XV. The Mistake About Milton’s Angels
What philosophy suggests to us on this topic is probable: what scripture tells us is certain. Dr. Henry More has carried it as far as philosophy can. You may buy both his theological and philosophical works in two volumes folio.
JOHNSON apud BOSWELL.
Johnson finds a ‘confusion of spirit and matter’ pervading Milton’s whole account of the war in Heaven. But Johnson approached it under a misconception; according to him Milton ‘saw that immateriality supplied no images’ and therefore ‘invested’ his angels with ‘form and matter’—in other words Johnson believed that the corporeality of Milton’s angels was a poetic fiction. He expected to see the poet’s real belief peeping through the fiction and thought he saw what he expected. I once thought—perhaps most readers thought—the same. A new period in my appreciation of Paradise Lost began when I first found reason to believe that Milton’s picture of the angels, though doubtless poetical in detail, is meant in principle as a literally true picture of what they probably were according to the up-to-date pneumatology of his century.
The great change of philosophical thought in that period which we call the Renaissance had been from Scholasticism to what contemporaries described as Platonic Theology. Modern students, in the light of later events, are inclined to neglect this Platonic Theology in favour of what they regard as the first beginnings of the scientific or experimental spirit; but at the time this so-called ‘Platonism’ appeared the more important of the two. Now one of the points in which it differed from Scholasticism was this: that it believed all created spirits to be corporeal.
Thomas Aquinas had believed that angels were purely immaterial; when they ‘appear’ to human senses they have temporarily assumed a body of air, sufficiently condensed for visibility (Sum. Theol. Ia, Q. LI, Art. 2). As Donne says, ‘An Angel face and wings Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure, doth weare’ (Aire and Angels). Hence, for Aquinas, an angel could not eat; when he appeared to do so it was ‘not actual eating, but a symbol of spiritual eating’ (ibid. Ia, Q. LII, Art. 3). And this is the view which Milton goes out of his way to controvert. When his Archangel dined with Adam he did not simply appear to eat, nor was his refection a mere symbol—‘nor seemingly . . . nor in mist’ (i.e. in a mystical or spiritual fashion. P.L. V, 435). Real hunger preceded, real assimilation, with a consequent rise of temperature, accompanied the meal. It is inconceivable that Milton should have so emphasized the reality of angelic nourishment (and even angelic excretion) if the bodies he attributed to his angels were merely a poetical device. The whole passage becomes intelligible, and much less poetically grotesque, when we realize that Milton put it there chiefly because he thought it true. In this he did not stand alone.
The root idea of the Platonic Theologians was that they were recovering from the ancient writers a great secret wisdom which was in substantial agreement with Christianity. Plato was only the last and most elegant of the six summi theologi, the others being Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, and Pythagoras, and all these said the same thing (Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XVII, 1). That is why a Christian like Puttenham calls Trismegistus ‘the holiest of Priests and Prophets’ (Arte of English Poesie, I, viii). It follows that the miracles recorded of Pagan sages need not be either diabolical or legendary. ‘The souls of men who have given themselves to God command the elements and perform the rest of those acts which poets sing, historians relate, and philosophers, specially the Platonists, deny not’ (Ficino, ibid. XIII, iv). ‘As for the miracles Pythagoras did,’ writes Henry More (of Milton’s own college), ‘though I do not believe all that are recorded of him, yet those that I have recited I hold probable enough, they being not unbecoming the worth of the person’ (Defence of the Cabbala. Pref.). Bound up with this is a belief that the pictures of non-human, yet rational, life presented in the Pagan writers contain a great deal of truth. The universe is full of such life—full of genii, daemones, aerii homines. And these are animals, animated bodies or incarnate minds.
According to Ficino each of the spheres and each of the four elements has, besides its general soul, many souls, or animals derived from it. They are corporeal enough to be seen, though we do not see all of them. We see the stellar ones because, though distant, they are bright, and the terrestrial because they are near and opaque. The aereal and fiery we do not see. The aquatic (‘whom Orpheus calls Nereids’) are ‘sometimes seen by people with very sharp eyes in Persia or India’ (op. cit. IV, i).
‘I was always disposed,’ writes Henry More, in his third letter to Descartes, ‘to agree with the Platonists, the ancient Fathers, and almost all the magicians, in recognizing that all souls and genii, whether good or evil, are plainly corporeal, and accordingly have sense experience in the strict sense; i.e. by the mediation of a body.’ How far he carried this idea may be seen from his book on the Immortality of the Soul (III, ix, 6) where he tells us that those spirits who have bodies of air may by ‘local motion’ and ‘the activity of their thoughts’ agitate the particles of such bodies till they ‘scatter and perspire’. The body will then need ‘a recruit’—‘wherefore it is not improbable but that they may have their times of refection, for pleasure at least, if not necessity’. He even mentions ‘innocent pastimes in which the musical and amorous propension’ of such beings ‘may be also recreated’ (op. cit. III, ix, 4). It is true that in his preface (para. 8) he complains of this passage having been misunderstood; but he certainly did not rule out the possibility of an ‘amorous propensity’ in the most literal sense; ‘that the genii or spirits which antiquity called gods might impregnate women’ seemed to him ‘not at all incredible’ (Grand Mystery III, xviii, 2). Paracelsus thought the same of his Gnomes, Undines, Sylphs, and Salamanders, whose females are eager to marry men because they thus acquire immortal souls—and also for the more prosaic reason that the males of their own species are in a minority (De Nymphis, etc.). Wierus, coming yet closer to Milton, tells us in his De Praestigiis Daemonum that daemons have an aereal body which they can change at will into male or female, because of its soft and ductile substance. Burton, quoting Psellus, has much to say of aereal bodies, which ‘are nourished and have excrements’, and ‘feel pain if they be hurt’. If these bodies are cut ‘with admirable celerity they come together again’. Bodinus, an eager upholder of the corporeality of spirits, holds, according to Burton, that the aereal bodies are spherical (Anatomy of Mel. I, ii, I, 2). Henry More agrees that this is their natural shape, but finding it difficult to imagine how ‘two such heaps of living air’ could converse, suggests that for purposes of social intercourse they temporarily cast their ‘vehicles’ into something like the human form (Immortality, III, 5). All authorities seem to agree in giving the airy body incredible swiftness and almost unlimited powers of transformation, contraction, and dilation. It is these bodies which explain the phenomenon of the aereal combat. I have never seen it, but in the sixteenth century nearly everyone seems to have done so. ‘The appearance of armed men fighting and encountering one another in the sky,’ according to Henry More, is ‘most notorious’ (Antidote against Atheism, III, xii, 7). Those are the ‘airy knights’ of Paradise Lost, II, 536, and the ‘fierce fiery warriors’ of Julius Caesar, II, ii, 19. Even a sceptic like Machiavelli mentions with respect the spiritist explanation of the phenomenon (aerem plenum spiritbus et intelligentiis esse) and affirms the phenomenon itself (De Republica, I, lvi).
With all this Milton was, of course, perfectly familiar. The Attendant Spirit in Comus is significantly called Daemon in the Trinity MS. The whole scheme appears to be assumed throughout Paradise Lost, except in one passage. In that one passage (V, 563–76) Raphael seems to assume the modern or scholastic view. After explaining that it is a hard thing to relate ‘the invisible exploits of warring spirits’, he says that he will adapt his narrative to human sense ‘by likening spiritual to corporal forms’. I am not at all sure that corporal here means more than ‘grossly corporal’, ‘having bodies like ours’. The adaptation which Raphael promises may consist not in describing pure spirits as material, but in describing the material, though strictly unimaginable, bodies of angels as if they were fully human. But even if corporal be taken strictly, it will be noticed that Raphael half withdraws from his position before the end of the paragraph and hints that the spiritual world may be much more like the earthly than some people (for example, the scholastic philosophers) suppose. At most, this passage expresses a hesitation of Milton’s, parallel to his hesitation between the two astronomies, a refusal to commit himself completely. Throughout the rest of the poem ‘Platonic Theology’ rules undisputed.
When once this has been grasped most of the inconsistencies which Johnson thought he had discovered simply vanish. When Satan animates the toad this does not prove that he is immaterial, but only that his subtle body can penetrate a grosser body and contract itself to very small dimensions. When he meets Gabriel he dilates. When there is insufficient room for the inferior angels in Pandemonium, they contract. There is nothing unreasonable in giving the angels armour; though their airy bodies cannot be killed (i.e. reduced to inorganic matter) because they re-unite after cleavage with such ‘admirable celerity’, they can be damaged and hurt. A casing of some suitable inorganic material would therefore be a real protection. It is also reasonable (P.L. VI, 595 et seq.) that this armour, when opposed to the unfamiliar attack of artillery, should prove a hindrance rather than a help, by reducing the nimbleness of contraction, dilation, and locomotion which the aereal body would have had when unencumbered.
A certain amount of critical prudery, in which I once shared, has been aroused by the account of what More had called ‘the amorous propension’ of Milton’s angels (P.L. VIII, 618–29). The trouble is, I think, that since these exalted creatures are all spoken of by masculine pronouns, we tend, half consciously, to think that Milton is attributing to them a life of homosexual promiscuity. That he was poetically imprudent in raising a matter which invites such misconception I do not deny; but the real meaning is certainly not filthy, and not certainly foolish. As angels do not die, they need not breed. They are not therefore sexed in the human sense at all. An angel is, of course, always He (not She) in human language, because whether the male is, or is not, the superior sex, the masculine is certainly the superior gender. But there exists among these creatures, according to Milton, something that might be called trans-sexuality. The impulse of mutual love is expressed by the total interpenetration of two aereal bodies; ‘total they mix’ because they are ductile and homogeneous—they mix like wine and water, or rather like two wines. The idea escapes the sensuality sometimes cast in Milton’s teeth because the desire for total union, the impossible desire as it is for human lovers, is not the same thing as a desire for pleasure. Pleasure can be obtained; total interpenetration cannot, and, if it could, would be the satisfaction of love itself rather than of appetite. As Lucretius points out, men seek (and find) pleasure, in so far as they lust: they seek (and cannot achieve) total union in so far as they are lovers. I suspect that Milton had the whole passage in mind.
etenim potiundi tempore in ipso
Fluctuat incertis erroribus ardor amantum . . .
Namque in eo spes est, unde est ardoris origo,
Restingui quoque posse ab eodem corpore flammam.
Quod fieri contra totum natura repugnat . . .
Nequiquam; quoniam nil inde abradere possunt
Nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto.
De Rerum Natura, IV, 1076–1111.
And obstacle find none, writes Milton of the angels; pointing by contrast the tragedy, perhaps the redeeming tragedy, of the human senses. No doubt these angelic fusions, since angels are corporeal, are not without pleasure: but we must not imagine it after the pattern of our own specialized and rebellious senses. Milton’s angels are what may be called Panorganic—‘all heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear, All intellect, all sense’ (P.L. VI, 350). Whereas men have five distinct senses, each of which receives from the outer world its peculiar stimulus and converts it into its peculiar kind of sensation, these sensations being later united into a reflection of the world by Common Sense, angels, we are to suppose, have a single sensibility equally distributed through the whole aereal body and capable of picking up all those stimuli which are portioned out with us among the different senses, and doubtless some to which none of our senses respond. The mode of consciousness produced by such a single supersense is, of course, not imaginable to humans. We can only say that it would afford a much more complete and faithful reflection of the outer world than we enjoy.
I hope it will not be supposed that I am prepared to support Milton’s angelology as science, if I suggest that it improves poetically when we realize that it is seriously intended—even scientifically intended. It should be approached as we approach similar scientific material in Dante. The Commedia combines two literary undertakings which have long since been separated. On the one hand it is a high, imaginative interpretation of spiritual life; on the other it is a realistic travelbook about wanderings in places which no one had reached, but which every one believed to have a literal and local existence. If Dante in one capacity is the companion of Homer, Virgil, and Wordsworth, in the other he is the father of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Moderns must not be shocked at this; the ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ branches of almost every art are usually specializations from an earlier and more fully human art which was neither or both. And something of this old unity still hangs about Paradise Lost. The angels are not to be judged as if they were the invented gods of Keats, but as poetizations of the glimpses which contemporary scientific imagination thought it had attained of a life going on just above the human level though normally inaccessible to direct observation. The details of Raphael’s eating seem unfortunate to the modern reader because he judges them as if they were gratuitous inventions, to be taken on their merits as fiction. The whole point of view changes if we suppose ourselves coming to the work with a belief in such theories of the aereal body already formed and curious to see whether the poet will evade such details or triumphantly bring them in without becoming prosaic. When we find successful treatment of our own science in modern poetry I believe we are usually pleased: a future critic who thought that the theories of Freud and Einstein were simply poetic conventions—who supposed that the poet was producing them as the most beautiful and suggestive things he could invent—would probably form a different, and erroneous, judgement.