Paradise Lost by John Milton
Such claims simply do not hold water. John Toland, writing Milton’s life in 1698, declined to defend Paradise Lost “against those people who brand [it] with heresy” (128), indicating that such complaints were fairly common even before the discovery of the treatise. Unlike Toland, Jonathan Richardson, writing in 1734, says he cannot in good conscience “pass over in silence another conjecture which some have made, … that Milton was an Arian; and this is built on certain passages in Paradise Lost “(xlix). Theologically acute readers like Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) objected to Milton’s account of the Son’s exaltation (5.600–615) for laying, in Defoe’s words, a “foundation for the corrupt doctrine of Arius” (75). A century later, shortly after Christian Doctrine was published, Thomas Macaulay remarked that “we can scarcely conceive that any person could have read Paradise Lost without suspecting him of [Arianism]” (3). Suspicion falls short of conviction, however, and unsupported by the evidence of the theological treatise, the Arianism of the epic is “no other than a conjecture” (Richardson, xlix). The mutedness of the epic’s heretical account of the Son has been persuasively attributed to Milton’s discretion in an intolerant age and the narrative disposition of epic (Rajan 23–31). Milton’s main goal in Paradise Lost is to tell a story, not to argue doctrine.
The challenge to this commonsense observation mounted by W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson was complicated, recondite, and, to the embarrassment of Milton scholarship, highly successful. Hunter originally argued that Milton’s version of the godhead exemplified a not always unorthodox strain of early church opinion, called “subordinationism,” which conceived of the Christian Trinity in terms of Platonic hypostases. Ralph Cudworth does in 1678 use the key term subordination in explaining the beliefs of the “Platonic Christian” and in asserting that such beliefs were consistent with those of “the generality of Christian doctors for the first three hundred years after the apostles’ times” (2:417). This claim is not controversial, but it has no bearing on Milton’s alleged orthodoxy. Like Arius before him, Milton was not a Platonic theologian, not when it came to his insistence on the absolute singularity of infinite God or on the finite existence of the Son. And even if Milton had been one of Cudworth’s Platonic Christians, by the seventeenth century the Platonist version of the Christian Trinity did qualify as heretical. The subordinationism attributed to Milton is in short, per Michael Bauman’s definitive formulation, “not orthodox, and Milton does not teach it” (133). Despite these flaws, Hunter’s argument prevailed for an entire generation, so that in scholarship from the 1970s and ’80s one generally finds the evasive and misleading label “subordinationist” in discussions of Milton’s depiction of the Son.
Less controversial by far are Milton’s opinions on how salvation occurs, perhaps because these opinions are now predominant among orthodox Christians and because Milton’s God himself details them in a plain theological exposition difficult to misconstrue (3.173–202). During Milton’s lifetime the Calvinist theory of salvation, and predestination as its distinctive tenet, reigned in England and especially in the Puritan culture that nurtured the young poet. Opposed to Calvinist orthodoxy was Arminianism, so called after the Dutch clergyman Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), whose deviations from determinist doctrine were condemned at the grand Calvinist council of the early seventeenth century, the Synod of Dort (1618–19). According to articles endorsed at Dort, neither the blessed nor the damned can influence their respective fates. For the sake of his glory, God extends saving grace to a few utterly depraved sinners, thereby expressing his mercy. Also for his glory’s sake, but additionally to exemplify divine justice, God consigns the rest of humanity (a large majority) to eternal torment. As for human liberty, even unfallen Adam and Eve were never free to obey, as Calvin insists: “God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree” (3.23.7).
Arminians, by contrast, held that human beings are created free and, once fallen, receive sufficient grace to effect salvation, provided that they embrace the opportunity rather than reject it. The dependence of such a moral framework on human choice seems to have struck Calvin as a self-evident slight to divine omnipotence, as if “God ordained nothing except to treat man according to his own deserts” (3.23.7). The notion that the deity would leave individual human beings to determine their own fates roused Calvin’s indignation. Four main claims distinguish the Arminians’ “barren invention,” as he called it (3.23.7). First, God’s grace is universal, extended to all humanity. Second, this grace is not irresistible, which is to say, as an anti-Calvinistic Thomas Jefferson insists in his summary of Arminian beliefs, “man is always free and at liberty to receive or reject grace.” Third, as Jefferson continues, divine justice “would not permit [God] to punish men for crimes they are predestinated to commit” (1:554). And last, foreknowledge and causation are distinct, even in a time line created, governed, and immutably foreseen by an omnipotent and omniscient God.
In England before the 1640s, clergy who held Arminius’s heterodox opinions regarding salvation tended to be high-ranking and conservative, adhering to and even embellishing sacramental ritual and set liturgical forms that to Puritan sensibilities smacked of Roman Catholicism. This religiously and politically conservative English clergy presided over a top-down episcopal hierarchy whose regime complemented and reinforced the Stuart monarchy’s civil sway—hence the so-called “thorough” government of church and state during the 1630s, when king and bishop sought to rule without Parliamentary interference. Continental followers of Arminius, by contrast, remained largely Calvinist in devotional culture and practice. Their deviations from Calvinist orthodoxy, moreover, were republican and not authoritarian in their political implications, as Jefferson’s enthusiastic assessment suggests. Yet Arminian English bishops were oblivious to any such implications and, though in the minority, used their power to institute and enforce their cultural and governmental preferences, even when doing so meant outraging consciences or ruthlessly punishing dissent. Such impositions grated on the Puritans, who, regardless of their views on salvation, deplored episcopal pomp, debunked most sacraments, and endorsed plain spontaneity in worship.
During the 1640s, the defeat of the high-church, anti-Calvinist elite and the ready resort of the now predominant Presbyterian faction to its own coercive policies seem to have freed Milton to argue explicitly in behalf of rational choosing and free will. For all his support of the Presbyterian faction against the prelates, Milton had never endorsed predestination. His Arminian tendencies become unmistakable in the divorce tracts and in Areopagitica’s exaltation of rational choice, toleration, and individual accountability. Milton insists that God created man free, and if Adam had not been free, he might as well have been a puppet: “a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions” (MLM 944). By the end of the 1640s, Milton’s contention that the English have every right to try and execute King Charles rests on an anti-Presbyterian first premise, all the more provocative for being presented as a self-evident truth: “No man who knows aught can be so stupid [as] to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself” (TKM in MLM 1028). At this distance, it seems clear that Milton’s breach with the Presbyterians rests on differing conceptions of the dignity of the human subject. By the time he comes to write his epic, choice and responsibility are for Milton the very stuff of human morality and of human desert (Danielson; S. Fallon 1998). Most Presbyterians, by contrast, deemed the ethical categories of choice and responsibility meaningless or wickedly delusional.
In Paradise Lost, it is only to the characterization of Satan and his followers that the language of predestination applies. Hell is thus described as a “prison ordained” to which they have been eternally “decreed,/Reserved and destined” (1.71, 2.160–61). Like stereotypical Calvinists, certain devils spend vast stretches of time debating “of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate/Fixed fate, free will,
Even the narrative and dramatic stress placed on Satan’s role and character, which some have deemed disproportionate, is an indicator of Milton’s distance from the determinist tenets of the Presbyterians. The serpent’s temptation is beside the point in Calvinist theology, as indeed is any agency outside God. The Fall is divinely ordained. Calvin’s deity was a volitional black hole, obviating the need for a malevolent opponent who sparks evil. For Milton, by contrast, temptation is an ethical state crucial to theodicy, permitting merit to the creature, as in the case of Abdiel, while at the same time justifying the redemption of humanity: unlike the irreversibly damned rebel angels, “man falls deceived/By the other first” (3.130–31). Most important, the freedom and accountability presumed by temptation prevent humanity’s recriminations against God “as if predestination overruled/Their will” (3.114–15). The justification of God’s ways to men turns out to be largely an Arminian response to the Calvinist insistence on the bondage of the will. Foreknowledge does not predetermine; the choices of unfallen humanity are free: “authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose; for so/I formed them free” (3.122–24). As Perez Zagorin observes, Milton’s “loyalty to the principle of liberty as he understood it was absolute” (114). It was a matter of doing justice to man and God.
To God more than to man, however. Liberty is a state that we ordinarily associate with human beings, but from Milton’s highly theocentric and theodical perspective, freedom is primarily and definitively a quality essential to the nature of God. Only because the human race is created in the image of God is it self-evident that humanity is born free. The only necessity that applies to God is that he not involve himself in contradiction. Any action he takes must therefore conform to the good, goodness being definitive of divine identity rather than a limitation on his freedom. Though raised in the highly Calvinist culture of seventeenth-century London, Milton insists on the freedom allowed humanity in Arminian theology because his God must not be held liable for the sins of humanity, as Calvin’s was. The necessity that God’s deeds be good ones does not wed God to any particular action, however; his “goodness” remains “free/To act or not” (7.171–72). Such freedom holds true even concerning the generation of the Son. God is under no necessity to beget a second divinity; he freely chooses to do so. The Son, in his turn, freely offers himself as a sacrifice on behalf of humanity (3.236–65). Adam and Eve echo and also mediate the praiseworthy choices of the Father and Son when they decide to procreate and so begin the line that will produce their redeemer (10.867–1096). So the theodicy comes full circle, with goodness remaining free at every juncture to act or not.
GENRE
“The greatest writer who has ever existed of a limited genre”—that is how T. S. Eliot in 1926 described Milton. The initial superlative hints at a magnanimous finish, but Eliot instead concludes by demeaning genre and diminishing his praise: “Instead of poetry, you get genres of poetry” (201). Centuries earlier, Thomas Rymer had also denied the authenticity of Milton’s poetry, snidely describing Paradise Lost as a work that “some are pleased to call a poem” (1678, 143). He even omits it from a summary of English heroic poetry that culminates instead with Davenant’s Gondibert (1651) and Cowley’s Davideis (1656) (1694, preface). Rymer condemns Milton for not being sufficiently generic, whereas Eliot criticizes him for being excessively generic. Their shared disdain may owe less to Milton’s artistic fraudulence than to the not uncommon tendency of lesser artists to mitigate the achievements of greater ones. Rymer is more easily cleared from that suspicion. True to his name, he scorned unrhymed narrative verse as prose, an arbitrary genre distinction but one general at the time as the note on verse affixed to the first edition attests. By contrast, Eliot’s dedication to the proposition that genre is an ersatz proxy for true poetry remains a head-scratcher, even in its historical context.
According to the OED, the term genre did not enter English usage until the nineteenth century. The concept of literary kind had by then already been debated for millennia, however, energetically so during the European Renaissance, when genre was held in very high esteem, not least by Milton himself. His ideal curriculum includes prosody as a necessary technical study, but far above it in real dignity he places the “sublime art” that teaches “the laws” governing “true” poems, whether epic, dramatic, or lyric (Of Ed in MLM 977–78). The reverential diction is telling. Taken together with the related claim that Scripture offers the most perfect instances of the major genres (RCG in MLM 841), it suggests that for Milton, as for Sir Philip Sidney before him, literary genres were divinely authorized modes of mimesis, corresponding to the Creator’s arrangement of reality. Compared with any individual poem, genre was the more real thing, and indeed “the first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost,” according to C. S. Lewis (1).
Eliot’s low regard for genre may have stemmed from discomfort with prescriptive rules for poetry. Milton does insist on “laws” for poems, after all. But his neoclassicism is distinct from the neoclassicism that prevailed in England after the Restoration, Rymer being one of its chief proponents. Through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, Italy was the center of cultural authority in Europe. Its cities “swarmed with critics,” according to Rymer, but as “swarmed” suggests, the Italian critical hegemony lacked uniformity or a common national focus. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the individualism of the Italian swarm gradually gave way to the regimentation of the French. “From Italy, France took the cudgels,” the pugnacious Rymer put it, tracing French ascendancy to Cardinal Richelieu’s amalgamation of cultural with political authority at the increasingly absolutist French court (1694, A2r–v). Milton, however, never acknowledged the cultural turn away from his beloved Italy. His ambitions as an epic poet crystallized during his visit to Italy (1638–39), and his disdain for France was quite general and persistent. His masterworks of the Restoration display a sublime if studied indifference to Gallic dictates, and his conception of literary genre, epic specifically, owes a great deal to the formative influence of sixteenth-century Italians, Torquato Tasso most prominently.
Milton refers to Tasso repeatedly in poems composed during his visit to Italy (see, e.g., Manso), and when in The Reason of Church Government he discusses epic, Tasso alone is named in the company of Homer and Vergil (MLM 840–41). It was Tasso who originally argued that the “laws of poetry” are divinely established realities, “essential and fixed by the very nature and law of things” (Kates 36). A poet did not need to conform to fixed rules derived from authoritative precedent but could instead embody the objectively based laws of poetry according to the judgment of natural reason, judgment informed not only by subjective experience and the efforts of precursors but also by, most crucially for a Christian poet, scriptural revelation. Milton may have adored Homer above all other poets, but to fulfill his own poetic vocation in the genre that Homer epitomized, Milton characteristically believed himself morally obliged to manifest the epic genre on his own terms, taking full advantage of his access to Christian doctrine. In short, the heroic poem as Milton conceived it was more adaptable to the individual poet’s conception of truth than a rote critic like Rymer could stomach.
English critics nursed on Gallic canons early on censured Paradise Lost for its wantonness. John Dennis in 1704 described it as “the most lofty but most irregular poem that has been produced by the mind of man” (bv), and unlike Dennis, who ultimately judges Paradise Lost above the critical law, subsequent neoclassical critics typically laud Milton’s loftiness and rue his i
In her magisterial study of Milton and genre, Barbara Lewalski tracks Milton’s use of virtually every subgenre recognized by Renaissance rhetoricians and deems Paradise Lost “an encyclopedia of literary forms” (125). Jonathan Richardson makes much the same point in defending Milton’s masterwork as “a composition … not reducible under any known denomination,” “the quintessence of all that is excellent in writing” (cxlv, clii). If in its encompassing formal plenitude Paradise Lost violates the “limited genre” defined by neoclassical critics, its promiscuity is nonetheless profoundly classical in spirit. Aristotle himself distinguishes epic from other genres by its capacity to assimilate within a single narrative other modes, such as the dramatic or lyric, and their various subgenres (26). Book 4 illustrates Milton’s singular gift for subduing such multiplicity under a unified narrative arc. The basic story line—Satan’s intrusion into Paradise leading ultimately to his apprehension and expulsion—occasions, among other genre variations, authorial apostrophe, Satanic soliloquy, landscape poetry with features of the country house tradition, various love lyrics, metamorphic tales of origin, evening prayer, and confrontational martial dialogue. Nor was epic originally confined to what Voltaire in his Essai sur la poésie épique defined as “narratives in verse of warlike adventures” (331), which Milton scorned as “tedious havoc” (PL 9.30).