Milton's garden of unfallen roots

Jutta points us to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal that suggests that religion is a natural, biologically significant part of the survival equipage of the species.

Lionel Tiger writes:

 there is a strange but durable connection between surviving in this world and contemplating another. There may or may not be such a world, but our sapient brain finds the idea easy to learn and entertain. Religion tastes sweet to the brain

Milton's vision of Paradise certainly seems richly sweet. Take the passage commented upon by Professor Rogers in Lecture 14 that begins at line 233:

And now divided into four main Streams,
Run divers, wand'ring many a famous Realm
And Country whereof here needs no account,
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Sapphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flow'rs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain…

And a little further on:

        Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true, [ 250 ]
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:

Edwards observes that Milton, in attempting to represent an unfallen world, resorts to a strategy of using words whose roots remind us of their original, "innocent" sense even as the "fallen" sense -- as in the word "error" in the first passage -- insinuates itself:

Now of course, "error" is one of the most resonant words in the entire poem. Error is the moral category, or we can think of it as the theological category, most often applied to the Fall and to Adam and Eve's eventual sin.. . . But Milton, of course, is using the word "error" in a special sense. He's doing what he does so often: he employs a word solely to evoke its etymological root sense, which in this case simply means "wandering.". . . Milton will remind us of the Fall with his use of such a word as "error," but at the same time, of course, he's attempting to create in us -- and it's a remarkable move -- to create in us a memory for a time in which a word like "error" had not yet been infected by its morally pejorative modern connotation.. . . but it's as if a memory is being instilled in us by means of Milton's poetry. He condenses into a single word what is essentially the entire poetic problem besetting the description of unfallen Eden.

With this hint, one might probe other roots in the passage -- for example, the "pendant shades" might suggest the suspenseful state of humankind, for whom everything hangs in perfect balance, and whose pending tilt will only be decided by the actions flowing from free will; the "mazy" error predicts the ambiguities and complexities of the maze of the fallen world, in contrast to the simple clarity of this unfallen realm; and the "nectar" visiting each plant derives from the Greek for "overcoming death":

nectar

1555, from L. nectar "drink of the gods," from Gk. nektar, which is said to be a compound of nek- "death" (see necro-) + -tar "overcoming." Meaning "sweet liquid in flowers" first recorded 1609.

There's plenty of sweetness in Paradise, and Milton manages even to tune the loaded verb, "fall," to an innocent note:

to thir Supper Fruits they fell,
Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes
Yielded them, side-long as they sat recline
On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours:
The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde [ 335 ]
Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;

The sap of plants and trees has its roots in Latin, sapere, which means "to taste, perceive," and ultimately is linked with sapience, knowledge. If "religion tastes sweet to the brain," its nectar runs through the tree of knowledge.
  

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.

Tartarean depths, Paracelsus, and gum disease

A few notes on Tartarus, which came up yesterday:


There's only one mention of the name Tartarus in the Bible - it comes in the Second Epistle of Peter:


4  For¹⁰⁶³ if¹⁴⁸⁷ God²³¹⁶ spared⁵³³⁹ not³⁷⁵⁶ the angels³² that sinned,²⁶⁴ but²³⁵ cast them down to hell,⁵⁰²⁰ and delivered³⁸⁶⁰ them into chains⁴⁵⁷⁷ of darkness,²²¹⁷ to be reserved⁵⁰⁸³ unto¹⁵¹⁹ judgment;²⁹²⁰


Note that the KJV says "hell," but the Greek uses a verb based on Tartaros:

4 εἰ γὰρ ὁ θεὸς ἀγγέλων ἁμαρτησάντων οὐκ ἐφείσατο, ἀλλὰ σειραῖς ζόφου ταρταρώσας παρέδωκεν εἰς κρίσιν τηρουμένους,  2 Peter 2:4

G5020
ταρταρόω
tartaroō
tar-tar-o‘-o 
From Τάρταρος Tartaros̄ (the deepest abyss of Hades); to incarcerate in eternal torment: - cast down to hell.

Tartarus makes its first appearance in Hesiod's Theogony (700 BC) and probably influenced Milton's rendering of space and description:

In Greek mythology, Tartarus is both a deity and a place in the underworld even lower than Hades. In ancient Orphic sources and in the mystery schools Tartarus is also the unbounded first-existing entity from which the Light and the cosmos are born.

In Hesiod's Theogony, c. 700 BC, the deity Tartarus was the third force to manifest in the yawning void of Chaos.

As for the place, the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth. The anvil would take nine more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus. In The Iliad (c. 700), Zeus asserts that Tartarus is "as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth." As a place so far from the sun and so deep in the earth, Tartarus is hemmed in by three layers of night. It is a dank and wretched pit engulfed in murky gloom. It is one of the primordial objects that sprung from Chaos (along with Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Sex)).

Quite a bit more can be found in the Wikipedia article.

In Prof. Rogers' lectures we hear about Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, usually known as Paracelsus, the Swiss man of medicine, alchemy, astrology and the occult.

Rogers alludes to Paracelsus' theories of digestion, and his thinking about tartar. And it seems we owe to the Renaissance magus the name "tartar," which he described as an acid deposit that "burns like hell, and Tartarus is hell."  More on this, if you're really really interested, here.

Rogers on theodicy

While we look forward to hearing Milton's verse read aloud, and to thinking about it as we go, it's also possible we might look for some basic premises from which to begin our exploration.

One place that might be of use is a lecture by Prof. John Rogers, Yale University, on Lycidas. Prof. Rogers has no qualms about addressing the extravagant claims made by Milton - for poetry, and in particular his poetry - that emerge in Lycidas as a prelude to the grand, or as some may feel, grandiose task he set for his epic:

Theodicy is the term coined by the eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz, and he applied this term theodicy to just that kind of philosophical sentiment that's implied by its etymology. The theodicy is an account of the justice (the dike) of God (theos). And so, to use the words with which Milton would begin Paradise Lost, a theodicy is an attempt "to justify the ways of God to men."

Now for a lot of orthodox Christians in Milton's time -- and I think we can say the same for a lot of orthodox Christians in our own time -- to embark upon anything like a theodicy at all can be considered heretical, or at the very least heterodox. A theodicy can be seen as heretical or even blasphemous for the simple reason that it -- think of what it assumes. It assumes that the ways of God are in fact justifiable. A theodicy assumes that God's justice can be witnessed, that it can be accounted for here on earth. A theodicy assumes that things on earth actually make sense and that God's ways are ultimately rationally accessible, that they are comprehensible by human beings, and that God can in some way -- and this is, I think, the central implication of the Elder Brother here -- that God can in some way be held accountable for his actions. To justify the ways of God to men is essentially to put God on trial for the actions that he performs. Of course in the central test case this is what we all care about, for the unfortunate events that befall virtuous people.

The above is from Lecture 6 of Prof. Rogers' free online course on Milton.

The Open Yale Courses series offers video of a wide variety of courses as well as transcripts of each lecture. Rogers devotes two lectures to Lycidas. The second is also quite worthwhile.