The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost

A consideration of Satan as a kind of teacher reveals Milton’s increasing pessimism regarding the function of education. Milton follows the 6th century biblical poem De Spiritualis Historiae Gestis by Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus in “framing the temptation of Eve as a diabolic parody of heavenly pedagogy.” Eve falls “through a rigorous but erroneous logical analysis of her situation.” Transcendent general principles rather than inductive particular data become the basis of knowledge. Gone is the optimism about the value of experience in education and the confidence in the inevitable victory of truth over falsehood expressed by Milton in the 1640s.

Introduction

Dorothea’s faith supplied all that Mr Casaubon’s words seemed to leave unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even bad grammar is sublime. George Eliot, Middlemarch 1...

God’s Grammar

Milton’s confidence in his powers of poetic sublimity seemingly falters when rendering divine speech. Evidently “in order to adequately discuss the transcendent quality of divinity, Milton’s grammar [particularly regarding verb tenses] must become strange or go (artfully and deliberately) awry.”

Euphrasy, Rue, Polysemy, and Repairing the Ruins

Examines the euphrasy and rue which Michael applies to Adam’s eyes in book 11 of Paradise Lost, which have been variously glossed by editors of the poem. In medieval and early modern herbals euphrasy was associated with joy or cheerfulness in contrast to rue’s association with sorrow, reinforcing the poem’s “ethical message of tempering joy with sorrow,” which “accords with other exhortations toward moderation” in Paradise Lost. Euphrasy was also, thanks to false etymology, associated with pleasing eloquence and poetry, allowing Milton an occasion for wordplay. Noting that Adam “does not always judge or interpret the visions [shown to him in books 11 and 12] correctly,” Stelzer suggests that “the remedy Michael administers in book 11 is temporary and imperfect, albeit extraordinary.”

Revisiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018

Draws on Milton’s Artis Plenior Logicae (1672) to read the logic of his God, arguing “that the poem is good not primarily because it makes God either good or bad,” pace Empson, “but because it lays bare the cosmic structure to which we are all subject.” In this structure “God will be justified, because [the cosmic structure] is his own creation; yet that justification does not have to make him good or kind within human definitions of those terms.” Ultimately “Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.”

Paradise Finding Aids

Discusses early verbal indices or concordances to Paradise Lost, especially the expanding series in the editions printed by Jacob Tonson from 1695 to 1711, frequently reprinted in later eighteenth-century editions, and Alexander Cruden’s concordance published in 1741. Examining these indexes not only illuminates “the habits of reading involved in making and using them” but also “can disclose structures in the poem that we have perhaps forgotten how to see, and even throw our contemporary critical practices into relief.” Tonson’s 1695 “Table” of generic ingredients, expanded into the subject “Index” of 1711, was composed mainly of descriptions (which disappear as a separate heading), “underscore[ing] how a finding aid can enlist the print codex to circumvent the epic’s basic ordering principle: the story”; instead, the index “processes epic into something like lyric.” Employing book and line numbers rather than page numbers, Alexander Cruden’s 1741 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost assumes that Paradise Lost, “like the Bible, had achieved enormous market penetration: the verbal index was designed for readers already equipped with copies in scores of different editions.” Thus “the verbal index helped Paradise Lost not only enter the lexicon,” as it “allowed readers to make the poem’s language their own,” but also helped to “define the lexicon through its pivotal role in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.”

Learning, Love, and the Freedom of the Double Bind

Viewing the poem through the lens of the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory, Campbell argues that some of the poem’s “odd or striking moments” produce the “paradoxical effect of a meta-liberation into a fuller awareness of the dissociative elements within the very discipline of freedom itself.” Campbell concludes that “perhaps God’s creation, like the poet’s, inextricably involves the strict necessity of appointed bounds and ordained freedom, without which the meaning of love, the most vital, disconjunctive, and transcontextual creation of all, cannot emerge into experience.”

High Enterprise

In the course of his research for the divorce tracts “Milton became a modern sort of scholar” as his scholarship changed and developed. Although in the divorce tracts themselves “Milton adheres mostly to Biblical and legal interpretation,” his scholarship “uses up to date methodologies of Biblical philology and reaches across sectarian divides.”

Political Diplomacy, Personal Conviction, and the Fraught Nature of Milton’s Letters of State

Discusses the considerable challenges facing the editors of the letters of state for the Clarendon Complete Works. These include the difficulty of ascertaining the degree of Milton’s authorship of state letters which were subject to revision by other agents of the Commonwealth, a problem only partially remedied by scholars’ ability to distinguish Milton’s Latin from that of other government employees. The discovery of additional manuscript collections unknown to earlier editors provides additional challenges, as does the fact that the final published versions of the letters often revise and alter Milton’s Latin. It is dangerous to assume that Milton’s own political convictions are substantially reflected in the state letters

Raphael’s Peroratio in Paradise Lost Balancing Rhetorical Passion in Virgil and Paul

Quintilian, Aristotle, and Cicero all comment on the peroration as an appropriate place to appeal most strongly to the passions or emotions of an audience. Mercury’s peroration in book 4 of the Aeneid, which chiefly excites the passion of fear, and Paul’s in Ephesians, which chiefly emphasizes fortitude and steadfastness, as well as Paul’s peroration in 1 Corinthians, with its emphasis on love, all serve Milton as models for Raphael’s concluding speech to Adam in book 8. Raphael’s peroration “brings together the wisdom of classical rhetorical scholarship, classical epic, and the Christian scriptures to help Adam maintain the perfect pre-fall balance of ‘passions.’”