XII. The Theology of Paradise Lost
They laid to my charge things that I knew not.
PSALM XXV, 11.
In so far as Paradise Lost is Augustinian and Hierarchical it is also Catholic in the sense of basing its poetry on conceptions that have been held ‘always and everywhere and by all’. This Catholic quality is so predominant that it is the first impression any unbiased reader would receive. Heretical elements exist in it, but are only discoverable by search: any criticism which forces them into the foreground is mistaken, and ignores the fact that this poem was accepted as orthodox by many generations of acute readers well grounded in theology.
Milton studies owe a great debt to Professor Saurat, but I believe that with the enthusiasm incident to a pioneer he has pressed his case too far. He tells us that ‘Milton’s God is far from the God of popular belief or even orthodox theology. He is no Creator external to His creation, but total and perfect Being which includes in Himself the whole of space and the whole of time’ (p. 113); ‘. . . matter is a part of God’ (p. 114). ‘Paradise Lost identifies God with the primitive, infinite abyss’ (p. 115). He is ‘utterly non-manifested: as soon as action appears in the world Milton speaks of the Son and no longer of God’ (p. 117); His ‘unity is incompatible . . . with Trinity’ (p. 116); the ‘creation of the Son took place on one particular day’ (p. 119); and He is ‘the sole manifestation of the Father’ (p. 120), who remains ‘absolutely unknowable’ (p. 121). By creation God ‘has intensified His own existence, raising to glory the good parts of Himself, casting outside . . . the evil parts of Himself . . . to drive away the evil latent in the Infinite’ (p. 133). Milton’s Urania is a being called in the Zohar (a thirteenth-century Jewish compilation) the Third Sephira, and Milton ascribes ‘a sexual character’ (accompanied, it would seem, with incest) to ‘acts within the bosom of divinity’ (p. 291). When he says that God is light, Milton is thinking of Fludd’s De Macrocosmi Historia (p. 303).
I am not quite clear how many of these doctrines Professor Saurat regards as remote from ‘popular belief’ or ‘orthodox theology’. If a criticism of his work were my main object I should of course endeavour to make sure. For our present purpose, however, it will be possible to leave that question on one side and, simply for our own convenience, to divide the doctrines mentioned by Professor Saurat into four groups: (1) those which really occur in Paradise Lost, but which, so far from being heretical, are the commonplaces of Christian theology; (2) those which are heretical, but do not occur in Milton; (3) those which are heretical and occur in Milton’s De Doctrina, but not in Paradise Lost; (4) those which are possibly heretical and do really occur in Paradise Lost.
1. Those which occur in Paradise Lost, but are not heretical.
(a) That the Father is non-manifested and unknowable, the Son being His sole manifestation. This is certainly in the poem and Professor Saurat rightly quotes III, 384 et seq., where we are told that the Father ‘whom else no creature can behold’ is made ‘visible’ in the Son. It merely proves that Milton had read in St. Paul that Christ ‘is the image of the invisible God’ (Col. I, 15) which God ‘only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see’ (i. Tim. VI, 16).
(b) ‘As soon as action appears in the World Milton speaks of the Son and no longer of God.’ In so far as this is true it means that the Son is the agent of creation. This doctrine Milton learned from St. John (‘He, sc. Christ, was in the world and the world was made by Him’—i, 10); from St. Paul (‘by Him were all things created . . . visible and invisible’, Col. I, 16); and from the Nicene Creed.
(c) ‘God is light’ (P.L. iii, 3). Every instructed child in Milton’s time would have recognized the quotation from the first epistle of St. John (1, 5).
2. Those which are heretical, but do not occur in Milton.
(a) The doctrine of latent evil in God. The only basis for this is P.L. V, 117–19, where Adam tells Eve that evil ‘into the mind of God or Man’ may ‘come and go’ without being approved and ‘leave no spot or blame’. Since the whole point of Adam’s remark is that the approval of the will alone makes a mind evil and that the presence of evil as an object of thought does not—and since our own common sense tells us that we no more become bad by thinking of badness than we become triangular by thinking about triangles—this passage is wholly inadequate to support the astonishing doctrine attributed to Milton. It is not even certain that ‘God’ means more than ‘a god’ (for the angels are called Gods, with a capital letter, in III, 341).
(b) The sexual character of acts ‘in the bosom of Divinity’. I see no evidence that Milton believed in anything of the sort. Professor Saurat’s doctrine depends on giving a sexual meaning to the word play in P.L. VII, 10, and in a passage from Tetrachordon. No doubt Milton may have thought—though he talks of it less, perhaps, than any other Christian poet—that sexual love provided an analogy for, or was even a real ectype of, celestial and Divine Love. If so, he was following St. Paul on Marriage (Eph. V, 23 et seq.), St. John on the Bride (Rev. XXI, 2), several passages in the Old Testament, and a huge array of medieval poets and mystics.
(c) ‘God is . . . Total Being which includes in Himself the whole of time.’ To support this Professor Saurat quotes from De Doctrina that God ‘knows beforehand the thoughts and actions of free agents . . . the foreknowledge of God is nothing but the wisdom of God or that idea He had of everything before he decreed anything’. This is nothing to the purpose. I have never heard of any Christian, any Unitarian, any Jew, any Mohammedan, or any Theist, who did not believe the same. If such a doctrine of foreknowledge implied that God contains in Himself the whole of time (whatever that may mean), then this implication would not be heretical, but common to all Theists. But I do not see any such consequence. Professor Saurat also quotes P.L. VII, 154 (‘I in a moment will create Another World’) and 176 (’Immediate are the acts of God’, etc.). These passages mean that Divine Acts are not really in time, though we are compelled to imagine them as if they were—a doctrine which the reader can study in Boethius (De Cons. Phil. V, Pros. vi), St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, XI, 6, 21), or Thomas Browne (Rel. Med. I, XI). How it should imply that God ‘includes all time’ except in the sense in which Shakespeare includes (i.e. ordains, while not entering) the dramatic time in Hamlet, I do not know. It is certainly not heretical. The question about space is more difficult and will be dealt with below.
3. Those which are heretical and occur in the De Doctrina, but not in Paradise Lost.
Only one doctrine falls under this heading. Milton was an Arian; that is, he disbelieved in the coeternity and equal deity of the three Persons. Milton is an honest writer. After spending chapters II to IV of the first Book of De Doctrina on God, he begins cap. V ‘on the Son’ with prefatory remarks which make it clear that he is now beginning to say something unorthodox, with the implication that he has hitherto been stating common beliefs. His Arianism, in so far as it here concerns us, is stated in the words ‘All these passages prove the existence of the Son before the world was made, but they conclude nothing respecting His generation from all eternity.’ Professor Saurat suggests that this heresy appears in Paradise Lost, V, 603, when the Father announces to the angels ‘This day have I begot whom I declare My onely Son.’ Now if this is taken literally it means that the Son was created after the angels. But that is impossible in Paradise Lost. We learn in III, 390, that God created the angels by the agency of the Son, and Abdiel refutes Satan by making the same assertion in V, 835—to which the best answer Satan can bring is that ‘we weren’t there to see it being done’. The puzzle would be insoluble if Milton had not given us the solution in De Doctrina, I, V, where he says that ‘beget’, when used of the Father in relation to the Son, has two senses, ‘the one literal, with reference to the production of the Son, the other metaphorical, with reference to His exaltation’ (Bohn, Prose Wks, vol. IV, p. 80). And it is obvious that ‘This day I have begot’ must mean ‘This day I have exalted,’ for otherwise it is inconsistent with the rest of the poem. And if this is so, we must admit that Milton’s Arianism is not asserted in Paradise Lost. The place (II, 678) where we are told that Satan feared no created thing except God and His Son merely illustrates the same illogical idiom which makes Eve one of her own daughters (IV, 324); if it were taken in any other way it would make the Father, as well as the Son, a ‘created thing’. The expression ‘of all Creation first’ applied to the Son in III, 383, is a translation of St. Paul’s πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως (Col. I, 15). A writer anxious to avoid the Arian heresy might indeed have avoided Milton’s translation; but we should not from this passage, nor from any passage in the whole poem, have discovered the poet’s Arianism without the aid of external evidence.
4. Those which are possibly heretical and do really occur in Paradise Lost.
(a) ‘God includes the whole of Space.’ The important passage is VII, 166 et seq., where the Father commands the Son to create the World. The Son is to ‘bid the Deep be Heav’n and Earth’. The Deep is ‘boundless’ because ‘I am who fill infinitude’; then come the crucial words,
nor vacuous the space
Though I incircumscrib’d myself retire
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not.
One of Professor Saurat’s great contributions has been to discover the doctrine in the Zohar which was almost certainly present in Milton’s mind when he wrote those verses. This doctrine appears to be that God is infinitely extended in space (like ether), and therefore in order to create—to make room for anything to exist which is not simply Himself—he must contract, or retire, His infinite essence. I do not think such an idea likely to have struck two writers independently, and I therefore allow to Professor Saurat that Milton has been influenced by the Zohar when he speaks of God ‘retiring Himself’. It remains to define the sense in which this is heretical. To say that God is everywhere is orthodox. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord’ (Jer. XXIII, 24). But it is heresy to say that God is corporeal. If, therefore, we insist on defining (which, to the best of my belief, no Christian has ever been obliged to do) the mode of God’s omnipresence, we must not so define it as to make God present in space in the way in which a body is present. The Zohar by making God present in such a way as to exclude other beings (for if He does not exclude other beings, why need He withdraw to make room for them?) would seem to commit this error. But does Milton follow it? To be true to the Zohar Milton’s God ought to say ‘The space is vacuous because I have withdrawn’; actually He says, ‘The space is not vacuous, although I have withdrawn.’ And Milton goes on to explain that God’s withdrawal consists not in a spatial retraction, but in ‘not putting forth His goodness’; that is, there are parts of space over which God is not exercising His efficacy, though He is still, in some undefined mode, present in them. This may possibly fall into a quite different heresy—that of including potentiality in God; but it does not commit Milton to making God an extended being, like matter. Indeed, it is doubtful if the Zohar itself is so committed; for having said that God ‘contracts His essence’ it goes on to assert that He does not thereby diminish Himself. But spatial contraction of a body would involve diminution in extent. Therefore the retraction of the Zohar is not really an affair of space, as we understand it, at all; and not even the Zohar, much less Milton, can with certainty be accused of such crude picture-thinking as we at first suspect. Finally, I would draw attention to the word ‘uncircumscribed’. It is not clear to what sentence in the Zohar Professor Saurat supposes this to correspond. But it can be paralleled in a very different author. Thomas Aquinas, in defining the mode of God’s omnipresence, distinguishes three different meanings of the words ‘to be in a place’ (or ‘in place’). A body is in a place in such a way as to be bounded by it, i.e. it occupies a place circumscriptive. An angel is in a place not circumscriptive, for it is not bounded by it, but definitive, because it is in that one place and not in any other. But God is in a place neither circumscriptive nor definitive, because He is everywhere (Sum. Theol. Ia. Q. LII, Art. 2). I do not suppose that Milton, who shared to the full the Philistine attitude of the Humanists to scholastic philosophy, had himself read these words, but I think it very unlikely that the conception of circumscription in this sense was unknown in Cambridge in his time. And if so, his use of the word uncircumscribed would have called up the associations of a theory of Divine omnipresence which is perfectly orthodox. Even if this is not accepted, and if uncircumscribed is taken to reproduce the Zohar’s ‘not that He diminished Himself’, it will still emphasize just that proviso in the Zohar whereby it avoids a purely spatial conception. In fine, from this highly poetical but philosophically obscure passage, the most we can draw is that Milton is perhaps following the Zohar where the Zohar is perhaps heretical.
(b) Matter is a part of God. Milton certainly rejects in De Doctrina I, vii, the orthodox teaching that God made the material universe ‘out of nothing’, i.e. not out of any pre-existing raw material. He holds it to be ‘an argument of supreme power and goodness that such diversified, multi-form, and inexhaustible virtue’ (sc. as that of matter) ‘should exist and be substantially inherent in God’. Spirit, according to Milton, ‘being the more excellent substance virtually and essentially contains within itself the inferior one’. It is not easy to understand this doctrine, but we may note that it does not fall into the heresy against which the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’ was intended to guard. That doctrine was directed against dualism—against the idea that God was not the sole origin of things, but found Himself from the beginning faced with something other than Himself. This Milton does not believe: if he has erred he has erred by flying too far from it, and believing that God made the world ‘out of Himself’. And this view must in a certain sense be accepted by all Theists: in the sense that the world was modelled on an idea existing in God’s mind, that God invented matter, that (salva reverentia) He ‘thought of’ matter as Dickens ‘thought of’ Mr. Pickwick. From that point of view it could be said that God ‘contained’ matter as Shakespeare ‘contained’ Hamlet. In fact, if Milton had been content to say that God ‘virtually contains’ matter, as the poet the poem or the feet swiftness, he would (I believe) have been orthodox. When he goes on to add ‘essentially’ he probably means something heretical (though I do not clearly understand what) and this something presumably appears in Paradise Lost, V, 403 and following—a fugitive colour on the poem which we detect only by the aid of external evidence from the De Doctrina.
Perhaps it will be useful to mention here—though it would concern me more closely if my subject were Paradise Regained—what Professor Saurat believes about Milton’s presentation of the Redemption. Professor Saurat says (p. 177) that the Crucifixion plays ‘no noticeable part’ in the poet’s theology and that ‘vicarious atonement is no Miltonic conception’ (p. 178). But it is precisely the scheme of vicarious atonement in its strictest Anselmic form which the Father propounds in P.L. III (210 et seq.) and which the Son accepts—‘On Mee let thine Anger fall . . . account me Man’ (III, 237). Michael explains the whole matter to Adam in forensic terms. Christ will save Man ‘by suffering Death, The penaltie to thy transgression due’ (XII, 398): ‘Thy punishment Hee shall endure’ (ibid. 404). His ‘imputed’ merits will save human beings (409). He will ‘nail’ our enemies ‘to the cross’ (415) and pay our ‘ransom’ (424). What could Milton have done, which he has not done, to forestall Professor Saurat’s criticism? Even in Paradise Regained it is only Eden—not Heaven—that Christ raises in the wilderness (Regained, I, 7). The perfect manhood which Adam lost is there matured in conflict with Satan; in that sense Eden, or Paradise, the state of perfection, is ‘regained’. But all the vicarious atonement is still to be carried out: that is why we hear so little of it in the poem. The temptation is merely ‘exercise’ (I, 156) and ‘rudiments’ (I, 157) preparatory to the work of redemption, and different from it in kind, because in the wilderness Christ merely conquers Satan’s ‘sollicitations’ (I, 152) whereas in the crucifixion He conquers ‘all his vast force’ (I, 153). Hence at the end of the poem the Angelic chorus bid Christ ‘now enter’ on His true task and ‘begin’ to save Mankind (IV, 634). Satan’s ‘moral defeat’ has been achieved, his actual defeat is still to come. If the analogy is allowable, Milton has described the enfances and knighting of the Hero, and has really made it quite clear that the dragon-slaying is not part of his subject. It may, of course, be asked why Milton did not write a poem on the Crucifixion. For my own part, I think the answer is that he had more sense. But why should such a question be raised? A man is not under a contract to write every poem we happen to think suitable for him.
The heresies of Paradise Lost thus reduce themselves to something very small and rather ambiguous. It may be objected that I have been treating the poem as a legal document, finding out what Milton’s words strictly hold him to, and thrusting aside the evidence of his other works which shows us what he ‘really meant’ by them. And certainly if we were in pursuit of Milton’s private thoughts and were valuing the poem simply for the light it threw on those, my method would be very perverse. But the words ‘really meant’ are ambiguous. ‘What Milton really meant by the poem’ may mean (a) his total thought about all the subjects mentioned in it; (b) the poem he meant (i.e. intended) to write, the instrument for producing a certain experience in the readers which he intended to make. When we are dealing with the second of these two we are not only entitled but obliged to rule out any effects which his words can produce only by the aid of the De Doctrina or the Zohar, for the poem is not addressed to students of either. The modern habit of writing poems which are to be understood only in the light of the poet’s own reading, however idiosyncratic and accidental it may be, was quite foreign to the classical, public, and objective conceptions of poetry which Milton held. You put into your poem not whatever you happened to be interested in, but what was proper, first, to the general end of delighting and instructing the readers, and, second, to the fable and the species of composition. Decorum was the grand masterpiece. To look away from the effect which the poem might be expected to produce, and was calculated to produce, on the ordinary educated and Christian audience in Milton’s time, and to consider instead all the connexions it may have had in Milton’s private thinking, is like leaving the auditorium during a tragedy to hang about the wings and see what the scenery looks like from there and how the actors talk when they come off the stage. By so doing you will find out many interesting facts, but you will not be able to judge or to enjoy the tragedy. In Paradise Lost we are to study what the poet, with his singing robes about him, has given us. And when we study that we find that he has laid aside most of his private theological whimsies during his working hours as an epic poet. He may have been an undisciplined man; he was a very disciplined artist. Therefore, of his heresies—themselves fewer than some suppose—fewer still are paraded in Paradise Lost. Urania had him in hand. The best of Milton is in his epic: why should we labour to drag back into that noble building all the rubble which the laws of its structure, the limitations of its purpose, and the perhaps half-conscious prudence of the author, have so happily excluded from it? Must Noah always figure in our minds drunk and naked, never building the Ark?
Christian readers who find Paradise Lost unsatisfactory as a religious poem may very naturally suspect that some of its failures in this respect are not unconnected with those heretical beliefs which, from his other works, we can bring home to the author. The suspicion will not be confirmed or removed till the Day of Judgement. In the meantime the sound course is to judge the poem on its merits, not to pre-judge it by reading doctrinal errors into the text. And as far as doctrine goes, the poem is overwhelmingly Christian. Except for a few isolated passages it is not even specifically Protestant or Puritan. It gives the great central tradition. Emotionally it may have such and such faults; dogmatically its invitation to join in this great ritual mimesis of the Fall is one which all Christendom in all lands or ages can accept.
I cannot leave this part of my subject without again expressing the thanks which are due to Professor Saurat from all lovers of Milton. I believe his book to be full of wrong answers to the questions he has raised: but to have raised those questions at all, to have rescued Miltonic criticism from the drowsy praise of his ‘organ music’ and babble about the ‘majestic rolls of proper names’, to have begun the new era in which readers take him (as he wished to be taken) seriously, was a most useful, and a highly original, piece of work. If I am right in finding very different answers to these questions, my debt to Professor Saurat is not the less. It was from him that I first learned to look for answers at all, or indeed to suspect that they were worth finding. He has made most criticism of Milton before his time look somewhat childish or dilettante; and even those of us who disagree with him are, in one sense, of his school.