Professor John Rogers:
In Book Five of Paradise Lost, Milton's theory of
monism -- that's the theory of the "one first matter" that we
looked at last time -- the theory of monism,
or vitalism or animist materialism, there are a number
of terms for it, arises in the context,
you'll remember, of a discussion about
digestion. I'll just remind you:
Adam simply asked Raphael how it was that angels could eat
human food, and Raphael responded with his
radical claim for a continuum of matter and spirit in God's
universe. The process of digestion was no
more suggestive or important to the Archangel Raphael than,
of course, it was for Milton himself.
You'll remember that letter to the famous Dr.
Leonard Philaras in which Milton had explained that it was
his bad digestion that he believed was largely responsible
for his blindness. Milton's digestive theory of
blindness was actually a perfectly reasonable medical
hypothesis in the seventeenth century.
Theorists of digestion were continually arguing that
unescaped gases could easily rise up in the body.But
Milton's own adoption of this theory served a particular and,
I think, an important purpose. Nearly every -- actually this
is a point that's made most brilliantly in a book that I
think Matthew Valdiviez has. It's by Michael Lieb.
Please hold up the book because it's a great book.
It's called The Dialetics of Creation.
Thank you for reminding me that I'm indebted to Lieb for
this point: nearly every important event in Paradise
Lost is represented in some way or another as a process of
digestion. Raphael tells Adam -- the
archangel says, "Knowledge is as food."
Adam must therefore ingest knowledge temperately just as
it's his obligation to ingest food temperately and,
of course, in moderation.But it's not just
knowledge: everything is digestive in Paradise Lost.
The process that we looked at last time,
the transformation of Adam and Eve into angels,
was going to be, as you remember,
the product of a virtuous digestion;
but so, too, will the expulsion of the rebel
angels be, their expulsion from heaven when the Son of God
drives them out with his chariot of paternal deity.
They are essentially eliminated as waste.
They're purged from the space of heaven.
Milton fills his account of that expulsion with really all
of the scatology that he can muster,
and even the Last Judgment will be described in terms of a
process of digestion. The saved will be assimilated
into the body of God, into the body of the universe,
and the damned at the end of time will be excreted into
hell.I think Milton's transforming a lot of these
absolutely central events in Christian history into something
like scenes of digestion for a very good reason.
By turning these moments into little or big digestive
episodes, Milton's able on some level -- although this might
sound irrational -- to rationalize Christian history.
The process of digestion was of extraordinary interest in the
seventeenth century, and scientists were fascinated
in it because digestion, like a lot of other processes
in the human body, seems to work without our own
conscious knowledge and certainly without our own
control. Digestion is a self-enclosed
system that seems to obey its own natural laws rather than
responding to an exercise of our will.
Milton imagines so much of Christian history as scenes of
digestion in a way, I think, because he needs to
imagine them as occurring without the deliberate
manipulation of the heavenly Father or in some way beyond the
Father's control. I think Milton is continually
fending off the Calvinist image of an arbitrary and punitive
deity. So the fall of the rebel
angels, the Fall of man, the Last Judgment -- all of
these events are perfectly reasonable,
natural and, at least from one important
perspective in the poem, reasonable,
natural, and also organic consequences of freely willed,
self-determined human behavior or creaturely behavior.
This is important for Milton: they're not examples of God's
skittish and arbitrary punishment of his creatures,
and that distinction is arising everywhere in Paradise
Lost.Now Book Seven is the book of creation.
Here more than anywhere we would expect,
I think, a representation of the extraordinary degree of
power and control that the heavenly Father is able to
exercise. What is the Creation,
after all, if not an arbitrary display of the Father's
omnipotence? Milton knows that that's the
case, but at the same time that he celebrates that,
he's also struggling to represent it otherwise;
and so he charges even the Creation itself with this same
cluster of images involving digestion.
Look for example -- this is the top of page 352,
Book Seven, line 234. I think this is one of the most
-- it's puzzling, and for a lot of readers it's
one of the most physiologically suggestive of all of the natural
processes that seem to be described in Milton's poem.
The Holy Spirit -- and the Holy Spirit is an interesting entity
for Milton. It seems to be something like
Milton's name for a principle of energy behind a lot of natural
processes, a divinely sanctioned principle of energy.
The Holy Spirit inseminates chaos.
This is Milton: [O]n the watr'y calm
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital vertue infus'd, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass...
Raphael describes the Holy Spirit's stunningly -- and we're
getting used to this -- stunningly ambisexual behavior
in brooding over and then, of course, inseminating the
fluid mass of the abyss. This is the process,
you'll remember, that actually supplies chaos
with that vital power of motion, the vital power of warmth and
virtue that's so consequential for Milton's theory of
monism.These are all ideas that Milton discusses in a
theoretical frame in chapter seven of Of Christian
Doctrine. There are seven days of
creation, and Milton has a kind of numerological bent,
and so it will be on Book Seven of Paradise Lost in which
the Creation is discussed and chapter seven of Of Christian
Doctrine in which the Creation is discussed.
It's this step -- this inseminating step,
in which all of creation is filled with the goodness of God
-- that really goes to the heart of Milton's theodicy.
Because of this infusion of divinity -- because of it,
everything that God creates, every natural thing,
must on some level be naturally good, necessarily good.
I think this much makes sense.But Raphael also
describes a moment in the Creation that,
I think, is a little more difficult for us to reconcile
with what we know or what we feel that we know of Milton's
monism. Look how this same passage
continues. This is line 237:
[B]ut downward [the Holy Spirit is the subject of the
verb] purg'd
The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life: then founded,
then conglob'd Like things to like,
the rest to several place Disparted, and between spun out
the Air… The Holy Spirit "downward
purg'd / The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs / Adverse to
life." The Holy Spirit doesn't merely
infuse chaos with vital virtue and vital warmth.
It purges something from chaos, too.
It's this strange digestive moment in Milton's text that has
left students of Milton's theology and students of the
poem scratching their heads in bewilderment,
and it's for some reason. Milton is usually so precise
and really every word and every image can almost always be
accounted for -- but dregs? This is the question:
where did these dregs come from?
Why are there any dregs in the inseminated space of chaos that
actually need to be purged? Think of the logic of Milton's
creation. God's infusion of vital virtue
and vital warmth should have completely filled the matter of
chaos with spirit and life. At least theoretically,
all matter should be steeped with spirit and energy and,
according to all of Milton's theories of this vitalist
universe in the Christian Doctrine,
there shouldn't be anything in Milton's creation,
technically, that's adverse to life.
This really is crucial for Milton's understanding of how
the universe is put together and it's crucial,
too, for his theodicy, but these dregs here are simply
-- there's no other way to read them: they are dead and they are
inert.I'm going to be applying some pressure to these
lines because what we have here is a moment of some metaphysical
incoherence, and it's metaphysical
incoherence at the very heart of Milton's account of the
creation. This incoherence is announced
with that wonderful word, "dregs," that Milton weighs
down so much. He weighs it down with well,
four contiguous adjectives: "black," "tartareous" -- what
an awkward line -- "black tartareous cold Infernal dregs."
I've spent a lot of time thinking about these lines,
and I've also written about this problem,
and so I'm going to ask that you to permit me a little
digression -- not that you really have a choice,
but I'm just announcing to you this fact that I will be
digressing now.What I'm going to do is give you my
theory, my pet theory,
of Milton's tartareous dregs. I'm convinced here that Milton
is participating in a contemporary conversation
involving one of his pet subjects and one of his favorite
subjects, which is that of digestion.
This is a debate -- and certainly it's not Milton's
debate, this is one that he inherits -- it's a debate about
those indigestible elements of food known as dregs in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century,
also known as tartar. I'm going to give you a little
bit of information about the Renaissance philosophy of
tartar, if you can believe it there is
such a thing, because I think it provides a
good example of just the kind of seemingly cockamamie
contemporary philosophical world that a lot of early modern
intellectuals inhabit.The key figure in the science of
dregs and tartar is the sixteenth-century German
philosopher Paracelsus. Literally, tartareous dregs are
simply the residue, the sediment,
produced by wine and vinegar. We still have a substance --
and if you cook you are familiar with this -- a substance made of
vinegar sediments, and it's called cream of
tartar. Well, Paracelsus had actually
developed an entire philosophy which had as its center his
understanding of these tartareous dregs,
so tartar for Paracelsus was the stuff that hardened into
stones within the gallbladder and within the kidney.
This was the explanation for gallstones or kidney stones,
and tartar was also the same material that formed a hardened
yellowish substance that we still call,
of course, tartar of the teeth. Milton in the seventeenth
century would have called it "tooth tartar," and more
commonly it was known as "tooth stone."
For Paracelsus, if there's any natural
substance on this planet that can be identified unequivocally
with evil, it is tartar,
and I mean metaphysical evil. Given the import of this
matter, Paracelsus was prompted to ask the same question that we
are all [laughs] prone to ask when we're
squirming on the dentist chair as we're having our teeth
cleaned: where in the hell does this stuff come from?
Paracelsus' answer to this question was a theological one,
which is why I think Milton was so interested in it,
although Milton eventually had to reject it altogether.Now
of course, I'm not suggesting that the central intellectual
context for understanding this part of Paradise Lost is
the history of dentistry or the history of oral hygiene.
Nonetheless we have a moment of Milton's engagement with a
contemporary theory, however seemingly off the wall.
This is the theory of tartar, which was easily as theological
and philosophical in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries as it was dental: okay,
so for Paracelsus, tartar originates in the food
we eat, and the tartar that ends up on your teeth is simply the
indigestible, unassimilable parts of that
food. For a lot of Paracelsus'
contemporaries this was an incredibly troubling theory.
A lot of Milton's contemporaries said so,
and so they had to reject completely the Paracelsian
theory -- you can guess why -- because Paracelsus' theory
implied, of course, that tartar had been
created by God -- it's part of the natural world -- and that
God was somehow responsible for the origin of evil in his
creation. And so you have philosophers
and theologians in the seventeenth century weighing in
on the tartar question, on the origin of dregs.
Of course, for the most part they're obliged to attack
Paracelsus.The entire tartar controversy and all of the
things that this controversy suggests about the nature of
divine justice -- all of this, I think, gets compacted into
this one truly extraordinary line: "black tartareous cold
Infernal dregs." Milton is using this incredibly
striking and strange sequence of words at this point in his
creation account because he wants to open up the question
for his contemporary audience -- it's,
of course, lost on us -- the question of the nature of divine
justice. Milton, I think,
in Book Seven is relatively torn about the kind of God that
he wants or that he needs to represent in the poem.
Is Milton's God the punitive and arbitrary God -- something
like an anthropomorphic deity, a God capable,
as Paracelsus had suggested, of actually creating evil?
Or is he a God from a slightly later deistic perspective,
a God that we can identify with the more rational or the more
natural processes implied in the theory of monism in which
everything in God's creation is just necessarily infused with
divinity and therefore good and alive and in some way capable of
virtue?This is the type of question that Milton is asking
throughout Book Seven of Paradise Lost.
One of the ways that Milton stages this problem is by
turning for inspiration to competing sources of
authoritative knowledge. Milton has, on the one hand,
the authority of scripture. You can see that although
scripture tells us a lot of things, one of the things that
it seems authoritatively to tell us is that it gives us a
representation of the anthropomorphic,
punitive deity -- at least in the Hebrew Bible.
Milton also has to support this view more or less the authority
of a philosopher like Paracelsus who had an image of a similar
although differently configured image of a punitive deity
capable of creating evil.But what kind of authority does
Milton have for representing the other kind of deity:
the force of life, or the energy,
that might actually be much more rationally recognizable or
accessible to a seventeenth-century scientific
contemporary of Milton's? Well, we don't have scientists
in the seventeenth century, technically.
We have natural philosophers: so what is the basis of
authority for contemporary natural philosophy?
The question of authority and authoritative knowledge is
central to the middle books, not just Book Seven but to all
the central books of Paradise Lost.
Raphael is presenting Adam and Eve with something like a
quick education in universal knowledge,
and the basis or the authority for this knowledge is constantly
under question in these books because so much of Raphael's
discourse has no foundation -- and this makes Milton nervous --
has no foundation in scripture whatsoever.
The Bible simply can't be counted on as an exclusive
source of universal knowledge, and so Milton has no choice but
to turn to other forms of authority and one of them is
science or natural philosophy.And so Milton at
the beginning of Book Seven invokes the muse of science,
the muse of astronomy, at the beginning.
So look at the invocation. This is page 345 of the
Hughes, the opening lines.
It's here in Book Seven and only here that Milton names his
muse, and the muse turns out to be Urania.
Without question, of course, she's a feminine
presence here. In the muse's earlier
incarnations in Books One and Three, there was some
uncertainty as to whether the Heavenly Spirit was a masculine
figure capable of impregnating chaos and who will now
impregnate Milton's mind, or whether the heavenly Spirit
was a feminine spirit, a feminine power that
"dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss" or similarly sat
brooding on the brooding mind of the poet.
But Book Seven is all about birth.
It's all about generation and creation, and Milton requires
for this book, I think,
an unequivocally feminine muse, a maternal muse who was there
when the world was born and who will serve here now as the
nurturing mother of Milton's own poem.Now Milton -- who's
committed, of course, to the truth of the
Bible and similarly committed, at least in part,
to a lot of the truths coming out in the world of natural
philosophy -- Milton's on shaky ground as he describes the
creation. His invocation is filled with
something like -- and it seems absolutely authentic -- a fear
of religious error. Look at line nineteen.
Milton conjures the fear of falling off Pegasus -- Pegasus,
the flying steed of poetry, "erroneous there to wander and
forlorn." Book Seven, especially this
invocation, is the focus for an enormous amount of Milton's
poetic anxiety. You can measure the degree of
Milton's poetic anxiety here by the reappearance of that figure
that Milton has called on throughout his career at moments
of intensest fear, or intensest isolation,
and that's the figure of Orpheus.
Orpheus' mother was the muse Calliope, the muse of epic
poetry. She had been incapable of
saving her son when he was dismembered by the followers of
Bacchus, the Bacchae. Milton implores Urania here at
the beginning of Book Seven to outdo Calliope and to spare him
the fate of Orpheus. Look at line 30:
[S]till govern thou my Song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race
Of that wild Rout that tore the Thracian Bard
In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Ears
To rapture, till the savage clamor drown'd
Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her Son. So fail not thou,
who thee implores: For thou art Heavn'ly,
shee an empty dream. Now, Urania is the traditional
name for the patroness of astronomy.
If this muse of astronomical wisdom is not truly governing
Milton's song -- if she's nothing more than the projection
of Milton's most outrageous poetic ambitions -- then Milton
will have no authority backing the poem's extraordinary claims
to knowledge. Milton is, I think,
really going on a limb in Paradise Lost as he's
claiming what is essentially the status of divine truth for
thousands of lines in this poem that really have no foundation
in holy scripture at all. Think of what we've just read
that I haven't spoken to at all: book Six, the story of the war
in heaven, is a story that doesn't,
in effect, appear in the Bible. There's a sense in this
allusion to Orpheus that this poetic endeavor of Milton's is
attended by really the profoundest risks.
Milton implores the muse, "so fail not thou," as Calliope
had failed, of course, Orpheus.
Behind this cry lurks a kind of nagging fear that Urania,
too, may turn out to be an empty dream: the fear that
Urania, just like Calliope,
will turn out to be nothing more than a convenient fiction
dreamt up by a desperately ambitious poet.But there's
another reason that Milton is invoking a feminine muse here.
He wants in this next section of the poem to establish a new
perspective for this book of universal knowledge,
and he's relying on a new muse to liberate him in some way from
the strictures of the orthodox forms of knowledge that are
sanctioned seemingly so unequivocally by the Bible.
Milton's struggling to balance the dominant theological
discourse with this new discourse, this new language of
science or natural philosophy. So what you have in Book Seven
is a really startling opposition of essentially competing forms
of knowledge and competing images of authority.
Milton will invariably -- how can he not?
And he does this authentically: he acknowledges the validity of
a scriptural account of a natural phenomenon,
but he will only do so in order to set the scripture aside at
some point and begin to explore an entirely different
perspective, an entirely different account,
of the same phenomenon.Let's look at an
example of this at the bottom of page 355.
This is Book Seven, line 387. Look at what Milton does with
the Genesis account of creation. Here we have the fifth day of
creation; this is when the God of Genesis
creates fish and fowl. Milton begins the account here
with a dutiful and humble transcription of Genesis,
and in some cases the verse is actually a word-for-word
transcription of the King James translation,
in some cases the Geneva translation.
You can see the King James translation in the footnotes.
Sometimes Milton will normally fiddle with just a couple of
words to make the Genesis text fit into the metrical scheme of
his blank verse. Look at line 387:
And God said, let the Waters generate
Reptile with Spawn abundant, living Soul:
And let Fowl fly above the Earth, with wings
Display'd on the op'n Firmament of Heav'n.
And God created the great Whales…
And so on and so forth all the way up to 398:
"And let the Fowl be multipli'd on the Earth."
These lines have to be -- and they've certainly been cited as
such since the eighteenth century -- they have to be the
flattest, the least interesting lines in
the entire poem. One of Milton's first editors,
this is on the handout, Dr.
Bentley, had actually argued that these lines were so bad
that they just needed to be deleted from the text
altogether. Bentley's thesis was [laughs]
an ingenious one: that Milton actually isn't
responsible for these lines at all.
According to Dr. Bentley, sometimes the
amanuensis -- the young man who would act as secretary and take
down the next installment of ten lines or fifteen lines or
whatever -- would just [laughs] start making things up or
didn't hear Milton properly. A lot of the lines that Bentley
most disliked were to be dismissed for just this reason,
that they clearly had nothing to do with Milton's own
composition.Bentley asked this question,
and it's a good question: why should Raphael be so tied
up to the letter in Genesis, Raphael who makes this
narrative thousands of years before Genesis was writ?
Not a bad question. Dr.
Bentley reasonably asks, "If Raphael came before Moses,
long before Moses, why is he quoting Moses?"
Why indeed? What might be the significance
of Milton's being tied up to the letter in Genesis?
Milton begins his account of the fifth day of creation by
paying homage to the scriptural source for his own creation
account, but that's, of course,
not where Milton ends. Look at line 399.
After Milton has exhausted -- thank God!
-- he's exhausted his bald versification of the King James
Bible, he lets loose with an entirely new representation of
creation. Listen to this:
Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek and Bay
With Fry innumerable swarm, and Shoals
Of Fish that with thir Fins and shining Scales
Glide under the green Wave, in Sculls that oft
Bank the mid Sea… Milton takes the austerity of
Genesis and amplifies it with some of the lushest,
most luxuriant verse in all of Paradise Lost.
I urge you all to read these lines out loud in the privacy of
your homes. So much of this poem has to be
experienced in your mouth, I'm convinced,
before it can fully be appreciated.
This is, in fact, how Milton experienced it.
He experienced it sonically because he was blind and wasn't
able to read it on the page. This particular description of
the fish and fowl continues for another perfectly amazing forty
lines. It's an extraordinary tour
de force.The sounds of water of which Milton speaks at
line 300 here are, of course, the bodies of water
that are suddenly filled with an enormous variety of aquatic life
forms; but the sounds that emerge
forthwith in this passage are also the sounds of this amazing
burst of imaginative poetry. The verse here explodes with a
kind of sonic energy that had been entirely repressed,
or suppressed, during Milton's lifeless
adherence to scripture: "And Shoales / Of Fish that
with thir Fins and shining Scales" -- Milton's swimming
here. He's loving every moment of it
-- you know it-- in a sensual, alliterative verse that almost
completely drowns out our memory of the bland King James English
of the previous lines. This demonstration of poetic
strength coincides with Milton's new sense of the strength,
or a new sense of a force, behind creation.
He takes the masculine image of God's verbal command from
Genesis, "And God said," and he replaces it with an
alternative feminine conception of creation that places the
power of creation in Nature herself.In his description
of the first schools of fish, Milton, I think,
is subscribing or can be seen to subscribe to a new and daring
school of thought. Look at the sixth day, line 450.
Milton begins -- and we've seen him do this before -- he
scrupulously follows the Genesis text.
This is Genesis: "And God said,
Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,
cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after
his kind, and it was so." Milton reproduces the
scriptural description nearly verbatim, but he very
scrupulously omits that final clause from Genesis,
"and it was so"; because he wonders well,
how was it so? The Genesis account of creation
is clearly inadequate here because it relies on some
mystical or some magical fulfillment of the Father's
divine command. Genesis refuses to provide a
rational or something like a natural explanation for how the
creation of "cattle and creeping thing" came to be so.Now in
the years of the Scientific Revolution in the later years of
the seventeenth century, the Genesis account of creation
was coming under a lot of scrutiny and the phrase "And God
said" was increasingly seen as -- this is inadequate,
this is an insufficiently believable form of natural
causation. There was a pressure felt by a
lot of intellectuals to imagine another form,
a more naturalistic force or power of causation,
at work, and this is exactly what Milton himself does.
He replaces the biblical phrase "And it was so" with a
spectacularly naturalistic drama of what we can think of as
self-creation. Look what Milton does.
The Earth obey'd, and strait
Op'ning her fertile Womb teem'd at a Birth
Innumerous living Creatures, perfet forms,
Limb'd and full grown…
Invoking a Mother Earth -- of course, this Mother Earth obeys
the Heavenly Father' but Milton, by invoking her,
is performing an operation similar to the strategy that he
had performed in the invocation. He's countering the entirely
masculine force behind the Genesis creation with a new
feminine presence. The female earth may just
demonstrate her initial obedience and subordination to
the Father, but after this humbling of
herself, she's empowered to produce -- and she does this on
her own -- all of the innumerous living creatures.
Milton's imagining here a female authority distinct from
the authority of the Father who's issuing these verbal
commands. He depicts this new source of
creative power by drawing on a literary authority quite
distinct from the Book of Genesis.
The image of the earth opening up her fertile womb actually
comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Interestingly, this comes from the section of
the Metamorphoses that describes life after the flood:
Deucalion's flood, seen by Christian readers in
Milton's day as a classical version of Noah's flood.
So it's a fallen phenomenon that Milton is placing well
before the Fall.But what Milton does after this point in
this passage doesn't even have an authority in Ovid.
Look at line [laughs] 463. Milton begins to represent what
may have seemed to less courageous poets as utterly
unrepresentable. This is the actual birthing of
these living forms, the emergence of cattle and
creeping things from the fertile womb of the living earth,
line 463. This gets me:
"The grassy Clods now Calv'd." The grassy clods of earth are
actually opening up and giving birth to calves.
It's an amazingly daring sequence of five words.
It's a spectacular image of creation.
The grassy Clods now Calv'd, now half appear'd
The Tawny Lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from
Bonds, And Rampant shakes his Brinded
mane… You'll note at the bottom of
the page that Merritt Hughes tells us -- and I love this
about Hughes, that he gives us this footnote
-- that the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had singled out
just this image, the image of the tawny lion,
as unworthy of Milton's gifts as poet.
You can see what offended Coleridge and what presumably
also offends Merritt Hughes. There is more than just a
little breach of decorum in this image of a lion wiggling his
bottom in order to free his hinder parts.
Milton's not only portraying the lion's attempt to give birth
to itself, which is no small feat as it paws its way out of
the earth's womb. He's also depicting something
like a liberation of sexual energy.
There's an emblem of the erotic charge that Milton is giving so
much of this nonscriptural material in Book Seven of
Paradise Lost. When the lion springs "as
broke from Bonds," there's a sense that Milton is
representing his own springing from the confining bonds of a
scriptural tradition that is insufficiently literarily
inspiring. It's also a liberation fully
akin to his poetic escape, we'll remember,
from the tyranny, the bondage,
of rhyme.Now, throughout so much of
Paradise Lost, the lines of hierarchical authority
seem to be incredibly clearly drawn,
but in Book Seven Milton begins to experiment a little more
freely with forms of authority and images of hierarchy that
actually counter more of the orthodox notions that he finds
in the Bible -- or in fact, that he finds in the culture at
large. The book itself is inspired by
a distinctly feminine muse, and in its description of
creation, there's a significant degree of
autonomy granted to this feminine power,
the Earth -- this new phenomenon,
the Earth. Now Book Eight would seem in a
lot of ways to put an end to this, what would seem to be a
provisional or momentary celebration of feminine energy.
In fact, Book Eight seems to reassert the subordination of
woman to man that had characterized our first glimpse
of Adam and Eve in Book Four. You'll remember that it's in
Book Eight that Adam recounts for Raphael the request that he
had made to God for a partner, some fellow human.
He specifically asked God for an equal.
This is Book Eight, line 382: For "mong unequals
what society / Can sort, what harmony or true delight?"
Adam asks.But God didn't seem all that interested in
granting Adam's request for an equal partner,
and Raphael's continually urging Adam to remember his
superiority to Eve. He mustn't mistake Eve's beauty
for nobility or wisdom or equality, and of course,
that has been Adam's tendency. Raphael famously contracts his
brow when Adam shows a tendency to idolize his wife,
and whenever the conversation turns to Adam's relation to Eve,
Raphael expresses a fixed and inflexible opinion on the matter
of sexual hierarchy. One sex clearly has a priority
over the other.But Book Eight is also concerned with
another kind of hierarchy, the hierarchy of the heavens:
the relations of the heavenly bodies.
Raphael and Adam also in Book Eight discuss at considerable
length the relative position in space of the sun and the earth
and the moon. Does the sun travel around the
earth, which remains fixed at the center of the universe as
the medieval Ptolemy had argued, or does the earth revolve
around the sun as the early modern Copernicus and then later
Galileo had theorized? Adam, of course,
isn't certain, though it certainly looks to
him, as it looks to us, as if the sun moves around the
earth. Now Adam's uncertainty here is
only reasonable but [laughs] the remarkable aspect of this
dialogue is that the Archangel Raphael isn't certain either.
Raphael doesn't really know which way [laughs]
the planets revolve even though he has spent much of this very
morning on his flight from heaven to earth,
where presumably he had some opportunity to observe the
workings of the heavenly planets.
It appears that God has made it difficult even for the angels to
discern the hierarchical structure of the cosmos.
There's an illegibility about hierarchy built in to the
system.Of course, by the mid-seventeenth century
the jury was still out as to whether the universe was
heliocentric or geocentric, and Milton wasn't alone in
expressing some uncertainty. You could say,
and it has been said, that it was wise of him to
hedge his bets; but there's a lot more going on
in the discussions of astronomy than just a serious desire to
get to the bottom of a difficult contemporary scientific
question. There's way too much made of
Raphael's confusion here and his uncertainty about cosmic
hierarchy. The sun and the earth,
or the sun and the moon, are deliberately gendered here.
Milton uses the traditional gender assignments of these
heavenly bodies that he inherits from the Latin language,
and he holds to them scrupulously throughout the
poem. The sun is always masculine,
and the earth and the moon are always feminine.
The controversy about the priority of the heavenly bodies
is, in some way, Milton's reformulation of the
controversy about the priority of the sexes.
The field of astronomy provides Milton with something like a
scientific discourse about the sexes,
an alternative source of knowledge that permits him to
counteract the more traditional and more theological account of
the sexes, assimilable from his culture
but also from the Bible.Look at page 366 in the Hughes.
Raphael's certainty about sexual hierarchy in the human
sphere seems to give way to nothing but doubts and
uncertainty as soon as that hierarchy is extended to the
cosmic sphere. Science provides a different
kind of space: this is a discursive space for
a more liberated, a more open-ended discussion of
sexual politics. It provides Milton with an
opposing source for the knowledge about the sexes,
a knowledge that seemed so complete and so sewn up from the
theological point of view implicit in the Genesis account.
So on page 366 -- this is Book Eight, line 148.
Raphael is beginning to grow exceedingly speculative here,
and he dares to conjecture that there may exist out there in the
cosmos other suns and other moons:
[O]ther suns perhaps With their attendant moons thou
wilt descry Communicating Male and Female
Light, Which two great Sexes animate
the World, Stor'd in each Orb perhaps with
some that live. The two great sexes here that
communicate their light do so with an equal brilliance.
The greatness of one isn't emphasized here,
at least in these lines, at the expense of the other.
You'll remember with Adam and Eve in our first description of
them in their naked majesty -- they were lords of all and,
presumably, equally lords of all.
When Raphael conjectures that some creatures might actually
live on these infinitely distant other suns and other moons,
he's pointing to an alternative conceptual world in which the
relation of the two great sexes might be configured altogether
differently.Raphael concludes the discussion at line
159, and he suggests essentially to
Adam that it's not Adam's place -- Adam should just cool it --
it's not his place to pursue these grand questions of
heavenly organization. So this is Raphael:
"But whether thus these things, or whether not,
/ Whether the Sun predominant in Heav'n / Rise on the Earth;
or Earth rise on the Sun..." Raphael's just telling us it
simply doesn't matter, and he suggests a decisive --
if such a thing makes sense -- a decisive uncertainty about
whether the predominant sun rises on the earth or whether
the predominant earth rises on the sun.
One Milton critic, John Guillory,
has been absolutely right, I think -- he's the best reader
of this, the whole problem -- in
suggesting that we can hear behind these lines the brooding
question of sexual hierarchy. Is the man on top or is the
woman on top? Is the masculine sex
predominant, or could it be that the feminine predominates?
When speaking about the sexes in the language of human
relations, Raphael is utterly definitive about who
predominates over whom, but when he's speaking the
language of science he seems baffled -- and it's lovable.
His confusion in the scientific realm can be seen to force us to
reconsider his certainty about relations in the human realm,
in the ethical realm.Now none of this is to say that
Milton is a feminist or even that Milton is a proto-feminist.
The question of what Milton actually believes about the
priority of the sexes is really, I think, too difficult to
discover or extract simply from a reading of the text.
This poem is far too filled with contradictions to give us
anything like a clear road map to Milton's own beliefs,
if it could even be said that he or any of us actually have
firm and fixed beliefs about such huge and consequential
matters as the relation between the sexes.
But it is, I think, possible to see that Milton is
struggling in some way to keep in suspension the competing
sources of knowledge that address this crucial question in
Paradise Lost, the question of the
relation between the sexes. Milton's poem is -- we can't
deny this -- is a far more theological poem than it is a
scientific one, but Milton will nonetheless use
the language of natural philosophy, the language of
science, to open up some of the pressing
questions that his theology seems to have closed down.
You can see Milton willingly placing himself in the role of
Raphael at just those moments when the archangel is discussing
astronomy. It's as if Milton,
just like that affable angel -- and don't you love it that
Milton lets us know that Raphael is the affable angel,
quite unlike the Michael that we will meet in the last two
books? -- as if Milton,
just like Raphael, were throwing his hands affably
up in the air in complete uncertainty and telling us,
the readers, "I don't know.
I don't know the answer to these big questions.
You decide." Okay.
