Though the English Protestants of the seventeenth century were, to their ultimate spiritual distress, so devoted to the literal interpretation of the Bible that they considered it the primary and superior reading, their affection for the letter and the historical sense did not prevent them from searching the text for types and allegories. This practice, of course, bore the taint of popery and hindered the full powers of the fides divina; yet it often yielded excellent results and enabled one to skirt the marsh of a troublesome passage. Though not addicted to the allegorical method, Milton was no stranger to it. He might scorn Amaryllis and Neaera, but he could spend an occasional moment of leisure with what Luther called “these whores of allegory.” The latter books of Paradise Lost and the tragedy of Samson proved that he was quite a talented typologist, who could find foreshadowings of the great Advocate of Grace in the biographical records of the advocates of the Law. More than this, Milton, unlike many of his contemporaries who were inclined to be universal in their analogical researches, made fine discriminations between types because he believed in what we might now call “typological evolution.”

An example of Milton's interpretative discretion is his refusal to accept—although in this he was contrary to theological opinion—the patriarch Aaron as a full type of Christ. He contended that this first priest simply adumbrated the priestly offices of Jesus.¹ When he came to this conclusion, Milton was flatly correcting the assertions of the Anglican prelates; but on another similar occasion he was mentally flexible enough to correct himself.² Since he also believed in a dynamic typology that changed as the sacred history was unrolled, he was quick to admit that symbols valid before the Law³ were afterwards worthless.⁴ He could also insist on the gradual revelation of types and symbols because he believed that the thunder and trumpets' “clang” on Mt. Sinai proclaimed, among other things, a new form of typology and established Moses, who was, in a guarded sense, “the Divine Mediator” and “the type of the Law,”⁵ as a master typologist. This evaluation had more than human worth because it was Jehovah who instructed Moses so that he could teach this mode of interpretation to men.

Ordaine them Lawes; part such as appertaine
To civil Justice, part religious Rites
Of sacrifice, informing them by types
And shadowes, of that destind Seed to bruise
The Serpent, by what meanes he shall achieve
Mankinds deliverance

(PL, XII. 230-35).

These words are placed in the mouth of the Archangel Michael, who at this moment is manipulating the magic lantern of holy shadows and who is also an experienced exegete skilled in all four senses. Shortly after speaking this gloss, he announces that the main purpose of the Old Testament is to prepare the sons of Adam for a “better Cov'nant, disciplin'd / From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit” (XII. 302-303). The mighty angel thus suggests that man can ascend (as humbled Adam has ascended from the Vale of Despond to the Mount of the Visions of God) from the darkness of sin and ignorance into the light of truth, from the shadow of type and symbol into the white blaze of the eternal literal.

It must be confessed that typology, even at its finest, is little more than hindsight prophecy; it points surely to the Advent, but it is best understood when the Word is made Flesh. Allegory—a game that even Jehovah plays⁶—is, in Milton's somewhat reluctant opinion, a possible form of revealed knowledge. This knowledge may be useful in some instances and not in others. When, for example, Moses urges the Israelites not to plow with an ox and an ass, Milton, who has been searching Deuteronomy for divorce evidence, perceives that the Hebrew lawgiver has the Miltons in mind,⁷ an interpretation that speaks better for a sense of mystery than for a sense of humor. In his poetry Milton uses allegory with somewhat better artistry than a modern reader might imagine. An illustration of this skill appears when he shows Satan, orbiting in space and viewing the margin of Heaven and the angelic ladder of which “Each stair mysteriously was meant” (III. 516). By reminding us that Jacob's ladder had allegorical force, Milton prepares us for Raphael's subsequent description of the scala perfectionis, “the common gloss of theologians.” There is likewise poetic irony resident in the fact that Satan, who is totally without hope, is permitted to see what will be interpreted as Adam's way of assuming angelic nature.

In general Milton probably defined allegory as a downward descent of knowledge, a revealing of suprarational information that enabled the humble learner to ascend. Raphael's well known comment on his account of the celestial battles (V. 570-76; VI. 893-96) and Milton's open admission that he can only accept the six days of Creation allegorically (VII. 176-79) make the Miltonic conception of allegory plain. For the poet, allegory is the only means of communication between a superior mind aware of grand principles, such as the enduring war between Good and Evil, and a lesser mind incapable of higher mathematics. It is essentially a form of revelation, or, as Vaughan would put it, “a candle tin'd at the Sun.”

To burnish this observation, I should like to point to events within the confines of the epic that could be called an allegory about allegory. This sacred fiction begins to be written in Book II when Satan, leaving Hell for Eden, retains, except for his momentary ventures into several forms of symbolic wildlife, the literalness of satanship, never putting on the ruddy complexion, the horns, hoof, and tail by which he was recognized in the allegorical world. The celestial messengers, however, are real creatures and stay feathered and decorous so that Adam, unlike his sons, does not “entertain angels unawares.” It is otherwise with Satan's strange relative, Death. At first he “seems” to be crowned and to shake his ghastly dart; actually, he is a vast black shadow, formless, not “Distinguishable in member, joynt, or limb, / Or substance” (II. 668-69). He is by no means the symbolic person who writes the dreary colophon to all human stories or who is stonily portrayed in ecclesiastical monuments. Once he has crossed his bridge into our world, he is better known. Although he is “not mounted yet / On his pale horse,” we are familiar with his “vaste unhide-bound Corps” and we understand his hearty hunger for whatever “the Sithe” of his companion Time “mowes down” (X. 588-606). The bridge between the two worlds is a convention of infernal histories; but in Paradise Lost, it could also be called the Bridge of Allegory.

There is no doubt that at times Milton read the Scriptures for meanings other than the literal one, but he also was aware, thanks to a long tradition, that the pagans had a glimmer of Christian truth. Their lamp was scantily fueled and the wick smoked, but with proper adjustments it could be made to give off a “pale religious light.” It took almost four centuries to light this lamp in the Church; the pagan philosophers and their idolatrous legends had first to be suppressed. Then, taking over the methods of the same heathen brethren, the Christian scholars began searching the mythology for physical, moral, and spiritual notions that had been bequeathed to men by the sons of Noah. The moral commentaries of Bishops Fulgentius and Eustathius on pagan literature encouraged others to unshell these truths, and in Renaissance England Chapman, Bacon, Reynolds, Sandys, Ross, and Boys searched the pagans for what had been better revealed in the Bible or was narrated in the Books of Creation. All of them were infected to some degree with the current confidence in a universal philosophical system, a disease nourished by earlier mystagogues such as Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Agostino Steucho, and best known to us in the fine clinical case of Theophilus Gale. Given the virulence of the epidemic, we are, consequently, not surprised when the daemon from “the threshold of Jove's Court” touches on it.

He tell ye, 'tis not vain or fabulous
(Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance)
What the sage Poets taught by th' heavenly Muse,
Storied of old in high immortal verse
Of dire Chimaeras and enchanted Isles,
And rifted Rocks whose entrance leads to Hell,
For such there be, but unbelief is blind

(Comus, 512-18).

After reading this speech in Comus, we understand why the mythological remembrances in Paradise Lost are sometimes more than ornamental, why their submerged moral or spiritual meanings enable them to consort with and support the braver Christian myths. The multicolored phoenix, first underwritten by Clement of Rome as a Christ symbol, adorns Milton's own adventual allegory: the descent of Raphael through the air, “a Phoenix, gaz'd by all” (V. 272). Eden, expressed in vegetable grandeur, is quickly seared with evil foreboding when Milton likens it to the meadows of Enna, those sinister fields “where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs / Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis / Was gather'd” (IV. 269-71). When Milton compares Adam and Eve to Deucalion and Pyrrha (XI. 8-14), even we do not need a whole series of pious mythologizers to make the point; and foolish Pandora hardly needs the testimony of a Father as old as Tertullian⁸ to inform us that she is the pagan half-memory of silly Eve (IV. 712-19). Milton is quite conventional in permitting pagan legend to lend its soft biceps to Christian power. His method of searching for metaphoric support in heathen culture also enables him to stand aside from the other characters of the epic and act as a commentator on the pre-Christian world from the vantage point of a postclassical man. Among the various pagan figures with whom Milton plants his poetry, two rise above the rest; they are the poet-theologian Orpheus and the demigod Hercules. Both are attractive to him because of their Christian meaning.

From the flats of the first Prolusion through the latter ranges of Paradise Lost, Milton accents the legend of Orpheus in a way that suggests self-identification. The Greek hero was praised in antiquity and by men of later ages for softening the human heart and turning it through his higher magic to the useful and the good.⁹ Christian as these achievements were, Orpheus, as Milton knew, enlarged them by singing of Chaos and Old Night and by teaching Musaeus the reality of the one God. St. Augustine, a Father beloved by Milton when he agreed with him, complained that Orpheus' theology was very poor stuff;¹⁰ but other primitive theologians from Athenagoras onward hailed the Greek as unique among the unelect in explaining divine matters as a Christian would.¹¹ There is, as I have said, little doubt that Milton thought of the murdered poet as one of his own grave predecessors, and this view was probably enhanced by that of the Christian mythologists who described Orpheus as a pagan type of Christ.¹²

Clement of Alexandria is the first to bring both harrowers of Hell together, although his comments are actually an angry rejection of pagan complaints about Christian imitativeness. He brands the Christian doctrines of Orpheus as spurious and mocks the alleged majesty of his songs; then he turns with a “not so my singer” to praise the new Orpheus, who tamed the lions of wrath, the swine of gluttony, the wolves of rapine.¹³ Religious Eusebius makes a similar comparison in a more kindly fashion:

The Saviour of men through the instrument of the human body which he united to his divinity shows himself all saving and blessing, as Greek Orpheus who by the skillful playing of his lyre tamed and subdued wild animals. The Greeks, I say, sang of his miracles and believed that the inspired accents of the divine poet not only affected animals but also trees who left their places at his singing to follow him. So is the voice of our Redeemer, a voice filled with divine wisdom which cures all evil received in the hearts of men.¹⁴

The history of Orpheus as a pagan type of Christ can be traced for many centuries;¹⁵ by Milton's time it was such a part of the symbolic fabric of Christianity that one had only to think of “lyre” to say “cross.” It is, for example, Orpheus who comes into John Donne's mind when he writes in “Goodfriday,” “Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, / And tune all spheares at once, peirc'd with those holes?” This is the occasional image of Christ on the lyre, but the open comparison is conventionally stated for us by Giles Fletcher:

Who doth not see drown'd in Deucalion's name
(When earth his men, and sea had lost his shore)
Old Noah; and in Nisus lock, the fame
Of Sampson yet alive; and long before
In Phaethon's, mine owne fall I deplore:
But he that conquer'd hell, to fetch againe
His virgin widowe, by a serpent slaine,
Another Orpheus was the dreaming poets feigne.(16)

Thus Christians hallowed Orpheus for his half-success as a saviour of men and for his frustrated attempt to lead a soul out of Hell's darkness.

Tatian, in his Oration Against the Greeks, had argued that Orpheus and Hercules were the same person;¹⁷ Milton would hardly say this, though he found in the demigod foreshadowings of both Samson and Christ. His admission of the Christian Hercules to his pantheon begins with the “Nativity Ode,” where we are shown the infant Jesus “in his swaddling bands” ready to control the snaky Typhon and the rest of “the damned crew.” It is Hercules, too, who is praised in The Tenure of Kings for his suppression of tyrants,¹⁸ a superb Miltonic exploit; and he is recalled in the twenty-third sonnet for his rescue of Alcestis from the dark floor of Hell. He was, of course, attractive to Christians for other reasons. Begotten by Jove of a mortal woman, he early chose the right path, eschewing “the broad way and the green”; and, according to the almost Christian Seneca, “Jove's great son” devoted his whole life, in the best Stoic manner, to the conquest of his passions and the suppression of vice.¹⁹ His major exploits were against the forces of darkness. We first hear of him in the Iliad (V. 397) as he strikes Hades with his “swift arrow” to leave him in anguish among the dead. No wonder that he thrice descended into Hell with somewhat better fortunes than those of Orpheus.

When Milton read the Orphic poems, he read the one that praises Hercules as a human saviour, but the comparison between Christ and Hercules, like the comparison between Christ and Orpheus, had been made before Milton's birth. “Ipse Christus verus fuit Hercules, qui per vitam aerumnosam omnia monstra superavit et edomuit.”²⁰ The analogy was firmly established across the Channel, where Hercules Gallus was a stern rival of Francus, by d'Aubigne's L'Hercule Chrestien,²¹ a moral prose on the labors Christianly read. This book inspired the Hercule Chrestien²² of Ronsard, who advises his reader to swim a little below his surface:

Mais ou est l'oeil, tant soit-il aveugle,
Ou est l'esprit, tant soit-il desreigle,
S'il veut un peu mes paroles comprendre,
Que par raison je ne luy face entendre,
Que la plus-part des choses qu'on escrit
De Hercule, est deve a un seul Jesuschrist.

Chaplain Ross, a good Scot, can put it bluntly: “Our blessed Saviour is the true Hercules.”²³

There is little question that these two pagan Christ-types were congenial to Milton not only for their Christian grace notes but for their reflection of Miltonic ideals. Both heroes were received in the “sweet Societies / That sing, and singing in their glory move,” because, as Boethius made clear,²⁴ they early chose the proper ascent to Heaven. Their accomplishments and their exploits were the sort that Milton himself might read in his own book of hope. But there is more to it than this. Hercules and Orpheus were types—not so good as Moses or Enoch, of course—of the strong Son of God and the Singer of the New Song. The event in their story that tied the hard knot of analogy was their descent into the darkness, their triumphs or half-triumphs in Hell, and their return into the light and, eventually, to the holy summits. In this process of descent and ascent, of entering the dark to find the light, the two halves of the coin of allegory were united.

II

The visual imagery of Paradise Lost depends to some extent on verbs of rising and falling, of descent and ascent, and on contrasts between light and darkness. These modes of expression coil about the demands of the central theme as the serpent coils about the forbidden tree so that we may be urged to abandon the horizontal movement of human history for the vertical motion of the spiritual life, the dark nothingness of ignorance and evil for the light of ultimate truth and reality. The descent of Milton into the darkness of Hell before he rises to the great “Globe of circular light” is a sound Christian rescript. “Descend,” says St. Augustine, “that you may ascend.” “Descende ut ascendas, humiliare ut exalteris.”²⁵ Christ's double descent—first into the flesh and then into the dark Saturday of Hell—furnished those who humbled themselves with a map of Christian progress. One goes down in humility into the dark so that one may ascend in triumph to the light. Satan and his squires know this course well enough to pervert it.

When the black tyrant, who has been “Hurl'd headlong” down, addresses his companions, he pretends, contrary to fact, that the descent was voluntary and a preparation for ascension. “From this descent / Celestial Virtues rising, will appear / More glorious and more dread than from no fall” (II. 14-16). Satan's prideful qualification is enough to make the word rising ironic; but his falsehood is not only believed but seconded by the deluded Moloch, who describes with desperate wit the millions that “longing wait / The Signal to ascend” and boastfully asserts “That in our proper motion we ascend / Up to our native seat: descent and fall / To us is adverse” (II. 55-77). Moloch's knowledge is no better than his grammar, for he, like his fellows, has gone about it the wrong way. He has already ascended in pride; been guilty of a “sursum cor contra Dominum,”²⁶ and so he has “frozen and fallen like a flake of snow.”²⁷ The literature of the Church knows all these phrases for the fate of the prideful aspirant; it tells us that those who descend in humility arise to those heights. “Unde Satan elatus cecidit, fidelis homo sublevatus ascendat.”²⁸ The humble ascend to the light; the proud enter the depths, the “caligo tenebrarum densissima.”²⁹ For those in hope of seeing the light that Satan truly detests, the road is easily followed, because both roads, as Bernard of Clairvaux puts it, are the same:

The same steps lead up to the throne and down; the same road leads to the city and from it; one door is the entrance of the house and the exit; Jacob saw the angels ascending and descending on the same ladder. What does all this mean? Simply that if you desire to return to truth, you do not have to seek a new way which you do not know, but the known way by which you descended. Retracing your steps, you may ascend in humility by the same path which you descended in pride.³⁰

Augustine's descent in humility is paralleled by Bernard's descent in pride, because both are dark ways that lead upward to light. Had Milton's Adam been humble in obedience, he would have ascended, as Raphael, who had read the Church Fathers,³¹ made plain (V. 490-505). But Adam sacrificed his prospects of angelic perfection for the immediate rewards of romantic love; even then, however, his subsequent humility guarantees his ascension. The demons also talk of ascending, but “self-tempted,” they are secure in their fall. The bitter pride and the prideful unrepentance that governs them is embossed by Satan in his soul-revealing soliloquy:

O foul descent! that I who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrain'd
Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
That to the hight of Deitie aspir'd:
But what will not Ambition and Revenge
Descend to? who aspires must down as low
As high he soar'd …

(IX. 163-70).

Satan, in other words, knows the rules. In time his legions will rise far enough to occupy the middle air, but they will not advance into the “precincts of light.” Depth and dark are really their “native seat.” Their master is very honest about this, admitting, as he returns from the grand seduction, that he finds descent “through darkness” an easy road (X. 393-98).

It is darkness, as well as descent, even though it is “darkness visible” that plagues the newcomers to Hades. They sit in the gloom, as Gregory the Great tell us, “inwardly dark amidst the everlasting darkness of damnation.”³² Behind them are “the happy Realms of Light” (I. 85), which they have exchanged for a dreary plain, “void of light” (I. 180). Once they were famed as God's “Bright-harness'd Angels”; now they spend their time plotting how to “affront” God's holy light “with thir darkness” (I. 389-91), confounding “Heav'n's purest Light” “with blackest Insurrection” (II. 136-37). In alternate moments they console themselves with foolish or violent plans for an escape to light (II. 220, 376-78), but Satan, who has read the sixth book of the Aeneid, reminds them that “Long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light” (II. 432-33). In Satan's church—and theology informs us that he has one—this might be called the diabolique of darkness; the counter-Church opposes to this opaqueness the sublime metaphysic of light.

We need not scratch through the Bible or the smaller gravel of the theologians to find the moral interpretation of the blackness of Hell, of the mind of evil, or what Milton's Jehovah calls the “dark designs.” The Christian conscience is fully aware of the dark symbols. Ignorance, sin and sinner, damnation, Hell and its provost are festooned with black against a midnight ground, and the speculations of Beatus Jung are seldom required to expound the Christian tradition. Opposed to this night of negation is what might be called the tenebrae in bono which is consonant with the descent in humility and is explained by the divine darkness that even Mammon knows.

This deep world
Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heav'n's all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his Glory unobscur'd,
And with the Majesty of darkness round
Covers his Throne; from whence deep thunders roar
Must'ring thir rage, and Heav'n resembles Hell?
As he our Darkness, cannot we his Light
Imitate when we please?

(II. 262-70).

If these were not English devils, we would put this down to conscious humor; but the absence of jest is proclaimed when Pandaemonium is lighted with sputtering gas lamps that badly imitate Heaven's essential light. The dark with which God mantles himself is as different from Hell-dark as Hell-fire is from Heaven's blazing cressets. Moses, who ascended Mt. Sinai to enter the dark folds of God's light, could lecture the swart Mammon in hermeneutics.

Though Orpheus and Hercules enter the dark and arise to the light, the basic Christian idea of the dark god in the divine night is a totally different concept. For the ancients, light was the essence of existence and the sun shone in their temples, bathing the clear gods in bright gold. Death was the greatest of horrors, not because it deprived one of limb and motion but rather because it extinguished the mortal world of light. Dying Antigone weeps because never again will she see the holy light (879-80), and her lamentation is heard again and again in Greek tragedy.³³ Light was life, and it was also wisdom. For Plato φωs is the means by which men who live in the realm of shadow almost place their hands on the unknown and unknowable.³⁴ The Roman stoics soothed themselves with the same consolation of light; hence Seneca can remind the suffering Helvia that “The gleams of night” enable one to commune with celestial beings and keep one's mind “always directed toward the sight of kindred things above.”³⁵ The Christians, too, saw Jehovah as a bright God, the Father of Lights, and in his human manifestation, the Lux Mundi,³⁶ but they also knew him as a god in darkness,³⁷ assuming his cloak of clouds.³⁸ The figure of a darkened god visible only in the soul's night demanded an explanatory inscription on the entablature.

The Christian doctrine of the light in darkness begins when Philo Judaeus, the stepfather of exegesis, interpreted Exodus 20:21. The broad cloud on Mt. Sinai, he writes, is the allegory of Moses' attempt to understand the invisible and incorporeal nature of Jehovah;³⁹ it is also, in a more general sense, the symbolic exposition of the process by which the contemplative mind tries to comprehend the immaterial.⁴⁰ More than a century later, Roman Plotinus compared man's perception of common experience to wandering through the statues of the gods that crowd the outskirts of a temple.⁴¹ The luminous soul has, truly enough, descended into darkness⁴² when it has entered the flesh, but it still provides an inner light.⁴³ Once it has reached its limit this light is also changed into an obscurity;⁴⁴ but this limit does not blind the inner sight by which one may ascend to the light in the shadows (ελλαμψ[b.iota ]s η ειs τо sκоτоs), the spiritual habitation which is the goal of the wise.⁴⁵ Philo, accounting for the experience of Moses, and Plotinus, elaborating on the light metaphysic of Plato, offered to western man an esoteric explanation of divine light: it hides itself in the dark and one must enter the cloud to find it.

Milton, who had only the rudimentary chronology of his age to guide him, would probably think of Plato as a contemporary of Moses. He would certainly accept the Pseudo-Dionysius, the great exponent of this philosophy, as the disciple of St. Paul and the coeval of Philo. He would, consequently, assign all these similar doctrines to the first Christian era. The facts, as we now know and as I intend to relate them, were otherwise, and it is Gregory of Nyssa, whom Milton was reading before he wrote An Apology, who was the precursor of the Areopagite and who brought this doctrine into the fold of the Church. Gregory invented the poignant oxymoron “bright darkness” (λαμπρssγυsφоs),⁴⁶ a trope that haunts the rhetoric of mystics ever afterward. In his Life of Moses he is troubled by the god who first showed himself in light and then in a dark shroud. He sought and found a solution for this strangeness. The Logos is first seen as light, but as one ascends, it becomes dark because one realizes that it surpasses ordinary knowledge and is separated from mortal comprehension by the tenebrae.⁴⁷ This is why Moses first saw God as light. Becoming more perfect in understanding by putting aside false knowledge of the divine, he passed from the primary light of the Logos, which dissipates impiety, into the divine dark. In this night, his mind, rejecting “the simple aspects of things,” was fixed in a stasis of contemplation so that here he saw the true light where God is.⁴⁸ In this way Gregory wrote out the Christian explanations of the dark experience which the person who called himself Dionysius would some centuries later make an intrinsic part of Christian knowledge.

The light metaphysic of the Pseudo-Dionysius also owes much to Origen's doctrine of the double vision obtained through the eyes of the sense and the eyes of the mind. In order that the external eyes of men may be blinded, Origen writes, and that the inner eyes may see, Christ endured the humility of incarnation. By this descent, he, who healed the blind by miracle, blinded our external eyes so that he could cure our inner sight.⁴⁹ The Pseudo-Dionysius begins his Mystical Theology with the request that he may be allowed to ascend to those oracles where the mysteries of theology are seen in a darkness brighter than light.⁵⁰ He yearns to enter the “divine darkness”⁵¹ where the human handicap of seeing and being seen is removed and all forms of external perception are blinded in the sacred darkness that is inaccessible light.⁵² For him … when the searcher has arrived at its limits, which are complete negation, he will see at last without veils.⁵³ The Pseudo-Dionysius supports this doctrine with the example of Moses, who penetrated into “the cloud of unknowing” by closing his human eyes to all the vanities of mortal knowledge.⁵⁴ Moses, it is true, did not see God's face but only the divine place;⁵⁵ nonetheless, his intellectual eyes, like those of the supercelestial Intelligences and Seraphim,⁵⁶ were cleansed of the “mass of obscurity.”⁵⁷

After the tenth century the vogue of the Pseudo-Dionysius and his doctrine was enormous. Hilduin, John Scot, Hincmar, Radebert, John of Salisbury, Sarrazin, Hugo of St. Victor, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas found spiritual fascination in his writings.⁵⁸ The excitement of the Middle Ages was shared by the members of the Florentine Academy, by Ficino, who translated the Areopagite and wrote his own De Lumine, and by Pico della Mirandola, who discovered in the Pseudo-Dionysius a fellow exotic. But the light metaphysic of this fifth-century Greek was particularly illuminating to those who followed the upward mystic road, to John of the Cross, Ruusbroec, Tauler, and Suso, all of whom walked the way marked out by Richard of St. Victor⁵⁹ and St. Bonaventura. The manuals of the latter saint are rubricated with the paradoxical notion that to see one must become blind: “Excaecatio est summa illuminatio.” One must search, says Bonaventura, for the night of light, but only those who have found it know what it is.

Jacob's ladder is placed on these three levels, the top reaching Heaven and so is Solomon's throne where sits the king wise and in peace, lovable as the most precious husband and most desirable. Upon him the angels desire to look and the love of holy souls yearns for him just as the stag seeks fountains of water. Hither in the manner of fire, our spirit is made skillful by a most fervent desire for the ascent but is carried by a wise ignorance beyond itself into darkness and delight so that it not only says with the bride: “We will run after thee to the odor of thy ointments,” but also sings with the prophet: “and night shall be my light in my pleasure.” What this nocturnal and delightful illumination is no one knows unless he tries it, and unless grace is given divinely no one tries it; and no one is given it unless he trains himself for it.⁶⁰

The same mode of expression is found in Dante, who like Virgil and Milton descended into Hell, who went into the dark in order to see the light. The poetic allegory comes at the beginning when Dante leaves the forest of this world and having endured the night with piety prepares to enter the dark downward path so that he may ascend to the triple circle of final illumination.

Ma poi ch'io fui al piè d'un colle giunto,
Là dove terminava quella valle
Che m'avea di paura il cor compunto,
Guardai in alto, e vidi le sue spalle
Vestite già de' raggi del pianeta
Che mena dritto altrui per ogni calle.
Allor fu la paura un poco queta
Che nel lago del cor m'era durata
La notte ch' io passai con tanta pièta

(I. 13-21).

Milton's poetic realization of the themes of descent and ascent, of the necessity of entering the dark in order to see the light, of the descent of light itself so that men may see, and of the inner eye that knows only when the exterior sight is gone, is constantly before us as we read him. These themes were carried to exorbitant excess by the mystics, but we must remember that in spite of the emphasis given them by this nervous faith they have a simple Christian provenience. It is in the plain sense, which seems nowadays to be extravagant, that Milton puts them to use. The descent of humility comes before us as early as the “Nativity Ode” when we are told how the Son of God forsook the “Courts of everlasting Day” to choose “with us a darksome House of mortal Clay.” The same theme comes forward again when Christ is assured that he will not degrade his nature “by descending” to assume that of man. “Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt / With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne” (PL, III. 303-14). On the human level the poet seeking perfection rises from the day of “L'Allegro” and enters the night, “the high lonely Tow'r,” of “Il Penseroso.” Thus he, too, enters the dark, as Moses did, in order to reach the dawn and the “Prophetic strain.” As Milton leaves the light of the first poem that reveals only the “aspects of things,” Orpheus lifts his head, but in the night of the second he hears the singing of both Orpheus and his son Musaeus. It is in darkness, too, that fallen Adam descends so that the day of fleshly surrender be followed by the night of remorse and humility; through this course, the father of men ascends to God, first, in prayer and, then, in vision.

The theme of the inner eyes, so comforting to the blind man, makes its appearance as early as the Second Defence,⁶¹ where Milton compares his blindness with his opponent's spiritual dark: “mine keeps from my view only the colored surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue and truth.” Samson Agonistes, if it is the last work, almost depends on this idea. At the bottom of despair Samson, “a moving grave,” doubts that “light is in the Soul” (92) and sees only “double darkness nigh at hand” (593). But Samson's night becomes day when in the complete negation of himself he yields humbly to the “rousing motions in me” (1382); then the Semichorus can sing:

But he though blind of sight,
Despis'd and thought extinguish'd quite,
With inward eyes illuminated
His fiery virtue rous'd
From under ashes into sudden flame

(1687-91).

We must turn, however, to Paradise Lost, and especially to two of its invocations, to find all of this in flower.

The epic opens with the great address recalling Moses' ascent from the low vale to the summit of Sinai to enter the clouded light that awaits him. The experience of “that Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed” reminds Milton of the brook of Siloa which flowed into Siloam's pool, “fast by the Oracle of God,” where Christ healed the blind man, curing at once both the inward and the exterior eyes. The types of both Old and New Testament are then personally read as the poet prays for the ascent toward light. “What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support; / That to the highth of this great Argument.…” Prayer is itself the humble act, preface to Milton's descent into the dark underground of Satan's province.

It is possible that Milton begins in Hell because he who met Casella “in the milder shades of Purgatory” began there. There is, however, a difference between the two poets and their purposes. Dante enters Hell (although the allegorical process of conversion and Christian education is a reader's requirement) because the literal demanded it. Milton's descent is an artistic voluntary. In moral sense Dante descends that he may ascend; he enters the dark to find the light. In doing so he takes Milton by the hand, but the reason is doctrinal rather than poetic. Having explored the dark bottom of pride, Milton rises toward the light. The preface to Book III recounts this ascension:

Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,
Escap't the Stygian Pool, though
long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes than to th'Orphean
Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare

(III. 13-21).

Milton, like Moses, sees the “Holy Light,” but like the great type of the Redeemer he must descend to his “Native Element.” Light, however, is given the inner eye, and, like Vaughan's Nicodemus, he can “at mid-night speak with the Sun!” It is more than sixteen hundred years after the typified event; yet the English poet joins himself to the procession, heathen and Christian, of those who acted in the great allegory of faith, who descended to ascend, who entered the darkness to see the light.

Notes

1. Church Government, Works (New York, 1931-38), III, 202-205; hereafter I shall cite only volume and page.

2. Hirelings, VI, 55, 58; Christian Doctrine, XIV, 311.

3. Christian Doctrine, XVI, 191.

4. Ibid., XVI, 197.

5. Ibid., XVI, 111.

6. Ibid., XV, 145.

7. Doctrine and Discipline, III, 419; Colasterion, IV, 265.

8. Liber de Corona, Patrologia Latina, II, 85.

9. J. Wirl, Orpheus in der englischen Literatur (Vienna and Leipzig, 1913). Milton's orphic imagery has been studied by Caroline Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,” PMLA, LXIV (1949), 189-207. The Columbia Index may be consulted for Milton's references to Orpheus.

10. Contra Faustum, PL, XLII, 282; De Civitate, XVIII. 14.

11. Legatio pro Christianis, Patrologia Graeca, VI, 928.

12. Fulgentius, Philosophi Mythologiarum libri tres (Basel, 1536), 77-79; Berchorius, Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter (s.l., 1509), fol. lxxiii; Boccaccio, Della Genealogia degli Dei, [Illegible Text] Betussi (Venice, 1585), 87; dell'Anguillara and Horologgi, Le Metamorphosi (Venice, 1584), 357, 387; Comes, Mythologiae (Padua, 1616), 401-402, 548; Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus (London, 1648), 334-37.

13. Cohortatio ad Gentes, PG, VIII, 56-57.

14. Panegyric to Constantine, PG, XX, 1409.

15. Lampridius informs us in his life of Alexander Severus (a work cited by Milton in Of Reformation) that this Emperor erected shrines to Abraham, Christ, and Orpheus: see Historiae Augustæ Scriptores (Frankfurt, 1588), II, 214. Antonio Bosio has a chapter on why Christians compared Orpheus and Christ in Roma Sotterano (Rome, 1630). For an account of the Orpheus-Christ metaphor in Spanish literature see Pablo Cabanas, El Mito de Orfeo en la literatura Española (Madrid, 1948), 153-76.

16. The Poetical Works, ed. F. Boas (Cambridge, Eng., 1908), I, 59-60. One of the earliest English comparisons is found in Gavin Douglas: see Poetical Works, ed. Small (Edinburgh, 1874), II, 18. Wither objects to these comparisons in A Preparation to the Psalter, 1619 (Spenser Society, 1884), 77-78.

17. PG, VI, 885.

18. Op. cit., V, 19; for other references to Hercules see the Columbia Index. The Samson-Hercules-Christ identification is explored by Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton, 1949), 44-45.

19. Dial., II. 2. 2; see also Apuleius, Florida, 14, and Servius on Aeneid, VI. 119-23. The moral mythologers who read Christ into Orpheus also found the same connections between Christ and Hercules: see Fulgentius, 32, 39-42; Boccaccio, 210-14; Gyraldus, Hercules, in Opera (Leyden, 1696), I, 571-98; Alciati, Emblemata (Leyden, 1593), 50-54, 505-508; Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (Basel, 1556), fols, 23^v, 109^v, 247^v, 386; Comes, 272-74.

20. G. Budé, De Asse et partibus (Paris, 1532), p. lxix.

21. Oeuvres, ed. Reaume and de Caussade (Paris, 1877), II, 226-31. Annibal Caro writes the Duchess of Castro: “Sotto il misterio d'Ercole si dinota Cristo, il quale estrinse il vizio, come Ercole uccise Cacco” (Lettere Familiari [Padua, 1763], I, 253).

22. Oeuvres, ed. Vaganay (Paris, 1924), VI, 137-45.

23. Op. cit., 169.

24. Consolations, III, met. 12; IV, met. 7.

25. Sermo CCXCVII, PL, XXXIX, 2313-14; Confessiones, IV. 12; De Civitate, VII. 33; Enarratio in Psalmos PL, XXXVII, 1596-1600, 1606.

26. Sermo XXV, PL, XXXVIII, 168.

27. In Job, PL, XXXIV, 875.

28. Cassiodorus, Exposition in Psalter, PL, LXX, 1036.

29. Anselm, Liber de Similitudinibus, PL, CLIX, 664-65.

30. De Gradibus Humilitatis, ed. Burch (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), 176.

31. For patristic comments on the perfectibility of an unfallen Adam, see Hugo of St. Victor, De Vanitate Mundi, PL, CLXXVI, 723; St. Thomas, Summa, I. 102. 4; Pico della Mirandola, De Hominis Dignitate, ed. Garin (Florence, 1942), 104, 106; J. Donne, Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson (Berkeley, Calif., 1953-60), II, 123, VII, 108.

32. In Ezechielem, PL, LXXVI, 1290.

33. See also Sophocles, Aias, 854-65, Oedipus Col., 1549-51, and Euripides, Iph. Aul., 1281-82, 1506-1509.

34. Republic, VI. 508-509, VII. 518; Phaedo, 99; see J. Stenzel, “Der Begriff der Erleuchtung bei Platon,” Die Antike, II (1926), 235-37.

35. Ad Helviam, VIII. 5-6; see also Plutarch, De Genio Soc., 590 B.

36. Psalms 36:9, 104:2; Wisdom, 7:21-25; I Timothy 6:16; I John 1:5.

37. Exodus 20:21, II Chronicles 6:1, II Samuel 22:12, Psalms 18:11-12, 97:2, Job 22:14.

38. Ezekiel 1:4, Revelation 1:7.

39. Vita Mosis, I. 28.

40. De Poster. Caini, 5.

41. Enneads, VI. 9, 11, 8-22.

42. Ibid., IV. 3, 9, 23-29.

43. Ibid., V. 3, 17, 27-37.

44. Ibid., IV. 3, 9, 23-26.

45. Ibid., II. 9, 12, 31; I. 6, 9, 22-24; see M. de Corte, “Plotin et la nuit de l'esprit,” Etudes Carmélitaines, II (1938), 102-15.

46. In Cantica Canticorum, PG, XLIV, 1000-1001. It should be noted that Tertullian prior to his polemic against Montanism describes an “obumbratio mentis” as a preface to divine knowledge; see Ad Marcion, PL, II, 413, and De Anima, ed. Waszink (Amsterdam, 1947), p. 62 and notes. Ambrose considers the tenebrae as a requirement of the prophetic state: De Abraham, PL, XIV, 484.

47. Op. cit., PG, XLIV, 376-77.

48. In Cantica, ibid., 1001.

49. Contra Celsum, PG, XI, 1476.

50. Op. cit., PG, III, 997.

51. Ibid., 1000.

52. Epistolae, ibid., 1073.

53. T.M., ibid., 1000-1001.

54. Ibid., 1001.

55. Ibid., 1000.

56. De Coelesti Hierarchia, ibid., 205.

57. De Divinis Nominibus, ibid., 700-701; see H. C. Peuch, “La Ténèbre mystique chez le Pseudo-Denys,” Etudes Carmélitaines, II (1938), 33-53.

58. P. G. Théry, “Denys au moyen age,” Etudes Carmélitaines, II (1938), 68-74.

59. Benjamin Minor, PL, CXCVI, 52.

60. Breviloquium, Opera Omnia (Florence, 1891), V, 260.

61. Op. cit., VIII, 71.