Milton's God and Wagner's Wotan

Anyone who subscribes to the New York Review of Books should have a look at Stephen Greenblatt's piece, "The Lonely Gods." Here's the beginning of the article from the NYRB site:

When James Levine’s tangled halo of white hair was picked up by the spotlight shining down over the orchestra pit at the May 9 performance of Die Walküre, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the audience roared with pleasure and relief. With good reason. Levine’s bad back and other health woes had forced him to pull out of multiple events he was scheduled to conduct, including one recent performance of this opera, the second in the Ring cycle. But there were no signs of diminished vigor or control on that evening.

Greenblatt eventually gets to something important regarding the visions of divine power and human freedom as found in Paradise Lost and Die Walkure, but the full article is behind a paywall. Thanks to Jutta I have a print-out and will be happy to share. Here's a comment on it from a listserv. By all means have a look, especially if you happened to catch the recent Met Opera performance of Wagner's opera.

Milton's Hamlet?

From a review of Harold Bloom's latest book, The Anatomy of Influence.

“The Anatomy of Influence” is Bloom’s effort — his last, he says — to recalibrate his great theory, only shorn of its “gnomic” obscurities and written in “a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking.” One of those changes is that over time his notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.

In a superb chapter, “Milton’s Hamlet,” Bloom shows how the Satan of “Paradise Lost” is the offspring of Hamlet, each a soliloquist who stands at a remove from the tragedy that engulfs him, puzzling out eloquent conundrums that press toward “depths beneath depths,” limitless self-consciousness. “It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not,” Bloom writes. “Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza.”

Book VI: Bum's Rush

As our reading of book 6 comes near to the end, a few things stood out in our discussion. To briefly summarize, Milton pulls out all the stops in bringing the first, cyclic half of his poem to a climax:

- the three-day structure of the book echoes the larger three-part structure of the poem, and of sacred history, which begins with a war in heaven, continues with a messianic triumph on Earth, and concludes with an apocalyptic final battle at the end of time.

- the hint that God and his creation are moving toward an ultimate convergence when God shall be "all in all."

- the diminished role of Satan, who is not directly presented or given a speech, yet ends up being mercilessly parodied.

- Milton's flawless use of Homer and the Bible, especially Exodus and Ezekiel, in portraying the action of the third day, when the Son in his Chariot singlehandedly triumphs over the rebel angels. The parallel with Achilles, whose rage dooms him, and the parody of Satan as a misguided Moses, leading his people to take a final stand before an onrushing King, only to find that instead of the Red Sea rolling back, the walls of heaven part to disclose a Promised Wasteland.

- The remarkable structure of the poem that presents a complete whole, or circle, narrating the doom of fallen Satan, then with Book VII opens a new book, a new world, and a new sense of what is at stake, of what can be lost, and where this might lead,

with wandering steps and slow.

Whatever the second half of Paradise Lost is, it is not a circle.

Notes on the Chariot of the Son

The chariot in Book 6 draws upon the vision in Ezekiel:

The Biblical Merkabah

See also: angelology

According to the verses in Ezekiel and its attendant commentaries, the analogy of the Merkaba image consists of a chariot made of many angels being driven by the "Likeness of a Man." Four angels form the basic structure of the chariot. These angels are called the "Chayot" חיות (lit. living creatures). The bodies of the "Chayot" are like that of a human being, but each of them has four faces, corresponding to the four directions the chariot can go (north, east south and west). The faces are that of a man, a lion, an ox (later changed to a cherub in Ezekiel 10:14) and an eagle. Since there are four angels and each has four faces, there are a total of sixteen faces. Each Chayot angel also has four wings. Two of these wings spread across the length of the chariot and connected with the wings of the angel on the other side. This created a sort of 'box' of wings that formed the perimeter of the chariot. With the remaining two wings, each angel covered its own body. Below, but not attached to the feet of the "Chayot" angels are other angels that are shaped like wheels. These wheel angels, which are described as "a wheel inside of a wheel", are called "Ophanim" אופנים (lit. wheels, cycles or ways). These wheels are not directly under the chariot, but are nearby and along its perimeter. The angel with the face of the man is always on the east side and looks up at the "Likeness of a Man" that drives the chariot. The "Likeness of a Man" sits on a throne made of sapphire.

The Bible later makes mention of a third type of angel found in the Merkaba called "Seraphim" (lit. "burning") angels. These angels appear like flashes of fire continuously ascending and descending. These "Seraphim" angels powered the movement of the chariot. In the hierarchy of these angels, "Seraphim" are the highest, that is, closest to God, followed by the "Chayot", which are followed by the "Ophanim." The chariot is in a constant state of motion, and the energy behind this movement runs according to this hierarchy. The movement of the "Ophanim" is controlled by the "Chayot" while the movement of the "Chayot" is controlled by the "Seraphim". The movement of all the angels of the chariot are controlled by the "Likeness of a Man" on the Throne.

Part of a Hasidic explanation:

The Man on the throne represents God, who is controlling everything that goes on in the world, and how all of the archetypes He set up should interact. The Man on the throne, however, can only drive when the four angels connect their wings. This means that God will not be revealed to us by us looking at all four elements (for instance) as separate and independent entities. However, when one looks at the way that earth, wind, fire and water (for instance) which all oppose each other are able to work together and coexist in complete harmony in the world, this shows that there is really a higher power (God) telling these elements how to act.

Following Moloc(h)

Gabriel meets "Moloc" in Bk. 6.355:

Mean while in other parts like deeds deservd
Memorial, where the might of Gabriel fought, [ 355 ]
And with fierce Ensignes pierc'd the deep array
Of Moloc furious King, who him defi'd
And at his Chariot wheeles to drag him bound
Threatn'd, nor from the Holie One of Heav'n
Refrein'd his tongue blasphemous; but anon [ 360 ]
Down clov'n to the waste, with shatterd Armes
And uncouth paine fled bellowing.

We readers have met Moloc twice before. The first time was in Bk. 1 -- he got top billing as Satan's henchmen were identified as the pagan gods:

First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,
Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud
Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire [ 395 ]
To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart [ 400 ]
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His Temple right against the Temple of God
On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove
The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. [ 405 ]

And again in Bk 2.43 ff, at the council in Pandemonium, Moloc argues for "open Warr":

He ceas'd, and next him Moloc, Scepter'd King
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair: [ 45 ]
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not, and these words thereafter spake. [ 50 ]

My sentence is for open Warr: Of Wiles,
More unexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in Arms, and longing wait [ 55 ]
The Signal to ascend, sit lingring here
Heav'ns fugitives, and for thir dwelling place
Accept this dark opprobrious Den of shame,
The Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns
By our delay? no, let us rather choose [ 60 ]
Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once
O're Heav'ns high Towrs to force resistless way,
Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear [ 65 ]
Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels; and his Throne it self
Mixt with Tartarean Sulphur, and strange fire,
His own invented Torments. But perhaps [ 70 ]
The way seems difficult and steep to scale
With upright wing against a higher foe.
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful Lake benumm not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend [ 75 ]
Up to our native seat: descent and fall
To us is adverse. Who but felt of late
When the fierce Foe hung on our brok'n Rear
Insulting, and pursu'd us through the Deep,
With what compulsion and laborious flight [ 80 ]
We sunk thus low? Th' ascent is easie then;
Th' event is fear'd; should we again provoke
Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find
To our destruction: if there be in Hell
Fear to be worse destroy'd: what can be worse [ 85 ]
Then to dwell here, driv'n out from bliss, condemn'd
In this abhorred deep to utter woe;
Where pain of unextinguishable fire
Must exercise us without hope of end
The Vassals of his anger, when the Scourge [ 90 ]
Inexorably, and the torturing hour
Calls us to Penance? More destroy'd then thus
We should be quite abolisht and expire.
What fear we then? what doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which to the highth enrag'd, [ 95 ]
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential, happier farr
Then miserable to have eternal being:
Or if our substance be indeed Divine,
And cannot cease to be, we are at worst [ 100 ]
On this side nothing; and by proof we feel
Our power sufficient to disturb his Heav'n,
And with perpetual inrodes to Allarme,
Though inaccessible, his fatal Throne:
Which if not Victory is yet Revenge. [ 105 ]

He ended frowning, and his look denounc'd
Desperate revenge, and Battel dangerous
To less then Gods.


Milton was surely aware of the Medieval and Renaissance sources for demons, including grimoires like the Pseudomonarchia Daimonum and The Lesser Key of Solomon. Asmodeus appears in these, but not Moloch.

Note the word that clings to Moloch. First he's the "furious King," then the "horrid King," and then, "the Scepter'd King."

Quite a bit about him can be found in the Old Testament.

"Liquid Texture:" Epic Evanescence in P.L. Book 6

A long-ish post -- I hope it begins to tap into larger themes that have preoccupied this blog from the start.

As noted a while back, Book 6 thrusts us into territory that we've only glimpsed before in Paradise Lost. The epic/mock epic battle of the immortal angels poses a challenge Milton must have thought about for a good long time: how to present a battle scene that can draw upon the potent epic voice of Homer and Virgil, and include the many standard features of war poetry that accompany that voice -- the brave talk and repartee, the dual of two great fighters, the glory achieved in death, the clash of weapons and the strategies of generals in battle -- how to present this in Heaven?

The other day we looked at this depiction of Satan in the midst of the strife:

long time in eeven scale [ 245 ]
The Battel hung; till Satan, who that day
Prodigious power had shewn, and met in Armes
No equal, raunging through the dire attack
Of fighting Seraphim confus'd, at length
Saw where the Sword of Michael smote, and fell'd [ 250 ]
Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway
Brandisht aloft the horrid edge came down
Wide wasting; such destruction to withstand
He hasted, and oppos'd the rockie Orb
Of tenfold Adamant, his ample Shield [ 255 ]
A vast circumference:

In this "raunging" we see the physical dominance of the Homeric warrior in motion; we can almost feel the weariness of fighters, who, after a long day under the hot sun battling their enemies, sense that things can go either way, and then see their leader stand forth to do even greater deeds.

Milton is telling it here just as an ancient epic poet would, full of thrust and parry, the arduous heat of battle and the suspensful uncertainty of outcome. Yet we know, because Milton has made it clear from the beginning, that the rules here are different. These armies are self-organizing, require no leaders, and consist of vast ethereal beings who cannot be killed. Here are Satan and Michael:

two broad Suns thir Shields [ 305 ]
Blaz'd opposite, while expectation stood
In horror; from each hand with speed retir'd
Where erst was thickest fight, th' Angelic throng,
And left large field, unsafe within the wind
Of such commotion, such as to set forth
Great things by small, If Natures concord broke,
Among the Constellations warr were sprung,
Two Planets rushing from aspect maligne
Of fiercest opposition in mid Skie,
Should combat, and thir jarring Sphears confound.

Instead of seeming stymied by these complications, Milton makes a virtue of poetic necessity. After preparing the scene above, he vividly describes how Michael "shar'd" Satan with his sword:

deep entring shar'd
All his right side; then Satan first knew pain,
And writh' d him to and fro convolv'd; so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passd through him, . . .

We experience the direct horror of epic warfare . . . but only for the length of this clause; rather than ending in death, it marks the end of pathos with a comma, before moving on, as Milton's verse relentlessly does, with "but":

. . . but th' Ethereal substance clos'd [ 330 ]
Not long divisible, and from the gash
A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow'd
Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed,
And all his Armour staind ere while so bright.

Before the reader or Satan can revel in the anguish of his war wound, it's closed -- indeed, we sense as we read forward that the immediately preceding verb:

passd through him

is now capable of an entirely different reading. Instead of penetrating guts, the sword is merely splicing air. Our attention is steered from Satan's innards to the matter of a stain on his Armour. Odd indeed, and more oddness is to come.

Next come the angel medics, rushing out to bear their leader off the field -- one thinks of several fallen Homeric heroes -- e.g. the rescue of Hektor, (Iliad xiv.428) -- carried off by comrades after valiant service. But Milton's peculiar alchemy won't leave it there. The battle, the wound, the pain, the bleeding (and immediate return to wholeness) the bearing off are very fine, but look at the utterly unexpected lines the scene closes with:

Yet soon he heal'd; for Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man [ 345 ]
In Entrailes, Heart or Head, Liver or Reines;
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in thir liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more then can the fluid Aire:
All Heart they live, all Head, all Eye, all Eare, [ 350 ]
All Intellect, all Sense, and as they please,
They Limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

Instead culminating in an admiring send-off for the fallen hero, the poetry morphs into this mind-blowing disquisition upon the properties of "Spirits," involving an utterly different form of corporeality than the part/whole relations we humans are more or less stuck with. The fusion of "limb" and "limn" teeters on the grotesque, while "all Head, all Eye, all Eare" defies imagining.

Reading the War in Heaven as told by Raphael, then, is unlike other war spectacles. Somehow Milton is capable of sounding the diapasons of glory and heroism, and of instantly transforming their predictable pathos and eternizing glory into something far more imaginatively rich and strange. Readers caught up in the surreality of "all Head, all Eye, all Eare," forget Satan before he manages to get comfortable in his chariot.

Book 6 plays a remarkable poetic game. Milton is having us have it several ways in multiple registers. He delivers the heightened sonorities of classic heroics, yet as we listen they're already dissolving into something whose scope and daring novelty, for want of a better word, cause the lethal scenes we've just been enthralled by to strangely go from the mind.

It's not quite an oscillation: the battle is played for all it's worth, but even as we enter into its stirring spectacle, it's being deflated, obliterated if not annihilated.

Here is the same effect achieved in a single word:

. . . deeds of eternal fame [ 240 ]
Were don, but infinite:

Book 6 is not simply, then, a battle of good and bad angels. Or, perhaps it is, only they are the angels of classical tragedy and Biblical comedy, a war that's riven Western poetry from the moment these traditions were first brought into enigmatic synthesis.

Polkinghorne Interview

… a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

Those intrigued by Milton's effort to grapple with the question of scientific authority within a theological frame that posits free will might be interested in this interview with John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and Anglican theologian.

From the transcript:

If working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. And I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of every day. It's cloudy, it's fitful, you don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing. If you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are.

And:

20th-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical and merely clockwork view of the world. It came first of all through quantum theory. At the subatomic level, quantum events are not precise and determinate. They have a certain randomness to them. They have a certain cloudiness to them, so that that process isn't clockwork.

. . . So the world is certainly not merely mechanical. And I think, actually, we always knew that because we have always known that we are not mechanisms. We are not automata. We have the power to choose, to act in the world.

. . . 20th-century science has loosened up our view of the physical world. It's no longer a piece of gigantic cosmic clockwork. It's a world in which we can conceive ourselves as the inhabitants and acting in it and helping to bring about the future.

There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen that you haven't seen before, are always regions which are at the edge of chaos. They are regions where cloudiness and clearness, order and disorder, interlace each other. If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart. It's these ambiguous areas, where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, where the action is, if you like. And I think that reflects itself both in the development of life and in many, many human decisions.

Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos

First Edition of P.L.

A bit of Googling turned up the text of the original 1667 edition of Paradise Lost in 10 books, easily readable online here.

Barring several additions and minor modifications, the text is the one we have. But the division into 12 books for the second edition of 1674 (which is now the standard edition) came about by halving two very long books:

The original Book 7 became what we now have as book 7 and book 8.

The original Book 10 became what we know as book 11 and book 12.

Here's a collection of essays that looks at the first edition.

Vicissitude

Book 6, like Book 5, begins with a dawn:

till Morn,

Wak't by the circling Hours, with rosie hand

Unbarr'd the gates of Light.

Verity notes "rosie hand" in Jonson's Masque of Oberon - a nice version of which can be found at the link.

It might reward patience to look at how this description of dawn in Heaven differs from the earthly in Book 5:

There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne, [ 5 ]
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night;
Light issues forth, and at the other dore
Obsequious darkness enters, till her houre [ 10 ]
To veile the Heav'n, though darkness there might well
Seem twilight here; and now went forth the Morn
Such as in highest Heav'n, arrayd in Gold
Empyreal, from before her vanisht Night,
Shot through with orient Beams:

A few sources for P.L. 6

Andrew Marvell admits he had his doubts about Paradise Lost:

When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown'd, Gods Reconcil'd Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,

One has to wonder if those dubieties peaked with the War in Heaven of Book 6. This action-packed "epic" ("mock epic" seems not right, but nearly just as right as "epic") features sword-wielding angels in cubic phalanxes, mountains flung like mudpies, a novel mode of canon-formation, truly execrable puns, and the Merkabah, a souped-up Chariot that blows away the works of drag-racing enthusiasts.


Some critics pass over Book 6 in as few words as possible. It has to be one of the strangest poetic concoctions ever undertaken, and it's a measure of the poet's confidence that he boldly proceeded with his over-the-top treatment of the war of Satan against the Heavenly Hosts in such detail -- a scene that receives the barest mention in a few scattered places in the Bible. After the quiet meal and contemplative conversation of Book 5, Book 6 is non-stop action. But the strange poetic mode might prod us to wonder: what is action?

Shackling Michael and Gabriel in Homeric garb is one thing -- after all, they are traditionally envisioned as warriors. But the escalation of the techniques of violence from swords to howitzers to mountains seems all Milton, and it risks falling into comic-book bathos as precipitously as Satan and his legions plummet into the gaping maw of hell at the book's end. Once again in the poem, a fall is staged, but here in full military regalia. With Marvell, we might want to ask: what was he thinking?


A few bits of fable and old song to have in mind for Book 6 would necessarily include Hesiod's battle of the Olympians and Titans from his Theogony, Homer's accounts of duels and combat in the Iliad, the chariot of Ezekiel 1 and 10, and the allusions to the war in heaven in Rev. 12. If others come to mind, be sure to share them as we make our way through this strangest of literary depictions of war.

From "Who saw?" to "I see"

This post is a bit long, and not finished. Just trying to tie together several threads that emerged from our close look at Book 5 of Paradise Lost this fall.

We noted the other day a contrast in the poetics of the book: on earth, the rich, full-blooded Keatsian bounty of Eve's table:

fruit of all kindes, in coate,
Rough, or smooth rin'd, or bearded husk, or shell
She gathers, Tribute large, and on the board
Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the Grape
She crushes, inoffensive moust, and meathes [ 345 ]
From many a berrie, and from sweet kernels prest
She tempers dulcet creams,

In heaven, the somewhat anodyne, music-box routine of the angels:

Forthwith from dance to sweet repast they turn [ 630 ]
Desirous, all in Circles as they stood,
Tables are set, and on a sudden pil'd
With Angels Food, and rubied Nectar flows
In Pearl, in Diamond, and massie Gold,
Fruit of delicious Vines, the growth of Heav'n.

On the level of sheer poetry, the book is already arguing that to be human is to share Satan's impatience with too much passive ease and involuntary order.

Book 5 looks at how we got from paradise to humanity -- the problem of the fall, and of knowledge -- from a variety of perspectives. As Professor Rogers has noted, the poem opens out to multiple models of the world that are not necessarily in agreement with each other:

As a poem, Paradise Lost places all of its divergent theories and all of its competing ideologies and visions of the way the world works -- places them all side by side on something like a level playing field, the playing field of the poetic line.

We've looked in particular at the complex imagery of stars and sun, dawn and eclipse interwoven throughout the book. With regard to the theme of mind, of knowing, they offer an entirely consistent model of human understanding as illumination: a power of seeing, clarifying, distinguishing:

know that in the Soule [ 100 ]
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief

This is science, and it's entirely rooted in nature and compatible with the classical model of education, of paideia in Plato's sense as a turn from darkness to light, shadow to truth.

So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves [ 480 ]
More aerie, last the bright consummate floure
Spirits odorous breathes: flours and thir fruit
Mans nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital Spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense, [ 485 ]
Fansie and understanding, whence the Soule
Reason receives,

Via the alchemy of conversation, or dialog, one communes, questions and consumes, digests, ruminates and refines in the manner of the chain of being:

one Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return, [ 470 ]
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 more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure, [ 475 ]
As neerer to him plac't or neerer tending
Each in thir several active Sphears assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportiond to each kind.

As Raphael's narrative continues, God, invisible in brightness, puts something new into this order -- his only begotten Son. The dawn of this Son, unlike the natural sun, is not something that simply rises out of the order of things. It is new, and it confounds the sense of reason that has been developing throughout the book. How can the Son be new if, as Word, He created the angels and all else? Is he the same as the Father or different? The new Son disturbs, runs counter to all that can be "understood" through natural light. It's going to take more than conversation, observation, and rumination to digest this new being.

At the same time, ignorance is not an option: all are under orders to actively acknowledge and obey this power, or be forever fallen:

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. [ 615 ]

Satan will invoke reason in his resistance to this mandate:

Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchie over such as live by right [ 795 ]
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedome equal? or can introduce
Law and Edict on us, who without law
Erre not,

Satan is using all the resources of logic and rhetoric to persuade his followers. Only Abdiel remains unmoved, and intuitively goes to the question of origin, generation, primacy:

But to grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals Monarch Reigne:
Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count,
Or all Angelic Nature joind in one,
Equal to him begotten Son, by whom [ 835 ]
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev'n thee . . .

And it is this that Satan seizes upon, because he can summon reason to assist him:

who saw
When this creation was? rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?

If Abdiel can't provide empirical evidence, Satan suggests, then isn't it more likely, more"reasonable," to understand that we are self-generated?

We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power,

But as he immediately goes on to say, to understand this sort of origination is to invoke a model of the world as determined, a natural system guided by Fate:

when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

We are all sons, but natural offspring of an order that runs on its own, without any Maker. No one created the program, it just runs -- always has, always will, nothing new under the sun.

Abdiel wastes no time arguing the issue. Instead he responds to Satan's "Who saw?" with "I see":

I see thy fall
Determind,

For Abdiel, it's not reality that's determined, but Satan. By choosing to deny the Son, he denies the Father, and in choosing that, he commits to an understanding -- "reasonable," to be sure -- that removes all freedom, not from the world, but from himself. Abdiel doesn't just "see" this, he hears it:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall; [885]

Against the visual, differentiating, communal, scientific world of reasoned knowledge -- which Milton and Raphael both value as the pinnacle of human being -- this introduces another kind of knowing. Abdiel here is neither seeing Satan literally falling, nor hearing audible decrees. Yet he "sees" that Satan's passport to paradise has been cancelled, just as Adam and Eve, in a sudden revelation that has nothing to do with argument, evidence, or the light of the sun, will see that they are naked. The book ends:

And with retorted scorn his back he turn'd
On those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom'd.

Abdiel turns away from a world that is doom'd by its knowledge that actively ignores power or knowing that might lie beyond the sun.

For Milton, as for Dante, all that the human mind can learn from itself and about nature falls within this doom. This is the natural world of science, the seasons, the rising and falling sun, the arc of life, the inevitability of death.

In Dante's Purgatorio, what lies outside that system arrives with Beatrice in the garden at the top of the mount. Here in Book 5, what lies outside that system is what Satan rejects: the Son and the inexplicable obligation that is imposed with Him.

Abdiel rejects that rejection, and foretells the eclipse of Lucifer. It's interesting to note that untold millions of angels, including other Seraphim (Abdiel is "among the Seraphim" in Satan's retinue), are swayed by Satan.

Rogers argues with some detail that Paradise Lost is not coming down finally on any side of this. He says, for example:

it's not absolutely clear to me that Satan is wrong to claim that the angels are "self-rais'd / by their own quick'ning power." I think on some level this has to be seen as true, at least according to what we know of the dynamic processes in Milton's account of the monistic Creation.

More than ever, then, we as readers are Adam, hearing a story that seems to have justice on both sides. So it'll be worthwhile to look at the horrific destruction of the War in Heaven in Book 6, and at the Creation in Book 7, with these complications in mind.

Of angels and regicide

A few links pursuant to our discussion today of Book 5 of Paradise Lost:

The author of the treatise on the angels entitled Celestial Hierarchy, is known today as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The "pseudo" was added later to distinguish him from an Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34. A bit more about Dionysius is here.

The Celestial Hierarchy in full is here. More about angels here and here.

Mystical Theology, another brief work by Pseudo-Dionysius, is here.

As for our poet's writings on regicide, Milton wrote more than one defense of the actions taken by Cromwell, where the regicide is discussed and defended:

With the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended popular government and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton’s political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. Though Milton's main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin, he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor. In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr. A month after Milton had tried to break this powerful image of Charles I (the literal translation of Eikonoklastes is 'the image breaker'), the exiled Charles II and his party published a defence of monarchy, Defensio Regia Pro Carolo Primo, written by the leading humanist Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, Milton worked more slowly than usual, as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte. On 24 February 1652 Milton published his Latin defence of the English People, Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning, exemplified in the First Defence, quickly made him a European reputation, and the work ran to numerous editions.^[27]

In 1654, in response to an anonymous Royalist tract “Regii sanguinis clamor”, a work that made many personal attacks on Milton, he completed a second defence of the English nation, Defensio secunda, which praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander Morus, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor (in fact by Peter du Moulin), published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. In addition to these literary defences of the Commonwealth and his character, Milton continued to translate official correspondence into Latin. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted in total blindness by 1654, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses (helpers), one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell. One of his best-known sonnets, On His Blindness, is presumed to date from this period.

Tales told by Socrates and Raphael

As has been mentioned before, Verity's notes to Paradise Lost, some of which are available online, are quite sensible and useful. His notes to Books 5 and 6 can be accessed here.

Of the Father's 16-line decree that begins on line 600 announcing the Son, his rule, his power of mediating the Father's glory, word and will, the editor wisely begs off, saying, "upon the particular theological bearing of this passage it would, I think, be out of place to comment," confining his note to scriptural sources, of which there are several.

Rather than look at the theology (we did, somewhat, in our last session, finding it more subtle, cryptic and complex than its austere brevity lets on), I want to suggest that the shape of Raphael's story might offer some interesting parallels and contrasts with Plato's cave allegory, which Socrates tells in Republic 7. The reasons for the comparison should become clear.

In the Republic, Socrates describes the human condition as essentially benighted. We are bound, like prisoners, fixed in the darkness, compelled to look at shadows of stage props. The props are behind us, between our backs and the fire that projects their images on the cave wall.

The story tells how one of these turns his neck and sees the two-dimensional props, and immediately understands that he's been seeing something of less substance than these. He's then dragged out of the cave into the bright light of day, where he is at first blinded, then gradually becomes accustomed to the sun's illuminating actual things. Socrates assures us that if this fellow were to return to tell his fellow cave dwellers what he saw, they would take him for a madman. But the shape of the story is clear: it's a journey through space, a paradigm of the eye and of light. It moves from darkness and servitude to light and freedom, from illusion to truth, from a kind of dreamworld to a stable, clear and serene upper world where one can contemplate things as they really are. So far, Plato's tale can be said to correspond to the pervasive solar imagery of dawn in Book 5 -- a process of gradual illumination.

If we turn to the story Raphael tells Adam and Eve, we find an parallel ascent, from Nature, the garden, the flower that turns to the sun, upward along a dynamic scale of being which follows the sublimation being described by the Angel as all things are consumed, transformed and refined. At a certain point, prompted by Adam's questions, Raphael has to pause and make clear that he is about to speak of warring spirits and high matter beyond the reach of human experience:

how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfet while they stood; how last unfould
The secrets of another World, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good [ 570 ]
This is dispenc't,

He is, then, going to speak in allegory, in figure -- we must be wary of taking what is said too literally, it will require interpreting:

and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and things therein [ 575 ]
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

One might be tempted here to find a suggestion of Platonism -- the spiritual world is to the physical world as Plato's Forms are to the shadowy figures on the walls of the cave.

But the story Raphael goes on to tell is anything but a journey that ends in gradual, eye-opening enlightenment. Instead we are carried back in time to a prime moment before our world was made. And we hear, rather than see, an act of power. God decrees the rule of his Son, and almost instantaneously Satan conceives malice, revolts, and launches the cataclysm of Book 6. Instead of a tranquil contemplative conclusion, Raphael's tale rises to a moment of perfect order; at God's Word, heavenly order shatters.

Raphael's story is but a beginning -- an enigmatic opening of a story still unfolding. He will go on to speak of Satan's rout and fall, which brings us back to the opening of Book 1. But is this a purely cyclical structure? With the creation in Book 7, another chapter begins; it will encompass another fall, then all of human history, then look beyond history.

The shape of Milton's story strongly diverges from Plato's. Where the cave dweller begins in dark servitude and ascends to brilliant plenitude, the tale of the angel and the poet begins in sweetness and light, and falls into disorder and harsh history. In Plato, knowledge, gained by toil and struggle, is the goal and liberating end of education; for Adam and Eve, knowledge will neither be the goal, nor the means of leaving or repairing the fallen world. Still, the Greek world's highest literary form was tragedy, where the culture of Milton and Dante finds its fullest expression in the comic.

Labor, Science, Adamic Innocence

Jutta sends along a review of a substantial new book about early modern ways of thinking about science, labor, and the public sphere. Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England by Joanna Picciotto is about

"the fertile conjunction between literature and science as it developed in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, offering new discussions on the ideas and texts of authors such as Francis Bacon, Gerrard Winstanley, John Evelyn, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Thomas Sprat, Andrew Marvell, William Davenant, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Celia Fiennes, and above all John Milton."

In the Renaissance vision of an unfallen Adam Picciotto finds the roots of a labor that leads to the producing of truth in a disinterested way, which in turn becomes a model for benign experimentalism in modern science, according to the review. More here.

Such a view would seem congruent with the vision of man in nature that emerges in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. In the garden, Adam and Eve are rooted deeply in a natural world whose order the human mind can labor to comprehend, cultivate, and master.

High matter, warring spirits

The natural language and ordering of the world as found in Adam and Eve's morning orison, and in Raphael's description of the system of nature -- essentially a kind of heliotropism, all in keeping with the metaphorics of dawn in Book V -- seem to be jettisoned as the angel, in response to Adam's request, begins to tell the origin of the war in heaven.

High matter thou injoinst me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits;

It might be worth asking some straightforward questions about how Raphael/Milton choose to tell this story. For example, while it seems to narrate a tale with a clear beginning, a sharp conflict, and a definite ending (at the end of Book VI, which leads right into the opening scene of Book I), does it reflect the natural ordering of time, space, agency, etc. that belong to nature and science, or is this a different kind of telling? Does it obey what we normally think of as the dictates of Reason?

In the description of the angelic congregation (580 ff), much is made of hierarchies, degrees, flags, a kind of militant order, and geometry is invoked:

Thus when in Orbes
Of circuit inexpressible they stood, [ 595 ]
Orb within Orb

Any observations about this sort of mathematical ordering?

How does the angels' meal compare with that of Adam, Eve and Raphael?

Since all the angels were used to worshiping the Father, why does Satan begin to conceive malice when he hears the decree about the Son?

How odd is it to find God smiling, and the Son joining in his laughter at Satan?

How cogent is Satan's reasoning when he says:

rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;

How is Abdiel "seeing" when he says:

I see thy fall
Determind,

How does he hear/know of these decrees:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall;

Why does Abdiel leave the towers of Satan behind?

What other questions come to mind?

Dawn in P.L. 5

If we needed assurance that Paradise Lost breaks neatly into thirds, consider the opening of Book 9:

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblam'd:

The poem that opens with Satan landing in hell with a thud turns, in book 5, to a human state suffused with images of dawn, of flowers and fruits, of the primal world of humanity working the world and conversing with angels. There's a striking difference between Adam and Eve's work in the garden and the harsher world of Virgil's Georgics, where the varied labors of cultivation require unremitting effort as well as study. If labor vincit omnia in Virgil, it does so with the qualifier improbus, whose relevant meanings include restless, indomitable, persistent, as well as, connotatively, fierce and violent. One result of the Fall is that we fell into Virgil's world of labor improbus.


The opening of Book 5, the mid-section of the epic, puts enough stress on dawn that the reader would be well advised to consider the manifold chain of images that invariably comes with it: figures of a gradual (rosie steps) enlightening that entails an ever more detailed differentiation of the visible realm; initiation of the temporal realm of hours, of the approach of the sun and the train of things that derive from it, the clearing of mists, the creation of rain leading to the biosphere, where all things consume and are consumed. And Dawn is naturally accompanied by the fairest of stars (166).


Adam's paean to the sun (of this great World both Eye and Soule) greets the day, and Dawn is the "sure/pledge of day" (167-68). Before the hours run, at the very beginning, is Prime - it's worth noting how that word returns four times in Book 5. The first occurrence is when we hear Adam, calling to the still sleeping Eve, we lose the prime (21).


Lucifer precedes dawn, but dawn is followed by the advent of Raphael, who, to Adam

seems another Morn
Ris'n on mid-noon

The angel will speak to Adam and Eve of high things - the appointment of the Son as head, the revulsion of Satan, and the prophetic voice of Abdiel. At this point we are beyond the natural light of the sun, but it would be worthwhile to consider echoes of the first half of Book 5 as they occur in the second half -- Satan's speech to Beelzebub, or words such as "impair'd" and "entertain." Milton seems to not use a word without its interestingly resonating with other instances of the "same" word.

Dawn and primacy resonate throughout: Look, for example, how at the end of Book 5, Satan can't swallow the idea that he was made, authored. Parodying the voice out of the whirlwind of Job (parody is the ultimate in secondary tropism), Satan can't accept that he is not primordial:

That we were formd then saist thou? and the work
Of secondarie hands, by task transferd
From Father to his Son? strange point and new! [ 855 ]
Doctrin which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? rememberst 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-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

The speed with which the angels intuit, decide and act is in marked contrast to the gradual taking in and development of knowledge, thought and feeling in Adam and Eve, or for that matter, in the reader of Paradise Lost. For Satan there is no logical argument or intuitable evidence that anything, including the Sun/Son, preexisted him. It is never going to dawn on him that he derives from something more primal than himself. The cogent logic of Book Five's images helps us see how and why no creature other than Lucifer could be the morning star.

Constituting happiness

Latent in Milton's rendering of Paradise in PL V is a richly imagined understanding of the world, humanity, the creator, and the purpose/meaning of this inaugural state. Clearly we were meant to be happy; the beauty of the world carried significance; as fallen descendants, we must turn back to understand our present through an imagined glimpse of the world before all went astray.

A few snippets from a multi-faith conversation about pursuing happiness (from Krista Tippett's On Being) might be relevant.

Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: The definition of a Jew, Israel is as it says in Genesis 34, one who struggles, wrestles, with God and with humanity and prevails. And Jacob says something very profound to the angel. He says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." And that I feel about suffering. When something bad happens, I will not let go of that bad thing until I have discovered the blessing that lies within it.

Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori: There's this ongoing tension between seeing happiness as joining with God, as communion with God, that's only possible in the afterlife, and the insistence that human beings are created to be happy, that happiness is possible in this life. There's the particular piece of Christianity that insists that sometimes suffering is a root to happiness for the larger community. That kind of suffering may not be chosen, but it contains blessing within it. The sense that our goal is this fully restored creation at right relationship with all that is and sometimes the journey there requires us to enter into suffering and to demand, to insist, that there is blessing in the midst of that, wrestling with the angel. It must be there. You have created us to be happy, you have created us to be good, now show us. Show us the way through this. Show us the possibility for which all that is is created.

Professor Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: First of all, in the Arabic language, the word for beauty and virtue is the same, and goodness, all three. In the Islam — Muslim mind, they're not separated from each other. In the deepest sense, goodness — in the ordinary sense, these were external actions. In a deeper sense, virtue is within us. Beauty can deal also with external forms and it can deal with beauty of the soul, beauty of the spirit, within us. But beauty in a sense is a more interiorizing. Beauty is what draws us directly to the Divine, to the Divine reality.

The Dalai Lama: I always believe and also share with the people, the very purpose of our life is for happiness. Those nonbeliever also they felt that religion — religious faith is a — brings a lot of sort of complication. So without that, they feel the easier to achieve happy life. So I think the very purpose of our existence is for happiness. So that mentioned, your constitution. And then also is equally their right. You see, happiness not come from sky, but we must make a happy life. So we have a responsibility. The government cannot provide happiness. Happiness must create within ourselves and our family. So ultimately, our own responsibility, isn't it?

At the point we are in Milton's idea of humankind's trajectory, Adam and Eve need not wrestle with the angel. See Dore's image here.

Falling through time

A few images about the fall - more here, including works of Cranach, Chagall, Tintoretto, Brueghel and Poussin.

Eve persuades Adam

Hugo van Goes

Raphael

Gossaert

This day...

Book V begins with "Now" and moves from dawn's "rosie steps" in Paradise to Raphael's account of an announcement from God:

Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light, [ 600 ]
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers,
Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My onely Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold 
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heav'n, and shall confess him Lord:

As the Dartmouth site notes, this entire scene has its textual roots in Psalm 2, of which Martin Luther says, "In a word this Psalm is one of the most important Psalms of the whole Psalter":

 ¹Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

 ²The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,

 ³Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

 ⁴He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision.

 ⁵Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

 ⁶Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

 ⁷I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

 ⁸Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

 ⁹Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

 ¹⁰Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

 ¹¹Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

 ¹²Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

Here's Luther on the now-ness of "today" in verse 7:

But Christ neither began to be born, nor will ever cease to be born, but is ever being born in a present nativity. He is rightly said therefore to be begotten "today," that is, being always begotten. For "today" implies neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow, but always a present time, a today. As it is said, John 8:58, "Before Abraham was I am."

For what it's worth, here's Calvin on the same verse.

Update: Should have pointed to Milton's verse translation of Psalm 2, in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme.