by Harold Bloom
This our high place, our Sanctuary, our Hill.
To whom the Son with calm aspect and clear
Light’ning Divine, ineffable, serene,
Made answer. Mighty Father, thou thy foes
Justly hast in derision, and secure
Laugh’st at thir vain designs and tumults vain,
Matter to mee of Glory, whom thir hate
Illustrates, when they see all Regal Power
Giv’n me to quell thir pride, and in event
Know whether I be dext’rous to subdue
Thy Rebels, or be found the worst in Heav’n.
Book V, lines 719–42
Milton knows that this God the Father resembles King James I, and this Son, King Charles I. Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah, the West’s three major literary characters, are presented with rather more aesthetic splendor in the Yahwist text, the Gospel of Mark, and the Holy Quran. Why did Milton risk our derision with a God the Father who blares: “Him who disobeyes / Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day / Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls / Into utter darkness…”? Or our surprise that Yahweh says:
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all imploy
In our defense, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our Sanctuarie, our Hill.
It could be a Stuart king urging defense against Oliver Cromwell and not the God who names himself “I will be present whenever and wherever I will be present.” As for the Son of God, where is the Jesus of Mark, who inquires anxiously, “But whom say ye that I am?” Instead we have King Charles the Martyr subduing rebels before offering himself as a suffering ransom for fallen mankind. There is no more deliberate poetic artist in the language than John Milton. He knew what he was doing. Unless we are deaf, we ought to know also.
Here is a rather different sound:
Yet not for those,
Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict, do I repent or change,
Though chang’d in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sense of injur’d merit,
That with the mightiest rais’d me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm’d
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos’d
In dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
Book I, lines 94–109
Satan is undefeated in spirit though disfigured in shape, and reduced from Lucifer the Light Bearer to a darkening shadow. There is self-deception here, since the battle was never in doubt. Yet we hear the tonalities of the Sublime in “And courage never to submit or yield: / And what is else not to be overcome?”
Contrast this with an exchange between the Father and the Son:
Man disobeying,
Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high Supremacy of Heav’n,
Affecting God-head, and so losing all,
To expiate his Treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,
Die hee or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Book III, lines 203–12
Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life
I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;
Account mee man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleas’d, on me let Death wreck all his rage;
Under his gloomie power I shall not long
Lie vanquisht; thou hast givn me to possess
Life in my self for ever, by thee I live,
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All that of me can die, yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsom grave….
Book III, lines 236–47
In book XII, the Archangel Michael gets Jesus on and off the cross with hilarious haste: “so he dies, / But soon revives” (lines 419–20). So much for the agony of the Crucifixion, since Milton has almost a Hebraic distaste for the Atonement. But, then, is Dante sincere? Like Dante, Milton is a savage sect of one who has so persuasively redefined Christianity that we are blinded by the newness of what we hear or see. My hero of modern scholarship, Ernst Robert Curtius, dismisses the prevalent Anglo-American Augustinian and Thomistic parody of Dante and demonstrates the extraordinary extent to which the Commedia presents a private gnosis. Nothing in Catholic doctrine allows for Beatrice as the necessary medium of grace. Similarly, nothing in Protestantism countenances Milton’s numerous heresies. We might say that Milton invents a Protestant stance free of all Protestantism.
I have reflected throughout my life on the irony that the Catholic poet proper is Dante; he imposed his own gnosis, in which Beatrice mediates between humankind and God. Similarly, Milton is the crucial Protestant poet who imposed his own version of the Inner Light, in which his inward voice replaces the voice of Scripture. We tend now to think of Kafka as the central post-Biblical Jewish writer, and his works were regarded as canonical by Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, yet he himself said he had nothing in common with Jews because he had nothing in common with himself. The central poet of the American Religion is Walt Whitman, who dared to represent his own Resurrection and who hoped that Leaves of Grass would be the new Bible for Americans. When I think of Whitman, I hear first the elegiac splendors that lament his ebbing with the ocean of life.
Nobody would ask whether Chaucer or Shakespeare is sincere. Palpably, the Pardoner and Iago are not to be believed, and the Wife of Bath and Sir John Falstaff have no interest in belief. Dante and Milton cannot create human beings in the round, and therefore rely upon private visions that become realities. Curtius emphasizes that Dante actually gives Beatrice a place in the objective process of salvation. On an authority entirely his own, Dante places an element in revelation that is not doctrinal. Curtius’s willingness to call this either myth or heresy is his own gentle irony. John Milton had no Beatrice, since Eve is not a figure of redemption.
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In my far-off youth, I played with concepts of myth, under the influence of the literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye. I broke from Frye, not personally but intellectually, in the summer of 1967, when I first drafted what was to become The Anxiety of Influence. I think now that myth is simply gossip grown old, whereas heresy is the breath of profound poetic voices. It is misleading to speak of any poet’s heresies. With Milton, we go astray when we call his images of voice “heresies.” Paradise Lost mounts so vast a scheme of what the rhetoricians call transumption that every ancestral work becomes belated and Milton’s poem perpetually early. “Transumption” seems an awkward word, but simply means a trope or metaphor that undoes precursor images. The initial thirty-three lines of Paradise Lost repeat “first” six times in order to stress that Milton was there before the world was made. He was not a Gnostic but a poetic knower, and his gnosis insists that what is best and oldest in him is not mortal. The true God of Paradise Lost is the Spirit that brooded on the vast abyss and brought forth creation.
For the last six decades, I have wondered why Milton
blundered in portraying the figure called God in the great English epic. I think now that his irony set a trap for the unwary. He composed in his mind at night and dictated Paradise Lost the next morning. In youth, he had contemplated an Arthurian heroic poem to celebrate the triumph of an England casting off the bondage of monarchy and established church. Oliver Cromwell died, and the Commonwealth could not long survive him. It seems strange that Milton is the major poet of the Restoration, dwarfing even Andrew Marvell and John Dryden. Defeat and loss are the burden of the most ambitious epic in Western literary history.
There are several Gods in Paradise Lost. I have spoken of the Spirit that first moved upon the waters and brought forth life; we hear this God within the narrative voice. There is also the hidden God, William Shakespeare, who intrudes despite Milton’s wariness. Shakespeare is everywhere and nowhere in Milton. The shadow of belatedness, here and throughout his poetry, falls upon him from Shakespeare. Pragmatically, in the poem Satan is Shakespeare. His is the competing voice always blocking Milton’s quest to listen for his own voice that goes back to before the world was made. Something in Milton is aware that Shakespeare is his hinderer. The four invocations and Satan’s extraordinary soliloquies are Shakespearean ventures into the power of the mind over a universe of death. Milton triumphs in his agon with Satan, who is consigned to the universe of death. This victory remains equivocal, since Satan is only a weak contestant. Beyond Satan are Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, and the power of mind they represent transcends even John Milton’s ambition and creative intellect. The invocations to books I, III, VII, and IX are Milton’s own soliloquies, always on the Shakespearean model. Satan’s soliloquies fuse Hamlet, Iago, and Macbeth.
Milton asserted that Paradise Lost was a theodicy. It is anything but that. If you read the grandest English epic as a justification of the ways of God to men and women, you would have to conclude that the strongest poet in the language, after Shakespeare and Chaucer, went wrong from the start. Sixty years of rereading the poem have convinced me it is a vast theurgy, a justification of Milton’s inward voice drawing down God, mending the divine utterance, and maintaining our idea of order. Milton seeks to uncover the God within himself. That may be the inner plot of his epic:
Of man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the heighth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
Book I, lines 1–26
This invocation to book I is magnificent and perplexing. The one greater man is Jesus, though unnamed. Milton calls upon the Heavenly Muse that inspired Moses following the tradition that Genesis was authored by Moses himself. Homer and Virgil are displaced with gusto; more subtly, the Holy Bible also yields to Miltonic priority. There is a wonderful ease in Milton’s ascendance over every received tradition. But who is the Heavenly Muse? The Muse is Greek and Roman, not Hebrew. Nor is it the Holy Ghost of the Catholic trinity. It is the spirit of Yahweh, calling the shepherd Moses, who was pasturing his flock on Mount Oreb. Alternatively, Milton places his Muse on Mount Sion, celebrated in the Psalms of David. The Jerusalem oracle of Mount Sion overgoes the Delphic oracle of Apollo. With vaunting splendor, Milton asserts that his song will soar above the Aonian mount, and the Helicon, the river of the Muses.
Northrop Frye sensibly remarked that in Milton, God the Father is an aesthetic disaster. Frye went so far as to call this God a smirking hypocrite. The mystery is, why did Milton allow himself this blunder?
Milton’s God is self-righteous, pompous, and morally dubious. He is a vindictive tyrant. The contrast with the Yahweh of the J writer in the Hebrew Bible is astonishing.
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The proper name of God in the Hebrew Bible is the four-letter YHWH; it occurs in that text more than six thousand times. We will never know how the name was pronounced. Yahweh is a surmise. The sacred name was strictly guarded by the oral tradition. After the return from Babylon in the fifth century B.C.E., the name was regarded as magical and was not to be pronounced. God was named either Elohim (divine being or beings) or Adonai (my Lord). Since the Greeks called God Theos, the Jews began to refer to him as Kyrios, Greek for Adonai or Lord. By the time of Hillel, the name Yahweh was never heard.
And yet Yahweh is a very old name. It is used in the great war song of Deborah and Barack (Judges 5), which is eleventh-century B.C.E. and is probably the oldest text in Hebrew.
Yahweh’s ways of speaking are usually not enigmatic. The grand exception is his “ehyeh asher ehyeh,” the self-naming by a pun. Though translated in the Christian Bible as “I AM THAT I AM,” its meaning is closer to “I will be I will be.”
Yahweh’s complexities are labyrinthine, infinite, and probably inexplicable, despite the extraordinary interpretational skills of the Talmud sages, and of the Sufi masters who confronted the Quran, where the entire work is spoken by Yahweh, under the name of Allah.
And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?
And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant?
And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.
Joshua 5:13–15
This is Yahweh as a man of war. But who was, who is Yahweh? His complexities are infinite and inexplicable. His furies are startling. He commands a reluctant Moses to descend into Egypt, and then tries to murder his prophet at a night encampment, on the way down. William Blake called Yahweh “Old Nobodaddy,” and James Joyce termed him the “hangman god,” and yet Yahweh, despite his ambivalences, shows us the difference between our being transcendent entities or merely engines of entropy.
Kierkegaard pictures Nebuchadnezzar, restored from feeding on the grass like a beast, wondering at Yahweh:
And no one knoweth anything of Him, who was His father, and how He acquired His power, and who taught Him the secret of his might.
This unfathered Yahweh is our perpetual dilemma: Who was his teacher? Can we know anything at all about Yahweh? The earliest strand of Torah centers upon Yahweh. He is close by, intimate with us, and seems to know his limits. That may indeed increase his irascibility. He walks and talks with angels and with men. He reposes under the terebinth trees at M
amre, and devours with gusto a meal prepared by Sarah. Best of all, he picnics on Sinai with seventy-three elders of Israel, who stare at him while he says nothing. He plays with mud, makes a figurine out of red clay, and then breathes life into it from his own nostrils. He is jealous, full of mischief, incessantly turbulent, and always inquisitive. He is over-ambitious and overworked.
It is sensible to fear Yahweh. Can we love him? He expects both: fear where there is love, and love where there is fear, a fusion so destructive that it is appropriate to him alone.
William Blake, in his brief epic Milton, emulates his precursor with a vision of the poet’s personal descent to redeem what has been lost:
Say first! what mov’d Milton, who walk’d about in Eternity
One hundred years, pond’ring the intricate mazes of Providence,
Unhappy tho in heav’n, he obey’d, he murmur’d not, he was silent,
Viewing his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep
In torment! To go into the deep her to redeem & himself perish?
That cause at length mov’d Milton to this unexampled deed,
A Bard’s prophetic Song! for sitting at eternal tables,
Terrific among the Sons of Albion, in chorus solemn & loud
A Bard broke forth: all sat attentive to the awful man.
Book I, Plate 2, lines 16–24
You might think of the “Sixfold Emanation” as Milton’s three wives and three daughters, or perhaps Milton’s poems, or even the society he had hoped he might help to create. What matters most is that the poet of Paradise Lost chooses to re-enter mortal life. Adam and Eve make that entrance reluctantly and not by choice. Like two children, they hold hands as they slowly wander out of Eden and into mortality. I have never known what to make of any doctrine of the Fall. When we were children, we were terribly punished for being children. I scarcely regard that as an eccentric judgment of our supposed first disobedience.
It is an antique jest to say that Milton immured in paradise would have leaped to devour the apple: how else could he have begun his epic? But I read the great poem as the Fall of Lucifer. Then you and I and all of us fell down. Like Milton and Satan, we lust after Eve and only seldom find the first Adam in our thought.