is cultivated through the study of works by Plato, Xenophon, Cicero, Plutarch, and others. On the basis of this moral education, students then study politics and law, as well as theology. Only later, when finally turning to rhetoric, does Milton propose that logic, “so much as is useful, is to be referr’d to this due place withall her well coucht heads and Topics” (CPW ii:). In one sense, Milton is simply reiterating his earlier point that the study of logic should not be introduced too early, because education generally should progress from sensible to intelligible truth (CPW ii:, ). There are, however, three implications that follow from Milton’s variation on the trivium and which have farreaching consequences. First, he emphasizes the inseparability of logic and rhetoric when both are properly understood – this, as we shall see, contrasts sharply with a central aspect of Ramist logic. Second, following the passage that he cites from Aristotle’s Ethics, Milton identifies the faculty of “reason” (logos in Aristotle) as a moral faculty and distinguishes that faculty clearly from the mere art of logic. Third, in place of instruction in formal logic that could become disconnected from rhetoric, Milton makes the cultivation of moral reasoning the focus of the second major phase of his curriculum. When Milton later argues for the liberty of unlicensed printing in Areopagitica (during the same year that he publishes Of Education), he appeals to an account of educative reading that models the benefits of the educational program he had outlined. There is, of course, much critical disagreement regarding the overall rhetorical aims of Areopagitica. Milton does not extend religious toleration to “Popery” (CPW ii:), which he defines tautologically as the practice of religious coercion that arises from belief in salvation by works. At no point in his prose does Milton argue for what we would call “religious toleration” generally; rather, he repeatedly argues that Protestants should not subject one another to coercion for religious causes, a position that I call “Protestant toleration.” Likewise, Milton does not advocate what we would call “free speech,” in that he clearly seems

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



to allow for some kind of post-publication censorship (ii:). Indeed, as Markus Klinge points out, the tract introduces the possibility of at least four different kinds of censorship. Nevertheless, various passages in the tract seem to invoke an ideal of free and open inquiry. At multiple levels, as many critics have observed, Areopagitica seems to be at rhetorical cross-purposes with itself regarding its own suasive ends. Although revisionist readings of Areopagitica are now numerous and vary greatly in their approaches and conclusions, they remain in general agreement upon at least one point: their rejection of the traditional view that Milton’s tract is a manifesto for “freedom of speech” and liberal toleration. In this respect, most post-liberal readings of Areopagitica tend to emphasize the “authoritarian” aspects of the tract, thereby assuming that any alternative to subjectivism is necessarily coercive. At the same time, there is a consensus that the tract’s “potency” “stems from a consistent self-disruption in its lines of argument, its sequence of images, and its rhetorical forms.” The meaning of that disruptive quality arises, as we shall see, from a further characteristic of the tract that is widely recognized: the idea of learning through “triall” “by what is contrary.” My aim here is not to present an overall analysis of Areopagitica, but to offer a heuristic treatment of specific passages that depict Milton’s view of educational reading as ethico-cognitive reasoning in action. At the most explicit level, when Milton argues in Areopagitica that “reason is but choosing” (CPW ii:), he paraphrases the very same passage from Aristotle’s Ethics that he had cited directly in Of Education. In Areopagitica, however, Milton situates his paraphrase of Aristotle at a key intersection between biblical interpretation and political debate. In arguing against pre-publication censorship, Milton contends that “The great art” of statecraft “lyes to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things perswasion only is to work” (ii:). In Milton’s account, the state may indeed require coercion to protect citizens from one another or from other states; yet the ultimate stability and success of the state depends upon the citizens’ exercise of positive virtues the nature of which precludes their being compelled. However, the reference to Aristotelian “reason” as “choosing,” in both Of Education and Areopagitica, immediately raises a question. If, as I contend, the modern understanding of reason as sheer necessity is, in effect, a return to the ancient metaphysical attempt to “master the real by force,” how does Milton’s appeal to Aristotelian moral reasoning avoid participating in that same modern return to a coercive view of reason? In short, Milton transforms the Aristotelian sense of reason by situating it within the biblical story of Creation as divine



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

gift and by locating its operation among other points in the biblical story, most notably the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Eschaton. On two different occasions, when he refers explicitly to “the gift of reason” as the ability for man “to be his own chooser” (CPW ii:) and when he later declares that “reason is but choosing” (), Milton situates his account of reason within the story of Creation and the Fall. But in an even earlier passage, Milton explicitly invokes the interpretation of Genesis : that identifies “reason” as the “image of God.” In each of these passages, Milton’s appeal to “reason” is not separable from the biblical narrative contexts that he invokes and which make it clear that he does not view “reason” as merely a calculative capacity. In the first of these three passages, Milton presents a direct analogy between human reason as the image of God and a book as, in turn, an image of human reason. In making this comparison, he is open about the incomplete character of the analogy, as well as the tendentious and somewhat paradoxical use that he makes of it: “As good almost kill a Man as kill a good book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.” He who destroys a good book “slaies an immortality” (CPW ii:–, my emphasis). Stanley Fish contends that such sentiments regarding the importance of books, if left to stand alone, would constitute idolatry in Milton’s view because Milton, holding to a doctrine of the “inner light,” rejects all belief in “external” objects as repositories of truth. Indeed, according to Fish, Milton’s “entire career can be viewed as an exercise in vigilance in which he repeatedly detects in this or that political or social or ecclesiastical program one more attempt to substitute for the authority of the inner light the false authority of some external and imposed rule.” The central difficulty in such an assessment appears in the assumption that Milton characterizes all “external” truth as necessarily “imposed” or coercive. But Fish is not unique on this point; as I indicated in Chapter , many Milton critics assume, like Hobbes, that all mind-independent truth is necessarily coercive. Even at the surface level, however, to interpret Milton’s treatment of books in the above passage as potentially idolatrous is to miss the obvious paradox upon which the idea of “slaying an immortality” depends. The paradox arises only because Milton assumes both that Truth is immortal and that, nevertheless, perishable books somehow communicate truth. To resolve the paradox as Fish does, by simply reiterating the first point (regarding Truth’s immortality) without the latter point (regarding the mortality of texts) is to disregard the tension that enabled the paradox to

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



be constituted at all. As suggested by his qualifications, “almost” and “as it were,” when Milton ascribes “life” to books at all, he engages in a selfconsciously tendentious analogy between the “reason” embodied in books and the “reason” that is the divine image in humans (ii:). The creator– creature analogy is later reiterated by attributing to books “the breath of reason” (ii:). Although books are obviously inanimate physical objects, they “are not absolute dead things” in the specific sense that they enable, through the eye, the learning of one rational mind to be communicated to that of another. Hence to kill reason “in the eye” is not literally to kill reason, which is presumed to be immortal and to exist apart from such things, but to “kill” a given opportunity for the communication of truth to others, making it thus “dead” to them. As the argument of Areopagitica unfolds, Milton obviously complicates his readers’ understanding of “truth,” but he never abandons those premises which enable the initial paradox in the risk of “slaying an immortality.” Rather, the possibility that one mind could communicate immortal, though partial, truth to others by means of a book provides the imperative that underlies the longest argument of the tract: that licensing will result in the “stop of Truth” (CPW ii:). Because Milton is not satisfied with an account of truth that would be limited to passive acceptance, he attempts to broaden his readers’ sense of truth by various means, most notably through the multiplication of analogies that he later exposes as incomplete. But he never abandons the central role of genuine understanding within that process. Milton’s enlarged sense of truth appears in his claim that “A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his pastor says so, or the [Westminster] Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie” (ii:). The modifying phrase, “without knowing other reason,” involves two key implications: first, Milton contrasts the external authority of other people – not Scripture – with the inner authority of individual knowledge; second, the “other reason[s]” that support such knowledge (in the case of theology) could obviously be found in Scripture. In Areopagitica Milton also continues to situate his adaptation of Aristotelian proairesis, or reason as choosing, within the biblical stories of Creation and Fall which, in turn, give rise to his account of educative reading, or trial “by what is contrary.” In explaining how the virtue of temperance is such that its genuine practice cannot be the result of compulsion, Milton points out that God does not “captivat [mankind] under a perpetuall childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were govern’d only by exhortation” (CPW ii:, emphasis added). We should note in passing that Milton presumes here a clear distinction between law and compulsion, on the one hand, and reason, preaching, and exhortation, on the other. Critics may, of course, reject Milton’s distinction as false, but that should not keep us from observing that Milton does not share in the assumption that rhetoric is necessarily a form of violence, or what Machiavelli calls “cunning.” But the more immediate point here is that, on the basis of this conception of reason as choosing, Milton goes on to develop his account of reading specifically through his interpretation of the Fall. After observing that “Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably,” he proposes that “perhaps this is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill” (ii:). In this way, Milton modifies his previous point that “to the pure all things are pure” (CPW ii:, quoting Titus :) and provides a basis for his argument that virtue is constituted through a process of educative reading: “Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary” (CPW ii:). Thus, knowledge in Areopagitica “proceeds by contraries.” Milton’s tract, however, not only proposes that knowledge is derived and virtue constituted through an encounter with falsehood, but also provides the opportunity for such a process. The process is effected through a series of images, analogies, and metaphors which are deployed to represent truth in different ways, but none of which is allowed to be accepted as final. Whether Truth is described as “Marchandize” (CPW ii:), as a body (ii:), as a warrior (ii:–), as or as a “cropp” (ii:), the tract does not rest in any particular simile, analogy, or metaphor. The immediate question is whether Milton implies that such difference is intrinsic to truth or that such difference is intrinsically falsifying and coercive. Milton implicitly addresses this issue in multiple ways, but the most obvious is in his reference to reason in the unfallen human condition and his explicit reference to reason’s ultimate purpose in the beatific vision. In the first case, he points out that to make every action, not to mention every publication, subject to “prescription and compulsion” would be comparable to those who wish that God had never given Adam the freedom to fall: When God gave [Adam] reason he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had bin else a meer artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



motions. We our selves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. (ii:)

Obviously, Milton does not take “freedom” to mean that all options are equally choice-worthy. His point is that although choosing the good was relatively easier in Eden than in a fallen world, virtue was not static even before the Fall. In making this point, Milton does not forget that he and his readers live in a fallen world. Rather, he insists that even the post-lapsarian condition that he has already described is still rooted in a human capacity whose goodness predates the Fall. As such, that capacity for participation in difference is not intrinsically falsifying or coercive. The most rhetorically important aspect of the biblical metanarrative that Milton engages in Areopagitica is eschatology – or the end of the story. That is the means by which he applies his most subtle indirect pressure on Erastian readers to show that their union of civil and religious authority is unchristian. For example, Milton points out the ongoing nature of Reformation, and the generally incomplete character of the human apprehension of truth within the saeculum, before the end of time: “we have not yet found [all Truth], Lord’s and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second coming” (). Later, the penultimate paragraph of the tract invokes images of final judgment, at which point the worthless “wood and hay and stubble” are finally, and not until then, separated from things of eternal worth (; compare  Corinthians :–). The theme is reiterated by reference to parables on the same topic, and with a view to their ecclesiological implications: “it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other frie; that must be the Angels Ministery at the end of mortal things” (CPW ii:–). From this limitation upon human judgments, Milton argues “that many be tolerated, rather than compell’d” for the sake of the “wood and hay and stubble” of “externall formality” (; ). Rather than argue directly for the separation of church and state, as he later does in Civil Power, Milton attempts to make those who do not hold such a view feel the pressure through the biblical metanarrative that they implicitly share in common. Milton similarly appeals to the end of the biblical story when he describes the search for truth as an attempt to reassemble the lost parts of a dismembered body that will not be completely restored “till her Masters



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

second coming” (CPW ii:). Ultimately, this emphasis upon the end of the biblical story allows Milton to foreground the ongoing character of rational knowing, a process that is fulfilled, but not stopped, in eternity: He who thinks we are to pitch our tents here and have attain’d the utmost prospect of reformation, that the mortall glasse wherein we contemplate, can shew us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion, declares that he is yet farre short of Truth. (CPW ii:–)

Areopagitica thus foregrounds the limitations in every analogy or metaphor intended to apprehend theological truth, but such rhetoric arises not from abandoning the idea of mind-independent truth but from presuming truth’s infinite inexhaustibility in the beatific vision. Milton’s belief that finite human creatures can participate in infinite truth arises from his understanding of the divine image in humans, but also from his understanding of how that image was restored through the Incarnation of the divine Logos, that point in the biblical metanarrative at which “Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master” (CPW ii:). The root difficulty in much criticism of Areopagitica is to presume that any admission of creaturely finitude is necessarily evidence of divine coercion. By contrast, for Milton, because the Incarnation reveals the infinite Creator through his Word, finite rational creatures are able to participate in divine glory in an inexhaustible way, to enjoy God’s infinity, without becoming God per se. This potential informs Milton’s understanding of reason as “poetic”: that is, part of an ongoing process of human making. “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” (CPW ii:). Here Milton emphasizes the etymological sense in which human knowing is an active making, or poesis: that is, he emphasizes the role of ongoing human action and making involved in human knowing. At the same time, Milton’s stipulation that such opinion which qualifies as “knowledge in the making” must be the opinion “in good men” reveals that he is not proposing a kind of moral constructivism that would make “good” a function of merely immanent human desire. Rather, his point is that human knowing finds its fulfillment by poetic participation in a reality – mineral, vegetable, animal, and divine – beyond the self. The very process of helping readers to know truth and to cultivate virtue through encounters with falsehood and vice, Milton contends, is embodied by Scripture itself:

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading



[The Bible] oftimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnall sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against providence through all the arguments of epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader. (CPW ii:)

Milton thus locates the warrant for his account of virtuous reading, his hermeneutics of “trial by what is contrary,” in biblical rhetorical modes, as well as in the overarching biblical story. Moreover, Milton is able to maintain that trial “by what is contrary” can lead to and embody truth, without positing that strife is the ground or telos of being, specifically because he presumes the ontic goodness of creation’s origin and end. He can hold this view because he maintains that the “wars of truth” result from the Fall – an event whose contingency Milton emphasizes in this very tract. This point is crucial in order to understand how Milton can describe the search for truth in a fallen world as a great struggle without presuming that reason is intrinsically, that is necessarily, coercive, even though it may be deployed for coercive purposes in a fallen world. The character of Milton’s underlying assumption becomes most apparent when he emphasizes the variability in Truth’s appearance: For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power: give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught & bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own. (CPW ii:–)

Although effort is often required in order to distinguish between truth and falsehood, such effort is not literally violent in Milton’s account. By contrast, Milton presumes that any argument for religious coercion reveals not only a false intellectual belief, but an idolatrous trust in brute force. Victoria Kahn claims that in the above passage “the personification of truth raises the problem of antinomianism it was designed to address . . . For once truth is personified – one might say, once truth enters the realm of representation – it engages the Machiavellian dilemma of how to distinguish between the force of truth and the force of its fraudulent representation.” Kahn does not consider that truth for Milton could be always already intrinsically representational or rhetorical without being coercive. Milton’s point is that using coercion to ensure religious uniformity is precisely what will make the truth into a lie. In the ensuing passage Milton allows that truth “may have more shapes then one” (CPW ii:); however, those possible shapes are not the shape of a lie that coercion gives to truth. Milton is precise on



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

this point: truth may have more shapes than one, indeed truth is infinite; consequently, the attempt to delimit truth by means of coercion, to deny its infinity, transforms truth into a lie, not by altering truth, but by inoculating people against enjoying it: that is, by encouraging people to become heretics in the truth. Milton is able to speak of truth in this way because he views human knowing as a participatory making rooted in harmonious and gratuitous alterity. Milton foregrounds the poor use that “a fool will [make] of sacred Scripture” (CPW ii:), but such potential does not alter his claim that truth is still available in Scripture to those who are less foolish. Milton’s point is not, as Fish claims, that “a truth that has not been internalized is no longer the truth” but, rather, that a person will not actually enjoy truth that has not been internalized. In a manner similar to Fish, Peter Herman attempts to explain what Milton means by “right reason” by referring to the above passage: “in Areopagitica, [Milton] warned against becoming a ‘heretic in the truth’ by accepting without demur any position offered by an authority figure without first examining it for oneself.” What drops from consideration for both Fish and Herman is Milton’s assumption that “right reason,” even when deliberating about Scripture, becomes “right” only by faithfully inhabiting the larger biblical story. Both critics tacitly impute to Milton a functionalist view of reason as an atelic power to control objects, a power devoid of moral or narrative content. In contrast to such functionalism, Milton explicitly locates “reason” in the divine image which both enables participation in and is itself part of the gratuitous goodness revealed in creation and in the ongoing narration of creation’s unfolding. Thus, Milton proposes educative reading that is an ongoing process but is not indeterminate or void of specific moral or intellectual content; the articulation and embodiment of Areopagitica’s argument depend upon specific elements in the biblical metanarrative and the ethico-hermeneutic implications of that story. Curiously, those critical accounts that emphasize mere indeterminacy in Areopagitica miss the very temporal dynamic that such an emphasis upon process purports to privilege. To emphasize only the interpretive process seems to imply temporality, but such a view actually makes reading into an unchanging static repetition, because it implies that every reader is doomed either to be always already “wise” (that is, know how to read by contraries) or to be always bound to foolish reading of even the best books. By contrast, Milton presumes that there is a temporal sequence involved which allows people to apply to one text what they learn from another. In short, although all texts, for Milton, may be potential occasions for readers to learn through “trial by what is contrary,” not all

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

texts are equally effective in teaching readers how to develop that skill in reading. He implies that those texts that are more effective in teaching readers how to, as it were, extract gold from a drossy volume should be read first. Thus, good reading, according to Milton, is neither an indeterminate process nor a static body of information, nor even a method: rather, good reading requires virtues whose embodiment by human reason requires readers to inhabit the specific content of the overarching biblical story, in all its gratuitous detail and obscure beauties. Areopagitica’s invocation of that story implicitly drives the process of learning to read more wisely. reasoning beyond logical art In Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio Milton deploys “reason” in a sense much different from Areopagitica. The crucial question here is whether or not Milton viewed the ability to “know God aright,” which is the goal of his virtue-based educational program, as reducible to the understanding of “reason” presented by the Ramist art of logic. The first important point to notice about Ramism is that, like most Renaissance logics, it is “a residual logic, a selection of items from an earlier, more complex and sensitive science”; as a result, the importance of Ramism, according to Walter Ong, lies not primarily in its claims as a logical system but in its influence as a widely held “cluster of mental habits evolving within a centuries-old educational tradition”: Ramist dialectic [or logic] represented a drive toward thinking not only of the universe but of thought itself in terms of spatial models apprehended by sight. In this context, the notion of knowledge as word, and the personalist orientation of cognition and of the universe which this notion implies is due to atrophy. Dialogue itself will drop more than ever out of dialectic. Persons, who alone speak (and in whom alone knowledge and science exist), will be eclipsed insofar as the world is thought of as an assemblage of the sort of things which vision apprehends – objects or surfaces.

Because, as Ong points out, “intellectual cognition must be treated by analogy with sensory cognition,” the terms used to describe intellectual cognition cannot avoid dependence upon some metaphoric origin. In contrast to the Aristotelian view, where human knowledge is constituted by an interpersonal “saying” or “enunciation” that “is itself conceived of in a visual–aural tension,” Ramism privileged to an unprecedented degree the spatial metaphors of sight. The deeper problem, in Ong’s view, is that



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Ramism encouraged practitioners to obscure altogether the metaphoric origin of the terms of intellectual cognition and thereby to treat as objective “truth itself ” what was really only a less-balanced, exclusively visual–spatial, metaphor whose basis was merely forgotten. In this sense, the broader movement towards an instrumental view of reason is directly related to the Ramist tendency to obscure the metaphoric origin of its own terms. One further central characteristic of the Ramist reform was to insist upon the independence of logic from rhetoric, considered as arts (that is, in theoretical presentation). Although Ramism allowed for logic and rhetoric to be united in practice, we have already seen that Milton – arguably on the basis of such practical unity – minimizes also the theoretical separation of the two arts in Of Education, insisting that the study of logic be undertaken only for the sake of rhetoric. A final difficulty characteristic of Ramism is the tendency to mistake the rhetorical method for presenting an existing body of knowledge for a universal method of investigation into truth about reality generally. In different ways, each of these aspects of Ramism contributed to the characteristically modern view of knowledge as impersonal and of the world as “objects.” But how does Milton engage these aspects of Ramism? As with any Ramist work, Milton’s Artis Logicae is a conflation of earlier texts and commentaries. In addition to Ramus’s Dialecticae of , Milton evidently drew from works by George Downame, Alexander Richardson, and Bartholomew Keckermann. Based on changes that Milton makes to these sources, I contend that there are three crucial ways in which Milton adapts Ramism to his program of virtue-based education: first, Milton opposes the Ramist tendency to reduce the art of logic to an instrumental rationality; second, he foregrounds the metaphoric basis for the central term ratio; and, third, he rejects the all-encompassing claims typically made for Ramist “method.” At one level, the only innovation that Milton explicitly claims for his work is the textual format: rather than presenting text and commentary separately, he points out that he has “woven” the commentary into the main text of Ramist axioms (CPW viii:). As Brian Weiss explains, “Ramist assumptions about the nature of a liberal art . . . encourage the scholar to imitate work that has already been done in the field. The axioms are considered established.” The scholar’s main task is to “add further remarks and clarification.” We might therefore expect that Milton would use his commentary to shape subtly the meaning of the fixed axioms in new directions. Milton, however, does not hesitate to alter even the first and most basic axiom when he states: “Logic is the art of reasoning well

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

[ars bene ratiocinandi]” (CPW viii:). In this opening line of the treatise, Milton alters the key term in the Ramist source text, which reads: “the art of discoursing well” [ars bene disserendi]. According to Ong, Milton’s use of ratiocinandi rather than disserendi “situates him farther out than Ramus had been along the trajectory moving logic from an art of [oral] communication to an art of presumably solipsistic thought.” Likewise, John Connor sees this passage as evidence of Milton’s post-Restoration inward turn. Such a reading, however, presumes that Milton means by the term ratio something less than disserere. Indeed, Milton argues that logic is properly concerned with “reasoning,” rather than “discoursing,” because the latter refers only to “the art of questioning and answering, that is, of debating” (CPW viii:); in effect, Milton insists that logic involves more than debating, so that to restrict logic to disserere “is too narrow” (viii:). A similar question arises toward the end of Milton’s Preface, as he recounts the different ends of the respective liberal arts and mentions that “reason can be used . . . without speech” (viii:). Ong takes this passage as further evidence that Milton views logic as part of “thinking” that “goes on independently of language.” But Milton uses “reason,” or ratio, here to indicate an ordered relation – the way in which any given thing can cause other things. In a general sense, Milton simply presumes that things besides speech – like sculpture, or architecture, or trees – can be rationally ordered. As we have already noted, Milton distinguishes in Of Education between the use of reason (as an ethical faculty) and the art of logic. In this case, he suggests that “reason,” even as deployed by the art of logic, need not be so narrowly understood. Indeed, Milton goes so far as to insist upon the intrinsically evaluative character of even the art of logic in practice. After discussing the first part of logic as inventio (the “finding” of arguments), Milton explicitly rejects the tendency to refer to the second part of logic as judicium (judgment) rather than dispositio (arrangement). He insists that judicium and dispositio are not synonyms: “judgment [judicium] is not the second part of logic but more like an effect common to both [parts, i.e., inventio and dispositio]” (CPW viii:). In effect, Milton stipulates that the name “judgment” should not be applied to just one part of the logical art, because judgment, or evaluation, is necessarily intrinsic to both parts of logical practice. Neither Ramus nor Downame includes such a stipulation, but such a view is consonant with Milton’s insistence that the faculty of reason (which the art of logic merely aids) is intrinsically evaluative insofar as its telos is to participate in reality that is good in itself. This is hardly a reductive treatment of either logic or the faculty of reason.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

A second way in which Milton departs from Ramist practice is in rejecting the tendency to occlude the metaphoric basis for its own terms. In the second chapter of his text, in the very act of defining logic, Milton states: Quicquid enim est, aut esse fingitur, subjectum est Logicae, ut supra demonstravimus. Argumentum autem propri`e neque vox est neque res; sed affectio quaedam rei ad argumendum; quae ratio dici potest ut supra. Tractat igitur Logica neque voces, neque res. Voces quidem, quamquam & sine vocibus potest ratiocinari, tamen, quoties opus est, distinctas & tant`um non ambiguas, non improprias, ab ipso usu loquendi videtur jure san`e postulare: res ipsa artib. quasque suis relinquit; arguendi duntaxat inter se quam habeant affectionem sive rationem considerat. Ratio autem dicitur, voce a` Mathematicis petita, qua terminorum proportionalium inter se certa habitudo significatur. (Works, xi:–, original italics)

—————————— For the subject of Logic is whatever exists or is claimed to exist, as was shown above. But an argument properly speaking, is neither a word nor a thing, but a certain relevance of a thing to arguing; it can be called a reason [ratio], as above. Logic therefore treats neither of words nor of things. Although it is possible to reason without words, nevertheless logic seems quite justified, by the very convention of speech, in requiring that whenever words must be used they be distinct and thus unambiguous, and not inappropriate. Things themselves logic leaves to their several arts, considering only the relevance or ratio [rationem] to arguing which they have among themselves. Ratio, borrowed from mathematics, is a word by which is signified a certain relation of terms proportional to each other. (CPW viii:–)

In the Latin text, the word ratio appears in each of the three paragraphs. The sense of the Latin passage is slightly altered, however, by the choices in the translation and the placement of italics: in the Latin ( and Columbia edition), the italics in the first and last instance of ratio emphasize a connection between them as the same root term; in the translation this connection is downplayed because the first instance is translated but the last two are not. The translated version emphasizes the connection between the last two instances of ratio, at the same time that it leaves them in their Latin form, suggesting a shift in meaning (perhaps toward the more “mathematical” sense of its English cognate) away from the first instance of ratio that is translated “reason.” The translation is a perfectly justifiable way to indicate an apparent shift in connotation for this term that has such wide lexical range; however, the choice also obscures something that would be more obvious to the reader of the Latin text. Milton is clearly not using ratio here to indicate a human faculty. Rather, he suggests how the

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technical term in the art of logic derives ultimately from broader meanings. Initially, this might seem like another instance of the very problem that Ong cites; the passage seems to assume that “thinking goes on independently of language.” However, by stipulating that the logical meaning of ratio (as the relevance of a thing to arguing) is borrowed from the mathematical meaning of ratio, Milton foregrounds the metaphoric basis for one of logic’s central terms. This sentence does not appear in Downame’s commentary. Milton is not simply rehearsing an etymological commonplace here; he is, at this point in his text, defining the central subject of the art of logic and, in doing so, departing from his source material in order to add this detail. In effect, Milton suggests that the logical term ratio is borrowed from mathematics because, in the same way that a mathematical ratio involves a proportion between numbers, logical reasoning involves a proportion between terms. Milton does not imply that logic is mathematics but that we can understand the logical sense of ratio by analogy with the mathematical sense of the term from which the logical meaning derives. In order to appreciate the implications of this departure from Ramism, we should recall Thomas Hobbes’s claim that reason is “nothing but Reckoning (that is adding and substracting).” For Hobbes, the human faculty of reason is indeed reducible not only to the art of logic but to the art of mathematics. Hobbes does not suggest that the idea of logical reasoning is ever borrowed from the mathematical sense of ratio because “reason,” in his account, simply is indeed calculation. Here, the importance of Milton’s single word “borrow” becomes most striking. By pointing out that the logical sense of ratio is borrowed from mathematics, Milton not only suggests the similarities but also keeps the distinction between the two arts of mathematics and logic, not to mention the distinction between the art of logic and the faculty of reason. The third way in which Milton departs from Ramist norms is by insisting that Ramist “method” is not all-encompassing. Against the Ramist insistence that there is only one correct “method,” which involves moving from the general to the particular, Milton notes that the Ramist approach is merely one possible “method of teaching” among others: From this [definition of “method” as a movement from universals to singulars] it is understood that it is here a question of method of handing on (tradendi) or teaching, rightly called analytic, and not one of invention [inventio, discovery]. For the method of invention, which by Plato is called synthetic, proceeds from singulars, which are prior in time and present themselves first to the senses, and by whose induction general notions are gathered. (CPW viii:–)



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Of Education refers to the synthetic method as that which is “necessarily follow’d in all discreet teaching” (CPW ii:). By contrast, the analytic method of Ramist logic would be deployed only in the later years, once the students have been sufficiently prepared for the demands of abstract thinking (CPW ii:–, cf. –). In effect, the synthetic method is used at the start because the movement from particulars to universals fits more readily the human process of discovery as it operates apart from formal instruction. In short, Milton does not equate Ramist method with the universal operation of the faculty of reason as it engages the created order generally. In contrast to the analytic method of Ramism, the synthetic method is closer to the general experience of reading, where various particulars are construed together in order to apprehend relations and wholes. Because logic is for Milton an art “employed to help nature,” it is not necessary for “those whose native ability is active and strong [to] torture themselves” doing analytic exercises (CPW viii:). In this case, Milton’s statement simply presumes that the ethico-cognitive faculty of reason should not be confused with the technical, and metaphorical, use of “reason” in the art of logic. When Milton points out that the mode of “place” (locus), understood literally, is a subject in physics rather than logic (CPW viii:), his resistance to the totalizing claims of Ramism effectively joins with his critique of the tendency in Ramism to obscure its governing conceptual metaphors. Likewise, Milton concludes his last chapter, titled “On Method,” by stipulating that “to orators and poets should be left their own account of method, or at least to those who teach the art of oratory and poetry” (CPW viii:). In this way, Artis Logicae demonstrates that Milton values Ramist “method” primarily for its pedagogical effectiveness in helping to organize a known body of material for teaching, rather than for its claims as a universal method for investigating all reality. Thus, not only does Areopagitica’s exploration of metaphorical limits find a place in Milton’s logic text, but the account of educative reading that he develops in the tract is an instance of the kind of synthetic reasoning that he mentions in Artis Logicae. Although he published what is known as a Ramist logic text, Milton’s text resists those specific aspects of Ramism that are most deeply associated with the rise of modern rationalism. We may now draw several conclusions regarding Miltonic reason, rhetoric, and educational reading which arise from the combined consideration of Of Education, Areopagitica, and Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio. The first two implications offer important corrections to customary accounts of Milton’s writing. First, although the larger trajectory of Ramism, as part of print culture more generally, resulted in a diminished importance for the

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role of memory in European intellectual culture, to project that change back onto Milton is not warranted. Despite the consequences of Ramism in this regard, Milton, for example, obviously shared in the residual belief that the extensive cultivation of memory was part of education. He often simply presumes such a view, but in Of Education, when he describes the study of Demosthenes, Cicero, Euripides, and Sophocles, he explicitly advises that some of their speeches should be “got by memory” (CPW ii:). Only after completing such memory work and extensive study in philosophy, biblical studies, and rhetoric are students then permitted to study logic “so much as is useful” (ii:). Despite the tendencies of Ramism with respect to memory, Milton presumes rather than argues the need for a cultivated memory. A second important implication arising from the mutual illumination of these three texts is Milton’s belief that people are capable of learning from one another through a shared enjoyment of truth. The modern and postmodern critical tendency to presume that all intersubjective persuasion, all rhetoric, is inherently coercive will obscure this aspect of Milton’s writing. Despite Milton’s most radical formulations of Protestant individualism and despite his own aptitude for self-teaching, he maintains that not all knowledge, not even all religious knowledge, originates exclusively in the regenerate conscience. This should be obvious, given Milton’s profession as a teacher and his authorship of Of Education; his self-presentation as a solitary prophet, however, could be misconstrued to imply a quasi-Cartesian individualism. The pivotal mistake is to think that a consistent, or even extreme, formulation of the Protestant emphasis upon individual accountability necessarily entails a solipsistic epistemology and ecclesiology. Even within the argument of Areopagitica, the emphasis upon conscience does not entail atomistic individualism; Milton clearly presents an image of scholarly investigation as part of friendship: “when a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditats, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends” (). The entire argument of Areopagitica presumes that people are able to learn truth from one another that they could not discover alone. This point would not need stating, except that Milton is typically characterized as the advocate of a solipsistic “church of one.” The very concept of “educative reading,” as it operates in Areopagitica but also in Milton’s poetry, presumes that the discovery of truth is a shared undertaking. As we shall see, Milton’s major poems presume an important place for both the implied community of readers and their capacity to remember amid the reading experience.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

In addition to these corrective conclusions, several further implications arise from the combined depictions of reason in these three texts. Of Education demonstrates the connection between Milton’s ethically driven pedagogical progression from sensible to intelligible truth and his belief that a regenerate conscience enables sanctified participation in beauty. The process of sanctification described in the educational treatise involves a re-ordering of recta ratio that is not merely subjective: the ordering entails a restoration of the human freedom to participate in the divine ratio (the Christo-poetic sense of reason) that informs all creation. In this respect, Milton’s deployment of “reason” as peaceful rhetoric in Areopagitica draws upon his earlier characterization of “regenerate reason” in Apology against a Pamphlet (): For doubtless that indeed according to art is most eloquent, which returnes and approaches neerest to nature from whence it came; they expresse nature best, who in their lives least wander from her safe leding, which may be call’d regenerate reason. So that how he should be truly eloquent who is not withall a good man, I see not. (CPW i:, emphasis added)

Although the general connection between virtue and true eloquence is a commonplace in the rhetorical tradition, Milton’s ethico-cognitive sense of “regenerate reason” unites epistemology, ethics, and rhetoric in a single faculty. The use of this faculty underlies Milton’s sense of logic’s inseparability from rhetoric. Thus, although Artis Logicae does not focus explicitly on ratio as a faculty, Milton’s technical treatment of logic consistently implies its limitations as a formal art and its deep connection to rhetoric as its end. He clearly situates the art of logic as a beneficial, but not necessary, help to rhetoric, in the same way that logic may serve “to help nature” (CPW viii:). Similarly, the very definition of “arguing” in Artis Logicae suggests a rhetorical orientation: arguing is “showing, explaining or proving [ostendendum; explicandum, probandum]” (CPW viii:; Works, xi:–). The parallel passage in Downame’s commentary speaks only of that which “indicates” (indicat) and “shows” (ostendit). By comparison, Milton’s three-fold definition of logical argument more clearly suggests the respective modes of epideictic, deliberative, and forensic rhetoric. Ultimately, Milton’s basis for interrogating the most characteristically modern aspects of Ramism arise from his assumption that the ethico-cognitive faculty of reason is not reducible to the arts of logic or rhetoric but is their source. Milton does not simply insist upon the intrinsic unity between logic and rhetoric; as in Areopagitica, he consistently reconfigures the classical sense

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of “right reason” into something divinely rhetorical by situating it within the overarching biblical story which extends from creation to eschaton. We shall consider further aspects of this narrative reconfiguration in chapters that follow, but we can already discern how the public art of rhetoric can consequently, according to Milton, become the occasion for practicing virtue that results from saving faith. Most importantly, in Areopagitica, Milton directly identifies the action of that faculty, including the activity of persuasion, as an aspect of the created goodness by which humans originally participated in the gratuity of divine glory. This is why Milton views not only reason but also rhetoric as inherently peaceful, despite the ways in which rhetoric in a fallen world can become a means of deception or coercion. As theologian David Hart points out, “persuasion is always intrinsically violent only if there is a truth (power) more basic than what appears in the figural play of language; if being is figural play, and originally peaceful, one may conceive of peaceful persuasion.” In Of Education and Areopagitica, Milton most clearly posits such a view of reality by his insistence upon the gratuitous goodness of creation and the beatific end for which humans are made. Although a fallen world requires that a “Warfaring Christian” must struggle to know truth, such struggle is warranted and hopeful in Milton’s account only because that struggle is neither eternal in itself nor destined to culminate in stasis; rather, creation culminates in infinite participation of the harmony arising from peaceful difference that is the beatific vision (CPW ii:–). As we shall see in the next chapter, this same understanding of reason informs Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration. From this account of suasive reason we can also discern how Milton’s account of educative reading, or trial “by what is contrary,” could operate in his poetry that we shall consider in later chapters. At the same time, his poetic attempts to bring readers to encounter truth may embody some of the same tensions observed in this chapter. On the one hand, Milton’s concern is for education in Christian virtue, or sanctification in its fullest sense. His writing may therefore attempt to prod readers so that none would remain comfortable as a nominal “heretick in the truth” whose relation to the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christ remains impersonal and disembodied. Moreover, Milton may attempt such rhetorical effects by presenting readers with images, metaphors, and ideas whose limitations he explores in a continually revisionist manner. On the other hand, Milton’s emphasis on the process that allows the constitution of virtue does not imply that he views truth simply as a volitional function devoid of intellectual content. Rather, the individual encounter with truth is ongoing



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

specifically because that process unfolds within the larger biblical narrative. To inhabit that story ethically – that is, for knowledge to be lived out – requires consistent engagement of the will. Because reasoning, according to Milton, necessarily involves volition, we may expect that his poetry often arranges intellectual engagement in such a way that provokes moral reasoning. At the same time, the central place that Milton gives to both memory and volition in understanding suggests that his poetry might require those who read to do so more than once and to remember previous readings. For example, Paradise Lost presumes that readers, rather than being “surprised,” would read the poem twice: allowing them to read the beginning of the poem with a concrete sense of how it anticipates the middle and the end, and vice versa. Finally, because the educative engagement of the memory, will, and understanding unfold within a world of consequences, the interpretive choices made by readers involve a freedom that is not randomness, as though the end to which one’s reasoning progressed was irrelevant to the means. Instead, Milton emphasizes the continuity between textual interpretive choices and consequences in the world because he views regenerate reason’s participation in the goodness and beauty of creation as continuous with its understanding of human texts.

chapter 3

Monism and Protestant toleration

Milton’s view of “right reason,” or conscience, provides a key link between his widely acknowledged monism and his arguments for Protestant toleration. As I indicated in Chapter , the argument here considers Miltonic “reasoning” under three different aspects. I refer, in one sense, to his “discursive” reasoning, which indicates the relationships among a network of specific claims that Milton engages throughout his writing: claims regarding what is real (ontology), claims about human nature (anthropology), and claims concerning human virtue (ethics) and civil society (politics). In a different sense, developed further in later chapters, I refer to “Christo-poetic” reasoning to indicate the indirect ways that Milton deploys Scripture to intimate how the above network of claims is intrinsic to the form and content of divine self-revelation. The third aspect of Miltonic reasoning that I distinguish might be called “ethico-cognitive,” which indicates action taken by the human faculty of “right reason,” or conscience. This chapter completes our initial heuristic treatment of the evidence in some of Milton’s prose for the “discursive” network of claims by continuing to unfold the central place of “right reason” among those claims. “Conscience” is obviously central to Milton’s prose arguments for Protestant toleration. We will consistently misconstrue those arguments, however, if we assume that Miltonic conscience participates in a reality that consists entirely of the strife between sheer necessity and randomness. By understanding how both Milton’s ontological and his anthropological monism differently inform his view of conscience, we can appreciate how his arguments for Protestant toleration embody his alternative to the binaries of modern rationalism. All created being, in Milton’s account, derives from a differentiation in prime “matter,” which is in itself good and not merely neutral atomistic material – I refer to this view of prime matter as Milton’s “ontological monism.” As we shall see, the goodness intrinsic to the matter of creation’s being arises from his insistence that authentic difference can be rooted in 

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

the unity of self-diffusing divine goodness. Milton’s ontological monism underwrites his claim that “right reason,” or conscience, is the human capacity to participate in such goodness that is beyond the self and peaceful, an ethical alterity without coercion. That human capacity for rational participation derives from a further distinct but related argument that Milton advances for what I call his “anthropological monism” – the insistence that humans are not bipartite but unitary. Ultimately, Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration tacitly depend upon both kinds of monism (ontological and anthropological) but that dependence can be discerned only if we do not conflate or confuse the two kinds of monism. Reserving our treatment of “matter” in Paradise Lost for the next chapter, this chapter focuses upon De Doctrina Christiana and A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (). The argument begins with a brief account of the relation between “right reason,” ontology, and matter, as they appear in De Doctrina Christiana. In view of this relation, we can understand how Milton’s insistence upon the ontological goodness of creation underwrites his belief that the human faculty of “right reason” is capable of participating in the good, as well as the true, and the beautiful. As we then consider his arguments for Protestant toleration in Civil Power, we can discern how Miltonic “conscience,” or “right reason,” derives its capacity as a peaceable intersubjective moral and interpretive guide from the anthropological monism that informs the relation between faith and works. rethinking milton’s monism The critical consensus that Milton’s later writing articulates a “monist” ontology seems virtually beyond challenge: Whether major contemporary Miltonists are concerned with the psychogenesis of the mature Milton’s poetry, his theodicy, his relation to emergent liberal political ideologies and subjectivities, his metaphysics, his response to the new science, his aesthetics, his epistemology, his morality, or his theory of value, they agree on at least one thing: the late Milton is a monist.

If we allow for the different kinds of “monism” being invoked here, the extent of such critical agreement is truly remarkable; the consensus includes not only Milton critics as different as Harold Bloom and Dennis Danielson; even John Rumrich agrees with Stanley Fish on this point. William Kerrigan offers what might be considered a representative definition of “monism” when he defines it as “the inseparability of matter and spirit, body and soul.” Because Milton never disowns entirely the conventional

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vocabulary that distinguishes and even contrasts “body” and “spirit,” however, the precise character of his monism remains contested. In particular, the persistence of the terms “spiritual” and “carnal” in Milton’s prose tracts has led William Walker to maintain that Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration depend upon “dualist ontological premises” that are in direct conflict with the monism commonly attributed to him. Similarly, Rachel Trubowitz, noticing some of the same tensions as Walker, asserts that Milton is simply both a monist and “a dualist as well.” One may, of course, easily present an a priori definition of both “monism” and “dualism,” such that Milton becomes an advocate of both. Walker and Trubowitz, however, seem to define “dualism” as the allowance of any distinction between “body” and “soul,” which they then interpret, in Cartesian terms, as a distinction between two different substances. But Kerrigan’s point, based on what De Doctrina clearly states, is not that there is no distinction between body and soul for Milton, but that they are properly inseparable. Even beyond such initial clarification, however, most accounts of Milton’s monism share a deeper problem: they tend to conflate his account of creation’s “first matter” (ontological monism) with his account of human indivisibility (anthropological monism). Only by understanding how Milton’s anthropological monism is distinct from and yet depends upon his ontological monism can we begin to appreciate how each kind of monism tacitly informs his arguments for Protestant toleration. Ultimately, I argue that Milton casts his arguments for Protestant toleration specifically so as to challenge the kind of anthropological dualism that informed many of his opponents’ arguments for religious coercion. Early in discussing the doctrine of God, De Doctrina Christiana rehearses some customary arguments for the general human apprehension that God exists. Milton first cites the way in which the “beauty and order” of “things which exist in the world” indicates “a supreme creative being” who has made the world “for some definite purpose, and that a good one” (CPW vi:). Milton presents this interpretation of the cosmos as a contrast specifically to those who would equate God’s being with “nature or fate.” As he explains, those who posit “nature” as the source of creation “have to introduce the concept of chance” and thereby subscribe to a dualistic account of God’s being, as well as creation (). In this way, Milton explicitly rejects from the outset any attempt to posit that either creation or its ultimate cause (God) consists of a dualistic strife between nature and chance, or order and chaos. His claim implies the recognition that to locate the cause of the creation in “nature” (and therefore in both nature and chance) necessarily reduces the Christian God to either an

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

undifferentiated “all” (pantheism) or a Zeus figure who is merely one being amid others, subject to fate. The underlying challenge that Milton addresses here is the attempt to hold together a simultaneous understanding of God’s immanence and transcendence. In short, how can God be understood as genuinely different from creation without implying that creation adds something to God’s being? In effect, Milton tries to avoid collapsing the difference between God and creation altogether without implying that there is an abyss between them that cannot be crossed. As we shall see below, Milton addresses such tensions by appealing to “matter” in a unique way specifically because he does not have recourse to the traditional ways in which Christian theology has thought about unity and difference together: that is, the doctrine of the Trinity (unity and difference in God) and the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) (unity and difference in the relation between God and creation, explained more fully below). Beyond citing the beauty and order of the cosmos as indicating a good creator God, Milton cites the evidence “provided by the phenomenon of Conscience, or right reason [recta ratio]” (CPW vi:). Milton does not presume that conscience is an infallible moral guide located within the self. Rather, even if a conscience may be suppressed or systematically deformed, the persistent act of making unavoidable judgments regarding the difference between good and evil testifies, according to Milton, to the existence of God, not only as the maker of a good creation, but as the final judge of human actions. In one sense, both of these general claims, regarding the goodness of creation and the operations of conscience, might seem incidental to the ensuing biblical-exegetical preoccupations that make up most of De Doctrina; however, both of these issues are central to Milton’s account of “matter,” as the means by which he thinks the relation between God and creation. The first and most consequential point to notice regarding the account of “matter” in De Doctrina Christiana is that Milton introduces the topic in specifically Aristotelian terms by insisting that creation must have a “material cause” which comes from God: There are, to begin with, as everyone knows, four kinds of causes, efficient, material, formal and final. Since God is the first, absolute and sole cause of all things, he unquestionably contains and comprehends within himself all these causes. So the material cause must be either God or nothing. But nothing is no cause at all. (CPW vi:–)

The “four causes” are, of course, four ways in which one can give a “reason” – in the discursive sense – for a specific being’s existence. By

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framing the discussion of creation in this way, Milton makes clear that he means by “matter” the “material cause” of creation, which he does not reduce either to the mere motion of particles or to the sensible body (corpus). As he explains in Artis Logicae, when defining a material cause, “matter” is “not peculiar just to sensible and corporeal things. But of whatever sort the things themselves may be, such, too, should be their matter: sensible matter for sensible things, eternal matter for eternal things, and so on” (CPW viii:). The most important point to notice about Milton’s ex deo account of creation is that its goal is to preserve the unity and goodness of creation without eliminating the difference between God and creation: It is, I say, a demonstration of God’s supreme power and goodness that he should not shut up this heterogeneous and substantial virtue within himself, but should disperse, propagate and extend it as far as, and in whatever way, he wills. For this original [formless] matter was not an evil thing, nor to be thought worthless: it was good, and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good. It was a substance, and could only have been derived from the source of all substance. It was in a confused and disordered state at first but afterwards God made it ordered and beautiful (CPW vi:)

Milton goes on to explain that, although “matter” in itself enjoys a kind of goodness, the beauty of creation arises only from the addition of forms (individuation). The formal (that is, essential) difference between God and creation has already been reiterated and developed in De Doctrina by the insistence upon the numerical unity of God’s essence, and consequent rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity (vi:–, ). Thus, the overall purpose in this account of matter is, by contrast, to explain how creation comes “from God” without reducing God to creation. The treatise follows here the distinction between “form” and “matter” that Milton describes in Artis Logicae: “Since the essence of any [individuated] thing is partly common and partly proper, matter constitutes the common essence and form the proper [essence]” (CPW viii:). Because Milton takes form to be the principle of individuation, that “through which a thing is what it is” (), the principle of matter is the “common essence,” or common being, shared by all creation. In effect, “the Father,” in Milton’s account, names the numerically singular and incommunicable “proper essence” of God, while the material cause of creation is God’s “common essence.” Although there is a sense in which matter may be initially disordered, Milton also makes clear that he does not view that disordered state as intrinsic to matter – chaos is not necessary to being. Regardless

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

of the ultimate success or failure of Milton’s theological arguments, we should note that his goal is specifically to avoid both pantheism and a gnostic denigration of creation. The key point is that “matter,” or the material cause of the cosmos, is the means by which Milton understands the simultaneous unity and difference between the being of God and the ordered yet contingent being of creation. As I suggested above, Milton deploys “matter” in this way specifically because he does not have recourse to the “analogy of being” (analogia entis). Until the late-medieval consequences of nominalism had made themselves fully manifest, the analogy of being had typically served to explain how creation derives its being from God without identifying God as creation. The analogy of being is not a comparison between God and creation; rather, based on the insistence that there is no formal or adequately proportional comparison available between God and creation, this doctrine maintains that to predicate the “being” of both God and creation involves a use of the word “being” that is analogical (not univocal or merely equivocal) yet also allows for God’s infinite surpassing of creation. God’s eternal, selfdonating being is understood to be analogous to yet infinitely greater than the contingency of creation’s being; at the same time, such predication of analogy amid infinite difference is not merely arbitrary equivocation. At a deeper level, however, this doctrine concerns more than theological predication because the possibility of such speech presumes that reality, or being, is intrinsically analogical. In this sense, the analogy of being might more accurately be called the “analogization of being as infinite difference.” “Being,” in this account, is not a category that encompasses God and creation, but is first the infinite difference between the Father and the Son that is traversed (but not eliminated) by the Holy Spirit. As a result, “the infinite distance between the world and God is grounded in the other, prototypical distance between God and God.” The Miltonic De Doctrina does not, of course, subscribe to either the doctrine of the Trinity or the analogy of being. My point, however, is that the theological treatise attempts to negotiate some of the same tensions that those doctrines were intended to address. This is one specific way in which, despite De Doctrina’s inadequacy as a gloss on Paradise Lost, the theological text can serve as a uniquely helpful context for understanding Paradise Lost because the epic’s biblicism similarly attempts to articulate the relationship between God and creation without explicit recourse to either the doctrine of the Trinity or the analogy of being. In short, Milton’s radical application of material causation to the creation of the cosmos allows him to insist upon the goodness of creation, as a real participation in divine goodness, while

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preserving the “properly essential” (formal) difference between God and creation. In this respect, Milton’s rejection of a dualistic ontology (nature vs. chance) at the outset of De Doctrina is directly related to his characterization of “right reason,” or conscience, as a moral guide; at the same time, his account of matter also underlies what I call Milton’s “anthropological monism.” Because the entire universe of individuated beings consists of uniting form with morally charged matter, the human faculty of “right reason” is able to discern and participate in that goodness. Milton’s insistence that the material cause of the universe is not evil, or even merely neutral, is central to his account of creation’s goodness. Milton’s anthropological monism is distinct from his account of matter but follows directly from it. In short, Milton insists that a human being is “not double or separable” and is not “composed of two distinct elements, soul and body”: On the contrary, the whole man is the soul, and the soul the man: a body, in other words, or individual substance, animated, sensitive, and rational . . . But in the context where “body” means merely physical trunk, “soul” may mean either the spirit or its secondary faculties, such as the vital or sensitive faculty . . . The idea that the spirit of man is separate from his body, so that it may exist somewhere in isolation, complete and intelligent, is nowhere to be found in scripture, and is plainly at odds with nature and reason. (CPW vi:)

In arguing for the inseparable unity of body and soul in constituting a human being, Milton is clear that he means by “soul” the animated form of the whole person and that he does not mean to reduce the soul to the “merely physical trunk.” Nor does the inseparability of body and soul deny the existence of spiritual beings generally. As the argument goes on to stipulate, “all form – and the human soul is a kind of form – is produced by the power of matter [ex potentia materiae]” (CPW vi:; ). Because matter per se is “only a passive principle” (vi:), forms are produced “as a result of that power [potentia] which God had implanted in matter” (vi:). Because of the inseparability of matter and form – since they compose individuated beings that are not divisible except by abstraction – all forms necessarily consist of matter (vi:). Because the soul is the “form” of the whole human being produced out of the potentia of matter (CPW vi:–; ), Milton thus does not insist that the human body and soul are indistinguishable or that they are identical, but that they are inseparably united in the constitution of individuated human beings. On this basis, according to De Doctrina, the possibility of corruption arises only after the differentiation of individual beings. Prime matter itself

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

is incorruptible, because it has no individuated being. In the very assertion that matter per se is “incorruptible,” De Doctrina clearly distinguishes first matter from individuated beings. The original goodness of individuated beings derives from the goodness of matter, but only the individual is susceptible to corruption: “it is not the matter nor the form [of a given being] that sins,” but the whole individuated being (CPW vi:). In this way, Milton distinguishes the goodness of matter sharply from the origin of evil in the moral choices of individual beings. The very possibility of corruptibility that is a function of entering a “mutable state” requires individuation in which matter and form are inseparable (vi:). Thus, in Milton’s view, such an ex deo account of creation is pivotal in maintaining that God, the immediate source of matter, is not the sufficient cause of evil. In this sense, “right reason” not only enables human participation in the goodness of creation’s being, but also shapes the extent to which a given rational creature will continue, or not, in that participation. In Milton’s account, however, the faculty of reason ultimately does more than participate in goodness; it enables human participation in all three of the transcendentals: the true and the beautiful, as well as the good. Milton states explicitly that beauty in creation appears only with the differentiation of matter into various forms, the order of which also enables intelligibility (CPW vi:). In short, insofar as “matter” identifies the unity of creation, and “form” identifies difference, matter–form individuation is the means by which De Doctrina articulates the simultaneous unity of and difference within creation. This explains why “right reason,” in Milton’s account, is not simply the coercion of difference within a randomness of undifferentiated neutral flux. Instead, because forms are implanted within matter that proceeds from divine goodness, and because individuated beings realize that potential for order and beauty through the union of matter and form, reason is the peaceful means by which humans may participate in the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation. The root difficulty in most critical treatments of Milton’s “monism” is a tendency to miss the difference between his ontological monism and his anthropological monism and to reduce both of these, in turn, to what Milton calls the “merely physical trunk.” As we shall see, presuming such a view also leads to a systematic misunderstanding of Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration. Although critics seem to agree ostensibly that Milton is neither a Cartesian dualist nor a Hobbesian mechanist materialist, they tend to reduce his account of matter to the motion of colliding particles. They may distinguish Milton’s monism from that of Hobbes by emphasizing the role of chaos (and linking matter to a

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libertarian volitional randomness) or the infusion of an animating life into all matter. Nevertheless, such accounts of Milton’s monism share a tendency to treat first “matter,” which is not corruptible, as a synonym for an individuated “body,” whose very capacities, including possible corruption, derive from being imbued with form. The most notable result of such an assumption is to imagine that, when Milton refers to “carnal” power in his arguments for Protestant toleration, he is deploying a Cartesian notion of “body” as something separable from the human soul. Just such an understanding of the anthropology informing Milton’s arguments has led some critics to claim that his arguments are in fundamental opposition to his alleged “monism.” Throughout his polemical prose, Milton’s consistent rhetorical challenge was to assure his readers, most notably English Parliaments of shifting composition, that to tolerate Dissenters would not necessarily entail either the encroachment of Papal political power or social anarchy. And yet, how exactly Milton’s anthropological monism does indeed relate to his arguments for Protestant toleration remains to be understood. conscience and divine rhetoric If we consider Milton’s central arguments in A Treatise of Civil Power, we can discern their basis in theological categories that derive from his anthropological monism. We are not attempting here either to offer an account of Milton’s politics, ecclesiastical or otherwise, or to give a comprehensive account of the historical contexts for Milton’s prose. The first aim here is simply to trace the central argument in Milton’s tract regarding why state coercion is not capable of promoting authentic religious practice among Protestants. In Civil Power Milton does not draw readers’ attention to metaphysical subtleties but claims to argue instead from “scripture only” (CPW vii:). Nevertheless, Milton’s anthropological monism continues to inform his arguments for religious toleration, insofar as he argues for the right ordering of the whole human person, rather than presuming a Cartesian distinction between the incommensurable substances of body and soul. Milton’s arguments in Civil Power consistently hinge upon his account of the relationship between “justification” and “sanctification,” or “saving faith” and “works,” respectively. The tract advances four closely related arguments for Protestant toleration. The first argument follows from his definition of “protestant religion” as rooted in two authorities alone: the external and non-coercive authority of Scripture, and the internal authority

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

of the Holy Spirit at work in the conscience (CPW vii:). Milton argues, in effect, that to use “carnal” force, rather than Scripture, as a means to persuasion is to reject truly Protestant faith, in favor of a return to salvation by works. Conversely, church discipline is not abolished but limited to separation from fellowship (, ). Against the claim that the magistrate should punish heretics, Milton defines “heresy” in such a way that it cannot include any Protestant committed to the authority of Scripture but must include anyone who admits religious coercion (–). Milton’s second main point against the use of force in matters of religion is that, even if a magistrate were capable to judge in such matters, “he hath no right” (CPW vii:), because the nature of Christ’s authority does not govern by “outward force.” In that context, he maintains that the sum of “euangelic religion” “is told in two words, faith and charitie; or beleef and practise” (). In short, genuine faith cannot be coerced, while authentic charity is necessarily the “fruit of the Spirit” that results from such faith (–). He cites Galatians :– as an elaboration of the meaning of “charity” (similar to the previous citation of  Corinthians ), in order to show the absurdity of trying to coerce people into exhibiting, for example, joy, peace, or patience (CPW vii:–). Thus Milton’s arguments against trying to coerce certain actions (good works) that should be the result of saving faith ultimately hinge upon the specific character of the unity between justification and sanctification, not the simple distinction between them. As a result, Milton’s second point in Civil Power also contains within itself the logic for the final two remaining points: that coercion in religious causes violates the nature of “Christian libertie”; and that coercion fails to achieve its own ostensible ends of glorifying God or benefiting others. For example, in addressing the claim that coercion is necessary in order to ensure that “prophane and licentious persons” “not neglect the performance of religious and holy duties,” Milton points out that such an argument falsely assumes that “prophane and licentious persons” even can perform those duties to God’s glory at all (CPW vii:): that is, such a view reveals a tacit faith in salvation by works. As Milton elaborates, in making the fourth point of his argument, he views “the foundation of the whole gospel” to be “that we are justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law . . . Surely force cannot work perswasion, which is faith; cannot therefore justifie nor pacifie the conscience” (). Again, the key point here is that the relation between faith (justification) and works (sanctification) is not simply a bipartite disjunction but involves a correct ordering of the entire person. Saving faith, in Milton’s view, necessarily results in virtuous

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action, “charity” or the fruit of the Spirit, the nature of which cannot be compelled. Similarly, vice, or the failure to love God and neighbor, may indeed be a sign of an unregenerate state; however, such virtuous actions can never be the cause of salvation. In referring to Milton’s position, I use the term “Protestant toleration,” in order to avoid misunderstanding, but even that term requires some clarification. At one level, the term acknowledges that Milton never argues for what we would today call “religious toleration.” When, in Civil Power, Milton excludes Catholics from the scope of religious toleration, he follows the customary English practice of citing the status of the Papacy as a foreign civil power (CPW vii:). Nowhere in his prose does Milton explicitly extend his arguments for religious toleration beyond Protestants. Milton also, however, consistently throughout his prose, from his anti-prelatical tracts of the s through Of True Religion (), assumes a tautological definition of “Popery” as “religious coercion.” As a result, “Protestant toleration” does not mean that Milton advocated simply the toleration of all self-described “Protestants.” As we have seen, Milton bases his arguments on the central Reformed teaching regarding the relation between faith and works. Those who approve of state-sponsored religious conformity are not, in Milton’s account, Protestants, in the sense that their explicit belief and practice implies salvation by works. On this basis, Milton applies the label, “Popery,” not only to the ostensibly Protestant Episcopal establishment but also to the Westminster Assembly. As Milton describes the situation at the end of his  sonnet, “On the new forcers of Conscience under the Long PARLIAMENT,” “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.” Lest there be any doubt what Milton means by “Priest,” the sonnet directly compares the Westminster Assembly to the Council of Trent. In short, Milton assumes that religious toleration will cease to be itself if it tolerates religious coercion, which he calls “Popery.” Consequently, civil power, in Milton’s view, can be legitimately used to protect Protestants from those, including those calling themselves Protestants, who would institute religious coercion. This clarification is important because any number of examples could be cited to show that Milton supported the use of civil force against people who identified themselves as Protestants (e.g., CPW vii:). Such examples are not relevant to the point that I am making here. Milton never argues against the use of civil force per se against Protestants; he argues, rather, that such force should not be used to compel religious practices. His argument is not that everyone should or could just get along, or that coercive power could be simply abandoned in a fallen world; his point is that, in a polity where civil authorities claim to be Protestants, such

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people have no warrant for compelling a conformity of religious practice among Protestants. The specific logic of Milton’s argument is crucial to his larger claim because the Reformed distinction between faith and works had been used in conjunction with a kind of dualist anthropology to argue against toleration among Protestants. The best illustration of the underlying theological difficulties that Milton had to address here is arguably found in the ecclesiology of Richard Hooker. As early as , in Of Reformation, Milton presumes that his readers are familiar with the crux of Hooker’s ecclesiology. But, both early and late in his career as a polemical prose writer, Milton engaged opponents across the theological spectrum who assumed the core of Hooker’s ecclesiology. In his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity Hooker never argues for religious coercion; instead he simply presumes that English Nonconformists, or Dissenters, are, in effect, modern-day Donatists and that, as such, they deserve their suffering at the hands of government authorities: When instruction doth them no good, let them feele but the least degree of most mercifullie tempered severitie, they fasten on the head of the Lords vicegerents heere on earth whatsoever they any where finde uttered against the crueltie of bloodthirstie men, and to themselves they drawe all the sentences which scripture hath in the favour of innocencie persecuted for the truth; yea they are of their due and deserved sufferings no lesse prowd, then those ancient disturbers [i.e., the Donatists], to whome S. Augustine writeth, saying: “Martyrs rightly so named are they not which suffer for their disorder, and for the ungodly breach they have made of christian unitie, but which for righteousness sake are persecuted.” (italics added)

Make no mistake, what Hooker means by “the least degree of most mercifullie tempered severitie” that gives rise to the “due and deserved sufferings” of Dissenters Milton would call “the use of civil power to support an ecclesiastical cause.” Again, Hooker never argues explicitly for religious coercion; however, his arguments are crucial to Milton’s context because Hooker presumed the possibility of a legitimate place for coercion among Protestants and, more importantly, Hooker’s version of Reformed ecclesiology was assumed by many of Milton’s opponents who did indeed argue explicitly for religious coercion. On the basis of the distinction between justification and sanctification, the central argument in The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity emphasizes that the reality of the church as a “body misticall” must not be confused with the operation of the church as a “sensible knowne companie” (..– ..). In keeping with a generally Augustinian ecclesiology, Hooker states: “If by external profession they be Christians, then they are of the visible

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Church of Christ,” regardless of whether they are part of the mystical reality of the church (..). Hooker, however, builds on this dual character of the church to argue, not only that human knowledge is limited to others’ professions of faith, but that the distinction between the “visible” and the “misticall” church also designates different realms of authority (..; ..). Christ is obviously head of the eternal reality of the mystical church (..), but in the temporal realm “an external regiment of outward actions” is ruled mediately by Christ through “them whom Christ doth allow to be the Rulers and guiders of his Church” (..–..). Hooker argues that church ceremonies, by virtue of their concern with the “external” aspect of the church, cannot be determinative regarding eternal salvation (..–..). In this sense, Hooker bases his argument for the royal supremacy of the visible church ultimately upon his interpretation of the Reformed doctrine of sola fide. By emphasizing the independence of all temporal “works” from questions concerning one’s eternal salvation, or saving faith, Hooker implies that all such works are potentially subject to civil authority. In developing his argument, Hooker engages an ongoing debate over the nature of “things indifferent,” or adiaphora, and responds to previous treatments of the topic by Calvin and others. For Calvin the doctrine of things “indifferent,” regarding salvation, is not merely “internal” to the believer, because those things involve the edification of others and the practice of virtue. Calvin’s teaching on adiaphora is not to be equated with the doctrine of sanctification, but is intended to facilitate the process of sanctification. By contrast, when Hooker claims that “matters necessarie unto salvation are of a different nature from Ceremonies, order, and the kinde of Church-governement,” he elaborates that claim by appealing to the distinction between doctrines that “we know and beleeve” and those things that must be “done,” or the “workes of charitie” that are “matters of action.” Ultimately, Hooker’s distinction between matters of faith and matters of discipline simplifies Calvin’s treatment of adiaphora, insofar as Hooker identifies the entire sphere of temporal sanctification – all human action – with the realm of things “indifferent” to salvation and which constitutes the realm of civil authority and potential compulsion. In this way, Hooker’s two-church ecclesiology demonstrates how the Reformed distinction between “faith” and “works” could potentially be deployed to justify religious coercion. The use of state coercion in matters of church discipline was indeed argued, not by Hooker himself, but by those who drew upon his ecclesiology, on the specific grounds that “works” concerned only temporal or

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

external government of the visible church and did not pertain to saving faith. Hooker’s influence can be seen, for example, in two of the most notable post-Restoration arguments for religious coercion: Samuel Parker’s Ecclesiastical Politie () and Edward Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation (). Both works “broadly adopted the adiaphorist argument,” but they were really “works of theology” only “in a limited sense” and “were not efforts at pastoral commitment or catechesis.” Nevertheless, the central adiaphorist claim, which was largely mediated to seventeenthcentury Anglican churchmen through Hooker, was central to the legitimation of ecclesial coercion because the ends of church government were deemed temporal rather than eternal. The most obvious and definitive instance of Hooker’s influence upon the Restoration church polity is the case of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon: During [Clarendon’s] exile in Cologne, from  to , he would translate Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity into Latin, so that its message might be understood in Europe . . . He quoted Hooker in the declarations which he wrote for the King on the eve of the civil war, and the first paragraph of his History of the Rebellion is deliberately modelled on the beginning of Hooker’s great work. Thereby he implicitly declared his aim: his History of the Rebellion was to be a secular counterpart of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

In different ways, both Hooker and Clarendon were concerned with “secular” topics, in that they were both concerned with outward, temporal government. Clarendon would view his own role as Prime Minister in instituting the Conventicle Act () and the Five Mile Act () – parts of what came to be known as the “Clarendon Code” – as consistent with the ecclesiology that he learned from Hooker. The Conventicle Act prescribed, among other things, penalties of imprisonment, fines, or removal to the colonies for those caught in attendance at a house meeting of “five or more persons in addition to the household.” Thus, although Hooker never argued for religious coercion, Clarendon clearly viewed the Restoration church polity as an attempt to apply Hooker’s Lawes. And in this respect, Clarendon’s legislative accomplishments embody most clearly those aspects of Hooker’s legacy that Milton continued to oppose as late as Of True Religion (). In , of course, Milton’s rhetoric is still aimed ostensibly at Presbyterians; however, Milton had been engaging arguments informed by Hooker’s ecclesiology since the s, and in Civil Power he reveals his clear understanding that the doctrine of “things indifferent” to salvation was central to arguments for Protestant religious conformity of all kinds, including Presbyterian:

Monism and Protestant toleration



They who would seem more knowing, confess that these things [church ceremonies] are indifferent, but for that very cause by the magistrate may be commanded. As if God of his special grace in the gospel had to this end freed us from his own commandments in these things, that our freedom should subject us to a more greevous yoke, the commandments of men. (CPW vii:)

Milton evidently recognized that the root issue informing Presbyterian arguments for Protestant conformity in s, no less than Episcopal arguments in the s or s, is the assumption that the distinction between the temporal “visible” church and the eternal “mystical” church permitted civil law to order the former because it was “indifferent” to the latter. In effect, such a practice of state-instituted religious conformity, according to Milton, denied the unity of saving faith and temporal works, and, by implication, the unity of the human person, by effectively giving the body over to the coercive power of the state. Thus, because some kinds of Reformed ecclesiology, based on the mere emphatic division between faith and works, had been used to underwrite arguments for state-sponsored religious conformity among Protestants, Milton roots his arguments for Protestant toleration in not simply a division between faith and works but the right ordering of the relation between them – unity amid difference. In this way, Milton’s rejection of anthropological dualism provides the basis for his rejection of the bipartite ecclesiology informing adiaphorist arguments for Protestant conformity. According to William Walker, however, Milton “presents a theory of religious toleration which is grounded not in the identification of but differentiation between the spirit and body.” Walker further claims that “this differentiation [between spirit and body] is not between manifestations of one corporeal substance, but between different kinds of being.” But, as I have pointed out, Milton’s anthropological monism never involves the identification of soul with body. Moreover, Milton indicates that corporeal reality is subsumed within spiritual reality, even as all beings, angelic or human, are differentiated out of one first material cause. As we have seen, all created being, according to De Doctrina, involves a unity of matter and form, and therefore arises ex potentia materiae, but Milton never argues for “one corporeal substance.” And yet, one might ask, is there not something true in Walker’s general claim, aside from problems in terminology? As Walker explains: By differentiating between what is inside and what is outside, Milton implies that the human is an essentially bipartite entity, consisting of an interior space occupied by divine spirit and mind . . . and something which, defining the boundaries of



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

that inner space and separating mind, spirit, and persuasion from “outward” things such as rules, Scripture, and the magistrate’s force, is fundamentally different from that inner space and its contents.

So says Ren´e Descartes, but not Milton. Milton’s entire argument for Protestant toleration depends not upon a fundamental difference between spirit and body, but upon the right ordering of their continuity: that is, the insistence that the spiritual condition of “justification” (saving faith) necessarily results in temporally embodied “sanctification” (charity) but not vice versa. Indeed, as we have seen, Milton’s arguments recognized in the dualistic anthropology and ecclesiology of his opponents the basis for their arguments for religious coercion. The obvious clue that something crucial has dropped from Walker’s summary is that he lists Scripture among the “outward” things without observing that Milton’s main argument hinges upon the difference between two “outward” things: Scripture and “the magistrate’s force”; Milton describes the former as “spiritual,” not because Scripture is located inside an inviolate Cartesian “soul,” but because its ability to persuade does not depend upon compulsion. For Milton, Scripture is both external and spiritual because it aims to persuade without coercion. A typical example of the “dualist” language that Walker claims to find in Milton’s tract appears in the claim that the government of Christ “deals only with the inward man and his actions, which are all spiritual and to outward force not lyable”: That the inward man is nothing els but the inward part of man, his understanding and his will, and that his actions thence proceeding, yet not simply thence but from the work of divine grace upon them, are the whole matter of religion under the gospel, will appeer planely by considering what that religion is. (CPW vii:, emphasis added)

The passage goes on to repeat Milton’s central claim regarding the unity of faith and works, or “faith and charitie; or beleef and practise.” At one level, the fact that Milton makes any distinction at all between “inward” and “outward” is a problem for Walker only because he assumes that Milton’s monism entails an identity of body and soul, rather than their dynamic unity. At a deeper level, however, Milton’s repeated insistence upon the “actions” of the “inward man” makes it apparent that he assumes the “inward man” to include temporal embodiment. Milton’s repeated basis for the contrast between “inward” and “outward” is the difference between the use of verbal persuasion and the use of force, not whether the action is embodied.

Monism and Protestant toleration

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Those who assume Cartesian categories might be misled by such terminology, but Milton is not ambivalent on this point: in his usage, “carnal” indicates a condition of the whole person, not the mere fact of the body. What distinguishes “carnality” for Milton is not the simple fact of something being “outside” the soul but a condition of trust in brute force. Similarly, when Milton points out that church discipline is biblically limited to “separation from the rest” and should never involve “any corporal enforcement or forfeiture of money” (CPW vii:), he does not imagine that such separation from fellowship does not involve the body. As we have seen, Milton’s point is that coercion of the body cannot achieve the specific religious end – the cultivation of Christian virtue, or “charity” – that its practitioners claim. That goal must be achieved by “persuasion”; that is, by means of engagement with Scripture. In this respect, the fact that Walker’s list of contrasting binaries puts “persuasion” on one side and “Scripture” on the other side also reveals a presumed disjunction within a reality that Milton views as unified: the assumption that Scripture is peaceful persuasion. In a similar way, Milton defines “conscience,” as “that full perswasion whereby we are assur’d that our beleef and practise, as far as we are able to apprehend and probably make appeer, is according to the Will of God & his Holy Spirit within us” (CPW vii:). Persuasion includes but is not limited to inner conviction because it also involves the ability to “probably make appear” what one understands. Just as he maintains that Scripture is “external” but not coercive, so also Milton maintains that conscience is “spiritual” but not merely subjective because of its rhetorical orientation toward others in peaceful persuasion. Thus, in Civil Power, Milton does indeed speak of an “inward” condition that is opposed to the “carnal” but these terms involve a contrast between two orientations of the whole person, not between disembodiment and embodiment. Milton does distinguish, on occasion, between body and soul, but he does so not to indicate two different substances – two kinds of reality with utterly different causal matrices – but to indicate the soul as the dynamic form of the whole person, differentiated out of first matter. More importantly, in Milton’s account, the “carnal” trust in force to cultivate Christian virtue presumes a false anthropological dualism that would drive a wedge between spiritual “belief” and bodily “works,” rather than recognizing the necessary unity between them. In this way, his arguments depend directly upon his anthropological monism, in that his insistence upon the inseparability (not identity) of body and soul provides the tacit basis for his repeated claim that embodied sanctification, or charity, cannot be a mere outward imposition, but must result from inner transformation.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

In a deeper sense, Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration also depend upon his ontological monism, in that conscience, or right reason, enables human participation in the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation that arises from the union of form and matter. Thus, although Protestant toleration is specifically not a species of “peaceful difference,” Milton’s political arguments on that point do depend on his belief that human reason is a poetic gift of peaceful difference. At this point, we return to questions of biblical interpretation that we began to unfold in the previous chapter. By way of conclusion, we shall briefly consider one specific way in which Milton views “right reason” as providing an interpretive guide for understanding Scripture. As with many of his earlier tracts, Of Civil Power invokes an eschatological context, part of the larger biblical story, near both the beginning and the end. Milton quotes from the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew ) in developing the first point of his argument, and he invokes the Last Judgment at the end of his tract (CPW vii:, ). In both cases, Milton appeals to the Eschaton, or the culmination of the larger biblical story, in order to emphasize both the limitations on human judgment and the ultimate fitness of God’s omniscient judgment regarding questions of conscience. The tenor of Milton’s rhetoric here is notably different from earlier tracts, like Of Reformation or Areopagitica, in that this later appeal to the Eschaton does not emphasize the location of the immediate parties within an apocalyptic battle between the Saints and the Antichrist, but insists instead upon the mixed character of the church before the end of time. Here, the invocations of final judgment emphasize, by contrast, the uncertain present temporal duration before the Eschaton. The key point here is that the very same insistence upon the “mixed” character of the visible church, and the human inability to know with certainty the true membership of the elect or mystical church, is also the basis for Richard Hooker’s claim that the regulation of the visible church is therefore subject to temporal civil government. How does Milton take this same aspect of the overarching biblical story, the hidden makeup of the “mystical” church until the Eschaton, and reverse its temporal political implications? He does so by appealing to the dynamic relation between “faith” and “charity,” or “justification” and “sanctification,” which is rooted in the regenerate conscience. In short, although works may be “indifferent” to earning one’s salvation, many actions are nevertheless a necessary result of faith being worked out, a process that by its nature cannot be compelled. In this way, by applying what he elsewhere calls the “analogy of Evangelick doctrine” (CPW ii:), Milton invokes eschatological obscurity specifically to argue

Monism and Protestant toleration



against religious coercion. His insistence upon the relationships between these claims explains why the “rule of faith” and the “rule of charity” are synonymous for Milton, insofar as he views “faith” and “charity” as distinct but inseparable, and why that inseparability, rooted in the single faculty of right reason, forms the basis for his arguments against Protestant religious conformity. Moreover, when Milton describes Scripture as the “sole interpreter of itself to the conscience” (CPW vii:), he is not claiming that Christians can have unmediated access to truth; rather, he assumes that the root of created reality, the Logos, is intrinsically mediational and therefore open to the human faculty of right reason when restored by faith. His practical interpretive point is that, when a person seeks to understand a specific passage of the Bible, the conscience needs to be informed by Scripture, and specifically the “evangelic religion” epitomized by the right relation between “faith and charitie” (vii:). In this way, through the memory of the Scripture already internalized by the believer, the biblical text can become an “interpreter of itself ” over time, but not by some immediate illumination that would deny even the role of the reader’s consciousness in interpreting the text. The most common objections to the version of sola scriptura and conscience that Milton advances in Civil Power tend to take two main forms. Critics tend either to deny that Scripture is really “external” at all, suggesting that Milton’s appeal to “conscience” is merely subjectivism, or to maintain that appeals to Scripture necessarily involve a coercive authoritarianism that denies freedom to others. Both objections rest ultimately on similar ontological assumptions. The first objection assumes that genuine alterity, real difference from the self, is not possible unless it is coercive. In such a view, any indication of peaceful alterity is immediately reduced to subjectivism – a “peace” that is such because it does not involve genuine otherness. The second objection seems to allow for alterity but assumes that all rhetoric or persuasion is necessarily coercive. In a kind of mirror-image of the first objection, this view interprets any suggestion of peaceful alterity as a falsification of the violence that constitutes difference. Both objections assume that, insofar as any reality is truly outside the self, such reality must be coercive, otherwise it is not really “outside” the self at all. At this point in our argument we meet what is probably the most difficult challenge of historical imagination for Milton criticism today: the challenge to imagine, even as a possibility, an intersubjective truth, goodness, and beauty that is outside the self but not coercive. Our concern here is not to argue for or against either Milton’s position or the ontology most commonly assumed by critics; my point



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

is simply that these differing assumptions embody contrasting ontologies and, more importantly, that to presume reality is necessarily violent will preclude Milton’s ontology from even appearing as an alternative. As we shall see, Milton presents in Paradise Lost just such a contest between competing ontologies, but even that contest will appear as such only to the extent that one allows for any alternative to the modern rational binaries of coerced order and violent chaos. At the beginning of this chapter I noted that Milton seems to deploy “matter” in unique ways in De Doctrina Christiana specifically because he does not have recourse to the traditional theological means for thinking about unity and difference together: that is, the doctrine of the Trinity and the analogy of being. In this respect, Milton seems to replace the “analogy of being,” as a basis for thinking unity and difference, with the “analogy of Evangelick doctrine,” or that dynamic union between faith and works. Understood hermeneutically, Milton implies that there is a remembered content that is intrinsic to regenerate “right reason”: that is, the relation between divine gift (faith) and human response (charity) which is neither sheer necessity nor simply random because, unlike mere chaos, their relation manifests beauty (glory). We need to recall here Milton’s point that chaotic first matter is not beautiful apart from the differentiation that is created being (CPW vi:). In theological terms, Milton’s “biblical reasoning” is the narrative unfolding of “Evangelick doctrine,” which results in a union of doctrine (true gift) and ethics (charitable response) that gives rise to human participation in divine glory (beauty). This is why for Milton to insist merely upon the division between “faith” and “works” is inadequate without the additional insistence that they are also united toward an end that is unavoidably aesthetic. In this way, Milton’s view of right reason, his anthropological monism, and his ontological monism are inseparable from one another and, through that unity, inform his arguments for Protestant toleration. Creation is good in Milton’s account because every creature derives from the good ex deo first matter, the “common form” that unites with “proper form” to make up each being. Conscience, understood as recta ratio, or “regenerate reason” (CPW i:; vi:), enables participation in the differentiating forms, while materia is the unity amid that difference. Because the conscience is the faculty by which the life of faith is worked out in charity, Milton views the formation of conscience by Scripture as the basis for his arguments against religious conformity among Protestants. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not, in Milton’s view, intrinsically coercive, nor is matter in itself chaotic. Although reason may be capable of coercion and matter

Monism and Protestant toleration



may be subjected to a condition of chaos, neither condition is ontically necessary; the divine act of creation is the gratuitous glory-manifesting union of matter and form. The resulting differentiation among beings that constitutes creation is peaceful, according to Milton, and is suited for participation by human “right reason” specifically because creation subsists through the first peaceful difference from God: that is, Divine Reason, or the person of the Son. Thus the next chapter considers the relation between Christology and first matter in Paradise Lost.

part ii

Biblicist Rhetoric and Ontology in Paradise Lost

Part II introduction

As we begin the second part of this study (Chapters –) and shift our focus from Milton’s prose to his major poetry, we shall not abandon his prose, but neither shall we presume that it offers merely an explicit formulation of what he says more obscurely in his poetry. We shall continue to notice the connections between the claims that make up the network of “discursive” reasoning we have traced in Milton’s prose, which includes the “ethico-cognitive” sense of reason as conscience, or “right reason.” Our primary focus, however, now turns to what I call Milton’s “Christo-poetic” reasoning: that is, the indirect ways he deploys Scripture to intimate that his claims regarding ontology, anthropology, virtue, and civil society are actually intrinsic to divine self-revelation, the center of which is the Son, or the divine Logos, who is both Ratio and Oratio. Against the modern view that reason is merely a calculative capacity, the purpose of which is to master fortune, Milton posits that human reason enables participation in creation’s gratuitous goodness. As Chapters  and  have shown, Milton’s view of human reason arises from his two-fold belief that Divine Reason, or the Son, is the poetic gift of peaceful difference from the Father who enables creation’s being, and that humans, in turn, are made in the image of God revealed in the Son. In this way, Milton’s mature poetry embodies “biblical reasoning” in its fullest sense by uniting all three aspects of “reason” – discursive, Christo-poetic, and ethico-cognitive – specifically through the indirection that Scripture makes possible. His major poems display a narrative unfolding of divine and human reason as peaceful difference not only by interpreting biblical texts but by offering themselves to be interpreted by the biblical intertexts that constitute their imaginative weave. Our consideration of Milton’s poetry shall also be informed by attention to three aspects of his writing that we have observed thus far in his prose. First, as we noticed in Chapter , with particular reference to The Tenure 



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

of Kings and Magistrates (), Milton appreciates well the rhetorical importance of basing his arguments upon convictions that he shares with his prospective readers. His appreciation for such rhetorical considerations also appears in Areopagitica (), as we noted in Chapter , but this aspect is most strikingly apparent in the differences between Civil Power () and Of True Religion (). While the former, addressing a Presbyterian Parliament, draws proof texts from the Westminster Confession, the latter, addressing an Anglican Parliament, appeals instead to the Thirty-Nine Articles (CPW viii:). In the case of Paradise Lost, Milton deploys the interpretive openness of Scripture as a common basis for appeal, in order to move his readers toward specific suasive ends, even while leaving other contentious theological issues unresolved. The interesting critical debates arise, of course, from disagreements regarding what we take to be Milton’s suasive aims in Paradise Lost. Only by considering the poem as a whole can we begin to explore the relationship between the poem’s explicit and implicit rhetorical aims. Nevertheless, as we begin our analysis, we shall need to give some attention to the initial explicit indications of rhetorical purpose. Even if, for example, we take the poem’s explicit statement of purpose to be ironically subverted in some way, the intelligibility of that subversion depends upon first noticing the surface meanings of the text. A second aspect of Milton’s writing that we shall continue to notice at work in his poetry is his claim, in Areopagitica, that fallen humans best discover truth through “triall” “by what is contrary” (CPW ii:). Not only does Areopagitica advocate learning to read in such a way that truth may be enjoyed through one’s encounter with falsehood, but the tract also, in its exploration of the metaphoric and epistemic limitations of language, embodies in itself an opportunity to learn and practice such reading. Most importantly, Milton views Scripture as his model for that kind of instructive writing. As he explains: [The Bible] oftimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnall sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader. (CPW ii:)

The fact that we might easily insert “Paradise Lost,” given its reception history, at the beginning of this sentence suggests the extent to which Milton attempts in his poetry to imitate not only biblical content but biblical form as well. In drawing attention to this aspect of Milton’s writing, this

Part II introduction



discovery of truth through its contrary, I am not advocating Stanley Fish’s model for interpreting Paradise Lost, in which the reader is repeatedly caught believing a lie, and thereby “surprised” by his or her own sinful condition. I propose instead that Milton deploys the biblical model of presenting fragmentary aspects of truth which are gradually transformed, not by being simply discarded as sinful, although some may be, but often by being set in a larger, or a different, context that may deepen, shift, or reverse the initially apparent meaning of those fragments. That new context may be within the poem or within a biblical passage that the poem invokes. Once again, in contrast to Fish’s account of repeatedly discovered readerly culpability, I suggest that what initially seems like an inevitable logic of supplementary antagonism between “good” and “evil” (coerced order versus a violent rejection of that order) becomes interrupted in Paradise Lost, not by an opposing force, but by the revelation of a love that is infinitely greater than the violence of either a necessary order or chaos. The ongoing possibility of the Satanic perspective in Paradise Lost arises from the fact that, although divine love does not depend ontically upon evil, the revelation of that love as infinite appears epistemically to finite fallen creatures only as deception and coercion are permitted to unfold to their furthest extent. In more specific terms, Milton’s prose and poetry both show that he understood the resurrection of the Son as revealing an infinite goodness that exceeded the most that cunning and violence could do – the resurrection of the body transgresses the boundary of death. As I indicated in Chapter , however, readers who fail to distinguish between Milton’s ontic and epistemic claims will consistently miss his point: every indication of epistemic limitation will be interpreted as an ontic claim regarding the divine need for evil in reality, rather than as a function of either the finitude or the fallen will of the human knower. The ongoing interpretation of fragmentary truth in a fallen world is not merely arbitrary, according to Milton, because of a third aspect of his writing that we shall continue to notice in his poetry: the central place of the dynamic relation between faith and works, or justification and sanctification. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, few claims are more basic to Milton’s thinking than the two-fold insistence that works cannot earn salvation but that saving knowledge, or faith, necessarily results in Christian virtue. Insofar as faith induces the regeneration of “right reason,” or conscience, that enables sanctification, or Christian virtue, the faculty of right reason constitutes the point of union between eternal



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

salvation and temporal virtue. This specific relationship between faith and works, as we have seen, is the basis for Milton’s insistence that Christian virtue, by its nature, cannot be coerced. In this way Milton’s emphasis upon the relationship between faith and works also becomes, in his account, the necessary content that is intrinsic to the regenerate reason that enables believers to interpret Scripture without necessarily either endorsing mere license or attempting to coerce Christian virtue in others.

chapter 4

Divine justice and divine filiation

To pose the question, as Paradise Lost does, whether the “ways of God to men” are just requires some presumed meaning to the term “ways.” As a result, any consideration of the question, whether tending to a positive or a negative answer, must deploy some working assumptions regarding the character of the causal relationship between the posited “God” and creation. Milton’s experience with Calvinist Presbyterianism showed him that if that relation is reduced to absolute necessity, without recourse to any sense of what is aesthetically fitting, then divine action in and toward creation must appear as tyrannic coercion. I contend that Milton appreciated this difficulty, and, as result, Paradise Lost implicitly addresses the theological problems that arise from reducing divine causation of the cosmos to absolute necessity. As Chapters  and  have shown, understanding Miltonic reason as the poetic gift of peaceful difference transforms our perception of his ontology, his account of what is real. For Milton, neither divine nor human reason is mere instrumental coercion because reality, or being, is not chaos but subsists as divine gift, or charity. Such a view contrasts with the ancient and modern tendency to understand “reality” either as fundamentally chaotic, or as statically determinate, or as the strife between two such principles. Against the ways that these ontological alternatives had influenced early-modern Christian theology, Milton’s poetry deploys biblical idiom in order to preserve a central place for beauty, or glory, in Christian ontology. As we have seen, for Milton, human “right reason,” or conscience, is the capacity to participate in the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation’s alterity as made through the Divine Reason (the Son) in a peaceful union of matter and form. As we now turn to Paradise Lost, we shall first consider how Milton’s depiction of “First Matter” relates to the epic’s presentation of the Son as Divine Reason; we shall then trace how the very form of the Father–Son dialogue in Book  is rooted in biblical precedents. Rather than ask what these passages of the poem state directly about God, I ask what the indirect engagement of biblical texts 

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

implies about God’s character through the relation between the Father and the pre-incarnate Logos. I contend that Milton’s biblicism embodies an interpretive openness which is pivotal to his depiction of the divine ratio as the poetic gift of peaceful difference. Before turning to the Christology of Paradise Lost, however, we should consider briefly how our interpretation of the poem will be shaped by our understanding of the biblical epic genre and by what we assume is meant by the words “Providence” and “justify” in the poem’s opening lines. Ultimately, I contend that Milton’s treatment of divine justice in the same Father–Son dialogue in Book , specifically with respect to predestination, depends upon maintaining an interpretive openness that imitates biblical form. biblical epic and theodicy Paradise Lost is ostensibly both a biblical epic and a theodicy. As the former, it integrates elements of biblical and classical narrative; as the latter it ostensibly attempts to demonstrate, at the very least, that the experience of evil in the world does not logically preclude belief in the existence of an all-powerful and wholly good creator-God. There is, however, no necessity that these two undertakings coincide. Given the central role of Fate in classical epic tradition, we might expect that a biblical epic would choose, by contrast, to emphasize Providence. To assert Providence over Fate, however, is not the same as attempting to show God’s justice, and in adding the latter aim Paradise Lost goes further than the genre of biblical epic might require. On the other hand, there is no apparent internal necessity for composing a theodicy in the form of a biblical epic. Milton’s theodic objectives in Paradise Lost are, of course, more specific and more ambitious than a bare claim of logical consistency. In this respect, we should be careful, when applying the term “theodicy” to Paradise Lost, not to assume, as Walter Ong seems to do, that a reductive instrumental view of reason necessarily accompanies such an undertaking: Milton lived in the the middle years of the age of theodicy, which logicized even divine Providence. Leibnitz’s Th´eodic´ee . . . was to climax the age in , undoing the book of Job and showing how God himself operated according to logical laws, which Aristotle had providentially discovered and Ramus had streamlined. For Ramus had been convinced a century and a half earlier that all creation was logical.

In Chapter , we considered the ways in which Milton explicitly rejects or resists the most characteristically modern aspects of Ramist logic. By

Divine justice and divine filiation

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ascribing the most reductive form of Ramism to Milton, Ong’s statement removes any difference between belief that the universe is uniquely fitted for participatory human understanding and belief that every causal relationship is susceptible to explicit and direct logical analysis. Ong’s preoccupation with the legacy of Ramism leads him to miss the fact that Paradise Lost is precisely not an axiomatic deductive theodicy according to Ramist method. Indeed, Milton’s choice to deploy the poetic mode of biblical epic in treating both Providence and divine justice reveals the extent to which Milton rejects the modern reduction of “reason” to sheer necessity (conditional or absolute). Yet whether one favors the view of, for example, William Empson or Dennis Danielson regarding the ultimate failure or success of Paradise Lost as a theodicy, there remains the more basic question: “Why should Milton choose the specific genre of a biblical epic as the means to carry out his treatment of divine justice?” This question is especially pertinent, given Milton’s previous career as a polemical prose tract writer. Why did he not simply write a tract, “On the Justification of God’s Ways”? The point of integration between Milton’s narrative strategy and the theodic telos of his epic is rooted in his view that reason, human and divine, is not reducible to a function of relations between propositions. This is why Paradise Lost does not aim to assert the mere possibility of divine justice entailed by the freedom of its claims from logical contradiction; the poem’s ostensible audacity lies in trying to show that the specifically biblical account of God’s ways, and of the reasons for the present state of the world, is actually true in a way that competing accounts are not. Moreover, Milton’s sense of what constitutes truth is not separable from an aesthetic sensibility arising from his Christocentric reading of the larger biblical story: that is, typology. Milton’s use of typology unites the stylistic and theodic dimensions of his poem by unfolding the ontology of peace, or harmonious difference, that he understands to be the source and goal of creation. In considering the narrative strategies available to a biblical epic, Erich Auerbach’s account of the main stylistic differences between biblical narrative and Homeric epic provides several helpful observations. Auerbach points out that in biblical stories we find “certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings,” as well as a sense of “historical development.” By contrast, in the epic narrative, we meet “fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground,” and very little sense of either “historical development” or “psychological perspective.” Moreover,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

he argues that the differences between the two modes of representation are rooted in the differing claims that the two texts make upon their readers. Rather than try to “flatter” or “enchant” readers, as Homer’s stories do, biblical stories “incarnate” “doctrine and promise” in such a way that the “world” they depict is “not satisfied with claiming to be historically true reality – it insists that it is the only real world.” Paradoxically, those stories that offer the less determinate and more obscure narrations end up making the greatest claims upon the lives of readers. Ultimately, by contrasting the capacity of biblical style to intimate the character of “a hidden God” with the Homeric tendency to “externalize thoughts,” Auerbach emphasizes that such differences in form between biblical and Homeric narratives have unavoidable theological implications. Given this relation between literary form and theological content, how is Milton able to restructure the biblical story according to the demands of the epic genre without fundamentally distorting the content that he takes as his ostensible authority? In short, he does so through a rigorously biblicist narrative strategy shaped by typological coherence. Typological, or “figural,” interpretation of the Bible was initially a way to unite the stories of the Hebrew Bible with the Christian New Testament. As a mode of reading generally, typology depends upon the view that both a “type” (for example, Moses) and its fulfillment in Christ have the status of concrete historical persons, but that their unity is in the divine purpose that connects them. In contrast to its deployment of allegory to portray ontic privation, Paradise Lost draws upon a typological reading of Scripture to present biblical narrative in a way that is consistent with the externalized elaboration of epic style. In this sense, Milton’s epic does not simply reshape a biblical narrative into a classical form and ethos; in a crucial sense, he converts the epic genre itself by relocating it within the biblical metanarrative and shaping it according to a Christian heroism defined by that narrative. Given the modern tendency to construe typology as a kind of abstraction, we should also note that, for Milton, the relation among types, including their fulfillment in the Incarnation, always involves concrete particulars. For Paradise Lost this means that even where, in keeping with the demands of epic style, Milton elaborates the surface detail of his narrative – whether through detailed description, extended simile, or elaborate dialogue – he does so in a way that is biblically allusive in the form and content of its details and harmonizes with the larger biblical story that the poem is in the very process of recapitulating. Thus, rather than simply using biblical intertextuality to achieve a uniform externalization that would be

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consistent with epic Fate, the typological use of Scripture enables Milton to preserve the interpretive openness of the biblical narrative, even while increasing its density of surface detail, its specificity, and its intelligibility. Milton often achieves the foregrounding and illumination of the epic style by juxtaposing normally distant elements of scriptural narrative and imagery. This he does in such a way that the intertexts contribute to a mutual interpretation within the trajectory of the larger narrative – the story whose origin (arch¯e) and end (telos) is divine gift, or charity. As I have suggested, one major problem among Milton’s Protestant theological contemporaries had become how to make divine grace appear as something other than random violence. Paradise Lost retells the larger biblical story in such a way that the epic elaborations are consistent, in form and detail, with what is either plausible or at least possible within the larger biblical story. Moreover, the reconciliation of biblical content and epic style is not, for Milton, an end in itself, but is integral to the poem’s treatment of divine justice. Ultimately, his poetic biblicism attempts to disclose how Divine Reason may justly mirror contingent creaturely violence back to itself without coercion being ontically necessary. providence and justice Paradise Lost’s explicit statement of intention, to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justifie the wayes of God to men” (PL .–), seems to be taken most often by critics as a redundant statement, rather than as an indication of a two-fold purpose. But the poem actually proposes two narrrative aims here. We should first notice that Providence is neither fate nor predestination. “Providence” involves the claim not only that God governs the universe but that the purpose or end of that governance is good (cf. CPW vi:–); Providence thus becomes most apparent in situations where divine power turns toward a good purpose what would otherwise be evil. In contrast to the operations of classical epic Fate, which tends to appear as the mere imposition of divine, or supra-divine, arbitrary will, effecting a good end is the distinguishing feature of Providence. Because the good purpose of creation is ultimately eternal, humans may participate in but cannot comprehend that end entirely. In this respect, Milton’s use of the word “assert” is precise; the term suggests his recognition that Providence cannot be proven by some combination of finite human experience and subsequent deductions. One may infer indirectly from various kinds of evidence that the purpose of creation is, or is not, ultimately good, but the answer to the question is not susceptible to definitive proof by

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direct logical analysis. At the same time, some answer to that question is often necessarily presumed, whether positively or negatively, by any given human discourse. As Milton points out at the beginning of De Doctrina, if one does not believe that the origin and end of creation is good, then one typically opts for a dualistic ontology of strife between “nature” and “fortune” (CPW vi:). The oft-quoted ensuing line of Paradise Lost, regarding the intention to “justify the ways of God,” now appears in a different light. Because Providence has been explicitly invoked, the surface meaning of “justify” appears to mean “declare or show the justice” of God’s ways, in the same way that “magnify” in the Psalms means to “declare or show the greatness (magnitudo)” of God (e.g., Psalm :). More crucially, the very topic of divine justice arises only because God’s purposes are assumed to be good; that is, only if Providence is assumed. If one does not believe in Providence, if one rejects the idea that the origin and end of creation is good, then there is no need to show God’s justice. The term “justify,” in this respect, offers an important contrast to “assert”; the pairing of these two different verbs indicates that, unlike Providence which must ultimately be either asserted or not, the justice of divine action can to some extent be humanly intelligible, but only if one does indeed believe in Providence. These two aspects of Paradise Lost’s explicit two-fold purpose – to assert Eternal Providence, and to show the justice of God’s ways – are therefore distinct and yet logically connected. The final point to notice in these opening lines is the stipulated attention to the justice of God’s “ways,” rather than to the justice of God’s being. The reference to “ways” relates justice back to the topic of Providence, insofar as Providence concerns not only the good purpose of creation but also God’s governance of creation toward that end. According to Michael Bryson, however, to interpret “justify” in the way that I do might seem “to be straining to maintain an ‘orthodox’ reading” of the poem. According to Bryson, Milton’s aim is indeed to “declare God righteous,” in a sense, but specifically by “changing the way in which God is conceived of by human beings”: that is, by exposing the Father’s monarchy as a false image of God. As both Brian Cummings and Bryson point out, by using the word “justify” Milton draws attention to the root of the word, “justification,” which had formed the crux of Reformed teaching regarding human salvation. According to Bryson, Paradise Lost uses “justify” in order to invoke the customary theological sense of “justification” but does so in order to reverse the normal application of that meaning:

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Milton places God in a position similar to that in which “sinful” and “fallen” humanity is put in the theological doctrine of justification, which focuses on the inability of humanity to redeem itself – even to defend itself – without the intercession of Christ. In Paradise Lost, Milton turns the tables; for Milton, the Son is the poetic figure through whom the justification of God (the Father) is made possible.

We shall consider Bryson’s claims regarding divine kingship in the next chapter, but we should note here that he is correct to emphasize Milton’s central concern with God’s appearance. The main difficulty in the above passage is that Bryson’s argument must isolate the meaning he gives to “justify” from the apparent sense of “Eternal Providence”: in effect, if “justify” means “to declare righteous” the ways of a pernicious god who is otherwise manifestly evil, then Bryson requires readers to disconnect the surface meaning of “Providence” from any attribution of goodness. Otherwise, there is no apparent reason for “God” to need “justification” in the specific sense that Bryson argues – as the Son’s redemption of the evil Father. Such a reading of “justify” could be plausible only if there were any evidence for a reversal of the customary meaning of “Providence.” In effect, as long as asserting “Providence” involves an imputation of complete goodness to divinity, the word “justify” cannot bear the meaning that Bryson suggests. Nevertheless, these lines of Paradise Lost do indeed make use of the theological resonances that are available between the words “justify” and “justification.” Even when Milton had self-identified in the s as a Calvinist, he explicitly acknowledged that the Reformed treatment of salvation, or justification, by grace through faith tended to risk a version of predestination that made divine justice at least obscure: The Jesuits, and that sect among us which is nam’d of Arminius, are wont to charge us [Calvinists] of making God the author of sinne in two degrees especially, not to speak of his permissions. . Because we hold that he had decreed some to damnation, and consequently to sinne, say they: Next, because thos means which are of saving knowledge to others, he makes to them an occasion of greater sinne. Yet considering the perfection wherein man was created, and might have stood, no decree necessitating his free will, but subsequent though not in time yet in order to causes which were in his own power, they might, methinks be persuaded to absolve both God and us. (CPW ii:)

The further difficulty here for Milton, which helps to explain his later turn to Arminianism in De Doctrina, is that although Calvin, in the Institutes, does stipulate that Adam fell “voluntarily,” Calvin is also careful not to equate “voluntary” with “free.” Even more crucially, Calvin later stipulates

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that Adam’s voluntary, if not free, fall was indeed ordained by God: “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it.” The real theological import in the use of the word “justify” in the opening of Paradise Lost is in the fact that what began in the Reformation’s attempt to defend the gratuity of salvation, or “justification,” as a divine gift ended up making God appear as an “unjust” tyrant. In short, orthodox Calvinism, in Milton’s view, risked making God appear evil. Thus, in addressing the problem of God’s appearance in Paradise Lost, Milton’s ingenuity lies in appealing to the most basic tenets of Reformed Christianity – the emphasis upon salvation by faith, and the epistemic primacy of Scripture – in order not simply to assert divine goodness (Providence) but to show the finite but real extent to which Scripture makes divine action intelligibly just. As the example of Calvin demonstrates, Milton appreciated that the mere assertion of divine goodness is not sufficient to ensure that God does not appear as a tyrant. Moreover, as we have seen (in Chapters  and ), Milton’s political experience with Presbyterians had shown him that a de facto admission of sin’s divine ordination depended upon the same view of reason as necessity that legitimated religious coercion among Protestants. Milton’s use of the term “justify” in the opening lines of Paradise Lost does indeed involve a reversal of customary theological usage, but not in the manner that Bryson maintains. In a mirror-image reversal of the way that Protestant “justification” results in “sanctification” but works cannot earn salvation, the opening lines of Paradise Lost imply that a belief in divine goodness (Providence) can enable a limited human understanding of divine justice. The connection, however, between these two aspects of understanding is not a completely predictable function of necessity but is rather intrinsically aesthetic. The intelligibity of the connection between divine goodness and justice depends upon a sense of what is fitting, rather than upon what is either merely random or inexorable: it depends on “decorum,” not in the Royalist sense of premature closure, but that aspect of the “sublime art” of poetry which Milton calls “the grand master peece to observe” (CPW ii:). Paradise Lost is therefore a “sincere” theodicy, in two key respects: it does not presume success in the poet’s attempt to show that divine justice is humanly intelligible, and it foregrounds, in the character of Satan, as well as the perception of God in Book , Milton’s self-awareness regarding the ongoing human possibility that one may indeed deny, or decline to assert, Providence. In effect, the ongoing viability of the Satanic perspective, not only in the early books but throughout Paradise Lost, is not mere

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ruse on Milton’s part or a failure on the part of readers, but is one of the ways in which the poem imitates a cosmos in which people may choose to believe that reality is fundamentally violent rather than poetically selfdonative. In this sense, the traditional Romantic interpretations of Paradise Lost are indeed of the Calvinists’ party without knowing it, insofar as both Calvinism and Romanticism tend to presume that reason is sheer necessity, the only alternative to which is a kind of Dionysian randomness. Thus, Milton’s decision to address the specific topic of divine justice in Paradise Lost does not arise primarily from his supposed inability to recover emotionally from his disappointment at the Restoration of the monarchy (pace Herman). Rather, Milton’s political experience showed him that certain versions of Reformed teaching had given rise to perceptions regarding the complete unintelligibility of divine justice. Moreover, Milton discerned that the legitimation of religious coercion among Protestants and the tendency to make God appear as a tyrant rested upon the shared assumption that the only alternative to “free” randomness is divine “sovereign” coercion. We may, therefore, legitimately apply the term “theodicy” to Paradise Lost in a qualified sense, to indicate generally any treatment of divine justice, goodness, and power, in view of the existence of evil in the world; however, we would be mistaken to read Paradise Lost as primarily concerned to address the “murmuring against providence through all the arguments of Epicurus” that Milton mentions in Areopagitica (CPW ii:). The famous ancient argument of Epicurus, which was preserved by Lactantius and known to Milton, appealed to the existence of suffering in the world in order to deny the existence, or at least relevance, of an omnipotent good God. The argument maintains, in effect, that there is a simple contradiction between the existence of “evils” in the world and belief in a God who is both “able” and “willing” to remove those evils. According to Epicurus, God must be either “not able” or “not willing,” and in either case he would not really be God. At one level, to the extent that Epicurus is properly concerned with the problem of suffering (because his atomism defines “evils” as “pains,” and vice versa ), Paradise Lost is simply about a different topic, in that it focuses on matters of eternal destiny and moral evil, topics in which suffering has a place but is not the ultimate focus. At a deeper level, however, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, the root issue for Milton is the mistaken view of causation that such an argument assumes in its appeal to God’s “ability” – that is, the presumed meaning of God’s “ways.” Epicurus assumes that the hypothetical divine causation, or the “reason” for things, is reducible to absolute

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necessity – in his case, the efficient cause specifically being atoms in motion. The meaning of “ability,” or power, in such a view, is consequently the imposition of one’s will on other bodies by means of such causation. By contrast, as we shall see in the next chapter, Milton views “power” as the ability of a given being to achieve that being’s purpose, or good. In the case of rational creatures, that end ultimately involves participation in divine self-giving. In this sense, the exercise of divine “power” over rational creatures (God’s “ability”), according to Milton, is realized in the goodness of enabling humans to achieve their good as creatures through the uncompelled exercise of right reason in the various fitting choices of self-gift. The key point to which I draw attention here is that Milton discerned in the specifically Calvinist account of sin’s entrance into human history a reduction of reason to sheer necessity or coercion similar to that presumed by the Epicurean argument (a metaphysical rather than atomistic necessity, but still necessity). In this sense, Paradise Lost does not directly address what might be called the philosophical “problem of evil,” except by rejecting the reductive view of reason as coercion which is commonly presumed by such arguments. Instead, the topic of divine justice arises sharply for Milton specifically because the Calvinist interpretation of predestination had made God’s justice a problem even among those who ostensibly affirmed divine Providence: an issue that Book  of Paradise Lost raises but ultimately answers only by indirection in the ensuing narrative as a whole. biblical matter and form Because the Son is the Divine Reason in whose image humans are made, our attention in the ensuing chapters to dynamics of Christo-poetic reasoning in Paradise Lost should begin with some observations regarding how Milton depicts divine filiation. Even to begin a discussion of Paradise Lost with the Son, rather than with the character of Satan, however, is contestable, if not simply falsifying, according to some Milton critics. For example, Neil Forsyth insists that “the place to begin” understanding Paradise Lost is “where the poem (almost) begins”: that is, with the “alluring portrait” of Satan. Beyond the fact that there is little that one could add to Forsyth’s subtle and erudite explanation of Satan’s fascination, such an interpretive approach involves two major difficulties. First, to insist that our understanding of Paradise Lost “begin at the beginning” in this particular way implies a version of “reader-response” interpretation that,

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like Stanley Fish’s, gives implicit primacy to the recreation of a na¨ıve firstreading experience. The “allure” of Satan’s character is not eliminated but much transformed if a reader is mindful of later events in the story, as one can be only in a second reading. As I noted in Chapter , Milton does not advocate the Ramist atrophy of memory and presumes instead that only a second reading of his poetry will give rise to real understanding: that is, to an apprehension of particulars that draws upon a memory of the whole. Thus, for example, the passages in Book  of Paradise Lost that clearly describe Satan and his companions as superlative epic warriors appear much differently to a reader who remembers, on a second reading, the invocation to Book  which interrogates the very conception of a warrior hero. Giving analytic priority to a na¨ıve first reading occludes the central place that Milton gives to memory in implied reading experience. A second difficulty in Forsyth’s emphasis upon Satan as the “beginning” of Paradise Lost is the fact that the epic genre begins emphatically at what is not the beginning, in medias res. I suggest that Milton chose the epic genre as a means to address the topic of divine justice specifically because the genre denies unmediated access to beginnings or origins – in a mode that is appropriate to finite creaturely apprehension of such a topic. For ancient and modern rationalism the difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting unmediated access to the beginning (arch¯e) of things is a problem. Although Forsyth’s argument elsewhere rightly foregrounds Milton’s insistence upon “the impossibility of fulfilling” the mythic “quest for the beginning,” Forsyth’s own choice to give hermeneutic primacy to Satan shows the interpretive need to assume, however provisionally, some answer to questions regarding origin. For Milton, however, mediation is not something to be “overcome” because the beginning, the arch¯e, is intrinsically mediating, signifying, and uttering: “in the beginning [en arch¯e] was the Word.” The inherently mediating quality of “the beginning” is for Milton the basis for the gift of creaturely existence as something genuinely other than God. As we shall see in Chapter , the refusal of that mediating unity amid real difference is the beginning of Satan’s rebellion. In this sense, the crux of the difference between my reading of Paradise Lost and Forsyth’s is encapsulated in the difference between the Greek prepositions en (in) and apo (from). Forsyth gives explicit critical priority to the biblical statement that the Devil was “a murderer from the beginning.” The emphasis upon the originary character of Satan tends to miss the crucial difference between “in the beginning” (en arch¯e) and “from the beginning” (ap’ arch¯e), mistaking the latter for the former. In Paradise Lost, Satan departs from

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

the truth of his own beginning because he rejects the mediating character of his beginning in the Son. In effect, a critical approach that gives primacy to Satan fails to distinguish between the good of peaceful difference that is in the beginning (the Son) and the rejection of the very possibility of such peaceful difference from the beginning (Satan). The Christology that Milton presents in Paradise Lost is obviously not identical to that presented in De Doctrina Christiana. Nevertheless, if we consider the depiction of the Son in Book  of the epic, reserving treatment of the Son’s anointing for the next chapter, we can see that the Christology of De Doctrina illuminates Paradise Lost in three key respects: first, whether the generation of the Son is external or internal to God’s essence, both texts present the Son as the first difference from the Father, the perfect image of the Father manifest to rational creatures; second, both texts root the intellective fit between the created order and human reason in the Son’s role as the means of divine creation; third, both texts maintain that the Son’s role as mediator enables rational creatures, angelic or human, to participate in the beatitude of divine life. As we have already seen in his prose, Milton’s view of reason as the poetic gift of peaceful difference becomes apparent in his rejection of the modern view that reason is merely a calculative capacity whose purpose is to impose order on chaos. For this reason, we need to consider directly the depiction of the Son in Paradise Lost as the divine Word who brings creation into being out of a state of chaos. How does this depiction of the Son’s creative act avoid making chaos a necessary condition for the order of creation’s goodness? In the previous chapter, we considered how Milton’s account of creation’s “first matter” in De Doctrina Christiana, what I call his “ontological monism,” is central to his claim that God is the sufficient cause of creation’s being without implying that God is the sufficient cause of evil, insofar as the latter arises from the corruption of individuated creatures. In the very assertion that matter per se is “incorruptible,” De Doctrina distinguishes it from individuated beings, whether mineral, vegetable, corporeal, or spiritual, any of which may be susceptible to corruption: “it is not the matter nor the form [of a given being] that sins” (CPW vi:). Thus the goodness of creation’s material cause is separated from the event of evil’s entrance into creation. The corruptibility that is subsequent to entering a “mutable state” requires individuation in which matter and form are inseparable (CPW vi:). In Paradise Lost, Milton implies that the Son is the first differentiation out of that materia prima. The epic narrative voice first identifies the Son as the “radiant image” of the Father’s “glory” (PL .) and then describes the Son’s appearance in heaven:

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Beyond compare the Son of God was seen Most glorious, in him all his Father shon Substantially express’d, and in his face Divine compassion visibly appeerd, Love without end, and without measure Grace, Which uttering thus he to his Father spake. (.–)

At one level, the pivotal ambiguity in this passage is in the term “substantially.” If one follows the customary English theological usage that deploys “essence” and “substance” as synonyms, then “substantially” might seem a reiteration of the trinitarian view that the three divine persons participate in one essence, or substance. However, if one follows the distinction that Milton’s Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio makes between “common essence,” or matter, and “proper essence,” or form (CPW viii:–), then the term would also be consistent with De Doctrina’s claim that the Son shares the Father’s ex deo matter, substance, or “common essence,” but not his unique form, or “proper essence.” In this sense, the passage could agree with De Doctrina’s characterization of the Son as a substantial differentiation out of first matter. However, by also stipulating that “all his Father shon” “express’d” in the Son, Milton insists that the Father’s form, or proper essence, is revealed visibly in the Son – in short, that the Son is the Father’s complete representation. The critical debates over Milton’s “subordinationism” versus his Arianism risk missing the more basic elements in the above passage from Paradise Lost (i.e., .–) that cannot be dismissed without imputing an implausible degree of irony to the narrative voice: according to this passage, the Son is the complete revelation of the Father, in this case to angels, and specifically reveals the Father’s infinite love and grace, as well as mercy. The Son makes these aspects of the Father “appeer” to rational creatures. By implication, the Father does not “appeer” so without the Son. One may ultimately view the Son’s revelation in this passage as inadequate, but any critical attempt, such as Bryson’s, to contrast the Father and the Son must account for the above passage in such a way that reverses its surface meaning. The status, however, of the Son as the perfect “substantial” expression of the Father entails that any account of the Son in Paradise Lost must also engage the account of “first matter” presented in the poem. Central to the heterodoxy of De Doctrina is the claim that the generation of the Son is the Father’s first act of external, rather than internal, efficiency. The Son, as divine Logos, is the one through whom all other creation is effected (creation is also by and for the Father). The theological treatise

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also, less controversially, interprets the title “only begotten” as an indication of the Son’s unique role as mediator between God and humanity (CPW vi:–, ). As I explained in Chapter , because Milton does not have recourse to the doctrine of the “analogy of being” in order to account for unity and difference within God, he locates the unity between the Father and the Son, and all of creation, in the materia prima that proceeds from the Father. Thus, for Milton, the Son is the first difference in that “common essence,” or matter. The crucial point here is that the Son’s generation, as the perfect image of the Father, who mediates between the Father and creation, is not a violent imposition of order upon chaos, because matter is not chaos. Rather, as we shall see, the Son, as divine Logos, Ratio, and Oratio, calls matter from a condition of disorder into the light of being and beauty. As William Hunter, John Leonard, and others have observed, the depiction of “chaos” in Paradise Lost seems to conflict with De Doctrina’s claim that matter is good. For example, Hunter points out that the figure of Chaos (as depicted in Books  and  of the poem) is evil, hostile, or, at best, neutral, a fact which various critics have tried to reconcile with the positive depiction of first matter in De Doctrina. I contend, however, that Paradise Lost never deploys “matter” and “chaos” as synonyms. At one level, we should note that the depiction of “Chaos” as an explicitly allegorical character is consistent with the epic’s deployment of allegory elsewhere specifically to depict the privation of being. Chaos is the personification of a principle (lower-case “chaos”), the opposite of which is the beauty of created being (CPW vi:). The key point here is that “Chaos” in itself is simply not “matter.” Although matter may be subject to the unrule of Chaos, matter may still be understood as good, as something distinct from the ontic privation of Chaos, much like the way that subjects of a corrupt monarch can remain virtuous themselves. The perception that Paradise Lost and De Doctrina offer opposing views of matter is based on the mistaken assumption that the allegorically depicted principle of chaos represents in itself the ex deo substance of the universe, rather than the condition of some, not all, materia prima. Milton uses the term, “chaos,” in one sense to indicate simply the condition of “the earth,” described in Genesis : as “without form.” We see this usage in his first invocation’s reference to Moses, as the one “who first taught the chosen Seed, / In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth / Rose out of Chaos” (PL .–). In Raphael’s later account of the six days of creation, the “Omnific Word,” the Son, rides “in Paternal Glorie” “farr into Chaos” in order to “circumscribe / this Universe” (., –).

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Even before this act of creation is described, however, we are presented with the Father’s instructions to the Son: And by my Word, begotten Son, by thee This I perform, speak thou, and be it don: My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee I send along, ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heav’n and Earth, Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. (PL .–)

The Father stipulates that the “Boundless deep” of space is not empty because this creative action by God does not imply that Chaos is God’s opposing counterpart, as if God were somehow defined by an opposing “non-being.” This is why the explanation continues: Though I uncircumscrib’d my self retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessitie and Chance Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate. So spake th’ Almightie, and to what he spake His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect.

(PL .–)

At one level, the emphatic point about “Fate” here is merely that the Father, unlike Zeus or Jove, is not subject to Fate. But if God is free to “put not forth” his goodness, how is creation anything more than a randomly chosen act? Such a question assumes that “freedom” is merely the absence of constraint. The very possibility of such a question leads, in fact, to the clarification offered in the next lines, explaining that God is not subject to “Necessitie and Chance” (line ), or coercion and randomness. The point of the unfolding explanation is to emphasize that just because God’s goodness is not compelled does not mean that it is random. By depicting the Father as saying “what I will is Fate,” Milton risks the reader assuming that the Father’s will, considered in itself, is therefore merely arbitrary (that is, mere chance); such an impression arises, however, only if we assume that God must be subject to either necessity or chance – hence, the stipulation in line . In effect, the impression that God’s freedom from Fate entails a randomness in his own volition obtains only if we assume that coercion and chaos exhaust reality as a totalizing binary. In what sense, then, with respect to the decision to create the cosmos, is God, in his goodness, “free to act or not”? Specifically in the sense

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that an aesthetic choice may be based on what is fitting, rather than upon what is determined, without being merely random. In this case, the “goodness” mentioned in the passage above (PL .–), which may be withheld, is specifically the actualized goodness of created being – which matter in a state of potential being does not enjoy but could. In discussing Milton’s ex deo account of matter, we need to keep in mind that traditionally materialist monism had been rejected because it typically led either to pantheism, making creation a necessary emanation from God, or to ontological dualism. This risk explains why Milton insists that matter may be but is not necessarily subject to chaos. In effect, the depiction of chaos allows Milton to maintain that the universe has a material cause which comes from God but that the act of Creation is free on God’s part and is not merely a result of necessary emanation. In this way, Paradise Lost implies that chaos represents a contingent contrast to creation’s ordered beauty but is not God’s ontic alternative or even a necessary opposition to created being. The epic presents the Father not as “being” in general but as the personal God, the “I am who fill / Infinitude” (.–), who also exceeds the vast possibility of non-existence, because the ex deo first matter is not simply the void, but is the material cause of all created being as well. Thus to describe the “Deep” or realm of chaos as “Boundless” (.) does not imply that chaos is fully “infinite,” as though it included the ordered realms of creation or heaven. In effect, the above passages stipulate that chaos is not a totalizing “non-being,” or the dark side of the positive “being” shared by God and creation. As a result, the poem implies, most importantly, that neither created nor uncreated being is constituted as such by its opposition to chaos but by an aesthetic, indeed poetic, union between matter and form. If, as I contend, “matter” is not “chaos,” where does Milton’s view of “first matter” appear in Paradise Lost? The passage most obviously similar to the ontological monism outlined in De Doctrina is Raphael’s account of creation’s being, as distinct from his later narrative account of creation’s origin: O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not deprav’d from good, created all Such to perfection, one first matter all, Indu’d with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and in things that live, of life; But the more refin’d, more spiritous, and pure, As nearer to him plac’t or nearer tending

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Each in thir several active Sphears assign’d, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportion’d to each kind. (PL .–)

Raphael does not mention chaos here because he is describing the operation of matter, not chaos, within creation. He is describing the plenitude of being, not the principle of its privation. Here “corporeal” and “incorporeal” (PL .–) both designate “degrees / Of substance” (.–), which are formed out of the “one first matter.” The passage fits well with De Doctrina’s insistence that a given being is not reducible to prime matter because that existent is only consequent upon matter being “indu’d” with form. Likewise, Raphael’s suggestion that Adam could change from “body” to “spirit” arises only if the difference between the two kinds of whole beings is strictly maintained, while both are understood to participate in a material continuum. The most important element in Raphael’s statement, however, is the conditional character of “first matter.” In opposition to the mechanist corporeal materialism of someone like Hobbes, the phrase, “if not deprav’d from good,” is Milton’s way of depicting “first matter” as both intrinsically moral (“good”) and yet also conditional in the preservation of that goodness in individuated beings. Thus, Raphael’s statements regarding “first matter,” together with his descriptions of “chaos,” suggest how Paradise Lost attempts to depict the ex deo matter of creation without positing either pantheism or an uncrossable chasm between God and creation. In effect, the poem implies that the material cause of creation comes “from God” and thereby participates in divine goodness but that created beings are all distinct from God’s form (or “proper essence”). The poem’s depiction of some matter in subjection to chaos stipulates how creation’s material cause could be from God without implying that creation is a necessary emanation of God’s being. Although some matter may initially be subjected to chaos, in a state of potentia, matter still derives ultimately “from God” rather than from chaos. Moreover, in such a condition of disorder, the goodness of matter remains a potential which is actualized only by its peaceable union with form. If, in Milton’s account, created being does not depend upon chaos, or randomness, as a necessary supplementarity opposition to its own order, Milton’s account of created being may still appear as though it arises from the Son’s wresting of order from chaos. In this regard, we should notice that the Father’s act of creation through the Son is a rhetorical act, a speech that gives form to ex deo matter. The Father tells the Son to “bid the Deep / Within appointed bounds be Heav’n and Earth” (.–). He



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

specifically tells the Son to “speak” and to “bid,” rather than to compel, even the Deep (., ). As Rumrich points out, the Son’s act of creation contrasts directly with the way in which the figure of Death later uses brute force (“his mace petrific” (.)) in shaping the matter of chaos into a bridge that runs from hell to earth. The contrast between these two narrative moments shows that the union of matter and form may be achieved by coercion but is not necessarily or intrinsically coercive. Thus, the depiction of the condition of chaos in Paradise Lost suggests that God’s infinite being exceeds even the boundless deep, while created being subsists in a union of matter and form, not a union of chaos and coercion. In this respect, chaos is a contingent aspect of prima materia but not a necessary aspect of created being; indeed, the contingency of matter’s subjection to chaos enables the individuated union of matter and form. Morever, even the depiction in Paradise Lost of the divine action that gives rise to created being does not entail that creation is intrinsically a coercive imposition upon chaos. elective dialogue and biblical form The conditional quality of created goodness in the ontology of Paradise Lost therefore informs the Father’s statement that “Reason also is choice” (PL .), not because chaotic indeterminacy is the root of goodness but because rational creatures may participate in the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation through a response that may be “fitting” rather than either random or compelled. In this way, the epic’s depiction of the Son, as the first peaceful difference, the substantial expression who is the Father’s perfect image, is also the basis for the freedom of rational creatures (angels and humans) who are made in the image of the Son. This correspondence between images informs the theological depiction of conditional election in Paradise Lost in which the work of the Son as the Father’s “Wisdom” is connected to the restoration of human “right reason,” or conscience, as the divine image. By insisting that not only divine foreknowledge but even divine predestination does not eliminate human freedom, the Father presents an Arminian interpretation of predestination (PL .–). Calvin insisted upon divine goodness (i.e., Providence), but did not, as we have seen, emphasize human freedom in the act of the Fall. The ensuing lines of the Father’s speech further explain the conditional character of divine election, or predestination. Despite some recent critical reservations regarding whether Milton presents a truly Arminian position in Paradise Lost, I take the poem’s emphasis upon the conditional character

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of divine election to be apparent to any reader who is able to distinguish between a necessary and a sufficient cause. Ultimately, however, as we shall see, I draw our attention here less to the explicit theological dimensions of the speeches in Book  and more to Milton’s biblical warrant for deploying the very form of a dialogue. Nevertheless, we should first note briefly what the Father–Son dialogue explicitly states about divine election, or predestination. As the dialogue in heaven unfolds, the Father explicitly describes the Son as his “chief delight” and calls him “My word, my wisdom, and effectual might” who has “spok’n as my thoughts are, All / as my eternal purpose hath decreed” (PL ., –). Those critics who find the Father here to be engaged in a kind of self-justifying re-adjustment, which tries dishonestly to include the Son’s position within his own initial response, must disregard the poem’s explicit statements regarding the Son as the image of the Father. In any case, when the Father says, “Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will, / Yet not of will in him, but grace in me / Freely voutsaft” (.–), he is not simply bringing “together Arminianism and Calvinism without resolving the two.” Arminianism is not the mere assertion of conditional election, but a way to unite the Reformed insistence that all power for human deliverance from sin comes from God together with the claim that grace is conditional and resistable. Similarly, when the Father claims that Man will “ow / All his deliv’rance” to God and to no one else (PL .–), he says what any Arminian might affirm regarding the place of divine power in effecting salvation from sin. The primacy of God in providing the gift of salvation is not the crux of the difference between Calvinists and Arminians. The difference lies in whether grace is offered universally and in whether the individual human experience of that divine gift is conditional or not upon human acceptance. Thus, when the Father makes a distinction between those “chosen of peculiar grace / elect above the rest” and “The rest” who “shall hear [God] call” (.–), he is specifically not distinguishing, in a Calvinist fashion, between those who are and those who are not arbitrarily predestined to salvation. Rather, the passage follows the explicit distinction made in De Doctrina between the extraordinary grace given to those who are called to a special work or service (CPW vi:–) and the “sufficient grace” for salvation that is extended to all humans (CPW vi:–). This explains why “the rest” who hear God call are ultimately described as those who may indeed repent and be heard by God. Ultimately, “the rest” in this passage are specifically not the Calvinist reprobate but those who are explicitly offered grace that may be accepted or not:



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning And I will place within them as a guide My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, Light after light well us’d they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive. (PL .–, original italics)

The emphatically conditional character of this statement by the Father clearly suggests an Arminian view of predestination. But the other key issue that we should notice here is that the locus for the operations of prevenient grace is specifically the conscience, or “right reason.” As Chapter  demonstrated, this faculty of right reason is where Milton locates the image of God in humans but also the place of union between the eternal reality of saving faith and the temporal reality of sanctification, or charity. Despite the fact that the Father in Paradise Lost explicitly advocates an Arminian view of predestination, the presentation of his character in the poem clearly gives the impression of a God whose tone of voice tends at least to sound more like an arbitrary tyrant than a beneficent Father. If the recent critical work by Michael Bryson, Neil Forsyth, and Peter Herman is any indication, the dominant critical tendency today is to view Milton’s depiction of the Father as representing a form of moral evil that must be overcome by the reader – whether the evil of tyranny, monarchy, or certainty. By considering, however, some of the biblical literary models that inform the heavenly dialogue, we can begin to appreciate that Milton does not simply present the Father as an image to be rejected but as an incomplete view of God that requires the rest of the biblical story, most notably a Christocentric understanding of that story, in order to be intelligibly good or just. A narrative treatment of divine justice involves itself in a complex set of potential problems when it attempts to treat God as a character. Beyond the artistic challenge, how does Milton avoid contravening the advice that Raphael gives to Adam?: Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, Leave them to God above, him serve and fear; ... Heav’n is for thee too high To know what passes there; be lowly wise: Think only what concerns thee and thy being; Dream not of other Worlds.

(PL .–; –)

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In the invocation to Book , the narrative voice questions specifically the propriety of his treatment of God as a character, when he asks, “May I express thee unblamed?” (PL .). Nevertheless, the speaker continues to ask that he might be able to “see” “things invisible to mortal sight” (.) and implicitly bases the legitimacy of his ensuing narrative upon a claim to divinely inspired poetic vision. The attempt to communicate that vision, however, according to Wendell Berry, is the central problem of the poem, because it forces Milton to “bring God on stage in person, not as inscrutable mystery and power, visible blindingly, but as a heroic king conversing in Homeric dialogue with the Son.” In effect, by “aspiring to ‘see’ the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Milton falls onto Olympus.” In such a view, the poem’s primary weakness is that, by using the epic genre to treat the biblical God as a character, the narrative risks violating its own principle of hierarchical order, as articulated by Raphael. I contend, however, that Milton’s warrant for such a depiction derives as much from biblical narrative modes as it does from epic conventions. If a reader begins with the assumption that any extra-incarnational relation between the Father and the Son would and should be hidden from human view, then any such dialogue clearly presents some difficulty. At the same time, the Father does address the Son explicitly as “My word, my wisdom, and effectual might” (PL .) and states that the Son has spoken the Father’s own thoughts even in asking the questions that he does (.–); in such statements we find a clear interpretive opportunity to understand the dramatically presented dialogue as already, in a sense, internal to God and oriented toward self-revelation rather than self-exploration. The conversation seems intended primarily for the benefit of those other than the Son who are listening. At one level, this mode is consistent with the theological view that the Father would reveal himself to rational creatures specifically through the Son in relationship to himself. In considering the form of the Father–Son dialogue in heaven, we should recall that the Bible does not provide much explicit information about the pre-incarnational existence of the Son of God. Nevertheless, given the characterization of the Son in the gospels, the general theological insistence upon the differences in “person” between Father and Son, and the necessities of a narrative presentation, I suggest that Milton viewed his portrayal as well within the limits of biblical artistic license. The subtlety of Milton’s presentation of the Son in Paradise Lost is that, although it may arguably fit with the Christology in De Doctrina, the poetic portrayal remains open to, without requiring, a more orthodox reading of divine filiation. My point here is

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

not to normalize Milton’s heterodoxy but to give due credit to his ability to choose his rhetorical battles. The explicit rhetorical battle of De Doctrina is to argue for one Christology over others; the rhetorical aim of Paradise Lost, I suggest, is quite different. The epic attempts instead to mimic biblical form in its very susceptibility to multiple interpretations, not for the sake of inducing hermeneutic despair (pace Herman) but for the two-fold purpose of de-familiarizing biblical passages that readers might have presumed to understand inadequately and of disclosing the biblical-hermeneutic primacy of divine gift. In the particular case of the Father–Son dialogue, I contend that the poem does not presume to depict events in heaven without a biblical precedent. Aside from the numerous “throne room” scenes transcribed from various visions of heaven, the three biblical passages that bear directly upon the question of Milton’s artistic license in this passage are Revelation , Zechariah :– and Job  and . Although none of these biblical scenes is identical to the dialogue presented in Book  of Paradise Lost, each of them contains formal elements that Milton incorporates into his own depiction of the heavenly dialogue. In his edition of Paradise Lost Merritt Hughes provides (as does Alastair Fowler in his edition) a gloss on the words, “And silence was in Heav’n” (PL .), by citing Revelation :, which mentions the half-hour silence that followed the opening of the “seventh seal.” The correspondence between the two occurrences of silence seems obvious enough; but only in Revelation  do we find a biblical model for the specific dramatic dynamics that precede the silence in Milton’s poem. In the biblical passage, before even the first seal of the prophecy is ever opened the question is asked in heaven, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll [beside the throne]?” But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it. I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside. Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”

Although an angel in this story, rather than God, is the one who asks the pivotal question, the dynamics of the drama parallel those in Paradise Lost (cf. PL .–). The challenge regarding human redemption is pronounced, and only the Son (or Lamb) is able to answer the challenge because he is willing to give himself for humanity. Of course, there are several key differences between this scene in Revelation and Milton’s presentation in Paradise Lost. First, the throne of God the Father is also that of the Lamb

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in Revelation – differences between Father and Son are minimized by the dramatic structure. The same one on the throne who is clearly God, “the Alpha and the Omega,” “the Almighty” (Revelation :), “the first and the last” (:), is also Christ who says, “I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever!” (:). Second, as a result of this unity, God the Father does not appear as a character separate from the Son through whom he reveals himself. Third, the narrative voice in Revelation is in the first person so that the vision of God’s throne is not treated from the perspective of an epic voice. If we look at the passages in Job and Zechariah, however, we can see that each of these three points of difference also has a biblical precedent. In the Job and Zechariah passages, the central human characters (Job and the high priest Joshua respectively) are normally understood as types of Christ. In both cases Satan appears as a dramatic character who comes before the throne of Yhwh to accuse the central figure. Zechariah’s account is important because typologically it emphasizes the role of “Joshua” as a supernatural high priest, or mediator, who represents the sinful chosen nation of Israel (by wearing rags) before Yhwh. For later Christian readers, the direct connection with Christ as high priest is unavoidable, so that what may be a “vision” for Zechariah becomes a reality for Christians. In Zechariah’s story, the rags are replaced so that Joshua can stand before Yhwh in pure white clothes; however, the important point for Milton’s purposes is that here we find biblical characters that could correspond to the Father and Son who are both presented as dramatic characters face to face, in an encounter that Christians claim is actualized in some sense by Christ’s redemptive work. Still, Zechariah’s vision is just that: a vision recounted in a first-person narrative voice which would not presume to treat God as simply one character among many within its story. The biblical precedent for that kind of treatment of God is the initial framing story of the book of Job. The book of Job, like Zechariah, presents a Satan figure in dramatic action before the throne of Yhwh in heaven. The main difference between them is that, in the initial framing narrative in Job, Yhwh interacts with the Satan character as if the story were not of Yhwh’s design (the later inset speeches by Yhwh are obviously a much different matter). This impression in the initial story is encouraged by the fact that Yhwh is treated by a third-person omniscient narrator. One pivotal question is how Milton would have interpreted the book of Job, with respect to the status of the events that it describes. As Barbara Lewalski demonstrates in her study of Paradise Regained, Milton was familiar not only with the patristic tradition of treating Job as an epic, but also with the humanist practice of treating

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Job typologically. Because typological interpretation maintains the historical status of the “type,” in this case Job, as well as its fulfillment in Christ, Milton could expect that Protestant readers would view the framing narrative in Job as an account of historical events. In this way, Job provides a clear biblical precedent for depicting the dialogue and dramatic events at the very throne of God by using the externalized verisimilitude of epic and specifically for treating God as a character within an epic narrative. Taken together, these passages from Revelation, Zechariah, and Job each model different formal aspects of biblical heavenly drama that Milton incorporates into the Father–Son dialogue. Amid the many other biblical intertexts that this passage engages, there is one further passage that is especially important for providing biblical warrant for the manner in which Milton presents deity in Book  of Paradise Lost. As Bryson points out, the Son’s appeal to the Father in the phrase “‘that far be from thee’ is a direct reference to Gen. :” which tells the story of Abraham’s appeal to Yhwh on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not surprisingly, Bryson takes the point of the biblical allusion to be that, just as Bryson himself understands Yhwh of the Hebrew Bible to be a capricious, vengeful, and bloodthirsty god, so also Milton’s point in alluding to Genesis : is to portray the Father as an evil character. At one level, the difficulty with such a view is that there is no real evidence that Milton shares Bryson’s moral evaluation of Yhwh. Ultimately, however, according to Bryson, the point of the biblical story seems obvious: “God is not testing Man; Man is testing God.” The deeper difficulty with such a judgment is that its plausibility requires a simple tone-deafness to the irony that is easily available in the Genesis narratives. Even among the few stories that precede Abraham’s intercession for Sodom and Gomorrah, four different stories in Genesis have already established interrogative dialogue as one of the customary modes of divine self-revelation by which humans are also brought to a knowledge of themselves. Readers have been well prepared for the conversation between Yhwh and Abraham. As the preceding stories make clear, Yhwh does not ask Adam and Eve, or Cain, or Hagar, or Sarah questions because he needs information or advice about what to do. I contend that Milton’s detailed attention to such dimensions of biblical idiom informs the similarly subtle ways in which Paradise Lost goes far beyond Bryson’s binary opposition between the “Father” (Yhwh) and the “Son.” Indeed, Milton’s appreciation for Abraham’s role as prefiguration of the Son’s work as mediator likely informed his decision to deploy the allusion. Rather than the biblical allusion serving merely to vilify the Father,

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however, Milton’s point is to highlight the biblical warrant for using such interrogative conversation as a mode of divine self-revelation. But why would Milton care about such a scrupulous imitation of biblical form? I contend that, at this early stage in Paradise Lost, one of Milton’s major aims is simply to foreground the interpretive openness and the demand for interpretation made by both the biblical texts and his own poem. How do such depictions of heavenly action reveal a God who is not merely omnipotent but also intelligibly good to humans? Milton’s point seems to be that, if considered on the basis of solitary episodes, neither Scripture nor his poem necessarily reveal divine goodness – the formal absence of local narrative necessity is precisely wherein opportunities arise for readers to exercise the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Which is, again, not to equate Miltonic freedom with mere indeterminacy. As the above discussion of these three biblical passages has already suggested, Milton’s ultimate aim will be to imply the need for typological interpretation of both the biblical texts and his own. As the next chapter shows, such interpretation is not, for Milton, merely a hermeneutic formula but entails a specific ontology – that is, an account of reality as a divine gift which is embodied by concrete particulars without being reducible to a mechanism. At this early point in Paradise Lost, however, the biblicist form serves largely to foreground the need for an interpretive guide that is not either a lock-step formula or simply arbitrary. Only in its final books will the epic offer a sustained response to that interpretive need. In the meantime, however, readers who are inclined to interpret the Father–Son dialogue or its biblical antecedents without recourse to typology will tend to reveal merely the ontology assumed by their respective critical approaches. With respect to the explicit theology of the Father–Son dialogue in Book , Milton could plausibly maintain that the content of the conversation we overhear tells us nothing (with respect to divine foreknowledge and predestination) that is not already apparent in biblical texts like Romans :. Beyond such obvious biblical content, the dialogue here initiates the epic’s explicit treatment of divine justice and human freedom but does not claim to resolve such questions finally, insofar as the passage remains satisfied to let the Father risk appearing in a negative light. In this sense, the dialogue raises theological challenges that result not so much from any explicit theological content but from the dramatic form itself. The root difficulty is not the Father’s free-will defense of divine justice but that he feels the need to tell the pre-incarnate Son his plans at all, as though the Son does not already know (PL .–). In effect, the heavenly dialogue in

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Book  of Paradise Lost offers a poetic depiction of God the Father, which is clearly based on biblical models and reveals how much the human perception regarding divine governance of the cosmos, if it is disconnected from the particularities and overarching shape of biblical narrative, could appear more like coercive tyranny than genuine kingship rooted in the good of those governed. The key point here is that the narrative risk that the Father could appear harsh persists despite the explicitly Arminian aspects of the his speeches emphasizing the conditional character of divine election. Given Milton’s long battles with Presbyterian opponents, we might expect him to present an explicitly Calvinist God who appears as an arbitrary tyrant, but why would Milton present the Arminian Father this way? I propose two main reasons. First, the perception of the Father as a tyrant will be strengthened in direct proportion to the extent that readers fail to perceive the Son as a true revelation of the Father, as his perfect image, rather than as merely a different being. If, however, Milton seriously intends that the Son is “the radiant image of [the Father’s] Glory” (.), in whom “all his Father shon / substantially express’d” (.–), we can expect that the Father would actually reveal himself to rational creatures specifically through dialogue with the Son. In this way, the Father’s statements could appear less strident if they are understood as necessarily united with the Son’s speeches. In moral terms, the attempt to interpret the Father’s speech in isolation from the Son is like depicting divine retributive justice without any glimpse of God’s infinite mercy. As Bryson’s argument inadvertently shows, if the Father is understood in isolation from the Son, then the Father will indeed tend to appear merely as Satan’s reverse image: that is, as the coercive opposition to disorder. A second major reason for Milton’s presentation of a morally dubious Father is to emphasize that even the Arminian theological emphasis upon God’s “conditional” decree of election could still involve a basic distortion of biblical ontology, insofar as it shares no less than Calvinism in modern assumptions about reason and therefore has difficulty depicting “conditional” election as anything other than mere randomness (thereby relocating the capriciousness from the divine will to the human will). These considerations help to explain why the poem does not simply end at Book . If the mere articulation of the argument from human free will were sufficient to show how belief in Providence can lead to an understanding of divine justice, the poem’s ostensible aim would be achieved – or rather, Milton would have done better to save such arguments for the end of his poem. Thus, Milton does intend the depiction of the Father in Book  to be off-putting, as Bryson argues, but not, as we shall

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see, for the reasons that Bryson claims. Paradise Lost does not simply repudiate the biblical models that Milton re-deploys in his depiction of the Father in Book . Rather, the poem implies that such a depiction may be incomplete, and indeed misleading, if made to represent the whole of biblical revelation or if disconnected from the charitable trajectory of the larger biblical narrative. Book  occupies an early stage in the unfolding of Milton’s epic. It presents an account of the poem’s central concerns in a way that is not simply refuted or rejected by the rest of the poem but whose very assumptions regarding the nature of power are subsumed and transformed. As we shall see in the next chapter, Milton similarly subsumes and transforms his readers’ assumptions regarding divine kingship.

chapter 5

Divine kingship

According to the implied chronology of events in Paradise Lost, the first action that occurs in the world of the poem is the announcement of the Son’s “anointing,” or kingship, over the angels. Although the event is recounted by the angel Raphael through an inset narrative near the middle of the poem, the Father’s revelation of the Son’s kingship is, in effect, the earliest action presented to human understanding for direct consideration. Why does Milton arrange his narrative to foreground this event and to depict Satan’s rebellion, and the ensuing war, as a direct response to the Son’s kingship? Given Milton’s allowance for the ways in which Scripture, on occasion, “answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader” regarding “great disputes” (CPW ii:), we might expect him to make a similarly educative use of ironic indirection. Regardless of what readers take to be Milton’s rhetorical aim, the very ordering of events in Paradise Lost unavoidably raises questions regarding kingship. Most notably, by depicting God as a king, does Milton imply a pious rejection of republicanism or rather a republican rejection of God? Such questions have been posed since the poem’s initial publication, and critics continue to offer answers, some of which we shall consider in this chapter. Against recent critical attempts to view Paradise Lost as repudiating the imagining of God as king, I contend that the epic adapts biblical idiom for transforming readers’ assumptions regarding the arch¯e in “monarchy.” As the preceding chapters have shown, in Milton’s account, the Son of God is the divine ratio and oratio, the poetic gift of peaceful difference, and that difference is not from but is actually in the arch¯e, in the origin and governing principle of reality. By placing the revelation of the Son’s kingship and Satan’s rebellion at the architectural center of the poem, Milton gives central place to the contest between two accounts of reason, whether divine or created: is reason the poetic gift of harmonious difference, or is it the calculative capacity to manipulate matter in order to impose one’s will on others? Reserving treatment of the heavenly war in Book  for the next 

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chapter, the argument here focuses upon the events recounted in the latter portion of Book  which lead up to the war. The first part of this chapter establishes the broader narrative and theodic contexts for this passage within Paradise Lost. The central, and largest, portion of the argument demonstrates how this part of Raphael’s inset story constitutes a narrative interpretation of Psalm . In this analysis, as throughout this study, my argument focuses on those biblical passages that the poem seems to engage directly, rather than on the countless other passages that were obviously relevant to Milton’s political context amid debates regarding kingship. This chapter does not attempt an account of Milton’s politics, which would replicate the work of Worden or Norbrook, but offers instead a critical treatment of Milton’s poetic biblicism that would complement such historical work. The final section of this chapter argues that the culminating dialogue in Book  discloses the contrasting ontological narratives that inform the ensuing battle in Book . Ultimately, these intertextual narrative treatments of divine kingship, Psalm , and ontology all help to explain the central place given to the Son’s anointing: they all contribute to the necessarily indirect treatment of divine justice, showing that divine justice will not appear if one assumes that divine reason (difference) and the gratuitous reality to which it gives rise (charity) are intrinsically coercive. narrative theodic contexts In Chapter  we noted how Milton’s uniting of epic style and biblical narrative allows Paradise Lost to illuminate what would otherwise be obscure gaps in the biblical story. In the case of Books  through , Milton dilates specifically what would be a gap between the end of Genesis Chapter  and the beginning of Chapter , between Creation and the Fall. The implied overall experience of Milton’s poem attempts to move from a concrete imagining of possibilities regarding this gap toward a positive claim regarding how the biblical story offers the most adequate account of evil’s entrance into human history and its ultimate defeat. At one level, with respect to the epic’s stated theodic aims, Milton’s dilation of the biblical story ostensibly emphasizes God’s justice in allowing humanity the freedom to fall. Milton also arranges, however, that, before Adam and Eve are ever tempted, they are instructed and warned about the dangers that they face. God sends the angel Raphael to “converse with Adam” (PL .), “as friend with friend” (), so that he “may advise him of his happy state” () and “warn him to beware” ():

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning Tell him withal His danger, and from whom, what enemy Late fall’n himself from Heaven, is plotting now The fall of others from like state of bliss; By violence, no, for that will be withstood, But by deceit and lies; this let him know, Lest willfully transgressing he pretend Surprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarn’d. (.–)

In sending Raphael for this purpose, the narrator observes that God “fulfilled / All justice” (.–). Whether or not readers find the Father’s statement too self-justifying, the narrator’s comment makes explicit the purpose of the educational process that takes up Books  through  of the poem – the central third of the whole epic: that is, to prepare Adam and Eve for the temptation that they will face. Viewed according to the sequence of events described within the first three chapters of Genesis, however, the entirety of those books’ events occur precisely within the ‘gap’ in the biblical story, between chapters  and . These books thus provide a large-scale example of epic dilation, as they supply many details regarding what daily life might have been like in the garden of Eden. Rather than resorting to mere speculation, however, the main narratives in Books  to  are largely a composite of other biblical passages. The stories that comprise Raphael’s educational curriculum can be designated as: () “pre-terrestrial history,” () “pre-human history,” and () Adam’s “post-creation history.” The last of these accounts is given by Adam rather than Raphael, but is no less crucial to the education process guided by Raphael. Moreover, by situating all three of these stories within such a dramatic context, Milton incidentally speculates regarding the possible historical source of the differences between the two biblical accounts of creation – that is, Raphael’s “pre-human history” echoes Genesis  (six days of creation), while Adam’s recollections since his creation echo Genesis . Most importantly, the events of Books  and  – far from offering only speculation about what Adam and Eve did during the temporal gap between chapters  and  of Genesis – actually relocate the contents of Genesis  and  within a rationale for demonstrating God’s justice by preparing Adam and Eve against temptation. Also placed within this narrative framework is Raphael’s account of how Satan and his companions fell from bliss – what I have called “pre-terrestrial history” – which we shall focus on here. At one level, the apparent biblical sources for the main narration of Books  and  would be the various references to Satan “falling,” but especially

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Revelation :– which speaks of a “war” in heaven. However, the amount of space given to the Satanic plotting and to the battle in heaven may seem disproportionate to the relatively few passages in Scripture. Does the elaboration of the war in heaven result primarily from an accommodation to the traditional epic focus on the great deeds of battle? I argue that the main actions recounted by Raphael in the latter part of Book  constitute a narrated reading of Psalm . By deploying the epic style in such a way that dilates the heavenly war by means of other biblical intertexts, Milton actually posits an alternative to the customary ontology and ethos of epic battle narrative. In thinking about how Milton undertakes such an intertextual reading of that Psalm, we need to keep in view two key elements of the narrative context. First, with respect to the poem’s larger theodic objectives, not only does Raphael’s story provide Adam and Eve with an understanding of their enemy, but it also provides the closest glimpse that we, as readers, ever get of the beginning of evil in Satan, at that moment when he “thought himself impair’d” (PL .). Second, Raphael explicitly foregrounds the status of his entire inset story as one based on analogy, enabled, as he says, by “lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms” (.). In effect, the epic makes an implicit statement about the capacities of human reason and spiritual truth which Milton makes explicitly in his tract, Of Education: But because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow’d in all discreet teaching. (CPW ii:–)

Milton’s point here is not, in itself, unusual and is shared to some degree by many theological accounts of human understanding. In the epic, however, Milton situates the very idea of accommodation within a retelling of the Fall that ultimately (in Books  and ) recapitulates within itself the whole of the biblical metanarrative. He thus illuminates the idea of accommodation itself. And in this case, the illumination of the extended analogy (the “lik’ning”) begins with an intertextual narrated adaptation of Psalm . anointing divine reason After Raphael introduces his story, the first event that he describes is the Father’s announcement:

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning This day I have begot whom I declare My only Son, and on this holy Hill Him have anointed, whom ye now behold At my right hand; your Head I him appoint; And by myself have sworn to him shall bow All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord. (PL .–)

As a transparent paraphrase of Psalm :, one of the key functions of this passage is to foreground the series of further intertextual connections to the Psalm in the rest of Raphael’s story. Not surprisingly, Bryson cites this moment in the action as evidence that, according to Milton’s characterization of a tyrant in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the Father is the original tyrant in Paradise Lost: that is, the Father seems to govern arbitrarily, for the benefit of himself or his faction and without regard for law or the common good. To sustain such an application of the label “tyrant,” beyond an initial impression, requires two assumptions: (a) that the Father and the angels are, in some sense, ontic equivalents; (b) that one knows what is the angelic “common good.” Regarding the first point, the poem never implies such equivalence. Regarding the second, when the Father stipulates that the Son is the one through whom the angels can become “United as one individual Soule / For ever happie” (PL .– ), he effectively identifies the Son as the consummate revelation of the angelic form of the good: a good that unites without eliminating either the differences among angels or the ontic difference between the angels as creatures and God as creator. Nevertheless, as David Norbrook points out, the appearance of God in this passage is both overtly political and unsympathetic: Milton politicized the story of the fall of the angels further than any predecessor. God’s elevation of his Son is cast in terms of a monarch’s nomination of a ‘Vicegerent’; his imperative speech-act demands that knees should be bowed without offering any reason for his choice [PL .–]. This immediately gives Satan the opportunity to cast his rebellion in terms with which Milton himself would have sympathized.

Although “Satan’s republican moment is a brief one,” and Norbrook suggests that Satan’s subsequent loss of “heroic grandeur” was probably “planned from the first,” Milton’s purposes in presenting the Father in such a negative light remain highly debatable. Milton’s politicization of the angelic fall is further transformed, I contend, by his implied insistence

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that even such political appearances must be understood in relation to the biblical intertexts that his story evokes. As Blair Worden points out, Satan’s characterization hinges upon appearance, insofar as Satan’s initial republicanism serves to illustrate the dangers of “Puritan hypocrisy.” The depiction of God in the poem involves a similar set of challenges regarding appearance, in that the perennial problem of justice, including divine justice, is that it should be choice-worthy apart from all external benefits or appearances. Any direct depiction of God as manifestly “just” will always be susceptible to a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding appearances and purposes that are extrinsic to justice. This possibility explains why ancient treatments of justice, like Plato’s Republic or the gospel narratives, emphasize that the person who is truly (and “happily”) just may not only suffer unjustly but do so while having the reputation of a criminal, thereby removing extrinsic, or politically apparent, reasons for choosing justice. Milton’s poetic response to this challenge will not appear fully until the end of Chapter ; however, my point here is simply that Milton appreciated the fact that this problem regarding the very appearance of divine justice, by its very character, could not be addressed directly and had to be addressed by indirection, specifically by the indirection made available in the models of biblical idiom. The political dimensions of the rhetoric in the above passage (PL .– ) are therefore important specifically in suggesting that the central driving question raised by the Father’s speech is divine appearance: specifically, “How could divine omnipotence ever be manifest to finite creatures without appearing as merely brutal destruction, or tyranny?” Immediately after the announcement of the Son’s anointing, the narrative voice recounts, “So spake th’ Omnipotent” (.), thereby foregrounding the question of divine power’s appearance. Such a question can be answered at all only if “power” is understood as the ability to achieve one’s good, rather than as the mere capacity to compel others. To presume that “power” can only mean compulsion would preclude the above question from being asked. Paradise Lost follows biblical idiom by answering that question in a necessarily indirect way which accommodates creaturely finitude: that is, through the figure of political rule and specifically the image of a kingdom that is given rather than taken; moreoever, this political rule is given to the one who is the revealed good for rational creatures. At the most basic level, Milton’s decision to use the image of political rule in order to depict divine power, while clearly rooted in the biblical texts like Psalm :, simply opens theological possibilities that would not be available otherwise. When compared

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to other descriptions of God, whether as a “fire,” or as an artisan shaping clay, the image of political rule uniquely brings with it the conjunction of divine command and creaturely response which may, or may not, involve obedience to that command. Whatever consequences might ensue from the responses to any command, the general character of political rule, as an image, presumes that the actions of those governed are not merely a function of immediate necessity issuing from the same ruler. In this respect, the political image of kingship is especially well suited for a biblicist poet with Arminian leanings: the very mode of representation foregrounds the cooperation of divine sovereignty and creaturely action. To state the point in negative terms, to depict divine “power” specifically as political sovereignty foregrounds the possibility of disobedience. As the Father’s speech announcing the Son’s kingship continues to unfold, the starkness of the alternatives proposed seems to intensify the arbitrariness, and hence apparent injustice, of the Son’s kingship: Under his great Vice-gerent Reign abide United as one individual Soule For ever happie: him who disobeyes Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place Ordaind without redemption, without end. (PL .–)

In commenting on this passage, one anonymous reader of this study pointed out, “the plain sense of the words will not allow for ‘peaceful difference’.” If, as I argue, Milton intends the Son to represent Divine Reason, or the divine “poetic gift of peaceful difference,” why does this announcement not sound more peaceful? The posed alternatives cannot both be peaceful because the issue at stake is the very possibility of peaceful difference: whether one will choose to be governed, or not, by peaceful difference (the Son). The explicit starkness of this passage is intrinsic to Milton’s point here; the tone coincides with what is logically the case: to claim that one may peacefully refuse to be governed by peaceful difference would, in itself, be a manifest self-contradictory rejection of peaceful difference. The severe tone of the proposed alternatives in the Father’s speech is Milton’s way of emphasizing the impossibility of advocating peaceful difference when the very thing that one rejects is the rule of peaceful difference. This point, however, will not even appear if we impute to Milton the assumption that reason, including divine reason, is mere necessity. In

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effect, God will indeed appear as a tyrant if we assume that Milton held a modern view of reason. Thus, if the Son is not understood as peaceful difference, along with a full grasp of what the rejection of his rule would mean, then the Father’s announcement of the Son’s anointing will simply appear as the arbitrary cause of Satan’s fall. Bryson and Forsyth, for example, both argue that Satan’s fall is caused by the Father, in the very act of exalting the Son and thereby provoking Satan to become the Adversary. As Forsyth puts the matter: “At the very moment the Son is said to to be begotten in order to make everyone happy forever, God’s word also calls Satan into being, not as Lucifer, his earlier name, but as rebel, the disobedient one . . . Like action and reaction, God’s word creates or begets both Son and Satan at the same moment.” The difficulty here is that to say that God “calls Satan into being” as a rebel, or that the Son and Satan are begotten “at the same moment,” assumes that Satan’s fall is sufficiently caused by the Son’s anointing. Forsyth does admit in passing that, “strictly speaking,” “Satan and his cohorts” “are free” not to rebel if they choose; but he quickly concludes that “we would have to imagine a defective speech of God if what it here predicts did not happen.” By failing to distinguish between an absolute and a conditional “prediction,” however, this passage construes a possibility as a necessity. As we shall see in the next chapter, this tendency on Forsyth’s part derives from his more basic claim that Milton intends his deployment of the “Combat Myth” to disclose a primal ontic strife. The key point here is that these difficulties arise in Forsyth’s analysis, despite his vast erudition and insight, specifically because Milton’s view of divine and human reason is not sufficiently distinguished from a modern view. Only when the Son is understood as the first peaceful difference from the Father – as the Father’s perfect self-expression who is nevertheless truly an other – does the meaning of the choice proposed by the Son’s anointing become apparent. Without that understanding of the Son as Divine Reason, the very starkness of the Father’s warning, the kind of warning that justice would require – the conditional prediction that there is no peaceful alternative to the rejection of peace – will itself appear as a form of injustice. In short, if we anticipate slightly a later part of the argument, the first consequence of Milton’s paraphrase of Psalm : is to foreground the primacy of gift: the Father’s giving of rule (kingship) to the Son (peaceful difference): this gift of sovereignty is revealed to the angels, crossing the infinite distance between the Father and Son without eliminating difference. Divine omnipotence is revealed to rational creatures (in this case

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angels) first as divine gift, the purpose of which is their good. Simultaneous with that appearance is the possibility, rather than necessity, of turning from that good. For Milton, intrinsic to the arch¯e, the origin of created being, is the harmonious difference between divine being and divine being’s perfect expression, between the Father and the Son. By locating the earliest moment of his epic chronology in the Father’s announcement of the Son’s kingship, Milton implies that the pivotal decision of angelic existence is whether they will allow themselves to be governed by the peace of the Son, the divine Rhetoric who is also Reason. As we shall see, Satan’s denial that the Logos was in the beginning (arch¯e) is necessarily a denial of the possibility of peaceful difference in Satan’s own arch¯e. In this respect, the most controversial implication arising from Milton’s weaving of biblical intertexts in Book  of Paradise Lost is to claim that the arch¯e in divine monarchy appears not first in the imposition of the divine will on creatures but in the act of self-gift for the good of those governed, a gift that may be either enjoyed or refused with the dignity of consequence. Thus, while the Son is “Divine Reason,” in the sense that he is the “poetic gift of peaceful difference” specifically from the Father, the subsequent announcement of the Son’s kingship reveals divine power as first a gift given for the good of others. In short, the revelation of the Son’s anointing is a revelation of divine love, or charity. Milton’s engagement of Psalm , however, is not limited to verse ; Raphael’s story in the latter portion of Book  eventually offers a dramatized interpretation of the whole of Psalm , the biblical passage itself providing an implicit typological context for the rest of the epic plot into which the Psalmic text is woven. Milton’s paraphrase of Psalm : (PL .–) transforms retroactively the passage that precedes it. The specific statement that “this day I have begot . . . / My only Son” (.–; italics added) gives a new importance to the temporal setting that Raphael has already given his story. Taken alone, a phrase like “on a day” is far too vague to constitute any kind of allusion. Indeed, in its immediate context, the phrase seems only to offer occasion for a parenthetical explanation of temporal accommodation as the story begins: As yet this World was not . . . . . . when on a day (For Time, though in Eternity, appli’d To motion, measures all things durable By present, past and future) on such a day As Heav’n’s great Year brings forth . . .

(PL .; –)

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As soon as we meet the obvious paraphrase of Psalm : a few lines later, however, we realize exactly what “day” was earlier being indicated, and its significance. In terms of the implied chronology of events depicted in the poem, this day is the first, and as such suggests where to locate the limit for human understanding of God’s infinitude – that is, in the Son. Milton accommodates the Platonic understanding of eternity, but only by changing it to allow for motion in eternity. What enables, and requires, Milton to reject the static character of a Platonic eternity is his interpretation of the Son’s actions before the creation of the world. The overall effect of this link, through the previous mention of “day,” is to foreground the analogical status of those events that are interposed with direct and indirect allusions to the rest of Psalm . The events recounted by Raphael include the beginning of Satan’s plot, his deceptive withdrawal of his angelic troops to the “northern” part of heaven where he persuades them to join his rebellion, and finally the story of Abdiel, the one angel who speaks openly against the plot before leaving the camp. These events then set the stage for Raphael’s account of the war itself in Book . When, in , Milton composed his own verse translation of Psalm , it was notably the only Psalm, out of a total of seventeen (composed between  and ), that was translated into Dantean terzetti – and explicitly identified as such in the title. How long Milton viewed this text as having especially important epic potential or infernal connections remains an open question, but by the time he published his Psalm translations in  he had already woven into Paradise Lost each of the key dramatic moments of Psalm . His parenthetic insertion of the words “though ye rebell” also strengthens the connection between this biblical text and the story of the angels’ fall from heaven: Why do the Gentiles tumult, and the Nations Muse a vain thing, the kings of th’ earth upstand With power, and Princes in their Congregations Lay deep their plots together through each Land, Against the Lord and his Messiah dear [?] Let us break off, say they, by strength of hand Their bonds, and cast from us, no more to wear, Their twisted cords: he who in heaven doth dwell Shall laugh, the Lord shall scoff them, then severe Speak to them in his wrath, and in his fell And fierce ire trouble them; but I saith he Anointed have my King (though ye rebell) On Sion my holi’hill. A firm decree I will declare; the Lord to me hath said

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning Thou art my Son I have begotten thee This day; ask of me, and the grant is made; As thy possession I on thee bestow Th’ Heathen, and as thy conquest to be swayed Earth’s utmost bounds: them shalt thou bring full low With Iron Sceptre bruis’d, and them disperse Like to a potter’s vessel shiver’d so. And now be wise at length ye Kings averse Be taught ye Judges of the earth; with fear Jehovah serve, and let your joy converse With trembling; kiss the Son lest he appear In anger and ye perish in the way If once his wrath take fire like fuel sere. Happy all those who have in him their stay.

For the sake of comparison, the twelve verses of the Psalm can be grouped into five moments of dramatic development, each of which finds treatment in this part of the poem: () the hatching of a plot to subvert the Son’s kingship (vss. –); () divine laughter at the plot (vs. ); () the announcement of Sonship and kingship (anointing) (vss. –); () the promise of judgment by means of the “iron rod” (vs. ); and () a final warning that offers the implicitly temporary option of return to fellowship with God (vss. –). There are allusions to Psalm  throughout the epic, but in Raphael’s narration there is an exceptional integrity to the allusions when taken together. There is, however, a crucial difference in the sequential order of these five dramatic moments. By beginning the story with the announcement of divine Sonship and kingship, the epic places first in sequence what, in the Psalm, comes third (in the middle). Only later, when Satan shares his initially secret rejection of the Messiah with his “unwary” “Associate” (PL .–), do we find a direct parallel to the opening verses of the Psalm that describe the plot to subvert the divine kingship (.–). That parallel is then followed by a dialogue between the Father and the Son that explicitly mentions the “derision” (.) of God’s laughter at such plotting. The sequence of the last two moments is also changed in the epic, so that Abdiel’s initial speech of opposition to Satan’s revolt echoes the Psalm’s final warning: Cease then this impious rage, And tempt not these; but hast’n to appease Th’ incensed Father, and th’ incensed Son, While Pardon may be found in time besought. (.–)

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To readers familiar with Psalm :, the evident allusion here is instructive. In isolation, the Psalmist’s admonition to “kiss the Son, lest he be angry” (Authorized Version) could be construed as monarchical peevishness. But Milton’s dramatized setting for the allusion is especially striking, in that it provides the moment depicted in the Psalm with an explicit intelligibility that remains only implicit in the biblical version. Only later in the poem, when it is finally clear to Abdiel that he is alone in his fidelity and must leave the group, does he then pronounce judgment on the others, specifically mentioning the “Iron rod” that they shall feel, having rejected the “Golden Sceptre” (.–). In this way, the epic elucidates the Psalm by reversing the sequence of its last two moments. This reversal of the last two dramatic moments – the promise of final judgment and the conditional warning – seems to result from the fact that, strictly speaking, Psalm  is literally concerned with the submission of specifically human kings to divine sovereignty – that is, in fact, how the Geneva Bible glosses the text. In this respect, such customary interpretation of this Psalm by Dissenters emphatically relativized the power of all human kings and noted their typical position as one of rebellion against divine rule. The reversal of the sequence of these two events in Paradise Lost emphasizes, in effect, the difference between fallen angels and fallen humans. When Abdiel leaves Satan’s camp, the opportunity for angels to accept the conditional warning has apparently passed. The episode thus concludes with the promise of final judgment that is penultimate in the Psalm. By contrast, the Psalm’s ending emphasizes the still conditional character of living human response to divine kingship that remains open. The other major difference, noted above, between the sequence of dramatic moments depicted in the Psalm and those in Paradise Lost is more complex and more significant. By placing the announcement of the Son’s begetting and anointing first in the sequence of events (rather than third), the epic implies an important difference in the causal relation between the events described. One of the characteristics shared by the Authorized Version and recent translations, as well as Milton’s own translation of the Psalm, is a sense that the announcement of the Son’s kingship is a response to the subversive plot. But in the epic version, the sequence of events implies that Satan’s plot, indeed his individual choice of rebellion, is a response to the Father’s announcement. Milton’s re-sequencing of events allows him to foreground something that is only implicit in the biblical text. Although the Psalmist suggests that the divine pronouncement itself is a response to the plot, the earlier initial description of that same conspiracy

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openly names the Lord’s “anointed” as also the object of their malefaction (vs. ). Thus, within the biblical sequence of the Psalm, the announcement (revealing) of the Son’s anointing is implicitly kept distinct from the event of anointing itself (that is, becoming king). But why then does the epic seem to collapse the announcement and the event into a single moment? In fact, it does not. Satan only perceived (when he “thought himself impair’d”) the announcement as the event, rather than as a revelation of a pre-existing kingship. The key point here is that only when this passage is glossed by the biblical text can the announcement be understood as merely revealing the pride in Satan’s heart, known until then only to God (compare Michael’s speech, PL .). The disclosure of that long-hidden, though free, choice is prompted, not by the Son becoming the Son per se, but by the Father revealing to the angels a further, more intimate, sense in which they are made in the Divine image (compare .–; –). Thus, rather than the poem being simply an interpretation of the Psalm, which it is, it also requires itself to be glossed by the Psalm. By resequencing the announcement of the Son’s anointing within the chronology of the poem, Milton also implicitly emphasizes the independence of the Son’s kingship from the limitations of humanly understood chronology. If we keep in mind Raphael’s opening discussion of “day,” the comments there regarding analogy then become directly linked with the “day” in Psalm  as a kairos moment. This treatment of chronology follows also from the use of typology at work in this part of the poem. Already, the entire discussion above has presumed Milton’s typological reading of the Davidic Psalm as a prophecy of Christ’s ultimate supremacy, which places the Psalm’s full meaning beyond the chronological framework of the history of Israel. But why choose this particular biblical text as a source for the emplotment of Satan’s rebellion? To understand that Milton’s choice is not simply arbitrary, we need only to consider Revelation :–, which is the most direct biblical treatment of the war in heaven. That passage directly connects the Son’s “rod of iron” from Psalm  with the story of the angelic war and Satan’s expulsion from heaven. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, the implied chronology of events in Revelation  does not fit directly with either the Psalm or Raphael’s version of events. Milton obviously goes far beyond the oblique suggestions offered by either of these biblical passages (Psalm  or Revelation ), but his elaboration is often achieved through a mutually illuminating arrangement of their elements. The more general and crucial point here is that the anachrony in many of the imagistic sequences in the book of Revelation provides further warrant for Milton’s re-sequencing of the Psalmic events as they are woven into Raphael’s narrative.

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disclosing ontology The exchange between Satan and Abdiel that ends Book  makes explicit the competing accounts of reality (ontology) that inform Raphael’s story of events in heaven. As we have seen, those contrasting ontologies were largely implicit in the engagement of Psalm ; but here we find a still more direct statement of what is at stake in the rejection of the Son. In the ontology assumed by Abdiel, rational creatures are themselves to the extent that they participate not only in harmonious alterity (divine reason) but also in the revealed creaturely good as given (charity) first from the Father to the Son. In this sense, divine love, or charity, is the origin and end of the angels, whose horizon of understanding is constituted by the infinite conviviality between the Father and the Son. As if to anticipate, however, the reactions of readers who may not perceive the revelation of the Son’s anointing as a revelation of ontic peace, the dialogue between Abdiel and Satan foregrounds the meaning of the ensuing war as a contest between two views of reality. Immediately before the allusion to the final lines of Psalm , Abdiel states that his opposition to Satan’s rebellion is rooted in the distinction between creator and creature (.–). Satan’s appeal to the other angels depends upon his claim that the Son is “equal” to them and does not deserve to rule over them (.–). Abdiel responds: Yet by experience taught we know how good, And of our good, and of our dignity How provident he is, how far from thought To make us less, bent rather to exalt Our happy state under one head more near United. But to grant it thee unjust That equal over equals monarch reign: Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count, Or all angelic nature joined in one, Equal to him begotten Son, by whom As by his Word the mighty Father made All things, even thee, and all the spirits of heaven By him created in their bright degrees Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers, Essential powers. (.–)

Despite the centrality of this passage for understanding the poem’s dramatized treatment of divine justice, its importance has become obscured by critical debate over Milton’s Christology.

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

When Abdiel maintains that “by his Word [i.e., the Son] the mighty Father made / All things” (.–, italics added), he not only paraphrases John :b and Colossians :, but emphasizes a point that is arguably occluded by De Doctrina. In effect, the epic remains open to the implication that the Son is not “made” at all, while the treatise rejects such a claim outright. This difference between the two texts arises, I suggest, not from some attempt on Milton’s part to be doctrinally duplicitous but from his self-conscious attention to his own rhetorical aims. In this case, Abdiel places the Son clearly on the “creator” side of the division between creator and creatures. If the epic implied that the Son were created, rather than co-eternal with the Father (cf. PL .–), then Satan would be right to insist that the Son is really just another creature like the angels. If the Son is created, then maybe the whole angelic host could indeed equal him in authority or power. Abdiel rejects precisely such a claim because he understands the Son to be the means of all divine creation. The logic of Satan’s own argument acknowledges the divine unity of the Father and Son: Satan denies not simply that the Son is his creator but that he was ever created at all. Satan thereby makes himself out to be what the poem depicts the Son to be – uncreated. In responding to Abdiel, however, Satan not only denies being created by the Father or the Son: his argument unfolds the logical relationship between ontology (an account of the real) and political discourse. In Chapter , we considered how the arguments of Thomas Hobbes deployed a story of origins in order to progress logically from an ontology to an anthropology, to a social ontology, and ultimately to an account of political life. Satan’s response to Abdiel similarly embodies, in a compressed form, the way that a story about origins underwrites such a set of claims. In this case, a story of origin (arch¯e) informs an account of angelic nature and an ontology of power (“puissance” understood as coercion) which legitimates an ethical stance and a political program: Who saw When this creation was? Remember’st thou Thy making, while the maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quickening power, when fatal course Had circled his full orb, the birth mature Of this our native heaven, ethereal sons. Our puissance is our own, our own right hand Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try

Divine kingship

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Who is our equal: then thou shalt behold Whether by supplication we intend Address, and to begirt the almighty throne Beseeching or besieging. (PL .–)

Despite the dubious initial claim based on the non-existence of evidence, the ensuing development of Satan’s argument, like that of Hobbes, embodies a remarkable internal consistency. Having denied that his own existence depends upon the creative act of the Father working through the Son, Satan’s alternative story of angelic origin by spontaneous generation entails also a different ontology. His story assumes that the arch¯e of angelic nature is not the divine gift of peaceful difference, but the sheer necessity (“fatal course”) of cosmic matter in motion. That ontology of “power” as compulsion, in turn, underwrites an ethic in which the angelic good is defined by becoming supreme in the compelling of others. That ethic then culminates in Satan’s political demand that God prove his omnipotence by means of military force. In this way, Satan’s speech models how a story of origins can give rise to an ontology, an ethic, and a political program. The violence of the main action that then follows in Book  is therefore a response to Satan’s free demand that God prove himself by means of force. In response to such a characterization of Satan’s argument, the customary neo-Empsonian objection, as we noted earlier, is to point out that Satan simply reflects the violence of the Father’s threats. As Forsyth puts it: “God’s sudden decision to exalt his Son, the event that causes all the trouble, is thus what readers of the Book (the Bible) have come to expect, but is in itself merely arbitrary. Satan may well get some of our sympathy.” Besides exemplifying Forsyth’s characteristic tendency to render the Son’s exaltation as a sufficient cause for Satan’s fall, this statement also demonstrates well the connection between a sympathetic reading of Satan and a suspension of a typological reading of the biblical intertexts. Regarding most notably Milton’s engagement of Psalm , I contend that Milton never imagined the Father’s announcement to appear “in itself,” that is, apart from the biblical passages invoked: Milton presumes that the event is always already intertextual. Because the revelation of the Son’s kingship is not dictated by absolute necessity, the action will indeed tend to appear “arbitrary,” or random, if the event is considered merely “in itself”: that is, isolated from the biblical intertexts that the event engages. In relation to those passages, however, Milton’s adaptation presents the Son’s exaltation as neither determined nor random, but fitting. At a still more basic level, the very conditionality of the angelic situation depends on an ontically

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

prior revelation to the angels that in their arch¯e is the Son, the peaceful difference from the Father, who is their good. In short, by arranging the central dramatic action in this way, Milton emphasizes that to reject the Son is to preclude, by conditional necessity, God’s “power” from appearing to oneself in any form other than compulsion. We are now in a position to return to the opening question regarding why a republican like Milton would portray God as a monarch. As Bryson puts it, why would the author of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes “portray God as a military king in Paradise Lost”? Bryson’s answer is that Milton depicts the Father as a revelation of the “wickedness inherent in conceiving of God as a monarch,” while “the Son promises” “monarchy-renouncing monarchy.” The latter phrase stands out as one of the few points at which Bryson admits that the Son’s governance is, in fact, described in both Paradise Lost and Scripture as a monarchy. Of course, the Son’s kingship is not really “monarchy,” as Bryson usually defines it. The root difficulty in Bryson’s argument is that he usually overstates his claim so as to impute to Milton a rejection of divine kingship per se, rather than a radical critique of the ways in which divine kingship is typically misconceived by fallen humans. By tautologically defining monarchy as violent, Bryson imputes to Milton an implausible attitude toward biblical idiom. If Milton does not simply challenge customary interpretations of divine kingship but condemns as idolatrous the very language of divine kingship, then Milton, according to such a view, condemns a central theological idiom deployed not only by the Hebrew Bible but by much of the New Testament, most notably the gospel of Matthew and the book of Revelation. Such a characterization of Milton’s position is not warranted by any of Milton’s statements regarding the nature of biblical language (e.g., CPW vi:–). The most decisive difficulty in Bryson’s proposed answer is that the alleged opposition between the monarchies of the Father and the Son is not finally supported by the depictions of their relation in Paradise Lost. If the Father and Son in Paradise Lost are truly opposed, then the Father is genuinely giving away sovereignty and cannot be the tyrant that Bryson alleges; if, however, Bryson is correct that the Father represents divine tyranny, then this “giving” is a mere deception and there is no real distinction between the monarchies of the Father and the Son. Thus, according to Bryson’s own argument, either the Father is not really a tyrant, or the Son is not really a positive alternative to the Father. In effect, even if the Son’s kingship is not really “kingship,” as Bryson defines it, the very source of even that supposedly alternative governance, according to the

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explicit action in the poem, remains the allegedly evil monarch/tyrant of heaven, the Father. I contend, rather, that Milton’s point is not merely to assert divine kingship but to stipulate that divine sovereignty is uniquely revealed as such, in its omnipotence, to rational creatures by the act of giving itself (sovereignty) away to the one who is the creaturely good. In this necessarily indirect way, Paradise Lost attempts to show how divine omnipotence could be manifest to finite creatures without appearing as mere destruction. Thus, also, Abdiel’s parenthetical explanation of the relation between time and eternity, occasioned by the word “day” (PL .–) cannot be dismissed as mere “gobbledygook,” as Forsyth contends. According to Forsyth, the explanation serves only to “account for the narrator’s use of the word ‘day’, which arises, in turn, from the need to quote the biblical passages [i.e., Psalm ] accurately.” All of which is true, as far as it goes, but is arguably beside the point: why is the accuracy of the Psalm  quotation important to Milton in the first place? At one level, the precise evocation of Psalm  reclaims it from the public habituation to Royalist interpretations that would use the text to legitimate human kingship, rather than to expose human monarchs for the rebels against divine rule that they typically are. In a further sense, the clear biblical intertext regarding “day” locates in the Son’s annointing the temporal limits of humanly intelligible reality. Forsyth maintains that the references to angelic actions that precede the anouncement of the Son’s anointing (PL .–) belie the pretensions of the Father’s speech as an “originary or foundation speech.” But this simply mistakes an explicitly accommodated revelation for an absolute ontic claim. Neither the Father, as the character speaking, nor Raphael, as inset narrator, implies that the moment is anything more than the beginning of Raphael’s story, which is accommodated to the capacities and needs of newly created human beings. The most important reason for the precision and accuracy in Milton’s engagement with this particular biblical intertext is his intention that the poem would be interpreted by reference to the biblical text, rather than merely vice versa. As Forsyth points out, the Father in Paradise Lost “sounds as if he is evoking a rebellion against his decree” because “in the psalm [i.e., ] the rebellion was already taking place, and God responds to it . . . The decree in Book  is almost nakedly what Psalm  in fact is, a threat that the new king will prove the stronger.” At one level, this passage registers but misses the point of the specific kind of repetition with difference that typology involves. The underlying issue, however, is that Forsyth misses the priority of gift; in effect, he presumes that “stronger” means only the ability to coerce rather than primarily the

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

ability to do good, which may include but is not limited to conditional acts of justice toward those who reject the good and refuse to be governed by peaceful difference. Of course, Milton’s arrangement of the sequence of events still gives the Father’s announcement of the Son’s kingship some role in Satan’s fall. How readers understand Satan’s fall will influence, both by comparison as well as by causal relation, how we understand the human fall that is central to Milton’s poem. As we have already observed, in strictly logical terms, the distinction between a “necessary cause” and a “sufficient cause” is enough to show that Satan falls freely. Insofar as being created at all is a necessary cause for any angel or human to be able to sin, God is a necessary but not sufficient cause of sin. Because creatures are created good, in Milton’s account, existence in itself can never be a sufficient cause for sin. Moreover, because humans and angels, as rational creatures, are able to choose actions freely, no number of necessary causes, apart from individual volition, can ever, in principle, amount to a sufficient cause of the origin of evil. This is why, as Dennis Danielson points out, there can never be a complete explanation of the human fall “in terms of sufficient causation” – to do so would eliminate free choice. If it were possible to demonstrate, on the basis of sufficient causation, why the Fall happened, then it would have been caused inexorably and would not have been freely chosen – thus making God the sufficient cause of evil. Stanley Fish makes a similar point in discussing the account of Satan’s decision: “there can be no answer to the question, ‘why does Satan fall?’ for any answer will compromise the freedom of the will he exercises.” In effect, those points in the poem that would apparently offer some explanation for Satan’s choice offer instead only narrated obscurity (for example, PL .–). Such critical attempts, however, to preserve the irreducibility of the epic’s narration of free choice, against a presumed necessity, risk implying a degree of division between the reason and the will, a division that Milton seemed especially concerned to avoid. Although such an explanation may show that God is not a sufficient cause of evil, the human will itself can appear as something merely random, as though the very act of distinguishing between possible choices did not presume intellection of some kind. Moreover, the details of the story in Genesis  may still leave the impression that for God to allow Adam and Eve to suffer temptation and deception, over and above such freedom to choose between good and evil, is somehow unjust. In terms of direct and explicit statements, the poem addresses this issue in two specific ways: first, by extending sufficient grace and hope of restoration to fallen humans; second, by sending Raphael to prepare Adam

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and Eve against temptation (that middle third of the epic). However, we could still ask, regardless of these precautions and remedies, why God allowed Satan to tempt Adam and Eve at all. The epic also addresses this question, but it does so with necessary indirection. In order to understand that indirection, we need to consider the remaining events of the war in heaven as they are recounted in Books  and .

chapter 6

Rational battle

If Paradise Lost deploys the image of divine kingship for the purposes that I argue in the previous chapter, to show the ontic priority of divine gift rather than compulsion, why does Milton devote Book  to an account of epic battle? Such an emphasis upon coercive conflict might seem to emphasize not charity but violence. Milton does not, of course, deny that coercion or corruption happens. To argue, as I have, that Milton views “reason” as the poetic gift of peaceful difference and views “reality” as rooted in the further gift of goodness (charity) across that peaceful difference does not imply that he na¨ıvely imagined violence to be impossible or even always avoidable in a fallen world. Rather, Milton recognized that any attempt to let divine justice become apparent must take full measure of what violence can do. This chapter begins by establishing the significance of Milton’s decision to engage Revelation  so directly in his own account of heavenly war. The central portion of the argument focuses on the ways in which the angelic debates that dilate this adaptation of Revelation  engage the polysemic sense of “reason” described in previous chapters. The final stage of the argument considers the same heavenly battle episodes but with a view to some other key biblical intertexts engaged by the account of the three-day war. As the narrative unfolds what I have called Milton’s “Christo-poetic” sense of divine reason as ontic harmony, it also connects that reality to the “ethico-cognitive” sense of reason as “right reason.” Ultimately, by placing the Son, this peaceful Ratio, in a martial role at the center of his epic, Milton also emphasizes that his poem is what John Rumrich calls “a sincere intention to justify the ways of God.” The extent to which divine governance of the cosmos can be humanly understood as just is a real question for Milton, and that is why the narrative structure of Paradise Lost foregrounds the very appearance of divine coercion as the central problem for theodicy. Of course, any distinction between the Son’s kingship and Satan’s rebellion will not even appear to readers who assume that “reason” is an instrumental capacity the purpose of which is to 

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master reality. Ultimately, the epic’s deployment of the interplay between Divine Reason (the Son) and the angelic rational (ethic-cognitive) faculty unites with Milton’s intertextual biblicism in order to disclose the ontic priority of peaceful self-gift (charity), rather than violence. Without such an ontology, Paradise Lost implies, divine justice will not even appear to rational creatures. heavenly wars In a manner similar to the engagement of Psalm , Paradise Lost frames its engagement of Revelation  in a way that clearly distinguishes its own narrative action from that of the biblical text. At one level, the epic states explicitly that the events described in Book  are not to be identified with the fall of Satan described in Revelation. At the outset of Book , which describes Satan’s arrival on earth, the narrator cries out: O for that warning voice, which he who saw The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud, Then when the dragon put to second rout, Came furious down to be revenged on men, Woe to the inhabitants on earth! (.–)

By describing the heavenly war in Revelation  as Satan’s “second rout,” the epic implies that its own ensuing narrative (in Book ) is an account of the dragon’s first defeat. Thus, despite the numerous points of parallel and comparison between the two stories, they must be understood to describe two distinct events. The cry of the narrator in the above passage also prepares us for that request for an apocalypse to be answered by the sending of Raphael. In this sense, beyond the many obvious differences in narrative detail, the very use of Raphael, as an intervening narrative voice, further removes the interpretation of the war in heaven from the biblical story. This framing distance, in addition to the many dissimilarities in narrative detail, emphasizes that the two “wars” cannot be collapsed into a single event. Nevertheless, Milton’s engagement of similar key dramatic moments foregrounds the potential for mutual interpretation through the interweaving of repetition and difference. The story in Revelation begins with the appearance of a “great wonder [semeion, “sign”] in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” who is giving birth to a child (Revelation :). A second “wonder,” or “sign,” appears in a “great red dragon” whose “tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

and did cast them to the earth” (:). The dragon attempts but fails to destroy the woman and her child who “was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” (:). The dragon will later attack the woman and wage war against “the remnant of her seed” (:), but before those events are mentioned, we are told: () And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels. () And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. () And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. () And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. () And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony [marturias]; and they loved not their own lives unto the death. () Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the Devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. (Revelation :–)

Strictly speaking, this “war in heaven” notably extends only through verses –. The “loud voice” in verse  is the comparable “warning voice” that the narrator of Paradise Lost calls for at the beginning of Book . If the sending of Raphael is the implicit answer to that cry for a “warning voice” (PL .), then the similarities between the two war stories effectively circle the biblical passage back upon itself. Rather than the “warning voice” speaking only as a result of the war in heaven, like the voice in Revelation , Paradise Lost also re-works elements of that same biblical war story by telling of Satan’s “first rout” in a way that actually constitutes the first “warning” (via Raphael) from heaven. At one level, both Revelation  and Paradise Lost recount a war that is based on a relation between sensible and intelligible reality, whether by referring to a “sign” in heaven or by “lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms.” Both texts recount a war in heaven between Michael and Satan accompanied by their respective armies of angels, and in both stories Satan and his angels are cast from “heaven.” In both cases also the ultimate victory is ascribed to God and “the power of his Christ,” in conjunction with the “saints.” But why would Milton choose to present an extended dilation of this particular passage as a central book of Paradise Lost? We have already noted that the reference to the “rod of iron” links Revelation  directly with the depiction of kingship in Psalm . But Revelation : (together with

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Revelation :) is also notable as one of the only two passages in the entire Bible that explicitly identify “Satan” as both the deceptive “old serpent” from the garden and the dragon who makes war in heaven. Because the identification of the “serpent” in Genesis  as “Satan” is part of some but not all traditions of Genesis interpretation, the biblical authority for such a view was evidently important to Milton. One verse (Revelation :), however, seems like a slim warrant for Milton to decide that a war in heaven will occupy the entire sixth book of his epic. Once again, I suggest that Milton expected his readers to know and to reconsider the familiar biblical passage quoted above (Revelation :–). The only verse in the above-quoted passage that has no direct reiteration in the heavenly war of Paradise Lost is verse . As with his use of Psalm , Milton calls upon readers to interpret his poem’s engagement of Revelation  by means of the biblical text. I contend that Milton evokes this particular biblical battle because Revelation  uniquely models the kind of literary strategy that Milton deploys in Book  of Paradise Lost: specifically the appropriation of a “Combat Myth” in a way that subverts the ontological primacy of violence customarily assumed by such myths. Readers who interpret the heavenly war in Revelation  as a disclosure of ontic strife will, in turn, similarly fail to notice Milton’s subversion of that ontology in Paradise Lost. As various commentators on the book of Revelation attest, the biblical account of the war in heaven appropriates elements from a broad and variously shaped ancient “Combat Myth” which typically narrates the struggle between a new king and the forces of chaos and infertility, the latter often being represented by a dragon. Forsyth points out that, although Milton could not directly know the Near Eastern versions of the Combat Myth which have only been recovered by archeology in the last two centuries, Milton did encounter various aspects of that myth through biblical texts and through classical myths rendered by Hesiod, Apollodorus, or Ovid. In Forsyth’s account, various versions of something like the Zeus–Typhon conflict constitute “a long tradition” of “human-as-cosmic conflict,” which includes much of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and Apocalyptic literature generally, and only out of that tradition emerges the eventual conception of “Satan,” as he later comes to be known. In this way, Milton shows himself to be “a close and accurate reader of the Christian tradition when he put Satan and his war with Christ, an explicit version of the [Combat] myth, so close to the structural center of his poem. . . . In a wider sense, the whole poem is informed by the meanings of the myth.” Milton’s engagement with the Combat Myth is indeed central to his poem; Forsyth,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

however, assumes that the particular “meanings of the myth” for Milton are ultimately the same as the meanings of that myth for ancient interpreters like Celsus and Heraclitus: that “everything comes into being through strife and necessity.” Forsyth’s argument is consistent in this regard, to the point of implacability: in effect, insofar as both the classical versions of the myth and the various biblical adaptations, most notably in Revelation , all embody this primal ontic strife between violent chaos and coerced order, Milton’s deployment of the Combat Myth, according to Forsyth, likewise foregrounds the supplementary ontic and moral dualism between Christ and Satan. Without denying Forsyth’s central claims regarding the Combat Myth or the historical development of Satan as a character, his interpretation of Paradise Lost fails to consider that Milton may have used elements from Revelation  specifically because he understood that biblical passage as providing a model for how to appropriate the Combat Myth while subverting the customarily dualistic ontological assumptions of the genre. Forsyth’s interpretation of the central war in Paradise Lost could be sustainable only if Milton expected his readers to disregard their own knowledge of what he arguably viewed as the most important part of the story in Revelation : that is, its subtle disclosure of a reality that is not rooted in coercion or strife but in the infinite power to give life, revealed in the resurrection. As early as Of Reformation (), Milton refers to Revelation :, when he mentions “the Martyrs, with unresistable might of Weaknesse, shaking the Powers of Darkness, and scorning the fiery rage of the old red Dragon” (CPW i:). As the context in Revelation makes clear, the martyrs’ hope for resurrection is based on faith in the resurrection of “the Lamb” who was slain and came to life again (Revelation :, :– , and :–). Milton’s reference to the biblical passage shows that he understood the resurrection of the body to reveal a power beyond the mortal limits of deception and violence. He also shows his understanding that the defeat of the “old red Dragon” results from such creative power, a gift that is greater than death, rather than from an opposing but merely corresponding coercion. The customary Protestant interpretation of Revelation  was to view it as a description of the history of the early church or of the pre-Reformation church more broadly. The “man child” is evidently the Messiah, but the events of his life, as well as the life of the “woman” (Israel and the church), have been contextualized to show their cosmic spiritual importance. There is no reference in Revelation , however, to the concrete particularities of the death and resurrection of Christ: the story seems to emphasize rather

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the Incarnation and Ascension. Of course, in the context of the book of Revelation, Christ’s death and resurrection have already been thoroughly emphasized from the outset, as has his redemptive work as the “Lamb” of God. Milton does not develop the very same imagery, but Paradise Lost follows a similar approach by depicting in Book  the Father and Son revealing to the angels their eternal purpose to redeem mankind. But what are we to make of the fact that Milton uses all these parallels and differences to recount a heavenly battle that is specifically not to be identified with the “second rout” of Satan described in Revelation ? In short, the parallel narrative in Revelation  provides Milton with a biblical model for a spiritual battle that is based on a Christo-poetic ontology and yet does not recount the details of the Passion narrative. This point is important to keep in mind because, even apart from arguments like Forsyth’s, there is a more immediate sense in which Milton’s depiction of war in heaven could present a challenge to my claim that Milton transforms the epic genre from presuming an ontology of violence to an ontology of charity. One could argue, for example, that the battles in Book  are simply descriptions of warfare and its havoc that are typical of the genre, and nothing more. If we consider some of the battles in detail, however, we can understand how the explicit dialectical engagement between the characters and the biblicist emplotment work together to advance the epic’s treatment of both divine justice and polysemic “reason.” rational unfolding In keeping with the epic norms for describing battle engagement, before Abdiel or Michael meet Satan in battle, we are presented with speeches that verbalize the respective interior states of the combatants. But rather than simply externalizing the subjective states of characters, the dialectical engagements explicitly consider the nature and character of creaturely reason as well as divine justice. In various ways, the angelic speeches address how creaturely reason, faith, and perseverance relate to divine omniscience, omnipotence, and love. As the first day of battle begins, Satan is described as sitting “in his sun-bright chariot,” “exalted as a god” and as an “Idol of majesty divine” (PL .–). Abdiel reacts to the sight by noticing the incongruence of Satan’s majestic appearance: O Heaven! That such resemblance of the highest Should yet remain, where faith and realty Remain not; wherefore should not strength and might



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning There fail where virtue fails, or weakest prove Where boldest; though to sight unconquerable? His puissance, trusting in th’ Almighty’s aid, I mean to try, whose Reason I have tried Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just, That he who in debate of truth hath won, Should win in arms, in both disputes alike Victor; though brutish that contest and foul, When Reason hath to deal with force, yet so Most reason is that Reason overcome. (.–)

As readers of Book  (specifically .–), we know that over time the appearance of Satan and his companions will indeed change to reveal their corrupted state of infidelity. But the consequences of sin require time to unfold, at least for human understanding. One could argue that Abdiel is simply mistaken to think “That he who in debate of truth hath won, / Should win in arms” (.–). But in the same way that deception and sin unfold intelligibly only through temporal narration, the victory of truth is actualized only through time. This central emphasis upon temporal unfolding explains the failure of the faithful angels to vanquish the rebels in the first two days of battle. On the third day, Abdiel’s claim regarding the victory of truth is finally realized by the one who is the head of the angelic host. Thus, critics who emphasize the failure of the faithful angels in battle, whether for reasons of comedic style, or voluntarist theological reasons, risk missing the larger meaning of the temporal delay. Both the ensuing dialogue of this passage and the accompanying biblicism within the plot emphasize a specific double aspect in temporal duration: the unfolding of sin, and the unfolding of faith. On the one hand, time is required for the unfolding of sin’s consequences, consequences that are necessary for the dignity of creaturely freedom to be meaningful or intelligible. On the other hand, given such a condition, the virtue of the faithful inheres in their perseverance in trusting God over time, despite the difficulty of immediate circumstances. In Abdiel’s interior monologue above, the word “reason” is used four times. When he says that through “debate of truth” he has found Satan’s “reason” to be “unsound and false,” he uses the term to indicate a faculty whose action is ethico-cognitive but also includes logical inference in debate. He further observes that, although “Reason” can respond to force using force, coercion is external to its nature:



Rational battle Though brutish that contest and foul, When Reason hath to deal with force, yet so Most reason is that Reason overcome. (.–)

Because reason, as described by Abdiel, is inherently peaceful, the meaning of these lines unfolds in several different senses. At one level, the final line uses “reason” to indicate the appropriate (reasonable) character of the eventual victory of the Son (Reason) over Satan’s violent rebellion. In a deeper sense, these lines indicate that Satan’s use of force belies the antecedent corruption of his own rational faculty which, in turn, had resulted from his refusal to be governed by the peaceful difference. In effect, this strong invocation of “Reason” at the outset of the angelic battle can be understood as a prophecy of the Son’s final victory. This “prophetic” aspect of Abdiel’s speech is emphasized by the fact that the message he proclaims had already been given by the Father, who says to him: The easier conquest now Remains thee, aided by this host of friends [i.e., including the Son], Back on thy foes more glorious to return Then scornd thou didst depart, and to subdue By force, who reason for their Law refuse, Right reason for their Law, and for their king Messiah, who by right of merit Reigns. (.–)

This passage explicitly points out that “force” is extrinsic to reason, but it also indicates the direct relation between angelic “right reason” internally and the political rule of the Son as Divine Reason. Because the Son is both Divine Reason and the one in whom the angels trust, Abdiel’s speech never separates faith from reason, as his own faculty of “right reason” and the person of the Son lead him into battle “trusting in the Almighty’s aid” (.). Thus the central paradox of the war is this: Satan’s use of brute force reveals his rejection of the peaceful ratio of the Son’s kingship but also his rejection of his own ability to participate in that ontic peace by means of the ethico-cognitive faculty of right reason. At the same time, as we have seen, the Son’s use of force in response to that violence does not compromise the peaceful integrity of reason because that response fits the actions and demands of creatures whose freedom entails the dignity of their actions having consequences.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

As we have also noted previously, Milton’s insistence upon the ontic priority of peaceful difference does not entail pacificism. Such an ontology suggests instead a theory of just war. Even to broach such a question, however, risks missing the point of the war story. We need to keep in mind the analogical status of the entire inset narrative. The root issue here is ontology; of course, any given ontology, whether that of compulsion or charity, has ethical and political implications, as we have seen in the previous chapter. Those implications, however, are not derived from a simple correspondence between events in heaven and those on earth – as though Satan’s throne were simply identifiable with the throne of an idolatrous English king. Rather, the ontology of divine gift enables an understanding of both the call to persevere in trusting God and the destruction of the wicked, yet without simplistic reduction of the narrative to present political divisions. As the war in heaven unfolds, the elements of dialogue, dramatic action, biblical intertextuality, and theodic purpose are woven together with increasing density. Abdiel is the first to engage Satan in battle, and he does so by stepping out of ranks to confront and address Satan directly. As the thoughts of his “undaunted heart” (.) change to open speech, he raises directly the question of God’s omniscience and omnipotence: Proud, art thou met? Thy hope was to have reached The highth of thy aspiring unopposed, The throne of God unguarded, and his side Abandoned at the terror of thy power Or potent tongue; fool, not to think how vain Against the omnipotent to rise in arms; Who out of smallest things could without end Have raised incessant armies to defeat Thy folly; or with solitary hand Reaching beyond all limit at one blow Unaided could have finished thee, and whelmed Thy legions under darkness. (PL .–)

According to the poem’s conception of God’s omniscience, Satan’s attempt to mount a surprise attack against God is genuinely laughable. But why then does God seem to let events happen at all, as though they were unknown to him? As revealed even by the terms of such a question, the real issue is not so much omniscience as omnipotence; the deep human impulse that drives theodic debate is the desire that God not simply know about evil and suffering but actually do something. Thus, we are not surprised that, without transition, Abdiel immediately moves his attention from

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Rational battle

God’s knowledge to God’s power. But why then does God not simply do as Abdiel suggests? Why not simply annihilate Satan and the rebels? Why involve all these other angels in a seemingly pointless battle? But thou seest All are not of thy train; there be who faith Prefer, and piety to God, though then To thee not visible, when I alone Seemed in the world erroneous to dissent From all: my sect thou seest, now learn too late How few sometimes may know, when thousands err. (.–)

The passage reiterates the difference between appearance and reality (in the past), but that difference is not between the perception of “two worlds,” as in Platonic allegory. Rather, the difference is between a perceived situation and a reality that is understood only over time. This suggests the way that truth, in Milton’s account, is revealed precisely as the consequences of sin and fidelity are allowed to take their due respective courses. More explicitly, Abdiel indicates that God’s decision not simply to annihilate the rebels “at one blow / Unaided” (.–), is to allow the faithful angels the opportunity to demonstrate to themselves and to one another their fidelity to God. Obviously God already knows who will freely choose to be faithful and who will not, but, having made creatures who can experience the discovery of self-knowledge, he is committed to allowing them the opportunity to declare and manifest their allegiance in accord with their creaturely capacities. At a further level, the invocation of terms from ecclesiastical debate, like “sect” and “dissent,” also implies Milton’s Protestant version of the meaning of the “fellowship of the saints” (hagioi). Whether the saints be originally angelic or human, they are all, amid infinite variety and irreducible particularity, constituted as holy (hagios) by their fidelity over time. typological reasoning We find the same emphasis upon this dual aspect of temporal duration – the judgment of consequences and the need for perseverance – in the indirect use of biblical texts to describe this heavenly war. When Abdiel actually first strikes Satan, causing him to fall back “ten paces huge” (.), the description of Satan’s vast bulk staggering backwards is then elaborated into an extended simile:



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning . . . as if on earth Winds under ground or waters forcing way Sidelong, had pushed a mountain from his seat Half sunk with all his pines. (PL .–)

Although such similes are typical of epic description, this particular simile alludes to the biblical faith that moves mountains and thus adds to Raphael’s repeated association with faithfulness. But within the poem, the image of a moving mountain also foreshadows the events of the next day’s battle, as well as the imagery used to describe the rebel angels’ response to their defeat on the third day. In the latter context, Raphael mentions that, as the Son rode his chariot “O’er shields and helms, and helmed heads,” the enemy “wished the mountains now might be again / Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire” (.–). As annotators observe, these words are a clear allusion to Revelation : which describes those on earth at the time of the final wrath of God, “[saying] to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” John is, however, at that point, repeating an image used by Hosea and by Christ. Hosea recounts the rebellion of an idolatrous nation of Israel who prefers a human king. When they are finally judged for sin, Hosea predicts that “they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us.” Jesus similarly predicts the judgment of Israel, and specifically the city of Jerusalem, using the same phrases. The context for Jesus’s prophecy (within Luke’s Passion narrative) is especially striking. Having been subjected to beating and scourging, condemned to death by crucifixion, Jesus is on his way to Golgotha, when he turns to those who “bewailed and lamented him” and says: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.

In each of these three biblical passages, the purpose of the mountain image is to convey a sense of the horror at God’s final judgment of sin. To recount how Raphael’s description of the Son in glory (.–) and in final judgment (.–) derives from a combination of prophetic biblical passages is not necessary here. The key point is that the desire to be crushed by mountains expresses, by comparison, the subjective experience of those under divine judgment. At the same time, the invocation of

Rational battle



this image of judgment that resonates across biblical texts adds to the epic’s signification of the events that have already happened on the second day. In the second day of battle we find the movement of mountains actually dramatized in the action of the poem. In response to Satan’s primeval invention of gunpowder and cannon fire, the faithful angels begin taking up whole mountains to cast on the rebels (.–). The battle then continues such that “hills amid the air encountered hills / Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire / That underground they fought in dismal shade; / Infernal noise” (.–). The rebel angels are already, in a literal sense, “subdued” (sub-ducere). And although only the King of the angelic host (the Son) can ultimately drive the rebels out, the actions of the faithful angels clearly presage the infernal and subterranean character of the final judgment. At one level, this scene also alludes to the war between the gods, described by Hesiod, not only taking the latter as a “pagan type of the angelic rebellion,” but even suggesting a possible source for the Greek story. More importantly, the dramatized allusion to Hesiod’s story is situated in Milton’s epic so that its meaning is clearly shaped by the biblical glosses provided on the first and third days of battle. In this respect, the image of the moving mountains on the second day of battle embodies both suggested meanings: the power of those acting in faith, and the horror of sin’s consequences in final judgment. Thus Milton uses this particular image to dramatize the same opportunity and challenge afforded by the unfolding of time that were addressed explicitly in the “rational” debates between the angels: the power of faithful perseverance and the judgment of sin through consequences. Moreover, Milton effects this duality of dramatic action through a continual shift in signification, as the mountain image is invoked differently on each day of battle. But why would Milton choose this specific image if it simply embodies the point already made by the characters’ dialogue? Earlier we observed the context for Jesus’s words in Luke :–. By speaking those words on his way to the cross, Jesus pronounced that judgment on the first of the three days that he was to spend in the tomb. The sequence of the three-day war in the epic suggests an obvious parallel with Christ’s three days in the tomb. It would be a mistake, however, to equate the two events or to see one simply as a version of the other, whether “allegorical” or “metaallegorical.” As we shall later see, in discussing Paradise Regained, one of Satan’s most notable mistakes is his failure to understand the differences between the war in heaven and the Son’s later Incarnation on earth. The



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

three-day symmetry is a numerical signification of the Son’s victory over sin in both cases. The two sequences are clearly distinct, however, and need to be understood as such – in the situations they address, in their means of unfolding, and in their ends. The war in heaven addresses the case of angels who chose to wage war against their revealed good. Battle is a fitting mode of response to the demand that omnipotence prove itself by force. The war thus achieves justly the goal of restoring peace to those angels who remain faithful. By contrast, the Incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection of the Son address the case of humans who have freely chosen to reject the will of their maker, but have done so under the influence of deception (PL .). The work of the Son in response to that different situation specifically eschews association with military power, by requiring him instead to be a victim of violence in order to bear the consequence of sin (death) for others. This allows humans the hope of redemption without over-riding the free will of either humans or fallen angels, and showing at the same time that even God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest creaturely compulsion. By keeping in mind the contrast between these two narratives, we can see the importance of the repetition of the three days, in that both stories proclaim the same “Messiah” (King) who is victorious. The poem does not need to mention here the incarnational side of the parallel threeday sequence because Milton could trust his readers to be familiar with the Easter story. Instead, the war in heaven depicts the Son in judgment and the horror experienced by those under that judgment. The three-day symmetry reminds readers who that central character of the Easter story really is – the true identity of that man covered with blood, carrying a cross on his way to death by torture, who told the Daughters of Jerusalem not to weep for him. By weaving the allusions to Luke :– into the consummate third day of heavenly warfare, Milton points out that the man on the cross is also the King of glory. Paradise Lost thereby emphasizes that there is only one Messiah (Anointed) – the divine Word of poetic peaceful difference – who is both fully transcendent, executing judgment, and fully incarnate, suffering death. But how is this theodically relevant? The thrice-repeated image of moving mountains is important also to the signification of the temporal demarcation of the three days of battle. The three-day symmetry (war in heaven; Christ in tomb) helps show the differences between the particularities of the two situations and the series of interactions. The events do not “correspond” allegorically; rather, the typological symmetry allows a connection between the two sequences specifically because of their differences.

Rational battle



And that connection (substantively and formally) is important to Milton’s theodic objective; through its function as an inset narrative, Raphael’s account of the war in heaven shows that divine love, with the freedom and consequences that it entails, can be intelligible to unfallen humans and is indeed real, completely apart from death. While fully admitting, as we find in Books  and , the importance of sacrificial suffering and death in response to the specifically human version of the problem of sin, Paradise Lost does not make death the ultimate standard by which divine love is judged, nor is death ultimately integral to charity. This point is no less crucial to the intellectual aims of theodicy than is one’s understanding of human freedom. In order to argue intelligibly that God is not the cause of evil, divine love must not be ontologically dependent upon the existence of evil, or death, even as a negation. To presume that sacrificial death is inherent in divine love would make God both good and evil. At this point, the importance of the fact that the participants in the war are all angels also becomes apparent. Although both parties consist of “immortal” creatures who are, in a sense, indestructible, they all risk losing, protecting, or celebrating the joy of true fellowship – harmonious difference – with their maker and with one another. In theological terms, such a breach in communion is precisely what constitutes genuine “death.” But the key point here is that the gift of such intercommunion ontologically precedes all else. Thus, the primal conviviality in which the angels share does not depend upon death for its reality or its supreme expression. It is important not to misunderstand my point here. Milton is not questioning the repeated biblical point that the post-lapsarian human experience of God’s love is dependent upon the sacrificial work of Christ. Nor does he question the importance, for example, of martyrdom as part of Christian faithfulness in a fallen world (e.g., PL .–). Rather, following the model of Revelation , Milton aims to encourage precisely such fidelity unto death by pointing out that the reality of divine love does not depend upon death, even in a supplementary way. The three-day symmetry ensures that the ultimate horizon for a thoroughly biblical understanding of Christ’s Passion is not death but the free convivial intimacy of divine love. The engagement of Revelation  shows again how the effect of biblical intertextuality in Paradise Lost is not only to gloss the poem by means of biblical text but to enact the dynamics of difference through repetition. By using elements from the biblical story of Satan’s second defeat to tell explicitly the story of his first defeat, the biblical elements are resituated in



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

a way that brings them into a new relation with their biblical source. For example, in the very act of pointing out that Revelation  describes Satan’s second defeat, the poem raises the question of what we could ever mean by Satan “falling” from heaven at all. Construed in crudely spatial terms, how could Satan ever get to “heaven” in order to be cast down a second time? The book of Job implies that, even after becoming the Adversary, Satan still somehow comes before God’s throne (Job :–). How can this be? The relevance of this question for Milton is demonstrated by the direct raising of a similar question, with specific reference to Job, in Paradise Regained (:–). First, we should keep in mind that Raphael’s story, following the idiom of Revelation , uses the adjective “heavenly” more to indicate things “spiritual,” rather than a precise spatial relationship. “Where” exactly do the events described in Revelation  – for example, the birth of the Messiah – actually occur, “heaven” or earth? The point is not location but that events on earth have spiritual meaning. Readers of Paradise Lost are also expected to recall that, after the Fall, Satan became legitimately entitled to a certain degree of spiritual (“heavenly”) authority over the earth, including human institutions (Luke :–) – that is, until his defeat at Golgotha. After the resurrection, we find the situation described in Revelation :– and explained theologically in those Pauline epistles that describe Christ’s supremacy as “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in the world to come” (Ephesians :). Thus, the ongoing battle described in Revelation , after Satan’s “second rout” and Christ’s Ascension, results from the fact that, although Satan is divested of spiritual authority, he remains able for a time to persecute the Saints (Revelation :–). The elements of repetition with difference in the two stories of heavenly war thus enable Milton to locate his readers implicitly at a specific point in the larger cosmic battle: that is, at a time when Satan continues to be granted agency, despite his loss of authority. There is also an implied parallel between the situation of Abdiel, dismayed at Satan’s continued appearance of power and glory (PL .–), and the “warfaring” Christian reader of the poem. Yet the sequential symmetry is skewed, because Abdiel’s speech occurs even before Satan’s “first rout”; whereas the implied reader of the epic, amid an incomplete Reformation, is implicitly located after the “second rout.” The poem implies that both war stories point toward a present spiritual battle that will culminate in the third defeat of Satan on earth, at which point Christ in glory will drive Satan from the earth in the same way that he drove him from heaven. The use of this particular

Rational battle



passage from Revelation thus allows Milton to unite the beginning, middle, and end of the battle against evil into a single episode at the centre of his epic, through a strategy of precise indirection. This unfolding of these three spiritual battles – in heaven, at the Incarnation, and in the readers’ present – does not, however, collapse the events into a single “abstracted narrative,” but recounts the singularities of the first war with a view (by implication and allusion) to parallel events in the other two wars, even as they remain distinct. Moreover, this triadic relation is made possible through the implied fourth temporal location of readers. If the three wars between Christ and Satan are taken respectively as the beginning, middle, and end of the ongoing struggle, the implied location of the reader is not in the “middle” as such (that is, at the Incarnation of the Son on earth). Instead, the reader is located, in this sense, between the “middle” and the “end.” The parallel between the situations of Abdiel and the reader implies that the reader is at the beginning of a spiritual battle (the “third rout”) which will drive Satan from the earth. We can now return to the earlier theodic question regarding why God allowed Satan to tempt Adam and Eve at all. Although the answer is not properly separable from the entire poem in all its specificity, we have considered enough of Book  to understand that the answer is “charity.” The war in heaven provides some account of what divine love really involves, but the meaning continues to unfold throughout the poem because charity is also, in a sense, the imperative that issues from the larger biblical story (as we shall see in Chapter ). In reduced terms, it involves the giving of oneself to another in such a way that allows the other to respond in true freedom – thus involving risk and the reality of consequences. The practice of charity will, of course, differ drastically between different kinds of beings. The difference is greatest when the practice of charity by any creature is compared with that by an omniscient God. But for rational creatures at least, an understanding of such gift-love and its consequences is always borne within a story. Whether we consider Adam’s narration of his first conversation with God, the Protoevangelium after the Fall, the Hebrew covenant recounted in Exodus, in each case the narrative embodies for Milton a divinely initiated relationship that allows humans the genuine freedom to respond in kind or to turn away as they choose. Typology enables those stories to be linked into a single biblical metanarrative in such a way that the origin and ultimate end remains this self-giving. The central role of charity in Milton’s theodic undertaking also bears upon the question of how one deliberates between competing ontologies



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

and the stories of origin that legitimate them. Notwithstanding Satan’s fallen condition and his self-deception, divine love still entails that his actions have, within limits, the dignity of consequences. In effect, to believe that God’s allowance of active temptation is somehow unfair to humans is to presume, not only that humans can know better than their maker what they can withstand, but also that coercion rather than divine gift is the ultimate reality. This issue is, in some ways, the crux of most arguments against theodicy, because most often they hinge upon the claim that, if there were a God who was truly good and omnipotent, he must have prevented anything like the Fall, or evil in general, from ever happening. The root issues here become especially apparent if we consider the obscurity in the description of the origin of Satan’s rebellion. Most striking is Satan’s apparent failure to grasp the reality of divine omniscience, when he seems to think that he can keep his plans a secret from God (.–), which invites recollection of the divine laughter of Psalm :. Indeed, Satan seems more concerned to conceal his plans only from other angels and rather presumes that he need not allow for God’s omniscience, given the degree of freedom to which he and the other angels are accustomed. But why was Satan allowed to tempt even one other angel, much less humans, or even to speak about his plans at all? Why did God not simply destroy Satan during the first moment that his heart genuinely turned to rebellion? It certainly would have made for a much simpler story and made things easier for humans. Of course, that is not what happens in the story, but the very appeal of such a “solution” for readers indicates how much we are prone to believe in the primacy of coercion rather than the fitting gratuity of divine gift which grants rational creatures the dignity of actions with consequences. The temporal unfolding of the war in heaven emphasizes the divine commitment to the being of rational creatures as genuine gift. In other words, because Satan’s being is really a genuine gift, not something revocable at whim, God allows Satan’s actions to unfold and does not simply destroy him the moment he chooses rebellion. As the apparent exceptions that prove the rule, the precise moments in the epic at which God permits and limits compulsion illustrate the point that the free intercommunion of charity, rather than coercion, is the ultimate reality in Paradise Lost. As noted, during the war in heaven, Satan and his troops are answered by force specifically because they have made their demands within those terms. They claimed supreme force as the basis for supreme rule and then demanded that God’s rule be vindicated by a compulsion greater than their own. As the Son explains:



Rational battle That they may have their wish, to try with me In Battel which the stronger proves, they all, Or I alone against them, since by strength They measure all, of other excellence Not emulous, nor care who them excels; Nor other strife with them do I vouchsafe. (PL .–)

Once the angels are answered in this way, however, and though they are in bondage to sin and its consequences, their own actions continue to have consequences, precisely because of the divine gift, the charity, that enabled their initial creation as rational beings. By contrast, a crucial point in the story where God specifically does not permit coercion is the point at which Satan is not permitted to use violence to overthrow Adam and Eve (PL .). He is allowed to tempt them, but not to compel. Both aspects of Satan’s condition are entailed by the divine gift of creaturely being, as charity permits Satan’s plan of temptation the dignity of consequences, yet divine love also restrains Satan’s actions so that those who would suffer the consequences are not forced to endure more than they can bear. But in both respects divine gift, rather than compulsion, is that which enables being. In this way, the epic demonstrates the relationship between Milton’s “scriptural reasoning” – in the Christo-poetic and ethico-cognitive senses – and charitable ontology, or creation’s being rooted in aesthetic gift. In this sense, as readers of the epic battles in Paradise Lost, we are thus surprised, not by sin, but by a love that is deeper than sin, and more real and more powerful than any coercion.

chapter 7

Rational allegory and gender

In choosing the human fall as the main narrative subject for Paradise Lost, Milton poetically engages a biblical story that had long been implicated in theological treatments of not only gender hierarchy but also rational faculty psychology and allegorical interpretation. In shifting the focus of this study from the central books of Paradise Lost to the climactic events of the Fall described in Book , this chapter moves our primary attention from the Son, as “Divine Reason,” to the human faculty of reason and its relation to gender difference. Nevertheless, in a manner similar to the depiction of the Son as the peaceful difference who is both from the Father and in the arch¯e of all created being, Paradise Lost depicts the difference between male and female as one that is in the arch¯e of human nature. The interpretive difficulty here is that modern readers of Paradise Lost will tend to assume that gender difference, like reason, is intrinsically coercive. In effect, readers who assume reason to be an imposition of order upon ontic chaos will similarly tend to assume that the arch¯e in hierarchy and patriarchy is necessarily an imposition of will upon others, rather than a prior gift for the good of others that does not compel. In this sense, Milton proposes what I call an “ontic charity,” in which reality, rather being coercive or chaotic, is a gift whose purpose is the uncompelled good of others. As Chapters  and  have demonstrated, the creaturely freedom entailed by such ontic charity results in the possibility, not the necessity, that some creatures may refuse to be governed by the gift of peaceful difference (that is, by the Son). Because Milton does not share in the modern assumption that reason is the calculative capacity to impose order on fortune or nature, as Chapters  and  demonstrate, he does not view difference as intrinsically coercive. As a result, his poetic depiction of gender difference, both before and after the Fall, similarly implies that relations between men and women may be rooted in harmony and not necessarily in compulsion. 

Rational allegory and gender

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This chapter does not attempt to resolve the longstanding disagreement between those critics who emphasize the role of gender hierarchy in Milton’s writing and those who emphasize the potential in his writing for a more egalitarian view of gender difference. Instead, the argument here goes beyond both sides of that disagreement by showing that Paradise Lost in particular does not reject hierarchy so much as subvert what readers might typically presume that the arch¯e in hierarchy involves. Because of the particular exegetical history of Genesis  to which Milton partly responds, our consideration of “reason” begins with an account of allegorical interpretations of the Fall. Based on that discussion of allegory, we shall then consider four key depictions of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost that seem to invoke allegorical interpretations of the Fall in terms of rational faculty psychology. The final stage of the argument brings these considerations of allegory and reason to bear directly upon the question of gender hierarchy in Paradise Lost. Ultimately, I contend that, amid the layers of allegorical ambivalence, Milton weaves a typological disclosure of ontic charity that subverts the customary assumption that the arch¯e in hierarchy is necessarily coercive. In this way, although Paradise Lost seems explicitly, at different points, to endorse alternately either a hierarchical or an egalitarian view of gender difference, the epic implicitly interrogates the modern ontological assumptions usually shared by both ways of interpreting the poem. allegories of reason Any adequate treatment of “reason” in Paradise Lost must contend with the topic of allegory because of three different, though related, factors in the history of biblical interpretation. First, Christian allegorical interpretations of Genesis  had, at least since Origen, been deployed specifically to address “rationalist” claims that the surface narrative was absurdly fanciful. Thus allegory, as an interpretive mode, became a means to make the surface narrative intellectually acceptable, by finding a universal abstract meaning behind the ostensible events of the story. Second, the substantive content of those allegorical interpretations advanced specific accounts of the role of “reason” as a faculty in the human soul. The concept of “reason” thus functioned traditionally both as the occasion for the imperatives of allegorical interpretation and as the object of that interpretive mode. In both of these cases, however, the concern is with allegory as a mode of reading, rather than writing. Throughout the medieval and early-modern periods, “allegory” functioned not only as an interpretive mode that could be applied to the Bible or any other text, but also as a compositional mode

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by which the resulting narrative foregrounded the allegorical function of its own surface elements. In what follows, I use the term “allegoresis” to refer specifically to the mode of interpretation, and “allegorical narrative” to indicate stories that explicitly point out the referential status of their own constituent parts. Early-modern examples of the latter kind of writing, which Catherine Martin calls “normative allegory,” can be found in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In Chapter  we noted, following Stephen Fallon’s lead, that Milton uses such explicitly allegorical narrative primarily to depict ontic privation in, for example, the account of Satan, Sin, and Death. I suggest that Milton also characteristically deploys typology in Paradise Lost to depict reality, the victory of ontic charity, rather than its corruption or privation. Milton’s use of typology contrasts with a nominalist conception of allegory in that for typology the “surface” narrative is not simply a discardable husk for communicating abstract truth. The intelligibility of truth, in such typology, is thus inseparable from the particularities of the story. In his retelling of the Fall of Adam and Eve, Milton does not, I contend, deploy explicitly allegorical narrative, but his account does clearly demonstrate a familiarity with the allegorical interpretations to which the biblical narrative had been subjected. The distinction between “allegoresis,” as a reading strategy, and “allegorical narrative,” as a mode of writing, is helpful to avoid two potential misconstruals of Paradise Lost. On the one hand, the predominant emphasis among Milton critics regarding the importance of typology in Reformation thinking (often to the exclusion of allegoresis) obscures the ongoing currency of allegory among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English interpreters of Genesis  specifically. Indeed, once one realizes how deeply persistent and widely presumed was the tendency toward allegorical readings of the Fall, it becomes especially striking that Paradise Lost does not engage the mode of allegory more directly. In reaction against that dominant critical tendency, Kenneth Borris does not deny the complex individuality of Adam and Eve’s characterization but argues that, in Paradise Lost, “the traditional [Edenic] allegories become heuristic devices, played off each other and the couple’s diverse traits as individuals; and so the allegories are themselves to be queried even as they are used to explore the meaning of the Fall.” Ultimately, Borris’s analysis suggests that Milton does not so much “query” the allegories as use them to add complementary psychological sophistication to his account of the Fall. Taking points of departure from such allegorical readings of Paradise Lost, I contend that the poem invokes but then frustrates any clearly allegorical narration when recounting the event of the Fall itself. In this regard,

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Milton’s choice of genre is revealing. The Trinity College manuscript that records Milton’s early drafts of a tragic play titled “Paradise Lost,” or “Adam Unparadized,” shows that the logic of the dramatic genre would have led Milton to make extensive use of allegorical characters, along the lines of a morality play, with names such as Justice, Mercy, Wisdom, Conscience, Faith, Hope, and Charity. In choosing the genre of biblical epic, Milton deliberately eschewed such abstract allegorical narrative, in the same way that he explicitly rejected the allegorical potential of romance epic (PL .–). The danger of the dominant critical attitude is to ignore how much Milton could have presumed his first readers’ expectations of an allegorical interpretation. By contrast, the risk in Borris’s account is that to elide the distinction between “allegoresis” and “allegorical narrative” might lead us to overlook how Milton criticizes the way allegoresis, at least in a nominalist and moralistic mode, tends to undermine the ontological status of the events recounted in the surface of the biblical narrative. The allegorical interpretations of Genesis  that remained commonplace in Renaissance English discourse did so in two main forms: one originating with Philo, the other with St. Augustine. Moreover, those allegories were used, in some cases, to underwrite a hierarchy of gender relations. In De Opificio Mundi, Philo of Alexandria interprets Adam in Genesis  as the Reason, or mind, and Eve as the Senses. In this model, the Fall occurs when the rational faculty becomes subject to sensual appetites. Philo interprets the passage using the traditional categories of a bipartite soul. Although such a reading could be, and often was, harmonized with a general Christian admonition to avoid sensuality, it was most commonly used during the Renaissance by those in the Hermetic and mystical traditions of Platonist philosophy. The connection is important because that tradition linked the bipartite account of the soul with the story of the hermaphrodite in Plato’s Symposium. According to that androgynous model, the originally perfect human soul consisted of a spiritual (masculine) and corporeal (feminine) component. As Marilyn Farwell has shown, the Renaissance Platonist concept of androgyny is simply not reconcilable with Paradise Lost, for several reasons. It requires that the sexes were originally part of an ontologically static unit, something directly opposed to Milton’s developmental view of Edenic perfection. In this respect, because the androgynous Platonic “Fall” is from the eternal into the temporal, it involves a very different kind of event from that recounted in Paradise Lost. Moreover, if Adam and Eve are interpreted as an androgyne, then the “Fall,” in this Platonic sense, would have to occur at the moment of their “separation,” whether that moment is understood as the moment of

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

biological differentiation between the sexes or as the subsequent dramatized separation that precedes the temptation. To interpret the first kind of separation as the Fall would locate the origin of evil in the corporeal human condition and in the differentiation of the sexes. Such a view would miss Paradise Lost’s implicit but evident insistence on the goodness of sexuality as well as the goodness of the body, as first created. On the other hand, to interpret the later dramatized separation as constituting the Fall would impute to Milton a kind of fatalism that Paradise Lost explicitly rejects; this is why the narrator specifically observes that, even after separating from Adam, Eve is still “sinless” (PL .). All of this is not surprising, given Milton’s explicit rejection, in Tetrachordon, of the idea that humanity was first created hermaphroditic (CPW ii:). The key point here is that, even if we discern within Paradise Lost an invocation of a Philonic allegoresis, such an invocation would still not entail a hermaphroditic account of human origins. In De Trinitate, Augustine argues that both Adam and Eve correspond to different aspects of human reason: Adam to intellectus (understanding) or higher reason, Eve to scientia (knowledge) or lower reason. The intellect is concerned with the contemplation of eternal, noncontingent truth, while scientia (also called simply “reason” or ratio), is concerned with the ordered reflection upon sense experience. In this model, the snake then corresponds to the senses. The “Fall” thus occurs when the lower reason becomes enamoured of sensual experience, which is that moment when Eve eats the fruit. Sin then becomes complete when the intellect gives consent to the action of the lower reason. Augustine’s discussion of the Fall in De Trinitate concerns specifically how to discern in the individual human mind a triune image of God. In his account, the divine image is located only in that part of the mind that contemplates eternal things (intellect) and not in that which deals with temporal things (lower reason). Moreover, that divine image, or intellectual capacity to consult “the eternal reasons of things,” is something that “not only men, but also women have.” Thus, the bodily differences between sexes are taken as a figural representation of the two functions of reason that exist in all men and women, regardless of gender. These elements in Augustine’s account are important because they bear on several issues that Paradise Lost also engages, including the nature of the divine image, the relation between higher reason and lower reason as that image, and the way that the divine image pertains to gender relations between whole persons. Moreover, Augustine’s interpretation attempts to negotiate the tensions between the same biblical passages that Milton will

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later engage. In short, Augustine must contend with the double assertion, made by St. Paul, that the relation between men and women is apparently hierarchical ( Corinthians :–), but that in Christ “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians :). Augustine’s response here is to say that the hierarchical relation and its potential corruption is only a temporal figuration of an individual spiritual state that pertains to every person, with respect to the psychology of good and evil. The individual dimension is important because Augustine stipulates, in passing, that his allegorical interpretation does not preclude a historical reading of the same biblical passage, according to which all three faculties (intellect, reason, and senses) would be equally operative in both Adam and Eve as whole individual persons. The crucial element in Augustine’s allegorical account is that lower reason, or knowledge of temporal reality, finds its ultimate end, or purpose, in the enjoyment of eternal truth in which sensible reality participates. In this way, the “Fall” occurs when scientia fails to refer temporal knowledge to eternal truth. As we shall see, Milton’s account of the relation between temporal and eternal reality involves a generally less static characterization of eternity, but Milton must ultimately deal with many of the same interpretive issues, with respect to faculty psychology. Given the persistence of these influential models for interpreting the Fall, how does Paradise Lost engage them? Borris frames, and begins to answer, the question in this way: Milton could have endeavoured to preclude such readings altogether by stating explicitly that his couple are not “allegoric,” or by dismissing the traditional allegories with one of his brusque narratorial interjections, such as “thus they relate, / Erring.” [PL .–] But the poet provides no such directives; critical assertions that allegory has little or no relevance to Paradise Lost are at best suppositious. Instead, the poem clearly aligns Adam and Eve to some extent with qualities attached to their respective psychological meanings in once-familiar allegories of the Fall. (italics added)

Despite the accuracy of the initial observations, the final assertion is more difficult to sustain. The allegories were familiar to readers, but the poem’s deployment of their categories is far from clear. Indeed, I contend that their invocation is so ambiguous as to have an effect quite opposite to what Borris suggests. Despite the importance of Philonic and Augustinian allegoresis of the Fall, we should appreciate that not all references to faculty psychology necessarily invoke such interpretations of Genesis , much less the same didactic point made by those interpretations. For example, Borris describes

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Milton’s account of faculty psychology in the Seventh Prolusion as “quasi– philonic”; however, a closer look at the passage shows that, even as a university student, Milton found such traditional allegorical categories inadequate to describe complex psychological dynamics: But all agree that while the human Intellect shines forth as the lord and governor of all the other faculties, it guides and illuminates with its radiance the Will also, which would else be blind, and the Will shines with borrowed light, even as the moon does. So even though we grant and willingly concede that Virtue without Learning is more conducive to happiness than Learning without Virtue, yet when these two are once wedded in happy union as they sure ought to be, and often are, then indeed Knowledge [scientia] raises her head aloft and shows herself far superior, and shining forth takes up her seat on high beside the king and governor, Intellect, and gazes upon the doings of the Will below as upon some object lying far beneath her feet; and thereafter for evermore she claims as her right all excellence and splendor and a majesty next to that of God Himself. (CPW i:)

The only thing vaguely “Philonic” about this account is that it uses a marriage metaphor to describe the union between two faculties of the soul. But the two faculties united do not correspond completely with either the Philonic or the Augustinian model. Instead of the bipartite soul of Reason and Sense, the Intellect unites with the feminine “Will” in order to produce the further feminine figure of “Knowledge.” If anything, the figure of Knowledge corresponds more closely to the Augustinian account of Eve as ratio or scientia, but even in that respect the allegory is stretched to breaking point. Indeed, “Knowledge” here seems to have important similarities to Eve in Paradise Lost, in that she initially proceeds (in part) from the male faculty, but then ultimately sits enthroned “beside” Intellect as a type of equal, and even seems only next to “God Himself ” in majesty. The latter aspect in particular seems to foreshadow Adam’s concern that Eve’s beauty is overwhelming. But such similarities are more misleading than helpful, for several reasons. First, the terms and events of the Prolusion’s allegorical narration of faculty psychology simply cannot be mapped onto the Genesis  narrative. Unlike the Philonic and Augustinian allegories, the senses are not even discussed directly as a faculty, much less as a threat to the Intellect’s sovereignty. The “union” and implicit birth metaphor put the Prolusion’s allegorical narrative into a genre completely different from the allegoresis of the Fall story. Second, the “union” of Intellect and Will is more accurately viewed as an early attempt by Milton to adapt inherited philosophical vocabulary to describe the mutual relation between understanding and choice. As we have noted above in Chapter , Milton’s attempt to deal with the respective problems of rationalism and voluntarism will later lead him

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to assert that “Reason also is choice” (PL .; cf. CPW ii:). Although Milton elsewhere makes a similar distinction between reason and will, his later usage does not insist so strongly as the Prolusion upon their spatial separation and emphasizes instead their unity. Third, although, the Prolusion’s allegory is rhetorically effective in extolling the importance of the will in producing true knowledge, when taken on its own terms and pressed to its logical conclusion the analogy breaks down. With respect to the surface narrative, when Knowledge becomes the Intellect’s consort, the story implies an incestuous relationship in which Knowledge supplants her own “mother,” the Will. Ultimately, except for the fact that the Prolusion employs the general categories of faculty psychology, the allegory is neither specifically Augustinian nor Philonic. Instead, the “inbreeding” entailed by Milton’s use of such faculty psychology ends up pushing the very limits of such allegorizing. More importantly, with respect to Borris’s claim, not every narrative deployment of faculty psychology necessarily entails an allegorical interpretation of the Fall. narrating the fall Paradise Lost presents four key moments in which the portrayal of Adam and Eve seems to invoke most clearly the categories of allegorical interpretation with respect to the Fall: Adam’s appeal to faculty psychology to explain Eve’s dream (PL .–); the dialogue between Adam and Eve before they decide to work separately (.–); the narrator’s description of the psychological conditions in Adam and Eve that result from sin, immediately after the Fall (.–); Michael’s explanation to Adam, in Book , regarding what has happened to humanity as a result of the Fall. Ultimately, the combined effect of these deployments of faculty psychology suggests the theodic inadequacy of interpreting Genesis  by means of such categories. After hearing about Eve’s dream, which neither of them realizes was guided by Satan’s whispering into Eve’s ear during her sleep, Adam uses his grasp of psychology to attempt an explanation. The terms of this explanation, Borris contends, initiate the motif of allegoresis throughout the ensuing account of the Fall: Adam creates his initial allegoria of psychic functions after Eve’s demonic dream: Reason “as chief” properly superintends “many lesser faculties” within “the soul.” By rendering elements of the psyche into notional persons, Adam endeavours to assess how “the mind of god or man” relates to “Evil.”

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

If we consider directly the complete passage from Paradise Lost and its context, we get a much different sense of what Milton is doing by invoking the categories of faculty psychology. The problem for Adam, after finding out about Eve’s troubling dream, is to explain where the apparent “evil” in the dream came from: This uncouth dream, of evil sprung I fear; Yet evil whence? In thee can harbour none, Created pure. But know that in the soul Are many lesser faculties that serve Reason as the chief; among these fancy next Her office holds; of all external things Which the five watchful senses represent, She forms imaginations, airy shapes, Which reason joining or disjoining, frames All what we affirm or what deny, and call Our knowledge or opinion; then retires Into her private cell when nature rests. Oft in her absence mimic fancy wakes To imitate her; but misjoining shapes, Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams, Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. (PL .–)

By arguing that Milton invokes both the Philonic and Augustinian allegories, Borris attempts to alternate between the two, invoking the former when there is an apparent reason–passion binary, but appealing to the latter whenever reason is identified explicitly as feminine. But in the above passage neither account really fits, because although “Reason” is clearly a feminine character (lines –), she is also evidently the ratio superior, or intellect (). If compared with the Augustinian model, fancy seems most comparable to lower reason who similarly rules over the senses. But in this case the entire soul is gendered as feminine. It is also important to keep in view the larger context of this dialogue. Although Adam is sinless, his explanation of the origin of the dream’s apparent evil is simply wrong. Even if Adam’s presumed account of human psychology is provisionally granted as conceptually true, his explanation of the particular event fails, much like Eve’s later attempt to understand an unusual phenomenon (a talking snake), because it does not allow for demonic agency. In this respect, the narrative emphasizes that Adam, like Uriel before him and Eve after him, is no less susceptible to Satan’s deception. Far from suggesting to the reader possible terms for interpreting the Fall, the invocation of faculty psychology pre-emptively discredits those categories as an

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adequate means for understanding the reality of the contingent events of the drama. When Adam and Eve separate in order, as Eve argues, to work more efficiently in the garden, Milton introduces into the biblical version of events one of his most striking epic narrative dilations. The Genesis text simply states that after Eve ate of the fruit, she gave some also to her husband who was “with” her. Milton evidently takes “with” to mean generally “in the garden of Eden”; such an interpretation is not in itself unusual, as interpreters had long offered various explanations for Adam’s silence during Eve’s temptation by the snake. Milton dilates the text significantly, however, by elaborating Adam and Eve’s separation scene into an extended dialogue on the nature of temptation and freedom. Once again, the elaboration of the spare biblical narrative is arranged to disclose ontic charity – the divine gift that allows the other the freedom to respond, entailing genuine consequences. The fact that Adam and Eve separate while still remaining innocent and unfallen is important for Milton’s treatment of divine justice, insofar as the narrative shape foregrounds the necessarily individual sufficiency of both Adam and Eve to resist temptation. The dilation emphasizes that the choice to obey the command remains a decision that Adam and Eve each remain adequate to make, regardless of circumstances. Moreover, their separation highlights the dynamic character of Milton’s paradise, where the necessary conditions of finitude, like misunderstanding and disagreement, do not preclude preserving the bond of mutual love. He imagines a paradise in which there is freedom to disagree without a loss of innocence or good will. During her initial dialogue with Adam in Book , Eve contends that they are both sufficient to stand against the attacks of the enemy, or else Eden is not truly paradise. Adam’s response suggests a tension between the different ways that their rationality and their sufficiency each applies to them individually and jointly: O woman best are all things as the will Of God ordained them, his creating hand Nothing imperfect or deficient left Of all that he created, much less man, Or aught that might his happy state secure, Secure from outward force; within himself The danger lies, yet lies within his power: Against his will he can receive no harm. But God left free the will, for what obeys Reason, is free, and reason he made right,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning But bid her well beware, and still erect, Lest by some fair appearing good surprised She dictate false, and misinform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoins, That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve, Since reason not impossibly may meet Some specious object by the foe suborned, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned. (PL .–)

Adam’s description of reason as a feminine character who is deceived by appearances clearly foreshadows Eve’s deception by Satan later in Book . Borris calls this passage “the most important psychological allegoria in Paradise Lost.” But the passage bears no clear relation to either of the received modes of Edenic allegoresis. Instead, it highlights the very element that is not usually accounted for in the allegorical interpretations at all: the agency of the deceiver and the central role of deception. The very character of the traditional psychological allegorical interpretations of Genesis  requires that all agency be “internal” to the one psyche – as Adam initially suggests, “within himself.” Even by the end of his own speech, however, Adam must revise the account to allow for the external agency of their enemy. Clearly Adam’s “allegorical narrative” foreshadows Eve’s later actions, but it remains a question whether his story implies that Eve’s actions should, in turn, be interpreted allegorically, and if so how. For example, the relation between “reason” and will seems to correspond with the Seventh Prolusion’s account of how the “Intellect” illumines the will, except that the gender is reversed. In that respect, the orientation of reason toward temporal action seems to be most similar to the Augustinian account of feminine scientia. Of course, there is no mention of the Senses as a faculty, because the role of the snake is already filled by the “foe” who attempts to “suborn.” At the same time, because Eve is so strongly identified with Reason, the Philonic allegory does not appear here. It is more accurate to say that, within the terms that Adam uses and applies to both of their psychological states, Adam’s speech emphasizes that the challenge in the face of potential deception is for the Reason of both characters to keep sufficiently alert. Beyond that, the relationship between the allegorical narrative invoked here and the customary allegorical readings of the

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Fall is so discordant as to raise questions about the legitimacy of such interpretations. Ultimately, the problem of Satan’s agency foregrounds the conceptual impossibility of trying to maintain simultaneously both an allegorical and a literal reading of the Fall. This problem is already implicit in Augustine’s attempt to affirm both interpretations in De Trinitate. There he specifically invokes the “historical” sense of the Genesis narrative, to the effect that his own allegorical interpretation should be admitted only insofar as it does not obscure “divine testimony” regarding “the first two human beings, that is, the man and his wife from whom the human species is propagated.” In this respect, the literal sense is taken as primary and is consequently invoked as a limit on the allegorical reading. The difficulty is that, if the allegory is granted as a true psychological account of sin’s progression, it remains unclear how that psychology would relate to a historical interpretation of the events. Specifically, if the psychological narrative is applied to the individual characters, the historical interpretation risks becoming incoherent regarding the origin of evil. For theodic purposes, Milton insists upon the agency of Satan, because a purely psychological interpretation risks making corporeality, or sense experience, in itself the cause of evil. Augustine avoids this problem by insisting that evil originates from a freely chosen perversity in the rational will toward a sensible object that is good but is not an end in itself. That interpretation still depends, however, upon a strict separation between the allegorical and the literal reading of the passage, so that in the former the serpent represents “sense,” while in the latter account the snake is an independent, intelligent volitional creature. Both Augustine and Milton attempt to maintain the literal reading of the Fall narrative as part of the doctrine of original sin, which is central to their account of divine justice and redemption. The overall effect of Adam’s brief allegorical narrative (PL .–) is to emphasize the utter inadequacy of customary allegoresis with respect to a theodic reading of the Genesis narrative. This is effected through the invocation of the allegorical terms in a way that is unmistakable yet also evidently incomplete and conflicted. The crux of the disagreement between Adam and Eve is whether the divinely ordered goodness that ensures their sufficiency to stand against temptation applies to them only as a couple, or also individually. They are, in different senses, both correct: existentially, their relationship of shared and complementary responsibility allows them to benefit each other if faced with temptation; but ontologically, they are each sufficient to stand individually against temptation. Being sufficient to resist does not, of

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

course, imply that being alone is the best resistance. The contrasting companion passage to Adam’s speech above is his post-lapsarian denunciation of Eve as “crooked by nature” (PL ., ). This appears in the third of Adam’s tirades against Eve after the Fall. In response to critics who impute Adam’s sentiments in these passages directly to Milton, Diane McColley points out that, if the accusations were true, God would be the sufficient cause of evil, by making Eve naturally defective and thereby making the Fall inevitable. By introducing into the biblical narrative the event of Adam and Eve’s physical separation, Milton emphasizes that the individual rational integrity of both Adam and Eve was sufficient for each of them to make the right choice when faced with temptation. There are two further points in the narrative that seem to invoke allegorical categories to describe Adam and Eve after the Fall. After having put together aprons of leaves to cover their nakedness, Adam and Eve still suffer from a sense of inward shame. The narrator elaborates the state of their souls thus: Not at rest or ease of mind They sat them down to weep, nor only tears Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate, Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore Their inward state of mind, calm region once And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent: For understanding ruled not, and the will Heard not her lore, both in subjection now To sensual appetite, who from beneath Usurping over sovereign reason claimed Superior sway. (PL .–)

The last few lines especially echo directly the Philonic account of the Fall as the subordination of “reason” to the senses, or passions. But if so, why is “understanding,” which is equated with reason here, identified as feminine (PL .–)? Milton is arguably deploying the common usage which characterizes the entire soul and its faculties as feminine. Given that terminological gendering, one could argue that, in some sense, Milton uses a brief “allegorical narrative” to depict the fallen psychological states of both Adam and Eve. But there is no clear way in which that allegorical narrative implies an allegoresis of the events of the Fall just recounted in the poem. For example, to which character would the allegorical figure “understanding” correspond, Adam or Eve? If Adam, then why is the faculty

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gendered as feminine? If Eve, why is she occupying the male position in a would-be Philonic binary? I contend that the narrative voice is invoking the terms of faculty psychology in a generally admonitory fashion and is not implying that an Edenic allegorical gloss be applied to the main action of the poem. The same kind of uncertainty surrounds a later extended deployment of faculty psychology. In telling to Adam the events of biblical history that follow the Flood, Michael recounts the story of Nimrod the tyrant which culminates in the folly of Babel. Adam responds to the story by denouncing Nimrod, that “execrable son,” who would dare to subject others by force, thereby taking away their freedom. But Michael explains: Justly thou abhorr’st That son, who on the quiet state of men Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue Rational liberty; yet know withal, Since thy original lapse, true liberty Is lost, which always with right reason dwells Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart passions catch the government From reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. (PL .–)

This passage would fit perfectly with the Philonic binary opposition between reason and the passions, except that the female gender of reason would either reverse the terms of the relation or else throw the whole comparison into question. Once again, if the brief allegorical narrative is intended to imply a Philonic allegoresis of the preceding event, then to which character in the surface narrative of the epic does a feminine Reason correspond? We shall soon consider in more detail how Milton treats the gendered hierarchy of reason, but it is already evident that Milton has a complex though consistent purpose in engaging the readers’ expectations of allegoresis. I contend that most of the alleged invocations of Edenic allegoresis in Paradise Lost are little more than general references to faculty psychology. More importantly, if we do not distinguish between interpretive allegoresis and explicitly allegorical narrative, we obscure the way Milton plays against his readers’ expectation of the former, by rigorously refusing to indulge the latter regarding the main action of the poem. He effects this by invoking,

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

through dialogue and description, some of the terms of Edenic allegoresis, but never allowing any of those terms to be effectively identified with a single character in the surface narrative of his own epic. The key point is not to mistake invocations of allegoresis terminology as evidence that Paradise Lost is presenting an allegorical narrative. I contend that Milton is doing something much closer to the reverse. By refusing to deploy allegorical narrative to depict anything other than ontic privation, and by invoking the terms of Edenic allegoresis in ways that are obviously incomplete or selfcontradictory, Milton implies that the full application of such allegorical interpretation of Genesis  would preclude divine justice from appearing. Such preclusion would arise from the way that allegoresis impinges on the characterization of the pre-lapsarian condition as genuinely free from compulsion, the rational sufficiency of Adam and Eve as individuals, and the volition of the tempter. the arch¯e of gender Given the ways in which Milton’s explicit invocations of “reason” bear upon his deployment of allegory, we can now consider how the depiction of reason in Paradise Lost shapes the treatment of gender. For readers today, one of the most explicitly objectionable passages regarding sexual equality is the description of Satan’s, and the reader’s, first sight of Adam and Eve in the garden: The fiend Saw undelighted all delight, all kind Of living creatures new to sight and strange: Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native honour clad In naked majesty seem’d lords of all, And worthy seem’d, for in their looks divine The image of their glorious maker shone, Truth, wisdome, sanctitude severe and pure, Severe but in true filial freedom placed; Whence true authority in men; though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seem’d; For contemplation he and valour formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace, He for God only, she for God in him. (PL .–)

As Diane McColley points out, one of the most striking characteristics of the first half of the passage, in contrast to the iconographic and literary

Rational allegory and gender



tradition, is that the qualities of truth, wisdom (contemplation of eternal truth), and authority are ascribed clearly to both Adam and Eve who, in the plural, bear the “image of their glorious maker” (.). The last four offending lines of the passage above conflict not only with attitudes today, but also with much that is said and done in the poem, including the immediately preceding lines. Of course, the most notable aspect of the concluding lines above is their simple assertion of gender hierarchy, the fact that they, in the words of one anonymous reader of this study, effectively “sum up” “centuries of anti-woman sentiment” which usually included the claim that “women are supposed to be ruled by their masculine superiors.” I suggest that, in the above passage, Milton ostensibly grants what he anticipates that most of his seventeenth-century readers will presume to be true, in some sense, about gender hierarchy. This is a rhetorical position that we have already seen Milton take many times before: whether in Areopagitica’s initial concession regarding the dangers of books, or the treatment of heroism in Book  of Paradise Lost, or the depiction of God in Book  of Paradise Lost, Milton characteristically presents his readers with a version of what he anticipates to be their own assumptions regarding the matter in question. Having granted those expectations, however, Milton then proceeds to take readers through a process of “triall” “by what is contrary,” in order to reveal the false assumptions involved in such received opinions regarding the differences between good and bad books, or what really makes a hero, or what it means to say that “Jesus is King.” The key point here is that, in each case, Milton grants his readers’ initial expectations, and he does not set out to refute them directly; nevertheless, he sets out to move the assumptions of that existing discourse in a new direction. I contend that Milton does something similar here in his treatment of gender hierarchy. This passage in Book  marks the beginning of the epic’s treatment of gender, and the poem never attempts to refute directly this initial depiction of gender hierarchy. The poem does, however, ultimately, if indirectly, challenge what Milton might expect his readers to assume regarding the meaning of gender hierarchy. Nor is this the only instance of expressed gender hierarchy in Paradise Lost; other examples could obviously be cited which do not involve the allegorical potential of this passage. My point, however, is that readers of the epic who attend closely even to the surface of the text will soon find any commonly assumed meaning of such gender hierarchy to be challenged or complicated. Thus we find that the above lines which insist so obviously upon gender hierarchy (PL .–) begin to introduce ambiguities as soon as even



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

the immediate context is considered. For example, “in the lines that follow we learn already that Eve’s first gaze is the contemplation of a reflection of heaven, and that Adam’s hand is ‘gentle.’” Moreover, if the line, “He for God only, she for God in him,” were taken literally, it would entail a rejection of the central Reformed theological teaching that each Christian, man or woman, is directly accountable to God. This teaching is crucial to the customary Protestant arguments against Catholic “priestcraft” which had insisted upon the need for church clerics to mediate between God and humans. Milton is not likely to imply that priests should be replaced by husbands as necessary intermediaries between their wives and God. But what then is Milton suggesting by the phrase, “she for God in him”? To answer this question we need to situate the line once again in its immediate context and the epic’s wider treatment of gender. Here we come to the crux of the usual debate over Milton’s treatment of Eve. The passage quoted above poses problems especially for those who emphasize Milton’s egalitarianism. On the other hand, those who characterize Milton as simply an advocate of patriarchal oppression are no less compelled to pick and choose their proof texts. I suggest that, rather than attempt to explain or reconcile such contradictions, we consider what rhetorical purpose becomes available by means of such manifest contradiction. Regarding the abovequoted passage (i.e., PL .–), Catherine Martin observes that this inherently contradictory portrait has generated a large number of disparate reactions: Milton is either the last great literary exponent of patriarchy, a moderate liberal proponent of gender equality within the context of seventeenth-century marriage manuals and Pauline doctrine, or a “radical and seminal revisionist” often divided against himself on the crucial issue of human freedom versus the stable economy of the Judeo-Christian family. Given this extraordinarily wide range, it seems tempting to question whether Milton is pointedly contradictory on the subject of gender in precisely the terms dictated by his allegorical poetics: in tune with a technique that “baroquely” conserves the ruins of a tradition whose shortcomings he overstates to the point of parody, thereby once again implosively correcting its schemas.

Such an “implosion” does not, however, in Martin’s view, simply eliminate hierarchies, because they continue to function, although “neither normatively nor wholly deconstructively.” I contend that the ultimate basis for this strategy within the epic is not so much the operations of “baroque allegory,” but rather a rigorous biblicism that eschews allegorical narrative in its attempt to embody ontic charity as the dynamic union between narrative means and end.

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

Some critics try to distinguish sharply between the hierarchy of gender roles in the above passage (PL .–) and Milton’s own views by pointing out that readers get only Satan’s perceptions of Adam and Eve. Martin rejects such qualifications, on the grounds that Satan’s observations must be accurate, given the nature of his purpose (to spy) and given that we do not dismiss the other lines in the passage that seem to fit with a correct sense of Adam and Eve’s appearance. The fact, however, that readers first see Eden through the eyes of Satan is not incidental but crucial to the narrative context. Milton denies his readers any pretension to a direct apprehension of Eden, reminding us, through Satan’s role in this scene, that a postlapsarian reader (and writer) cannot really imagine Eden without the taint of sin. If the passage had not pertained so directly to the issue of gender hierarchy, this point would be more readily admitted. Moreover, regardless of how accurate Satan’s perceptions may need to be for the purpose of spying, his fallen condition requires that they are constitutionally skewed regarding precisely the character and operation of authority. As we have seen in Chapters  and , after Satan “thought himself impair’d,” he tends with increasing frequency to construe all “truth,” “reason,” or “authority” as a form of either coercion or cunning. Finally, the fact that many of Satan’s observations are evidently accepted as true elsewhere in the epic would fit exactly with the mixture of precise information and false understanding of purposes (the good) that readers might expect from Satan. Nevertheless, to reject the whole description outright on such grounds seems inevitably like special pleading on the part of those arguing for Milton’s proto-feminism. There is, however, a further way to understand the passage. We can take the emphasis upon “saw” and “sight” (PL .–) and the thrice explicit invocations of “seem’d” (lines , , ), as an emphasis upon the notoriously suspect quality of appearance. What does Satan see? Insofar as he is able to discern the divine image in their upright posture and their “looks divine,” they both evidently have the same capacity for “higher reason,” or the contemplation of eternal truth, called here “wisdome” (). As soon as he turns his attention specifically to their sexuality, however, he deduces a hierarchical difference between them, a difference that is elaborated in terms of their referential relation to God. That referential connection between Adam and Eve, described as Satan’s perception, directly parallels the Augustinian account of the relation between “understanding” (intellectus, or higher reason) and “knowledge” (scientia, or lower reason). The parallel is especially striking, given Augustine’s emphasis that the lower reason needs consistently to refer all temporal knowledge to the intellect for judgment, which in turn refers to eternal truth which is



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

the end, or goal, of both. That sense of referential teleology is briefly but precisely captured in Milton’s parallel use of the word “for.” Thus Satan’s two-stage observations fit perfectly with the double aspect of the treatment of gender in Augustine’s allegoresis of the Fall. He first observes the evidence of the divine image that exists in all humans regardless of gender, and then observes the bodily differences in sex that are figurations of the psychological dynamics within each person. In Paradise Lost, there remains a question whether Satan understands bodily sexual difference to figure a psychological reality that exists within both Adam and Eve individually. In any case, Satan apparently perceives a difference between them that parallels the Augustinian allegorical interpretation of Genesis . Thus, for Milton’s readers who are accustomed to the allegoresis of Genesis , the line “He for God only, she for God in him” presents an odd pair of interpretive options: either the lines, taken literally, imply a repudiation of the Reformed emphasis upon individual accountability to God, or one follows the at least ambivalently Satanic perception of sexual difference as an allegorical depiction of a psychological reality that applies to both characters individually. As a clear invocation of the Augustinian allegory of referential psychological hierarchy in which subsists the divine image in each character, the phrase would not imply an assessment of Adam and Eve’s relative worth as historical persons. Given what we have already discovered, however, regarding how the categories of allegoresis are invoked elsewhere in the epic, what are we to make of the fact that the most consistent and clear deployment of Augustinian allegoresis is in Satan’s perception of Adam and Eve? It suggests that, although the strong invocations of Satan’s perception do not negate the ascription of gender hierarchy to the biblical passage or to the poem, those invocations instead raise questions regarding how allegory should be used to understand gender hierarchy in view of ontic charity. Ultimately, the root tension internal to Milton’s treatment of gender hierarchy – the very tension that has provoked such a wide range of critical interpretations – derives from his commitment to imitating the same tensions that appear in Scripture. In Augustine’s case, an allegorical interpretation of the Fall allowed him to reconcile the Pauline claims regarding the different senses in which gender hierarchy should be affirmed and yet also denied. In effect, Augustine accommodated both depictions of gender by insisting that, with respect to the individual, the affirmation of hierarchy concerns temporal things, while its denial elsewhere concerns eternal things. I stipulate “with respect to the individual” because in much common theological usage the temporal arrangement of gender hierarchy is

Rational allegory and gender



taken as a figure, not for an individual psychological state, but for an eternal reality pertaining to the whole community of faith, in which all believers, male and female, are described as “the Bride” of Christ. Milton’s approach to negotiating this same tension is importantly different from Augustine’s, in that Milton locates his interrogation of the arch¯e in gender hierarchy within time, with respect to Adam and Eve as individual characters, even as he affirms hierarchy as a figure for the eternal relation between Christ and the church. We are now able to consider directly how Milton deploys intertextual biblicism in order to disclose ontic charity as an alternative to the ontology of violence that most readers continue to assume is the arch¯e in patriarchy. My argument, however, is susceptible to being misunderstood in two very different ways that should be addressed directly here. Some readers may charge that I anachronistically distort Milton’s position by downplaying his obviously hierarchical (if not misogynistic) view of gender. By contrast, other readers may think that my very use of the word “patriarchy” fails to allow for Milton’s persistent destabilizing of all such hierarchy. In response to the former perception, I emphasize that Milton’s texts often allow for an initial affirmation of gender hierarchy that would seem to reflect the assumptions of most seventeenth-century English readers. In response to the latter perception, I contend that destabilization is not the only Miltonic alternative to the Apollonian version of determinate, compelled, and static hierarchy. At a deeper level, both kinds of misunderstanding arise from the modern assumption – explained in Chapter  – that reality consists of either violent chaos or coerced order. Because Milton posits an ontic charity which entails a dynamic process of gift and free response, the epic, in the very act of affirming “patriarchy,” as we shall see, re-defines the arch¯e, or governing principle, in such a way that subverts customary assumptions about the nature of fatherhood. In short, the epic configures gender hierarch¯e as an order of free self-gift, rather than as an order imposed on others by compulsion. If we consider briefly several of the moments in the depiction of Adam and Eve that bear obvious typological connections, we can discern how the epic discloses ontic charity as the arch¯e of gender difference; each instance depicts a different aspect of that self-giving love, followed by a truly free response from the beloved, which then, in turn, becomes a new gift to the lover. When Eve is created from Adam’s rib, the blood that pours from Adam’s side is a commonplace “type” of the blood that later flows from Christ’s side when he is pierced by a spear after dying on the cross (PL .). The further commonplace theological parallel here is between



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Eve and the church, in that the church is said to be born from Christ’s side in the same way as Eve came from Adam. Why is this important? At one level, the parallel has general moral application, in that all Christian husbands are told to love their wives, “even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians :). Most striking in Paradise Lost, however, is the way Milton situates Adam’s narration of Eve’s creation within the elaboration of the response and counter-response to such self-giving. The account of Eve’s creation comes as part of Adam’s telling Raphael about his memories since his own creation (PL .–; –). As readers of Book , we know that, although evidently prompted by Raphael’s stories, Adam’s narration of his own first experiences follows the model of such self-understanding that he first heard from Eve (.–). Similarly, Adam’s supposedly masculine question concerning the purpose of the stars in relation to earth (.–) was first posed by Eve in that earlier discussion between them (.–). Moreover, when Eve first asks, “wherefore all night long shine these [stars and moon], for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (.–), she does so only at the end of a sixteen-line declaration of the incomparable degree of her love for Adam. In that passage we thus get a complete example of how she expects the conversation to proceed later, as Adam recounts to Eve his cosmological discoveries when she is his “sole Auditress” (.). She is now in the position of waiting for Adam to respond not only to her astronomical question but also to her declaration of love. The key implication here is that Adam’s questions to Raphael in Book  are themselves instances of discourse first modelled by Eve in her response to the gift of her creation and Adam’s love for her. This implicit context is evidently the main reason for her choice to leave the discussion with Raphael at the beginning of Book : she wants to give Adam the opportunity to respond to her in the same way that she earlier responded to him, by weaving lofty accounts of astronomy with no less superlative declarations of love. To suggest that her decision to leave during the discussion of astronomy implies a distaste for abstraction or speculative thinking simply disregards the explicit statement that she did not go “as not with such discourse / Delighted, or not capable her ear / Of what was high” (.– ). Instead, her decision to leave emphasizes her freedom with respect to the immediate situation, but also her participation in a circle of gift-love in which she has moved from being the initial receiver of the gift to being the one who has become the giver and is, like God, now waiting to see how the other will respond. Furthermore, the fact that Adam and Eve are both, amid “conjugal Caresses,” able to discourse on “high” subjects

Rational allegory and gender



of contemplation reminds us again that they both as individuals have the capacity for intellection (higher reason). This shared capacity is the apparent response to Adam’s request for a mate who is equal and would be able to share “All rational delight” (., italics added). Nevertheless, Eve’s earlier declarations of love for Adam clearly indicate that she views herself as, in some sense, subordinate to him, as when she, for example, calls him her “Head” (.), or addresses him as “My Author and Disposer,” to whom she says, “unargu’d I obey” (.–). How can this kind of gender hierarchy coincide with an apparent affirmation of rational equality? The arguably most pointed version of this contrast in the poem is the difference between Eve saying to Adam, “God is thy Law, thou mine; to know no more / Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise” (.–) and her later insistence, Book , that Adam is simply wrong in his judgment that they should not separate in order to work more efficiently. I contend that these passages in Book  are part of a larger development that highlights the dynamic and reciprocal quality of freedom and love, as they unfold between Adam and Eve. As I have suggested, the separation scene in Book  is central to how one views Milton’s entire treatment of divine justice. In effect, if Eve’s decision to eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil is already determined by her decision to work separately and by an individual inadequacy to withstand temptation, then the Fall is inevitable and divine justice will not appear. This reveals a further reason for the narrator to point out Eve’s continued innocence even after her separation from Adam (.). Marilyn Farwell argues that the differences between Eve’s character in Book  and Book  reveal “Eve’s growth from inexperienced thought to independent decisions based on experienced thought.” Eve’s decision to work by herself, after careful reflection and deliberation on the point, is neither a surprise nor a fault but a natural part of her growth as a rational person. What I emphasize here, however, is that the form and substance of her growth has been the self-giving love that was initiated by God through Adam – the love that grants the other that freedom to respond and in which she can then become an initiator. Adam is her “Head,” in the sense that the divine gift of her being (peaceful difference) and her good (charity) first come literally by means of Adam; however, the evident fulfillment of that ontic charity is a life of reciprocal love. Most importantly, by dramatizing the separation of Adam and Eve and emphasizing the unfallen character of their agreement to disagree, Milton foregrounds the fact that ontic charity, as the arch¯e of gender difference, entails that any response by Eve is always given freely and never compelled.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

We have focused here upon the events before and surrounding the moment of the Fall, but what about life after the Fall? The next chapter will focus more generally on post-lapsarian history, but in closing we can consider one revealing moment in Adam and Eve’s restoration after their repentance. At one level, by identifying the origin of gender difference in the sequential unfolding of divine gift and counter-gift, rather than in compulsion, Paradise Lost implicitly reminds readers that the distinguishing feature of leadership among Christian husbands is in their calling to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians :). In Book  of Paradise Lost, the Son’s actions toward Adam and Eve model such love, while the narrative provides the precise allusions to cue the reader as to the typological significance of the action. After the Son pronounces judgment on Adam and Eve, he provides them, as the Genesis account specifies, with the “skins of beasts” to cover their nakedness (PL .; cf. Genesis :). But the narrative voice elaborates the description of the Son’s action by explicit reference to a different biblical passage: Then pitying how they stood Before him naked to the air, that now Must suffer change, disdained not to begin Thenceforth the form of servant to assume, As when he washed his servants’ feet so now As father of his family he clad Their nakedness with skins of beasts. (.–)

The role of the Son specifically as “father” of the human family is exercised through this “clothing” of Adam and Eve, which is further connected to the Son’s later taking on the role of a servant and washing the feet of his disciples. That later action, in turn, is part of the unfolding work of his sacrificial death which occurs the next day within the gospel narratives. The connection to this particular New Testament event is important because the action is directly explained by Christ in the biblical narratives as a demonstration of the contrast between two kinds of governance: Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you. (John :–)

This event takes place in the moments just before the Last Supper on the night before Christ is crucified. In the same dramatic context, Luke recounts Jesus’s further elaboration of the point:

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The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise that authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. (Luke :–)

At one level, by referring directly to this New Testament context while describing the Son’s clothing of Adam and Eve, Milton typologically connects the death of the animals whose skins become the clothing to the future death of the Son for human sin. In a deeper sense, however, the connection to this particular New Testament event foregrounds the fact that the Son’s action is not merely incidental but is intended to reveal an arch¯e, a governing reality, that is a gift whose purpose is the good of others, rather than a compulsion whose purpose is to limit the violence of chaos. Although such interpretation of the animal skins as a “type” for Christ’s sacrifice is not unusual, Milton takes the typological connection a step further by invoking the foot-washing episode as a revelation of the true arch¯e in Christian leadership – that is, as initiating a gift for the good of others that allows free response. If, however, readers assume that all arch¯e and all ratio is intrinsically violent, then there is no way to distinguish between peaceful gift and compulsion, and all gender hierarchy in Paradise Lost will likewise appear violent. Milton may, of course, be incorrect to reject the modern ontology of violence, but only by unfolding his alternative vision of ontic charity can we begin to understand how his poem interrogates the view of reality commonly assumed by both those who argue for and those who argue against the interpretation of Paradise Lost as endorsing a coercively hierarchical view of gender. In this further way, Milton deploys what I call his “Christo-poetic” biblical reasoning to disclose an alternative ontology.

part iii

Biblicist Poetics and Hermeneutic Ethics

Part III introduction

These three culminating chapters remain focused on what I have called Milton’s “Christo-poetic” biblical reasoning: that is, the biblical intertextuality by which his major poems imply that Divine Reason is the poetic gift of peaceful difference who enables human reason to participate (ethical charity) in a reality that is freely given for the good of others (ontic charity). As a result, the network of claims regarding ontology, anthropology, ethics, and politics that we traced in Milton’s prose in Part I, which I refer to as Milton’s “discursive” reasoning, shall also continue to inform these remaining chapters. In contrast to the emphasis of Part II on the competing accounts of reason and ontology, however, Chapters  to  emphasize the ethical and hermeneutic implications that arise from belief that reason is peaceful difference and that the origin of reality is divine gift. In this respect, the shift in analytic focus here is indeed only a shift in emphasis and not a complete departure; we shall continue to notice where the poems intimate peaceful Divine Reason and ontic charity, but our emphasis will be upon what that Christology and ontology imply regarding the action of human “right reason” (or “ethico-cognitive” reason) in the fallen world. In focusing, respectively, upon the final two books of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, each of these chapters considers a central interpretive question. Although the particular question arising from each poem is different, they each address how ethical praxis should arise in detail from a belief in peaceful logos (ratio and oratio) and ontic charity. In the case of Adam in Paradise Lost, his explicit question at the beginning of Book  is how to know God’s presence outside Eden (PL .–), but I suggest that the implicit question posed to the reader is the ethical meaning of trinitarian biblical language. In Paradise Regained, the central explicit and implicit questions concern Christology (the person and work), questions which the Son ultimately answers by his successful ethical action that is based on faith in divine love. In narrating the Son’s action, Milton aims, 



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

I contend, to articulate more clearly than in Paradise Lost the connection between biblical typology and charity, both ontic and ethical. Here also appears a further unfolding of Milton’s view of the relation between faith and charity, as he implies that ethical charity arises from faith in the Son as the revelation of ontic charity. This helps to explain further why Milton, when he discusses the need for an interpretive guide, tends to use “analogy of Evangelick doctrine,” or rule of faith, as an equivalent for being guided by “charity” (CPW ii:–). In this sense, Milton’s two epics can be viewed as emphasizing two different aspects of one interpretive dynamic: the final books of Paradise Lost present an interpretive “rule of faith,” emphasizing the need for persistence in the faith whose goal is charity, while Paradise Regained presents a “rule of charity” embodied in the Son’s faithfulness. In Samson Agonistes the central interpretive question concerns the self-understanding of the protagonist: a person who is neither the First nor the Second Adam and has no understanding of biblical typology and little sense of how the larger biblical narrative impinges on the particularities of his own life. Here I contend that the pairing of Samson Agonistes with Paradise Regained serves to emphasize both the similarities and the differences between what the characters and the implied readers are presumed to know about typology and its relation to their own lives. Each of these texts calls variously upon readers to engage in typological interpretation, and in this way the poems also allow themselves to be glossed by the biblical intertexts that they invoke. Thus, one element that we shall continue to trace is how each of these poems differently contrasts ethical charity with reliance upon compulsion to accomplish one’s ends. In developing their thematic ethical claims, these texts go so far as to touch, at some points more indirectly than others, upon the topic of religious coercion. Let there be no misunderstanding here; these poems do not make a direct argument for the kind of “Protestant toleration” that we see in Milton’s prose works. Readers interested in his direct arguments regarding the topic could obviously turn to his Treatise of Civil Power (if Presbyterian) or Of True Religion (if Anglican). I suggest that Milton’s purpose in raising these related issues of biblical interpretation and religious coercion is not to mount a polemical argument, but to do something more subtle. In the case of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton effectively shifts the exegetical, noetic, and imaginative presuppositions for any future public debate regarding religious toleration among Protestants. In the case of Samson Agonistes, Milton again does not simply argue for Protestant toleration but aims instead to offer counsel to those who suffer religious coercion.

Part III introduction



Not only because Chapter  uses the word “metanarrative” in its title, but also because all three chapters continue to refer to typology, I should emphasize here that I use the term “biblical metanarrative,” in a premodern sense, as a synonym for the “larger biblical story,” or what Milton, in Of Education, calls “the story of Scripture” (CPW ii:). In preceding chapters I suggested that typology enables Milton to connect the various biblical stories into a single narrative whose origin and end is the ontic charity revealed in the Son. As we shall see, the last two books of Paradise Lost present the most explicit evidence for this claim. But, as I explained in Chapter , this overarching biblical story is specifically not a “metanarrative” in the modern sense because it does not pretend to offer predictive control over fortune or chaotic nature. Neither does Milton view the overarching biblical story, however, as merely a random series of events connected arbitrarily. Typology for Milton is necessarily aesthetic. This is why I use the term “Biblicist Poetics” in the title for this third part of the study, not to suggest a stylistic borrowing, which is certainly present and well studied by Milton critics, but to indicate the way in which Milton’s narrative invention imitates the intertextuality of biblical typology in order to imply a similarly integrated sense of what is faithful, free, and fitting. In this way, biblical typology combines concete particularity with an understanding of reality as neither merely determined nor random but ordered freely in a way that is poetically appropriate. In effect, because for Milton the cosmos, like a poem, is not determined by sheer necessity, it could be different in particular details and still be ordered toward a good that is neither merely compelled nor arbitrary. As a result, the engagement of typology in each of these texts gives rise to a biblicist poetics in which, amid finite participation in doctrinal truth and ethical action (that is, justification and sanctification, or faith and charity), one may also preserve the fruitful aesthetic tension between means and ends within a story that is still unfolding.

chapter 8

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith

In the final two books of Paradise Lost the deployment of typology becomes more explicit than in the preceding books. In those earlier books, as we observed in Chapters  and , Milton deploys typology at key points to disclose what I call “ontic charity”: that is, to reveal that reality subsists not in an opposition between coercion and chaos but in a genuinely free and peaceful gift for the good of others. Such ontic charity is made possible, in Milton’s account, by the first gift of peaceful difference who is the Son of God, or Divine Reason. As we now focus on the last two books of Paradise Lost, we find that, as the typology becomes more explicit in the narrative, the treatment of charity shifts from the earlier emphasis upon ontology to the ethical and hermeneutic implications of belief in the primacy of peaceful gift. In effect, Adam’s post-lapsarian education in Books  and  model how typology is a Christocentric reading of the larger biblical story, the purpose of which is to enable (after repentance and regeneration) faith in the Messiah, which, in turn, gives rise to the ethical practice of charity. As we discovered in Chapter , the core of Milton’s arguments against religious coercion among Protestants is his insistence upon the right relation, not mere disjunction, between precisely such saving faith and consequent ethical charity. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that Michael’s revelation of biblical history, or biblical metanarrative, culminates by describing the post-apostolic church’s decline into religious coercion, resulting from a loss in genuine faith. I argue that these last two books of Paradise Lost connect typology and the ethical practice of charity (rooted in right reason) more explicitly than the first ten books specifically in order to provide, at one level, a guide for interpreting the more subtle use of typology in the earlier books. At a deeper level, however, the explicit indications of purpose for the inset narration of biblical history – that is, faith and charity – serve a further purpose of implying that the specific doctrine of the Trinity cannot legitimate religious coercion. In both of these senses, with respect to the poem itself and broader theological 

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



interpretation, the summary of biblical history in these last two books provides an implicit “rule of faith.” The argument here first considers how the use of typology in Michael’s prophecy is intended to help restore the ability of “right reason” to practice ethical charity. The analysis then turns to the indirect treatment of the “economic Trinity” in these same passages. In this way, Books  and  provide an implicit interpretive guide not only for understanding the rest of the epic but for conducting oneself ethically amid doctrinal controversy. typology, right reason, and charity The revelation of human history that Michael gives to Adam and which takes up most of Books  and  continues, in a most striking way, Milton’s conversion of epic modes through biblicist adaptation. In these last two books, however, important changes in the mode of that adaptation require a qualitatively different kind of attention to the poetry. The intertextual situation is largely reversed from the previous books, as the typological elements that had formerly to be explicated are now drawn out on the surface of the text. The switch to the mode of biblical paraphrase can also be potentially misleading, however, with respect to the larger function of that scriptural engagement. What is for the implied epic reader an obvious case of biblical paraphrase of ostensibly past events is for Adam, as an interpreter within the story, an instance of prophetic revelation of future events. We need to keep in view how Milton uses this persistent double focus throughout these books to educate the reader as well as Adam. In effect, these books require a somewhat different mode of interpretation specifically because the deployment of typology is so much closer to the surface of the text than elsewhere in the epic. First Abel, Enoch, and Noah in Book , and then Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David in Book  are “types” who each prefigure different aspects of the redeeming work accomplished by the coming Messiah to whom they look forward in hope, just as Adam eventually does. As a result of the difference in location between Adam and epic readers, however, Adam encounters the story as prophecy, rather than history, and he therefore does not really understand the typological function of these characters until the culminating revelation of the Son’s life on earth. In this way, Adam’s experience emphasizes that typology is simply a Christocentric reading of Scripture, in that Christ is the culminating revelation of divine love toward humans. The obvious extent and density of the deployment of typology in these last two books is worth noting, however, lest Michael’s explicit comment



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

regarding “types” be construed as a general disparagement. In explaining to Adam the function of the Mosaic law, the angel elaborates: So Law appears imperfet and but giv’n With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better Cov’nant, disciplin’d From shadowy Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit, From imposition of strict Laws, to free Acceptance of large Grace, from servile fear To filial, works of Law to works of Faith.

(PL .–)

Taken in isolation, the passage could be interpreted, if not as a disavowal of typology, at least as a suggestion that typology is really not very important. Viewed within its full context, the apparent denigration is striking – immediately surrounded as it is by particularly dense treatment of the interaction between Moses and Joshua as types of different aspects of Christ’s work (.–; –), and embedded within the larger account of typological figures. The key point to notice here, however, is that the “shadowy” quality of the types refers to the limited intelligibility of what they prefigure, apart from their fulfillment in Christ who is the “Truth.” In that respect, the context of the above passage in Paradise Lost also implies that types are crucial preparation in order for the Truth of the Messiah to be intelligible. The conceptual dynamics of typology are thus not unidirectional; the arrival of the Incarnation of divine love is intelligible only in the context of the history of Israel that Milton summarizes. The obvious evidence for this aspect of the epic appears in the fact that Michael does not simply begin by telling Adam about the Incarnation of the Son: the gospel narratives are not intelligible apart from the history of Israel. Because the types are fulfilled by “Truth” within time, they are specifically not “shadowy” in the Platonist sense that they resemble entities belonging to some more “real” world. Thus types persist as the incorrigibly particular and embodied instances of divine revelation that are not simply discardable, like allegorical “husks,” but are necessary preparation for the human apprehension of divine love. At the same time, by adding on to his adaptation of the biblical metanarrative a summary of the church’s history between the Ascension and the return of Christ, Milton also implies, in epic fashion, a continuity between the imagined “world” of the poem and that of implied readers. Also accessible at the surface level of Books  and  are the central didactic themes that recur throughout. Michael is intent upon the elucidation of three pairs of key concepts and their multiple interactions:

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



the dialectic of freedom versus bondage; the contrast between charity and trust in compulsion; and the relation between “internal” and “external” aspects of the human condition. None of the terms, as worked through the stories, involves a simple correspondence with the other pairs. For example, the bondage discussed within a given story can, in Milton’s account, involve internal enslavement to appetites (like those in the “Lazar-house,” or Noah’s peers) or external coercion (whether by Cain or Nimrod). Yet the same story can also develop the theme of internal freedom despite subjection to external compulsion by others (for example, Abel, Enoch, Christ, or the early church). A further recurring topic is the condition of people subject to internal bondage to appetites amid apparent external freedom (for example, PL .–; .–; .–). The key point here is that each of these paired contrasts differently involves the use or abuse of the faculty of “right reason,” or conscience. As we have seen in previous chapters, a recurring theme in Milton’s prose is that true charity and freedom both depend upon a properly ordered right reason. Also, as we noted, the contrast between “internal” and “external” does not imply a Cartesian anthropological dualism, but arises instead from Milton’s insistence upon the unity of the human person whose “internal” condition necessarily results in certain “external” actions which cannot be compelled into a specific form but which are also not merely random. Thus, as the variously paired themes repeat in Michael’s prophecy, we are not surprised to find that his story culminates (before the return of Christ) by describing the post-apostolic church’s decline into religious coercion. As Michael explains, after the death of the apostles in the early church, “Wolves shall succeed for teachers” (.). The ensuing account of religious decline and corruption succinctly weaves together historical, theological, and moral themes that Milton had often woven together from his earliest anti-prelatical tracts to his later arguments in Civil Power, Hirelings, and Of True Religion. In this case, the “grievous Wolves”: All the sacred mysteries of Heav’n To thir own vile advantages shall turne Of lucre and ambition, and the truth With superstitions and traditions taint, Left onely in those written Records pure, Though not but by the Spirit understood. (.–)

In order to satisfy their desires for wealth and honor, these teachers will corrupt the belief of others by teaching that salvation can be achieved



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

by works (“superstitions”), rather than by faith in Christ. This passage also succinctly connects such ecclesiastical corruption and superstition with an inability to interpret Scripture, even though the “written Records pure” remain. Here Milton makes an implicit connection to his central belief that the “rule of faith” by which all biblical interpretation must be guided is the integral unity between “faith and charitie; or beleef and practise” that is the sum of “evangelic religion” (CPW vii:). The key point here, however, is that Michael connects such moral, theological, and hermeneutic corruption directly to the further step of using compulsion to enforce outward religious conformity: Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names, Places and titles, and with these to joine Secular power, though feigning still to act By spiritual, to themselves appropriating The Spirit of God, promisd alike and giv’n To all Beleevers; and from that pretense, Spiritual Lawes by carnal power shall force On every conscience. (PL .–)

The term “carnal power” indicates for Milton not the mere fact of the body but a misplaced trust in compulsion rather than peaceful persuasion to induce faith or its attendant actions. As I demonstrated in Chapter , Milton’s opposition to such coercion rests upon his insistence that body and soul are not distinct entities but are necessarily united: the bodily good works (charity) that result necessarily from spiritual regeneration (saving faith) cannot be compelled without implying that those works constitute the basis for one’s salvation. Ultimately, this culminating passage implies that the inward and external condition of people are related to each other, but not in a direct correspondence, as though every corruption of right reason necessarily corrupted a person’s appearance or bodily strength. Instead, the attempt to bind “Faith and Conscience” (.) by means of such “carnal power” leads to a further condition: Whence heavie persecution shall arise On all who in the worship persevere Of Spirit and Truth; the rest, farr greater part, Well deem in outward Rites and specious formes Religion satisfi’d. (.–)

In effect, the divine judgment for rejecting salvation by faith (internally) is being permitted to practice religious persecution against others (externally).

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



Once again, the denigration of such “outward Rites and specious formes” does not imply that all outward actions are necessarily specious or irrelevant to one’s salvation. According to the theological framework that Milton deploys here, what makes such actions “specious” is the false hope that they, rather than Christ, will save one from sin; they are not specious simply because they are “outward.” Michael will later emphasize the embodied virtues that result from faith, but the point of the entire passage above (.–) is that such external virtues cannot be coerced. Thus, people who practice such coercion reveal their enslavement to base appetites, resulting from the fact that their conscience, the imago dei capacity of right reason, has never been restored by faith in one who is Divine Reason (compare .–). The passage does not imply that all who suffer from such an internal disorder of the affections necessarily attempt such coercion, but it does imply that those who compel the religious practices of others are in such a condition of internal enslavement. economic trinity and biblical interpretation Near both the beginning and the end of Michael’s inset narration of biblical history, Paradise Lost refers specifically to the actions of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Moreover, as we shall see, both of these occasions also involve specific reference to divine love, or “charity.” As any reader of the Miltonic De Doctrina Christiana would know, Milton did not evidently subscribe to the doctrine of the Trinity. What may be more accurate to say, however, is that, while Milton does not subscribe to extra-biblical formulations regarding relations internal to the being (or essence) of the Godhead – the “immanent Trinity” – he clearly endorses biblical depictions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working in co-ordination to bring about salvation history – the “economic Trinity.” Theologians frequently discuss the necessary relation between accounts of the “immanent Trinity” and the “economic Trinity,” but the key point here is that Milton’s biblicism seems to have left him open to the latter without entailing the former. In a deeper sense, however, even to raise the topic of Milton’s antitrinitarianism in De Doctrina risks misleading our discussion of what Paradise Lost does rhetorically when it refers specifically to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. Without denying either Milton’s authorship of the theological treatise, or his rejection of what he understood the doctrine of the Trinity to involve, I contend that Milton’s rhetorical aim is specifically to re-embed the doctrine in its biblical source texts. An appeal to biblicism is, of course, a standard part of antitrinitarian argument. As a result, we could debate



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

whether Milton’s biblicism serves a secret antitrinitarianism, or whether the apparent allowance for an economic Trinity is merely an accidental function of his biblicism. I contend, however, that the very attempt to resolve such a question obscures a more important point that Milton makes about the connection between true belief and moral transformation. By referring to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without recourse to extrabiblical vocabulary regarding the immanent Trinity, Milton’s rhetorical aim is to show that such biblical idiom is sufficient as a basis for saving faith in divine love that gives rise to the ethical practice of charity. Before Michael presents Adam with the revelation of future events, his explanation of the vision’s purpose connects Adam’s knowledge of divine love to the practice of virtue: Ere thou from hence depart, know I am sent To show thee what shall come in future days To thee and to thy Offspring; good with bad Expect to hear, supernal Grace contending With sinfulness of Men; thereby to learn True patience, and to temper joy with fear And pious sorrow, equally inur’d By moderation either state to bear, Prosperous or adverse: so shalt thou lead Safest thy life, and best prepar’d endure Thy mortal passage when it comes.

(PL .–)

What may not be evident from this quotation is that the first line is not the syntactic beginning of the sentence. The immediately preceding lines, however, situate the goal of moral education within a still larger purpose which has just been elaborated. In bemoaning his expulsion from Eden, Adam expresses regret that he will no longer know God’s presence and that he will not even be able to set up shrines in order to show his children where he once met with God (.–). Michael responds: Yet doubt not but in Vallie and in plaine God is as here, and will be found alike Present, and of his presence many a sign Still following thee, still compassing thee round With goodness and paternal Love, his Face Express, and of his steps the track Divine. Which that thou may’st believe, and be confirm’d, Ere thou from hence depart, know I am sent To show thee what shall come . . . (.–, emphasis added)

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



In short, the ultimate purpose of the revelation is to strengthen Adam’s faith (trust) in God’s continued love (charity) toward him and his progeny. The ensuing exhortation to virtue (quoted above) which the narrative then embodies further for Adam is thus part of the divine care for creaturely happiness in a fallen world of action and consequence. At the conclusion of Michael’s prophecy, the didactic purpose of the revelation is again emphasized, though in slightly different terms. At the culmination of his post-lapsarian education, Adam responds to Raphael by summarizing the lessons that he has learned about virtue and declaring his own trust in the coming “Redeemer” (PL .–). Michael responds by acknowledging that Adam has learned “the sum / Of wisdom” (.–). He recommends such understanding to Adam on the grounds that it is superior to the knowledge of “all Nature’s works” (.). Michael also indicates, however, that in order for Adam to experience the full restoration of God’s image, that “paradise within,” the intellectual apprehension that he possesses is not sufficient in itself: Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call’d Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far. (.–)

The paratactic repetition of the word “add” suggests a similar construction found in  Peter :–, which begins with faith and culminates in charity. The “soul,” or living form, as it were, of the “paradise within” is not constituted through private inner knowledge, but through active and often outwardly accessible action. The key point here, however, is that “divine love” progresses through the course of Books  and  from being something external to Adam, something of which he needs assurance, to being something internal to him, in the restoration of the divine image. In effect, the internal knowledge of divine love (that is, “faith” as content rather than virtue) makes possible the human practice of ethical “charity” which includes all the virtues above. The same passages, however, that present this considerable treatment of divine love and ethical charity also foreground the co-operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just before Adam’s final confession of faith, Michael begins the last segment of his prophetic narration by describing the life of the church after Christ’s Ascension. In a manner strikingly similar to



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Adam’s own situation a few lines later, Michael describes the operations of divine love upon the hearts of the first disciples after Pentecost. Moreover, he does so in terms that are generally trinitarian: From Heav’n [The Son] to his own a Comforter will send, The promise of the Father, who shall dwell His Spirit within them, and the Law of Faith Working through love, upon thir hearts shall write, To guide them in all truth, and also arm With spiritual armor, able to resist Satan’s assaults, and quench his fiery darts, What man can do against them, not afraid.

(PL .–)

Intertextually, several important things are happening at the same time in this passage. At one level, the mention of “fiery darts” alludes to the themes of spiritual warfare engaged in Book  of Paradise Lost. In a further sense, the final lines reiterate the recurring emphasis throughout Books  and , regarding how inward or spiritual restoration results in certain kinds of outward actions or conditions. In this way, the inscription of the “Law of Faith” by the Holy Spirit clearly indicates the restoration of the imago dei of conscience, or “right reason,” but it does so in a way that links such regeneration from the internalization of divine love to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Thus, finally, as with Adam, the believers’ restoration of their divine image is expressed specifically in terms of “Faith” (knowledge of God) and “love.” The Son sends the Holy Spirit who is promised by the Father, in order to regenerate within individual believers the image of God. That restored faculty of right reason then allows believers to embody a unity of faith and love in a way that necessarily impinges on the world with consequence. Once again, because of Milton’s rejection of dualistic anthropology, this brief summary of the church’s earliest history also emphasizes that people who experience such an “inner” restoration may also experience persecution or martyrdom specifically because their virtues and religious practices are not merely private. Milton assumes, as we noted in Chapter , that an “external” good, like intersubjective rhetorical practice, is not necessarily coercive. The reader has already been prepared for such three-fold co-operation between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the events described at the outset of Book , where each person of the Trinity plays a role in Adam and Eve’s repentance:

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood Praying, for from the Mercy-seat above Prevenient Grace descending had remov’d The stony from thir hearts, and made new flesh Regenerate grow instead, that sighs now breath’d Unutterable, which the Spirit of prayer Inspir’d, and wing’d for Heav’n with speedier flight Than loudest Oratory. . . . Them the glad Son Presenting, thus to intercede began. See Father, what first fruits on earth are sprung From thy implanted Grace in Man, these Sighs And Prayers, which in this Golden Censer, mixt With Incense, I thy Priest before thee bring . . . . (PL .–; –)

In the lines that follow, the Son, as “Advocate,” goes on to offer to the Father his “Merit” and “Death” to redeem mankind, so that, as he says, “All my redeem’d may dwell in joy and bliss, / Made one with me as I with thee am one” (.–). The Holy Spirit enables prevenient grace to induce repentance. Because the reference to sighs “unutterable” openly recalls the description of the Holy Spirit’s role in prayer found in Romans :, the phrase “Spirit of prayer” is not mere vagueness or obfuscation on Milton’s part. Taken as a whole, the above passage clearly invokes the different roles of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in effecting human salvation together. In short, the passage depicts the “economic Trinity.” The passage does so, however, by means of vocabulary limited to biblical idiom and notably without ever using the word “Trinity.” Nor is there mention of the threein-one vocabulary customary in any explanation of the immanent Trinity. Milton, we should note, could easily have employed such vocabulary here, or earlier, if he had intended to present an unambiguous affirmation of the immanent Trinity. The case of Lucy Hutchinson provides a striking contrast in this regard. Her paraphrase of the creation story in Order and Disorder explicitly invokes all three members of the Trinity with orthodox precision and without equivocation. We can begin to understand the rhetorical purpose of Milton’s precise reticence on this point if we consider one particular instance of such theological equivocation in the above passage. The last phrase in the passage quoted above, “Made one with me as I with thee am one” (.), opens an equivocation that easily could have been removed and specified in order to argue for either a trinitarian or an



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

antitrinitarian view. The phrase (based on John :) compares the unity enjoyed between the Father and the Son and the unity enjoyed between the Son and believers. The equivocation arises from the fact that the unity attributed to the Father and Son may or may not be taken to refer to a tacit insistence that they do not share the same “essence” (as an orthodox view of the immanent Trinity maintains), any more than believers who are united in Christ would share the same essence. If one follows the theological tradition of analogical predication regarding divine names, then the verse may easily be interpreted as a trinitarian text. As I explained in Chapter , however, Milton’s arguments are often shaped at key points by the fact that he does not have recourse to analogical (rather than merely equivocal) predication regarding God’s being. I also explained how Milton’s peculiar deployment of “matter,” for example, arises specifically because his attempt to think about the unity amid difference between God and creation does not have recourse to the “analogy of being.” Nevertheless, Milton appeals to matter in the unique way that he does specifically because his theology, in the attempt to avoid both pantheism and polytheism, attempts to negotiate some of the same tensions addressed by the analogy of being. In a comparable way here, Milton depicts the work of redemption as shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not because he subscribes to belief in the immanent Trinity, but in order to suggest that biblical vocabulary is sufficient for disclosing the reality of divine love. In other words, rather than attempt a direct argument against the doctrine of the Trinity, Paradise Lost implies that, while the immanent Trinity is not intrinsic to Christian faith and charity based on sola scriptura, the economic Trinity is. For this reason, the key point to notice about this passage (PL .) is that Milton expected his readers to recognize the line as an obvious paraphrase of John :, thereby connecting this moment in the epic with the biblical account of the Son’s prayer in Gethsemane for the church. In effect, Paradise Lost posits a tacit biblicist theology that does not necessarily deny the truth of extrabiblical terms like “Trinity” but insists that Christian doctrine should not depend centrally upon them. Most importantly, Milton implies that, even if one does adopt the vocabulary of the immanent Trinity, the disclosure of ontic charity by the economic Trinity should preclude the disconnection between faith and charity that religious coercion requires. The rhetorical position implied by the treatment of the Trinity in Paradise Lost is probably most similar to the position embodied in Of True Religion (). Like Paradise Lost, however, the tract’s central argument risks becoming obscured by critical debates over Milton’s antitrinitarianism. In Of True Religion Milton lists a series of theological issues that

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



are “the hottest disputes among Protestants,” but which may nevertheless be “charitably enquir’d into” (CPW viii:). The list includes Lutherans on Consubstantiation, Calvinists on Predestination, Anabaptists on Infant Baptism, Arians and Socinians on the Trinity, Arminians on “free will against free grace” (viii:–). Critics have, of course, been quick to point out where De Doctrina stands on the various topics listed. There has been, however, some debate over the sentences in which Milton describes the antitrinitarian position: The Arian and Socinian are charg’d to dispute against the Trinity: they affirm to believe the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, according to Scripture and the Apostolic Creed; as for the terms of Trinity, Triunity, Coessentiality, Tripersonality, and the like, they reject them as Scholastic Notions, not to be found in Scripture, which by a general Protestant Maxim is plain and perspicuous abundantly to explain its own meaning in the properest words, belonging to so high a Matter and so necessary to be known; a mystery indeed to their Sophistic Subtilties, but in Scripture a plain Doctrine. (CPW viii:–)

William Hunter points out that, on the particular issue of Milton’s own Arianism, this passage is rhetorically structured like those preceding it, so that the “Sophistic Subtilties” likely refers to the antitrinitarian position. John Rumrich rejects Hunter’s reading on the grounds that “Sophistic Subtleties” is an “obvious” reference directly back to the phrase “Scholastic Notions,” used by Arians to describe trinitarian arguments. But even if Milton were repeating the Arian misgivings of others, that would not imply his adopting them as his own, unless we disregard the context of the tract and its presumed readers. As Keith Stavely points out, the overall concern of the tract is to address the issues raised by a pending bill in Parliament, by taking advantage of the recent “No Popery” agitation in such a way as to argue for the toleration of dissenting Protestants. Thus, for example, Milton’s various references to the Thirty-Nine Articles are part of his broader attempt to appeal to the Anglican orientation of the Restoration Parliament. Given such a rhetorical context, Milton would hardly risk explicitly aligning himself with Arianism, thereby alienating his most important intended readers. Even if Milton’s views on the Trinity are represented in De Doctrina, those views would be distinct from the ostensible rhetorical purpose of this passage in Of True Religion, given the latter’s context and aims. But all such debate risks missing Milton’s more obvious argument in Of True Religion. Before presenting the list of disputed issues, Milton states openly that, regarding “all things absolutely necessary to salvation,” these

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

doctrines “will be found less than such” (viii:). The passage goes on to emphasize that, even if such beliefs are disputed among Protestants, such that some might be in error, “it cannot be imagin’d that God would desert [them] . . . to damnable Errors & a Reprobate sense” (viii:). Milton’s argument depends upon a previous distinction between heresy and error, as well as specific definitions of both Protestant and Catholic belief that he continues to unfold. Much of what he argues is common Protestant fare, but a brief consideration of the modes and implications of his argument offer telling comparison with Paradise Lost. His central distinction is that “heresy is in the Will and choice profestly against Scripture; error is against the Will, in misunderstanding the Scripture after all sincere endeavours to understand it rightly” (CPW viii:). Milton defines “True Religion,” or Protestantism, as “the true Worship and Service of God, learnt and believed from the Word of God only” (viii:). This definition he then elaborates into two “main Principles of true Religion”: That the Rule of true Religion is the Word of God only and that their Faith ought not to be an implicit faith that is, to believe, though as the Church believes, against or without express authority of Scripture. (viii:–)

In terms of the argument’s construction, these two principles enable the contrasting characterization of “Popery,” as including extra-biblical human traditions and “tacit faith,” or faith based on something other than Scripture. The second point is that which ultimately enables the pivotal move to equate all attempts to coerce conscience with “Popery,” for to deploy such coercion embodies a necessary endorsement of tacit faith. In this way, Milton thus elaborates the commonplace Protestant self-identification with sola scriptura (against tradition) and sola fide (rather than works), in such a way that equates all Erastianism or any policy of religious coercion with “Popery.” The logic of Milton’s argument here continues to unfold the premises of his earlier arguments in Civil Power, which we discussed in Chapter . In effect, Milton viewed the practice of religious coercion among Protestants as a basic falsification of the right relation between justification (faith) and sanctification (charity). Thus, by Milton’s own explicit account, belief or unbelief in the Trinity is not “necessary to salvation” (CPW viii:–): the search to understand such matters is part of sanctification, which is a result, not a cause, of salvation. What is crucial, according to Milton, is that people hold to the explicitly scriptural claim that Christ is “both God and Saviour” (viii:). Both the epic and Milton’s statements in the  tract reveal an express purpose of avoiding susceptibility to strong interpretations along either

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



trinitarian or antitrinitarian lines. Moreoever, such an approach is taken in each text because the primary rhetorical purpose is to advocate not for a given doctrine but for an approach to any doctrinal debate. In this way, the biblicism and interpretive openness that we have observed in Milton’s poetry are integral to his elaboration of ethical charity and his rejection of religious coercion. Both the epic and the tract resist the simple rehearsal of doctrinal formulations that risk leaving a reader still a “heretick in the truth.” Milton eschews the extra-biblical doctrinal formulations in a way that emphasizes the practice of human virtue that should arise from faith in the co-operative work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but Paradise Lost simultaneously offers strong criticism of those who would try to join ostensibly trinitarian belief with religious coercion. Thus, one of the central functions of the concluding books of Paradise Lost, with respect to “reader response,” is to provoke a reaction of extreme discomfort among Erastian readers who find themselves depicted in the culmination of salvation history as acting in opposition to divine love. Such rhetorical effect, however, is not achieved by mounting a direct argument for Protestant toleration or against the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, the epic subordinates both kinds of argument to the larger purpose of inducting readers to the practice of hermeneutics in a fallen world that is based on a trust in the ontic charity revealed to humans in Scripture by the combined work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In short, Milton chooses his rhetorical battles: he does not attempt in Paradise Lost to change readerly debates about the Trinity. Instead, he appeals to the biblical idiom shared by all sides of such a disagreement in order to show that religious coercion is already precluded among those who hold to sola scriptura. Thus, the summary of biblical history in Books  and  of Paradise Lost embodies the kind of Christocentric typological interpretation that functions more implicitly in the earlier books of the poem. And in this way, Michael’s prophecy embodies an implicit “rule of faith,” or interpretive guide, for those earlier books. As I explained in Chapter , Milton does not participate in the neglect of memory that is characteristic of modern typographic culture. His assumptions on this point appear in the way that he expects readers of Paradise Lost to apply the memory of the explicit typology in Books  and  to a second reading of the poem. Only in the second reading does genuine understanding begin, once there is some concrete knowledge of all the parts. The poem’s structure, in effect, presumes a second reading which keeps in mind the previous reading and thus implies the central importance of memory in the readers’ response to its central preoccupations. Lest such a point seem too obvious, we should remember



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

that the epic’s emphatic assumptions regarding memory pose a problem not only for critical approaches that would, following Stanley Fish, privilege “surprise” in the readers’ experiences; even more recent treatments of Paradise Lost, as we discovered in Chapters –, continue to posit a reading experience of the early books that must temporarily suspend the implied reader’s knowledge of the poem’s final books. This interpretive structure of Paradise Lost also embodies Milton’s view, anticipated in his prose, that educative reading is not simply a matter of intellectual apprehension that would risk leaving the reader a “heretick in the truth,” but a process of personal transformation. This is why the epic tends to make the dramatization of biblical events inextricable from the revelation of divine love (ontic charity) the purpose of which is to evoke faith which, in turn, results in ethical charity. Because the relation between faith and works is the crucial hinge in Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration, Paradise Lost does not advance a direct argument but deploys the whole of biblical history to shift the basis for any future debate regarding the toleration of Dissenters. Milton’s ingenuity is to make the dynamic union of faith and charity, or the regeneration of right reason, integral to the overarching biblical story that he presents. As a result, the challenge for those who would argue for the legitimacy of state-sponsored religious conformity is to advance a refutation of and a genuine conceptual alternative to Paradise Lost that similarly involves not only a comprehensive “rule of faith” but one that recapitulates the scope of the biblical story. There are, however, two major difficulties that could arise from Milton’s hermeneutic structuring of Paradise Lost in this way. The first challenge is illustrated by the very existence of the Romantic tradition of interpreting Paradise Lost, a tradition well defended most recently by Neil Forsyth. The problem is not that Romantic readers fail to read past Book  of the epic; the problem is that, even when they consider the entire poem in detail, deploying consummate erudition and subtlety, as Forsyth does, such readers tend to interpret all parts of the poem in terms of the ontic violence assumed by Satan and his companions in the opening books, rather than in terms of the ontic charity revealed by the work of the economic Trinity in the final books. In short, many of Milton’s readers tend to assume not only the modern disregard for the role of memory in understanding his poetry but also the view that reality, whether ordered or random, is violent. The very existence of the Romantic tradition of interpreting Paradise Lost shows Milton’s success in locating at the center of his epic a contest between these two contrasting visions of reason and reality as either

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith



peaceful gift or coercion. Milton appreciated that such questions concerning fundamental ontology are not susceptible to direct logical argumentation that does not merely presume an answer to the question it purports to address. The decision to begin with and give full voice to that Satanic assumption that reason and reality are intrinsically coercive arises from Milton’s appreciation that the character of the questions at stake requires a necessarily indirect approach – an approach arising from his biblicism, in which the very appearance of divine justice is obscured at key points in order to manifest reality’s appearance as true glory. Paradise Lost thus closes in the way that it does in order to provide, not a determinate key for decoding every ambiguity in the poem, but a guide for discerning the relation between one’s assumed ethical origins, means, and ends. Milton’s risk in taking such an approach, of course, is that people will interpret the last two books as merely a contest between two types of coercion. I suggest that Milton appreciated this risk and thus attempted in Paradise Regained to give a more explicit depiction of the relation between ontic charity and ethical charity. For this reason, the next chapter of this study focuses on Paradise Regained. There is, however, a contrasting difficulty that arises from structuring Paradise Lost hermeneutically in the manner that I have described. The alternative risk is that the combination of explicit typology and sustained moralizing in Books  and  risks suggesting that the practice of both biblical interpretation and ethical charity is largely a matter of rehearsing glib formulaic answers to the most enduring human questions. Such an impression of these books would obviously be very “un-Miltonic,” but such an impression is available and also helps to explain why Romantic readers tend not to give much attention to the final books. There is indeed a danger that readers could mistake the equipoise of epic closure for an interpretive prescription to avoid struggling with their own particularities. In short, such readers could appeal to “Providence,” the good end of the story, in order to excuse their own sloth, cowardice, license, or infidelity, rather than to fortify their strenuous liberty. I suggest that Milton was well acquainted with such interpretive risks and that he paired his publication of Paradise Regained with Samson Agonistes in order to address just that kind of reading which would mistake faith for presumption. Thus, the final chapter of this study turns to Samson Agonistes.

chapter 9

Paradise Regained as rule of charity

In his biography of Milton (), Edward Phillips observes that Paradise Regained “is generally censur’d to be much inferiour to [Paradise Lost], though [Milton] could not hear with patience any such thing when related to him.” Why should Milton be so utterly convinced that Paradise Regained was at least as good as Paradise Lost, if not superior? Historical evidence suggests that he wrote most of the brief epic after writing Paradise Lost. In composing the later work between  and , Milton was able to write with some sense of how his earlier poem had been and would be understood, at least by initial contemporary readers. Milton’s strong reaction to the comparison of the two epics at the expense of Paradise Regained resulted, I contend, from his understanding of the often mistaken basis for such comparison. In his account of the early readers of Paradise Lost, Nicholas von Maltzahn shows that the epic’s central war in heaven was one of the most important elements of the poem for Restoration readers. Those early readers tended, however, to understand the war not as an imagined proto-type of the spiritual battle described in Revelation , but as an endorsement of the traditional epic ethos which valorized warfare and brute force. As Milton had observed long before, “a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book” (CPW ii:); yet Paradise Regained suggests that Milton may not have resigned Paradise Lost entirely to such foolish misreading and may have attempted to offer a corrective to such misunderstanding. The “great duel” central to Paradise Regained is explicitly stipulated to be “not of arms” but between “wisdom” and “hellish wiles” (.–). Although Michael does explain to Adam that the fight between Christ and Satan does not depend on the “local wounds” (PL .–), Paradise Regained states even more emphatically that the Son will “conquer Sin and Death” “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance” (.–). In Paradise Lost, the explicit account of Christ’s whole life and work on earth is summarized in a few lines (.–, –); by contrast, Paradise Regained dilates one episode in Christ’s life in order to foreground 

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



the way that typology reveals the relationship between complete virtue, or “ethical charity,” and the belief that reality is rooted in a peaceful gift for the good of others, or “ontic charity.” This chapter first explains how the subject of Paradise Regained uniquely configures the relation between redemption and ethical charity, or justification and sanctification. By then considering some of the main typological dilations that Milton introduces into the biblical narrative, we can understand how this brief epic foregrounds the way ontic charity gives rise to the Son’s practice of complete ethical charity. The Son’s ethical charity is the establishment of a “Paradise within” that will culminate in his sacrificial death and resurrection which, in turn, is the basis for restoring fallen humans to their enjoyment of complete virtue. In this way, Paradise Regained addresses the apparently common failure among readers of Paradise Lost to appreciate that the central war in heaven embodied a critique of the ontology and ethics widely assumed by its readers. In this way, Milton’s brief epic arguably serves as an interpretive “rule of charity” for Paradise Lost. incarnating redemptive sanctification Because the main character of Paradise Regained is the Incarnate Logos who is both Divine Reason and Rhetoric, Milton’s view of “reason” (human and divine) as the gift of peaceful difference appears in the brief epic both more indirectly and more obviously than in Paradise Lost. The increased verbal obscurity regarding “reason” in Paradise Regained arises, in part, from the redundancy of saying what is embodied; however, there is the additional element of the Son’s concealing from Satan what he knows. In a still further way, the brief epic’s reticence regarding the usually freighted terms “reason,” “conscience,” and “charity” serves a specific rhetorical purpose that we shall consider. Nevertheless, this poem continues through its narrative action to unfold Milton’s view that Divine Reason makes possible the peaceful gift of created difference from the Father and the subsequent gift of rule to the Son for the good of creation (ontic charity) in which the human faculty of right reason may participate. In this respect, the Son’s embodiment of complete human virtue, or charity, is also the restoration of “right reason.” As we have seen in preceding chapters, Milton’s understanding of “conscience,” or right reason, and his view of charity are central to his arguments against religious coercion among Protestants. Ultimately, his arguments for Protestant toleration depend on his claims regarding the right ordering of the relationship between justification and sanctification. Paradise Regained does not mount an argument for Protestant toleration;



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

instead, the poem shows even more directly than Paradise Lost how the understanding of reality as a divine gift for the good of others (ontic charity) gives rise to the ethical practice of charity. In this way, the poem effectively shifts the biblical-hermeneutic grounding for any future debate about Protestant toleration by making his account of the relations between justification and sanctification, in effect, an implacable consequence of biblical narrative. Although many critics, as well as the character Satan, view the Son’s identity as the central interpretive question in Paradise Regained, the most important question that the poem attempts to answer, as Regina Schwartz points out, is the two-fold concern with the meaning of the “Paradise” that the Son regains and the means by which such a restoration of Paradise is to be achieved. From its opening lines, Paradise Regained foregrounds both of these concerns as well as its relationship to Milton’s previous epic: I Who e’re while the happy Garden sung, By one mans disobedience lost, now sing Recover’d Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’t, And Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness.

(PR .–)

The most striking, and frequently noted, aspect of these opening lines is the emphatic use of the past tense, indicating that, only by means of the successful resistance of temptation, Eden is “rais’d,” not as a future goal but as an accomplished fact. The concluding angelic chorus of Paradise Regained similarly states that, when Christ thwarted Satan’s temptations in the desert, he “regain’d lost Paradise” (.). One of the most important points to understand initially about Paradise Regained is that it does not primarily concern Christ’s work of atonement, or the forgiveness of human sin. The poem does ultimately make a point regarding redemption, but it does so indirectly. Much of the interpretive difficulty surrounding Paradise Regained arises from the tendency to restrict the meaning of regaining paradise to Christ’s work of atonement. This assumption is the main cause for the common puzzlement over Milton’s choosing the story of Christ’s temptation for poetic dilation, rather than one of the gospel passion narratives. For example, Christopher Hill observes that Milton’s “failure to mention the crucifixion more than incidentally is . . . a startling departure from orthodoxy in a poem about the recovery of Paradise for all mankind.”

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



But such a departure is startling only if one restricts the meaning of the “Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness” to the forgiveness of sin resulting from Christ’s death and resurrection. Milton does ultimately include that work of forgiveness in his meaning of “paradise,” but that is not the only or the first sense that Milton assumes here. By pointing readers back to Paradise Lost in these opening lines of Paradise Regained, Milton also allows us to recall that, in the final book of that previous epic, Michael used the phrase, “paradise within,” to indicate the temporal embodiment of complete virtue, whose “soul,” or living form, is called “Charity” (PL .–). The process of developing such virtue, or sanctification, is distinguished in Paradise Lost from the earlier forgiveness of Adam and Eve’s sin as a result of the Son’s mediation in response to their prayer of repentance (.–). Thus, if the spiritual “Eden” that Christ establishes in Paradise Regained includes the “paradise within” of the earlier epic, then the “Paradise” that is restored by Christ in the brief epic is the authentic practice of ethical charity (sanctification) which ultimately gives rise to the forgiveness of sin (justification) for others. To describe the Son’s actions in this way, however, with respect to justification and sanctification, is to emphasize that the situation of the Son in Paradise Regained is utterly unique. Not only is he sinless and therefore not in need of forgiveness, but also his very embodiment of charity eventually culminates in the sacrificial death that will make (and, in a sense, has always already made) the forgiveness of human sin possible. This singular condition involves Paradise Regained in a logic that is a reverse mirror-image of the relationship between faith and works (in the rest of humanity) which we have seen is central to Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration. Whereas, for believers, ethical charity arises from faith in the Son’s redemptive work, in the case of the Son, Milton emphasizes that the Son’s complete virtue (charity) will culminate in his redemptive work for others. As we shall see, there is also a further sense in which the Son’s charity, in turn, depends upon his complete trust in the love of the Father. That trust in what the preceding chapters of this study call “ontic charity” enables the Son to resist Satan’s multiform temptation to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by any means other than charity. In this way, Paradise Regained uniquely emphasizes the impossibility of treating Christ’s Passion in isolation from his entire virtuous life of charity. This point regarding the unity of Christ’s virtue and his work of atonement is important in two respects. First, as Milton would point out, there is nothing inherently good about suffering or being executed, even unjustly. The work of atonement itself has meaning only because Christ’s entire life



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

is virtuous and without sin – that is, a life of complete sanctification. Moreover, for charity to remain potential is not sufficient; it must be embodied. Second, Christ’s temporal practice of charity, although it will result in his death, does not depend upon death for its reality or intelligibility. Milton’s choice to focus on Christ’s temptation, rather than his Passion, is not simply a result of bloodless rationalism, or a reaction against the counterReformation emphasis upon Christ’s suffering. The poem implies that, although the response of divine love to the specifically human problem of sin involves sacrifice, such death is not ontically necessary to charity. This theological basis for the poem clarifies its central themes. Because of its emphasis upon Christ’s temporal embodiment of charity, the didactic core of the poem is exemplary rather than theologically demonstrative. Such an emphasis does not, however, imply that Milton ascribes saving efficacy to human attempts at following Christ’s example. Anne Krook makes a similar observation that “Christ’s action in the poem is predominantly exemplary.” Because she does not sufficiently allow for the distinction between justification and sanctification in the life of the believer, however, Krook suggests that Milton advocates salvation by human effort. The difficulty arises, once again, from presuming that the “regaining of paradise” is synonymous with salvation from sin, rather than with Christ’s embodiment of charitable virtue which will result in that salvation. To suggest that people could be saved from sin by simply following Christ’s example of virtue is to ascribe to Paradise Regained the very stoicism that the poem openly rejects (PR .–). The poem does not imply that the individual believer can establish the “paradise within” merely by imitating Christ’s virtue, but that sanctification is a result of saving faith in Christ’s redemptive work that is the culmination of his ethical charity. Understanding “paradise” as Christ’s embodiment of complete virtue, or charity, helps to explain what would otherwise seem a strange shift in verb tenses at the beginning and at the end of the poem. At both points, Christ’s resistance to Satan’s temptation is described as that which completes the action of establishing paradise (PR .–; .–). Yet also at both points, the Son’s victory is described as a still future event that follows the temptation (.–; .–). As the closing passage makes clear, Christ has yet to “reinstall” the “chosen Sons” of Adam within the paradise that he has just established (.–). That event is described in the future tense, not because any amount of human striving will ever result in that reinstalling, but because the work of atonement is yet to be completed (compare .–). Paradise Regained implies that only the forgiveness of sin made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection could

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



result in the freedom required for anyone besides Christ to share, by faith alone, in that paradise constituted by a life of charity. narrating ethical charity In elaborating upon the gospel accounts of Christ’s temptation in Paradise Regained, Milton uses a much plainer style than in Paradise Lost, but he deploys a biblicist strategy similar to the earlier epic’s elaboration of the Genesis story. At one level, he makes similar use of typology to engage within an immediate narrative framework the whole of biblical history. We can see this in the explicit connections and comparisons made between Adam (PR .–; .; .–) as well as Job (PR .; .; .–) and the Son, the last being a completion or fulfillment of the truth that was incomplete or only intimated by aspects of the former two. A typological dynamic is also at work in the several parallels drawn between the temptation story and the heavenly war in Revelation . Although, in one sense, the repeated mention of “Wilderness” in Paradise Regained simply follows the gospel narratives, and is part of Christ’s identification with Israel’s forty years in the desert, the coincident and repeated descriptions of the temptation as a battle connects that wilderness specifically to the one into which “the Woman” and the “remnant of her seed” are pursued by the dragon where he attempts to “make war” against them (Revelation :– ). Structurally, the poem’s use of the angelic song as a kind of dramatic chorus is similar to the angelic chorus and/or the “voice in heaven” that interjects throughout the Apocalypse. This alternation between heavenly and earthly perspectives results in what Joseph Mede calls, in his commentary on Revelation, “the apocalyptick theater” in which the reader is able to glimpse the connections between temporally distant events. But such apocalyptic theatre is, in effect, a function of typological interpretation. By connecting distant events through time in order to depict the relation between heavenly and earthly perspectives, Paradise Regained emphasizes the unity between charity as divine gift and charity as human virtue – in this case, between the divine gift of justification and the human embodiment of sanctification. If we consider some of the key points in Paradise Regained at which Milton dilates the biblical narrative, we can understand why the poem does not explicitly invoke “charity,” but instead implies that the Son embodies the unity between ontic charity (love that he shares with the Father) and ethical charity. One of the most important changes that Milton makes to the biblical versions of the temptation story is the conclusion of the final temptation,



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

in which Satan falls from the top of the temple. By arranging that the final defeat of Satan’s last effort to tempt Christ results in Satan’s own fall from the temple pinnacle, rather than in Christ’s falling into sin (.–), Milton makes a series of further biblical connections. Most immediately, the fall constitutes a further parallel with the heavenly war in Revelation  that results in Satan’s “second” fall, as it were (see PL .). Thus, the closing angelic song relates Satan’s immediate fall from the temple both to his past defeat “long of old” (PR .) and to his future final defeat (.–). As with Milton’s typological strategy elsewhere, however, Paradise Regained does not collapse the various similar events into a single form or identify them entirely with one another. Although the fall of Satan from the top of the temple at the end of Paradise Regained is like his earlier fall from heaven and his future fall from earth into hell, the narrative preserves the temporal framework and does not imply that these events are simply re-enactments of a single atemporal pattern. Rather, the typological similarity between the three events allows the recognition of a resemblance that does not deny their respective singularity. As we shall see, Satan’s blindness to charity is precisely what prevents him from understanding the singular meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. The angelic prediction of Christ’s final judgment of Satan (PR .–), like the earlier war in heaven, but unlike the immediate situation in Paradise Regained, is a response to Satan’s demand that God’s power be proven by coercion to match his own. But the point of invoking the Last Judgment in Paradise Regained is that precisely such retribution cannot be exercised by humans who, before the Eschaton, can only best follow the example of the incarnate Christ. The invocation of the future judgment thus serves as a reminder of the penultimate character of all temporal regimes and their use of force (see Chapter  above). Moreover, by alluding to the same biblical locus of Revelation , Milton emphasizes the typological correspondence between the event that occupies the centre of Paradise Lost and the event at the end of Paradise Regained, thus weaving the conclusion of the later poem back into the center of the earlier one. We encounter a different typological elaboration of the gospel narratives in the most sustained treatment of Job within the poem, in Book . There Christ responds to the temptation to pursue imperial power for fame and glory by citing Job as an example of true virtue that remains little known among humans. Job’s character occasions sustained comment on his position as someone who is better known in heaven than on earth, whose true glory, although publicly intelligible in retrospect, is not concerned with political power. He therefore eschews the use of bodily force to acquire fame or glory among men:

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



They err who count it glorious to subdue By Conquest far and wide, to overrun Large Countries, and in the field great Battles win, Great Cities by assault: what do these Worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter and enslave Peaceable Nations . . . But if there be in glory aught of good, It may by means far different be attain’d Without ambition, war, or violence. (PR .–; –)

This description of true glory is offered here by Christ as part of an account of Job’s exceptional life (.–; –), a life that is itself a prefigurement of the life that the Son embodies fully. But Job also, in a sense, becomes here a figure for the hidden character of the true church, at the same time that his rejection of coercive power clarifies the distinction between those who believe that reality is coercive and those who believe that reality is ultimately a peaceful gift. The similarities in the deployment of typology in Milton’s two epics should not, however, obscure crucial differences in emphasis between them. Paradise Regained invokes the terms of spiritual battle by reference to an apocalyptic framework similar to that deployed in Book  of Paradise Lost, but in a much different immediate setting. The particular choice of Christ’s temptation story also allows Milton to foreground more directly questions concerning biblical interpretation as they relate to the practice of license versus freedom, and to belief in the primacy of coercion versus charity. At the very end of Book , at what is, in effect, the centre of Paradise Regained, we find the end of Christ’s response to Satan’s appeal to wealth as a means to achieve “Conquest, and Realms” (.). Initially Christ observes, in terms generally analogous to a classical account of virtue, that the man who controls his own desires is “More a king” (.) than one who rules other people (.–). But the culmination of Christ’s rejection is that which Satan seems unable to anticipate and which leaves him “mute confounded” (.): But to guide Nations in the way of truth By saving Doctrine, and from error lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part; That other o’er the body only reigns, And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning Besides, to give a Kingdom hath been thought Greater and nobler done, and to lay down Far more magnanimous than to assume. (PR .–, emphasis added)

The passage begins with an emphasis upon the way in which “truth” involves a practical unity between justification (“saving Doctrine”) and sanctification (“worship”), a unity that shows by contrast the weakness of bodily force. But what Satan seems most unable to anticipate is the experience of gift. Satan seems to know that the Messiah will obtain a kingdom. But because Satan is unable to imagine what it would mean “to give a Kingdom” or to be given one, his strategy for temptation consistently revolves around the question of how to take one. Whether he specifically proposes force or some other means, his logic depends upon taking rather than giving a kingdom. As the Son concludes, in the ensuing final lines of Book , he emphasizes that what is ultimately at stake is the unavoidable connection between means and ends: “Riches are needless then, both for themselves, / And for thy reason why they should be sought, / To gain a Scepter, oftest better miss’t” (.–). In effect, riches provide a means only to the kind of kingship that the Son does not want: that is, a governance that is a mere capacity to manipulate bodies, rather than the genuine power to enable others in achieving their good. By comparing the structural location of this passage in Paradise Regained – that is, just before the center – with the structure of the ten-book  Paradise Lost, we notice that it corresponds directly with the announcement of the Son’s anointing and the beginning of Satan’s rebellion. In this way, Paradise Regained seems to present more clearly what is mostly implicit in the central books of Paradise Lost: that the Son’s kingship – being ruled by the gift of peaceful difference – is not intrinsically coercive. revealing ontic charity As a result of Satan’s assumption that divine reason and reality are coercive he is not able even to perceive divine gift-love, or ontic charity, and his incapacity in this regard becomes central to the interpretive emphasis in the dramatic action of the poem. The fact that the “battle” between Christ and Satan turns upon biblical interpretation is generally understood. Although the narrative voice expresses no anxiety regarding the Son’s identity and seems satisfied to leave the hypostatic union a mystery, Satan is

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



most interested in ascertaining Christ’s identity. Yet the precise character of Satan’s most important interpretive failure, evidenced dramatically in the final temptation, requires further illumination. In the lines immediately preceding the climactic moment at which he transports Christ to the top of the temple, Satan reveals the full extent of his puzzlement and anxiety over Christ’s identity. He is worried about the exact meaning of the words spoken from heaven after Christ’s baptism in the Jordan – an event that is recounted here for the fourth time within the poem and for the second time by Satan himself: By voice from Heav’n [I] Heard thee pronounc’d the Son of God belov’d. Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view And narrower Scrutiny, that I might learn In what degree or meaning thou art call’d The Son of God, which bears no single sense; The Son of God I also am, or was, And if I was, I am; relation stands; All men are Sons of God; yet thee I thought In some respect far higher so declar’d. (PR .–)

Satan claims that his final “method” (.) of testing Christ is compelled by his determination to know if Jesus is “more . . . than man, / Worth naming Son of God by voice from Heav’n” (.–). At that moment when Satan “with amazement” falls from the temple (.), he seems to recognize that Jesus is indeed the same “first-begot” “Son of God” who had driven him from heaven (compare .–; .–; .–). But until then, his persistent reduction of the meaning of Jesus’ sonship to a function of compulsion reveals Satan’s incapacity to understand the meaning of the word “belov’d.” In his earlier recounting of the same event to the demonic council, Satan characterizes the “first-begot” Son as the “Monarch of Heaven” who, if he and Jesus are one and the same, is sure to benefit from the favoritism of his almighty Father (.–). Satan puzzles over the meaning of the sonship, and openly admits his incomprehension of the descending “perfect Dove” (.), but he simply presumes that he knows the meaning of “belov’d” is reducible to a kind of favoritism that enables political and coercive power. This leads him to mistake his present situation as being similar to his earlier defeat in heaven. The previous “fierce thunder,” which drove Satan and his peers to the deep (.), was a just response to those who, having



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

denied dependence on any creator, demanded that God’s power be proven in answer to their own force (PL .–). By contrast, the Son’s Incarnation and eventual humiliation are in response to the specific needs of the human problem of evil which resulted, in part, from deception (.–, –). In effect, even as Paradise Regained implies comparison among the past, present, and future spiritual battles between Christ and Satan, Satan as a character within the story fails to understand the crucial differences between those battles. This point shows the typological insistence upon the particularity of the events being compared, but it also demonstrates the central place of divine gift-love in Milton’s deployment of such comparison. The repeated reference to the Son as “belov’d” indicates the basis for his response to Satan’s temptations: his trust in the Father’s love. The fact that the brief epic manages to repeat the statement of the Father’s love for the Son four times indicates that Milton is making a point beyond that suggested by the single reference to the Father’s announcement in the gospel narratives. The event, which includes Jesus’ baptism, the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father from heaven calling Jesus his “belov’d Son,” is recounted first by the narrative voice (PR .–), by Satan during the demonic council (.–), by Christ himself (.–), and finally by Satan again, just before the final temptation (.–). The fact that the narrator and the Son both specifically mention his act of baptism and “rising up” from the water, whereas Satan focuses upon the message of the voice from heaven, suggests Satan’s failure even to notice the prefiguration of the Son’s victory. The very image of baptism – the descent into the water and the rising again – prefigures the death and resurrection. That action of death and resurrection will not present an equal and opposite force in response to Satan’s coercion but reveals a creative power to give life, which infinitely exceeds the presumed alternatives of compelled order or indeterminate chaos. In a further sense, the biblical account of the Son’s baptism is also the most apparent instance in Scripture of the “economic Trinity” whose work, as we noted in Chapter  above, is traced in Books  and  of Paradise Lost. In effect, Paradise Regained emphasizes that the same divine love which is the source of all reality in Paradise Lost is also the basis for the Son’s virtue and, therefore, human redemption. In this way, the later epic presents a direct reversal of the connections between ontology, identity, and coercive action that Satan exhibits in Paradise Lost. At this point in the larger story, of course, the Son’s redemptive work, what he calls the “means” by which he shall come to David’s throne, remains concealed from Satan (PR .–). The four iterations of his baptism in

Paradise Regained as rule of charity



Paradise Regained, however, emphasize the way in which the Son unites the means and end of charity. In such a story that emphasizes the Son’s temptation, the impression of his “charity” as virtue might seem muted by his isolation. We should remember, however, that, although the Son is alone in this story, he is neither independent nor self-concerned. The love he shares with the Father is the basis and origin of his action, while the explicitly stated goal of his resistance to Satan’s temptation is ultimately the redemption of humanity (PR .–) – hardly a case of spiritual solipsism. In effect, Paradise Regained offers in the temptation story, and through its use of typology, a depiction of how the life of Christ embodies ethical charity. The poem openly invokes both the divine love of the transcendent Godhead (ontic charity) and the “paradise within” which is Christ’s enacting of perfect human virtue (ethical charity); however, the poem does not explicitly use the term “charity” because Christ himself embodies the mediation between the two realities of divine love and human sanctification. More importantly, Milton’s rhetorical aim is not simply to induce a comfortably vague verbal affirmation regarding the importance of “charity,” as an explicit use of the term might do. Neither in Milton’s day nor our own do we hear many people publicly arguing against “charity”; it is most susceptible to the corruption of mere lip service. Instead of invoking charity, Milton provokes a choice between accepting Christ’s virtuous action as the substantive content of ethical charity or rejecting the Protestant view of the relation between justification and sanctification. In other words, if readers accepted Milton’s poetic portrait of the Son’s action in Paradise Regained as consonant with the biblical account and its implications, they would already have agreed to key premises for Milton’s arguments against religious coercion among Protestants. In this way, Paradise Regained makes explicit the connections between typology, the rule of charity, and biblicist poetics that remain implicit in the first ten books of Paradise Lost. The surface narrative of the brief epic thus presents more openly the account of peaceful ontic charity that underlies Milton’s poetics. The later poem’s shift in emphasis is unmistakable, and that difference explains the aversion to Paradise Regained on the part of those who, judging by Milton’s own reaction, enjoyed the earlier epic for the wrong reasons. Thus, in both of Milton’s epics we find that the intertextual dynamics of biblical typology are, in effect, a Christocentric interpretation of the overarching biblical story intended to ensure that charity rather than coercion is understood as the basis for reality and for authentic human freedom. In both poems, Milton develops from within his biblicism an account of



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

sanctification that guards against the kinds of Protestant ecclesiology that permitted coercion in such “external” or temporal matters as church discipline. The final books of Paradise Lost present, however, an implicit “rule of faith” by uniting a Christocentric account of faith and works “writ large,” as it were through the whole of biblical history. In Paradise Regained, the direction of the scale of the Christocentric poetics is reversed so that the whole of Christ’s work is engaged from within the narration of one part of his life. By making more explicit the way that the Son’s ethical charity depends on the ontic charity that is the arch¯e of creation, the brief epic emphasizes also the kind of practical choices involved in the spiritual battle depicted at the centre of Paradise Lost. Thus, if Books  and  function as a metanarrative version of the “rule of faith” for the preceding books of the longer epic, Paradise Regained offers what might be called a “micronarrative” version of the “rule of charity” which more emphatically eschews the risk of being misunderstood as an epic celebration of violent warfare. In this way, the brief epic offers a corrective to those early readers who mistook the nature of the epic battle at the centre of Paradise Lost. Thus also Paradise Regained offers, through its portrayal of Satan’s interpretive practice and its defeat, a quasi-prophetic account of how Paradise Lost could be misunderstood, at the same time that it embodies an antidote to such a misreading that would mistake the ontology of the earlier poem for one of coercion rather than charity.

chapter 10

Samson Agonistes as personal drama

If the “soul,” or living form, of all the virtues is, for Milton, the ethical charity embodied by the Son in Paradise Regained, why does Milton pair the publication of his brief epic in  with Samson Agonistes? If Milton truly rejects enthusiasm for carnal warfare, as I contend in the preceding chapter, why does Samson Agonistes seem to legitimate divinely inspired violence? Attempts to explain the paired publication of these texts tend to argue that each hero presents either a complement or a contrast to the other and to connect the pairing to some aspect of the political context. In a further sense, Samson Agonistes also contrasts with Milton’s other major poems in its careful avoidance of the explicit typological intertextuality that we have traced in the preceding chapters. As a result, we should not be surprised that neither ontic charity nor ethical charity gets much explicit treatment in the play; nevertheless, the play is indeed centrally concerned with the relation between “right reason,” or conscience, and genuine virtue. Rather than referring to “ethical charity,” the analysis here refers to Samson’s concern for “virtuous action,” or “sanctification.” I contend that the central question for Samson is whether he, as the particular person that he has become, is capable of co-operating with divine action in the world, rather than being merely used despite himself. In short, Samson attempts to discern whether he in particular is capable of virtuous action. The questions surrounding the meaning of Samson’s violence as well as questions surrounding typology are part of the debate that has made Samson Agonistes the most contested work in Milton studies. Derek Wood does not exaggerate when he claims that “there is no consensus about the nature of the central character, the moral significance of what he achieves, the authority or ideological status of any character or of almost any statement made in the play.” Yet, on the basis of just such “contestation,” Mark Kelley and Joseph Wittreich claim the tragedy “as a scene of instruction from which a new Milton criticism, once born, may take direction.” Taking as a point of departure what Barbara Lewalski calls the “cacophony of interpretations” to which Samson 



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Agonistes has given rise, this chapter begins by considering some of the root interpretive issues that underlie the present critical controversy. We can then establish the ways in which the play engages matters of tragic form and biblical narrative, thereby transforming both. Ultimately, by tracing the drama’s treatment of true versus false worship – that is, sanctification versus “idolatry” – we can understand the five agons that make up Samson Agonistes as Milton’s most nuanced treatment of the ethical questions surrounding religious coercion. Once again, Samson Agonistes never advances Milton’s customary arguments for Protestant toleration that we find in his prose. Instead, specifically by means of its biblical intertextuality, the tragedy offers implicit guidance to those religious Dissenters during the Restoration who were subject to coercion by a state church. As we begin this chapter, we should also note how the various threads of argument throughout the preceding chapters will uniquely combine in our treatment of Samson Agonistes. In several chapters, we considered how Milton’s epics engage the particularities of the overarching biblical story without reducing that story to an abstraction or allowing it to underwrite religious coercion among Protestants. In contrast to the metanarratives of modernity that presume the unfolding of a contentless instrumental reason whose telos is necessarily the manipulation of bodies, Milton’s epics unfold a narrative whose origin (arch¯e) and end (telos) is charity, or divine gift for the good of others. Milton is able to take such a view because he understands both divine and human reason as the gift of peaceful difference – a capacity for alterity that enables harmony without being coercive. In contrast to both modern determinism and pagan fate, Milton contends that freedom is intrinsic to the human experience of divine love. In rejecting such fatalism, however, Milton does not equate freedom with mere chaos. The typical difficulty for both modern and postmodern readers is to understand how “freedom” could be anything other than an arbitrary randomness that is the supplementary counterpart of deterministic necessity. For Milton, freedom is not separable from an understanding of the good for humans, whose “right reason” is part of the divine image. In this sense, each human life is potentially a tragedy or a redemptive comedy, depending on a person’s location and trajectory in the larger story. The overall shape of the larger story is redemptive, in Milton’s account, but not in a way that negates the ability of rational creatures to accept or refuse grace. As the preceding chapters have suggested, the purpose of the larger biblical story in Milton’s view is to foster the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, rather than to serve the modern metanarrative ends of prediction and control. That larger biblical story is, however, a means of grace to which neither the

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



biblical Samson nor Milton’s imagined Samson has access. Yet any reader of Samson Agonistes who has also read the companion text of Paradise Regained does indeed have access to that story. That difference between the range of perspectives available to readers and those available to characters underlies the present critical controversy as well as the drama’s greatest insight. the critical agon over samson In Samson Agonistes, Milton offers what I call a “personal drama”: that is, a version of the Samson story that aims to elaborate the particularities of the biblical account in ways that are plausible and fitting but whose ultimate meaning, as either tragic or redemptive, depends on how readers locate Samson in the larger narrative of divine gift presented in the companion text of Paradise Regained (). Milton’s play is a “personal” rather than merely “subjective” drama, in that it portrays the agon of a finite and fallen creature who is made in the divine image. For Milton, even the most avowedly solipsistic story necessarily entails comprehensive claims that result from merely speaking into a world of consequence; subjectivism conceals a political agenda that dare not speak its own name. Rather, the root issue is whether one’s stories assume the ontological primacy of coercion or divine gift. Against the ancient tragic polarities of violent chaos and coerced order, Samson Agonistes presents a character whose actions are neither random nor determined. Because of the critical tendency to presume that Miltonic “reason” is necessarily coercive, the central interpretive challenge is to avoid construing the play as an image of either modern presumption or postmodern despair. This challenge explains why some critics read Samson Agonistes as an explicit model for religious or revolutionary violence, while others take it to be a deliberate undermining of all confidence regarding almost any action. Although Samson Agonistes was published with Paradise Regained in , there has been considerable debate regarding the tragedy’s date of composition. The question is important because whether we imagine the play’s primary implied context to be before or after the Restoration will directly shape our reading. Depending on which political contexts, and which of Milton’s prose works, seem most relevant, we can take the figure of Samson to signify Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, the Regicides, or the “Good Old Cause” generally. At the same time, David Loewenstein is right to caution that, whether we connect the play to religious movements or historical events, readers of Samson Agonistes “need not make



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

such connections too literally or narrowly.” Nevertheless, Loewenstein’s own historical contextualization of Milton’s play, in combination with that of Laura Knoppers, Janel Mueller, and Blair Worden, suggests how complex and specific is the tragedy’s engagement of its Restoration political and religious contexts. Some uncertainties about the precise date of composition may remain, but the play does arguably identify, as Loewenstein points out, an interpretive double focus that “looks painfully back to the past” and “registers the sharp disruption between the glorious past and the tragic present.” Without reducing Milton’s play to a political tract or to a singular historical context, this chapter builds upon and extends such historical treatments of the play. Rather than offering a direct historical or political allegory, however, Samson Agonistes presents a character whose conditions are analogous to those of the English Dissenters who were subject to the coercive ecclesiastical practices of the Clarendon Code. Recent critical assessments of Samson Agonistes tend to divide on two main issues. One division is between “regenerationists,” who understand the play as the story of Samson’s spiritual renewal which enables him to destroy the temple of Dagon, and “revisionists” who see no such regeneration in Samson’s character. A second division exists between those who view Samson’s final violence as a heroic act that Milton endorses and those who view Milton as ironically undercutting Samson’s status as a hero and the legitimacy of his violence. The two divisions do not correspond perfectly. For example, although Stanley Fish rejects any attempt to identify a causal connection between Samson’s regeneration and his final action, Fish maintains that Milton presents Samson as a virtuous hero. By contrast, David Loewenstein takes Milton to be offering Samson as a hero, upon whom comes “the mightiness of the Spirit of God.” John Carey reads Samson as a “barbaric foil” to the hero of Paradise Regained, and, although he shares Fish’s opposition to regenerationist readings, he is horrified by Fish’s view of Samson Agonistes, apparently because Fish imagines that such violent action could be judged as virtuous. Although distinct, these two kinds of division do tend to coincide at certain points. For example, those who think Milton presents Samson as a hero tend to take a regenerationist view of the play. Likewise, none of the critics who take Milton to be undercutting the legitimacy of Samson’s final violence reads the drama as one of regeneration. Much recent criticism is dominated by the latter question regarding how the play seems to lead readers to evaluate Samson’s final violent action. In arguing that Samson’s violence is consistent with his spiritual renewal, regenerationist readings typically cite the passages from Milton’s prose

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



where he makes explicit his belief in the legitimate use of force to serve the common good. The best of such evidence comes from Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, where Milton points out that “whether prompted by God or by his own valor [Samson] thought it not impious but pious to kill those masters who were tyrants over his country, even though most of her citizens did not balk at slavery” (CPW iv:). Because Milton limits the evaluation here to Samson’s own judgment of his actions and leaves open the question of divine prompting, Joseph Wittreich argues that Milton is here concealing his deeper doubts about Samson. But Milton’s point is simply that, whether inspired or not, Samson, like Parliament, did the right thing in deposing a tyrant and that such use of force is indeed justified. The real question is whether, between writing Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio () and finishing Samson Agonistes (), Milton might have changed his mind regarding the possibility of a divine mandate for using force in order to oppose tyranny. This question is pivotal because how we answer it will also determine what interpretive role we grant to Milton’s prose, in which he obviously does hold such a view. Does Samson Agonistes imply that Milton had doubts about the use of violence to support the cause that he championed so long? Even if he did, how could he introduce such doubts into his tragedy without risking a tacit endorsement of the Restoration regime that he certainly continued to view with enmity? By the time he finished writing Samson Agonistes, Milton may have reversed his view of Samson; just as he may have changed his view of Cromwell. But Milton did not likely reverse his views regarding the justice of either killing a tyrant or using civil force to protect religious toleration among Protestants. Although the topic, occasion, and prospective readership change drastically between the Defensio () and Of True Religion (), Milton’s argument in the latter text continues to presume that civil force may legitimately protect the common good and Protestant religious freedom (CPW viii:–). Without restaging here the details of the disagreement between regenerationist and revisionist readings of the play, some aspects of the debate are important to keep in view. First, contrary to some revisionist rhetoric, there is no necessary connection between a regenerationist reading of Samson Agonistes and either a typological reading of the play or an attempt to normalize Milton’s heterodox theology. This point is important because revisionist critics tend to argue that a regenerationist reading depends necessarily either upon discerning a non-existent explicit typology in the drama or upon imputing to Milton an untenable theological “orthodoxy.” In her classic regenerationist reading of the play, however, Mary Ann



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Radzinowicz makes her case while pointing out that Milton “nowhere makes explicit a typological link between Samson and Christ.” Likewise, Radzinowicz’s extensive discussion of Milton’s heterodoxy demonstrates the second point; a regenerationist reading does not require an orthodox theological interpretation of the play. Nor is there any necessary connection between a regenerationist reading and an interpretive presumption of total or determinate textual meaning, as some revisionists suggest. The best evidence against such a presumption is David Loewenstein’s account of Samson as a violent radical saint, an account which clearly acknowledges the indeterminacy that arises from the pairing of Samson Agonistes with Paradise Regained. Yet Loewenstein’s reading of the tragedy generally assumes that Milton presents Samson as a regenerate hero. The most common characteristic of much recent Samson Agonistes criticism is an emphasis upon indeterminacy. Such an emphasis often presumes, however, an equation of “randomness” with “freedom,” thereby reinscribing the ancient tragic binary which Milton’s “personal drama” aims to overcome. Moreover, readings of Samson that privilege indeterminacy tend to conceal the fact that there are no thoroughly destabilized readings. Any instance of interpretive ambiguity tacitly depends upon other interpretive claims that must be taken as given; the real question is not whether Samson Agonistes offers certainty or indeterminacy, but where to locate both of those elements in any reading of the play. In tracing the engagement of Protestant toleration in Samson Agonistes, such a reading does not imply that there is only one valid context for understanding the play, much less an exhaustive one, but offers one among several contexts that enable us to understand the play better by giving the work and its possible intertexts due regard. The root difference among competing readings of Samson Agonistes is thus not whether the play is indeterminate in meaning, or whether it offers a vision of life as indeterminate, but rather where best to locate tensions between the given and the indeterminate elements of the play. Rather than insisting upon mere indeterminacy itself as the determinate meaning of the play, we can ask, “Indeterminate about what? For whom?” Based on the continuities in his early and late prose, I suggest that there are at least two points on which Milton was implacably resolute: his opposition to tyranny (unjust rule) and his opposition to Protestants subjecting one another to religious coercion. Alan Rudrum suggests that critics who read the play as a repudiation or an interrogation of Samson’s final violence mistakenly project onto a seventeenth-century writer their late-modern academic reaction to

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



certain kinds of violence. The question arises, however, not from mere anachronism but from simply reading Paradise Regained, where the Son seems to disown the very kind of religious-political violence that Samson embodies. In Chapter  we considered how Paradise Regained offers an interpretive “rule of charity” for Paradise Lost without necessarily entailing pacifism or undermining a legitimate role for coercion by civil government in a fallen world. In contrast, however, to Milton’s epic engagements of charity through typology, Samson Agonistes offers no such clear typological engagement. Moreover, those points in the text that could be taken to offer a typological engagement seem simultaneously to obfuscate such connections, whether we consider the recounting of Samson’s auspicious birth (lines –), the mention of Goliath (), or the ambiguous phoenix imagery of cyclical resurrection (–). Each of these elements respectively offers opportunities for intertextual interpretation of narrative events as messianic, Davidic, or generally figurative. But Milton’s epics do not depend upon the reader to the same degree that Samson Agonistes does in order to make those connections. The consistent eschewal of explicit typology in Samson Agonistes is, I contend, part of the shift to the tragic genre and enables Milton to distinguish more sharply between the knowledge available to readers and that available to characters; moreover, this shift alters, as we shall see, the way that the play engages the issue of religious coercion. transforming tragedy Samson Agonistes foregrounds the relation between tragic form and biblical narrative even in its prefatory headnote. Although no less contestable than the main text of the play, the headnote does offer some guidance regarding viable questions. In addition to foregrounding the self-conscious sense of genre that informs the drama, Milton also clarifies what he takes to be the telos of tragedy: Tragedy, as it was antiently compos’d hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr’d up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.

Milton does not cite Aristotle here as a source of external authority for poetic rules. He stipulates his freedom from Aristotle when he later insists that the only competent judges of his tragedy are those “not unacquainted”



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Rather, Aristotle simply identifies what Milton takes to be the goal of dramatic representation. Milton interprets “purging” to indicate not the extinction of passions but their moderation. In this sense, the success of any given tragedy, according to Milton, resides in the extent to which it represents passions like pity or fear in such a way that those passions in the reader or audience are rightly ordered. The tragic genre is thus, for Milton, uniquely conducive to education in virtue; that is, it can be a means of grace in aid of sanctification. In view of the recent controversy over Samson Agonistes, we might ask, “What kind of pity or fear does the play seem intended to moderate in its readers?” The possible answers can go in some very different directions. Does the play aim to induce a freedom from the fear of merely suffering violence, as a kind of preparation for martyrdom, or does it also intend to remove the fear of actually doing violence to others? Or both? Thus, as with Paradise Lost’s statement of theme in the opening lines, the headnote to Samson Agonistes makes explicit Milton’s understanding of the poem’s rhetorical aims without pre-emptively defining answers to the questions that it raises. Moreover, the mere recognition that Milton distinguishes between “carnal” and “spiritual” reading of Scripture is not sufficient in itself to clarify which kinds of passions Samson Agonistes is intended to moderate. As we established in reading Civil Power, in Chapter , “carnality” for Milton does not refer to mere embodiment but indicates a spiritual condition of inordinate trust in compulsion to achieve the human good. Similar difficulties can arise for critics who emphasize the differences between the Old and New Testaments as a means to explain what Milton is doing in Samson Agonistes. The success of such explanations depends on which specific differences they emphasize. A simple contrast between supposedly literal Hebrew embodiment and figural Christian metaphor begins to break down as soon as we consider, for example, that the command to “circumcise” the heart comes not from the New Testament but from Deuteronomy (:, :), where it serves as a figure for humility. So which differences between Old and New Testaments does Milton emphasize? As the preceding chapters of this study have demonstrated, few differences were as important to Milton as the difference between the ordering of relations between civil and religious life in the Old and New Testaments: the fact that, in ancient Israel, civil and religious authority were united; whereas, for Christians, civil authority is to be distinct from spiritual authority. Moreover, in Milton’s account, civil power is most clearly distinguished from spiritual authority by virtue of the fact that only the former could

Samson Agonistes as personal drama

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legitimately use force to protect civil order. This much is sufficiently clear from reading only Paradise Regained. As Milton continues in the preface to Samson Agonistes to argue for the moral value of the tragic genre, he cites the biblical commentary by David Pareaus on the book of Revelation, noting Pareaus’s comparison of Revelation’s structure to that of a tragedy. Although this point is widely observed and is often connected to the apocalyptic character of Samson Agonistes, there is a particular aspect of Pareaus’s commentary that has been overlooked. The title page for the  English edition of the commentary emphasizes the inclusion of “specially some things upon the th Chapter,” “against the MILLENARIES.” Augustine’s comments on Revelation  in City of God were aimed directly at the millenarian tendencies of Donatists. When Pareaus later begins his advertised refutation of Millenarianism he quotes at length from that very passage in Augustine’s City of God. Augustine was concerned with the way that the overrealized eschatology of millenarian interpretation could lead to a misidentification of the Kingdom of God with temporal rule. Milton was cognizant of such dangers both during Cromwell’s consolidation of power and after the Restoration. I contend that the widely noted indeterminacy of the play addresses a key issue in such millenarian thinking. Wittreich’s work has been especially effective in opening the question of whether Samson is really among the “elect” or bears more similarity to the Antichrist described in biblical commentaries. Wittreich has also shown, however, the difficulty in answering that question with much clarity. As it turns out, that very question is the one that Augustine takes up in his reading of Revelation . Unlike Pareaus, Augustine offers his reading not as a direct rebuttal to the millenarian reading of Revelation , but as a positive alternative: And the addition of the words “set a seal on him” [Revelation :] seems to me to indicate that God wished it to be kept a secret who belongs to the devil’s faction and who does not. In this world, this is indeed kept a secret; for it is uncertain whether he who now seems to stand firm will fall, and whether he who now seems to lie fallen will rise.

The root of the Donatist hermeneutic was a tendency to presume knowledge regarding who was and was not among the elect – and therefore to identify the visible ecclesia (according to certain criteria) with the spiritual elect. Augustine’s aim was to offer a spiritual interpretation of the eschatology in Revelation that avoided sanctifying temporal institutions. As we discussed in Chapter , however, the central challenge faced by Milton’s arguments for Protestant toleration is that such eschatological obscurity

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

had been used in early-modern England to legitimate religious coercion. Milton’s Civil Power admits that very obscurity but runs its implications in the opposite direction by rooting the relation between saving faith and temporal virtue in his view of right reason (CPW vii:). In view of Milton’s recurring argument in this regard, I suggest that the oft-cited obscurity in Samson Agonistes, although not definitive of its hero’s status, clearly warns readers against presumption regarding Samson’s inclusion among the elect. For those who view Samson as a villain, however, the temptation to presume knowledge regarding his election can also run in the opposite direction, answering the question in the negative. I contend that the play leaves the reader with no more, and no less, knowledge regarding the divine election of Milton’s Samson than would be available regarding any living person. The question of Samson’s regeneration is not susceptible to a definitive explicit answer, but remains unavoidable and full of significance in its very insistence upon an implied answer. Samson’s words and deeds in the play are the only basis for making any judgment regarding his regeneration; the difficulty is that much evidence of his regeneration could also be read as ironic. For example, on what grounds could we distinguish between a given confession or claim of forgiveness that should be taken as such and one that merely reveals Samson’s presumption? Milton presents this very question to the reader by providing parallel instances of confession by Samson and Dalila. Whose confession is authentic? This is not to ask “Whose confession is sincere?” but to ask whether each confession, considered as an utterance, offers a plausible sign of repentance. Such questions are a subspecies of the relationship between justification and sanctification – insofar as confession is a sign rather than a cause of forgiveness. As the preceding chapters demonstrate, the simple assertion of the doctrines of justification and sanctification, for Milton, is not sufficient to avoid legitimating religious coercion. Moreover, dramatic representation is uniquely suited to the treatment of sanctification because of the potential for “acting,” in the Aristotelian sense, as virtuous action, to become equated with “acting” as play-acting, or mere pretense. The exemplary sustained treatment of this ethical ambivalence in early-modern drama is arguably Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which offers, in the character of Claudius, a classic example of false confession. After finding Claudius in prayer, Hamlet resolves to wait, lest killing him so soon after confession should send him directly to heaven. As Ramie Targoff points out: What critics of all persuasions have largely ignored, however, and what a Renaissance audience would have certainly been alert to, is the actual content of this

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scene [rather than Hamlet’s procrastination or his metaphysical malice]: its detailed exploration of the devotional process that fails to produce a sincere state of contrition.

Targoff rightly argues that Shakespeare engages here a central debate in early-modern England regarding the meaning and efficacy of devotional practices. What Targoff does not consider, however, is that, while Hamlet may have been mistaken in his interpretation of Claudius’s actions, Claudius himself makes it clear to the audience what kind of actions would be a necessary part of authentic devotional practice: My fault is past – but O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive my foul murder’? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder – My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain th’offence?

When Claudius goes on to complain that his prayers are simply words without thought, the audience should not be surprised. The issue here is not simply one of making restitution: for Claudius to confess his crime would have entailed his own execution. The consequence of death ensures that, if Claudius had renounced his crown and queen, he could not do so in the hope of some further secret temporal benefit. Nor is the question of “sincerity” relevant here; at some conscious level, Claudius may very well in this scene be “sincerely” trying to confess his sin. The key point here is that Milton could expect readers of Samson Agonistes to be at least as informed as the villainous Claudius regarding the signs of true repentance. There remain, of course, numerous ambiguities in Samson Agonistes, but the signs of true repentance are not among them. This is not to claim that absolute certainty is available but to claim that there can be some warrant for thinking that a given confession indicates repentance, or not. The question of whether Dalila’s confession of her guilt and continued love for Samson are authentic is thus less obscure than some would argue. What would indicate the truth of Dalila’s confession? Her admission of guilt would be much more plausible if, for example, she had returned the money that she gained from Samson’s betrayal. Similarly, her declaration of continued love for Samson would be more believable if she had offered to live with him in squalor. Genuine repentance or genuine love would have, as Samson says, “brought forth other deeds” (). This also shows why, as with the case of Claudius, Dalila’s conscious “sincerity” is not the crucial issue that it might seem. She may sincerely regret her past actions

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

and want Samson to come home with her, but her present actions, like those of Claudius, reveal a classic example of someone enslaved to the fleeting benefits of sin. Samson’s own statements of confession and hope of forgiveness are, in principle, just as open to question. This gives a new meaning to the obscurity surrounding the conditional necessity of Samson’s death – explicit in Milton’s prefatory summary of the plot. At one level, Samson could be simply mistaken in thinking that his “rouzing motions” indicate divine prompting to pull down the temple of Dagon; however, Samson’s willingness to die as a consequence of obedience shows that his repentance, at least, is not feigned. Moreover, the miraculous strength which makes possible Samson’s final action suggests that the source of the prompting is supernatural. At this point, Wittreich could rightly point out that such supernatural power would also be available to the Antichrist. But, as one rabbi famously observed, in reference to demonic power, “if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself” (Matthew :, cf. Mark :–): Milton implies that Samson pulls down the temple of Dagon, not by the power of Dagon, but by the power of Yhwh. worship and idolatry in samson agonistes Having established the key elements in the critical debate on Samson Agonistes and how the play’s engagement of tragic genre and biblical narrative bear upon Samson’s confession, we can now focus on the five scenes, or agons, that make up the play. In the first four encounters, the play’s engagement of ethical discourse culminates through the interrogation of Samson’s particular prospects for virtuous action in service to God (true worship, or sanctification) and of the meanings of idolatry, or false worship. The dramatic treatment of these issues then provides the context for the final agon which engages by analogy, if rather transparently, questions concerning how Dissenters should best respond to religious coercion. In his opening monologue, Samson admits, “whom have I to complain of but myself?” (line ). In his first exchange with the Chorus, Samson insists that Dalila “was not the prime cause but I myself” (). In his meeting with Manoa, Samson emphasizes a third time that “Nothing of all these evils hath befall’n me / But justly; I myself have brought them on, / Sole Author I, Sole cause” (–). He goes on to explain that his “former servitude” to Dalila and his moral blindness were worse than his present servitude and physical blindness (–). In lamenting the consequences of Samson’s fall, Manoa points out that the main result will be an increase in idolatry and glory given to Dagon. Samson agrees:

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“Father, I do acknowledge and confess / That I this honour, I this pomp have brought / To Dagon, and advanced his praises high / Among the heathen round” (–). With implacable repetition, Samson reiterates his guilt a fifth time, as he rejects Manoa’s plan to buy Samson’s freedom: “let me here, / As I deserve . . . I God’s counsel have not kept” (–; ). Samson will later admit that Dalila was a necessary but not sufficient cause of his fall, but he consistently maintains his own position as “prime cause.” Given this insistence upon Samson’s responsibility, the countless resemblances between Samson Agonistes and Oedipus at Colonus – from the opening scene parallels, to the similar debates, to the final obscurity in a death that is also a blessing – all take on a different meaning because of this central striking contrast. Unlike Oedipus, who insists that he fell in blameless ignorance, Samson fully acknowledges his culpability. Manoa rebukes Samson’s apparent despair, but Samson makes it clear that he has not despaired of God’s forgiveness: “His pardon I implore; but as for life, / To what end should I seek it?” (–). Having confessed his guilt, Samson asks forgiveness. The remaining question for Samson that drives the rest of the play is not whether he will be forgiven, but whether he has any prospect for being able to co-operate with God’s work in the world. He does not doubt “Gods propos’d deliverance” (), whether of Israel, insofar as he understands it, or of himself. Milton’s Samson knows well enough from the Exodus story that one can be “used” by God in the same way that Pharaoh was “used” – that is, despite oneself. What Samson longs to know is whether he should resign himself to such use, or whether his capacity for virtue, rather than merely vice, could be of genuine service to God. The emphasis upon the limited prospects for his own co-operation with God is implicit even in Samson’s opening soliloquy: Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke; Yet stay, let me not rashly call in doubt Divine Prediction; what if all foretold Had been fulfilld but through mine own default, Whom have I to complain of but my self? (–)

Stanley Fish takes these lines to indicate that Samson mistakenly presumes God’s success is contingent upon Samson’s co-operation. The potential ambiguity in this passage resides ultimately in whether “but” in line 

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

is understood to mean “except,” as Fish implies, or “only,” as Flannagan’s edition glosses it. The initial lines make it clear, however, that Samson stops himself from doubting the prophecies – he implies a belief that they could indeed still come to pass. The final lines simply point out that such “Divine Prediction” could be fulfilled no less through his failings (his “default”). Samson’s claim is arguably the very opposite of what Fish takes him to be saying. Samson merely recognizes that divine purposes will be realized regardless of his co-operation and that he remains responsible for his fall. Thus, a central question posed by the play is not so much Samson’s regeneration or election, but the extent to which true worship – in a broad sense as “sanctification” – can be distinguished from idolatry. This question drives the play in two different ways. At one level, the particular case of Samson raises the question whether he is any longer capable of co-operating with God’s purposes, rather than being used merely despite himself. Through a contrast between true worship and “idolatry,” however, the play also implies a prophetic warning regarding English ecclesiastical politics. One of the most obvious ways in which Milton dilates the biblical story of Samson is to introduce a preoccupation with the theme of “idolatry” which does not appear in the Judges narrative. “Idolatry” is also a major theme in the prose work that Milton published two years after Samson Agonistes: that is, Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration (). Although the tract reiterates many themes from earlier works, Milton’s immediate rhetorical purpose was to link his central arguments for religious toleration with the “universal ‘No Popery’ agitation” in England during –. The main burden of his argument is, in effect, to show that the toleration of dissenting Protestants did not entail the toleration of Catholicism which was presumed to be politically dangerous by Milton and many of his contemporary English readers. The key point for present purposes is that, in making this argument, Milton applies the discourse of “idolatry” not only to Catholic devotional practices which seemed to make salvation depend on works, but also to any practice of religious coercion. Whether asking if “Popery” should be tolerated in private as well as public, or arguing for the best means by which to oppose its growth, Milton repeatedly equates such religious coercion and belief in salvation by works with “idolatry” (CPW vii:–, ). He argues that “corporal punishment” is inconsistent with “the Clemency of the Gospel,” although the state is entitled to remove the “idols” used for such false worship (–). Once again, given his presumed definition of “Popery” as religious coercion, Milton seems to assume that to tolerate such practices would entail the logical

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Samson Agonistes as personal drama

contradiction of tolerating religious coercion. The tautological character of Milton’s terminology is important to appreciate here: because “Popery,” “compelled religious practice,” “salvation by works,” and “idolatry” are all inexorably identified with one another, Milton’s argument implies that, on the one hand, a Catholic who opposes religious coercion based on the character of saving faith would not, according to Milton’s usage, be practicing “Popery,” while, on the other hand, a self-described Protestant who allowed for religious coercion would actually be practicing the idolatrous trust in human works that Milton labels “Popery.” The key point here is that, when Milton invokes the discourse of “idolatry” in Samson Agonistes, he is alluding not only to Reformed commonplaces about “Popery,” but also to any practice of religious coercion among self-proclaimed Protestants. In the early parts of the play, there is little suggestion that the use of the word “idol” refers to anything more than the Dagon worship in the immediate action of the plot. By the final agon, however, the exchange between Samson and the Philistine “Publick Officer” clearly implies that debates regarding “idolatry” in the play refer to a much wider set of practices that include the world of seventeenth-century English readers. By means of this graduated disclosure of the meanings of idolatry at work in the play, as we shall see, Samson Agonistes probes the relationship between Protestant toleration and the possibility of true worship, or sanctification. The encounter between Samson and Dalila is the central and longest of the five main agons that make up the tragedy. It also offers the deepest engagement of the central issues raised by the play regarding the relationship between religion and politics. As the exchange between Samson and Dalila unfolds, their modes of rhetoric shift from an initial attempt to establish culpability regarding past actions (forensic rhetoric), to questions regarding future action (deliberative rhetoric), to aspirations for praise or blame (anticipations of epideictic). The subtlety of their engagement arises not from the fact that they disagree sharply but from the way in which Dalila anticipates and refuses to allow for the very terms that constitute Samson’s position by mimicking it. Thus, her initial selfjustification not only appeals to her “love” for Samson, but does so in such a way that echoes Samson’s own justification for violating Israel’s marriage restrictions: These reasons in Loves law have past for good Though fond and reasonless to some perhaps; And Love hath oft, well meaning, wrought much wo. (–)

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Dalila appeals to “Love’s law” in the same way that Samson had previously claimed that divine prompting justified his disregard for Israelite marriage law. Samson will later insist that his action, unlike hers, does not violate the “law of nature” or “law of nations” (), but the crucial point here is that Dalila will continually shift the very basis for what makes possible the evaluation of her actions. Thus, her appeals to her “civil Duty” and her obligation to “ensnare an irreligious / Dishonourer of Dagon” (, –) do not simply contest Samson’s claims; they pre-emptively refuse the national identity and religious perspective that would make Samson’s actions plausible. As John Shawcross points out, regardless of whether Dalila is “sincere” in making these arguments, their rhetorical impact upon the reader is, at one level, the same: they make unavoidable the question: “whose god is God?” Just because these are not Samson’s nation and god does not make them wrong. She has not given evidence of falling into the specious and repugnant attitude one hears too often, “My country right or wrong.” It may be that she has acted in her good faith.

In this sense, the root contest of this agon is between Samson’s moral claims (whether claims to justice or indictment) and the moral tribalism unintentionally implied by Dalila’s “good faith” alternative claims. As Milton emphasizes in True Religion, however, appeals to “good faith” do not entail a right to practice idolatry: “we have no warrant to regard Conscience which is not grounded on Scripture” (CPW viii:). Shawcross’s characterization, although locally valid, would be a sustainable implication to draw from the play only if we had no evidence that Milton thought idolatry could be distinguished from true worship. The questionable character of Dalila’s “confession,” noted earlier, thus follows directly from her status as a worshiper of Dagon. Milton apparently views idolatry as not simply blameless error regarding one’s ideas about deities but as a set of actions that are unjust – actions which, even apart from special revelation, the prevenient grace of conscience, or right reason, could stop one from practicing. Moreover, as Milton makes readily apparent in his historical summary of censorship practices in Areopagitica, he does not imagine that all pagan religions involved religious conformity or coercion; rather, he insists that all attempts at religious coercion reveal a de facto idolatry. Samson’s penultimate exchange with Harapha returns explicitly to the question regarding the possibility of Samson’s co-operation with divine purposes. The encounter with Harapha is crucial, in that it offers Samson’s first indication of his recovered ability, based on trust in God’s forgiveness

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(justification), to trust God’s empowerment for virtuous service (sanctification). When Samson offers to fight Harapha in order to know “whose God is strongest, thine or mine” (), Harapha accuses Samson of presumption and recounts the story of Samson’s fall. Samson replies: All these indignities, for such they are From thine, these evils I deserve and more, Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon Whose ear is ever open; and his eye Gracious to re-admit the suppliant; In confidence whereof I once again Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight, By combat to decide whose god is God, Thine or whom I with Israel’s Sons adore. (–)

In affirming once more his own guilt and expressing his hope of forgiveness, Samson also goes on to offer an implicit answer to the question that he had posed earlier for Manoa regarding what purpose his continued living could serve. Harapha, of course, refuses the challenge, but Samson demonstrates, in any case, his ability to connect his trust in the divine forgiveness with his own prospects for co-operating with God. If we suspend our knowledge of how the drama ends, Samson’s actions may not be distinguishable from presumption; but given that we do know the ending and that, as I have shown, the ending does indicate genuine repentance on Samson’s part, Samson’s faith, regarding his forgiveness and his sanctification, is not reducible to presumption or self-delusion. Obviously, Samson does not know how the story will end; that is why he needs faith – faith not only to be forgiven eternally but to act virtuously in the present. For readers, the question is how much we can reliably discern regarding the character of Samson’s actions, and the play’s culmination provides clear warrant for understanding his encounter with Harapha as a renewal of Samson’s prospects for sanctified action. Incidentally, Samson’s point about divine affliction and final forgiveness also has a counter-part in Milton’s conclusion to Of True Religion, where he maintains that “the last means to avoid Popery, is to amend our lives” (CPW viii:). The root problem is that, “instead of Working out his salvation with fear and trembling,” a wicked person will try to use “easy Confession, easy Absolution, Pardons, Indulgences” in order to “bribe God as a corrupt judge” (). This is how, according to Milton, vice leads to false religion, but he goes on to make a further crucial point:

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

For God, when men sin outrageously, and will not be admonisht, gives over chastizing them, perhaps by Pestilence, Fire, Sword, or Famin, which may all turn to their good, and takes up his severest punishments, hardness, besottedness of heart, and Idolatry, to their final perdition. (, emphasis added)

This passage is revealing, not only because it echoes Samson’s claim that his suffering is “from God” and thus may become part of God’s loving chastisement, but also because it links idolatry with the worst kind of evil: the kind that is its own punishment (by being permitted to do it) and which leads to final destruction. Samson’s fifth agon, his final encounter with the Philistine “Publick Officer,” provided seventeenth-century Nonconformist readers with transparent links between the discourse of idolatry and their own experience of religious coercion. The very designation, “Publick Officer,” suggests a context more like early-modern England than ancient Palestine. The parallels between Samson and English Dissenters become most apparent when Samson, after refusing to obey the officer’s command to come to the temple of Dagon, engages debate with the Chorus regarding what he should do when the Officer returns. Even the terms of the debate resemble those that might be deployed by Dissenters deliberating whether their statemandated attendance at Anglican worship services, which many viewed as idolatrous, would involve them in a violation of conscience. The episode culminates in Samson’s decision to go to the temple of Dagon, prompted by “rouzing motions.” In the course of the exchange that ends with his decision, however, the action also foregrounds two sets of questions that have informed the play from early on: questions concerning Samson’s relation to the law (natural and national) and reason, and questions concerning Samson’s moral freedom during his final off-stage action in the play. Samson initially replies to the Officer, “Our Law forbids at thir religious Rites / My presence; for that cause I cannot come” (–). The Officer warns Samson: “Regard thy self” and advises that his refusal to come will “offend [the Philistine Lords] highly,” but Samson answers: My self? My conscience and internal peace. Can they think me so broken, so debas’d With corporal servitude, that my mind ever Will condescend to such absurd commands? (–)

Not only does Samson’s appeal to his “conscience,” or right reason, directly echo arguments against religious conformity, but the ensuing exchange between Samson and the Chorus sounds like a model of conflicted

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Dissenting casuistry on the question. Initially, Samson contends that his performance at the temple would “abuse this Consecrated gift / Of strength” by “prostituting holy things to Idols” and using his strength “in honour to thir Dagon” (–, , ). Against the Chorus’s claim that Samson’s strength already serves the Philistines in his work at the mill, Samson distinguishes between “Idol-worship” and “labour / Honest and lawful” which he does “under those who have him in thir civil power” (–). When the Chorus replies that “Where the heart joins not, outward acts defile not” (), their explicit intention is to ease Samson’s conscience. Precisely such views, however, also served, as Milton knew, to legitimate religious coercion (see Chapter  above). Samson’s response grants that bodily coercion does not impinge upon one’s moral freedom, but, like Sophocles’s Antigone, Samson adds the further stipulation that a mere threat of coercion does not constitute compulsion: Where outward force constrains, the sentence holds But who constrains me to the Temple of Dagon, Not dragging? the Philistian Lords command. Commands are no constraints. If I obey them, I do it freely; venturing to displease God for fear of Man, and Man prefer, Set God behind. (–)

Given Milton’s explicit prefatory invocation of ancient Greek tragedy as his model, the parallel between Samson’s and Antigone’s insistence upon obedience to divine law over human law is fairly apparent. At one level, it could be argued that both Antigone and Samson Agonistes imply that tragedy ensues when the state sets its laws in opposition to divine law. The most striking parallel between the two tragedies, however, is in the way that the words of Samson’s Chorus, in arguing that co-operation with the Philistines could be acceptable, clearly echo the claims made by Antigone’s sister, Ismene, at the beginning of Sophocles’s Antigone: We must remember that . . . we are ruled by those whose power is greater, so that we must consent to this and to other things even more painful! So I shall beg those beneath the earth to be understanding, since I act under constraint, but I shall obey those in authority; for there is no sense in actions that exceed our powers.

In contrast to Ismene and Samson’s Chorus, both Antigone and Samson insist that even a threat of violence, as an attempt at persuasion, does not, in itself, constitute a “constraint.” Antigone and Samson insist that they may contradict the threats that they face; even if they suffer or are later

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Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

constrained as a result, they are, strictly speaking, not constrained either to choose or to avoid those consequences. The tragic theme of conflict between divine law and human law is not, of course, unique to Antigone; however, the opening scene of Sophocles’s play addresses that issue by means of the very same refusal to grant a command the power of bodily force. The effect of this parallel, however, is not to equate the two tragedies, but to draw our attention to the stunning contrast that ensues, as Samson concludes: Yet that [God] may dispense with me or thee Present in Temples at Idolatrous Rites For some important cause, thou needst not doubt. Chor. How thou wilt here come off surmounts my reach. Sam. Be of good courage, I begin to feel Some rouzing motions in me which dispose To something extraordinary my thoughts. I with this messenger will go along. (–)

If Antigone, after making her initial speech, became suddenly persuaded that the gods had now commanded her to leave her brother’s body without burial after all, the story would not be a tragedy and might even not bear telling. Antigone’s persistence on this point is intrinsic to Sophocles’s play, which would otherwise lose the central conflict that initiates its plot. By contrast, Samson’s sudden reversal makes possible the climactic events of Milton’s play. The Antigone intertext emphasizes that Samson does not simply go to the temple of Dagon, but goes there after arguing directly against taking such action, and arguing on the basis of what would seem his most deeply held religious beliefs. In short, Samson’s “rouzing motions” lead him to do what would be unimaginable for Antigone. To dilate the biblical narrative in this specific way is obviously not necessary; Milton could have arranged that Samson simply go with the Officer. At one level, Samson’s action, in contradiction to the strictures of Israelite law that he has just cited, is a classic instance of ironic reversal, which, as Anthony Low points out, Milton deploys at several points and which is characteristic of Sophoclean tragedy. The reversal, however, serves to emphasize several points: Although Samson knows that he need not obey Mosaic law simply for its own sake, and recognizes how easily God can set it aside for some good cause, he also knows that he cannot dispense with the law himself, on his own judgment, and that no state has the authority to dispense him from it. He will not go to the

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temple because, unless he is inspired to the contrary, the law represents God’s will in the matter, and God’s will must come before man’s.

Some critics point to Samson’s action as evidence of what they call Milton’s “antinomianism.” Samson, however, does not simply disregard the law; he refuses to make a particular law an end in itself, rather than serving a good beyond itself, but he does not necessarily abandon obedience to the law in toto. At one level, Milton might seem to imply that the “rouzing motions” of the Spirit allow the believer to rise above the Mosaic law. But Milton previously argued that the execution of Charles I was appropriate precisely because no one, including a monarch, is above natural law (CPW iv:). His position is rooted in the Ciceronian view that law is “right reason derived from divine will which commands what is right and forbids what is wrong” (CPW iv:). Moreover, throughout Civil Power and True Religion, Milton insists that an individual conscience, or “right reason,” is not authoritative by itself but must be formed by Scripture. “Conscience” for Milton is thus not simply subjective inward persuasion; it names the ability of the mind to participate in (not master) the infinite truth, goodness, and beauty that radiates from the surfaces and depths of all creation. Such a characterization of Samson’s reversal, however, leads to a further question because the distinction between Mosaic law and natural law does not fully address the nature of Samson’s action. In the fifty lines between the moment when Samson announces that he will go with the Officer and the moment that he leaves the stage, Samson repeats emphatically three times that he will do “nothing” to “dishonour / Our Law” (–; cf. –, –). If Milton seems to be making the point that divine commands can, on occasion, trump Mosaic legal restrictions, why would Samson thrice insist that he will not, after all, break the law? By means of this emphatic repetition, the play emphasizes the question: “How is this any different from self-justifying rationalization?” Because divine command is the source of law in Milton’s account, Samson’s decision is defensible only if prompted by a divine command. In raising this question, the drama implies that Samson has learned to apply the lesson from his previous contraventions of Israelite marriage law. In the initial encounter between Samson and the Chorus, Samson points out that his first marriage to the woman of Timnah was prompted by “intimate impulse” (), whereas he only “thought” the marriage to Dalila was “lawful from my former act” (). On this point, both the tragedy and the biblical narrative imply that Samson’s liaison with Dalila (whether marriage or not) was not prompted by divine impulse but by his presumption and lust. By making Dalila into Samson’s wife, Milton emphasizes the contrast between Samson’s



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

first and second marriage; the contrast implies that Samson could have distinguished between a divine command that overrides a given law and a presumption to divine warrant that masks mere license. Samson seems to have learned that divine prompting on one occasion does not provide a license to disregard the same law in the future. But in this later context, could anyone besides Samson evaluate his choice to go with the Officer? The drama implies that evaluation is possible, not with Cartesian certainty but with some degree of warrant. The criteria for evaluating whether his action is truly prompted by divine warrant include his expressions of confession and hope of forgiveness from Yhwh, his recovered miraculous strength, his willingness to die in obedience to the divine prompting, and the fact that his final actions expose Dagon as a false god. Once again, none of these points in isolation is conclusive, and, even when they are considered together, the play never pretends to require omniscience as a minimum criterion for human knowledge. Nevertheless, these combined elements do provide warrant for thinking that Samson’s decision is divinely prompted, rather than driven by a desire to save his own life or comfort. samson as conforming dissenter The debate leading up to the climax of the play also raises questions regarding Samson’s moral freedom in his destruction of the temple of Dagon. Just before reversing his decision to go with the Philistine officer, Samson makes the point that “commands are no constraints”; “If I obey,” he says, “I do it freely” (–). Milton would also insist upon the obverse of Samson’s statement: when Samson obeys God’s commands, rather than the Philistine’s, he also obeys freely. Such a view of freedom informs Samson’s reported final words to the Philistine nobility in the temple: Hitherto, Lords, what your commands impos’d I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying, Not without wonder or delight beheld Now of my own accord such other tryal I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater; As with amaze shall strike all who behold. (–)

Joseph Wittreich has most notably argued that the words, “of my own accord,” indicate that Samson acts without divine warrant, like a false prophet. The root difficulty in such a reading is, as Alan Rudrum points out, that it “takes the phrase at face value, as if it were embedded in omniscient author commentary rather than in a dramatic narrative”:

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



Samson, now “persuaded inwardly that this was from God,” speaks with dramatic irony, meaning his words in one sense (he is acting as God’s person or representative), expecting his enemies to take them in another (he is acting as a private person).

More recently, however, Wittreich has offered further evidence for his position by pointing out that “the New Testament site for the scriptural idiom – of his own accord – is John :– where the high priest Caiaphas NOT of his own accord speaks truth” (original emphases). In the gospel narrative, the ruling Pharisees are debating how to deal with the political threat posed by Jesus. Caiaphas, the high priest that year, contends that “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” The gospel narrator then points out that Caiaphas had, in effect, unwittingly “prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation” (John :–). On the basis of this story, Wittreich contends that “if the scriptural idiom, ‘not of his own accord,’ points to divine commission, inspiration, and warrant, the phrase, ‘of my own accord,’ pulls oppositely, implying that Samson acts without divine authority.” Milton does, I contend, use the phrase in order to bring the Caiaphas story (and others, like Balaam) to mind, but with a purpose much different from what Wittreich suggests. One of the central questions that drives the play, as we have noted, is whether Samson, rather than simply being used by God despite himself, might actually co-operate with divine purposes. Caiaphas’s condition of speaking “not of his own accord” indicates precisely that condition which Samson hopes to overcome – not by merely contradicting the explicit divine will but by miraculously co-operating with it. The biblical intertext thus does serve as a contrast, but not after the model of a simple binary: Milton does not presume that the only two options available are either complete mechanistic determination by the divine will or complete anarchic disregard of the divine will. As a result, Samson’s reported claim that he acts of his “own accord” is crucial, not as a revelation of Samson’s anarchic rejection of the divine will, but as the culmination of the play’s interrogations regarding Samson’s prospects for sanctified action that co-operates with divine purpose. At the same time, as with the parallels in Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, the primary function of the Caiaphas biblical intertext is for the sake of insightful contrast. Divine commands, according to Milton, are simply that: commands which may be obeyed, or not. They do not override the human will, as in the case of Caiaphas. The decision by a repentant, trusting conscience to obey a divine command is free, and that is why – still allowing for other multiple levels of irony – Samson



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

insists that he acts “of [his] own accord” (). Although responding to divine prompting, Samson’s response nevertheless requires an act of will, trust, and effort on his part: just the kind of “strenuous liberty” () that Samson says that Israel’s leaders failed to practice. Milton does not vilify Samson, but neither does he offer his violence as a model for Christians; the play persists as a tragedy because Samson is a preChristian hero. So why does Milton choose this particular story to adapt as a tragedy? This question becomes still more pointed when we consider the claims of Ren´e Girard, regarding the ways in which Jewish and Christian scriptural narratives tend to side with the victim, rather than deploying tragedy to justify a culture’s founding violence. According to Girard, one of the unique characteristics of Hebrew Bible narratives, and later gospel narratives, is their ability to bring into question the logic of redemptive violence that ancient tragedy served to legitimate by showing the injustice of the victim’s treatment (for example, Abel, or Joseph). The most obvious question that appears, then, is why Milton should choose a story that seems to reinforce the pagan idea of necessary sacrificial violence, rather than retelling a story that exposes the unjust treatment of the victim. Part of the answer begins to appear when we recall that stories like the murder of Abel are the ones most often used to support a typological reading of the Hebrew Bible. Milton’s choice of the tragic genre and his eschewing of explicit typology are thus related. As we established in Chapter , typology arises from a Christocentric reading of the overarching biblical story – a story that is ultimately comedic. For Milton to deploy explicit typology in Samson Agonistes would thus change the drama into a comedy. Strictly speaking, a story that ends by offering a vision of redemption is not a tragedy. As Martin Mueller contends, Samson Agonistes is part of a small group of humanist tragedies, including George Buchanan’s Jephtha and Jean Racine’s Athalie, that involve a “deferral of salvation to the point of its disappearance” as a result of “rigorous and austere allegiance to both Scripture and Greek tragedy.” In the very austerity that Meuller notes, however, the importance of Samson Agonistes as a “personal drama” appears more clearly: although readers since  have been able to read Samson’s story in light of Paradise Regained, precisely such a perspective is unavailable to the characters inside the play or its imagined historical past. This is why the play offers no explicit or overt use of typology, whether biblical or classical. The readerly perspective is thus the reverse of the characters’ – until one recalls that, with respect to knowledge of our own lives, our condition is directly analogous. Stanley Fish is half correct when he claims that there is no “formula” by which to delineate an explicit “cause-and-effect relationship”

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



between Samson’s regeneration and his pulling down the temple of Dagon. Fish presumes, however, that the only alternative to a totalizing “formula” is complete obscurity. As with his reading of Areopagitica, Fish contends that, according to Milton, people must either be God (that is, be omniscient) or be completely without understanding. The dichotomy between rational mastery and radical indeterminacy obscures the fact that Milton does not equate intelligibility with Cartesian certainty. Although Milton clearly places a full account of redemption from sin beyond the horizon of understanding available to Samson or any character in the play, Paradise Regained offers a vision of human history that can inform a reading of Samson Agonistes without making all causal connections explicit or making all necessity unconditional. In effect, Milton implies that, because people may now live in light of the Son’s complete revelation of a creative good that transgresses the boundary of death, he may present Samson as an exemplar of faith without suggesting that his particular act of violence must be imitated. Once again, in the context of a world whose redemption is still unfolding, Milton never seems to deny his belief that coercion could play even a divinely prompted role in opposing tyranny. Nevertheless, his point in pairing his tragedy with the depiction of the Son in Paradise Regained is that such compulsion is not intrinsic to a shared human good. Samson, however, did not know this. Thus, Samson has hope of forgiveness, but the play offers no clear indication of how his redemption will finally be effected. More importantly, all the Israelite characters in the play understand “redemption” in strictly national terms, as they should, given the imagined historical context. But that is not the only context available to any seventeenth-century reader who has also read Paradise Regained. There are two profound mistakes available here: either to impute to Samson an anachronistic engagement of New Testament typology, or to presume that Milton required his audience to pretend ignorance of the New Testament typology that he explicitly engages in Paradise Regained. The key point is not simply to refuse typology, nor to project it onto the play, but to learn from juxtaposing the readers’ knowledge of the larger biblical story with the characters’ ignorance. Although the work of Providence can be discerned in part by looking back through time, each person with respect to knowledge of his or her own immediate temporal contingencies is in a position much like that of Samson. At one level, with respect to understanding the operations of Providence in one’s own life, the situation of each reader is similar to that of Samson. The play establishes that similarity, however, only in a tertiary manner, through the very contrast between the characters’ and the readers’ respective understandings of Samson’s participation in a providential plan.



Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning

Thus, the biblicism of Paradise Regained makes it possible for Milton’s readers, though not his characters in Samson Agonistes, to understand Samson’s actions as both typological and exemplary without proposing Samson’s final action as a model for religiously motivated violence. Because Samson Agonistes is a tragedy, Milton understood that the genre risks reinforcing the ancient binary of chaos versus coercion, but he also deemed the genre susceptible to offering intimations of a death and resurrection that would reveal an infinite good beyond that binary. According to Milton’s interpretive framework, to read the play as a valorization of physical violence is comparable to those idolatrous literalists who would interpret Christ’s admonition to take up one’s cross as an invitation to literal crucifixion. Moreover, by virtue of presenting Samson as precisely a tragic hero, like Oedipus or Jephtha, for example, the play does not present him as a figure for direct imitation by the audience. The call to be faithful, however, remains the same. The creaturely understanding offered by the larger biblical narrative in Paradise Regained does offer its readers hope of a providential purpose, but one that is, like Samson’s, unknown to them in the details of their present circumstances. Again, the purpose in rendering the overarching biblical story is not to provide the mastery of a Cartesian subject over objects in the world, but to foster the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The root question of the play is, therefore, not whether God will forgive Samson, or whether God’s purposes will be realized, but whether Samson’s particular role in achieving those purposes will be co-operative or in despite. Samson Agonistes induces, not a radical doubt regarding the justice of Samson’s actions, but a combination of sober faith and circumspection regarding one’s own. I contend that the fact that readers can understand Samson’s action in a way that Samson himself cannot is part of Milton’s rhetorical aim to induce faith, hope, and humility in readers, as well as a fearless resolve to obey divine commands. At the same time, the disowning of any use of martial force to advance God’s Kingdom in Paradise Regained clarifies that for New Testament believers such divine commands will not involve the constitutionally impossible attempt to coerce the faith of others. According to Milton’s tragedy, such an attempt to coerce religious practice – to make Samson’s actions glorify Dagon, as the Philistines attempt – is precisely what enables Samson to become a means of divine judgment. Given that Milton equates religious coercion with “idolatry,” his thematic treatment of idolatry in Samson Agonistes offers, I contend, both an implicit warning to state-church Anglicans and a purgation of the fears faced by persecuted Dissenters. At one level, the convoluted deliberations leading to Samson’s decision to go with the Officer imply that some Dissenters may be prompted by God to attend Anglican worship in good

Samson Agonistes as personal drama



conscience – without authorizing license or excusing “idolatry.” At the same time, to Anglicans who would persist in idolatrous insistence upon coercing religious conformity, the play offers a warning – not a threat of violence, but something potentially worse: internal institutional collapse and self-destruction. To Dissenters Samson Agonistes offers hope – not the hope of a suicide bomber, but the hope that if they, regardless of external pressures, remain faithfully obedient to divine commands, in good conscience, they will be granted the grace to respond to divine prompting. Moreover, that prompting may, or may not, involve entering institutions of ecclesiastical coercion in order to “bring them down,” as it were, not by literally destroying buildings, but by embodying the virtues enabled by a regenerate “right reason,” thereby exposing idolatrous practices for what they are and possibly undergoing persecution. Thus, in asking, “Where do we locate the tragic reversal, or the revealing that gives rise to catharsis?” the answer depends on the different potential readers. For those English readers of the Restoration who supported religious conformity based on the inducements of civil power, the “reversal” comes in recognizing that, according to the terms of the play, they are the Philistines. The play does not attempt to challenge the longstanding view of the Philistines, but takes that traditional view and revises the customary English self-identification with the Israelites. The play also addresses a further issue that must certainly arise in such a context of religious persecution: how should those Dissenters who refuse to attend churches that they deem to be idolatrous view those who do submit to the mere threat of force, thereby avoiding persecution? Without suggesting that “idolatry” is acceptable, the drama implies that some of the Dissenters’ neighbours who attend state-ordered worship services could be doing so at divine prompting. Samson Agonistes thus embodies the most subtle exploration of how Milton’s poetic scriptural reasoning impinges on matters of “right reason” and addresses Protestant toleration. As with Paradise Lost, however, the aesthetic character of Milton’s subtlety on these matters will be obscured if readers impute to him the modern assumptions that reason is reducible to compulsion and that reality is a function of strife. At the same time, the pairing of Samson Agonistes with Paradise Regained serves not only to contrast the respective heroes but to draw readers into the activity of biblical reasoning through the contrasting deployment of explicit typology. In this way, the biblical intertextuality in each of Milton’s three major poems differently unfolds the ethical consequences of his belief that the entrance of sin and violence into human history is not reality but is the disruption of a convivial reality. It is this latter that endures amid a fallen world and shall be renewed in full beyond the effects of the Fall.

Notes

 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURAL REASONING  CPW vi:. Compare Regina M. Schwartz, “Citation, Authority, and De Doctrina Christiana,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Throughout this study, I treat Milton as the author of De Doctrina Christiana. For a detailed bibliography and consideration of the questions regarding Milton’s authorship of the treatise, see Michael Lieb, “De Doctrina Christiana and the Question of Authorship,” Milton Studies  (), –. Like Lieb in Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), –, I do not “suggest that the treatise can in any sense be construed as a ‘gloss’ on the poetry,” but that the treatise can offer “a fitting context” for considering the theological aspects of Milton’s poetry. I take the difference between using De Doctrina as a gloss and using it as a context to be the difference between closing down and opening up interpretive possibilities.  I use the adjective “discursive” primarily in its logical sense, to indicate “passing from premisses to conclusions” by means of discourse (as distinct from “intuitive” reasoning) (OED, def. ) but also partially in its “figurative” sense, to indicate “rambling, digressive; extending over or dealing with a wide range of subjects” (OED, def. ). Compare PL . & .  See, for example, CPW vi:–, , which identifies the Son as the one through whom all other creation is effected. As my fuller account of Milton’s Christology shows, in Chapter  below, in both Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana Milton assumes that the generation of the Son is peaceful.  For example, in Of True Religion (), Milton maintains that a conscience that is “not grounded on Scripture” cannot be regarded as a reliable moral guide (CPW viii:).  Such general critical usage of “logocentrism” often goes beyond Jacques Derrida’s specific sense of the term, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), ; however, Derrida’s characterization of the “Logos” depends upon the same two-fold historical claims that I point out here. In a passage moving directly from “Greek [Stoic] conceptuality” through medieval philosophy to Saussurian linguistics, Derrida 

Notes to pages 3–5













interprets all such discourse as positing “an absolute logos” of “pure intelligibility” free of mediation (–). Compare John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. Although the two-stage historical conflation of Platonism, Christianity, and modern rationalism was never claimed initially (by Nietzsche) as historiographically viable, the post-Heideggerian versions of that story, as an account of “ontotheology,” tend to assume the narrative to be historical and continue to exert considerable influence on critical practice as a kind of assumed mythos. Phillip J. Donnelly, “Enthusiastic Rationalism and Rationalized Christianity: The Poetic Theory of John Dennis,” Christianity and Literature . (), –, n. Compare David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), – . For two of the most famous examples of the modern assumption that reason’s purpose is to master fortune, or nature, see Niccol`o Machiavelli, The Prince, nd edn, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ch. , and Ren´e Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, th edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), Part .. See, respectively, Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan, ), –; Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (London: University of Nebraska Press, ), , ; Walter J. Ong, “From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence,” in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), – ; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –; –; Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), – . John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , . The first element is most commonly associated with C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost,  (New York: Oxford University Press, ), while Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,  (London: Macmillan, ), is the prime example of the second and third characteristics of the “Invented Milton.” In addition to his own arguments and those of Rumrich, Herman includes in this latter group the criticism of Joseph Wittreich, Jonathan Goldberg, Neil Forsyth, and Michael Bryson, among others. See Herman, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The New Milton Criticism,” Literature Compass  (), –. www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/ article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bpl. Herman’s essay is based on his book-length study, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave, ).



Notes to pages 6–10

 One of the most revealing aspects of the “New Milton Criticism” is that it arises in reaction to the so-called “neo-Christian” interpretation of Milton propounded by a self-described “Hobbesian” – nominalist, constructivist, materialist – such as Stanley Fish. See Stanley Fish, “One More Time,” in Postmodern Sophistry, ed. Gary A. Olsen and Lynn Worsham (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), .  Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, nd revised edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, ), , –.  Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, –, –, –. Cf. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, –.  Joseph Wittreich, “Milton’s Transgressive Maneuvers: Receptions (Then and Now) and the Sexual Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  Ibid., .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, ), .  Ibid., –.  Herman, “Paradigms Lost,” .  As if to illustrate exactly how such a binary will result in a misconstrual of my argument, Herman’s essay models the kind of interpretive distortion that I predict. In my essay, “Paradise Regained as Rule of Charity: Religious Toleration and the End of Typology,” Milton Studies  (), , I point out that, in Book  of Paradise Lost, Michael the angel “reiterates [a] point made by Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” regarding the way that “internal enslavement to appetites can lead to external servitude.” According to Herman, for me to suggest that Milton might have repeated himself necessarily entails a belief in “a Milton who is always the same” (“Paradigms Lost,” ). To point out such a similarity between two texts, according to Herman, assumes that “the Milton of  would be the same Milton of , that the Miltonic ‘I’ did not change over the course of  years, or that the collapse of Milton’s political hopes might have altered his views in some way” (). Herman’s supposed inference is simply false; to observe similar claims in two different texts does not require either assumption. My observations assume merely that Milton was capable of re-appropriating his own ideas, often to very different ends.  See, for example, Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – and Go Togashi, “Milton and the Presbyterian Opposition, –: The Engagement Controversy and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Second Edition (),” Milton Quarterly . (), –.  Rumrich, Milton Unbound, xi.

Notes to pages 10–13



 Herman, Destabilizing Milton, ; Cf. Herman, “Paradigms Lost,” .  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, , ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –. Parenthetical in-text citations hereafter refer to Tuck’s edition. My reading of Leviathan has been influenced by John Milbank’s comments regarding Hobbes’s social ontology in Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.  Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), , argues, against my reading of Leviathan, that “moral virtues” do indeed antedate the social contract in Hobbes’s account and are actually required for the commonwealth to come into being. Admittedly, Hobbes’s argument does require the tacit introduction of a moral imperative in order to theorize any escape from the natural condition of mankind; that imperative seems to derive from Hobbes’s Epicurean assumption that pain is evil and therefore should be avoided. A moral imperative, however, is not a virtue. For a critique of Berkowitz’s treatment of Hobbes, see Robert C. Miner, “Is Hobbes a Theorist of the Virtues?,” International Philosophical Quarterly . (), –, esp. –.  See for example, Hobbes, Leviathan, – and . Similarly, when Hobbes later develops his own explicit account of “Right Reason,” or “Natural Reason,” as a source of divine law (), he refers readers directly back to his earlier account of the “Lawes of Nature” in chapters  and  which draw upon the initial account of “reason” as mere calculation.  In the pivotal chapter  of Leviathan, Hobbes must deploy a tacit evaluative claim in order to permit the introduction of prescriptive statements into his rigorously descriptive project. In order to deduce from his mere description of what humans have the possible “power” to do by “right of nature” a further moral imperative that “man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life” (), Hobbes must assume that the “preservation of [one’s] own nature” is, in effect, “the good”: in this inference, Hobbes tacitly draws upon the atomist Epicurean imperative to avoid the dissolution of the material body, which constitutes pain, or “evil.”  Compare Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, .  Although not published in England until , De Cive had been printed in Paris in  with a second revised edition published by Elzevirs in Holland in . The  printing was responsible for “Hobbes suddenly acquir[ing] a European-wide reputation,” according to Richard Tuck, Introduction to Leviathan,  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xx. Whether or not Milton encountered the  edition, my point in citing Hobbes here is to provide an example of a certain kind of argument, rather than to posit a necessary point of engagement for Milton’s argument in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.  Exactly who is legitimately authorized to do such deposing depends upon which edition of The Tenure one reads. See Togashi, “Milton and the Presbyterian Opposition,” . Compare Martin Dzelzanis, Introduction, Milton’s Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzanis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xii–xix.



Notes to pages 13–21

 Compare appeals to “reason” in Areopagitica (CPW ii:, cf. ) and De Doctrina (CPW vi:) and appeals to “conscience” in Civil Power (CPW vii:–) and True Religion (CPW viii:, cf. ).  Compare Phillip J. Donnelly, “The Teloi of Genres: Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana,” Milton Studies  (), – and John Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius, and ‘the Void Profound of Unessential Night’,” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, ), . Although Milton may indeed have later changed his view, there is no textual evidence that he ever came to equate freedom with mere randomness. Instead, Milton consistently suggests that people who refuse the guidance of reason cannot be truly free – that is, actualize their good.  Herman, Destabilizing Milton, . In this passage, Herman is not describing the philosophical or theological assumptions that inform The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; Herman’s larger, and quite plausible, claim is that Milton later became tired of, frustrated with such constitutional debates generally ().  Compare Rumrich, Milton Unbound, – and Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius.”  Hobbes, Leviathan, .  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), ... Compare .., where Calvin stipulates that “man is corrupted by a natural viciousness, but not by one which proceeded from nature. In saying that it proceeded from nature, we mean that it was rather an adventitious event which befell man, than a substantial property assigned to him from the beginning.” Despite the validity of the main distinction here, which Milton follows, Calvin’s account will later (..) attribute that “adventitious event” of the Fall to divine will.  Ibid.  Galatians :–, which Milton cites in his Treatise of Civil Power (CPW vii:–).  Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, .  For example, Rumrich, Milton Unbound, –; Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Stephen M. Fallon, “Milton’s Arminianism and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language  (), –.  Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ; for a general account of the “rule of faith” in Protestant hermeneutics see –.  Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), xxiii–xxiv.  Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, –.  “Ramism” refers to aspects of humanist education, including rhetoric and other disciplines but most notably logic, that were deeply influenced by the reforms

Notes to pages 27–31



of Peter Ramus (–). Ramist logic was characterized by a preoccupation with “method” which later informed early-modern philosophers like Ren´e Descartes and by the spatialization of knowledge typified by vast tables of bifurcating logical terms. Chapter  below considers some aspects of Ramist logic in more detail.

 REASON, RHETORIC, AND EDUCATIONAL READING  Walter J. Ong, Introduction, CPW viii:–.  John T. Connor, “Milton’s Art of Logic and the Force of Conviction,” Milton Studies  (), –.  A “compleat and generous Education,” according to Milton, is one that “fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices [i.e., duties] both private and publike of peace and war” (CPW ii:–). These benefits to private and public life, however, are clearly identified not as the goals of education, but as consequences that result from the goal of knowing God that, in turn gives rise to growth in virtue. I am grateful to Stephen Schuler for showing me his unpublished essay in which he explains the larger educational importance of this distinction.  “For decision [proairesis] involves reason [meta logou] and thought [dianoias].” Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), .. Cf. .; .; .. References to the Greek text are from Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).  See Chapter  below for full discussion of this point.  The “four main categories” of censorship are ordered, according to Klinge, “sequentially from most severe to least severe”: () the Catholic model, () the Athenian model, () the Roman early Christian model, () post-publication censorship based on a book’s effects. See Markus Klinge, “The Grotesque in Areopagitica,” Milton Studies  (), –. As Klinge points out, given Milton’s explicit claim that the effects of any given book will depend on the use to which readers put it (e.g., CPW ii:), the fourth option may not be clearly distinct from having no state censorship at all ().  As Martin Dzelzanis points out, in “John Milton, Areopagitica,” in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, ed. David Womersley (Oxford: Blackwell, ), , Areopagitica has been traditionally “regarded as one of the constitutive texts of modern liberalism,” and consequently it “has become a contested site in a larger dispute about liberal values.” Compare Abbe Blum, “The Author’s Authority: Areopagitica and the Labour of Licensing,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (London: Methuen, ), .  For example, Stanley Fish, “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica,” in Nyquist and Ferguson, eds., Re-membering Milton, –; John Illo, “Areopagiticas Mythic and Real,” Prose Studies .



 

    



       

Notes to pages 31–40 (): –; William David Kolbrener, “Plainly Partial: The Liberal Areopagitica,” English Literary History  (): –; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Nigel Smith, “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, –,” in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Dzelzanis, “John Milton, Areopagitica,” . David Loewenstein, “Areopagitica and the Dynamics of History,” Studies in English Literature  (): ; David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Fish, “Driving from the Letter,” ; Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ; compare Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –, –. Gianni Vattimo, “Towards an Ontology of Decline,” in Recoding Metaphysics, ed. Giovanni Borradori (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), . Vattimo is recapitulating Nietzsche’s characterization of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Compare Genesis :, :. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, ; Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, –. Compare Fish, “Driving from the Letter,” –; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, –; compare Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. Against the post-Nietzschean tendency to think that all constructivist accounts of human knowing are necessarily atheistic, or at least intrinsically modern, Robert C. Miner offers a useful account of constructivist epistemology, extending from Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas Cusanus to Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Giambattista Vico, in Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, ). Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, . Fish, “Driving from the Letter,” . Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave, ), . Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue,  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Ibid., –. Ong, CPW viii:–. Compare Connor, “Milton’s Art of Logic,” . There are at least four known antecedent logic texts upon which Milton drew: Commentarii in P. Rami [. . .] Dialecticam (), by George Downame;

Notes to pages 40–45

         

   



Dialecticae Libri Duo (), by Peter Ramus (Ong, CPW viii:; ); The Logician’s School-Master (), by Alexander Richardson; and Systema Logica Tribus Libris Adornatum (), by Bartholomew Keckermann. In making my own comparisons at some points between Milton’s text and those of Downame or Ramus, I was limited to the earliest British edition () which is available in the Short Title Catalogue microfilm collection. However, the particular pages that I used from that  edition of the joint Downame– Ramus text have been compared with an earlier continental edition (Frankfurt: Wolfgangi Richteri, ) to verify that the text is indeed the same. I am grateful to Nicholas von Maltzahn for his meticulous comparison of the key passages in the  text with a copy of the  edition in the Bodleian library. Brian Weiss, in “Milton’s Use of Ramist Method in His Scholarly Writings” (Dissertation, City University of New York, ), . Milton was not, of course, utterly unique in defining logic in this way. See Connor, “Milton’s Art of Logic,” n. However, Milton did clearly make his own decision to differ from the customary Ramist definition in this way. Ong, CPW viii:n. Ong, CPW viii:. Connor, “Milton’s Art of Logic,” –. Ong, CPW viii:n. Ong, CPW viii:n. Gilbert’s translation decisions regarding ratio in the Columbia edition of this passage are the same as those in the Yale edition. George Downame, “Commentarii,” in Dialecticae Libri Duo, by P. Ramus (London, ), –. The Latin suggests, in a way that is partially obscured by translations, that the mathematical sense of ratio, as “a certain relation of terms proportional to each other,” is the meaning from which the logical sense, “relevance of a thing to arguing,” has been derived. The passage also links these instances of ratio to the earlier explanation that reasons “are more often called arguments” (CPW viii:). An argument (and hence a ratio) is further described as that which “explains and proves on what grounds it is first judged that one thing follows or does not follow from another” (CPW viii:). Keckermann makes a similar point regarding the connection between mathematics and his own use of syllogism (Keckermann, Systema Logica Tribis Libris Adornatum, ). Keckermann’s observation, however, is buried well inside his text (page ) and is not emphasized as being integral to the definition of logic, as it is in Milton’s text. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Compare Connor, “Milton’s Art of Logic,” . Compare Albert P. Duhamel, “Milton’s Alleged Ramism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association  (), ; Weiss, “Milton’s Use,” –. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, .



Notes to pages 45–51

 For accounts of Milton’s intellectual and social life that attempt to redress the traditional individualist emphasis, see Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); compare Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, ).  George Downame, Comentarii in P. Ramus Regii Professoris Dialecticam (London, ), .  The three-fold correspondence is not to be taken as a rigid or exclusive reduction of each kind of rhetoric to the three different kinds of arguing. Rather, each kind of rhetoric – epideictic, deliberative, and forensic – seems to be suggested here by the kind of arguing that is its most characteristic mode. Compare Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, –.  Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, .

 MONISM AND PROTESTANT TOLERATION  William Walker, “Milton’s Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration in A Treatise of Civil Power, Of Christian Doctrine, and Paradise Lost,” Modern Philology  (), . See, for example, William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –; Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York: Methuen, ), –. One of the most widely influential treatments of Milton’s materialist monism is Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ).  See respectively, Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; Danielson, Milton’s Good God, –; John P. Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, ), –; Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,  (London: Macmillan, ), ix–xxiv.  Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, .  Walker, “Milton’s Dualistic Theory,” –.  Rachel J. Trubowitz, “Body Politics in Paradise Lost,” Publications of the Modern Language Association . (), .  Compare Rumrich, Matter of Glory, –, –, and his Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, where he argues that Miltonic Chaos in Paradise Lost is a feminine aspect of God’s being.

Notes to pages 52–54



 For a detailed account of how Milton’s views of substance and matter draw upon and change Aristotelian categories, see Rumrich, Matter of Glory, – . My account of Milton’s monism has benefited from the important historical work done by Rumrich in Matter of Glory and Milton Unbound, as well as from Stephen Fallon’s Milton Among the Philosophers. Although I differ from them on several points, my position has often developed in response to their work.  As both Ong and Rumrich point out, Milton also departs in important ways from Aristotelian norms by making form rather than matter the principle of individuation. See Walter J. Ong, CPW viii: nn. – and Rumrich, Matter of Glory, .  In this respect, when Rumrich claims, in Matter of Glory, that “Chaos and Night represent an essential . . . attribute of God” (), his emphatic choice of the term “essential” risks being more misleading than helpful, insofar as it obscures Milton’s repeated and most basic insistence that God’s “proper essence” is not communicated by matter.  The Reformers do not typically disavow the analogia entis explicitly; nevertheless their critique of the doctrine of transubstantiation, as a form of “idolatry,” often assumes a rejection of the very possibility of analogical predication (as described below), upon which the doctrine of transubstantiation depends. See for example, Calvin, Institutes, ..–, esp. –.  For the most influential medieval account of analogical predication, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part i, Quest. , Art. – & . In Thomas’s formulation, human speech about God is neither univocal nor merely equivocal; human language is not adequate to God, as univocal signification would presume, but neither is the relation between language and God wholly disjunctive; rather, a word may be applied to God with the understanding that God infinitely surpasses the meaning of those terms (e.g., wisdom, or goodness) as they are applied to creatures (see esp. ST, Part i, Quest. , Art. –). The “analogy of being” applies such an understanding of predication to “being.” By this means, humans are able to speak of both creation and God as “being,” without resorting to pantheism, dualism, or the reduction of God to the mere apex of being’s plenum. See R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in 17th-Century Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –, for an account of how analogical predication and the analogia entis impinges upon interpretation of early seventeenth-century devotional poetry.  According to John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being,” Modern Theology  (), , the Thomistic account of the relationship between God and creation involves both a linguistic and a metaphysical theory of analogy, and the former requires the latter. Compare Young, Doctrine and Devotion, –, –, regarding Thomas de Vio Cajetan’s interpretation of the Thomistic analogy of being.  “The proportion – the analogy – that created things declare is that of an ever greater distance from God, even in God’s expression of himself in creation; the proportions of created things, their orders of magnitude, quantity, and



 

 



 



Notes to pages 54–57 beauty, tell of an infinite proportion – an infinite interval – of ever yet greater magnitude, ‘quantity,’ and beauty. God differs infinitely from created beauty not by being utterly alien to it, but by being infinitely more beautiful. And for this reason the language of analogy functions within theology not as some presumptuous grasping after the ‘essences’ of things, nor as a discourse that establishes a hierarchy within a totality, but as a fruitful coincidence of the incommensurable within deferral.” David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), . Angela Franz Franks, “Trinitarian Analogia Entis in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist  (), . As I indicated at the outset of this chapter, “ontological dualism” maintains that creation’s being derives from two substances, while “anthropological dualism” maintains that human existence in particular consists of two distinct substances. Although Milton clearly rejects both ontological dualism and anthropological dualism, they are not the same thing, and Milton rejects them for different reasons. My claims here and in the next two paragraphs draw upon and revise arguments that I first advanced in my essay, “‘Matter’ versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism,” Milton Quarterly  (): –. De Doctrina further clarifies that matter is not reducible to bodily motion when the argument for the ex deo status of first matter describes the production of corporeal substance out of spiritual substance (CPW vi:–). Donnelly, “‘Matter’ versus Body,” –. Compare Rogers, Matter of Revolution, –; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –; and Rumrich, Milton Unbound, –. In the arguments below I focus on William Walker’s arguments, but as I indicated earlier such difficulties are not unique to Walker and appear in many treatments of “matter” in Milton’s writing. Although specific opponents remain unnamed, Milton engages the same biblical proof texts that are cited by the Westminster Confession (Humble Advice , chs. , , ) and upon which Presbyterians sitting in Parliament would continue to base their arguments in  (William, Hunter, Preface, CPW vii:–). In addition to his biblicism, Milton’s rhetoric in this plain-style tract includes the rhetorical use of definitions, repetition, and litotes. Especially regarding the latter, see Susanne Woods, “Elective Poetics and Milton’s Prose: A Treatise of Civil Power and Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church,” in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –. My account of Milton’s Civil Power here and in the next paragraph elaborates on claims that I first advanced in my article, “Paradise Regained as Rule of Charity,” Milton Studies  (), –.

Notes to pages 59–60



 John Milton, “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, ), –, see lines , . Compare the final line of the Sonnet with Areopagitica’s suggestion that “Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing” (CPW ii:).  In The Reason of Church Government (), we find Milton’s “only explicit reference to [Hooker’s] works,” according to P. G. Stanwood, “Of Prelacy and Polity in Milton and Hooker,” in Heirs of Fame: Milton and the Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ), . Yet even that single reference is most revealing, I contend. The tract is Milton’s final anti-prelatical work and marks a relative clarification in his central arguments and in his sense of readership. The ostensible occasion for the tract’s publication was to offer a response to Certain Briefe Treatises, Written by Diverse Learned Men, Concerning the Ancient and Modern Government of the Church (). Rather than engage the text ascribed to Hooker in Certain Brief Treatises, however, Milton refers directly to Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity at that specific point where Hooker denies that Scripture offers direction with respect to church government (CPW i:–). Compare Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, in Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, et al.,  vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, –), iii... This text is cited parenthetically below. The root issue is not simply the exegesis of  Timothy :; Hooker’s interpretation had supported his larger claim that church government in general is subject to the “external government” of human reason and positive civil law, rather than to Scripture. Thus, as early as , Milton engages and presumes that many of his readers knew the crux of Hooker’s argument. Hooker’s influence had, of course, been wide and continuous from early in the seventeenth century, despite the ways in which Laudian churchmen misrepresented his position. Compare H. R. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –; Stanwood, “Prelacy and Polity,” ; Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –.  My characterization of Hooker as a deeply Reformed thinker has been influenced by W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (New York: E. J. Brill, ) and stands in contrast to those who view Hooker’s work as a kind of Thomist reaction against the Reformation. For example, Trevor-Roper, in Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, –, locates Hooker within a “tradition” of rationalist Socinianism and crypto-Arminianism.  Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Pref. .. Hooker’s citation of that particular letter by Augustine (i.e., Epistle ) may seem somewhat tendentious. Nevertheless, Hooker seems to have linked that letter to the nearby letters (, , ) regarding Donatism, and most notably the “sacrilege of schism” that Augustine brings against the Donatists in Epistle . Augustine, Letters, 1–82. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Vol. xii, trans. Wilfrid







 



Notes to pages 60–61

Parsons (New York: Catholic University of America Press, ). Despite the imprecision of Hooker’s citation on this point, his argument is consistent with Augustine’s general theological response to the Donatists, by emphasizing the hidden character of the “mystical” church. Despite her emphasis upon the generally tolerant character of Hooker’s position, Joan Bennett, in Reviving Liberty, , notes the same tensions that I cite here, which arise from subsuming the law of the visible church within that of the commonwealth. As Joseph Le Cler points out, in Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow (New York: Associated Press, ), –, such logic, oriented toward the “visible church,” is consonant with the justification of coercion based on outward conformity. For sustained comparisons of Hooker and Milton see Bennett, Reviving Liberty, –, and Stanwood, “Prelacy and Polity,” –. Calvin, Institutes, ..–. The use of things indifferent is intended to serve the larger purpose of “edification” of others, that is, charity. A tension arises within Calvin’s account from the fact that he clearly thinks that some actions although indifferent to salvation are not indifferent with respect to whether they ought to be done or not, even though they are indifferent with respect to justification – for example, obedience to the moral law and to civil authorities. See Calvin, Institutes, ..; ... Because Hooker so clearly makes the realm of adiaphora the realm of civil authority from the outset, such a tension never really appears in Hooker. Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, ... Compare W. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Zeeveld offers an account of how “adiaphorism became an integral part of the Anglican polity.” Zeeveld specifically cites the writing of Henry VIII’s chaplain, Thomas Starkey, as the means by which the Lutheran adiaphorism of Philip Melanchthon became part of statesponsored English Protestantism from its inception (). My point is that, while the term “adiaphora” was deployed by Reformers like Calvin, whose writing Hooker engages, there was also from the outset in England a degree of imprecision and lack of agreement about what constituted the category of “things” to which the term referred. Compare also Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. One problem in Hooker’s reception is that Laudian churchmen used Hooker as though he were an advocate of the divine right of episcopacy and of monarchy, when in fact his belief in the supremacy of law kept him from advocating the kind of absolutism maintained by Stuart apologists. In Reviving Liberty, Bennett rightly points out that, against the nominalist and voluntarist tendency to reduce reason to “ratiocination, or logic,” Hooker and Milton share a fuller sense of “right reason” as a participation in the goodness of the whole of the created order (–). Bennett contends, in effect, that Milton’s position is largely an application of Hooker’s logic to new political circumstances (). Although I emphasize that Hooker’s ecclesiology – the difference between

Notes to pages 62–73

          





“visible” and “mystical” church – was deployed to argue for religious conformity, I agree with Bennett’s claim that Hooker’s position is “not philosophically authoritarian in its notion either of episcopacy or of royal supremacy” (). For example, Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, ..–..; ..–... Previously, Stillingfleet had advanced a similarly adiaphorist argument for religious conformity in Irenicum (London, ), . Mark Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, . A. A. Seaton, The Theory of Toleration Under the Later Stuarts (New York: Octagon, ), . As I explain above, Milton’s explicit engagement of Hooker in Of Reformation () (CPW i:–) reveals that Milton understood the ecclesiological crux of Hooker’s argument. Milton offers a similarly direct response to such adiaphorist arguments in Of Reformation () (CPW i:) and Of True Religion () (CPW viii:–). Walker, “Milton’s Dualistic Theory,” . Ibid., . In the same way, De Doctrina Christiana describes presumptuous biblical interpreters as “rashly puffed up” by “fleshly intelligence” (CPW vi:). The latter term is obviously not referring to the mere fact of the body. For example, in his annotations to the Yale edition of Civil Power, William Hunter observes that Milton’s emphasis upon sola scriptura, as interpreted by the Spirit-led conscience, effectively set him in opposition to “all traditions supporting external authority” (CPW vii:n.). But at that point Hunter, like Stanley Fish and Dayton Haskin, simply presumes that “Scripture” does not count at all as an “external authority,” insofar as it fails to be coercive. Compare Stanley Fish, “Wanting a Supplement: The Question of Interpretation in Milton’s Early Prose,” in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –. Chapter  shows how the tendency to equate “chaos” with “matter” leads to a serious misunderstanding of the ontology informing Paradise Lost.

PART II INTRODUCTION  At the beginning of Chapter , I outline the three different aspects under which this study considers Miltonic “reasoning”: that is, discursive, Christo-poetic, and ethico-cognitive.  As I noted in Chapter , throughout this study, I treat Milton as the author of De Doctrina Christiana. I also view the very mode of engagement with Scripture in his major poems as an embodiment of the interpretive ambitions



Notes to pages 74–78

of De Doctrina Christiana: that his own words would be glossed by the biblical text, rather than vice versa (CPW vi:).  As William Hunter points out (CPW vii: –), despite the anonymity of specific opponents in Civil Power, the particular biblical proof texts that Milton engages are the same as those deployed in chapters , , and  of the Westminster Assembly’s Confession, published as The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of Parliament, Sitting at Westminster, Concerning a Confession of Faith: With Quotations and Texts of Scripture Annexed (London, ), reprinted in The Creeds of Christendom (), ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, ), –.  From his earliest prose writing in Of Reformation () to his late poetry in Paradise Regained (), Milton indicates his belief that the resurrection of the body reveals a power beyond the limits of deception and violence. The belief appears, for example, in Of Reformation’s reference to “the Martyrs, with unresistable might of Weaknesse, shaking the Powers of Darkness, and scorning the fiery rage of the old red Dragon” (CPW i:). Here Milton dilates Revelation :, which describes those who “overcame” the “great dragon” “by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony [marturias]; and they loved not their lives unto the death.” The martyrs’ hope for resurrection is based on the resurrection of the Lamb. The key point is that Milton clearly understood that the human means for defeating the dragon is not through some opposing coercion but through a creative goodness reaching beyond death that constitutes the horizonal limit of coercion and cunning. Similarly, Paradise Regained emphasizes that Satan is defeated through a power (ability to do good) that crosses the boundary of death. In particular, the four different iterations in Paradise Regained of the Son’s baptism – a figure for death and resurrection – manifests Milton’s continued emphasis upon what the resurrection reveals about ontology.  DIVINE JUSTICE AND DIVINE FILIATION  Compare, for example, Lucy Hutchinson’s similarly explicit reference to “Providence” in the opening lines of her biblical epic, Order and Disorder (), ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, ), Canto , line . The fact that Hutchinson asserts Providence, while Milton additionally proposes the intelligibility of divine justice, indicates the degree to which Milton goes beyond the Calvinism that largely informs Hutchinson’s writing.  Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Danielson discusses some of the similarities between Milton’s use of the “Free Will Defence” in his epic and recent attempts by twentieth-century philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga, to demonstrate that belief in a good, all-powerful creator-God can be logically consistent with admitting the existence of evil in the world (–; –). Throughout this study, I apply the term “theodicy” to Paradise Lost, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, the word did not enter English until after the

Notes to pages 78–82

 



        



publication of Leibnitz’s Th´eodic´ee in . In fact, the earliest citation in the OED, despite actually quoting from Paradise Lost in the definition, is a  reference to Leibnitz. Compare Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, as well as his more extended argument in God, Freedom and Evil (London: George Allen and Unwin, ). However, most theodicies also undertake something more than Plantinga’s carefully circumscribed avoidance of contradiction. Walter J. Ong, “From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence,” in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), . In The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), , Catherine Gimelli Martin observes that critics have often confused Milton’s revisioning of epic with his theodic aims. Even admitting Martin’s point, however, treating the two aspects of the poem in isolation seems no better as a critical approach. Rather, only by treating the two aspects of Paradise Lost together, without confusing them, can they be properly distinguished from each other and their mutuality properly understood. Throughout this study, I use the term “typology” in the strictly theological sense to indicate the way that Old Testament passages may be interpreted as prefigurations of events in the New Testament (CPW vi:). Although Milton obviously appropriates biblical typology for his own poetic purposes, we would be mistaken to extend his use of “typology” to include all “figurative” language generally. Compare Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, ), . This paragraph and the next adapt and revise claims that I first ventured in my essay, “The Teloi of Genres: Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana,” Milton Studies  (), –. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Ibid., –. Ibid., ; . Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Compare Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, ), . Ibid., . Bryson refers specifically to the explanation of “justify” given by Christopher Ricks: “bear witness to the justice of.” Ibid., . In this respect, despite all his rhetoric to the contrary Bryson’s reading of Paradise Lost is ultimately “orthodox” in its aims, insofar as Bryson does not deny the theodic purpose of Paradise Lost but rejects the customary account of the literary means to that end.



Notes to pages 82–85

 Compare Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, ; Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, –.  Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, .  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ...  Ibid., ...  For a historical account of how this reversal in preoccupations regarding divine “justice” unfolded, see Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, –.  On Milton and the “Republican Sublime,” see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –.  Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –.  According to Forsyth, Satanic Epic, “Without that sympathy for Satan that is our Romantic inheritance, we cannot properly read Milton” (). I suggest, rather, that until we overcome the ontology of violence that is our Romantic inheritance – Dionysian anarchic freedom versus Apollonian rationalism – we cannot properly read Milton. Skepticism toward Romantic interpretations of Paradise Lost is warranted not simply because the Romantics held theological and ethical opinions that differed from Milton’s but because the Romantic view of “freedom” makes Milton’s crucial distinction between “liberty” and “license” simply unintelligible.  In his Commonplace Book, Milton cites and quotes from the passage in de ira dei, by Lactantius, which includes a recapitulation of Epicurus’s argument against Providence (CPW i:).  Milton’s Commonplace Book (CPW i:) summarizes Lactantius’s account of God’s reasons for permitting evil, but the complete famous recapitulation of Epicurus in Lactantius, Treatise on the Anger of God (de ira dei), trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. vii (), ed. Alexander Roberts, et al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, reprinted ), , runs as follows: God, [Epicurus] says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them? Both Danielson, in Milton’s Good God (–), and Forsyth, in Satanic Epic (), discuss this passage as a central point of engagement for Milton’s poetic “theodicy.” My point is that we may be misled if we take Paradise Lost to be answering Epicurus without realizing that Milton would have interrogated the assumptions involved in Epicurus’s very formulation of the theodic question. Regarding the engagement of Lactantius throughout Milton’s Commonplace Book, see Katherine Ellen Hartwell, Milton and Lactantius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), esp. –.

Notes to pages 85–90



 See, for example, Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, in Letters, Principle Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russel M. Geer (New York: Macmillan, ), .  Although Epicurean (unlike Hobbesian) atomism attempts to preserve some sense of human “freedom” (that is, randomness) by including the concept of a “swerve” in the falling of atoms through the void, the “swerve” does not enter into his account of divine causation, insofar as Epicurus assumes “power” to involve precisely the overcoming of such swerving motion, normally referred to as “chance.” See Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, in Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, .  Forsyth, Satanic Epic, .  Despite disclaimers to the contrary, Fish’s approach to Paradise Lost in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,  (London: Macmillan, ), does indeed proceed, not by positing an originary reading experience, but by presuming a reading experience without memory of what follows in the rest of the poem: that is, the kind of experience possible only in a first reading. See Phillip J. Donnelly, Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, ), .  Forsyth, Satanic Epic, .  John :.  John :; Forsyth, Satanic Epic, .  John : and John :, respectively.  Compare Gordon Campbell, “The Son of God in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost,” Modern Language Review . (), –; William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), –; John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  Chapter  below considers Milton’s depiction of the Trinity in the final books of Paradise Lost. Regarding the broad interpretive questions posed by Milton’s Arianism, see Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism,” –, as well as Joseph Wittreich, “Milton’s Transgressive Manoeuvres: Receptions (Then and Now) and the Sexual Politics of Paradise Lost,” – in the same volume.  Compare Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d, – and John Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius, and ‘the Void Profound of Unessential Night’,” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, ), –.  Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. Compare John Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, , where Rumrich also picks up on Fallon’s observation regarding Milton’s use of allegory to portray ontic privation. Compare Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Fire, Ice and Epic Entropy,” Milton Studies  (), –.



Notes to pages 92–100

 For example, Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), Bk. .–.  Rumrich, Milton Unbound, –.  Chapter  above explains how Milton transforms the ethical bearing of the Aristotelian teaching that “reason is a choice,” specifically by situating that teaching in relation to biblical narrative.  As Paul Sellin and John Hill both point out, the Arminian position is not distinguished by a denial of predestination, or election to salvation, but by the insistence that predestination is conditional upon divine foreknowledge regarding human choices to accept or reject the sufficiency of prevenient grace. See Paul Sellin, “John Milton’s Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana on Predestination,” Milton Studies  (), – and John Spencer Hill, John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet: A Study of Divine Vocation in Milton’s Poetry and Prose (London: Macmillan, ), –.  Sellin, “John Milton’s Paradise Lost,” –. See also Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave, ), . For a response to Sellin, see Stephen M. Fallon, “Milton’s Arminianism and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (), –.  In commenting on the Father’s statement of agreement with the Son (PL .– ), Bryson insists that “The Father has been caught out, and he has had neither the courage nor the honesty to admit it. The Father, in short, lies” (Tyranny of Heaven, ). The only warrant for such a claim is ultimately Bryson’s presumed opposition between the Father and the Son (), an opposition that, as the next chapter shows, cannot be sustained if Bryson also wants to insist that the Father is a tyrant who does not really give his sovereignty away.  Herman, Destabilizing Milton, .  My argument in the next five paragraphs incorporates and extends claims that I first advanced in “The Teloi of Genres,” –.  Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Place,” in Standing By Words (San Francisco: North Point Press, ), . Compare C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost,  (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.  For example, Isaiah  or Ezekiel .  Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Macmillan, ) and Alastair Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, ).  Revelation :.  Revelation :–.  See, for example, Hebrews :–:, :–:.  Zechariah :–.  Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (London: Methuen, ), –, .  Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, .  Ibid.  See, respectively, Genesis :–; :; :–; and :–.

Notes to pages 101–08



 Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God, , makes a similar point regarding the way in which the “Free Will Defense” of divine justice in Book  does not complete but rather initiates “a kind of theodical dialectic that takes place on a large scale over the length of Paradise Lost.” My point is that Milton’s warrant for such a dramatic depiction of God is clearly based on biblical precedents; moreover, such engagement of biblical narrative ultimately transforms both the mode and content of what some readers may presume to mean by “theodical dialectic.”  Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, .  DIVINE KINGSHIP  I use the term “action” here in the Aristotelian sense to describe not simply “motion” in general, but the specifically purposive and complete movement that distinguishes both mimetic and ethical action from mere motion in general. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, nd edn, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), a–; esp. a–b. Compare Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: Norton, ), a and a. I mention this point because the first event that Raphael narrates in heaven is the gathering of the angels in response to a divine summons (PL .). The purpose of that summons, however, is the announcement of the Son’s anointing as king over the angels. In this sense, the summons, the gathering, and the announcement are all part of what Aristotle would call a single “action,” with respect to purpose.  See, for example, Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  The most obvious examples of such biblical texts would be  Samuel  and Romans . Compare Merritt Y. Hughes, CPW ii:–.  See, for example,  Peter :; Isaiah :–; Luke :; Revelation :–; Jude .  Stella Revard and William Hunter both point out some of the allusions to Psalm  in Book  of Paradise Lost, but they do not treat all the allusions that I consider below, nor do they treat those allusions together as a single unit of biblical intertextuality. See Stella P. Revard, The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ). Compare William B. Hunter, “The War in Heaven: The Exaltation of the Son,” in Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology, ed. W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides and J. H. Adamson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, ), –.  CPW iii:. Compare Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, ), –. Although Bryson does, as in the passage cited here, follow Milton’s



   

       





Notes to pages 108–16 commonplace distinction between “kingship” and “tyranny,” his argument most often fails to register any such distinction. Indeed Bryson’s central claim, evident in the relation between the main title and the subtitle of his book, depends rather directly upon suppressing any distinction between kingship and tyranny. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, . Ibid., , . Compare Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” –. Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” –. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), b–e; e–c. Compare Phillip J. Donnelly, “Poetic Justice: Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (),” in “ Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books”: Essays on the 1667 First Edition, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), –. For example, Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –, and Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, –. Forsyth, Satanic Epic, . Ibid., . Alastair Fowler, Preface, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longmans, ), . Fowler, note on PL .–. Compare Charles Dahlberg, “Paradise Lost v,  and Milton’s Psalm ii,” Modern Language Notes  (), –. Psalm , trans. John Milton () in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), . The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . The gloss states, regarding verse , that the “power of Kings cannot prevail against Christ” and, regarding verse , that “He exhorteth all rulers to repent in time” (emphasis added). In this way, the gloss interprets Psalm  as a radical relativization of all human kingship. By contrast, for a full account of the extent to which Charles I was identified typologically with Christ, see Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, ). As I explain in Chapter , my point here must not be misunderstood to imply necessarily that Milton was an orthodox trinitarian. It is worth noting, however, that those who insist on Milton’s outright Arianism do so on the basis of using De Doctrina as a gloss on the poem (for example, the treatise states that the Son was begotten in time [CPW vi: & ]). Completely aside from the debate over the treatise, I suggest that one of the functions of the epic’s complex narrative treatment of time in relation to eternity, embodied as it is through an indirect biblicist textual practice, is to show the theological difficulties that inhere to demonstrative assertions like those in the treatise. Compare Revard, War in Heaven, –, – and Hunter, “War in Heaven,” –. Although she does not engage Psalm  in detail, see also Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), for a wide-ranging account of Milton’s engagement of the Psalms.

Notes to pages 116–25



 I use the Greek term kairos to indicate simply a moment at which a typological connection can be made between a “type” and its fulfillment in a later figure. See John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ), – .  Forsyth, Satanic Epic, .  Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, .  Ibid., , .  In effect, Bryson defines “monarchy” as a form of political rule that is “hierarchical” and “external”; by contrast, the Son (in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) models a kind of government that is based on “internal individual rule” (Tyranny of Heaven, –). Bryson assumes “external” to mean “bodily coercion,” an equation that, as I demonstrate in Chapter  above, Milton does not follow. Similarly, Bryson seems to assume that “difference” and “hierarchy” are vaguely synonymous and intrinsically coercive (ibid., –).  A typical formulation of Bryson’s argument in Tyranny of Heaven would be his claim that the “monarchical imagery in heaven” “serves as a portrait of injustice blown up to monstrous proportions, with the rankest corruption located in the idea of Divine Kingship itself” (, original emphasis).  Compare Bryson’s claim that divine kingship is simply “a metaphor beyond which humanity must grow” (ibid., ) with what De Doctrina Christiana says about the accommodation of biblical language to human understanding (CPW vi:–).  Bryson, Tyranny of Heaven, –.  Forsyth, Satanic Epic, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,  (London: Macmillan, ), xxx–xxxi.  Compare Donnelly, “Poetic Justice,” .

 RATIONAL BATTLE  John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  For an account of the relationship between Paradise Lost and the whole of the book of Revelation, see Michael Fixler, “The Apocalypse within Paradise Lost,” in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. Stella Revard considers the specific use of Revelation  in her study, The War in Heaven (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. In “‘Something Like Prophetic Strain’: Apocalyptic Configurations in Milton,” English Language Notes  (), –, C. A. Patrides



                   



Notes to pages 127–43 takes issue with Fixler’s emphasis upon the book of Revelation as a structural model for the whole poem. J. Martin Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –, , , . Compare Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), , . See, for example, Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, ), e.g., –. Forsyth, Satanic Epic, . Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . See, for example, the Geneva Bible preface to the book of Revelation; cf. CPW i:–. See, respectively, Revelation : or :, and Revelation :–. For example, Arnold Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on Paradise Lost (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ),  ff. For example, Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,  (London: Macmillan, ), –. Matthew :; :. See, respectively, Hosea :, Luke :, and Hosea :–. Hosea :. Luke :–. Such work on the prophetic books has been done most notably by Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of Paradise Lost (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), lines –. Alastair Fowler, note on PL .–, in The Poems of John Milton (London: Longmans, ). William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), . Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. In commenting on this passage (PL .–) in Satanic Epic, Forsyth contends that “according to God’s logic, Satan is actually necessary for salvation” (). Such a statement is obviously true, as long as “necessity” is not mistaken for “sufficiency” and as long as “salvation” is understood, like the difference between “healing” and “health,” as the restoration of goodness and is not mistaken for the good itself. Compare John Milbank, The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, ), .  RATIONAL ALLEGORY AND GENDER

 As Joseph Wittreich points out, critical debates regarding the treatment of gender in Paradise Lost are not new but are, like the debates regarding the

Notes to pages 143–44

     



meanings of Milton’s heterodoxy, an arguably permanent feature of the poem’s reception. See Joseph Wittreich, “Milton’s Transgressive Maneuvers: Receptions (Then and Now) and the Sexual Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Compare Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Dalila, Misogyny, and Milton’s Christian Liberty of Divorce,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Martin rightly connects Milton’s treatment of gender to his famous “rejection of the traditional heroic ethic” in Paradise Lost (.–) and presents Milton as searching for an alternative to the mutually violent characterizations of gender difference. I contend that Milton goes still further, however, by interrogating what his readers presume to mean by “masculine.” Because my argument here focuses on Paradise Lost, I address Martin’s earlier analysis in The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). For an account of the relation between the “three waves” of feminism and critical treatments of gender in Milton’s writing, see Martin’s Introduction to Milton and Gender, –. The article in Milton and Gender that overlaps most closely with the concerns of my argument here is John Rogers, “Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost,” –. J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –. Ibid., –. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. Martin, Ruins of Allegory, . Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. I use “typology” throughout my argument here in the strict theological sense in which De Doctrina deploys the term, as when Milton notes that “in the Old Testament” the “single sense” of a given passage of Scripture “is often a combination of the historical and the typological [historia et typo]” (CPW vi:). Historical accounts of the interaction between typology and literature can be found in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); and C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ). One of the seminal works on typology in Milton studies is William G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Compare Stanley Fish, “Transmuting the Lump: Paradise Lost, –,” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. Against the traditional opposition between allegory and typology, see Kenneth Borris, “‘Union of Mind, or Both in One Soul’: Allegories of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies  (), –. On the interplay and overlap between allegorical and typological idiom in Milton’s writing, see Mindele Anne Treip,



    

                    

Notes to pages 144–53 Allegorical Poetics and the Epic (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, ), –. Borris, “‘Union of Mind,” –. As Borris points out, early-modern writers who deploy such allegorical interpretations of Genesis  include, for example, Philip Sidney, Joseph Glanvill, Sir Henry Vane, Henry More, and Jean Bodin. Ibid., . Ibid., –. Fowler, Introduction to Paradise Lost in The Poems of John Milton (London: Longmans, ), –. My use of the term “allegory” in general, whether as an interpretive mode or as a narrative strategy, is distinct from Catherine Martin’s use of the term in Ruins of Allegory. Although she distinguishes sharply between what Milton is doing and the more rigid constraints of what she calls “normative allegory” (), she includes Milton within a broader account of “baroque allegory” (). In one sense, her “normative allegory” corresponds directly with what I term “allegorical narrative.” At the same time, her description of Milton’s “baroque allegory” is arguably comparable to what I characterize as his elaborations of a temporal typological strategy which ultimately opens out to the infinite (). Borris, “Union of Mind,” –. Ibid., . Philo, On the Creation (De Opificio Mundi), in The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, rev. edn., trans. C. D. Younge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, ), sec. –. Marilyn R. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene, and the Renaissance Idea of Androgyny,” Milton Studies  (), –. Plato, Symposium, in The Symposium and the Phaedrus, trans. William S. Cobb (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), d–d. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene,” –. Ibid., . Augustine, On the Trinity [De Trinite], trans. Arthur West Haddan, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. iii (), ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, reprinted ), .–. Ibid., .–. Ibid., ... Ibid., .. Compare ibid., .. Ibid., ... Ibid., ... Borris, “Union of Mind,” . Ibid., . Ibid., . Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, ; . Borris, “Union of Mind,” . Augustine, Trinity, ... Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene,” .

Notes to pages 154–58



 Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), –; .  Borris, “Union of Mind,” .  McColley, Milton’s Eve, . In “Transported Touch,” John Rogers engages this same passage (PL .–) and quotes the ensuing lines that elaborate upon the apparent differences between Adam and Eve which ultimately “impli’d / subjection” on Eve’s part (.–). Rogers dismisses these lines, however, as “The poem’s half-hearted attempt to ground sexual hierarchy in nature” which ultimately “gives way to its dominant conviction that Eve’s subordination to her husband was arbitrarily ordained by God after their creation” (). Rogers’s attempt to contrast natural law with positive law, at the expense of the latter, would be more persuasive if the argument did not seem to presume that positive (“arbitrary”) law per se is necessarily incapable of serving even as an instrumental good. Compare CPW vi:–.  For example, PL .– or .–. In each respective case the explicit affirmation of gender hierarchy is soon followed by a subversion of what fallen readers might typically assume that hierarchy to mean. In the first case, Raphael’s allowance of Adam’s intellectual superiority ends by pointing out that Eve’s wisdom will at times be superior to his (.). In the latter case, the Son’s insistence upon Adam’s obligation to lead is soon followed by an explicit typological connection that shows true leadership, or fatherhood, as rooted in self-gift rather than compulsion (.–).  McColley, Milton’s Eve, .  For a characterization of Milton as simply a misogynist, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –; Sandra Gilbert, “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Writers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey,” Publications of the Modern Language Association  (), –; Katherine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ), ; Marcia Landy, “Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies  (), –. Compare Joan Webber, “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies  (), –, which offers a brief list of some of the main problems in Gilbert’s analysis. For arguments contending that Milton is doing something more than reiterating his culture’s assumptions about gender, see, in addition to the sources cited above in note  of this chapter, Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Milton on Women – Yet Once More,” Milton Studies  (), –. The latter essay responds to Landy’s claims. Compare Diane Kelsey McColley, “Milton and the Sexes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Catherine Martin, “Introduction,” in Milton and Gender, –; Phillip J. Gallagher, Milton, the Bible and Misogyny (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ); Cheryl Fresch, “Milton’s Eve and the Problem of the Additions to the Command,” Milton Quarterly 



  

       

 

Notes to pages 158–73 (), –; Diana Benet, “Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,” Milton Studies  (), –. Martin, Ruins of Allegory, –. Ibid., . For example, James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), – ; David Aers and Bob Hodge, “‘Rational Burning’: Milton on Sex and Marriage,” in Literature, Language and Society in England, 1580–1680, ed. David Aers, Gunther Kress, and Bob Hodge (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ), – . Martin, Ruins of Allegory, . Augustine, Trinity, .–. Compare Ephesians :–; Galatians :. See Augustine, City of God [De Civitate Dei], trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .. McColley, Milton’s Eve, –. Martin, Ruins of Allegory, –. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene,” . As Rogers notes in “Transporting Touch,” , the whole of . reads “Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains.” According to Rogers, Eve’s choice of wording here shows that gender hierarchy is specifically a result of a divine command (“ordination”) that is subsequent to Eve’s creation. Even if gender hierarchy is subsequent to creation, however, that fact does not imply either that the command results merely “from the arbitrary fiat of absolute power” () or that the purpose of such a command is extrinsic to the human good. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene,” . Ibid., –. PART III INTRODUCTION

 On “metanarrative realism,” which stands in contrast to the aims of Enlightenment metanarratives to master reality by means of unfolding foundational reason, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, ), .  BIBLICAL METANARRATIVE AS RULE OF FAITH  As I explain in Chapter , my emphasis upon Milton’s view of Christian virtue (or sanctification, or charity) as an uncoerced result of saving faith does not imply that Milton held a pacifist view of war or that he rejected the role of coercion in the administration of civil law in a fallen world.  Regarding the specific sense in which I use the term “biblical metanarrative,” see the prefatory remarks at the beginning of Part I and Chapter  above.  As Stanley Fish, “Transmuting the Lump: Paradise Lost, –,” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary

Notes to pages 174–83

 

      



and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, points out, there is within the history of Milton criticism a direct connection between the rehabilitation of Books  and  of Paradise Lost, and the attention given to the use of typology in the epic. The tradition of giving strong attention to the use of typology in the last two books of the poem extends from the work of William Madsen and F. T. Prince in the late s, through H. R. MacCallum and B. A. Rajan in the s, to Edward Taylor at the end of the s. In each case there persists the shared view that typology is central to the poem and especially the last two books (Fish, “Transmuting the Lump,” –). Because Fish’s account of typological interpretation is influenced, however, by the Jungian orientation of Northrop Frye, Fish tends to emphasize the “spatial” rather than temporal aspects of typology (–). In this respect, his description of typology revealingly ends up sounding much like Catherine Martin’s account of “normative allegory.” Compare Fish, “Transmuting the Lump,”  and Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Compare William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. For treatments of the antitrinitarianism in De Doctrina that are more recent than the standard treatments by Carey and Patrides, see A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), and John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Regarding what De Doctrina Christiana specifically argues regarding the Trinity see Phillip J. Donnelly, Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, ), –. Because the “trinitarian” position that De Doctrina aims to refute is actually closer to modalism, the final position of the treatise is arguably a reverse-image of that taken by Stephen Nye, in The Explication of the Articles (), who contends that the usual orthodox view is simply “Tritheism” and offers instead his own explicitly modalist account. See Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . See, for example, John Thompson, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Maurice Kelley, Introduction CPW vi:; –; Compare Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, –. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, ), Canto , lines –. See, for example, Keith Stavely’s annotations for CPW viii:–. William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), –. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism,” . Stavely, CPW viii:n.



Notes to pages 184–90

 Milton’s distinction here is similar to that made by Jeremy Taylor in A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (London, ), ; , and John Hales in A Tract Concerning Schisme and Schismatiques (Oxford, ), . Milton’s definition of “heresy” is stipulative and therefore contrasts sharply with my descriptive, rhetorical definition in Chapter . What Milton calls “error” others would insist on calling “heresy.”

 PARADISE REGAINED AS RULE OF CHARITY  Edward Phillips, The Life of Mr. John Milton (), in The Early Lives of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London, ), –. This chapter revises arguments that first appeared in my article, “Paradise Regained as Rule of Charity: Religious Toleration and the End of Typology,” Milton Studies  (), –.  Phillips, Life of Mr. John Milton, . Even if one remains skeptical regarding Thomas Ellwood’s claim that he, in effect, prompted Milton to write Paradise Regained by his reaction to Paradise Lost, the basic chronology of Ellwood’s account fits with that given by Phillips. See Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (London, ), –, , –. For a fuller account of the circumstances under which Milton likely composed Paradise Regained, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, –.  Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  Ibid. –.  This is not to imply that such spiritual battle has no bodily dimension. As the poem clearly states, the “Humiliation and strong Sufferance” (PR .) involved in that battle includes the body. Rather, the point is that the nature of the power deployed by the Son is not coercive. Compare Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), –.  In Paradise Lost the term “charitie” is used to indicate that “Love” which is the “soul,” or living form, of all the other human virtues (PL .–). “Charity” also indicates the divine “Love without end” that is expressed to creatures through the Son (.) and that leads him to redeem mankind (.–). I use the term “ontic charity,” developed in preceding chapters, to indicate Milton’s way of depicting all reality as rooted in the action of peaceful gift for the good of others. See Chapter  above regarding Milton’s appeals to “charity” as a guide to biblical interpretation.  Regina M. Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies  (), –. Schwartz follows the work of Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “Standing Alone on the Pinnacle: Milton in ,” Milton Studies  (), –, and Irene Samuel, “The Regaining of Paradise,” in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –.

Notes to pages 190–201



 Christopher Hill, Milton, and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, ), .  My account of how Milton’s view of charity avoids a supplementary relation to death or sacrifice has been influenced by John Milbank, “Can Morality be Christian?” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.  Throughout his writing career, Milton repudiates salvation by works or by anything other than explicit faith. See, for example, Of Reformation (CPW i:–), Of Civil Power (CPW vii:–, –), and Of True Religion (CPW viii.–).  Anne K. Krook, “The Hermeneutics of Opposition in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Studies in English Literature  (), –.  The poem actually implies two future victories for Christ. The first is the victory over “Sin and Death” “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance” (PR .–). The other “future” victory, in relation to the poem’s temporal framework, concerns the ultimate driving of Satan and his companions from earth altogether and back to hell (.–; compare .).  For what remains the definitive study of typology and biblical precedent in Paradise Regained, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (London: Methuen, ). Compare Northrop Frye, “The Typology of Paradise Regained,” Modern Philology  (), –.  Emory Elliot, “Milton’s Biblical Style in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies  (), , claims that there are  allusions to the Book of Revelation in Paradise Regained,  of those occurring in the final fifty lines.  Compare Paradise Regained .–; .–; Revelation :–; :–.  Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation, Searched and Demonstrated out of the Natural and Proper Characters of the Visions, trans. Richard More (London, ), part :.  Mede derives the very idea of an “apocalyptick theater” specifically from his delineation of typological correspondences between the heavenly throne in Revelation :– and the “ancient encamping of God with Israel in the wilderness” in Numbers :–:. See ibid., part :–.  Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, –.  Compare ibid., –.  See, for example, Anne K. Krook, “Hermeneutics of Opposition,” –; Elliot, “Milton’s Biblical Style,” –, and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “Paradise Regained as Hermeneutic Combat,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature – (–), –.  Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” –. Compare Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, –.  SAMSON AGONISTES AS PERSONAL DRAMA  Critical treatments that give particular attention to the political dimensions of pairing the two texts include: Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The





  





Notes to pages 201–03

Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (London: Methuen, ), – ; Arnold Stein, Heroic Knowledge (; reprint Hamden, CT: Archon, ); Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Viking, ), – ; N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ), –; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Derek N. C. Wood, ‘Exiled from Light’: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Nor has the debate since resolved into much consensus. In addition to Wood’s study, recent book-length treatments of Samson Agonistes include John Shawcross, The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), and Joseph Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ). See also the recent collection of articles edited by Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich, Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, ), and Alan Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon of Samson Agonistes,” Huntington Library Quarterly  (), –, as well as treatments of the play in Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, ), – and Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Compare also Feisal G. Mohamed, “Reading Samson in the New American Century,” Milton Studies  (), –, which is exemplary in the subtlety of its treatment of Samson Agonistes, despite apparently assuming that an ontology of violence must attend the distinction between “liberty” and “license.” Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich, Introduction to Altering Eyes, . Lewalski, Life, . See, for example, David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – and Loewenstein’s more recent Representing Revolution, –, as well as Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. For those who emphasize the indeterminate character of Samson Agonistes, see Wittreich’s Shifting Contexts, Fish’s How Milton Works, and Shawcross’s Uncertain World. For arguments favoring the traditional dates of composition, –, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – and Laura L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, ), –. For those favoring an earlier date see William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell,  vols, nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – and Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. E.g., CPW i:–; CPW ii:; CPW iii:–; CPW iv:. For further historical arguments that identify Samson with, for example, the  fire of

Notes to pages 204–05

 

 



   

 



London, see Knoppers, Historicizing Milton –, and Janel Mueller, “The Figure and the Ground: Samson as Hero of London Nonconformity, – ,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Perry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), –. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, . Compare Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, –, –; Mueller, “Figure”; and Blair Worden, “Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, and History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, –. As I note in Chapter , the “Clarendon Code” refers to the series of postRestoration legislative acts that were intended specifically to enforce an Anglican state-church conformity. These included the Conventicle Act () and the Five Mile Act (). The Conventicle Act prescribed, among other things, penalties of imprisonment, fines, or removal to the colonies for those caught in attendance at a house meeting of “five or more persons in addition to the household.” See A. A. Seaton, The Theory of Toleration Under the Later Stuarts (New York: Octagon, ), . The most important classic regenerationist readings include Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, and Anthony Low, The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Although Low notes the typological aspects of Samson’s action (e.g., ), Radzinowicz makes it especially clear that a regenerationist reading of the poem does not necessarily depend upon or entail either a theologically orthodox Milton or a typological reading of the poem (). In their Introduction to Altering Eyes, Kelley and Wittreich suggest that the questions concerning Samson’s regeneration have been superseded by the debate over what the play implies regarding the culminating violence (–). Fish, How Milton Works, –. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, . John Carey, Milton (London: Evans Brothers, ), . Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September  and Samson Agonistes,” Times Literary Supplement, September , . In his ensuing letter to TLS on September , , Carey emphasizes that his “main point” concerned “Stanley Fish’s apparent belief that if a terrorist intends his act to be ‘answerable to the divine will,’ we must account it virtuous, and ‘no other standard for evaluating it exists.’” The furor raised by Carey’s article among Miltonists is evidenced by the fact that the  International Milton Congress featured no fewer than ten presentations (of those I heard) that made explicit reference to his TLS comments on Samson Agonistes. See, for example, Low, Blaze of Noon, , ; compare Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon,” . Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, –. The larger context of Milton’s own argument (CPW iv:–) makes it clear that he views Samson’s actions as proof that there is indeed biblical warrant for deposing a tyrant.



Notes to pages 205–13

 Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, , claims that “there is no equivocation on Milton’s part in his depiction of Samson’s [final] act.” Compare Joseph Wittreich, “Samson Agonistes: Thought Colliding with Thought,” in Kelley and Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes, –.  Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, .  Ibid., –.  Such a necessary connection seems to be presumed by Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, xix–xx. Some of the critics that Wittreich engages obviously do deploy some of the suppositions that he lists, but there is no necessary connection between a regenerationist reading of Samson Agonistes and any of the critical positions that he names.  Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, –.  Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon,” –.  Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes, –.  See, for example, the account of circumcision by Lauren Shohet in “Reading History with Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies  (), –.  The obvious question is therefore whether Milton implies a parallel between Pareaus’s account of the tragic fall of the Antichrist and the death of Samson. Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, –, argues that Milton intends at least to raise such a question for his readers. Milton also, however, clearly links the Philistine city of Gath, rather than Samson, with the city of Babylon in the suggestive repetition of the word “fall’n . . . fall’n” (SA –; cf. Revelation :, :, ).  Augustine, City of God, ..  David Pareaus, A Commentary Upon the Divine Revelation of the Apostle and Evangelist John, trans. Elias Arnold (Amsterdam, ), .  Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, –.  Augustine, City of God, ..  Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (New York: Oxford, ), ..–.  On the question of Dalila’s sincerity, compare Shawcross, Uncertain World, –.  In her essay, “‘Spiritual Contagion’: Male Psychology and the Culture of Idolatry in Samson Agonistes,” in Kelley and Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes, –, Jackie DiSalvo offers a sustained treatment of Dalila in relation to the discourse of idolatry. DiSalvo does not, however, take up the specific question of religious toleration. Moreover, when her conclusion cites Milton’s “incapacity to imagine any communal, participatory aesthetic” (), the argument seems to mistake the problems of our own culture for Milton’s problems.  For a detailed comparison of the many similarities between Samson Agonistes and Oedipus at Colonus, see William R. Parker, Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, ), –. More

Notes to pages 213–16



   

 

  





recent critical attention has focused on the influence of Euripides. See, for example, Mark R. Kelley, “Milton’s Euripidean Poetics of Lament,” in Kelley and Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes, –. See, for example, Sophocles, Oidipous epi Kol¯on¯oi / Oedipus at Colonus, in Sophocles, ed. and trans. by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), lines –, –. John Rumrich, “Samson and the Excluded Middle,” in Kelley and Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes, , similarly notes this point of contrast between Milton’s play and the sense of fate that informs classical Greek tragedy. Fish, How Milton Works, . Thus, Flannagan’s Riverside edition of Samson Agonistes glosses the words “but” and “default” in line  so that it reads, in effect: “had been fulfilld only through mine own fault.” Parker, Milton, . As with, for example, Edward Stillingfleet’s use of the term in his Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (London, ), Milton’s accusation of “idolatry” simply presumes a longstanding commonplace usage in Protestant polemics. In Of True Religion, Milton specifically invokes the discourse of idolatry when he turns to consider “whether Popery be tolerable or no” (CPW viii:). Milton’s initial discussion of “true religion” had already stipulated that “no true Protestant can persecute, or not tolerate his fellow Protestant, though dissenting from him in som [sic] opinions, but he must flatly deny and Renounce these two main Principles, whereon true Religion is founded” – that is, explicit faith and sola scriptura (–). Thus, when he later defines “Popery” as an illegitimate union of ecclesiastical authority and coercive civil power, Milton’s argument distinguishes sharply between Dissenters and Catholics; however, the argument also implicitly reiterates Milton’s enduring insistence that even Anglican (no less that Presbyterian) religious coercion is itself a sign of “popery” – that is “idolatry” – because the practice entails salvation by works. See my discussion of Protestant toleration in Chapter . I am grateful to Kevin Hawthorne for showing me his work on Antigone that is part of “Rhetoric and Discursive Frameworks in Sophoklean Agones” (Dissertation, University of Chicago, ). His analysis of rhetorical frameworks helped me to appreciate the detailed extent to which Milton’s dramatic strategies are indebted to ancient Greek models. Shawcross, Uncertain World, –. Ibid., . John C. Ulreich, Jr., “‘Incident to All Our Sex’: The Tragedy of Dalila,” in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), –, attempts to defend Dalila’s actions by appealing to the criterion of “charity,” but lacks a clear distinction between “charity” and the tyranny of eros. Milton stipulates that opposition to “the growth of popery” should not extend to “Forreigners,” or across national borders, given the respect due to the “Law



  

          

  

Notes to pages 216–26

of Nations” (CPW viii:). Such qualifications, however, arguably do not apply to the case of Samson and the Philistines, according to Samson, because of the state of war that exists between Israel and Philistia. See, for example, PL .–, –; .–. Compare Keeble, Literary Culture, –. For a detailed treatment of Samson Agonistes as “a meditation on the consolations, obligations, and temptations of labor after the Restoration,” see Blair Hoxby “At the Public Mill of the Philistines: Samson Agonistes and the Problem of Work after the Restoration,” in Kelley and Wittreich, eds., Altering Eyes, –. Sophocles, Antigon¯e / Antigone, in Sophocles, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), lines –. Low, Blaze of Noon, –. Ibid., . For example, Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon,” ; compare Fish, How Milton Works, –, –. Similarly, in City of God, Augustine describes Samson’s final action not as “antinomian” but as righteous obedience to a divine command (Bk. .). Compare CPW vii:; vi:, ; iii:; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, . Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon,” . Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, . Ibid., . Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, makes extensive use of Girard’s idea of “generative violence,” as presented in Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Curiously, Lieb does not engage the second half of Girard’s argument regarding the disclosure of alternatives to such violence, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). I am grateful to Dana Jillene White for sharing with me her unpublished essay in which she points out this gap in Lieb’s use of Girard. Martin Mueller, Children of Oedipus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Fish, How Milton Works, –. Compare David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), –, –.

Subject index

Abdiel –, –, – Abel ,  Abraham – Adam –, –, –, –, –, –, –, ,  “Adam Unparadized” (Trinity College manuscript)  adiaphora, or “things indifferent” , – Aeschylus  allegory and/or allegoresis , –, –, – and the Fall –, – and Milton’s Seventh Prolusion –,  and ontic privation  Philonic and Augustinian – analogy of being (analogia entis) , –, , , , nn.– antinomianism  antitrinitarianism, see Trinity, doctrine of the Apollodorus  Apology against a Pamphlet  Aquinas, Thomas Summa Theologiae and analogical predication n. arch¯e and creation –, , –, ,  and gender , –, – and monarchy ,  Areopagitica , , , , –, –, ,  “knowledge in the making”  Trial “by what is contrary” , , –, , ,  Aristotelian four causes – Aristotelian reason as choosing (proairesis) – in Areopagitica – in Of Education  Aristotle ,  Nicomachean Ethics ,  Poetics – Arminianism , , , –, , , 

Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio , , –, – “matter” in , –,  Auerbach, Erich , – Augustine , –, ,  City of God  De Trinitate –,  Letters n. Berry, Wendell  biblical metanarrative –, , , –, , –, , , , –, – Bloom, Harold  Borris, Kenneth –, , – Bryson, Michael –, , , –, , – Buchanan, George Jephtha ,  Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress  Caiaphas  Cain  Calvin, John Institutes , – Calvinism –, –, –, ,  Carey, John  Celsus  chaos and matter, in Paradise Lost , – charity ethical (see also justification and sanctification), , –, , –, – ontic (see also ontology of peace), –, , –, –, , – and theodicy – Charles I, King, see Stuart, Charles Christology in Paradise Lost –, –, ,  Cicero , , 





Subject index

Clarendon Code ,  Connor, John ,  conscience, see reason, “right reason” Conventicle Act ()  Council of Trent  Cromwell, Oliver , ,  Cummings, Brian – Danielson, Dennis , , –,  De Doctrina Christiana ,  antitrinitarianism in , ,  Arminianism in ,  authorship of n. Christology in –, ,  monism in , , –, , , – Demosthenes  Descartes, Ren´e , , , , –, , , , ,  Donatists ,  Downame, George Commentarii in P. Rami Dialecticam , , ,  Dryden, John  Eikonoklastes  Empson, William , , – Enoch  Epicurus , , – Erastians , ,  Euripides ,  Eve –, –, –, –, –,  faculty psychology , –, – faith and works see justification and sanctification Fall, the –, , , –, – Fallon, Stephen  Farwell, Marilyn  fate , –, ,  Father, God the , , , , –, –,  as Arminian –,  as tyrant , –, –, – Fish, Stanley , , –, , , , , , , –, – Five Mile Act ()  Flannagan, Roy  form (formal cause) and matter –, –, – Forsyth, Neil –, , , –, –, – and “Combat Myth” , – Foucault, Michel – Fowler, Alastair 

freedom, or liberty as chaos, or indeterminacy , , , , , ,  as power to accomplish good end , , –, ,  gender allegory and –, – critical debates on Milton and – hierarchy and –, – Geneva Bible  Girard, Ren´e  glory , , , , , , –, , ,  Goliath  Hart, David B. , n. Haskin, Dayton  Heraclitus  heresy – Herman, Peter C. , –, , ,  Hesiod ,  Hill, Christopher  Hobbes, Thomas , –, –, , , , ,  De Cive  Leviathan , –,  Holy Spirit –,  Homer , –,  Hooker, Richard  Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, The – Hosea  Hughes, Merritt  Hunter, William ,  Hutchinson, Lucy Order and Disorder  Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon  intertextuality, biblical –, , –, , , , , , ,  Jeffrey, David viii Job –, , – Joshua  justice, divine  in Paradise Lost justification and sanctification or faith and works (ethical charity) , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, , , –, ,  Kahn, Victoria – Keckermann, Bartholomew Alexander Systema Logica Tribus Libris Adornatum  Kelley, Mark  Kerrigan, William , 

Subject index Klinge, Markus  Knoppers, Laura  Krook, Anne  Lactantius ,  Leibnitz Th´eodic´ee , – Leonard, John  Lewalski, Barbara ,  liberty, see freedom Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church,  Loewenstein, David –,  Low, Anthony – Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois – Machiavelli, Niccol`o , – Maltzahn, Nicholas von vii Martin, Catherine Gimelli , – matter as materia prima, or “first matter” , , , –, , – and monism –, , –,  Matthew, gospel of  McColley, Diane ,  Mede, Joseph  metanarrative, biblical,see biblical metanarrative Michael, the angel , – Milbank, John  monism and Protestant toleration , , – anthropological –, –, , , ,  ontological –, , – Moses  Mueller, Janel  Mueller, Martin  “New Milton Criticism” – Nimrod ,  Noah  nominalism –,  Norbrook, David , – Of Education, , –, , , , , ,  Of Reformation , ,  Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, , , , , , –, , –, –,  Ong, Walter –, , –, – “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long PARLIAMENT”  ontology –, –, –,  of peace, or charity , , , , –, , –, , , , , –, , , –, –



of violence –, , , –, –, , –, –, , –,  Origen  Ovid  Paradise Lost , , , –, , , –, , ,  as biblical epic –, , –, ,  divine justice in , –, –, , , –, , – divine kingship in , –, – faculty psychology in , –, – heterodoxy of De Doctrina Christiana and –,  Providence in , –,  Romantic interpretations of , – typology in , –, – Paradise Regained , –, , , , – baptism in – divine kingship in – as hermeneutic contest , – in relation to Paradise Lost –, –, – typology in , –, ,  “paradise within” , , –,  Pareaus, David  Parker, Samuel Ecclesiastical Politie  Phillips, Edward  Philo of Alexandria – De Opificio Mundi – Plato , , , , –,  on eternity  Republic  Symposium  Plutarch  predestination , –,  Presbyterians , –, –, , , ,  Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio on Samson – Protestant toleration –, , –, , –, –, –, , –, –, –, , , , –,  Providence (see also Paradise Lost, Providence in) , –,  Psalm  Milton’s  verse translation of – and Paradise Lost , , –, –, ,  Racine, Jean Athalie  Radzinowicz, Mary Ann  Ramism and Ramist logic , , –, –, –



Subject index

Ramus, Peter Dialecticae Libri Duo ,  Raphael, the angel , , –, , –, , – reason, modern –,  in Milton studies –, –, , , – as sheer necessity, compulsion, or calculation , –, –, , , , –, , , , –, ,  reason and reasoning, Miltonic “biblical reasoning” or “scriptural reasoning” –, ,  Christo-poetic , , , , ,  discursive –, , –, , , –,  distinct from logic –, , , , ,  Divine Reason, see Son of God ethico-cognitive, “right reason” (recta ratio), or conscience , –, , , , , –, –, –, –, , –, , , , –, , –, , ,  “peaceful difference” , , , –, , , , , , , , ,  Richardson, Alexander Logician’s School-Master, The  Rudrum, Alan , – rule of faith (analogia fidei), or rule of charity –, , , , , –, , –, ,  Rumrich, John , , , , , ,  Samson Agonistes , –, , , – conscience and virtuous action in – critical debate concerning – Dalila –, – and Dissenters’ responses to state persecution – Harapha – Manoa – and Paradise Regained –, – “Publick Officer” – Restoration context and –,  tragic form and biblical narrative in , –, – worship and idolatry in – sanctification, see justification and sanctification Satan , , –, , , –, –, , –, –, , –, , , , – Schwartz, Regina  Shakespeare, William pages="–+">Hamlet, social contract –, n. sola scriptura, sola fide, or sola gratia , , , , , 

Son of God –, , –, –, – and divine kingship , , –, – as divine Logos, Word and Reason , , , –, , , , ,  as the Father’s “Wisdom” and self-revelation , , ,  as the “first peaceful difference” from the Father , , –, , , ,  Sophocles ,  Antigone –,  Oedipus at Colonus , ,  Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene  Stavely, Keith  Stillingfleet, Edward Unreasonableness of Separation  Stuart, Charles (King Charles I) ,  Targoff, Ramie – Tenure of Kings and Magistrates , –, , ,  Tetrachordon  theodicy , , –, –, , , –, – Thirty-Nine Articles ,  Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes , , –, –, –, , , , , , ,  Trinity, doctrine of the , –, , , –, , ,  Trubowitz, Rachel  typology ,  and biblical metanarrative , , , , , , ,  definition , – in Paradise Lost , , –, –, – in Paradise Regained , –, ,  and Samson Agonistes , –,  Walker, William , – war in heaven , –, –, – and moving mountains – Weiss, Brian  Westminster Assembly ,  Westminster Confession  wheat and tares, parable of  Wittreich, Joseph , , , , – Wood, Derek  Worden, Blair , ,  Xenophon  Young, R. V. n. n.

Index of Scripture references

Genesis   :  :     , , –, , – : – Deuteronomy :  Psalms  see Subject index :  Zechariah :– – Matthew   Luke :–  :–  :– – John : , n. :  : , n. :–  :–  : 

Romans :  :  1 Corinthians :–  :–  Galatians :  Ephesians :  : ,  Colossians :  Titus :  2 Peter :–  Revelation :  :   – :  :   , , –, –, , –  

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