Light on, or at least in, Book III

Looking back at Book III, one could very well call it the "book of light." It begins with the invocation to light,

Bright effluence of bright essence increate

.and rises to a climax on the source of worldly light:

The golden Sun in splendor likest Heaven

This being Milton, there's more to light than first appears, and we're not bathed in the neutral, evenly distributed fluorescence of the observational laboratory of scientific reason. 

The invocation in Book III addresses primordial holy Light, not the sun. If we think of "light" as a spectrum from the highest holy light to the dimmest light of "darkness visible," we discover that at the high end, we see nothing: God's beam is blinding, even when in a cloud. And material light is not invariably revealing: Satan manages to hide his actual identity from the sharpest-eyed archangel, Uriel, precisely at the brightest spot in creation.

Clearly (no pun intended) Milton is trying to establish light's importance even as he suggests critical ways in which it can fall short. Light does not show us, our eye -- everything we need to see, to understand. We learn of God and the Son's plan to counter Satan's schemes via a difficult, tightly coiled verbal maze of an argument; nearly all of it deals with supersensory concerns, like Justice, Mercy, and Grace.

Light can also lead astray. Satan sees the ladder to Heaven, but is attracted like a moth to the Sun, a shiny new bauble.

All of which is to suggest that there's more to what is going on in Paradise Lost than meets the eye. The power of light to carry or to reveal knowledge, truth, is shown as compromised, less than all-sufficient, fallible. When Uriel describes creation, first comes an act of the word:

I saw when at his Word the formless Mass,
This worlds material mould, came to a heap:
Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar [ 710 ]
Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd;

One might ask, what was it that he "saw", and how could he see it? Only at the Word's "second bidding" did light cause the world to appear. We're dealing with something more - or other - than purely a solar system.

For the reader, it's perhaps illuminating to sense the reservation, the skeptical brackets, being put around light in the poem. This may resonate more when Lucifer seduces with his promise to enlighten Adam and Eve.

One tweets, the other doesn't

jillybobww: Hey ... lookee there. The word "Ides" is trending, and a certain pubescent vocal performer is not. Who says Twitter doesn't have cultcha?

This morning on Twitter, one of the hottest topics is "Ides." It seems everyone must take time from their day to tweet the fact that it was on this day 2054 years ago (give or take a bit of calendar tweaking) that a band of Roman conspirators ended the life of Julius Caesar (and two years later, deified him).

Twitter seems to partake of such short-lived conversational modes  - whatever is occurring in the moment becomes a hot topic, and, a moment later, belongs to oblivion.

One might call such linguistic environments "modes of the short now" - the preoccupation is of the instant, tending to the trivial, the ephemeral, the next fashionable thing, the hyped meme, or nano-meme. These stand in contrast with the long now, the now found in theological and philosophical notions of eternal consciousness, godlike, synchronic apprehension of all time, past and future, within one pervasive, perdurable, uninflected NOW.

I mention this just to briefly note that Milton does a stunning thing with these very different kinds of temporality in Book III. It's quite clever, and easy to summarize. The last we see of Satan is at the very end of Book II, when he's crawling out of the realm of Chaos like a waterbird from oil sludge, sees the pendant world hanging by a golden chain:

Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies. [ 1055 ]


Then comes Book III's soaring invocation to light, followed by the first appearance of God:


Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure Empyrean where he sits
High Thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye ...


And it's in this now that he spies Satan:


Coasting the wall of Heav'n on this side Night
In the dun Air sublime, and ready now
To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet


Satan's now is the now of finite movement, of step after step as he clambers out of the abyss and onto the backside of the universe. He's approaching, he's not yet landed. Look what Milton now does: he presents the dialog of God with the Son, in which is foreseen and foretold the outcome of Satan's efforts, Adam and Eve's fall, the resulting impact upon mankind, and the provision of a new plan that involves the son's volunteering to become the new Adam, and to die for man and for Justice, leading to an eventual resurrection, day of doom, transformation of the world in refining fire, and elevation of the Son as God/Man to eternal sanctity in a Paradise in which God is "all in all."


Milton has compressed the entire "Satan problem" and its solution, and with it the entirety of human history and God's sacred plan, into a few hundred lines, ending:

O unexampl'd love, [ 410 ]
Love no where to be found less then Divine!
Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Fathers praise disjoine. [ 415 ]


At which point the narrator takes up the thread from the moment that Satan "lights" on the world:


Mean while upon the firm opacous Globe
Of this round World, whose first convex divides
The luminous inferior Orbs, enclos'd [ 420 ]
From Chaos and th' inroad of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks: 

In the interval between Satan's approach and his actual alighting, Milton has pinched the Now of God, in which Satan's future, and that of mankind, are decided. Indeed, a future is literally provided for humanity: an alternative to the now of finitude and Death. The architecture of Milton's narrative dramatically gives us two kinds of time, two kinds of now. Satan tweets; Providence...provides.

Seeing man before and from above

Here's God in Book III, talking with his Son, about his "youngest son," man. (We recall from Genesis the repeated pattern of the younger son getting preferential treatment). I've put in bold words that are referred to in the commentary below, or that will probably receive attention in a future post:

Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change [ 125 ]
Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree
Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordain'd
Thir freedom, 
...


Man shall not quite be lost, but sav'd who will,
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew [ 175 ]
His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthrall'd
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe,
By me upheld, that he may know how frail [ 180 ]
His fall'n condition is, and to me ow
All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace
Elect above the rest; so is my will:
The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warnd [ 185 ]
Thir sinful state, and to appease betimes
Th' incensed Deitie while offerd grace
Invites; for I will cleer thir senses dark,
What may suffice, and soft'n stonie hearts
To pray, repent, and bring obedience due. [ 190 ]
To Prayer, repentance, and obedience due,
Though but endevord with sincere intent,
Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide
My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, [ 195 ]
Light after light well us'd they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.

Much is coiled within these compact lines. For now, let's just note that compositionally, placing this scene -- in which God decides what he will do to, for, and about his creature man after man has been seduced by Satan -- placing that statement of intent before we meet Adam and Eve for the first time, is at the very least unorthodox.

God is talking about man's "nature," and how he would change it if he were to alter man's powers of judgment and choice. Here's a clue then, as to what human nature means to God and presumably Milton: the freedom and power of judging and choosing. Change that and we are no longer human.

Then God, foreseeing the Fall, talks about what he will do for man after it: There are a lot of verbs: He will "uphold" man -- He'll put him back on "even ground" with Satan, giving man another shot at being "saved," at "deliv'rance." He'll place his umpire, conscience, in man, clear his senses, and soften his heart.

This seems like radical surgery. Clearly much has happened to man -- he's fallen, he's lost his way, his senses, and become a brute -- a Hobbesian brute? -- but, instead of consigning him to a war of all against all, God holds him up, returns the playing field to even, clears our senses, and softens our hearts.

What's amazing is that the intention of God in his first creation of man here is stated, then revised -- the human being that emerges after the Fall, with conscience, on even ground, upheld with cleared senses and a sensible heart is not the same creature that had been planted in the Garden of Eden.

That is to say, before we meet Adam and Eve for the first time, we are already getting wind of the tragic changes resulting from the Fall, and of how God will intervene to help them out -- not changing their nature, but equipping them for a new form of battle.

As storytelling, this is very unusual, and bold. Before we have met Adam and Eve, we are told of three temporal moments in their history: their original state (very briefly), then their condition after falling, and then a prospective account of the situation after their rehabilitation (which some have referred to as the "human condition"). From that we can read backwards, so to speak, to get some notion of what they - we - were before the Fall. That being was free, but it was another creature -- far from the vulnerable, darkened, conscience-burdened one we see in the mirror.

In a sense, we sharing a glimpse of the atemporal, eternal vision that the narrator ascribes to God:

Him God beholding from his prospect high,

Wherein past, present, future he beholds,

whose scope of vision offers the reader a knowledge of himself as a complex, conditional being with a history richer than anything he could come to know experientially through his own fallen selfhood.

Situating God rhetorically

One comment with regard to both Prof. Rogers' and William Empson's discussions of God's council scene in Book III: They address the overt "semantic content" of God's dialog with the son without spending much time either on the rhetorical character of that dialog, or how the scene, situated after the quite similar council scene in hell (Book II), plays off its demonic counterpart by significant contrast.

A few things to consider: how does the dialog in Heaven proceed, as compared with that in Satan's council? Are there meaningful similiarities between them? Differences? How does the way God and the Son speak compare with the manner of Satan and his cronies?

Milton's problematical God

The burden of Milton's theodicy is to justify the ways of God to man, and this has led some readers to fault the poet, and others to condemn the theology the poet says he's trying to justify. Impossible to address the whole argument, but a few highlights, first from John Rogers:

From lecture 13:

I think it has to be seen as authentic and sincere, Milton's desire to justify God. He needs to imagine a God who can't be held responsible for the Fall because only a blameless God could be worthy of Milton's praise or even worthy of Milton's interest. Frankly, I think that Milton does a pretty decent job of representing a God who cannot be seen as some kind of guilty coconspirator in the Fall of man. He does a pretty decent job vindicating God, but then when we think about it, there are few poets more adept at the art of vindication than John Milton. Milton had been practicing the art of vindication and the art of defense, something like the art of criminal defense, all of his life.

Later:

Milton first of all has to reject the orthodox understanding of the Christian redemption. I'll remind you what that looks like. In the New Testament, and for a lot of Christian theologians, the redemption seems to work along the lines of something like a revenge sacrifice and, as cultural anthropologists have taught us, there is something like a primitive logic, an intensely primitive logic, at work behind the notion of the Christian notion of the crucifixion. One of the Father's sons, Adam, has died and so the Father will avenge that death by murdering someone else. Of course, that means murdering another son. This model of redemption is based on the repetition, or a repetition, of the initial crime, and this logic of repetition, I think, is largely responsible for that rhetoric of repetitiveness that we hear so often in the Father's speech. According to this -- we can think of it as a sacrifice theory of redemption or of the atonement, God chooses to sacrifice his son since someone is going to have to be punished for Adam's sin. The logic demands that.

But Milton, I think, can imagine no aspect of his religion, no aspect of Christianity, more barbaric than the image of the Father's willing sacrifice of his son. This would be a God truly unworthy of Milton's justification. Milton's struggling here, and there are a few of his contemporaries who are doing the same thing in the seventeenth century. He's struggling to bring Christianity in line with certain standards of rationality and, as Dr. Johnson had said, in the rest of the sentence that I wrote on the board, Milton wants to show the reasonableness of religion; and so Milton replaces the sacrifice model of the redemption with something like a satisfaction model of redemption. According to this way of thinking, in Adam's sin, a debt has been incurred, and this debt can be satisfied by someone else's payment so revenge is no longer the motive. There is something impersonal about this new way of imagining the atonement, and it's here that Milton gives the notion of the Christian redemption its particular Miltonic twist. Milton's Father does not willingly sacrifice the Son. It's magnificent: he simply asks for a volunteer, and the Son out of his goodness volunteers. It's something like an economic desire simply to balance the books.

The Son chooses to humiliate himself and subsequently God chooses to compensate that humiliation with the Son's supreme exaltation. You see the extent of this compensation at line 311 in Book Three, page 265 near the bottom of the page. God says to the Son:

Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign

Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,

Anointed universal King; all Power

I give thee, reign for ever, and assume

Thy Merits; under thee as Head Supreme

Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions I reduce…

To reward the Son for having sacrificed himself, the Father is going to give the Son all power. (Emphasis added)

This rewarding of the son was viewed by William Empson as a form of abdication. More on Empson, and on "Milton's God," here. Empson's views were admired and pilloried by various readers. He defended his interpretation in a 1978 letter to the NYRB, which in part reads:

The chief new defense invented for God is that he intends to resign, and will do so as soon as he conscientiously can, as soon as a workable alternative to his rule has been prepared. God is at his worst when we first hear from him, early in Book III, but he is soon won over by the Son and speaks with magnificent generosity, then as on all later occasions, when he foresees his eventual abdication. But somehow, and Milton can hardly be expected to explain why (p. 145), the necessary political lay-out could only be attained through a long and painful training for both men and angels, with many casualties. Naturally God is bad when he acts as a dictator, because dictatorship is inherently bad, but he knows, as Cromwell had known, that he must labor to build a situation that makes democracy possible. No wonder the recitation of history is so dismal in the last two books. ... 

Christopher Hill gives me welcome support for the idea that God is going to abdicate, saying that it is found in a number of Ranters and suchlike bold men. But they seem to have expected a kind of palace revolution, whereas Milton presents it as a plan which the Creator has been evolving since the start of time.