Skepticism and poetry in Milton's infernal conclave

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 191-212

  Weinfield, Henry ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 60950738074     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2005.0011     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," 2d edn. (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. X
2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), pp. 206-469, 323, bk. 5, lines 896-7. Subsequent references to Paradise Lost will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number
3. T. S. Eliot, Milton: Two Studies (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 18
4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts and Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 478-508, 498
5. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, A Verse Translation, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto and New York: Bantam, 1982), p. 239, canto 26, lines 21-2
6. Fish, however, quite consistently sees Milton as defending himself against the muse. Chapter 8 of his most recent book, for instance, is entitled "With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends against the Muse" (How Milton Works [Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001], pp. 281-304)
7. The greatest exponent of a Dante whose humanism cuts against the grain of his professed ideological commitments is still Erich Auerbach. See "Farinata and Cavalcante," in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 174-202, in which Auerbach deals with the Farinata canto
8. see also Auerbach's Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961)
9. In the discussion of rhetoric in the Phaedrus, Socrates asks: "What do adversaries do in the lawcourts? Don't they speak on opposite sides? ... And won't whoever does this artfully make the same thing appear to the same people sometimes just and sometimes, when he prefers, unjust?" (Plato, in Phaedras, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff [Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995], p. 57)
10. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates, in criticizing the sophist Lysias's speech, says that he has paid attention only to its style, as if to say that though "his thoughts were low ... yet he pleas'd the ear." In his discussion of the relevance to Belial's speech of the Platonic attack on the abuse of rhetoric, John M. Steadman mentions, in addition to the Phaedrus, the condemnation of flattery in the Gorgias ("Pandaemonium and Deliberative Oratory," Neophilologus 48, 2 [1964]: 159-76, 174). It should be noted that the attack on rhetoric and sophistry in Plato is to some extent parallel to the attack on poetry itself, which is often accused of saying false things about the gods
11. A. J. A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1947), p. 77
12. Eliot understood this perfectly well. In his essay "The Music of Poetry" (1942), he writes that "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning" (in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward [London: Penguin, 1953], pp. 56-67, 56)
13. It follows from what I am saying that I do not think the treatise can be used as a "gloss" (to borrow Maurice Kelley's term) to explain Paradise Lost (see Kelley, This Great Argument: A Study of Milton's "De Doctrina Christiana" as a Gloss upon "Paradise Lost" [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941]). The poem and the treatise inhabit different modes of thought, and, when brought into conjunction with each other, reveal that what Milton does in the poem he cannot do in the treatise and vice versa
14. Lucretius, The Way Things Are: The "De Rerum Natura" of Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. Rolfe Humphries (London and Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), p. 110, bk. 3, lines 830-1
15. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), p. 1
16. William Kerrigan, in The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of "Paradise Lost" (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 201, uses the term "spiritual materialism."
17. According to Milton, writes W. B. Hunter, "substance (substantia) is the substratum or stuff of God the Father which underlies the Son. It is not common to both but derives only from the Father" ("Further Definitions: Milton's Theological Vocabulary," in Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson, Bright Essence: Studies in Milton's Theology [Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1973], pp. 15-25, 15)
18. Milton, Two Books of Investigation into Christian Doctrine Drawn from the Sacred Scriptures Alone, trans. John Carey, in ca. 1658-ca. 1660, ed. Kelley, vol. 6 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-82), pp. 125-633, 310. Subsequent references to Christian Doctrine will be to this edition, unless otherwise noted, and will appear parenthetically in the text by page number
19. Aristotle, Metaphysica (Metaphysics), trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 689-926, 786
20. In Milton, The Christian Doctrine, trans. Bishop Charles R. Sumner, Complete Poems, pp. 900-1020, 979. In general, Sumner's translation, although old fashioned, seems more precise than Carey's, and if I give Carey's first, this is only because it is now considered the standard one
21. As has often been recognized, the phrase "To be no more," which marks the beginning of the most lyrical passage in Belial's speech, connects two phrases that are separated in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleepNo more. (Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2d edn. [Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997], pp. 1182-1245, III.i.55-60.)
22. Thomas Gray, The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, English, Latin, and Greek, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 37-43, lines 85-8
23. On Milton's mortalism, see Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalismfrom Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), esp. pp. 1-5, 168-91
24. and William Kerrigan, "The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism," ELR 5, 1 (Winter 1975): 125-66
25. Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. J. A. Smith, in The Basic Works, pp. 535-603, 548
26. Here is Sumner's translation: But the same, or even a greater difficulty still remains - how that which is in its nature peccable [i.e., susceptible to sin] can have proceeded (if I may so speak) from God? I ask in reply, how anything peccable can have originated from the virtue and efficacy which proceeded from God? Strictly speaking indeed it is neither matter nor form that sins; and yet having proceeded from God, and become in the power of another party, what is there to prevent them, inasmuch as they have now become mutable, from contracting taint and contamination through the enticements of the devil, or those which originate in man himself? (Complete Poems, p. 977)
27. Once again, here is Sumner: "God is not able to annihilate anything altogether, because by creating nothing he would create and not create at the same time, which involves a contradiction" (Complete Poems, p. 977)
28. I am alluding to the famous conclusion of Candide, which could be read as a gloss on Mammon's speech: "I know," said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden." "You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was placed in the Garden of Eden, he was placed there ut operaretur eum, in order to work on it, which proves that humankind was not made for rest." "Let us work without theorizing," said Martin. "That is the only way to make life bearable." (Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, trans. Robert M. Adams, in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 5th edn., vol. 2, ed. Maynard Mack et al. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1985], p. 409.)