There is a fund of linguistic peculiarities in Paradise Lost. Milton, for example, likes the sequence adjective + noun + adjective, as in universal hubbub wild or vast profundity obscure. He was not the first to try this sequence, but it is a good bet that, wherever we encounter it in subsequent English verse, Milton is probably on the author’s mind; Arnold’s “vast edges drear” in “Dover Beach” hopes to remind us of the seething Chaos of Paradise Lost. F. T. Prince (112–29) discussed Milton’s interest in a related sequence found in Italian verse as early as Dante: adjective + noun + and + adjective, as in “Sad task and hard” (5.564) or “Sad resolution and secure” (6.541). Does the second adjective come in as an afterthought? The task, let us say, is primarily sad, so much so that one forgets for a moment that it is hard as well. Or does the second adjective bear the main emotion? A sad task would be burden enough, but this one is, more important, hard. Milton enjoyed playing with this scheme. He experimented, for example, with distancing the adjectives: “pleasing was his shape,/And lovely” (9.503–4) or “For many are the trees of God that grow/In Paradise, and various” (9.618–19). In place of adjective + noun + and + adjective, he tried noun + verb + and + noun, as in “he seemed/For dignity composed and high exploit” (2.110–11). The poet did not invent a “Babylonish Dialect.” He wrote English with a high degree of originality, and his original poetry sublime unleashes a number of effects that had never been tried before in English verse.
THREE CONTROVERSIES
Attacks on Milton’s verse early in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and A. J. A. Waldock sparked a debate that eventually came to be known as the Milton Controversy (Murray 1–12). Although the notion of Milton’s artistic greatness had never before been questioned so systematically, this was hardly an isolated incident. Historically Milton is by some measure the most controversial of the great English poets. He has given rise to an inordinate number of critical debates, altogether too many, in fact, for us to suppose that his poetry is itself innocent of contentiousness. Certainly in his prose Milton liked to mix it up. He was among the greatest controversialists of the day. The decades he spent fighting the wars of truth, Coleridge suggested, added a “controversial spirit” to his youthful character (Thorpe 91). But the early poems are also imbued with the love of argument. When Milton in the first invocation to Paradise Lost refers to “this great argument,” the word argument primarily means “plot,” as in the prose “Argument” or plot summary attached to each book of the epic. Yet the great argument of the plot is wed to an “argument” of another kind, a rational contention, since Milton vows that “to the highth of this great argument” he will, if inspired, “assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men” (1.24–26).
Emerson wrote that no man in literary history, perhaps in all history, excelled Milton in the power to inspire: “Virtue goes out of him to others” (Early Lectures 1:148). No doubt some of the controversies about Milton have not demonstrated much of the poet’s own idealism, but the generally high quality of Milton debates over the centuries is arguably the finest of the poet’s gifts to our culture, as Christopher Ricks has pointed out. It is for good reason that Milton is “the most argued-about poet in English.” He brings out the serious and passionate advocate in us:
Of the needs to which he ministers, one of the greatest is our need to commit ourselves in passionate argument about literature. Not as part of the academic industry, but because literature is a supreme controversy concerning “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (to adopt the words which Matthew Arnold applied to culture). By the energy and sincerity of his poetry, Milton stands—as no other poet quite does—in heartening and necessary opposition to all aestheticisms, old and new. (xi)
Milton’s argumentative art refuses to stay within aesthetic boundaries, however they may be drawn. Virtue goes out of him to his readers. His arguments come to life, and participating in them both pleases and elevates us.
One of the oldest of the Milton debates swirls about the character of Satan. Is he the hero of the epic? Is he so attractive as to upset the standard moral balance of Christianity? The first of these questions is the more easily answered. Early in the poem, Milton deliberately places Satan in the roles occupied by classical epic heroes. He founds a civilization in Hell. He undertakes a long and arduous journey. Compared to Odysseus, Addison observed, Satan “put in practice many more wiles and stratagems, and hides himself under a greater variety of shapes and appearances” (Shawcross 1:152). To some extent, Milton uses his Satan as a diagnostic test of the moral health of classical epic.
In the beginning of the poem especially, Satan exudes glamour. His appearance—huge, ruined, thunder-scarred, darkened, but still able to evoke the memory of his former luminescence in Heaven—makes a tremendous impression. The Satan glimpsed in Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated has, like the cheap special-effects devils of modern supernatural thrillers, massive horns, red eyes, a huge beard, an open mouth filthy with red blood and spewing rancid fumes (4.6–7). As William Hazlitt put it, the Satan of Paradise Lost “has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there.… Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot” (Thorpe 109; see also Newton in Shawcross 2:154). Satan is proud, obstinate, the rebel of rebels. He speaks thrillingly of his “unconquerable will.” For Milton, part of giving the devil his due is having the devil give God his due. Satan several times concedes the omnipotence of his foe. When he finds himself cursing the “free love” God gave to all the angels because it did not prevent him from falling, Satan fiercely, and in the name of truth, recoils on himself: “Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will / Chose freely what it now so justly rues” (4.71–72).
William Blake took the romantic exaltation of Satan to an extreme in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is, because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake was something of a Gnostic, for whom Milton’s God the Father was an evil and inferior God, and his satanic opposition the force of true deity (Nuttall 224). But readers whose imaginations remain responsive to the ordinary polarities of Christianity will probably not leave the poem with the favorable impression of Satan with which they began. As the work continues, they realize that Satan’s cannonlike recoils inevitably issue in a fatalistic resolve to go on being himself and fulfill his initial plan of corrupting mankind. His speeches remake the same decision over and over again. Readers come to understand that conceding the omnipotence of God, far from being magnanimous, is the only way Satan can reconcile his pride with his defeat. Heroic resistance begins to look like habitual stubbornness. Satan would desperately like to believe that he is self-created. But his image of his own greatness is also his enemy, the uncreated Father. Satan sits in “God-like imitated state” (2.511). Declaring that evil is his good, he dreams of sharing “divided Empire with Heav’n’s King” (4.111)—in other words, of being the equal of God in a Manichaean universe.
But Satan’s true God is his own will. Milton always maintained that tyrants were self-enslaved. An unconquerable will sacrifices the willer and everyone under his sway. Most readers, their infatuation with Satan having run its course, savor his final comeuppance in the poem, as his triumphant return to Hell becomes the first of countless annual reenactments of the wicked self-harming travesty he is doomed to think a victory. The attractions of Satan are real, and beguiling, but in the end not so profound as his degradation.
Satan’s heroism, though felt in its highest form by the Romantics, did not die with them and remains a main source of argument in modern Milton criticism. It is crucial, for example, to the middle period of Harold Bloom’s work, which begins with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Hazlitt noted that Milton showed no signs of alarm over a vast literary indebtedness that
would have stymied many a lesser poet: “Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer.… The quantity of art in him shows the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition” (Thorpe 101).
Bloom points to a great subtext in Paradise Lost concerning the apparent ease with which Milton masters the anxiety of being belated, preceded, and preempted. Satan is the modern poet (20). God is “cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more” (21). Everything has been done. The world created, the Bible written, the classical epics finished, the romance versions of them already penned by Ariosto and Spenser. What is there to do? To rally what remains, to salvage all creative impulses that are not infected by devotion, while trying to fend off the knowledge that nothing remains, that one will wind up in one God-like imitated state or another. Wallace Stevens’s famous aphorism “The death of Satan was a tragedy/For the imagination” (“Esthétique du Mal”) seems pertinent here. Assuming that his death has occurred, or may soon occur, this reading of Paradise Lost shows the dimensions of the tragedy. For Satan is imagination. Bloom transformed the Satan controversy into a neo-Romantic fable for modern poets.
The arguments set forth in Stanley Fish’s influential Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) are also to a large extent responses to the traditional Satan controversies. The author, a born Miltonist, loves to argue. Fish maintains that it is all right for the most serious readers, for readers in search of the author’s intentional meaning, to allow heroic images of Satan to form in their minds, provided they are willing to sacrifice those images when the intentional meaning of the poem requires it (as it always will). Satan’s attractiveness is not an unconscious or unintended effect of some sort. Milton wanted his readers to entertain false ideas of Satan’s virtue. He deliberately and repeatedly trapped them into doing so, only to correct them in the next phrase or line or passage. Blake responded to attractive cues but refused to obey the corrective cues, and wound up losing touch with the poem. Milton himself is the creator of, and ultimate manager of, the Satan controversy. Fish’s most impressive examples are of course drawn from the glamorous treatments of Satan in the first two books of the epic. The spasmodic self-corrections of his model reader uncannily resemble the recoils of Satan.
While impressed with the neatness of this argument, and the energy with which Fish has defended it, other critics have wondered at the infinite gullibility of Fish’s model reader, who goes through the same experience again and again without learning his lesson, as if reading were less a process of illumination than an obsessive-compulsive ritual. They doubt Fish’s implicit view of Milton as a dogmatist unable to admit to mixed feelings about the devil. They question whether great poetry could be as Pavlovian in its didacticism as Fish implies (Kerrigan 1974, 180n, 1983, 98–99; Rumrich 1996, 2–4, 7–11, 60–64; Pritchard; Leonard 2002).
A related and comparably venerable controversy concerns Milton’s portrait of God. Pope observed that “God the Father turns a School-Divine” (“The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated”). The word school-divine appears in many subsequent discussions of this issue. It means “a medieval scholastic theologian, of the sort that was taught in European universities,” and was not usually a derogatory word, though it does appear to have pejorative charge for Pope. He seems to be referring primarily to God’s speeches during the Heavenly Council at the opening of Book 3, where the Father explains the relationship between freedom and foreknowledge, and the doctrine of the Atonement, in a language compounded of standard theological terminology and statements from Scripture. Some have answered with Addison that in Book 3 the central mysteries of Christianity and the “whole dispensation of Providence with respect to man” are defined with admirable clarity and concision (Shawcross 1:178). Some have maintained that Milton went wrong in the very decision to assign speech to deity, since this procedure will inevitably bring God down to a human level (Wilkie in Shawcross 2:240–43).
But the deeper issue here is not whether God should speak at all and if he must in what vocabulary. Milton’s God, foreseeing the development of human philosophy and theology, anticipates being held responsible for the sins of Adam and Eve. This forethought irritates him:
so will fall
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. (3.95–99)
The speech implies that man’s theodical attacks continue the faithlessness of the Fall itself. If someone maintains that God did not make him in such a way that he could be responsible for the Fall, he manifests ingratitude. He wants to have been given more from God than mere freedom. He deems his divine endowment not “sufficient.” With regard to the poem’s readers, God is provocative and ill-tempered. “Go on,” he seems to be saying, “blame me. Doing so can only show your fallenness, your faithlessness, your ingratitude, and your utter lack of responsibility.”
The same sort of provocation, daring his audience to disagree or disobey, marks the Father’s words when he is exalting the Son in Heaven. He demands that the angels kneel and “confess him [the Son] Lord”:
Him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed union, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end. (5.611–15)
It is difficult not to be reminded, as we contemplate such a passage, that Milton hated the bullying ways of earthly monarchs. Why did he make the Father, at times, into a threatening king?
Milton would probably have replied that because God is a king, almighty and eternal, no one else can be. For all others sit in God-like imitated state, aspiring to godhead like Satan himself. God’s legitimacy through merit, not birthright, renders all other monarchies illegitimate, all other monarchs pretenders. This helps to explain why a republican like Milton can have a king for a God, but not why his God should be angry and threatening. God is not always that, to be sure, and at one point amuses the Son by acting the role of some chronicle-history Henry IV worried about usurping northern lords (5.721–32). His aims are merciful, and he praises the Son for seizing upon those aims and guaranteeing their future realization (3.274–343). When pretending that Adam does not need a mate, God seems playful, and appreciative of a creature whose freedom and rational self-confidence permit him to disagree with his creator (8.357–448). But as we have seen, Milton’s God has a tough side.
This much can be said. Today we are somewhat embarrassed to think about God in terms of human emotions, unless the emotion in question is love. But the idea of God having in any sense a character—with exasperation, anger, jealousy, and wrath to go along with his love, mercy, and playfulness—probably seems childish or simplistic or even (though we have grown suspicious of this word) primitive. As Milton saw things, however, the portrait of God in the Bible was full of anthropomorphism. No form of divine symbolism can represent God as he is. But in the Bible, God delivered the metaphors through which he wished us to know him. There can be no shame in taking him at his word. “Why does our imagination shy away from a notion of God which he himself does not hesitate to promulgate in unambiguous terms?” (CD 1.2 in MLM 1148). Milton had little interest in the sort of God we sometimes associate with philosophers and mystics, known to us through some esoteric and reason-humbling symbolism. By the same token, he was relatively unexcited by the thought of contemplating the visio dei. His angels seem happiest, like Milton himself, when performing a divinely assigned task.
Both the God and the Satan Controversies animate William Empson’s striking Milton’s God (1960). In the process of indicting Christia
nity, this book invents a new way to praise Milton, albeit one that he himself would surely have deplored. Christianity, for Empson, is intractably evil. In any telling of the story of the Fall of man, God will in some manner be revealed as the responsible party. Milton was a Christian of uncommon moral sensitivity, and he did virtually all that one could do to improve the faith. There is, as we have noted, no torture. The Crucifixion, though recounted briefly (12.411–19), is hardly the centerpiece of Milton’s religion. Temptation, the act of free moral decision, takes its place. Satan is more sympathetic than ever before. But God the Father is still provocative, still threatening. This portrait, far from being the failure it was conventionally assumed to be on one side of the God Controversy, shows Milton’s honesty. His God manifests the dark impulse to rule, to wield power purely and simply, that the many attractive aspects of Paradise Lost conceal from our view. Dennis Danielson’s aptly titled Milton’s Good God (1982) defends Milton and Christianity against some of the main arguments in Milton’s God.