David V. Urban
Reading The New
Milton Criticism: A Review Essay
Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., The New Milton Criticism. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge,
UK & New York, NY, USA, 2012), 253 pp. + xii. ISBN 978-1-107-01922-5 (hardback) $95.00 (USD) & 978-1-107-60395-0 (paperback) $27.99 (USD).
Michael E. Bryson, The Atheist Milton. Ashgate
Publishing (Surry, UK & Burlington, VA, USA, 2012), 184 pp. ISBN 9781409447016. £49.50 (GBP).
1> These two volumes are recent book-length contributions by
representatives of a critical movement that calls itself the New Milton
Criticism (hereafter referred to as the NMC). The NMC label was given to the
movement by Peter C. Herman in his 2005 article, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms
Found: The New Milton Criticism,” an essay which heralds the coming of “a New
Milton Criticism” that “embraces indeterminancy and incertitude" (1), as
well as contradiction, as essential aspects of Milton's writings. The NMC's
antecedents, writes Herman, can be found in the Romantics’ responses to Milton,
as well as in 20th-century works such as A. J. A. Waldock’s “Paradise
Lost” and Its Critics (1947), John Peter’s A Critique of
“Paradise Lost” (1960), and William Empson’s Milton’s God (1961),
but Herman suggests that the NMC itself began in earnest in 1990 with the
publication of three separate essays by Thomas N. Corns, Jonathan Goldberg, and
John Rumrich, each of which “sought to recast Miltonic uncertainty as a
constituent element of Milton studies, that is, as an opportunity rather than
an embarrassment” (14).1 Subsequent book-length efforts that
Herman considers important contributions to the NMC are Rumrich's Milton
Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (1996), Rumrich and Stephen
Dobranski’s Milton and Heresy (1998), Michael Bryson's The
Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (2004), and
Herman's own Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the
Poetics of Incertitude (2005). Another important book aligned with the NMC,
which appeared shortly after Herman's essay, is Joseph Wittreich’s Why
Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Writings (2006).
2> Herman's article, which soundly criticizes what he considers
the “dominant paradigm” of Milton studies (1), summarizes that paradigm as
follows: 1) “Milton is a poet of absolute, unqualified certainty”; 2) “Paradise
Lost coheres”; and 3) “the critic’s task is to make the poem cohere”
(2). Invoking the terminology of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1962),
Herman announces that the NMC is ushering in a new paradigm within Milton
studies, one which is beginning to flourish amid the recognition that the
current dominant paradigm has, in Kuhn’s words, “ceased to function adequately”
(19). Herman’s essay concludes by stating, “If C. S. Lewis wrote A
Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ with the intension of preventing ‘the
reader from ever raising certain questions,’ the New Milton Criticism
encourages all questions, regardless of where the answer will take the reader”
(19).
3> The claims of the NMC, particularly those made by Herman and
Bryson, drew the ire of Stanley Fish in his keynote address to the July 2008
Ninth International Milton Symposium. In this now-published address, Fish notes
that he and C. S. Lewis—whom Bryson in The Tyranny of Heaven portrays
as the two dominant forces behind the so-called “neo-Christian” school of
Milton studies that Bryson derisively calls “Milton ministries” (23)—are the
main targets of the NMC's critical iconoclasm. Fish calls the NMC’s conclusions
“unpersuasive” and spends the remainder of his essay critiquing what he
considers the faulty “argumentative logic by which [the NMC’s conclusions] are
supposedly reached” (131).
4> More recently, I myself became embroiled in controversy with
the NMC when, in May 2011, I published an article in Milton Quarterly,
“Speaking for the Dead,” that argues that Herman, Bryson, and Wittreich have
each misrepresented Lewis in efforts to further the aims of the NMC. My essay
was answered in the December 2011 issue of Milton Quarterly by
a forum of three responses authored by Herman and two contributors to The
New Milton Criticism, Wittreich and Richard Strier. My response to Herman,
Wittreich, and Strier appeared in the October 2012 issue of Milton
Quarterly. My 2012 essay, “The Acolyte’s Rejoinder,” primarily responds to
Herman’s response, which, I argue, never substantively answers my concerns but
rather offers a litany of ad hominem attacks against me.2
5> It is not now my intention to rehash the specific issues
discussed in those essays. But I will use as a point of reference something I
wrote toward the end of “The Acolyte’s Rejoinder”: “Herman should know that I
actually find the New Milton Criticism’s contention regarding the fundamental
tensions in Milton’s writings to be intriguing and even persuasive in certain
areas. But a clear line must be drawn between legitimately analyzing tensions
within an author’s texts and misrepresenting sources in an effort
to further one’s argument” (178).
6> In examining these present books and the essays contained
therein, I have kept in mind this distinction between legitimately analyzing
tensions within Milton’s writings as opposed to misrepresenting sources to
further one's own critical argument. And, although there is significant source
misrepresentation in two of essays contained in The New Milton
Criticism, the majority of the collection’s essays succeed in their efforts
to highlight the tensions and contradictions evident in Milton’s works. One
needn’t be in complete sympathy with the NMC’s larger aims and particular
arguments to appreciate the challenging critical perspectives its adherents
offer. Indeed, my goal for this review essay is to move beyond, for the most
part, the specific matters that concerned my earlier essays and to offer a
broad analysis of recent NMC works that considers thoroughly both their
strengths and weaknesses. I chose to publish my review in Appositions because,
given my own history with the NMC, I thought it appropriate to write in a forum
in which those whose works I analyze can publish their responses immediately if
they so desire.
7> In their Introduction, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The
New Milton Criticism,” Herman and co-editor Elizabeth Sauer skillfully lay out
the aims of the NMC. Readers will recognize that this Introduction has an
identical title to Herman’s 2005 Literature Compass essay, but
while this Introduction does incorporate some material from Herman’s earlier
effort, it is largely a new composition, and a more careful one, being
helpfully devoid of the bombast in which Herman occasionally indulged in his
2005 essay and also omitting that essay’s above-quoted reductionistic summary
of the so-called “dominant paradigm” of Milton studies. Also absent from the
introduction is any reference to C. S. Lewis, disparaging or otherwise,
although Fish remains, over and against the NMC’s emphasis on “indeterminancy
and inconclusiveness,” the most prominent spokesman for “the will-to-order in
Milton” (11).
8> Herman and Sauer suggest that the “paradigm of imposing
certainty on an unruly Miltonic text” is evident in the earliest Milton
commentary, including Andrew Marvell’s 1674 poem “On Paradise Lost”
and John Dryden’s 1677 operatic adaptation of Paradise Lost, The
State of Innocence and Fall of Man, both of which attempt to tame the
rebellion and discernible impieties in Milton’s epic.
9> Herman and Sauer also highlight what they call the “seeming
debate” in the 1730s between Milton editor Richard Bentley and his critic,
Zachary Pearce. Herman and Sauer refer to their feud as a “seeming debate”
because, although Pearce criticized Bentley’s infamous 1732 edition of Paradise
Lost for Bentley’s many emendations to the text—emendations Bentley
made because he believed the originally published text contained many
problematic phrases attributable to some of Milton’s acquaintances, who changed
Milton’s epic without the blind poet's knowledge—Pearce’s critical strategy was
to argue that the epic’s original phrases that Bentley changed were, if
examined properly, perfectly appropriate. Thus, although history has judged
Bentley as ridiculous for seeking to emend away Milton’s inconsistencies,
Pearce himself was explaining away these inconsistencies. Indeed, both critics
maintained that Paradise Lost “should be absolutely consistent
and contain no contradictions” (6). This critical urge to smooth over Milton's
writings’ inconsistencies and contradictions, Herman and Sauer argue, continues
to dominate Milton studies to the present day.
10> The collection is divided into two parts, “Theodices” and “Critical
Receptions,” each of which contains six essays.
11> The first part’s opening essay, Richard Strier’s “Milton’s
Fetters, or, Why Eden Is Better than Heaven,” is a revised version of an
article by the same name that appeared in Milton Studies 38
(2000). Aligning himself with those “who have seen Paradise Lost as
a poem deeply divided against itself,” Strier explicitly adopts both “Blake's
idea that Milton wrote ‘in fetters’ of God and the good angels” and “Shelley’s
view of Heaven and Hell in the poem as, in a sense, morally equivalent” (25).
Offering a twist on Blake’s contention that Milton wrote “at liberty” when
writing “of Devils & Hell,” Strier argues that Milton’s “attempt at
theodicy [. . .] produces most of the aesthetic and religious failures of the
poem,” whereas “Milton wrote without fetters” when writing on “an area free of
the Great Argument: the presentation of Eden and of unfallen human life within
it” (25).
12> Strier goes on to suggest that Paradise Lost’s
portrayal of Heaven is problematic because it is characterized by the Father's
acts of fiat and displays of raw power in his sudden exaltation of the Son in
Book 5 and his sending of the Son to defeat the rebellious angels in Book 6.
The poem’s Hell, by contrast, actually contains the admirable virtue of the
demons’ genuine unanimity in their decision making in their council in Book 2,
where they demonstrate a “Firm concord” that the Miltonic narrator wishes were
possible among humans (2.496-500). In Strier’s view, Milton’s Heaven is not
morally superior to his Hell but rather is its moral equivalent. Milton’s
Heaven is also problematic in Book 3 because it displays “Milton’s commitment
to rational explanation” (40), which manifests itself negatively in its
rationalistic portrayal of a “defensive” God (36), one who tests his subjects
in order to properly exercise their free will but does not inspire their
spontaneous love and affection.
13> This lack of spontaneity in Heaven contrasts with Milton’s
portrayal of Eden, a place where, for significant stretches of the poem, “Milton
escapes from his preoccupation with deliberation and choice” (40). This
artistic freedom is demonstrated by Milton’s descriptions of Eden’s landscape
and by the spontaneous gratitude and worship that Adam and Eve show their
Maker. Following Joseph E. Duncan in Milton’s Earthly Paradise (1972),
Strier finds it “extraordinary” that Adam and Eve are not presented “as
following a ‘Covenant of Works.’ They are not following prescriptions in order
to obtain a reward. They do not have to be constantly instructed in virtue”
(42). One could, however, easily argue that Milton does in fact imply a
“Covenant of Works” with the first couple, but in any event the idea that Adam
and Eve naturally pursue virtue apart from direct instruction is by no means
uniquely Miltonic. The Westminster Larger Catechism—which does briefly refer to
a “Covenant of Works” (Answer 30)—explicitly states that Adam and Eve were
created with “the law of God written in their hearts” (Answer 17); Milton’s
portrayal of the first couple is not revolutionary in this sense.
14> Nonetheless, Stier’s brief discussion of Milton’s artistic
freedom in Eden is genuinely convincing and even inspiring. But it is, well,
too brief. Given the essay’s title, we might expect something more developed
than the three-page discussion of Eden that Strier offers, a discussion
regretably silent on the spontaneous affection shown by Adam and Eve toward
each other. Nonetheless, Strier contributes a thought-provoking essay whose
claims are well worth considering.
15> In the collection’s second essay, “‘Whose fault, whose but
his own?’: Paradise Lost, Contributory Negligence, and the Problem
of Cause,” Herman uses case law on negligence contemporary to Milton to examine
the matter of blame for the Fall in Milton’s epic. Herman argues that although
the epic’s narrator and God assume the strict liability of the
defendants—Satan, Adam, and Eve—and the full innocence of the plaintiff—God—contemporary
case law suggests that blame for the Fall can be spread far wider than what God
and the narrator assert.
16> Herman specifically employs case law on negligence to argue
that God shares blame for the Fall because he chained Satan in Hell with
“Adamantine Chains” that do not hold him down (Book 1), he entrusted (of all
people) Sin with the key to exit Hell (Book 2), and (presumably) he let down
the stairs that Satan climbs to first glimpse the created universe and Earth
(Book 3). Herman also uses case law on negligence to place blame on Uriel for
not recognizing Satan in Eden, and on Gabriel and his troop for not apprehending
him (Book 4). Blame also extends to Raphael in Books 5 and 8 for his
insufficiently thorough warnings to Adam concerning Satan, and for his overall
indifference to Eve’s presence when he speaks to Adam, something all the more
unsettling “because it is Eve, not Adam, who will face Satan” (63). Herman’s
essay is particularly intriguing for its use of contemporary case law to
undermine the trustworthiness of the Miltonic narrator and Milton’s God, and
one needn’t be finally convinced by his argument to find his contentions
valuable and challenging.
17> Strier’s and Herman’s efforts represent, in my view, the
strongest material in the collection's first part, and Herman’s essay in
particular best exemplifies what he has called the NMC’s hermeneutical practice
of showing tensions in Milton’s writings through close textual analysis and
historical research (Herman, “Paradigms” 15).
18> The remaining essays in part one are of mixed value for
various reasons. Judith Scherer Herz’s “Meanwhile: (Un)making Time in Paradise
Lost,” to quote the editors, “complicates notions of linearity,
temporality, and chronology in Milton, thus challenging the claims to narrative
stability founded on these features” (14). Herz examines Milton’s repeated use
of the word “meanwhile” to argue for the instability of the poem. For example,
Herz states that “for Adam and Eve, meanwhile is always now,”
but “as God enters the poem he identifies a now that carries
with it the meanwhile of all human time from a present that is not
yet in time to the end of time” (88). Herz’s essay offers an intriguing rubric
through which to analyze the shifting temporal structure of Milton’s epic, but
I confess that I found her thick prose difficult to read.
19> Elizabeth Sauer’s “Discontents with the Drama of
Regeneraton” examines the reception history of Samson Agonistes. Sauer
presents the conflict between “neo-Christian interpretations and
regenerationist readings that resolve complications in the poem, especially in
the final act” and those readings which resist “neo-Christian readings,”
contending that Milton’s drama “offers debate, not certainty” (121). Sauer pays
particular attention to critical readings of Dalila, whose character “accentuates
the contested nature of Samson’s heroism” (121). Among other things, Sauer
highlights the significance of how “the extra-biblical episode of Dalila’s
defense” (122) complicates both Samson’s final destruction of Dagon’s temple and
the Philistines and readers’ interpretive reliance on the book of Judges.
20> Sauer’s essay offers a helpful survey of criticism
pertaining to Dalila, but it fails to note the powerful defense of Dalila’s
character offered by Derek N. C. Wood in “Exiled from Light”: Divine
Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” (2001), a
work whose interpretation of Milton’s drama fits well with the broader concerns
of the NMC.
21> I will reserve for later in my essay a discussion of John
Rogers’ and Michael Bryson’s contributions to “Part I” of the collection and
now turn my attention to “Part II: Critical Receptions,” which offers a series
of strong essays.
22> In “Against Fescues and Ferulas: Personal Affront and the
Path to Individual Liberty in Milton’s Early Prose,” Christopher D’Addario
challenges the prevailing portrayal “of Milton as a wholehearted supporter of
individual liberty, one who, at least until 1660, consistently and firmly
believed in the unfettered use and efficacy of human reason” (142). Such a view
of Milton, D’Addario fairly asserts, conflicts with the Milton who
“persistently misdoubts his readers’ abilities, passionately attacking their
refusal to accept what Milton plainly sets before them” (142). D’Addario
suggests that Milton’s later explicit statements of disappointment with the
English people in Eikonoklastes (1649) and especially in The
Readie and Easie Way (1660) are “not unique, but rather inhere in Milton’s
earliest thoughts on liberty and right reason” (142). D’Addario convincingly argues that because “personal animus, indeed even passion and antagonism, drive
Milton’s political theories,” his early prose demonstrates “a writer whose
conception of individual liberty is far from unified, coherent or sustainable”
(142).
23> I consider D’Addario’s argument largely persuasive. But I
also think it worth noting that as he problematizes the portrayal of Milton as
a champion of individual liberty and reason, he simultaneously presents a
Milton whose earlier and later prose are actually more consistent than
generally supposed. We may fairly ask: Does D’Addario’s valuable essay
undermine or actually strengthen the “dominant paradigm” of Miltonic coherence?
24> In “Disruptive Partners: Milton and Seventeenth-Century
Women Writers,” Shannon Miller presents a fascinating discussion of Paradise
Lost in relation to writings by Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, Aemilia
Lanyer, Mary Chudleigh, and Mary Astell. Miller argues that, “Surrounded by
women who engage narratives of the Fall, issues of gendered culpability, and
even representations of Christ’s Passion and redemption,” Milton’s poem
“internalizes lines of inquiry posed by early seventeenth-century texts authored
by women” (156). Miller’s essay discusses both what she considers the influence
of Sowernam’s, Speght’s, and Lanyer’s texts upon Milton’s portrayal of Eve and
the subsequent reworking of Milton's portrayal of Eve in the writings of Astell
and Chudleigh.
25> In the most engaging part of her essay, Miller discusses
the Eve figures of Sowernam’s Ester Hath Hanged Haman (1617)
and Speght’s “Dream” vision poem within Mortalities Memorandum (1621).
Both works’ Eve figures are women “in search of self-knowledge” (159), women
whose characters develop through self-understanding. The complexity of
Sovernam’s and Speght’s Eve figures contrast with the the Eve’s of other early
seventeenth-century Fall narratives, characters whose character development is
precluded by their “almost immediate fall” or an “almost fetishistic
fascination with the apple” (159-60). Miller suggests that “Sowernam’s and
Speght’s defenses of Eve exploring her ‘esse’ imprint onto Milton’s
representation of our first mother as he explores similar strands of her
character” (160). The “impulse to solitariness” that Milton’s Eve exhibits in
Books 4, 5, 6, and 9 can be linked to Speght’s Eve figure, whose solitariness
is a means for “knowledge acquisition” (161). Miller states that Adam speaks
with some accuracy when, in Book 8, he tells Raphael that Eve “seems . . . in
her self compleat” (547-48). Miller argues that this aspect of Eve's character
creates “a tension between God’s and Adam’s impulse that it is not good for man
to be alone and Eve’s inclination to be ‘sole’” (161).
26> Thomas Festa’s “Eve and the Ironic Theodicy of the New
Milton Criticism,” while somewhat less engagingly written than Miller’s essay,
offers a valuable analysis of Eve’s character through examination of her early
reception history. Festa discusses 18th-century critics’ response to two
scenes—Eve’s narration of her birth in Book 4 and Eve’s contrition before Adam
in Book 10—as a means to examine the tensions inherent in Milton’s text.
27> In discussing Eve’s birth narrative, Festa first notes the
responses of “misogynist readers” (178) who see Eve's impulse toward autonomy
as a negative, narcissistic trait that, from the perspective of 18th-century
Milton editor and commentator Thomas Newton, serves as Milton’s ridiculing
reminder to women to stay submissive to their husbands. Festa then counters
such misogynist perspectives with the positive interpretation offered by Edward
Young who, in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) “reframes
Eve's story of her birth [. . .] as an allegory for the emergence of genius”
(182). In this allegory, Eve represents “the writer’s ‘happy confusion’ at the
sudden appearance of genius,” something which Young contrasts with the “narcissistic
vanity” of self-enamored wit (183).
28> In discussing Eve’s repentance, Festa observes with some
sympathy Jonathan Richardson’s 1734 biographical interpretation of the scene as
reflecting Mary Powell’s return to Milton, as well as Newton’s admonition to
his readers that their hearts ought to “relent with Adam’s” in
response to Eve (qtd. on 186). But Festa’s interpretation of the scene is more
full-orbed than Richardson’s or Newton’s, and he recognizes in Eve’s humility
the phrase alluding to 2 Corinthians 12:9 that Milton used, in Greek, to sign
two autograph books in 1652 and 1656: “I am perfected in weakness.” Indeed,
Eve’s humility contrasts with Adam's pride preceding her repentance, demonstrating
to Adam and the epic’s readers that post-Fall perfection can only be obtained
in weakness. Festa goes on to link “Young’s differentiation between narcissistic
wit and reflexive genius” and his own contrast between Adam’s pride and Eve’s
humility after the Fall (187). Both reflexive genius and humility, Festa suggests,
involve “self-sacrifice” and the “recognition of another” (187).
29> Festa follows this analysis by asking if Milton may have
used Eve, in her suffering and humility “to expose the unethical impetus toward
theodicy—to reveal in her discomfort and ours, the ultimate immorality of
rationalizing the suffering of others, including Christ, as a way to secure
consolation for the evil that occurs” (188). Despite his essay’s title, Festa’s
humble challenge to theodicy here seems forced because it appears so suddenly,
so late in his essay, and remains undeveloped. Festa’s challenge to theodicy
might well be more persuasive if it were explained more thoroughly, but as it
stands it seems almost perfunctory. That being said, Festa’s discussion of both
scenes is genuinely worthwhile.
30> In “Man and Thinker: Denis Saurat, and the Old New Milton
Criticism,” Jeffrey Shoulson examines Saurat’s work and influence with the
expressed aim of restoring Saurat to his rightful place of import in Milton
studies. Shoulson argues that Saurat’s Milton: Man and Thinker (1925,
reissued in 1944) “was the underlying trigger for the [mid-20th-century] Milton
Controversy” even though Saurat’s book has often been disregarded “as an
aberrant curiosity” (194). Shoulsen asserts that Saurat’s book both “anticipates
the New Milton Criticism’s arguments with interpretive orthodoxies” and is “largely
responsible for the stubborn, and seemingly un-theoretical, presence of the
author Milton—Man and Thinker—in virtually all efforts to render his writings
meaningful, whether they be neo-Christian or heterodoxical” (194-95).
31> Early in his essay, Shoulson outlines the landscape of
Milton studies in the decades prior to Saurat’s book, stating that they focused
on “Milton’s language, his prosody, his imagery” and generally ignored or
dismissed “his biography, his theology, [and] his politics” (195). (Shoulson’s
claim that there was little interest in Milton’s theology, however, seems at
odds with Saurat’s book’s exhortation that it was time to “disentangle”
Milton’s thought from “theological rubbish” [114].) Although Saurat’s
contemporary James Holly Hanford did offer a more historically informed analysis
of Milton, Hanford offered “a Milton of high humanist culture, largely detached
from the complex political and religious issues of his day” (196). But Saurat “made
it essential to read Milton in dialogue with his own cultural, intellectual,
and political milieu, and just as important, in dialogue with himself
throughout his extensive and diverse career as a writer” (196). Moreover,
Saurat pioneered making use of De Doctrina Christiana as a
tool for understanding Milton’s other works, emphasizing the iconoclastic and
unorthodox ideas present in that work.
32> But Saurat’s book fell into disfavor amid the Milton
Controversy, and the Milton who was attacked in the 1930s and after by T. S.
Eliot and F. R. Leavis was, in Shoulson’s words, “Saurat’s Milton” (198). Also
contributing to Saurat’s decline in stature were assessments offered by James
Thorpe in the introduction to his anthology Milton Criticism (1951)
and, most damningly, Robert Adams in Milton and the Modern Critics (1955),
whose portrayal of Saurat as “a failed Hebraist” continues to diminish Saurat’s
critical reputation (201).
33> Nonetheless, Saurat’s book continued to demonstrate its
strong influence in books by two prominent defenders of Milton coming from very
different theological perspectives, C. S. Lewis in A Preface to “Paradise
Lost” (1942) and William Empson in Milton’s God (1961).
Although Empson’s book does not acknowledge this influence—likely, says
Shoulson, because of Saurat’s damaged critical standing—both critics follow
Saurat in “tak[ing] seriously the complex intellectual apparatus that is part
of the warp and woof of Milton's writings” (199). And if Empson followed Saurat
more closely in his interrogation of orthodoxy, the orthodox Lewis—who
presented a Paradise Lost in line with the orthodox Christian
tradition—honored Saurat by stating that “even those of us who disagree with
him are, in one sense, of his school” (qtd. on 199).
34> Asserting the unacknowledged link between Saurat and Empson
and the oft-noted link between Empson and the NMC, Shoulson suggests Saurat’s
importance to the NMC and also suggests that “provocative arguments” put
forward by Bryson in The Tyranny of Heaven and Victoria Silver
in Imperfect Sense (2001) regarding “the absolute
discontinuity between Milton’s imaginative representations of God and the
‘true’ God who is necessarily unrepesentable” are anticipated by Saurat’s
analysis of Milton’s God (200). Shoulson also argues that although Milton
studies has often been resistant to larger trends in literary theory, when
theory is employed, it is often used to examine John Milton man and thinker, in
the tradition of Saurat himself. Saurat is also an enduring force behind Milton
studies’ continued commitment to intentionality in Milton.
35> All that being said, one could argue that Shoulson succeeds
more in demonstrating Saurat’s continuing influence upon Milton studies in
general than upon the NMC in particular—perhaps Shoulson’s essay serves as a
well-developed affirmation of Lewis’ aforementioned statement that all
Miltonists “are, in one sense, of [Saurat’s] school.” And yet I think Shoulson
is correct to argue for the particular connection between Saurat and the NMC,
especially in the parallels he notes between Saurat and Silver, and, especially,
Bryson. I also wonder if Bryson’s disdainful attitude toward more orthodox
interpretations of Milton’s work even while he pursues his own esoteric
theological interpretations can be traced on some level to Saurat’s example. If
so, then I would suggest that such an attitude, so counterproductive to the
open exchange of ideas the NMC claims to champion and, significantly, one never
demonstrated by Empson in his scholarly disagreements with Lewis, is not worthy
of imitation.
36> In “The Poverty of Context: Cambridge School History and
the New Milton Criticism,” William Kolbrener analyzes the methodology of
historian and Milton scholar Quentin Skinner and its suitability for the study
of Milton. Skinner’s methodology has been influential in various major studies
of Milton, including his co-edited volume Milton and
Republicanism (1995), Sharon Achinstein’s Milton and the
Revolutionary Reader (1994), and David Norbrook’s Writing the
English Republic (1999). Kolbrener states that because Skinner’s
methodology aims at recovering the “singular intention” of its subject within
its context, it “seems to advocate a conception of univocal certainty not in
line with the focus on fault lines and uncertainty characterizing much of current
critical debate” (214). Aligning himself with Thomas Corns’ suggestion that
there exists a “plurality of Miltonic ideologies” (qtd. on 214), Kolbrener
argues that “the Skinnerian insistence on the clarity of intention within a
specific context will certainly produce an impoverished conception of Milton”
(214).
37> Kolbrener further suggests that Skinner’s desire, as an
historian, for “singular consistency” has “produced a Milton who may be easily
assimilated within specific political traditions, but has been less successful
in eliciting the Milton who nurtures paradox and ambivalence” (215). But
Kolbrener does not advocate an unbridled emphasis on uncertainty in Milton
studies. Indeed, he expresses concern that “a Milton criticism focused on
‘uncertainty’” might bring about “an equally partial counter-image of the
Milton of ‘certainty’” (215).
38> To illustrate the longstanding conflict in Milton studies
between the advocates of Miltonic unorthodoxy and orthodoxy and the excesses on
both sides, Kolbrener discusses the efforts of early Miltonists John Toland and
Richard Bentley. Kolbrener notes that Toland, in his Life of
Milton (1698), portrays a thoroughly monist Milton in ways that
misrepresent the “persistently qualified” monism that Milton actually held to
(223). Toland’s presentation of Milton, says Kolbrener, “served the purpose of
creating a radical image of the poet, modeling Milton in Toland’s own image”
(221). Kolbrener concurs with Peter Herman that Bentley’s presentation of
Milton in his emended edition of Paradise Lost seeks to
“promote an image of Milton suitable for orthodoxy” (221), but Kolbrener notes
that the impulse toward “one-sided” conceptions of Milton has persisted on both
sides of the debate for three centuries (225).
39> Significantly, Kolbrener does not advocate completely
jettisoning Skinner’s methodology; rather, he postulates that “The complexity
of Milton’s work may demonstrate the need to complicate Skinner’s model, which
emphasizes tracing ‘the relations between an utterance’ and the wider
‘linguistic context’ for that utterance” (225). A more complex and more
appropriate approach will recognize “the diverse (and sometimes
competing) contexts” for Milton’s work (225, italics Kolbrener’s).
Kolbrener advocates “a New Milton Criticism informed and enacting a more
complex Skinnerian method, soliciting—not rejecting—Miltonic paradox” (225).
There is little to fault in Kolbrener’s common-sense call for the recognition
of such varied Miltonic contexts, and Kolbrener notes that Skinner himself, in
a 2008 London Times essay that reproduces his address to the
Ninth International Milton Symposium, gestures toward such plural contexts.
40> Joseph Wittreich’s Afterward is rightly placed within the
“Critical Receptions” section of the collection; Wittreich surveys various
phases of the centuries-long Milton controversies before examining the current
critical landscape and finally looking forward. Along with Herman and Sauer in
their Introduction, Wittreich acknowledges that “in one sense we find nothing
at all new in the New Milton Criticism” (232). Rather, the present volume draws
readers back to Paradise Lost’s earliest reception history.
Wittreich notes that Joseph Addison’s and Richard Bentley’s attempts to correct
Milton follow John Dennis’s and Daniel Defoe’s efforts “to discredit him as an
erring theologian” (232). In such cases, “criticism” became “correction” (232).
Similar early efforts to correct Milton’s writings were offered by Dryden and
Lucy Hutchinson, and “The interpretive straightjacket” such figures sought to
enforce “strains against both Milton’s poems and their source material” (236).
In contrast, Wittreich notes the conflicting voice(s) of the Miltonic (or
not-so-Miltonic) narrator, repeating the NMC warning against easy resolution.
41> At times Wittreich’s rhetoric seems a tad self-indulgent—“The
New Milton Criticism showcased in this volume would effect another Reformation,
this one in literary criticism” (238)—but his assertion that the NMC returns us
to the first controversies in Milton studies is fair enough, even as it gives
one pause, yet again, to wonder if the “New” in the New Milton Criticism is not
a misnomer; for as Wittreich again specifically reminds us, the NMC revisits
and revises readings of Paradise Lost offered by Blake and
Shelley, the unorthodoxies of Saurat, and the responses to C. S. Lewis offered
by A. J. A. Waldcock, John Peter, and William Empson, with the added dimension
of countering the orthodoxies present in Stanley Fish’s analyses of Milton—an
enterprise that is not particularly new.
42> Still, Wittreich ends his essay by affirming that a
genuinely “new criticism beckons Miltonists,” one whose canvas has
become ever larger with the new conversations, be they “literary, critical,
theoretical, historical, cultural, and global” (245). One can hardly argue
against that; but again, wouldn’t all that be going on anyway with or without
those who have self-identified as members of the NMC? And if Wittreich is in
some sense correct to affirm that “this New Milton Criticism, whether
acknowledged as such or not, is emerging as the dominant mode of discourse in
Milton studies” (244), is that not because the study of tensions within
Milton’s texts has been going on for a very long time by Miltonists of various
schools? Certainly the study of Miltonic tensions is commonplace in Milton
studies. But it is going too far to say that Milton studies as a whole embraces
the larger NMC claim that tensions are ultimately central to
Milton—and Herman and Sauer say otherwise in their Introduction. It is not
clear if Wittreich is making the larger or more modest claim. Overall, The New Milton Criticism is a genuinely valuable volume,
but it is at its best when its claims are less overarching and
self-congratulatory.
43> I have saved until now my discussion of John Rogers’ “The
Political Theology of Milton’s Heaven” and Michael Bryson’s “The Gnostic
Milton” because I believe that these essays transgress the distinction I made
in my fifth paragraph between legitimately analyzing tensions within Milton’s
writings as opposed to misrepresenting sources to further one’s own critical
argument. I will discuss Rogers’ article first and then discuss Bryson’s within
the larger context of his book The Atheist Milton.
44> In his essay, Rogers offers the daring argument that Milton
had a special purpose behind portraying God the Father as a tyrant who conceals
from the angels his Son’s status over them and then makes the seemingly
arbitrary choice to exalt him on a particular day. Milton’s purpose in doing
this, says Rogers, is to introduce “choice and contingency” in the relationship
between the Father and the Son, a freedom, Rogers claims, that is absent in the
theological language of the contemporary literature of Trinitarian Christians.
For such orthodox Christians, “the relations and actions” of the “divine drama”
is “founded strictly on a principle of unswerving necessity” (72-73). Such
unswerving necessity in orthodox Calvinist theology, according to Rogers,
includes the following aspects:
Just as the Father had no choice but to create the Son, the Father
has no choice but to demand judicial satisfaction for the crime of Adam’s fall,
and the Son has no choice but to be sacrificed on the cross [. . .] The
necessary action of Christ’s sacrifice in and of itself automatically,
necessarily, effects the atonement [. . .] The three persons of the Trinity,
with respect certainly to their role as actors in the divine drama of Creation
and redemption, endure a bondage of the will easily as constrictive as that
suffered by the sinful man of Reformation Protestantism. (73)
45> The first clause of Rogers’ quotation is deeply problematic
for its failure to distinguish between the orthodox doctrine of the Father’s
eternal begetting of the uncreated Son and the Arian doctrine of the Father
creating the Son. This is no trivial distinction, for the orthodox Trinitarian
Calvinists whose views Rogers’ claims to represent contended that a created and
therefore not eternal and not fully divine Son would not be able to satisfy
divine justice in dying for humankind (cf. Westminster Larger Catechism, Answer
38). But the entire above quotation is problematic for its faulty
representation of the orthodox Calvinist position.
46> Significantly, Rogers neither quotes nor refers to a single
specific passage from a Reformed theologian as evidence for his summary of the
orthodox Calvinist position. He only offers this endnote:
Milton’s contemporary, the Congregationalist divine John Owen, is probably mid-century England’s fiercest critic of anti-Trinitarianism, and the noisiest proponent, as in De Divina Justia [A Dissertation of Divine Justice] (1653) and A Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Trinity (1669), of the absolute necessity of the Trinity’s actions, especially that of the Son’s satisfaction of the Father’s demand for justice after the Fall. (83)
47> But a reading of Owen’s writings reveals Rogers’
oversimplified depiction of Owen’s complex theological positions, particularly
in relation to the “bondage of the will” Rogers says describes the persons of
the Trinity in relation to the drama of creation and redemption. Most
significantly to Rogers’ essay, although Owen did maintain the Father’s
necessary eternal begetting of the Son, he certainly did not believe that “the
Son had no choice but to be sacrificed on the cross.” Rather, Owen writes
in A Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Trinity that
the Son offered himself as a propitiatory sacrifice “by his own
voluntary consent” and “by his own counsel and choice”
(2.425, italics mine). Indeed, Owen’s orthodox position on this matter does not
conflict with but actually agrees with the Son’s voluntary offer to die for
humankind in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, and this agreement—and Rogers’
misrepresentation of Owen’s stance—makes problematic Rogers’ overall argument,
however skillfully he puts it forward throughout much of his essay.
48> Bryson’s contribution to The New Milton Criticism—“The
Gnostic Milton: Salvation and Divine Similitude in Paradise Regained”—reappears
in slightly altered form as chapter 3, “The Gnostic Milton,” of his book The
Atheist Milton. Before analyzing the merits of Bryson’s volume, some
discussion of Bryson’s use of—and lack of acknowledgment of—previously
published material is in order. Bryson’s New Milton Criticism essay
is a slightly altered version of “From Last Things to First: The Apophatic
Vision of Paradise Regain’d,” which was published in the edited
collection Visionary Milton (Duquesne UP, 2010). But The
New Milton Criticism includes no acknowledgment of this previous
publication, even though its editors dutifully acknowledge that the original
version of Strier’s essay appeared in Milton Studies 38.
Chapter 3 of The Atheist Milton essentially reprints “The Gnostic
Milton” (from The New Milton Criticism) and also includes some
material from “From Last Things to First” that does not appear in The New
Milton Criticism version of “The Gnostic Milton.” But The
Atheist Milton contains no acknowledgement of this previously
published material. Moreover, the vast majority of chapter 2 of The
Atheist Milton, “The Apophatic Milton,” originally appeared as “The
Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing: Paradise Lost and the God
Beyond Names” within the collection A Poem Written in Ten Books: “Paradise
Lost” 1667 (Duquesne UP 2007). But this too is unacknowledged. Finally,
nearly all of chapter 4, “The Atheist Milton,” originally appeared as “A Poem
to the Unknown God: Samson Agonistes and Negative Theology”
in Milton Quarterly 42.1 (2008). But once again, no
acknowledgment is given. Moreover, this unacknowledged previously published material
comprises more than half of Bryson’s slim but expensive book. As I go on to
analyze Bryson’s book, I will ask a number of questions, keeping in mind
Herman’s 2005 declaration that “the New Milton Criticism encourages all
questions, regardless of where they take the reader” (19). But my first
question is this: why doesn’t Bryson follow scholarly—and legal—convention and
acknowledge the previous publication of this material?
49> Similar to Bryson’s The Tyranny of Heaven, The
Atheist Milton benefits from Bryson’s readable and often pugnaciously
entertaining style. The trajectory of Bryson’s overall argument is
straightforward: In his final three great poems, Milton moves from a troubled
version of Christian theism in Paradise Lost to a Gnostic-like presentation
of deity in Paradise Regained to “a radical and quite literally
a-theist doubt about God’s activity, purpose, and existence” in Samson
Agonistes (17). In his Introduction, Bryson states that the “movement”
of Milton’s poetry suggests that were he alive today, “Milton would be an
atheist” (2); moreover, Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana reveals
that, according to the broader definition of atheism in Milton’s own day,
Milton “was an atheist” (2). In stating this, Bryson
self-consciously sets his position against C. S. Lewis’s assertion, in A
Preface to “Paradise Lost,” that “Milton’s version of the Fall
story is substantially that of St. Augustine” (65; qtd. in Bryson 6).
50> In the course of his Introduction, in a digression that
essentially echoes Herman’s argument in “C. S. Lewis and the New Milton
Criticism,” Bryson attempts to respond to my charge, in “Speaking for the
Dead,” that in The Tyranny of Heaven he misrepresents C. S.
Lewis and sets him up as a straw man censor of critical discussion by taking
out of context Lewis’s statement that he hoped his brief analysis of Paradise
Lost in relation to Augustine would “prevent the reader from ever
raising certain questions which have, in my opinion, led critics into blind
alleys” (69; Bryson ends his quoting of Lewis after the word “questions” [Tyranny 21]).
51> At this point, Bryson demonstrates a troubling lack of
self-reflection. Despite Richard Strier’s statement that I am “certainly
correct that the line about preventing questions has been taken out of context
[by Bryson and Herman] and used in a somewhat irresponsible way” (271), Bryson
refuses to acknowledge his misrepresentation. Instead, he digs in his heels,
reaffirms that preventing questions was exactly Lewis’s scholarly agenda, and
states that Lewis’s and my approach (as if they were one in the same) is
designed “to promote a very specific theological agenda” (12). Parroting
Herman’s 2011 Milton Quarterly essay, Bryson’s evidence for
my “specific theological agenda” is my employment at Calvin College. Bryson’s
red herring and ad hominem argumentative tactics are problematic. First and
most importantly, Bryson tries to obfuscate my recognition of his unfair
depiction of Lewis by passing off my concerns as a matter of theology. But
regardless of whatever Bryson thinks I believe, demonstrating scholarly
misrepresentation hardly constitutes the stuff of “a very specific theological
agenda.” Any scholar, regardless of his or her theological beliefs, could have
done the footwork to expose Bryson’s scholarly shenanigans. What I pointed out
concerned scholarly integrity, not specific theology. Second, there is
something profoundly ironic about Bryson’s ongoing tirade against scholars who
see Milton’s works (despite his obvious heterodoxies) as being part of a
broader Christian tradition; is Bryson, who dedicates his book to the secretly
atheist priest Jean Meslier—whom Bryson affirms “lived a lie, but wrote [in his
posthumously discovered Testament] the truth”—devoid of a specific
theological agenda? Finally, it is irresponsible to dismiss another scholar’s
concerns by simply stating that scholar’s place of employment along with an
inaccurate web posting (also previously cited by Herman) that misrepresents
matters of academic freedom at that school. Logically speaking, that is a
circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. Would it be sensible for me to suggest that
Bryson’s brief book is so expensive because he teaches in the California State
University system, and the state of California is known for its exorbitant
financial expenditures?
52> Also ironic in light of Bryson’s continued harangue against
Lewis for supposedly preventing readers from raising certain questions is
Bryson’s curious diction concerning those who continue to question the Miltonic
authorship of De Doctrina Christiana. Early in The Atheist
Milton, Bryson notes that ever since William Hunter’s challenges to
Miltonic authorship were first put forth, “it has become standard practice in
published works that make use of the treatise to acknowledge that questions as
to its authorship have been raised. Perhaps since the findings of
Gordon Campbell et al. in Milton and the Manuscript of "De
Doctrina Christiana" (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), this
practice can be put to rest” (7, additional italics mine). Bryson’s
dismissive tone toward the questioners, combined with the fact that he fails to
mention any title of Hunter’s germane works, opens Bryson to the charge of
preventing questions. Bryson holds the majority position in considering the
matter settled, but a minority, including Ernest Sullivan in his Review
of English Studies review of the aforementioned book, believe that the
debate regarding Miltonic authorship “remains open” (Sullivan 154), a
questioning position that Strier respectfully acknowledges in his contribution
to The New Milton Criticism (“Milton’s Fetters” 26). My
concern is not at all with Bryson’s stance concerning the authorship of the
treatise, but rather with his dogmatic dismissiveness of the minority that still
dares to raise questions, a dismissiveness that goes contrary to the NMC’s
stated principles.
53> Chapter 1 of Bryson’s book, “Atheism by Any Other Name,”
performs the helpful service of demonstrating that, throughout the centuries,
and certainly during Milton’s own lifetime in England, the word “atheism” has
been used more broadly than simply to describe the lack of belief in any god,
but also to describe various kinds of unorthodox or “incorrect” beliefs. Bryson
observes that several “incorrect” doctrines espoused by Milton in De
Doctrina Christiana—“Arianism,” “Materialism” (“the belief that all of
reality can be explained in terms of matter”), and “Mortalism” (the belief that
the soul dies with the body or sleeps until the final Resurrection) earned adherents
of such views the title “Atheist” in the 17th century. Because
Milton’s controversial work of systematic theology was not discovered until
1823, Milton largely escaped the atheist title in his lifetime, but Bryson
demonstrates that Milton’s theological heterodoxies place him squarely among
his “atheist” contemporaries. Although this chapter is genuinely informative,
Bryson overstates his case when he equates Milton’s brand of materialism with
that of Spinoza. But Milton’s doctrine of creation ex deo is
distinct from Spinoza’s pantheistic monism. Whereas Spinoza held that there is
only one substance, which is God, “Milton’s monism,” to quote Kolbrener’s
essay, “if one can speak of it, is persistently qualified. [. . .] God is not
to be identified with his Creation” (223; cf. Bauman 86-87). Indeed, Bryson
indulges in the same misrepresentation of Milton’s position that Toland did
more than three centuries ago.
54> In chapter 2, “The Apophatic Milton,” Bryson argues that
when Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667, he had already been
shaken from the theological certainties he expressed earlier in De
Doctrina Christiana (something that doesn’t prevent Bryson from
utilizing quotations from De Doctrina Christiana whenever it seems
appropriate). Consequently, Milton, who was already moving toward the absence
of God expressed in Samson Agonistes, depicts deity in his epic in
“a negative, or apophatic approach to the knowledge of God,” one which “brings
with it a ‘yes, but no’ dynamic in which images of God are first affirmed
(brought onstage and allowed to strut and fret their hour) and then denied, a
pattern he will follow through the journey he takes from Paradise Lost,
through Paradise Regained, and ends with Samson
Agonistes” (77). Drawing upon the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and other
apophatic theologians, Bryson makes the case for Milton’s apophatic depiction
of God in Paradise Lost, a poem which, significantly, concludes
with the absence of God as Adam and Eve depart from Eden.
55> As noted earlier, chapter 3, “The Gnostic Milton,” is essentially
identical to Bryson’s contribution to The New Milton Criticism.
When citing quotations that appear in both books, I will cite page numbers
first for The Atheist Milton and then for The New Milton
Criticism. Early in this chapter, Bryson quotes a passage from De
Doctrina Christiana that he also makes use of in his previous chapter:
“God, as he really is, is far beyond man’s imagination, let alone his
understanding” (6:133). Bryson notes that such a realization obviously makes
problematic depicting God in literary form, a problem already explored in
Bryson's second chapter. By the time Milton published Paradise
Regained in 1671, Bryson contends, his solution to this problem was to
focus on “the human Jesus (more often referred to as the Son)” of the brief
epic (111/103), a character Bryson calls “a remarkably Gnostic creation” (115/104).
Bryson argues that Milton’s Jesus is one who, like the Gnostic depictions of
Christ, “refuses to save anyone from sin” (115/103), and who “saves not through
a sacrifice of blood, but by bringing knowledge of divine similitude, the
oneness of the human and divine nature” (119/106).
56> Bryson’s emphasis on the Son’s allegedly Gnostic
teachings—something Bryson never attempts to reconcile with the fact that the
Gnostic texts he cites maintain that Jesus’ humanity was illusory, a condition
notably removed from Milton’s depiction of Jesus—marks an evolution in Bryson’s
scholarly expression since he published a slightly different version of this
essay in 2010 as “From Last Things to First: The Apophatic Vision of Paradise
Regained.” That earlier version contains no mention of the Son’s Gnosticism
but rather, in its early pages, emphasizes the apophatic theology of
Pseudo-Dionysius. In The Atheist Milton (but not in the chapter
in The New Milton Criticism), Bryson retains these early pages
while inserting into them several times the word “Gnostic” in an apparent
effort to merge apophatic theology with Gnosticism. In one place, directly
after quoting Paul, “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13.12), Bryson changes
his previous “The Pauline insight is also the Dionysian
insight” (“From Last” 244, italics mine) to “The Gnostic insight
is also the Dionysian insight” (Atheist 113, italics mine). But
what of it? As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance, “A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
57> In discussing Satan’s temptations of the Son in Paradise
Regained, Bryson emphasizes that Satan tries to get the Son to identify
himself with power, knowledge, and even divinity external to himself. But,
argues Bryson, the Son defeats Satan by looking within his own “inward Oracle”
(PR 1.403), the “Spirit of Truth” (1.462) that dwells within. And the power of
such divine self-recognition is not limited to the Son, but is available to any
who would recognize the divinity within: “The Son’s conquest is achieved in the
realization that for humankind, indeed, for all Creation, the divine is only to
be found by searching within, by heeding the promptings of ‘the Spirit, which
is internal, and the individual possession of each man’ (De
Doctrina Christiana, CPW 6:587, emphasis added)”
(122/115).
58> Bryson’s presentation of Milton’s Son—and how humankind
ought to imitate him—seems something akin to Emerson’s presentation of Jesus in
his 1838 Divinity School Address. But it rather flies in the face
of the Son’s words in Paradise Regained. For example, when Satan
tempts him to free the Jews from Roman oppression, the Son responds that the
Jews have continually not “Humbled themselves, or penitent besought / The God
of their forefathers” (3.421-22). This is not an admonishment to look within
but to appeal to the God without. Moreover, the Son himself regularly
acknowledges and depends on his Father. His leading by the Spirit into the
desert was directly preceded by the Father’s public pronouncement in which his
Father “pronounced me his, / Me his beloved Son, in whom alone / He was well
pleased” (1.284-86). He goes on to say that his own “authority” is “derived
from Heav’n” (1.289). When he first encounters Satan, the Son explicitly states
his dependence on the “God [. . .] who fed / Our fathers here with manna”
(1.350), and he later tells Satan that his own reign will “begin” when “The Father
in his purpose hath decreed” (3.185-86). It is also rather important that the
Son recognizes his own messianic identity not by looking within but by
searching the external "law and prophets," recognizing that "the
Messiah . . . / . . . of whom they spake / I am" (1.260-63).
59> Bryson’s Emerson-like depiction of the Son reaches its
height of audacity when he argues that the Son’s final rebuke to Satan, “Tempt
not the Lord thy God” (4.561), means, ultimately, don’t tempt the Son, anyone
else, or even yourself, for “all creatures, sharing in the divine as their
origin, are also God” (130/116). Bryson justifies this equation between God,
Satan, and everything else by a brief reference to Milton’s aforementioned
belief in creation ex Deo. But Bryson’s assertion depends on his
aforementioned mistaken equation of Milton’s belief in creation ex Deo with
a Spinoza-like monism, an equation, as I have noted above, that has been
refuted both by fellow New Miltonist William Kolbrener and by Michael Bauman
in Milton’s Arianism, a book Bryson lauds in The Atheist
Milton.
60> In chapter 4, “The Atheist Milton,” Bryson calls Samson
Agonistes “the capstone to Milton’s attempt to solve the problem of
God through a negative path. At the end, God is neither the Father of Paradise
Lost nor the Son of Paradise Regained” nor “the vengeful
warrior of Samson” (161). Samson Agonistes is “Milton’s final and
most devastating critique of theism, of the belief that a personal God exists,
that you know the will of that God, and that the will of that God is that you
kill in his name” (137). Bryson asserts that “No God exists in Samson
Agonistes, except as an object of talk, tales told by idiots, full of sound
and fury, but signifying little or nothing at all” (137).
61> The non-present God of Samson Agonistes does
not speak but rather “is often—and recklessly—spoken of, and for, by those for
whom the deity serves as a focus and justification for violent actions” (139).
The Chorus, Manoa, and Samson himself all claim to know God’s will, but the
carnage that results at the end of Milton’s drama confirms the extreme danger
of presumptuous and inevitably false efforts to represent God’s will. The
“rousing motions” that Samson thinks is God's voice and which leads him to
destroy Dagon's temple and its worshippers is most certainly not the divine
voice. Instead, “it may be something rather closer to the ‘Hell’ that Satan
carries within him in Paradise Lost—an abiding conviction that
violence is the order of the universe, and physical strength that universe's
primary principle” (157-58). Moving away from the recently fashionable critical
notion of Miltonic uncertainty regarding whether or not Samson really heard
God’s voice, Bryson is dogmatic: With Samson Agonistes, “Milton
ends with negation. Milton ends without God” (161).
62> Bold words, yet once more, from Bryson. But even if one is
convinced that Milton ended his poetic career as an atheist (the kind who is
“without God,” not simply the kind who holds “incorrect” beliefs), as
demonstrated, according to Bryson, by Milton's 1671 publication of Paradise
Regained and Samson Agonistes—with the alleged atheism
of Samson trumping the blatant theism of Paradise Regained by
virtue of the fact that Samson is placed last in that two-poem volume—one must
lament how quickly Milton fell away from his newly-embraced atheist position.
For in 1673, with the composition of his final published tract, Of True
Religion, Milton once again backslides into full-throttled Christian (to
use the term broadly) theism, warning his fellow Englishmen that they risk God’s
judgment if they will not amend their lives. Milton warns that “God, when men
sin outrageously, and will not be admonisht, gives over chastizing them,
perhaps by Pestilence, Fire, Sword, or Famine” (CPW 8:439). Throughout this
tract, Milton warns of the displeasure of a still-active personal God, the very
sort of God Bryson claims Milton has abandoned in his interpretation of Samson
Agonistes. Milton also rails against “bold and open Atheism” (8:438),
something Milton clearly distinguishes from heterodox forms of Christianity
such as Arianism and Socinianism, which in the same tract Milton asserts should
not be classified as heresies, and which he begs his readers to tolerate.
63> There is something endearing about Bryson’s chutzpah.
Throughout The Atheist Milton he constructs the Miltonic deity
(or lack thereof) he desires, textual evidence aside, maintaining boldly the
Sauratian tradition of claiming that his novel interpretation is what Milton
actually intended. He cites (always in contextual isolation) no fewer than four
times Milton’s quotation, from the chapter “Of God” in De Doctrina
Christiana, that asserts, “God, as he really is, is far beyond man’s
understanding” (CPW 6:133). But Bryson completely ignores the next paragraph,
where Milton encourages his readers, despite “the limitations of our
understanding,” “to form an image of God in our minds which corresponds to his
representation and description of himself in the sacred writings” (6:133). Even
more significantly, Bryson is conveniently silent about the opening sentences
of that same chapter, in which Milton quotes Psalm 14.1—“the fool says in his
heart, There is no God”—and goes on to write that God “has left so many signs
of himself in the human mind, so many traces of his presence through the whole
of nature, that no sane person can fail to realise that he exists” (6:130).
Bryson pontificates against stifling “neo-Christian” interpretations of
Milton’s writings while dogmatically asserting Milton’s atheism. He concludes
his book by warning his readers of the dangers of religiously inspired
violence, hopefully embracing what he considers the final Miltonic vision of “a
universe that is truly without a god” where, “perhaps, just perhaps, reason can
finally take hold” (162), even as he ignores the murderous atrocities of the
atheistic regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
His moral indignation in the face of his own dubious position is reminiscent of
Milton’s most glorious poetic character, a compliment that I, who am reduced
before Bryson’s grandeur to being just another scholarly Abdiel, do not offer
lightly.
Notes:
I wish to thank Calvin College, whose
Dean’s Interim Research Leave and Calvin Research Fellowship enabled me to
write this essay. Thanks also to Brian Ingraffia and Paul Klemp, who read and
commented on earlier versions of this essay.
1. These essays were Corns, “‘Some Rousing Motions’: The Plurality
of Miltonic Ideology”; Goldberg, “Dating Milton”; and Rumrich, “Uninventing
Milton.”
2. In addition, my essay “Surprised by Richardson” addresses what
I consider certain New Milton Critics’ exaggeration of the influence of Lewis’s
A Preface to “Paradise Lost” upon
Fish’s Surprised by Sin.
Additional Works Cited:
Bauman, Michael. Milton’s Arianism. Bern: Lang, 1987.
Bryson, Michael. “From Last Things to First: The Apophatic Vision
of Paradise Regain’d.” In Visionary Milton: Essays on
Prophecy and Violence. Ed. Peter E. Medine, John T. Shawcross, and David V.
Urban (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2010): 241-65.
---. The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King.
Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004.
Corns, Thomas N. “‘Some Rousing Motions’: The Plurality of
Miltonic Ideology.” In Literature and the Civil War. Ed. Thomas
Healy and Jonathan Sawday. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 110-26.
Dobranski, Stephen B. and John P. Rumrich, eds.Milton and
Heresy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Fish, Stanley. “The New Milton Criticism.” In Versions of
Antihumanism: Milton and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 131-44.
Goldberg, Jonathan. “Dating Milton.” In Soliciting
Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Ed.
Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
199-220.
Herman, Peter C. “C. S. Lewis and the New Milton Criticism.” Milton
Quarterly 45.4 (December 2011): 258-66.
---. Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics
of Incertitude. Hamshire: Palgrave, 2005.
---. “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The New Milton
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---. “Speaking for the Dead: C. S. Lewis Answers the New Milton
Criticism; or, ‘Milton Ministries Strikes Back.” Milton Quarterly 45.2
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---. “Surprised
by Richardson: C. S. Lewis, Jonathan Richardson, and Their Comparative
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_____
David V. Urban is
associate professor of English at Calvin College. He
completed John Milton: An Annotated
Bibliography, 1989-1999 and is the co-editor
of Visionary
Milton. His most recent articles on Milton appear in Appositions, Connotations, Milton Studies, and Milton Quarterly. He has also
recently published essays on Fugard and Tolstoy and Pauline
Rhetoric. He is completing a book on Milton and Jesus’ parables.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Six (2013): Editions & Editing
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