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Earth the Shadow of Heaven: Typological Symbolism in Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William G. Madsen
William G. Madsen*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit 2, Michigan
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Extract

      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 shadow of Heav'n, and things therein
      Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?
      —Paradise Lost, v. 571-576

In prefacing his account of the war in heaven with these words, Raphael is saying that it will be not allegorical or merely metaphoric, but analogical; that although he will have to use the language of accommodation in order to convey his meaning at all, still there may be (he puts the statement in a subordinate clause and in the interrogative mood) a relationship between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual, which is inherent in the nature of things. After Raphael finishes his narrative, Adam denies that earth is the shadow of heaven:

      Great things, and full of wonder in our ears,
      Far differing from this World, thou hast revcal'd
      Divine Interpreter… (VII. 70-72)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 5 , December 1960 , pp. 519 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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Footnotes

*

Portions of this paper were read at the December 1959 meeting of the Modern Language Association.

References

1 John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 1957), p. 315. AU quotations from Milton's poetry are from this edition. The Neoplatonic interpretation of Raphael's lines appears also in James H. Hanford, A Milton Handbook (New York, 1946), p. 205, and in his edition of the poetry; in M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (New Haven, 1950), p. 204; in Paul Shorey, Plalonism Ancient and Modern (Berkeley, Calif., 1938), pp. 41–42, 184; and in all the annotated modern editions of Paradise Lost that I have seen.

2 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, ii, viii, 1–2, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1953), I, 368.

3 Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. Dom Illtyd Trethowan and F. J. Sheed (New York, 1938), pp. 210–212 and p. 515, n. 10; Nicolas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Fr. Germain Heron (London, 1954), pp. 150 and 158 (iii.vii. and iii.x); Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, in Edizione Nazionale Dei Classici Del Pensiero Italiano, I (Firenze, 1942), 184; Ficino, Epistolae (Opera, Basle, 1573), i, 659, quoted in Nesca Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italien Renaissance (London, 1935), p. 87; Thomas Wilson, A Christian Dictionary (London, 1612), s. v.

4 The Wonderfull Workmanship of the World (London, 1578), p. 24a.

5 Valentine Weigelius, ASTROLOGIE Theologized (London, 1649), pp. 45–46. On Vane see R. M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the luth and 17th Centuries (London, 1914), p. 276. On Sterry see below, n. 7.

6 Blake, Jerusalem, 77; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, ii.iii.11–16; Coleridge, “TheDestiny of Nations,” vv. 12–25; The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (Modern Library ed.), pp. 216, 284, and passim; Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (Dutton Everyman Paperback ed., 1958), pp. 95–96.

7 Vivian De Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry: Platonist and Puritan (Cambridge: University Press, 1934), pp. 161–162.

8 A Commenlarie on the Whole Epistle lo the Hebrewes…. Translated Ovt of French… (London, 1605), pp. 200–201. Professor Walter MacKellar has called my attention to the gloss on “shadow” in Hebrews x: 1 in the Geneva Bible: “which was as it were the first draught and purtrait of the liuely paterne to come.”

9 David Dickson, A Short Explanation of Paul to the Hebrewes (Aberdeene, 1635), p. 197.

10 William Jones, A Commentary Vpon the Epistles of Saint Paul to Philemon and to the Hebrewes (London, 1635), p. 383.

11 The Interpreter's Bible (New York, 1955), xi, 583–584, 585. See also E. C. Rust, The Christian Understanding of History (London, 1947), pp. 174–178. Arndt & Gingrich's A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Chicago, 1952) defines skia as “2. shadow, foreshadowing (in contrast to reality)” and cites parallels from Philo Judaeus that are decidedly Platonic in implication. None of the modern commentaries or lexicons that I have consulted makes use of the analogy from painting. That the word was so used in ancient times is attested by Liddell and Scott: “HI. 1. shadow in painting 2. silhouette, profile.”

12 I am indebted here to C. K. Barrett, “The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, ed. W. D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: University Press, 1946).

13 Fernand Prat, S. J., The Theology of Saint Paul, trans, from the 11th French ed., by John L. Stoddard (Westminster, Md., 1926), i, 361.

14 Barrett, p. 388 (see n. 12).

15 See Emile Brehier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, trans. Joseph Thomas (Chicago, 1958), pp. 17–18.

16 “ ‘Grateful Vicissitude’ in Paradise Lost,” PMLA, LXIX (March 1954), 251–264.

17 This passage is more fully discussed in my monograph, “The Idea of Nature in Milton's Poetry,” in Three Studies in the Renaissance, Yale Studies in English, 138 (New Haven, 1958), pp. 235–237. In “The Fortunate Fall in Paradise Lost,” MLN, Lxxiv (1959), 103–105, I discuss its relationship to Milton's Christian view of man's ultimate destiny.

18 Enneads, ii, iii, 7.

19 Conjectura Càbbalistica (London, 1653), p. 38.

20 I cannot agree with Mrs. Bell (PMLA, LXVIII (Sept. 1953), 871) that this episode reveals a “dainty vanity” in Eve. Her image is physically the most beautiful thing she has seen, that is all. This natural attraction to the beautiful has nothing to do with vanity. Eve's fall is perhaps dramatically foreshadowed in her initial failure (a failure of intelligence) to distinguish between the higher good (Adam's inward beauty) and the lower good (her physical beauty). The difference between dramatic foreshadowing (an oft-noted feature of Milton's narrative technique) and typological foreshadowing is that the significance of a type is not revealed until it has been fulfilled in the antitype.

21 The Reason of Church Government, ii, ii, in Frank Allen Patterson (ed.), The Student's Milton (New York, 1941), p. 528.

22 Malcolm M. Ross, Poetry and Dogma (New Brunswick, N. J., 1954), p. 106.

23 Of Reformation, in Patterson, p. 469.

24 Animadversions, in Patterson, p. 493. There is an interesting study of the Exodus typology in early Christian thought in Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum Futuri (Paris, 1950), pp. 131–200.

25 Ross, p. 106.

26 James H. Hanford, “Milton and the Art of War,” SP, XVIII (1921), 232–66.

27 It is difficult to describe Raphael's mode of discourse in the critical terms available to us. It differs from allegory in that the first term is not a fiction; it differs from ordinary metaphorical discourse in that we cannot test the validity of the metaphor by pointing behind it to the reality which is being described. It is obviously not meant to be literally true; on the other hand, Milton would certainly claim for it more than “imaginative” or “poetic” truth. It is because of the impossibility of looking behind the narrative to the actual conflict in heaven (whatever its nature) that I have regarded its significance as primarily (though not exclusively) typological, that is, oriented toward the future.

Milton perhaps would have claimed for his own narrative in Paradise Lost the same kind of relation to reality that Raphael's has. It is very unlikely that “Milton actually believed that he was adding historic details to the Scriptures,” as William J. Grace maintains (“Orthodoxy and Aesthetic Method in Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy,” CL, i (1949), 174.) Grace sets up a false antithesis between Milton's “attempt to present the facts of history at first hand” and Dante's “more veiled and indirect allegorical method.” Milton's mode of discourse, like Raphael's, lies somewhere between these two extremes. But this is matter for another discussion.

28 For evidence that Ezekiel's vision, which Milton incorporates in his description of Christ's rout of the rebel angels, was regarded as a foreshadowing of Christ's recreation of the universe on the Last Day, see J. H. Adamson, “The War in Heaven: Milton's Version of the Merkabah,” JEGP, Lvii (1958), 690–703.

29 Christian Doctrine, i. xxxiii, in Patterson, pp. 1046–48.