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The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III.1–417

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Irene Samuel
Irene Samuel*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, New York 21
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Extract

WHEN Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1957 , pp. 601 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 Cf. English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (London, 1946), p. 381, and A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), p. 126; and see Milton's Paradise Lost (New York, 1948), Chs. V and VI.

2 The popular word now is “strategy,” though one may still prefer the metaphor of the productive household to the metaphor of the destructive battlefield. Milton, at any rate, used the term “economy,” explaining it in the Preface to Samson Agonistes as “such… disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum.” For what he meant by “decorum,” “verisimilitude,” and “economy” the reader should consult Ida Langdon, Milton's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, Cornell Stud, in Eng., No. 8 (New Haven, 1924).

3 Logic, I, 32, trans. A. H. Gilbert, The Works of John Milton, Columbia ed., xi, 283. My references to Milton's prose are to the volume and page numbers of this edition. For Paradise Lost I have used the edition by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1935), but have normalized some spellings for the quotations incorporated into my own prose.

4 Ernest Schanzer has collected a number of such parallels in “Milton's Hell Revisited,” VTQ, xxiv (1955), 136–145. My notion of these contrasts is that Milton used his augmented treatment of Hell to make possible an abbreviated treatment of Heaven. Thus, for example, because Hell is finally summed up as “a universe of death” where “all life dies, death lives,” and Death in fact is king (as he claims [II.698–699] and his crown proves [II.673]), we recognize more immediately that Heaven is the realm of vitality and indeed of nature, without any hammering at the point. And thus in turn the list of the beauties of nature from which blindness has cut the poet off (III.40–50) can suggest to us that Milton's God is the God of Nature long before we meet the phrase “God and Nature bid the same” (VI.176). Or again, because we have noted the incestuous monstrosities, ugly contention, and even uglier agreement between Satan, his perfect image Sin, and their only begotten son Death, the whole dialogue in Heaven between the Father and his only begotten Son, who is his perfect image, takes on added meaning.

5 Lewis shows that Milton keeps to “the great central tradition” of Christian doctrine throughout P. L. (pp. 81–91). But Lewis, it occurs to me, makes heavier theological demands on the reader than Milton ever suggests in the poem.

6 Milton, of course, knew the ancient distinction between what is appropriate in persuasion and in exposition. Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper, in, 1404a: “Strict justice, of course, would lead us, in speaking, to seek no more than that we should avoid paining the hearer without alluring him; the case should, in justice, be fought on the strength of the facts alone, so that all else besides demonstration of fact is superfluous.… No one uses them [the devices of style] in teaching mathematics.” And see Plato, Pkaedrus, especially 263.

7 It will be evident that I fully agree with Maurice Kelley that “no indecision is present in Paradise Lost, III” (This Great Argument, Princeton, 1941, p. 34) and even that nothing Milton says in P. L. conflicts with his Christian Doctrine. But is there any evidence that Milton wanted his reader to adopt, or so much as recognize, the Arianism implicit in Bk. III? Any reduction of the drama of the council-scene to exposition of doctrine surely distorts Milton's intent.

8 Milton clearly knew the traditional treatment of the dispute in Heaven on this very theme of man's condemnation or salvation, so that he would feel no suggestion of impiety in attributing vigorous argument for opposing views to the participants in such a celestial debat. See Hope Travers, The Four Daughters of God, Bryn Mawr Coll. Monographs, No. 6 (Bryn Mawr, 1907), for the history of this popular mediaeval theme from the Hebrew Midrash to the Renaissance. Miss Travers observes that Milton “knew a number of the versions of the allegory” (p. 146) and that it “would have reached crowning expression in English drama” if he had carried out the plan of the Cambridge Manuscript (p. 143). I am indebted to Professor Merritt Y. Hughes for calling my attention to the relevance of Miss Travers' work to my thesis. Milton with his true epic touch reassigns the old arguments of mercy and justice, along with some decidedly new arguments, to the Son and God, transmutes the débat into a dialogue, uses what he had assimilated from Homeric scenes on high Olympos, and creates an episode central to P. L.

9 Need we cite evidence of Satan's attempts at “Godlike imitated state?” Perhaps the most interesting are the echoes in V.772, and throughout Bks. I and II of God's words in V.600–601; the most obvious, the palace on the mount in V.756–766, and the throne in II.1–5, to be compared with God's in III.58; the most significant the sudden self-revelation in x.444–450, with its almost ludicrous effort to duplicate the effect of God described in III.375–382.

10 Note that when Michael is to give Adam knowledge of the future Milton makes clear twice over that Michael's prophecy has to be allowed him by Omniscience: “reveal / To Adam what shall come in future days, / As I shall thee enlighten” (xi.113–115); and “So both ascend / In the visions of God,” where “of God” must mean “provided by God” (xi.376–377).

11 The phrase “joy and love,” emphatically repeated in the first reference to Eden (III.67–68), recurs here to make us doubly sure that the atonement will re-establish true Paradise; for the phrase is virtually the leitmotiv of Eden. See IV.519, VI.94, VIII.621; and cf. the anticipations in Comus, II. 1010–11, and Lycidas, I. 177. The excellent collection of Milton's repeated phrases by Edward S. Le Comte, Yet Once More (New York, 1953), to my mind, offers no adequate explanation of Milton's intended repetitions.

12 For the dual meaning of “beget” in the Son's career see Christian Doctrine, I, V (Columbia ed., xiv, 181–191), and the expositions of John S. Diekhoff and Maurice Kelley.

13 I am indebted for my phrasing here to Professor Hoxie N. Fairchild, whose critical comments on my argument have, I trust, helped me to avoid theological pitfalls.